Live Review: Los Campesinos! - Project House, Leeds 04/06/2026
Los Campesinos! celebrate two decades of the band with their Vicennial Cringe tour. We went along to Project House to join in the celebrations.
Arriving tonight at Leeds’ Project House, there’s already something of a festival atmosphere in the air; a sense of anticipation and expectation as Los Campesinos! eschew their usual venue (Brudenell Social Club on the other side of city) in favour of somewhere lighter and airier.
It’s a welcome change given the weather, and the large double doors leading out the venue’s beer garden provide a gentle breeze as we make our way first to the merch desk, then to the bar just as tonight’s support Nathy SG takes to the stage.
A member of North East indie punks Martha, he’s a fitting addition to the Northern run of LC’s Vicennial Cringe tour. A short but sweet set comprised of originals, covers and of course some Martha material, it’s the perfect way to kick off tonight’s celebrations.
And celebrate we shall. Every Los Campesinos! show feels like an event. A party. A coming together of like-minded people for whom the band due on stage mean so much. Indeed, for 20 years now, Los Campesinos have provided the soundtrack to break-ups and break-downs, the highs and lows of adolescence and now, adulthood.
It’s for that reason that when the seven-piece step on stage and launch instantly into ‘This Is How You Spell "HAHAHA, We Destroyed the Hopes and Dreams of a Generation of Faux-Romantics"‘, the venue erupts. Taken from the band’s first album, it’s a fizzy, frothy, E-number-fuelled explosion that sets the precedence perfectly.
Not a show in support of any one album, each record is represented at least once. And while most recent album All Hell takes the lion’s share, deep cuts such as ‘There Are Listed Buildings’ and ‘Knee Deep At ATP’ showcase the band’s earlier offerings perfectly.
‘A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show Me State; or, Letters from Me to Charlotte’ gets its tour debut early in the show, reducing this writer to tears sooner than expected. While fan-favourite and quintessential LC! anthem ‘The Sea Is A Good Place To Think of the Future’ get’s a surprisingly early mid-set airing; that particular lyric finding the crowd in full voice, as it always does.
Elsewhere, ‘Songs About Your Girlfriend’ is followed by an ecstatic cover of Pavement’s ‘Frontwards’. It’s fast, it’s scrappy and it showcases perfectly just why we fell in love with Los Campesinos all those years ago.
By this point, the crowd have worked themselves into a heaving sweaty mass of bodies; the breeze felt earlier no longer noticeable as the atmosphere in the venue reaches fever pitch and the band head into their encore.
And what an encore it is. Four tracks that seem to summarise the last two decades perfectly. ‘By Your Hand’ kicks things off, before ‘We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed’ once more finds the crowd in full voice. ‘Straight In A 101’ is a chaotic penultimate offering, but it falls to both a raucous and indeed heartfelt outing of ‘Sweet Dreams Sweet Cheeks’ that closes the night out far too soon.
While tonight may have been a celebration of 20 years of Los Campesinos!, it also felt like a celebration of life, and of everything that makes it worth living. And at a time when the world feels unrecognisable from how it did back in 2006, and evening of life-affirming indie-pop feels like the perfect antithesis. Here’s to another 20 years.
Words by Dave Beech
Photo by Lee Hammon
