A thunderous debut where tenderness and chaos find equal expression
Words by Harry Cooper
Keo have quickly built a reputation as one of the most exciting new bands in UK guitar music. Combining emotive songwriting with hard-hitting grunge and alt-rock tropes, the London four-piece arrive at their debut album, ‘Put A Smile On For Me’, already with a fiercely devoted following. With sell-out crowds consistently singing along to songs both released and unreleased, this album feels less like an introduction than a document of music already echoing around venues all over the country. Recorded in just ten days, the album excels in preserving a thunderous live energy, while the studio allows its vulnerable details to shine.
That tension between tenderness and violence runs through ‘Put A Smile On For Me’. Following electrifying opener ‘Be Happy’, lead single ‘That’s Me’ condenses much of the album’s ethos into just over two minutes. Its subject is guilt, with Finn Keogh painting an exposed and ugly picture of his own capacity to cause damage, while the music is explosive to the point of threatening to pull the song apart. Rather than feeling mismatched to the inward-looking lyrics, it’s as if the instrumental has launched those feelings to the surface in their rawest form.
Album highlight ‘Best I Can Do’ is where Keo’s grunge influences are most explicit, and shows where the studio adds to tracks that already thrive onstage. The loud-quiet dynamics are familiar, but the execution is far from anonymous, with verses that feel defensive and jaw-tight before the choruses open into something scorched and honest. Finn’s delivery is captured with a closeness, selling the feelings behind the song fantastically. Its bitterness becomes increasingly tied to its hurt, with the later turn of the lyric ‘I’m the best you can do’, transforming a premise of self-defence into something far more cutting. It has all the edge of a live performance. However, it’s the claustrophobic intimacy of the quieter sections that, in contrast, make the peaks burn brightest.
As the tracklist progresses, the aggression of earlier tracks begins to give way to something more reflective and bruised. ‘Bird On The Wire’ is the first downtempo offering, pulling back some of the distortion to give Finn’s voice more space and seeming more like a flashback than a nightmare. ‘Loser’ and ‘Blue Song’ continue that shift, trading some of the guitars’ attack for atmosphere. What makes the change effective is that it never feels like Keo have abandoned the identity established at the album’s outset. The influence of Radiohead and Jeff Buckley is more transparent in these quieter moments, but the same confessional voice remains at the heart, conveying the same weight as when it’s embodied by a vast instrumental.
‘Thorn’, having existed as one of the defining tracks of the previous EP ‘Siren’, and a pillar of Keo’s live sets, seems to turn up the intensity on every axis. A new recording of the song, it is quicker, longer and more aggressive, with the guitar tones allowed to scream closer to their live sound. The relentless process of repeatedly recording each song until it felt right really serves the material; Finn’s vocals feel genuinely anguished, as though the strain of the performances has become part of the songs themselves. It gives lyrics like “watching you cry, the love in your eyes like a chore” a weary desperation, far more than the EP version. It echoes the album’s philosophy: These are songs that already have a life when Keo play to a room, but the record can make them more intimate, dynamic and sometimes even more affecting.
That is ultimately what makes ‘Put A Smile On For Me’ more substantial than a simple document of the songs fresh off the live circuit. The band has built its reputation through the shared energy of live performance, and the album captures that immediacy without being confined by it. In bringing these songs into the studio, Keo have preserved their force while revealing the quieter details beneath it, resulting in a debut that feels both immediate and considered.