Skin hits the stage like a starting gun, all nerve endings and clenched teeth, “This Means War” detonating before we even know the room’s filled. No easing in. No preamble. Just the sharp crack of drums punching ribs, guitars slicing hot and metallic, and her voice—half-battle cry, half-wound—cleaving the stale Roundhouse air like a fire axe. Everyone packed inside seems to lurch forward at once, like some feral organism desperate for heat.
The bass gnaws, gnashes, threatens to chew through the floorboards during “Charlie Big Potato,” a grinding, monstrous loop that starts low in your guts and ends up rattling your teeth. Crowd sway turning to surge turning to something nastier, heavier, bodies swinging, eyes half-shut against the flood. Skin’s stalking the stage now, serpent-quick, a blur of fists, boots, shaved skull glinting every time the lights catch the sweat on her skin. She looks half-possessed, half in command, like she’s simultaneously chasing something and dragging us behind her by the throat.
Someone next to me is screaming the words. Or maybe it’s me. Hard to tell when the sound inside your skull feels stitched from the same jagged fabric the band’s tearing through.
And just as it’s tipping over into full collapse, something steadier threads itself through: the reminder that this isn’t some nostalgia circuit warm-up act, not even close. The Painful Truth, their first studio album in nine years, is about to hit—the kind of record born teeth-first, produced by Dave Sitek, stitched from defiance and gasoline. Skin spat it plain a few weeks ago: if you rest on your laurels, you rot. Skunk Anansie didn’t come back to bask—they came back to tear things open all over again, just like they did in the ’90s when her voice—Black, queer, ferocious—blew a hole clean through the middle of polite British rock.
We’re not here for memories. We’re here for the scorch.
And then—”God Loves Only You” slinks in sideways. No warning, no mercy. The bassline, slinky and slick, creeps around ankles while Skin slows down, every phrase curling out of her mouth like smoke from a molotov. The air, suddenly viscous. Half the crowd freezes in place, like if we move too fast we’ll break whatever twisted spell she’s casting. Someone shouts something behind me, a wordless howl, quickly swallowed.
The drums hang back, pounding like a heartbeat you can’t control. The guitars, less a wall now, more a slow, inevitable undertow pulling the room somewhere colder. For a second it feels like we might drown.
“Weak” arrives like a knife in soft skin. Shimmery, fractured guitar lines spiderweb out over the crowd, and Skin—oh God—Skin uncoils herself into something terrifyingly small. Fragile enough to shatter with a wrong glance. She sings the first lines so gently, it’s almost a dare. The crowd doesn’t sing along at first; we’re too stunned, too afraid that opening our mouths will blow it all away.
Then the eruption. Her voice vaults into that raw-throated roar, tearing up the distance between stage and floorboards and lungs. Thousands of voices rising to meet it, overwhelming her, overwhelming each other. It’s not beautiful. It’s messy. It’s ugly. It’s skin-tingling, battlefield-camaraderie ugly. You can hear people cracking open mid-chorus.
After that, breathing feels optional.
“Tear the Place Up” is a sucker punch. No cue, no lead-in. Just chaos. Anarchic drums clatter like loose bones, guitars spitting venom, Skin hurling herself off the stage into a mosh pit that parts and devours her all at once. Bodies colliding, limbs flailing, shoes scraping skin. A pit opening like a sinkhole under our feet, everything centrifugal and lawless and perfect.
At one point I think I see her grinning wide enough to split her face. Or maybe it’s a snarl. Maybe it’s both. There’s no way of knowing and that’s the point.
The Roundhouse smells like sweat and adrenaline and something more ancient, something primal clawed loose from under the veneer of polite society.
They could have ended it there. Left us broken, gutted, begging for breath. But no. Skunk Anansie are rupture artists, and every wound they open, they stitch back up with jagged thread.
When “Hedonism (Just Because You Feel Good)” unfurls in the encore, it doesn’t feel like an encore at all. It feels like a funeral hymn for something beautiful we’ve just killed together. Starts slow—Skin almost whispering into the mic, every syllable a stitch, a salve—and then swells, and swells, and breaks, not cleanly but gloriously jagged, like a shipwreck against the rocks.
The crowd presses in closer. No room between bodies now. Skin-to-skin. Soul-to-soul. No banners. No flags. Just this cathedral of broken voices, reaching and reaching and still falling short but reaching anyway.
I think the final chord rings out but I’m not sure. Could just be the tinnitus setting in, that low cathedral drone of too many hearts breaking open at once. Lights stay down a beat too long. Long enough that hope flares that they might come back, tear the wounds open again, leave us bleeding better.
They don’t. And it’s perfect.
Words & Photos by Richard Isaac
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