Alex Spencer

A Manchester act with a Barcelona birth certificate

Spencer is 19 and from Manchester, though he was born in Barcelona to a Spanish mother, and spent stretches of his childhood in India and Thailand. He picked up a guitar at ten, following his father, and taught himself; by 13 he was busking on Manchester's streets, which is how most people in the city first heard him.

The busking is not a bit of back-story he has moved on from — it still shapes how he works a room, and the throwback covers he learned on the pavement still turn up in his own headline sets. The other early landmark was a pitch-side performance at Manchester City's Etihad Stadium, the sort of booking that does more for a teenager's confidence than a dozen pub gigs.

Speaking to Northern Exposure Magazine in spring 2025, days after his eighteenth birthday, he named Sam Fender as the reference point and described writing in Spanish as something he does because it is simply part of him rather than a gimmick.

The EPs, and the football game that moved the needle

The first body of work that counted was the EP 'Where Do We Go From Here?', released in 2025. Before that came the track that did the heavy lifting: 'Nightmares', written with a full verse in Spanish, which EA Sports put on the FC25 soundtrack when the game shipped in September 2024. He has since called it his biggest accomplishment; it has passed a million Spotify streams, and the song also found its way into the BBC's Six Nations coverage. 'Wake Me Up' followed as a single in 2025.

Radio took the hint. BBC Radio 1, 6 Music, BBC Introducing and Radio X have all played him, Clash has written about him, and Apple Music keeps putting him on editorial playlists.

The second EP, 'These Will Be The Days', came out on 24 July 2026: four tracks — the title song, 'Farewell To Forever', 'Masks' and 'All Of This Will Be Gone', the last of which switches to Spanish in the bridge. His framing of it is blunter than the music sounds. Life is fragile, he said around release, and chasing whatever comes next buys momentary happiness and a lot of worry. Elsewhere he has described his method as taking a heavy feeling and making it upbeat enough that people can actually get near it.

2025: supports, festivals, and a tour that sold out on announcement

The climb through 2025 was made of other people's stages. He played Liverpool Sound City, Neighbourhood Weekender and the BBC Introducing stage at TRNSMT on 12 July. A headline show at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow on 29 April — only his second visit to the city, with his mother in the room — drew a review that called it the kind of gig you leave knowing you have seen the start of something. In the summer he opened for The Black Keys at Alexandra Palace Park, then spent the autumn supporting Corella, including the Scala in London.

On 17 September 2025 he announced his own UK headline run for February 2026: Sneaky Pete's in Edinburgh on the 14th, Sidney & Matilda's basement in Sheffield on the 15th, the Sunflower Lounge in Birmingham on the 17th, EBGBS in Liverpool on the 19th, Manchester Academy 2 on the 21st and Omeara in London on the 24th. Tickets went to his mailing list on 18 September and on general sale the following morning. He said at the time that touring the UK at 18 and playing rooms the size of Academy 2 and Omeara was a bucket-list moment.

The whole run sold out in advance. The 900-capacity Academy 2 night produced the moment he still talks about: during 'Masks', the crowd turned their phone lights blue and sang the words back at him.

Arenas, as the opening act

In 2026 he was booked onto the first ten dates of Louis Tomlinson's How Did We Get Here? European arena tour. By his own account that run covered eight countries and more than 100,000 people. In May 2026, with the dates still ahead of him, he described it as a significant step up from anything he had done, and made the point that playing to ten people in a room has always frightened him more than playing to thousands.

Then came the first Reading & Leeds booking of his career in August 2026, timed a month after the EP. The through-line of the year is that almost all of it has been spent in front of audiences who came to see somebody else — and that this appears to be the plan rather than an accident.

Where he stands in October 2026

September 2026 brought his first European headline tour, a small-rooms circuit through Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, Prague and Warsaw — Nochtspeicher in Hamburg on the 3rd, Privatclub in Berlin on the 4th, BARdzo Bardzo in Warsaw on the 9th.

October put him back in the opening slot, on The Reytons' UK and Ireland tour: the 3Olympia in Dublin on the 9th, the Telegraph Building in Belfast on the 10th, Connexin Live in Hull on the 16th, the Great Hall at Cardiff University on the 23rd, the British Airways Arc in London on the 24th and Co-op Live in Manchester on the 30th, with Cruz Beckham and the Breakers also on the Dublin bill. Between the Hull and Cardiff shows he played Neighbourhood Festival across Manchester city centre on 17 October.

November is another support run, which his own listings attribute to Only The Poets: O2 Academy Bristol on the 15th, the Eventim Apollo in London on the 16th and Manchester Academy on the 19th, then Lille VEGA in Copenhagen on the 23rd and Nalen in Stockholm on the 24th. He is managed by Modest Management and booked by CAA. No record label has been announced, and neither has a debut album — the catalogue is still two EPs and a run of singles, which makes the scale of the rooms he is playing the more interesting number.