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The profile · researched 20 September 2026
A flower pot, a book and a forest backdrop: Asha Banks before Bottled Up
A St Albans child actor who spent a decade in the West End and on BBC sets, Asha Banks has spent the last two years building a parallel career as a songwriter on Island Records — and on 2 October 2026 she releases her third EP in nineteen months, two days into her first full North American headline tour.
Seven years old at the Queen's Theatre
Asha Alice Banks was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, on 26 November 2003, and was working professionally before she reached double figures. Saturday drama classes at Top Hat Stage School led to small BBC parts in EastEnders and Call the Midwife in 2011, and in 2012 she made her West End debut as the young Éponine in Les Misérables at the Queen's Theatre. Stage work followed steadily: 1984 at the Almeida and the Playhouse in 2014, a UK tour of Annie in 2015, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane across 2016 and 2017, and Spring Awakening back at the Almeida in 2021. She took musical theatre and music performance at Elstree Screen Arts for sixth form.
Screen work arrived alongside it. She played Princess Pamina in The Magic Flute, which premiered at the Zurich Film Festival in 2022, appeared in the CBBC series Rebel Cheer Squad the same year, and has been in A Good Girl's Guide to Murder since 2024. The Prime Video film My Fault: London came in 2025 and its sequel, Your Fault: London, in 2026.
The songwriting predates nearly all of that — she began writing songs at six — but it stayed out of public view until she was twenty. Two careers now run in parallel, and the ticketing copy for her own shows still introduces her by both.
So Green, and a tongue untied
The first single, "So Green", appeared in November 2024. "Feel the Rush" followed, and both landed on Untie My Tongue, an EP she released herself on 7 March 2025. It set the register she has worked in since: close-miked writing about what is immediately in front of her, arranged with more restraint than her musical theatre background would predict.
Island Records signed her later in 2025. Her first release for the label was "Rerun", out on 14 August 2025, which pushed deliberately upbeat against a lyric about going back to someone she should not. Speaking to Atwood Magazine around its release, she framed that gap as the point: "Sometimes my favourite type of songs are those that sound happy but are truthfully quite heartbreaking." She works closely with the producer and co-writer Josh Bruce Williams, who also made the first EP, and describes a method that resists planning — "I'm kind of able to see what happens and not have to know where I'm going with each song."
"Mascara Tears" came next, and the second EP, How Real Was It?, arrived on 14 November 2025, eight months after the first.
A forest at the Roundhouse
North American dates began in December 2025. The first headline UK and European run started in March 2026 and closed at the Roundhouse in London on 15 March, a set of roughly an hour and a half. Banks walked in through the crowd carrying a flower pot and a book rather than arriving from the wings, onto a stage dressed with foliage, branches and a forest backdrop; the lighting moved between moonlight and sunset, and during the ballads her shadow was thrown large across the back of the room.
She opened with "Rerun" and drew mostly on How Real Was It? — "Headstart", "Saltwound", "Half Built Bridge" — alongside "So Green", "Delay", "Feel the Rush", "Freeze" and "Dive", closing on "Shiver". Liang Lawrence played first, acoustic and unhurried; Alfie Jukes, a Brighton songwriter Banks has known since she was sixteen, played second. She told the story of how they met before bringing him back on for Noah Kahan's "Everywhere, Everything" — "I could speak for years on how amazing Alfie is… he's my favourite artist in the whole world."
Reviews were warm without being uncritical. Adrenaline's Chloe Morris wrote that the performance "blew me away… and I don't say that lightly". The Upcoming praised the crowd work — call-and-response, hands held over the barrier, paper stars waved through the slower songs — but flagged a middle stretch of heartbreak songs that ran together and blunted the intensity they were reaching for. That criticism is a fair marker of where a two-EP catalogue sits: enough material to fill ninety minutes, not yet enough variety to shape it.
A festival summer and a million listeners
2026 widened the audience. "Come Down" came early in the year, then the spring single "Too Busy Missing You", which took her highest streaming peaks to that point and was placed on the soundtrack of Prime Video's Off Campus. She passed a million monthly Spotify listeners for the first time this year.
On 30 July she made her Lollapalooza debut, a forty-minute early-afternoon slot on the T-Mobile Stage in Grant Park. Nine songs: "Rerun", "Closing Time", "Every Way You Look At Me I Honestly Die", "Mascara Tears", "come down", "Shiver", then "Biggest Fan" while it was still unreleased, "Feel the Rush" and "Too Busy Missing You". Boardmasters and Victorious followed in August. BST Hyde Park and All Points East are also on the record.
"Biggest Fan" came out the day after that Lollapalooza set, on 31 July 2026. Banks co-wrote it with Williams, who produced it with Myles Avery, whose credits include Tate McRae and The Kid LAROI. She described it as sounding "deeply me, but in a way I haven't done before", and wrote it about the difference between being loved and being used as a source of reassurance.
Bottled Up, and rooms that keep selling out
"Anything But" arrived on 11 September 2026, written with Bülow and Sammy Witte rather than in the usual room with Williams. It sits with a relationship that has clearly ended and the delay before anyone says so out loud. Banks called it representative of what comes next: "I'm really proud of this song and feel like it really represents both me as an artist and the upcoming project as a whole."
That project is Bottled Up, a five-track EP due on 2 October 2026 — her third in nineteen months, and the second for Island.
The something inbetween tour opens two days before it, on 30 September at Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Massachusetts, and runs to the Echoplex in Los Angeles on 18 October. It is her first nationwide North American headline run, with Alfie Jukes supporting throughout. Demand has already forced doubling up: two Washington nights at The Atlantis on 2 and 6 October, the second already sold out, and two New York shows in the same week — Racket on 1 October and the Bowery Ballroom on 5 October. Montreal, Toronto, Lincoln Hall in Chicago, Amsterdam Bar & Hall in Saint Paul, the Troubadour and The Independent fill out the rest.
The show, now
The something inbetween tour opens on 30 September 2026 at Brighton Music Hall in Allston and closes at the Echoplex in Los Angeles on 18 October, with Alfie Jukes supporting every night; several dates, including The Atlantis in Washington on 6 October, sold out before the run began, and second shows were added in Washington and New York. The template comes from the Roundhouse on 15 March 2026, which closed her first UK and European headline tour and ran about ninety minutes: a stage dressed with foliage, branches and a forest backdrop, lighting moving between moonlight and sunset, and Banks entering through the crowd carrying a flower pot and a book rather than from the wings. She opened on "Rerun", leaned on How Real Was It? — "Headstart", "Saltwound", "Half Built Bridge", "Mascara Tears" — mixed in "So Green", "Delay", "Feel the Rush", "Freeze" and "Dive", and closed on "Shiver", with Jukes brought back on for a duet of Noah Kahan's "Everywhere, Everything". The American clubs are smaller, so expect the shorter festival shape she played at Lollapalooza on 30 July — nine songs in forty minutes — stretched back out with newer material from Bottled Up. Crowds have been young and word-perfect: reviewers at the Roundhouse noted paper stars waved through the slower songs and the whole room singing back, while The Upcoming's reservation was that the middle of the set stacked too many heartbreak songs in a row.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · ashabanks.co.uk · atwoodmagazine.com · adrenalinemag.co.uk · livesphere-magazine.com · theupcoming.co.uk · universalmusic.ca · universalmusic.ca
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
MLuz99 · CC BY-SA 4.0
