Cherryholt

Stamford, a set of twins, and a song that got away from them

Cherryholt are from Stamford, the limestone market town in south Lincolnshire, and the line-up is a school-age one: Reuben Baskerville on vocals and guitar, the twin brothers Harvey and Ben Walsh on lead guitar and bass, Dylan Austwick on drums and Dan Goldspink on keyboards. Their first single, Criminals, came out in 2024. It did what first singles by teenage bands usually do.

What happened to the second one did not. Irresistible, released in 2025, took hold on TikTok in August of that year while the band were inside Yellow Arch Studios in Sheffield watching somebody else play — a detail they have since repeated often enough that the Sheffield stop on this winter's tour is at the same building. The song passed 100,000 streams within a fortnight of release, a figure the new-band platform This Feeling singled out at the time precisely because there was so little else behind it; the band had barely any catalogue to send the traffic to.

The early live work was the ordinary kind: support slots in Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds with The Cases, then a Leeds club show opening for The North. The agency that now books them, Primary Talent International, files them alongside The Kooks and The Strokes, which undersells the second half of the songs — the guitar solos and breakdowns that arrive once the choruses have done their work.

Seven songs, one producer

The released catalogue is still small enough to count. Criminals in 2024; Irresistible and Bailey in 2025; then The Bullet, flies and Rose across 2026, Rose arriving on 23 July as the most recent release. Seventeen has been in the live set through the year. When Y Not Festival's reviewers caught them at the end of July, the running total was seven released songs.

All of the recent material was cut with Rich Turvey, who has produced Blossoms, and the signing that followed the viral spike was to Regal Records. The pairing shows: the 2026 singles are cleaner and more deliberate than the bedroom-scale thing that first travelled. Rose has had an acoustic version and a live-in-London video attached to it, which is the usual sign of a label trying to make one song do a year's work.

There is no album and no EP. For an act with this much touring booked, that is unusual, and it is the main open question about them — the shows are currently outpacing the discography rather than following it.

A summer on other people's stages

Most of 2026 was spent in front of audiences who had come to see somebody else. At Kendal Calling they played the Calling Out stage on the Saturday to a full tent, with the reviewer picking out Baskerville's voice and calling them one of the better new bands in the indie scene. At Y Not on Friday 31 July they filled The Quarry tent, and the write-up framed it as a standout slot delivered off the back of almost no records.

The most exposed test was 12 August at Kelvingrove Bandstand in Glasgow, opening for The Wombats alongside Keyside. The Scottish review arrived expecting to be underwhelmed by a band this young and said the assumption was put to bed within moments, describing the set as tight, assured and remarkably polished, with Rose and flies the best-built songs of it and Irresistible closing.

The wider list of acts they have supported through the year runs to Bastille, The Wombats, Red Rum Club and Arkayla — a spread of room sizes from club to bandstand, which is a reasonable way to learn how much of a set is actually portable.

Where they stand in October 2026

Fourteen dates are currently on sale, and the next few weeks are still support work. Cherryholt are second on the bill for Red Rum Club's autumn UK tour with Keyside, a run that takes in the O2 Forum Kentish Town, Rock City in Nottingham and the Cheese & Grain in Frome in the first half of October, Portsmouth Guildhall on 14 October, the O2 Institute2 in Birmingham on 16 October, Northumbria Students' Union on 29 October and the O2 Ritz in Manchester on 31 October. Between those, on 20 October, they play Supersonic in Paris — their first listed show outside the UK.

Then the billing flips. A headline tour was announced in June, with mailing-list pre-sale on 17 June and general sale at 10am on Friday 19 June, promoted by SJM: The Louisiana in Bristol on 2 December, Yellow Arch Studios in Sheffield on the 3rd, The Lower Third in London on the 4th, Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff on the 5th, The Bodega in Nottingham on the 10th, Zerox in Newcastle on the 11th and Glasgow on the 12th, with The Wardrobe in Leeds added for 28 November. These are rooms of a few hundred capacity, 16-plus, 7.30pm doors. Bristol is already sold out.

Further out, they are on the bill for Neighbourhood Weekender at Victoria Park in Warrington on Sunday 30 May 2027, which is the first booking that assumes an audience rather than builds one.

The gap between the rooms and the reviews

The consistent note across this year's coverage is that the live band is further along than the release schedule suggests. Their first headline show, at Oporto in Leeds on Monday 18 May, sold out the venue's small side room; the reviewer's verdict was that this was not a band testing the water but one diving in headfirst, and that the night felt like the start of something too big to stay in rooms that size for long.

That is the tension worth watching over the winter. Seven songs will fill a 35-minute festival slot comfortably and a headline set only just. The December tour is the first time they have to carry a whole evening in eight different cities, and the material will have to stretch — which is usually the point at which a band either releases a record or starts repeating itself.