Girl In The Year Above

A hairdresser's commute, and a pub in Cornwall

Jennifer Ball wrote acoustic songs at college, then stopped. She trained and worked as a hairdresser, choosing the steadier career, and the writing retreated into something done on the way to work — ideas sung into a phone on the commute, with no particular destination. Those phone recordings are what eventually reached the musicians who became her band: in interviews she describes the group coming together through local connections made at a pub, with the early writing done in late-night sessions rather than in any studio booking.

The band dates from 2024 and settled into a six-piece spanning Cornwall and Ireland: Ball on vocals, Nathan Coen, Shane Kennedy and David Kennedy across guitars and bass, Jeanie White on keys and vocals, and Kapil Trivedi — previously of Mystery Jets — on drums. The Irish-Cornish split is audible rather than decorative. Press and the band's own framing keep returning to Celtic storytelling as the spine of the songs, attached to an indie-rock delivery that is louder and more physical than the folk reference implies.

Ball has been explicit about not wanting the songs to orbit romance. She has said she would rather cover a multitude of different topics, on the grounds that there are far more human experiences than that one. The band also declines to settle on a genre, citing reference points as far apart as Joni Mitchell and The Cure, with Ball's reasoning that playing whatever they want simply seems more fun.

Three originals, a cover, and half a million listeners

The debut single, 'Mama, My Heart Is Achin'', arrived in March 2026. It came out of the death of Ball's mother, and she has described it changing shape through repeated live performance — becoming less funereal and more celebratory the more it was played to rooms. A second original, 'Ode To The Glory Days', followed and was picked up by Rolling Stone UK among its hot new songs.

The thing that moved fastest was not an original at all. The band recorded a reinterpretation of Massive Attack's 'Teardrop' for the soundtrack to the Peaky Blinders film The Immortal Man. It reached the top ten on Shazam in the UK and Ireland in March 2026 and charted at number 83 on the UK Singles Sales Chart. Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack publicly called it the most sublime version of the song he had come across, which is the kind of endorsement that cannot be bought and tends to travel further than a playlist add.

Radio followed across BBC Radio 1, Radio 2 and 6 Music. Rolling Stone UK included the band in its Future of Music 2026 feature. By the time that interview ran, two tracks had accumulated more than half a million listeners between them — on a release schedule of three original songs.

The gap between the audience and the catalogue is deliberate. Ball has said she loves how old-school it is to play a great many shows where people cannot hear the music unless they come and see it, and that live music is transcendent and ought to be wanted that way. The recording approach follows the same logic: organic and live-feeling rather than click-tracked and digitally corrected. Behind the four released tracks sits a reported stockpile of more than fifty written songs.

Transgressive, and 'Wet Paint'

The band announced a deal with Transgressive Records on 21 September 2026 and released 'Wet Paint' the following day as their first single for the label. Transgressive described them as a truly extraordinary and captivating band with a talent for writing unifying anthems that move, inspire and rouse in equal measure — which, from a label whose roster history runs through Foals, Alvvays and Arlo Parks, is a specific sort of bet.

'Wet Paint' was written by Ball with Jeanie White and is about consent. The band's account of writing it is that the two of them realised in the process how painfully relatable the subject is and how rarely it is actually discussed. The arrangement pushes against the weight of the topic rather than leaning into it: Celtic inflections over piano and guitar, pitched bright and loud. Their stated hope for the track was that it would bring joy and defiance.

The release also marked a shift in what the band is willing to put on record. For most of 2026 the recorded output trailed well behind what audiences were hearing in venues; 'Wet Paint' was in the live set before it was available to stream, as were several songs still unreleased now.

Where they stand in October 2026

The summer was spent almost entirely on other people's stages. The band opened the European and outdoor forest legs of The Kooks' anniversary tour — Ball has noted she was playing roughly her tenth ever show while supporting them in European arenas — and took support slots with Razorlight, Seb Lowe, Wolf Alice at the Eden Sessions and Courteeners at Wythenshawe Park on 29 August. Festival appearances included The Great Escape in Brighton, where they played TGE Beach and One Church and turned up at the NME opening party, plus Boomtown Fair on 13 August, Rock N Roll Circus in Norwich on 20 August, Golden Leaves in Darmstadt on 23 August, Tramlines, Boardmasters and Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg on 19 September.

Television came in September. The band filmed an acoustic set at Barryscourt Castle in County Cork for the Anam Sessions strand of the Irish series Other Voices; the broadcast went out on RTÉ2 on 10 September 2026. It is the closest thing to a document of how the songs work stripped back, and it arrived before most of them had been released.

The immediate future is an eleven-date headline run across the UK and Ireland, announced in July with tickets on sale from 10 July. It opens at The Bodega in Nottingham on 11 October, takes in Bristol Exchange (12th), Village Underground in London (13th), The Hope & Ruin in Brighton (14th), Arts Club Loft in Liverpool (16th), Neighbourhood Festival in Manchester (17th), King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow (18th), The Cluny in Newcastle (19th), Hare & Hounds in Kings Heath (20th) and Headrow House in Leeds (22nd), before finishing at Whelan's in Dublin on 25 October. It follows a run of dates earlier in the year that sold out. Further ahead, they are booked for Neighbourhood Weekender in Warrington on 30 May 2027.

The show itself

What the October run tests is whether a band whose reputation was built in support slots and festival tents can carry a room on its own terms, with an audience that mostly still cannot sing along to the words. The venues are small and hard — 200 to 700 capacity, the Bodega and King Tut's and Whelan's circuit that tends to expose anyone relying on volume alone.

The evidence from the summer suggests they are not. The sets are short and front-loaded with material that does not exist on streaming services, which means the songs have to work on first hearing, every night, in front of people who came for someone else. That is an unusual apprenticeship, and it is the reason the live reputation arrived before the discography did.