High Vis

New Brighton to New Cross

High Vis came together in London in 2016 out of the city's hardcore scene, with members arriving from a scatter of earlier punk bands. The frontman, Graham Sayle, grew up in New Brighton on the Wirral before moving south to study at Goldsmiths, and his accent became part of the band's signature rather than something to be sanded off — the shouted vocals sit on top of guitars that jangle as often as they bludgeon.

The name is a joke with a sharp end. Sayle has described high-visibility clothing as the unifying garment of the working class, and noted that putting one on "alienates you completely". That double edge — belonging and exclusion at the same time — runs through most of what the band has written since.

The line-up settled slowly. Romain Bruneau left on guitar around 2018 to go back to Paris and was replaced by Martin MacNamara; bassist Rob Moss played with the band from 2017 until 2024, when Jack Muncaster took over. The current five are Sayle on vocals, MacNamara and Rob Hammeren on guitars, Muncaster on bass and Edward "Ski" Harper on drums. Sayle was teaching design technology at an independent school and fitting the band around it before going full-time.

Three records, each one wider than the last

The debut, No Sense No Feeling, arrived in 2019 and read as a hardcore record with its windows open: the tempos and the bark were familiar, but the guitar tone was already borrowing from post-punk rather than from the New York hardcore canon. Blending followed on Dais Records in September 2022 and was the record that moved the band out of the clubs, leaning harder into indie melody and baggy rhythm without dropping the aggression. Songs from it — "Choose to Lose", "Walking Wires", "Fever Dream" — remain the backbone of the live set, and setlist records make "Walking Wires" and "Choose to Lose" the two most-played songs in the band's history, at 188 and 186 performances respectively.

Guided Tour, the third album, came out on 18 October 2024 through Dais. It was recorded across 2023 and 2024 at Holy Mountain Studios in London, produced by Jonah Falco of Fucked Up and engineered by Stanley Gravet. Four singles trailed it: "Mob DLA" on 11 June 2024, "Mind's a Lie" on 31 July, "Drop Me Out" on 17 September and the title track on 16 October. "Mind's a Lie" was the clearest statement of intent — a hardcore band building a song on a four-to-the-floor house pulse and refusing to apologise for it.

Sayle has been blunt about the pressure that comes with that kind of reach. Talking to NME around the album, he said that "people get a whiff of success and then change their sound", and placed High Vis against that: the eleven tracks on Guided Tour deliberately sit between Britpop swagger and hardcore fury without committing fully to either.

What the critics made of it

Guided Tour was the band's best-reviewed record by a distance, carrying a Metacritic average of 82 out of 100. The Guardian gave it five stars, with Daniel Dylan Wray calling it a triumph and pointing to its tough shell and soft underbelly. Kerrang! also went to five stars and later placed it in its top five albums of 2024. Pitchfork scored it 7.6 and Madison Bloom described it as a rousing Britpop manifesto. It also turned up on year-end lists from Alternative Press, BrooklynVegan and others.

Not everyone was convinced. Exclaim! gave it six out of ten and argued the approach was more derivative than experimental — a fair summary of the case against a band whose reference points are audible by design. The dissent is worth noting because it marks the line High Vis walk: the same borrowing that makes the records legible to an indie audience is what makes a section of the hardcore press suspicious.

Scaling up without changing the sound

The band's growth has been mostly a live story. In 2023 they opened their Outbreak Festival set in Manchester with a reading of Oasis's "Morning Glory", a gamble Sayle later described as nerve-shredding until the stage-diving started, and made their Finnish debut at Flow Festival that August. Asked then whether playing to non-hardcore crowds meant softening anything, his answer was that he was "fully unwilling to compromise".

The larger step came with Turnstile. High Vis supported the Never Enough tour across the UK and Europe from September 2025 through to January 2026, playing arena-scale rooms nightly alongside The Garden — the kind of run that tends either to expose a band or to bed it in.

It bedded them in. By the summer of 2026 High Vis were on festival main stages across Europe: a Swiss and German stretch in early June that took in Rock im Park at Nuremberg on 5 June and Rock am Ring at Nürburg the following day, Dour in Belgium, and Release Athens on 7 July. At Outbreak Festival at Manchester's BEC Arena in late June they played the Saturday main stage between Touché Amoré and PUP, in rain the crowd cheered for. Louder Than War called them one of the best British bands currently around; At The Barrier, reviewing the same set on 5 July, suggested they were working their way towards an Outbreak headline slot.

Where they stand in November 2026

The band are currently most of the way through a North American tour, co-headlining with Basement. The West Coast leg ran through San Diego's Casbah on 19 October, the Shrine Exposition Hall in Los Angeles on 20 October, two nights at the UC Theatre in Berkeley on 23 and 24 October, Seattle's Showbox SoDo on 27 October and The Complex in Salt Lake City on 30 October, before the Ogden Theatre in Denver on 1 November.

Ten dates remain on sale, all in November 2026: First Avenue in Minneapolis on 3 November, Liberty Hall in Lawrence on the 4th, the House of Blues in Chicago on the 6th, The Hawthorn in St Louis on the 7th, the Royal Oak Music Theatre in Michigan on the 8th, Spirit in Pittsburgh on the 10th, the Rec Room in Buffalo on the 12th, Roadrunner in Boston on the 13th and Saint Vitus in Brooklyn on the 15th. Big Boy and First Day Back are on most of the bills; Fiddlehead joins the Boston show, and Lowertown and Soulless appear on selected dates.

There is no announced fourth album, but the sets have begun to carry material that exists on none of the three records. The Denver setlist on 1 November included two such titles alongside the usual run of album tracks — the clearest sign yet that the next record is written and being road-tested in front of American crowds before anything is confirmed.