Necati ve Saykolar

Denizli, 2008, and a bağlama in the front line

Necati ve Saykolar come out of Denizli, in south-western Turkey, and the band carries two founding dates rather than one. The earliest version of the group goes back to 2008; the line-up that has held the name since was settled in 2011. The gap matters, because those first years were spent as amateurs in local venues playing other people's songs — Cem Karaca, Barış Manço, Moğollar — before any of their own material existed. That same catalogue is still the quarry they work.

What marks them out from the many Turkish bands mining the same seam is the instrument at the front of the arrangement. Necati Karadayı sings and plays bağlama, the long-necked Anatolian lute, and the band is organised around it rather than around a lead guitar. Alper Kayman plays electric guitar and sings, Barış Şanlısoy plays bass, Serhat Ergür drums, and Sezer Süngü keyboards. Music databases file the band under rock, alternative rock and psychedelic rock, and each of those tags is doing something: the folk-rock template of the 1970s and 1980s survives, but with a heavier and more distorted bottom end than the originals ever had.

Two records, and a producer who changed the altitude

The first album of their own songs, Dur Bak Dinle Geç, came out in 2014 on Dokuz Sekiz Müzik — six years after the band first assembled. It is the record that moved them from being a covers act with a good instrument to a group with a catalogue.

The second, Mütemadiyen, followed in 2017 on DMC and was produced by Hayko Cepkin, one of the few Turkish rock performers operating at that scale. That production credit is the single clearest step up in the band's history: it put the group's name next to a rock audience considerably larger than the Denizli bar circuit, and the title track is still one of the songs audiences turn up expecting.

Looked at through streaming, though, the catalogue reads as songs rather than albums. The tracks that sit at the top of the band's listings — Leyla, Gamzedeyim, Özlem, Kafam Güzel and Fırtına — are drawn from across both records and the standalone releases that came afterwards, with no album dominating.

A decade of singles instead of albums

After Mütemadiyen the band stopped making full records and went to a steady drip of singles, which is where most of the catalogue since has come from: Gurbet in 2018, Gamzedeyim in 2019 and Leyla in 2020. Leyla has since become the most-played thing they have.

From 2021 the releases started bringing guests in. Güzel Ne Güzel Olmuşsun arrived in 2021 with Volkan Konak, Kafam Güzel in 2022 with Orçun Sünear, and the same year produced a short record, Bey Diyeceksiniz. Then Piskopat in 2023, two singles in 2024 — Aşk Bankası and Yel Gibi — and Ses Ver with Erci E in 2025. It is a release pattern built for playlists and for keeping a touring band in front of people between festival seasons, rather than for album cycles.

2026: one new song, one borrowed

The band's first release of 2026 was Bi Garip Dünya, out on 8 May. It is their own material and it landed in the middle of the spring run of shows.

The second, on 10 July, was not theirs. Sanki was recorded for Feridun Hürel Albüm II, a project in which contemporary acts reinterpret the Anatolian rock songwriter's catalogue; the band's version runs three minutes and nineteen seconds. There is a neatness to it: eighteen years after starting out playing the 1970s songbook in Denizli bars, the group is being commissioned to do exactly that, as the act a tribute project calls when it needs a bağlama and a rock band in the same room.

The gigging year

The 2026 diary shows a band working two circuits at once. The spring club date was Hayal Kahvesi Bursa, in Nilüfer, on 9 April. On 10 May they closed Gökkaya MotoFest in the Gökkaya neighbourhood of Ahmetli, a motorcycle festival where the local mayor, Fuat Mintaş, said afterwards that the enthusiasm had peaked during their set and that the crowd sang along through the evening. On 4 July they played SoldOut Performance Hall in İzmir, and on 17 August they closed the 22nd Bekilli Culture, Art and Grape Festival — Bekilli being a district of their own Denizli province, which makes that one a home fixture. The municipality's statement afterwards credited the band with adding colour to the festival and noted that the ground stayed full into the late hours. They were back at SoldOut Performance Hall in İzmir on 29 August.

That is the shape of the band's year now: municipal summer festivals, where they are often the closing act, alternating with a club circuit of rooms like Hayal Kahvesi and SoldOut that will book them twice in a season. Concert trackers log 93 shows for the group, and the longer history takes in Zeytinli Rock Festival, Rock'n Coke and Moda Kayıkhanesi in İstanbul. The listings themselves are fragmented in a way that is worth knowing about if the aim is to catch them — one Turkish concert tracker currently shows no forward dates at all for the band while international listings carry three, so the ticketing sites and the band's own channels are the reliable source rather than any single aggregator.

What is on sale

Three dates are listed as on sale, and all three are in İzmir. The band play İzmir Tattoo Fest across 16 and 17 October 2026, then return to SoldOut Performance Hall on 1 November 2026 — the same room they filled on 4 July and again on 29 August. A hall taking the same act three times inside five months is the clearest available signal of where the band's draw currently sits. Beyond 1 November nothing is announced, which in the pattern of previous years means the next cluster is likely to be club dates over the winter and festival bookings from spring, though neither has been confirmed.