On the Rise
Ain't

That’s how vocalist Hanna Baker Darch intros the operation onstage. Ain’t’s social media bios read pretty much the same way, occasionally shuffling the syntax. It’s a sentence that tells you nothing and therefore everything – or at least something. Because if it doesn’t tell you what they are, perhaps it tells you what they ain’t. 

For one, they ain’t a band that over-defines themselves for you. They ain’t a band that gets too in the weeds, the discourse, the multihyphenates. Ain’t the band would like you to meet them halfway and perhaps decide for yourself what rock music can be in 2026, an era in need of some definition-through-music. 

I’ll give it a shot: I think they meld the best bits of my favourite indie rock bands from this century: the weirdo give-it-all vocals of Hop Along, Wishy’s electricity-pylon guitar shocks, the paranoid, dark textures of certain Deerhunter cuts, and Rainer Maria’s pained but cathartic instrumental interplay. 

It’s not shoegaze. It’s not slowcore. It’s not punk or emo. It’s rock. 

“It’s kind of a dorky label to put on yourself, which in a way makes it feel slightly subversive,” says Ed Randall, one half of the South London band’s guitar formation. A couple years back, he and the other half, George Ellerby, actually followed through on a chatting-about-music-in-a-pub meet cute, and got together to jam, soon birthing the rock band Ain’t. 

“I also feel like lots of bands probably waste too much of their time and energy worrying about what exact niche of rock music they should be filed under,” Randall continues. “It’s all kind of pointless and silly getting so microbial about it. That said, it did used to really irk me when we were starting out and kept getting called shoegaze for some reason.” 

It doesn’t take long for a word’s meaning to morph or muddy: shoegaze, rock, ain’t. But that deconstructed meaning lets you crowbar yourself in there a bit. Or a lot. “When I hear the word ‘ain’t’ now, I don’t ever think it’s not about the band.” 

“It’s millennial branding.”

That’s drummer Joe Lockstone and Darch respectively. The five band members – including bassist Isaac Griffiths, who mostly keeps quiet while wearing a reassuring smile – are seeing to their rider outside Green Door Store. It’s day two of Great Escape and show 99 for the band overall. Their 100th show is the same day, later on at The Hope & Ruin. 

If you’ve seen Ain’t before, those numbers make sense. They don’t miss a beat or a note. They add both, in fact, interluding songs together or raising the tension by extending an intro until you are totally gasping for the gut-punch payoff of the main riff. Each of the seven times I’ve seen them, without fail, you feel this eureka moment sweep the crowd by the time they finish their first song – and if not by then, certainly by the time they close with “Pirouette”. That surging, pop punk-leaning gem shows up the Pumpkins’ “Today” by miles. They’ve played it at every show but one. 

“After tonight, ‘Pirouette’ will have a perfect 99% success rate of being played live,” Lockstone says. “It’s as effective as dettol,” Darch yes-ands without missing a beat. 

Her stage presence is a big part of Ain’t’s USP and the confidence the band projects. There’s something gothic and eerie about the undulating movements, like a self-taught ballerina from a Tim Burton movie, or a swan midway through its transformation into human form. She’ll gaze up at an arm as it curls away from her as if without her permission, then dive bomb into a forward fall and rocket straight back up like she’s being yanked by invisible strings – though actually she’s being cued by the handbrake lurch of the guitars. 

“I guess before I did music I was mainly into dance. I did dance lessons multiple times a week but I never followed that up,” Darch says. “I feel embarrassed when I look back at myself dancing onstage because it’s been like ten years since I did a formal lesson and I’m flopping around all over the place.”

Everyone jumps to defend her. “You know what it is, for me, I’m a very fidgety person and I’m always moving around fiddling,” she says, “so in order to not pull all my hair out onstage I need to outsource it into arms.”

While this is going on, Lockstone is sure to enter what the rest of them lovingly dub “goblin mode.” “If you see him sweaty and shirtless and hunched down like this, that’s goblin mode,” Randall says, crouching forward with air-sticks in hand. Lockstone started out in metalcore and hardcore bands, and his style is even more turbocharged and propulsive live than on record. “I’ve always loved someone drumming when they are beating the shit out of the drums,” he says. “A hard hitter is always something I’ve enjoyed watching. The way I drum now isn’t the same as when I started in the band either.”

Since joining Ain’t, his whole music taste has been turned upside down, thanks to everyone else / a group playlist called Corporate Comms. Randall is wearing a Peel Dream Magazine shirt, a relatively obscure LA-via-Brooklyn project that splits the difference between Burt Bacharach and Stereolab’s bubblefuzz. Isaac plays guitar in the white-knuckled hardcore band Rotten Luck alongside bassing (and occasionally yelling) for Ain’t. Darch, an English Lit maven, has on a Throbbing Gristle shirt the day of our photo shoot – some of the least approachable music I’ve ever tried to approach – but she also likes the Pavement songs that Stephen Malkmus sings, just not the ones by Scott Kannberg (“I don’t like the one that’s responsible for ‘Two States’”). You get the idea: “rock band” is easier to explain.

“We started out with a pretty clear idea of the kinda band we were gonna sound like,” Lockstone explains, emphasis on started out. “We were gonna sound like Horse Jumper of Love or Alex G or something slightly slowcore, but then when you actually get the people in the room and you’ve got Hanna’s vocal style and performance style, and similarly with my drumming, and Isaac’s bass – that whole process changed.”

We could also look at the producers they’ve worked with over the last two years for some clarity; by association, they’ve entered into conversation with some buzzy British sceneleaders. For instance, Ali Chant has worked with Dry Cleaning and Sorry. Theo Verney is known for his English Teacher and Lime Garden records. And Oli Barton-Wood has Porridge Radio and Lambrini Girls on his CV. Ain’t have recorded a song or two with each of these guys, so far only releasing standalone singles. But their proper debut EP is out 22 May. It’s called How They Faked the Moon Landing, the title of an old song that’s since been retired. 

“It was Ain’t’s slowest, quietest song ever,” Lockstone says. “Before we came through into the energy and dynamics that we play with now, it was a bit of a mixed bag at the start.”

“It was brutal to play live because you can hear every word of chatting,” Randall adds.

Back to Lockstone: “It’s the most exposing song ever. Hanna, you got yourself heebie-jeebied up with coming in on the first bit, because you’re just so exposed.”

“I hated it. I hate doing slow songs.”

“But we loved the title,” Lockstone says. “It’s just a tiny story in one sentence.”

Using it as the EP title is a callback for the real heads, and feels akin to drawing a neat line under this first chapter of Ain’t. “It was quite a nice way to wrap up all of those songs, Ellerby says. “Because this is a collection of all of our previous releases with a nice bow.” 

“Considering it spanned over two years of recording, three different producers – I guess that’s a testament to how set we are on our expectations in the studio and our references,” Lockstone says of its accidental cohesion. “We don’t deviate too far from that.”

“Long Short Round” is the first of six tracks and the perfect Ain’t song – not to mention the best example of the Ellerby-Randall guitar unit in dizzying action. In one ear you’ve got a drunk bee trying to find its way back to the hive, and staccato click-clack chugs in the other. But they interface, calling and responding; commiserating in the pindrop-quiet outro, raging arm in arm earlier on. 

“We both write a lot of guitar parts, riffs, in a way where you get a half lead/half rhythm part, so they’re on top of each other,” Ellerby explains. “I think, Ed, you’re primarily the lead guitarist really” (the drunk-bee-lines guy) “but even rhythm playing is lead-like.” 

Randall elaborates: “We’re both such tetchy rhythm writers, because you do it in your bedroom. We don’t do much writing of those parts in the rehearsal room. Normally that’ll be the one thing we have sorted before we go in. And I’m kind of hard to please with my own stuff, so if I can make a guitar part that’s mine sound like two people are doing it – you’ve got the rhythm and the melody going – that’s the only way I feel happy. I feel like I’ve not achieved anything otherwise.”

Achievement begets achievement, because Ain’t have been killing it lately. You might have heard their name via support gigs with the Hold Steady, Rocket, Belair Lip Bombs, or thistle. They were approached by Dinked – the collaborative, limited-run vinyl series – for this exclusive EP pressing. And their first major London headline show is next week at The Social, where 100+ Ain’t fans from across London and beyond can come together and chant the twiddly-doodly riff from “Pirouette” like we're at a football match. 

And they owe all of this – or certainly some of it – to the man who owns their practice space, Gun Factory in Homerton. He’s called Brian. “He’s the first person who believed in us,” Lockstone says. “He’d listen to us from outside the practice room. He’d be like, ‘that’s alright, that is. A bit Smashing Pumpkins’” – he effects a heavy Scottish accent for that last part. “‘Very Mazzy Star,’” Ellerby adds in the same thick brogue. 

“‘Are you gonna gig this live? Just send some emails, get a show,’” Lockstone continues. “And this is before we ever played live. He spurred us on to do it. He was so happy when we told him we got our first gig.” 100 shows later – probably 101 by the time you’re reading this – Ain’t are such a formidable rock-music powerhouse, an enabler of communal catharsis, a hellraiser of questions, that for some of us they’ve started to define whatever epoch we’re in right now. A loud London band for loud London times. As for the rest of you: get in while the going’s good, because it’s about to get way louder.