LIVE REVIEW: Mothica – Gorilla, Manchester – 27/09/2024

Everyone has to start somewhere, even if it doesn’t feel like it’s where they should be. Case in point—this is Mothica’s first Manchester show, sold out and awaited with palpable eagerness from outside, and it’s in a venue called Gorilla with an entrance under a railway bridge. Not exactly the environment best fitted for alt-pop’s current imminent superstar, is it? Truth be told, though, you won’t find Mothica slumming it to this degree again. Not only is she, by far, in the best place musically she’s ever been in on new album Kissing Death, but a headline run of three UK dates—all sellouts, at that—reads as something of a pivotal moment going forward. Mothica’s own ambition and reach barely fits in rooms this size as it is; give it a little time, and you’ll have no chance in somewhere this intimate again.

As for openers Artio, there’s still a ways to go before they get there. They’re already a bit shafted having to kick off while most are still queued outside, an oversight for the sort of newer act that’d likely nab quite a lot of attention from this crowd specifically. They ultimately do, but there’s the ring of proficiency that holds more for Artio than outright excellence. It’s a nice touch to have their own bespoke production on the LED wall behind them; otherwise, their dense pop-rock is buoyed up most by its road miles and zeitgeist-y flavour. To their credit, they get close to a legit hit with Unhinged, thanks to a sharper bounce that sends the energy rocketing up before returning to a safe mid-level of ponderous, generally ill-defined fare. The band themselves are fine at pulling it off, mind, and throughout, the feel of well-accumulated support-act stock feels rather evident. A little on the middling side as far as grip goes, then, but it’s alright.

And at least they can hit the ground running; Starbenders, on the other hand, take a full song to get their stage lit properly. It takes them the best part of another to actually pick up some motion. After another couple, there’s finally a grander, more impactful guitar solo on We’re Not OK, and things, at long last, seem to have clicked. Yeah, for a band so proudly espousing the glam-rock aesthetic, any associated balls-to-the-wall rip takes absurdly longer than it should to get going. A slow burn should not the weapon of choice for this band. Still, given that Starbenders’ own glam-rock—for the most part—is smaller and less overtly flamboyant, maybe that’s a conscious decision. And yet, there’s a clear turning point reached, often when frontwoman Kimi Shelter ditches her guitar and ends up a lot more mobile and gifted with personality. It’s such a weird dichotomy to spend this much time building up to, especially when, by the end, they’re as competent and appropriate as a band for whom demeanour is such a standout trait should be. At least they get there, though. Perhaps it’s too little, too late, but it’s better than nothing.

Mothica, though, has no such issues. Not even close. In fact, for the just-under-an-hour that she’s onstage, you’d struggle to find a single hole to pick. The disconnect between the room and presence at its head might register as a disconnect, but Mothica presents as such a magnetic entity that you’d almost forget this is all effectively in a restaurant’s basement. There’s almost an ethereality about the presentation to begin with, as she floats across the stage with tassels on her sleeves streaming along with her. Later on, when she leans into a robotic uncanniness to match the grind of a song like Afterlife, the theatricality takes greater hold. As far as dialling into the theatricality required by alt-pop and nu-gen edict, there’s really nothing more that Mothica could do within these very limited means. Her backdrop of a moth superimposed on red thunderclouds implies the desire for something even grander, really only held back by these walls.

Above all, though, Mothica’s greatest strength—and it’s not even a contest—is her sincerity. In a scene populated by disaffection that’s had all the edge ruthlessly sanded off of it, a shot of real enthusiasm is almost an unfathomable tonic. Here’s an artist fundamentally like the others, but dashing back and forth across the stage, smile plastered on her face, with palpable excitability about just being here. This isn’t artificial; it’s genuine, and cool. Moreover, it spills into Mothica’s openness about her own history in a way that isn’t just compounded platitudes. As has become tradition before forever fifteen now, she speaks on her diagnosis with major depressive disorder at a young age, her own abuse of drugs and alcohol to cope, and her suicide attempt at 15. Apparently this isn’t some off-the-dome monologue—reports from other dates would suggest it’s actually rather rehearsed—but it’s not stilted or perfunctory either. Mothica gets clearly choked up during it, and there’s not some vacuum of personality preventing its human moments from slipping through: “I tried to hang out with dudes in bands to feel something; turns out they were…paedophiles.”

For a demographic of all genders that’s a little older, you can see exactly why Mothica is the kind of draw she is. Nothing about this feels shackled down by nu-gen optics, or bent over backwards by TikTok commodification. It’s just real, unfeigned music, decked in alt-pop garb with an arena-pop-rock heart beating vigorously within. You find that on the synthpop pound of The Reaper, or big rock numbers like Casualty and Sensitive that are no marvels of technical flash, but are still as solid as they come. Although the guitarist and drummer are clearly in the backseat behind Mothica herself, they put in the work regardless. It’s already exponentially preferable to a backing track, not just in realism of sound but in filling things out physically. In a set that makes room for covers of Bring Me The Horizon’s Can You Feel My Heart? and Smash Mouth’s All Star, it’s helpful to avoid the dreaded karaoke-esque awkwardness that’s so easy to trip into. The latter is actually the set closer, a kitschy novelty but a much-appreciated bout of levity after a set of trauma-dumping (Mothica’s words, not ours). It’s just fun, above anything else, another thing that nu-gen is deathly allergic to, but Mothica brings in spades. Right now, there’s no reason she shouldn’t be leading the charge on this scene; she’s honestly better than most of them combined.

Words by Luke Nuttall