LIVE REVIEW + PHOTOS: Joey Valence & Brae – Club Academy, Manchester – 29/11/2024

In Manchester’s Club Academy—a basement venue with prime sweatbox potential, should the occasion call for it—there’s a clear movement brewing. Forget Sleep Token or Charli XCX, who’ve both played across town over the past week; this is where the real excitement is. You can tell from the garish outfit choices and surprisingly flexible demographic crammed into this tiny room, the key signifier that Joey Valence & Brae are making moves beyond simply rising through the ranks. This is the latest stop on a world tour, an impressive for anyone to undertake. But for an independent, grassroots hip-hop duo with a repertoire comprised almost entirely of nerd references, meme soundbites and quasi-ironic braggadocio that’d fall directly on its face without the gumption to sound believable, it’s borderline mythical.

To that end, you almost feel pity for Subten having to open. This might be the sort of environment that’s paid proven dividends in the past, but in a scenario that’ll find itself overwhelmed by how much…muchness is unleashed, his efforts don’t even begin to compete. It’s not helpful that a good portion of his work can feel indistinguishable, where there’s little done in the hip-hop / jungle / drum ‘n’ bass fusion that breaks from set flows and beatwork patterns. It gets there eventually with pieces taken from grime and dubstep, where a backhanded but accurate branding of ‘Bru-C with dignity’ comes into play. The aim is to convey the feel of underground MCs, with basic call-and-responses and a more fluid creative atmosphere, which Subten is generally capable of. It seldom amounts to much, though, where his calls of “Loving the energy, Manchester” have an almost perfunctory reservation when there’s not a lot to speak of.

It’s almost impressive how easily he gets blown out of the water, no less by Joey Valence & Brae’s DJ Ewook in a 15-minute prelude mashup. This isn’t a set, per se; more an appetiser that’s more attuned to where tonight’s headliners are. So with that in mind, there’ll be House Of Pain’s Jump Around, and Travis Scott’s FE!N, and a garage remix of Limp Bizkit’s Break Stuff, and all manner of sundry trance and D’n’B snippets. It’s actually a pretty well-done mashup, with loads of room to experiment while remaining conscious of how frequent its bomb-drop moments are.

More crucially, it sends the vibe in the room rocketing up from the jump, which allows Joey Valence & Brae to leap in headfirst with the heavy lifting essentially done for them. Not that they take that as an excuse to slack, mind, when even just the first half of THE BADDEST has the jackhammer intensity and fun factor to ramp things up a few more levels alone. The vocal mixing might start off a little iffy, but the second that’s rectified, there’s barely a complaint to be had. Here are two consummate showmen making use of every tool and square inch of space at their disposal, with the kind of self-evident freedom that comes from so obvious avoiding tethers to genre or industry micro-managing. Nowhere else would an abundance of cornball wham-lines land with such a cratering impact, such is the effect of sincerity and love for fun in the game.

There’s an unquestionable punk feel that makes this all so cool, in the simpatico relationship between the surroundings, the free-sparking crackle onstage, and how hard so many of these songs can actually go. Joey primarily embodies that as the most animated of the pair (though neither are slouches, truth be told). More often than not, he’ll be stretching out and splaying limbs in any which way, with an intensity in which he could be fronting, like, Knocked Loose right now. It’s likely why Joey Valence & Brae have been embraced by alternative circles in the way that they have, almost one-to-one how the Beastie Boys were in the ‘90s. There’s a rock element at play, clearly—see the cement-cracking weight of HOOLIGANG for the first proper example—but the feel is embedded in the culture, too. With the room-sized circle pit and hardcore dancing inspired throughout STARTAFIGHT, you’d have to go to some wild lengths to argue this doesn’t belong in the same conversations as the rock vanguard.

The best part about it all is, again, the freedom in which this stuff imparts upon itself. In proving themselves the masters of the unsung art of the jock-jam, Joey Valence & Brae can translate that mood into whichever style they see fit. They are genuinely great at it, too. PACKAPUNCH and NO HANDS have the dustier backpack-rap feel that’s more eased-into but no less charismatic. Much later, their cover of 365 (with its appropriately BRAT-green lighting) has the feel of Liam Howlett’s fingerprints on Charli XCX’s original to go off ridiculously hard. A little on from that, there’s even gold mined from Napalm—the Pendulum collaboration that saps precisely all of the duo’s individuality—but affixing it GUMDROP’s jittery hyperpop and an array of additional D’n’B touches. Needless to say, it, too, works like a treat.

Honestly, the whole thing just speaks for itself, without much reason to ever quieten down. This is only an hour-long set but there’s barely a second of fluff or filler, such is airtight approach that Joey Valence & Brae have curated. Every song, regardless of style or appearance, is a banger, treated and received as such. Hell, by the time THE BADDEST comes around again towards the end, you’re more than a little convinced that they’ve got an all-timer under their belt, if not more than just the one. All of that comes into play in a showing with no greater flash or pretension, or even anything more than two hyperfocused frontmen and a DJ. It’s the truest attitude of ‘do-it-yourself’ imaginable, never breaking its hold or feeling anything less than ready to wreck. Honestly, the fact that an entire world tour has been built off the back of an almost inconceivably simple ethos is mind-boggling, in the best way possible. There’s no one in the world who could knock Joey Valence & Brae back.

Words by Luke Nuttall

Photos by Faye Roberts (Instagram)