Ioan Hazell
Journalist, musician, and poet with a passion for storytelling in all its myriad forms.
Interested in the stories, people, and art at the fringes. If it’s weird, count me in.
Pom Poko bring their latest album ‘Champion’ to The Garage, London with support from Alien Chicks
Norway’s Pom Poko are a band whose sound has deepened with time. Their debut album, ‘Birthday’ (2019), was a rush of energy and oddities from which sprung 2021’s ‘Cheater’, an album that gave rise to some of their most beloved and catchy tracks, such as ‘Like a Lady’ and ‘Danger Baby’. Their most recent release, ‘Champion’ (2024), proved in places to be a softening of their sound, showing a more tender side to the band. It is an album that balances moments of sweetness with a disarming, almost blunt sincerity.
On March 8, 2025, Pom Poko brought ‘Champion’ to The Garage, London, as the second UK date of a much-anticipated EU tour. The venue, a former billiard hall once frequented by local villains—members of the infamous Highbury Mob—holds a certain kind of faded grandeur. In this odd, historically charged space, Alien Chicks, a South London three-piece, opened the evening.
Alien Chicks felt like a strange fit for The Garage. Their performance tore through the venue’s classic, near anachronistic interior. From the outset, the group’s restless energy and unyielding on-stage movement seemed performative constituents of a band aiming to impress. Indeed, they succeeded in being impossible to ignore.
Alien Chicks appear to revel in disorder, offering a heady blend of jagged rhythms and maniacal vocals. Their 2024 single, ‘Steve Buscemi’, was a standout, a track that harkened to Fugazi’s punk intensity but with more erratic rhythmic shifts. For those seeking chaos (and possibly a particularly sinister rendition of ‘A Teddy Bear’s Picnic’) Alien Chicks will headline at Oslo, Hackney, on the 7th May.
When Pom Poko took the stage, opening with ‘Growing Story’ from ‘Champion’, their impact was immediate. Having seen the band at various venues, I was struck by how much more brutal their sound felt at The Garage. They were louder and toppier than I have ever known them to be. Rather than a flaw, this sonic boldness served only to illuminate the band’s remarkable precision, their ability to deliver staggering complexity without losing control.
Throughout the set, Pom Poko performed tracks from all three of their albums, and the crowd’s devotion was palpable. The sing-alongs were as loud for 2018’s ‘My Blood’ as they were for the title track of their most recent release, ‘Champion’. In ‘Champion’, Ragnhild Fangel Jamtveit, the band’s singer, effortlessly navigated a song of sweet vulnerability, drawing the room together. Her voice—gentle yet powerful—was complemented by clean, enveloping guitar tones that lent the song a feeling of quiet embrace.
Pom Poko communicate with one another on stage, exchanging smiles and glances: outward indicators of their freedom from the overdone trappings of rock ego. It’s refreshing to see a group making such musically adventurous, boundary-pushing work without the self-destructive air that so often lingers over more experimental—and perhaps namely, distorted—music.
One of the night’s highlights came with ‘Follow the Lights’ from ‘Birthday’. The song showcased the band’s remarkable musical command. Ola Djupvik, their drummer, is a study in cool efficiency—technically extraordinary but nevertheless, dutifully restrained, embodying the band’s ethos of controlled power.
For the encore: ‘Big Life’ from ‘Champion’, a track that is altogether darker and more brooding than the rest of their set. Never ones to linger too long in predictability, the pervading doom of the verses was soon interrupted by bursts of excitable optimism: “This day is a big one for me,” sang Jamtveit, grinning and flailing infectiously. As the band picked up the pace, the heavy sub-bass and pulsing strobe lights hammering away at the senses of the audience, that line became a tangible, shared intuition.
Pom Poko are a band intent on giving their audience a good time. Beneath the noise and the chaos, there is an undeniable warmth, a sense of goodwill that can’t be ignored. Musically, they balance the raw brutality of The Jesus and Mary Chain with the precision of Mingus, all the while maintaining a childlike, contagious joy in their performance. It is an asset that makes their noise feel less like aggression and more like an invitation to their raucous, freewheeling party.
Listen to ‘Champion’ here: