Live Review: Dead Pioneers + YAKKIE at The Underworld 1/3/26

Sunday night. Not your typical gig night. But there I was, on my way to Camden on a slightly drizzly evening, heading to The Underworld, a venue so conveniently placed you can practically roll out of Camden Town tube station and straight through the doors.

The support band were YAKKIE, a band I first saw at 2023’s LOUD WOMEN Fest (which also happened to be their very first live performance). They were one of my standouts that year- political, loud, and deeply aligned with the riot grrrl energy I so love. They recently released their debut album Kill The Cop Inside Your Head, which, in my opinion, is a feminist punk masterpiece, so I was very excited to see them live again. I was not disappointed.

Kicking off with the title track, ‘Kill The Cop Inside Your Head’, the atmosphere in the already sweaty, packed and intimate room immediately intensified. The band are full of movement – jumping, dancing, completely committed to delivering a set brimming with vigour and conviction. The addition of Ren Aldridge, vocalist of Petrol Girls, for ‘Right of Reply’ was a brilliant moment. I’ve seen Petrol Girls before and they are another formidable political force, particularly when it comes to championing women’s rights. Seeing Ren join YAKKIE on a song about femicide felt powerful and fitting, a moment of solidarity as much as performance.

While YAKKIE’s songs pulse with righteous anger at a patriarchal world, they also offer something crucial: hope. I felt genuinely inspired by singer Janey Starling’s speech before ‘Under the Pavement Is the Beach’, where she encouraged us not to succumb to despair, because despair is what they want us to feel. Sometimes, she reminded us, the right thing to do is fight. Fight for our values, for our rights, and for those more vulnerable than ourselves. The audience absolutely adored them; they were the perfect openers, setting the tone for a night rooted firmly in punk’s activist spirit.

Dead Pioneers were relatively new to my ears, though they already have two albums behind them and another on the way. A quick look at their bio had immediately piqued my interest- a punk band incorporating spoken word poetry (a personal tick as a poet myself) and tackling subjects such as identity, resistance and white supremacy. Frontman Gregg Deal, a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, brings his Indigenous identity powerfully into the band’s art. He opened the set by introducing himself in his native language before switching to English, a grounding, intentional beginning.

Riding the momentum created by YAKKIE, the intensity only escalated. Dead Pioneers channelled raw fury into a fusion of hard rock, metal and spoken word passages that cut through the noise with precision. Ren Aldridge made another appearance, lending her unmistakable vocals to ‘Nazi Teeth’, further amplifying the sense of collective resistance that ran through the night.

Amid the heaviness, there was a soft and unexpectedly tender moment when Gregg shared that it was one of his five children’s birthdays and filmed the crowd singing “Happy Birthday.” It felt sweet and human, a brief pause that reminded us that behind the politics and power are real lives and real families.

American politics were called out. Racism was punched in the face with hard-hitting lyrics and colossal riffs. Rallying cries rang out: free Palestine, amplify women’s voices, join unions.

This was a gig about far more than headbanging (though I did plenty of that). Emotionally, it didn’t leave me angry, it left me lit from within. Not rage, but determination. A sense of fire to stand up, to speak out, to hold onto hope. It felt deeply community-driven, as though everyone packed into that sweaty venue was united in something bigger than a Sunday night show.

And surely, that is the true meaning of punk.