Eight years on from Beside Myself, Basement land their fifth record WIRED in a Waterloo tunnel with Rough Trade and Outbreak at their backs. There were better-lit options. They picked the right one.

Words by Felix Bartlett, photos by Aaron Heather (@aaronheather_photo) | 09 May, 2026

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Some venues are just rooms. Leake Street has never been a room. The Waterloo tunnel where Basement chose to baptise their fifth record WIRED on its release night doubled, for me at least, as a time machine.

These arches were where I came of age. Same postcode, different lifetime. Smoking outside, drinking too cheap and too fast, looking for the kind of connection only a sweaty basement gig (small b, no pun intended) can offer. The staff probably still remember me throwing up in the entrance. If there’s any mercy in this world, they don’t.

So coming back was always going to feel weighted. Coming back to watch Basement play here, on the night their first album in eight years dropped via Run For Cover, with Rough Trade and Outbreak co-presenting the whole thing as a love letter to independent venues, that’s a circle so neatly closed it almost feels engineered.

Last time I saw Andrew Fisher and co. they were warming up Wembley for Bring Me The Horizon. Tonight they were playing to a few hundred people in a tunnel that, if my teenage memory serves, used to be a car wash. The band looked like they preferred it this way. I know I did.

WIRED had been out for less than a day. They open with “The Way I Feel”, a track that sounds meatier in a low-ceilinged box of brick and damp than it does on John Congleton’s polished mix. The title track follows. It’s the most urgent thing they’ve ever recorded and it lives even bigger live. By the time “Covet” hits, the slow-burn TikTok sleeper that pulled half this room back to Basement in the first place, the singalong is loud enough that Fisher can step off the mic and let it ride.

Then they pivot. “Whole”, “Earl Grey”, “Pine”, “Spoiled”. Promise Everything era stuff for the people who got Basement at 15. The room moves differently for these songs. Same room, but every face has aged into the lyrics by another decade. New record material weaves back in: “Head Alight”, “Time Waster”, “Broken By Design”. The contrast lands. WIRED isn’t a soft pivot. It’s a band who know exactly what they sound like and have decided to lean harder into it.

The line of the night came from Fisher between songs, a mission statement disguised as small talk. “I used to sing this song about the things I didn’t have and look in envy,” he said. “Now it’s about the things I’m grateful for.” The room didn’t quite know what to do with it. People my age, the ones who got Basement at 15 and have aged alongside them, recognised the move. The angsty, scarcity-coded songs that scored our adolescence aren’t being disowned. They’re being rotated. Same songs, new lens. A gentle bit of philosophy from a frontman who doesn’t usually waste his words.

The mics crackled. Fisher kept asking the engineer for more vocal gain. In a more polished room this would feel like a problem. At Leake Street, on album release night, with Rough Trade and Outbreak having framed the whole evening around the small venues that birth bands like this in the first place, it’s the entire point. I was 15 at a local show once. I am, in some functional sense, still 15 at a local show. So was everyone else in this room.

Closing on “Are You The One” into “Promise Everything” was the only way to land it. The first had every voice in the tunnel. The second had the band looking at each other like they’d remembered, mid-song, what doing this for fifteen years in front of people like us actually feels like.

Independent venues are the lifeblood. Bands like Basement know this because they came from rooms exactly like this one. That they chose to release WIRED into the world from a tunnel under Waterloo, with the people who actually still go to small shows, says everything you need to know about where their head is at right now.

I had to leave a piece of myself at the entrance again. Different reason this time.