← All scenes

The Windmill Scene

Brixton, South London, UK2016–present4 bands

Since 2016, a run of art-literate, genre-restless bands has converged on one small Brixton pub venue — the Windmill — where a permissive booker and a rotating cast of overlapping members turned a 150-capacity room into a genuine incubator, still active today.

  1. black midi

    The scene's most sonically extreme act and, by reputation, its center of gravity — their controlled-chaos live sets became the thing other Windmill regulars measured their own gigs against.

    Photo: Paul Hudson from United Kingdom · CC BY 2.0
  2. Black Country, New Road

    Formed a couple of years after black midi out of an earlier band's remnants, and became stage-mates and label-mates rather than direct followers — Georgia Ellery's parallel membership in Jockstrap tied the two bands together directly.

  3. Squid

    The one act here that didn't start in London — met at university in Brighton and only became part of this scene once they relocated and started playing the same stage as black midi and Black Country, New Road.

    Photo: Paul Hudson from United Kingdom · CC BY 2.0
  4. Jockstrap

    Formed out of the Guildhall School rather than the Windmill circuit itself, but Georgia Ellery's parallel membership in Black Country, New Road made the two bands' overlap concrete rather than just a shared bill.

The room

Brixton, South London, UK · 2016–present

The Windmill isn't a genre venue — it's a Brixton pub room that will book almost anything, run by promoters willing to give unsigned, half-formed bands a regular slot and an audience that's mostly other musicians. That informality, more than any shared sound, is what let a small circle of acts trade members, ideas, and stage time for years before any of them had a record deal.

The bands that came out of it share almost no fixed genre — jazz-inflected post-punk, glitchy chamber-pop, motorik dance-punk, prog-scrambled art-rock — but they share the room, overlapping lineups, and a wave of press attention that landed on all of them at once around 2019 and hasn't really let up since.

Room to room

No band in another scene names the bands here; 5 bands from 4 other scenes shaped them.

Red: who a band here shapedBlue: who a band here learned fromPoint at a band to see only its links; click a scene to go there.

What came out of it

Mercury Prize nominations for black midi and Black Country, New Road, and wide critical attention for Squid and Jockstrap, took the scene from a single pub circuit to an internationally covered story within a couple of years. It's too recent to say yet what these bands will go on to influence — the more honest claim is just how fast a 150-capacity room turned into an internationally-watched scene.

Who they learned from 14

Who learned from them 0

Too soon to tell: no one on the map names them yet.