The Burning Hell + Jon McKiel

The Burning Hell
+ Jon McKiel
Saturday 30th August
The New Adelphi Club
£15 Adv tickets on this page(from Friday 21st at 9am)
Doors: 8.00pm

The Burning Hell is the ongoing musical project of songwriter Mathias Kom and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Sharratt, often including additional comrades and collaborators.

Their densely populated genre-shifting songs are packed with an abundance of literary, historical, and pop-cultural forebears, heroes and villains, subjects and objects, stories and hooks.

They move with heavy rhyme and a light step, incorporating a frequent fixation on apocalypse and ruin into work that celebrates participation in a mutually created, ever surprising, and even occasionally beautiful world. Which is to say they’re good dance partners and they want to dance with you.

Now based in the woods of rural Prince Edward Island, The Burning Hell has famously ventured to every out-of-the-way island and inland neglected by the less adventurous, emphasizing presence and connection across latitudes, longitudes, and time, affirming a commitment to the political power of sharing music. It is a profoundly optimistic gesture delivered by way of killer tunes and joyful live performances.

When Mathias and Ariel aren’t on the road or in the studio with the band, they pursue art projects at the intersection of ecology and sound with their collective Idlefield Art Lab. Recent ventures have included mobile, solar-powered recording studios in Scotland and Canada, and off-grid recording projects in abandoned farms and lighthouses.

‘Ghost Palace,’ The Burning Hell’s newest album, will be released on March 7, 2025 on You’ve Changed Records in North America and BB*Island everywhere else.

“…funny, sardonic, and literate. Add in a new-wavey, Loaded-era VU sensibility, and it’s impossible not to be swayed by these acerbically funny story songs.”
MOJO MAGAZINE

“…super literate and fantastically droll, over backings that range from bubbling synth pop and acoustic folk to rattly punk and even a spot of semi-calypso. Silver Jews and Jeffrey Lewis spring to mind on the terrific ‘Birdwatching’; ‘Bird Queen of Garbage Island’ sounds like a glorious revival of Tom Tom Club.”
UNCUT MAGAZINE

9/10 “Maybe The Burning Hell won’t be for everyone – I don’t think they’d even want to be for everyone – but if you like brilliant, thought-provoking lyrics, superb musicianship and killer tunes, you know what… you might just love this too.”
AMERICANA UK

Jon McKiel is a Canadian singer-songwriter, originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia and later based in Sackville, New Brunswick. He is most noted for his 2024 album Hex, which was a longlisted nominee for the 2024 Polaris Music Prize.

“McKiel writes songs like philosophical treatises, pondering ecological decay, existential jitters and the fate of humanity in an increasingly digitized world” SPIN

“McKiel resents the erasure of wonder, the mundane encroaching on everyday magic—a timely concern now that bands are proudly using AI to write songs. McKiel finds humanity in a bit of confusion”. PITCHFORK