Live review: Hot Milk – London Roundhouse

“Where the fuck is my big fat gaping hole?”

This could only come from the mouth of Han Mee, who evidently would like a mosh-pit to open. Playing the iconic Roundhouse just two albums deep is A) a deserving occasion and B) quite a good excuse for the Hot Milk singer to be as loud and sweary as possible. Not every band gets to scale the ladder as quickly as they have, but it’s not without graft either. Every night in their local Manchester scene, and every night on their multiple rounds of touring with Foo Fighters, and more recently Green Day, has helped to forge them into the force they are in London tonight.

Tonight is equally significant for goofy nu-metal crew Silly Goose, who are playing outside of their native U.S. for the first time on this tour. They’ve got to build a bond with the UK from the ground up, but once they’ve found their footing – which involves boundlessly energetic vocalist Jackson Foster yelling “FUCKING SLIDE!” at the crowd – the crowd are bouncing along. With the chunky riffs of Traffic and the pissed-off groove of Tsunami, the momentum begins to build. Just in case he hadn’t endeared himself enough, Jackson mentions they’re selling a shirt featuring his mugshot from when he was arrested for trespassing (after they spontaneously played at a petrol station). “I will happily sign it.”

It's Silly Goose’s second show in the UK, but it’s Cassyette’s third this year. She’s had a very quiet 2025, but that all changes when she soars through opener September Rain without a hint of rust. In fact, she sounds stronger than ever, especially when the agonised screams on When She Told Me make the violent grief she sings about feel like a fresh wound all over again. She even throws a new song in called Oops, a funky, sassy floor-filler that suggests that her next chapter can’t come soon enough.

Talking of fun, Hot Milk bound onstage determined to throw the party of their lives. With a discography splitting at the sides with rage, angst and life-affirming bravado, there’s many ways they could have steered the evening. There’s a place for defiance, as demonstrated with the bullish nu-metal stomp of Sunburn From Your Bible (with some real hair-raising screams from co-vocalist Jim Shaw), the sneering The American Machine and a gigantic Insubordinate Ingerland, but the dominant emotion of the night is not anger.

In fact, beyond a brief rebuke to the flag-shaggers decorating lamp posts with St George’s cross who are angry at something they don’t understand”, there’s little political chat at all. “Every single person is forgetting about the world outside,” declares Han.

And fair fucks. God knows the people here need a sing-along. The Roundhouse becomes a bubble of euphoria with the rowdy Over Your Dead Body and the fizzing Bloodstream, as well as a reworked ‘nightmare’ version of Candy Coated Lies that’s more like Toxic Waste than Haribo Starmix, but the darker, heavier take certainly works.

Han’s spitting a one-liner every minute – “Split in two like my fanny,” she dares the crowd. “We’re going to do this,” she adds later, waving her arm, “because it feels really good on my armpit.”

When the band stop for a moment and properly absorb the weight of it all, the sentiment changes, the place erupting as Han takes in the scene and sobs before a heart-rending Breathing Underwater. Hot Milk is an emotion, so they say. And when that emotion is life-affirming joy, an hour and a half can really fly.

Hot Milk are on tour in the UK until November 22.

Read this next:

• Hot Milk: “Why shouldn’t we make England the home of music again?”
• Cassyette: “In order to evolve and for the scene to have culture, it has to have a bit of everything”
• “When 1,000 people come to see you at a gas station at 20 minutes’ notice, that’s a real ego trip”: Meet Silly Goose, the band filling nu-metal’s tank