2025: A Year of Movement

Looking back at 2025, I'm struck by how much of it was defined by motion - running, crossing borders, touring across countries, and the constant forward momentum that comes from refusing to stay still. Some of it went well. Some of it was exhausting. Here's what happened.

Running For Its Own Sake

I ran two races this year that I'm proud of. The first was a 10K in Chichester back in February, and the training leading up to it was really tough. We were recording in Belgium at the beginning of January and it took a lot of inner strength to put on ten layers of damp clothes every morning for my fast training runs in the snow. But I did it, and the race went better than I'd hoped.

I credit the success to my partner Dara who acted as my coach throughout my training period and paced me for both races. His discipline and commitment to fitness always sets the bar extremely high.

The second was a half marathon in Newport in April. By this time, I was in the habit of running between five and ten miles every single day, which sounds like a lot, but still nothing close to Dara's mileage. By the time I got to the race, I'd only done twelve miles so hadn't even proved I could physically manage the extra distance. But I finished it in under two hours, and it was a huge personal achievement that I'll always have to look back on.

A New Life in Còmpeta

It's funny to look back at the year with a zoomed-out lens because back in January our house was on the market for the seventh month and we were looking at isolated smallholdings in Wales to begin an animal rescue.

We went back to Wales in February and walked through countless muddy fields, cold to the bone, wondering how many miles we'd have to drive to find a place to run. After the last house viewing Dara and I got back into the car, shivering, looked at each other, and said: fuck this, let's move to Spain.

It took a lot of work and planning, but finally at the beginning of August we made the move. We found a place in Còmpeta - a small mountain town in Andalusia near the Costa del Sol.

I never really felt like England was my home and I think I'll always be a rootless kind of person, but there's something about being here that feels right. The pace is different, the light is different, the sunshine makes a huge difference to my mental health, and I love the Spanish culture. We haven't settled permanently yet, but I feel hugely optimistic about our future here.

A highlight of Spain so far was a seven-day hike with my mum around the towns of Málaga in October.

Learning Spanish

One of the things I'm most proud of this year is the daily work I've put into learning Spanish. I still have a long way to go and progress isn't linear. It's slow work, but as a musician slow work is what I'm used to, and the harder things are, the more rewarding the results. Every successful interaction or visible sign of improvement gives me a soaring high.

I've finally started actual lessons, which is one of the highlights of my week.

The Saddest Moment of 2025

After making the huge move to Spain with us and enjoying the siesta lifestyle, our cat Sam was put to sleep in October after a long illness. It all happened suddenly while I was away and it was a difficult time for both Dara and I. Sam has been our big nasty baby for our whole life together and it will be a while before the house stops feeling empty.

Elixir of Life Takes Flight

Professionally, the year started with releasing the ballet-themed music video for Elixir of Life. This was another thing that didn't come easily - I'd begun ballet lessons a few years previously and had been working hard on my routine for months leading up to the shoot. The video concept was ambitious - dark, elegant, slightly unsettling - and I wanted the challenge of performing it myself rather than having someone else do it. Nothing ever matches up to the vision and I'm still very much a beginner, but I was extremely proud of the hard work I put into this video. I mostly credit the success to my teacher and choreographer Olivia Grace Piper and to my talented and lovely dance partner Emerson, as well as my long-time collaborator and dear friend Arron West.

Touring with Hana Piranha

The UK tour with Hana Piranha was everything a tour should be - exhausting, full of laughs, and worth every mile driven. Just before the tour I discovered I was anaemic, which explains my disproportionate exhaustion from mid-2024 - so although I was finally on iron supplements, the tour felt more gruelling than it should have been. But I still loved it. We made new friends (most notably Palindrones, Hot Rockets and Flesh Tetris) and it was wonderful to spend so much time with my band and our tour manager Brad Bennet.

We worked very hard in the lead-up to this tour to make sure it was a step up both visually and musically from previous tours. With other things like Spanish and ballet and running, I'm hugely proud of my objectively mediocre achievements because I know how hard-earned they were. But Hana Piranha has been a very long-term project, so it's all at a different level and I'm objectively proud of my band and the progress we make.

The Combichrist Tour: A Dream Realised

Probably the professional highlight of the year was joining Crimson Veil for the longest tour we've ever done, supporting Combichrist - a band I've been listening to for years. If you've ever seen or heard Combichrist, the music and vibe is kind of scary (which is why I love them) but they turned out to be lovely people. We formed a real bond with the other bands, Extize and Esoterik, and it made the tour really special. I think the best thing about it was watching Combichrist absolutely smash it night after night - truly a masterclass in stagecraft.

Whenever I'm on tour I feel at my most settled and functional. There's something about the physical movement of travelling and getting somewhere that quiets my inner critic a little bit and makes every day feel like progress. I also sleep better in a moving van than I ever do in an actual bed! I feel like I was made to be on tour.

I also got an opportunity to borrow Salvi's Delta Electric Harp. It was such a cool instrument to play and I loved having a reason to practice harp again and bring it back into our set.

The Combichrist tour was relentless. More shows than I'd ever done back-to-back, in venues that ranged from huge stages to places with no green room at all. I could write pages and pages talking about it all, but the experiences ranged from huge crowds in Mannheim to a venue in Slovenia that had about a hundred junkies outside sniffing entire cardboard trays of white powder and tapping at the van, to Newcastle and Dublin and everywhere else where we got in the moshpit and felt such a connection to the crowd both on and offstage.

The highlight was the final gig of the tour where Combichrist invited me to join them onstage for their headline set at WGT, to about ten thousand people. Months later, my nineteen-year-old self is still squee-ing.

HVIRESS: Bitchhouse Arrives

We released the debut HVIRESS album, Bitchhouse, this year. It took longer to make than either Mishkin or I planned because what started out as a fun side project during lockdown grew a life of its own. This project signed to the wonderful Give/Take Life a few years ago - an LA-based label with a great "deathpop" roster. Bitchhouse is a fun and pretty accessible (but not "easy") album that we're really proud of, including the videos for "Welcome to the Bitchhouse" and "Secret" (only just premiered - see it first here).

A First Glimpse of Heart of Darkness

A couple of weeks ago, I performed songs from the upcoming Heart of Darkness project for the first time at my label Not Saints' Christmas party. We will be playing this live as a full band in February, but I gave myself a final challenge at the end of the year to perform the whole EP acoustically on piano. I've been working on my vocals pretty consistently throughout the year but it was the first time I'd practised piano in a while, so it was a joy to have a reason to practise it again. I think piano is probably my favourite instrument to play.

Discoveries Worth Mentioning

Some things I discovered this year that made it better:

Music: I discovered Rosalía just a couple of months before she released her new, wildly successful album LUX. I don't often discover new music that I love but when I love it, it gets played on repeat. I sometimes feel a bit depressed at the state of the music industry and the world in general by the absolute nonsense that rises to the top, but it's so encouraging to see a talent like Rosalía rise to the top of all the charts.

TV/Film: Probably my favourite TV series I saw this year was Severance. We ended the first season with our jaws to the floor, absolutely hooked. The second season was a little less compelling but still good and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Books: I started the year reading a lot but that slowed down in May when I started putting all my spare time into learning Spanish. So for my favourite "book" this year, I should probably mention Paul Noble's excellent Spanish learning books. I'm a visual learner but in the past I've felt that this always slows down my speaking and listening skills. So this year was all about aural learning. I listened to all of Paul Noble's audiobooks a couple of times and it set my Spanish foundations up strongly.

Apps: Again, Spanish-focused. I've tried many apps to find what works for me. Right now I'm subscribed to Pimsleur - this was intially an audiobook course but they've developed it into an app and it's really structured and bite-sized, which I love. It also has only five month-long courses, so it's nice to have an end goal in sight. I also use Quizlet to memorise stuff. It has many ways of presenting the information you load onto it but I use it for simple flashcards to learn vocabulary.

Game-changer: Claude has become my second brain and we work on everything together. I even use it to brainstorm lyrics and write blogs and other stuff that involves my personal voice. It takes constant training and tweaking (it still hasn't managed to remember that I don't use "genuinely" or "here's the thing" every second sentence) but the more I use it, the better it gets and my workflow is getting consistently smoother.

What's Next

We're starting 2026 with our Heart of Darkness tour in February. Our first release is a track called Valentine that we'll be sharing - you guessed it - on Valentine's Day. It has a whistling intro (that none of us can whistle), dark lyrics, and a sexy vibe. The whole EP Heart of Darkness is about the dark side of love and "lovers" being a mirror to your own emptiness. Cheerful stuff as always.

We will be joined by the talented Catherine Elms and Emberhoney - as well as being amazing artists, they are also very close friends of ours and touring together is going to be a lot of fun.

Personally, my focus will be my continued Spanish lessons, new exercise goals, and - most excitingly - Dara and my wedding in Costa Del Sol to look forward to. Of course I've already sorted out the dress (the most important part, obviously).

Thank you to everyone who made 2025 such an epic year - all the bands we toured with, the people we met, and everyone who came to shows, bought CDs, and everyone who made us laugh.

See you in 2026.