Heart of Darkness: A Tour About Human Connection

We're going on tour in February, and we're going to tell you why this matters.

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The Heart of Darkness tour isn't just four acts sharing a bill. It's Catherine Elms, Emberhoney, HVIRESS and Hana Piranha creating something that shouldn't need to be radical but somehow still is: a space where artists actively celebrate each other instead of competing for scraps.

We've known each other for years now, some of us since the Indie Noir nights back in 2015 when Taylor (Emberhoney) first created those events to bring together dark, female-fronted acts who weren't being heard. A decade later, we're still here, still making music, and we've finally found ourselves in the same place at the same time with something to say about how this whole thing could work differently.

The music industry has spent decades convincing us that there's only room for one woman at a time, that every other female artist's success is a threat to our own survival. It's designed to keep us isolated and easier to control. We refuse it.

What we're offering instead is an entire evening of human-made art performed by people who actually care about each other's work. Four unique voices, four completely different approaches to music, all sharing one stage without any of the territorial nonsense that often comes with live shows. No crowds talking over each other's sets, no bands disappearing the second their slot is done, no football team mentality where everyone's trying to steal the audience from everyone else.

The timing feels urgent too. We're watching AI-generated slop flood Spotify, watching genuine artistry get devalued and dismissed as "saturated market", watching the human element get systematically removed from music production. This tour is about us standing up and saying: come into a room and experience something made by actual people with actual instruments and actual stories to tell. Feel the electricity that only happens when humans create together in real life. Remember what music is supposed to be.

Our Hana Piranha Heart of Darkness EP provides the thematic spine for the tour - four songs exploring the dark side of desire. The feeling we call love that's really just seeking our own reflection in someone else's eyes, emptiness and betrayal dressed up and called romance. We'll be sharing Valentine on Valentine's Day, followed by Wild Eyes, the title track, and Avalanche. It's all very film noir, cinematic, drawing from Dickens and Graham Greene and every bleak exploration of desire I could channel into something seductive and sophisticated.

But the EP is just one thread. Cath's work brings this raw feminist power - if you haven't heard "If Destroyed Still True", you need to, it's an anthem about refusing to disappear no matter how many times you've been pushed aside. Emberhoney's "Smoke" has this intoxicating Bond-film energy that makes you feel like you're in some smoky bar making dangerous decisions. HVIRESS will bring all the fun with your favourite slightly silly witch-hop duo.

The four of us spent a weekend together in the Cotswolds, sitting in hot tubs and talking about what we're building, and the phrase that keeps coming back is "a rising tide lifts all ships". That's what we're after. Not one person at the top with everyone else scrambling underneath, but a whole community working together because we're all expressing something bigger than ourselves.

If you appreciate music, if you want to see real artistry before the robots take over completely, if you're tired of polished-to-death auto-tuned products that have no soul - come to these shows.

We're creating spaces where human connection isn't just possible but inevitable, where the art matters more than the algorithm, where women supporting women isn't a marketing slogan but the actual foundation of what we're doing.

The dates are below. Bring yourselves, bring your friends, come and be part of something that remembers what music is actually for.

Find the full list of dates and tickets here