UK Blues Award-winning Brave Rival to debut new material in hometown show at Staggeringly Good, Portsmouth

There was a hugely emotional farewell show at The Wedgewood Rooms shortly before Christmas, and with that the Portsmouth-based five-piece became four.

Now the hard-rockers are well and truly into chapter three of the band’s story. Founded by vocalists Lindsey Bonnick and Josephine, along with drummer Donna Peters in 2019, the lineup solidified with the addition of Ed "The Shred" Clarke on guitar and Billy Dedman on bass.

They released their debut album Life’s Machine in 2022, and then second album Fight or Flight last year, touring relentlessly throughout.

Tomorrow (Friday, June 6) they perform a hometown gig at Staggeringly Good in Milton, their first headline show on home turf as a quartet – and it also gives them the chance to unveil the first new material since Chloe’s departure.

"Yes, this is kind of Chapter III, 2025, and there’s new music!” says Bonnick. “It’s not necessarily a new sound, maybe slightly new – I think it's up to everybody to decide whether it's different or not!”

The EP is “all brand new music,” the singer explains. “We’ve been working on it since February and we've been working really hard, because we didn't want to leave it until next year. We wanted to take the bull by the horns and get new music out to our fans as soon as we could.”

The demos are in the can and the band have studio time booked to record what will be a five-track EP (plus bonus tracks). An October release date is tentatively pencilled in.

They’ll be recording at Global Fire Studios in Fareham, who are also presenting the Staggeringly Good gig.

"We've done a bit of work with Global Fire Studios over the years – they've produced a couple of our music videos, but they're branching out a little bit into live events.

"And then we're working with them on our new EP too. They're filming the whole thing, recording the whole thing, so it's all kind of tied in with them for this year.”

Besides wanting to get new material out with the new lineup, they have another aspect to capitalise on – in April the band won Band of The Year at the UK Blues Awards

“That was very unexpected,” Lindsey laughs. “I keep forgetting about it because it was just so unexpected. It's like, hang on, did that really just happen? So, yeah, we're riding that high too. We were all elated, really.”

So unexpected was the win that Clarke had gone to America for a guitar show instead of the awards bash.

“We were like, ‘Don't worry about it, we'll never win anyway. You're just going to miss hanging out with our mates, really, we can do that another time’.

“If you saw any social media, our faces were dumbstruck. It was a very cool honour.”

It’s a scene that has always been supportive of the band – they’ve had several previous nominations in the awards.

“Absolutely. It's always been like that. It's a scene that embraces its diversity in the sense that they've even changed some of their awards and categories, so there's authentic blues, blues-rock, and so on. It spans the whole genre.

“I'd say that we’re more rock than blues, but we've definitely still got some blues influence in there. And even in the new EP, there's some bluesy elements in there.”

“And we really do love the blues – so much of it comes from blues anyway.

“The scene has been amazing, and to work our way through it and get that encouragement and that support from them as a community has been just beautiful.”

As always, the band have barely been off the road – playing dozens of shows already this year, but it wasn’t until after some serious soul-searching for the band that they felt ready to announce in April that they’d not be replacing Chloe.

“At first I was very tentative [performing without her],” says Lindsey. “Although I'm used to singing with a co-singer in Brave Rival, outside of the band, I've always been a front woman in my own right.

“Sharing the vocals with Chloe in Brave Rival was a real honour because she's an incredible singer, always has been, always will be.”

“But as soon as we got it into our heads that this band was going to carry on because it was a little bit… not undecided, but we weren't sure how we were going to make it work because a founding member was leaving – that was it.

“Very, very quickly we were like, well, we don't want to stop! Chloe left for her own personal reasons, but our drive and ambition is still very much within the band.”

With the band so closely identified with its strong co-frontwomen, any concerns that it wouldn’t work with just one, were soon allayed.

“It kind of just fell into place and I just owned the front. Someone said I was taking the helm, and I quite liked that.

“I was like, yeah, I'm strutting my stuff, and me and Ed have got this kind of duel-thing going on now. It's good. I'm fully embracing frontwoman energy!”

While they’re not going to be playing all of the EP tomorrow – they’re going to hold some of it back for the October release show at the 100 Club in London – Friday will see the debut of a new set.

"It's going to be a very special show.

“We just played Lincoln last night and we played Worthing on Friday, and those were the last two shows of that set. It's been half a year, and that set has been quite structured. So this will be a brand new set – we're really chomping at the bit to play new music.”

Brave Rival are at Staggeringly Good in Milton on Friday, June 6. Doors open 7.30pm. Tickets £10. Go to simpletix.com/e/brave-rival-j-lee-and-the-hoodoo-skulls-tickets-205219.

They are supported by J Lee and The Hoodoo Skulls who hail from Surrey and have two albums under their belts, with a sound described as “groove laden and down-right-dirty rocking.”