4 November 2026
Never have I been to a concert as carefree, wholesome and joyous as Joy Anonymous at Hackney Church on Friday. The London duo, often euphoric and ever optimistic with their sound, gave us all more reason to be so with their surprise drop of Us People (Source Material) that same day.
What is joy? And what happens when it’s anonymous? You need only recall the gloom and isolation of Covid lockdowns to see why the band — with their tenets of hope, community and connection — caught on when they did. In 2020, the childhood friends Henry Counsell and Louis Curran, tired of making music in their London flat, carried a sampler, a keyboard and two camping chairs down to the Thames and began playing to whoever passed by. The name, and much of the ethos, came from Alcoholics Anonymous, whose meetings Counsell had attended in support of friends.
Six years later in Hackney, the crowd was as varied as you could get, whether dancing crazy at the front or holding hands and swaying demurely at the back: an unsurprising range, given the band’s first audiences were whoever happened to be passing the Thames on their daily exercise. The fans were there to dance, but anything slower or operatic were obviously appreciated with a “whoo” or something like it.
The band draws on house, disco, soul and gospel; some moments are slow and open, and others are fully thumping and ravey. Their tracks are often built from live jams looped and stretched through samplers, and you can hear it in a simple chord or vocal snippet repeated until it gains a woozy, happy quality. Maybe joy is what’s unlocked when you strip a beat down to the bones and put it on loop for a while.
The new record has more meditative musk, and we heard a bit from it throughout the night. At their gentlest, with soft falsetto and stripped-back grooves, Joy Anonymous veer closer to soul; otherwise, their concerts are indistinguishable from a rave. London’s own Hak Baker and NAMESBLISS popped out for some surprise tracks near the end, bringing a reggae-punk-jazz-rap-grime sound to the church, and threw flowers into the crowd. Joy all around.
Joy Anonymous make the type of music you’re meant to hear live, and the type that will get you in the feels if you hear it in the right circumstance. And what better place than Hackney Church, with the band at one end of it and a large organ at the other, the nave bathed in a bright neon red that makes it impossible for any kind of gloom to fester, and the crowd doing their signature Joyous People hand sign, fingers locked together and thumbs apart over their heads. Short and sweet at just an hour and a half, the set drew
out some slow stuff as it wrapped up before ending on a stonking, ecstatic high.
Joy, joy, joy.
Words: India Das-Brown
Photo Credit: Leva Jura