After years spent playing in Beach Riot and Gnarlah, the musicians behind Brighton’s Toy Parlour could probably have done with a break from bands. They’d already played hundreds of shows, dealt with the less enjoyable parts of the music business and got to that point where something you started for fun can begin to feel like another job. Somehow, putting a new band together with old friends brought back the excitement. Their latest single, “Galactic Girl“, is a heavy, melodic alternative rock song with four voices, two bass guitars and a rather sweet story behind it.
It’s also a good time to catch up with them. Earlier this year they completed their first proper tour supporting Don Broco, released “Love Me” in May, and now have a Brighton show with Tigercub coming up in November. They’ve got more songs ready, and they’re still working out exactly what sort of band Toy Parlour can become.
Beach Riot and Gnarlah had known each other for years. The bands played plenty of shows together, and when both eventually came to an end at roughly the same time, getting together was a fairly obvious move. Guitarist Benjamin Lindsay was the extra person they brought in, sitting somewhere between the two old groups and adding ideas of his own.
Travis Powers, one of Toy Parlour’s two bassists, remembers being a little worried about how the writing would work. With practically everyone accustomed to writing songs, there was a real chance that five people would spend rehearsals arguing over whose ideas were best.
“We were slightly concerned that with all of us being writers we would have a too many cooks in the kitchen situation, but as we all already had that close bond we found it easier than expected to just let everyone throw ideas at the wall and then we could fine tune the ones that landed.”
Ben helped with that too. He knew the others but hadn’t been part of either previous lineup, and brought some welcome new thinking into a room full of people who already had their own ways of doing things.
The current five-piece has Ren Woods singing, Rory O’Connor and Travis Powers both playing bass, Ben on guitar and Jonny Ross on drums. Yes, both Rory and Travis really are bassists. There’s one conventional guitar, two bass guitars and no shortage of people wanting to sing. Ren handles the main vocals, while Rory, Travis and Ben all contribute harmonies.
Heavy riffs and big melodic vocal parts are a big part of what they do, with the two-bass setup giving them a fairly unusual starting point for their alternative rock songs. The four singers are just as important, especially when the arrangements start moving between lower harmonies and Ben’s much higher falsetto.
Getting to this point has been refreshingly straightforward on a personal level. The people involved already liked spending time together. They’re older now, everyone has day jobs, and touring means having to think about energy, money and time in ways they probably didn’t when they were 19 or 20.
“As I’m sure everyone knows, being an independent band is a very expensive and consuming creative habit. But genuine love for the game is what keeps you in it.”
There’s still that buzz before a gig, even after several hundred of them. The difference is that they now know how much work goes into keeping a band going and have found their own ways of managing it. UK touring in particular can be tiring, especially when you’re fitting everything else around it.
Travis has a pretty simple explanation for why they’re doing it again.
“Each rehearsal, each writing session and each show is just a really elaborate way of finding excuses to hang out! Everyone finds time to hang out with their mates after working day jobs whether that is at the pub or getting a coffee. Instead of getting a pint we just get together and create, or get together and play a crazy show, all of us standing on stage with the people that we love the most.”
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That friendship has made the writing easier and given them a reason to keep meeting up when everybody could just as easily go home after work. It also helped shake off some of the frustration they’d accumulated in their previous bands.
Of course, knowing your way around a tour doesn’t mean your new band automatically inherits everything you’ve spent years building.
Some fans have followed them over from Beach Riot and Gnarlah, but plenty haven’t. Others might know the old bands and simply prefer those songs. Connections and experience are useful when you’re starting again, yet Toy Parlour still have to win people over on their own terms.
“You have to prove to everyone this new thing is just as good if not better, and make them believe in the project the same way you do.”
Their first chance to spend a proper stretch of time doing that came with Don Broco. Toy Parlour joined them for an intimate, sold-out run of shows around “Nightmare Tripping”, including smaller rooms than the headliners would usually be associated with.
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For musicians who’d been on the road many times before, the tour was still a learning experience. They hadn’t spent that much continuous time playing together as Toy Parlour, and they began picking up little things about how each person behaved on stage. Where somebody naturally stood during a particular part, where there was enough room to get the crowd moving, and how much of a song needed to be played live before they could really understand what worked.
They’d been especially excited about their hometown Brighton date and London’s Garage, a venue they’d all wanted to play for years. Leeds was barely on their minds beforehand.
Then they arrived at Project House.
The converted warehouse immediately impressed them, with its big open room, proper stage and sound system. They spent the day wandering around Leeds, a city they hadn’t really explored before, and came back to find a huge queue outside. The room was packed when they went on, and the audience was already responding before they reached the first chorus of their opening song.
For a new band still getting used to playing together, it was probably about as encouraging as a gig could get.
Then, during the second-to-last song, Jonny’s kick pedal broke.
Everything stopped while they waited for help. Don Broco’s crew eventually found them a spare, but it took long enough that the band started wondering whether they’d lost the audience completely. People stayed, waited for the problem to be sorted and were ready to go again as soon as the drums started.
The final two songs went down brilliantly, helped by the crowd being so keen to see them finish.
Afterwards, a security guard approached Ren backstage and told him: “I have seen crowds wait shorter amounts of time than that and bottle or boo the band. How you got away with that I will never know, they must have really liked you”
Travis finishes that particular story with four words: “That’s why we love Leeds.”
The tour also gave them a few habits that are carrying through into their next shows. Nobody is choreographing where the members stand or how they move, but certain moments have started to repeat themselves. Something gets a good reaction in one city, they do it again somewhere else, and before long it becomes part of how they naturally play that song.
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They’ve also worked out how to prepare for a gig individually. Travis, for example, joins the other singers for vocal warm-ups, then spends the final minutes before going on stage walking around alone.
He has a theatre background and used to approach performances by trying to turn himself into a character. After years of playing shows, he’s found it easier to concentrate when he gives himself a few minutes to clear his head. Other people meditate. Walking around in circles works for him.
That growing familiarity with one another is especially useful when four people are singing.
Travis has performed with Ren for almost a decade, and knows his phrasing well enough to follow him in a lower octave through most of a live set. He can anticipate small changes in delivery, including the little inflections Ren puts into certain lines.
“It almost sounds like an automated lower octave put in post but in reality is just us lining up.”
Rory has a similar lower range to Travis, with a little more reach. He usually takes close harmonies just above or below the lead, and Travis compares some of those parts to the way voices work together in System of a Down or Alice in Chains.
Ben covers the upper end. He can sing across several octaves and has a clean falsetto that gives the other three plenty of room underneath.
It’s all worked out around Ren’s lead, with each person gradually finding the parts that suit them. That can still get messy during writing, but they now have a decent idea of who should take which part.
“Galactic Girl” gives a good example. Rory wrote the song about his wife and brought it to the others already around 80 percent complete. The lyrics and basic arrangement were there, leaving the band to tidy up the structure, shorten a few sections and change some chords.
It was also a fairly unusual song for them to be working on. Toy Parlour don’t write many love songs, and Rory had come in with something very personal that already said what he wanted it to say.
The idea is deliberately a little over the top. You meet somebody so amazing that you can’t quite believe they’re real, and begin joking that they must have come from another planet. Everybody would want to know this person, and somehow you’re the lucky one who gets to be with them.
“Galactic Girl is a love song.” says the band. It’s about meeting someone so amazing, so unbelievably perfect, they must be from out of this world. There’s no other explanation. Everyone wants to know her, everyone wishes she wanted to know them, and you can’t believe you’re lucky enough to be with her.”
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The finished recording keeps pretty close to what Toy Parlour can play together in a rehearsal room. They avoided adding piles of extra guitar parts or small overdubs and concentrated on getting the song and vocals right.
The final chorus is where the original demo changed most noticeably. Rory’s first version had only his lead vocal idea. The band then worked out four separate roles for the finished arrangement.
Ren takes the main vocal. Rory sits just below him, while Travis moves from matching Ren’s lower octave to singing beneath the answering voices in the call-and-response section. Ben adds the high falsetto lines, giving the chorus a much wider vocal range than the original demo.
The result has the heavy guitar-and-bass approach Toy Parlour use across their songs, with the melodic parts carried by four different voices. There’s a clear pop instinct in the chorus too, particularly in how those harmonies are arranged.
“We wanted to keep it tight and to the point, let the words carry the weight behind the track,” Travis says.
“Galactic Girl” was recorded at Brighton Electric, with Ally Jowett handling engineering and production. Pete Hutchings mixed the song, Grant Berry mastered it, and Get a Real Job Kid created the artwork.
The single arrived on 24 September 2026, following May’s “Love Me”, their first release after the Don Broco run. The band reported that their earlier songs had been reaching around 50,000 streams each, an encouraging start as they continue putting out music independently.
For now, they’re happy releasing singles.
Making a full album would mean finding the money to record it, promote it properly and give it the attention they think it deserves. They don’t have a label or sponsor funding that sort of release, and there are already enough expenses involved in keeping Toy Parlour active.
Travis also reckons that streaming and playlists have changed how many people approach music, with less general interest in full albums than there used to be. That’s one of the reasons they’re comfortable keeping things moving song by song.
They have another couple of tracks ready. One should arrive relatively soon, with the others expected to appear across 2027. There’s no album being forced into the calendar, and they can concentrate on releasing the songs they’re happiest with while continuing to build an audience.
Before then, there’s another Brighton show to prepare for.
On Friday 13 November, Toy Parlour join Tigercub and City Dog at Chalk for Tigercub’s “Nets to Catch the Wind” tour.
It’ll be another opportunity to play to a crowd that may not know much about them yet, this time with some brand-new songs in the set.
Travis reckons around 60 percent of the performance will consist of songs they’ve played enough times to have a good understanding of how the crowd reacts. The remaining 40 percent will be newer tracks they haven’t performed live yet.
He likes that mixture. The familiar songs give them room to play around with the audience, and the new ones still require a bit of figuring out on stage.
“What you will see at that show is 60 percent of tracks that have been fine tuned to the point of the most perfected version of itself, but that last 40 percent comes in the form of these new songs that haven’t been played live yet so there is a certain level of finding our feet within them which is an exciting prospect and keeps both ourselves and the crowd on their toes.”
They’ll be doing it in a city where all five have spent years around local music.
Brighton has always had plenty happening across different styles, although it has also suffered the loss of smaller venues. Sticky Mike’s is one of the places Toy Parlour particularly miss. They’re aware of how difficult things have become for grassroots spaces across the UK, and appreciate the venues still managing to stay open.
There are some obvious Brighton names getting wider attention, including Lambrini Girls and Tigercub, but the band have plenty of suggestions among the smaller acts as well.
Gaffa Tape Sandy have recently returned with new music after some time away.
Travis particularly likes their vocal harmonies and the way they move between catchy indie pop songs and much heavier riffs. They’ve been around for a while and seem to have come back with plenty of ideas.
Then there’s Carne, a relatively new band working with a semi-industrial rock sound. Frontwoman Carmen is a big part of their appeal, and Travis hears something of the 1990s alternative scene in what they do, bringing up Nine Inch Nails and Vast as comparisons.
Their friends in Hutch are doing something quite different. They’re a jangle-psych band with several singers, lots of Beatles-inspired vocal harmonies and twangy guitars. Toy Parlour are especially keen on them live.
Gaffa Tape Sandy can be found at @gaffatapesandy, Carne at @carnetheband and Hutch at @hutch.band.
All of this keeps Toy Parlour fairly busy between their day jobs, rehearsals, recording and shows. They’ve already been through the long years of touring with other bands and know how much time music can take up. For now, they’re enjoying having another group of friends to write with, and still getting excited about the next gig.
“Galactic Girl” has been out since 24 September 2026. You can find the song and Toy Parlour’s official streaming and social channels through their Linktree. They’re next scheduled to play Chalk in Brighton with Tigercub and City Dog on 13 November, with tickets through Lout Promotions.
