In 2025, London band Keo achieved 55th in the UK Album Charts with their debut EP, and little over a year later their debut album reaches 2nd in the same charts.
‘Put A Smile On For Me’ was released October 25th, and was pipped to chart topping success by Taylor Swift. The young hopefuls did however top the Official Homegrown Chart, Official Album Sales Chart and Official Physical Album Chart.
Before their sudden rise in the past year, Keo spent a few years building a following at live shows and gigs. It seems to have paid off as they’ve spent the past week touring around record stores in an album-selling campaign, and are preparing to embark on a sold out arena sized venue tour.
This momentum will follow them into 2027, as it was recently announced they’ll be playing to a sold out O2 Academy Brixton on March 12th.
‘Put A Smile On For Me’ is a raw and deeply personal record that captures a band finding themselves in real time. Written and recorded in a matter of weeks, it moves between ragged guitars, bruising emotion and huge, undeniable melodies, holding onto all the chaos and uncertainty that made it worth making in the first place.
Alongside their album, Keo shared ‘Be Happy’, the record’s opening track and new single. It takes the idea of happiness and pulls it apart, questioning what it actually means to feel good when you are still trying to make sense of yourself. There is humour in it, but something darker underneath too, with the song constantly threatening to tip from euphoric into something more unsettling.
“Be Happy is about envy towards people who feel content with the banality of life, who seemingly believe in happiness,” Finn Keogh explains. “There have been times in my life where I have questioned its existence. But near the end, in all the song’s chaos, I brush all of those feelings to one side with ‘nevermind’. If you think about all of that stuff too much, fear takes over and then you never really live anyway.”
Be Happy’ arrives after a run of singles that have each revealed a different side to the record. ‘That’s Me’ introduced the album with its huge, self-questioning hooks, while ‘Pistol’ pushed that into something more visceral. Recent offering ‘Bird On The Wire’ offered a quieter turn, stripping everything back to its most vulnerable and accepting.
At its heart, ‘Put A Smile On For Me’ is an unfiltered examination of shame, accountability, memory and vulnerability, with frontman Finn Keogh confronting the parts of himself he would rather avoid. But there is something equally important in the act of making it. Recorded mostly live and self-produced by Finn alongside guitarist Jimmy Lanwern, the album feels like a document of a band figuring things out in real time, turning confusion, contradiction and self-doubt into something loud, immediate, and alive. There is humour in it, but also a real sense of self-recognition, as though the songs are finding their shape at the same time Keogh is finding his own.
There’s something exciting about watching a band grow and rise in front of you. I caught Keo in Brighton this week and they still feel like a band on the rise. Knowing their debut album cemented itself as Number 2 adds a new dimension of weight to the claim.
A year ago they were still building the roots to their success. Now, the rooms are bigger, the records are flying off the shelf and they’re sitting pretty at the sharp end of the charts.
In just a few short weeks I’ll be heading to their sold out Southampton show to review the night, and the most interesting part might be looking at how far they’re already progressing from their already impressive showing.
Written by Brad Halcrow for The Songbird HQ