Keo say the rough edges on Put A Smile On For Me are deliberate

Keo have finished their first album and are happy to say it has rough edges. The London alt-rock four-piece told NME backstage at Reading 2026, shortly after their set, that Put A Smile On For Me came out of a deliberate refusal to smooth anything over. "It's not perfect, at all, but I like the edge it has," said Finn Keogh, who fronts the band with his brother Conor.

The method was the point. Their friend Harry Jordan recorded them in a big room with the amplifiers bleeding into the drum microphones, and most of the vocals are live takes. The band debated whether individual harmonies belonged on the record at all. Having built an audience through live shows, Finn argued, a live record was the obvious thing to make, and one people need right now.

Getting there meant repetition rather than editing. They spent time in the studio playing the songs over and over until, in his phrase, all of the dots aligned in a take, and those takes are the ones on the album. Conor said the best-played version is often not the best version, because what matters is the energy and emotion in it.

Finn described his own idea of perfection as the sweet spot between sounding like a record and sounding spontaneous, which he called a hard way to work. He also owned up to the temptation to tinker afterwards, and to being enough of a perfectionist for it to be a real risk.

Both brothers reached for the same argument when asked for models. Finn picked John Martyn's Solid Air, made by a musician he described as too talented for his own state to matter. Conor picked Nirvana's MTV Unplugged In New York, a record full of mistakes, including a howler from Kurt Cobain in The Man Who Sold The World that listeners now look forward to. The imperfect parts, he said, are what make it perfect.

The album also revisits older material. Their 2025 EP Siren was mostly recorded live in five days before the band had any label backing, but Thorn was the exception, and they have redone it for the album to correct that.

Put A Smile On For Me arrives on September 25 through Island Records, and it joins an autumn of rock debuts on the release calendar. Keo played Reading on a weekend that also carried Royal Blood's secret Gallery set and the festival's Spotify playlist tie-in.