Panchiko

About Panchiko

Panchiko might be the strangest comeback story in indie rock, and it happened almost entirely by accident. The band formed in Nottingham in the late 90s, a group of teenagers making the kind of bedroom indie that never found an audience because, well, nobody heard it. They recorded an EP called "D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L" in 2000, burned a few copies, and that was basically it. They broke up. Everyone moved on.

Then in 2016, someone found a corrupted copy of that EP in a charity shop in Sherwood. The disc was degraded, warped by time and heat, which gave the recordings this haunting, decayed quality. Whoever found it uploaded it to 4chan, and suddenly people were obsessed with tracking down this mystery band. The damaged audio became part of the appeal. Songs like "D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L" and "Stabilisers For Big Boys" sounded like they'd been excavated from some forgotten corner of the internet, lo-fi dream pop filtered through digital rot.

The original members—Owain Davies, Andy Wright, Shaun Ferreday, and John Schofield—had no idea any of this was happening. They'd all gone on to regular lives. When they finally got tracked down and discovered people actually cared about music they'd made as teenagers, they were baffled. But the demand was real enough that they decided to remaster and properly release "D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L" in 2020, this time without the corrupted charm but with actual clarity.

What's remarkable is that the songs held up. Stripped of the degradation, tracks like "Laputa" and "Kicking Cars" revealed themselves as genuinely lovely pieces of 90s-influenced indie—shimmery guitars, mumbled vocals, the kind of melancholy that soundtracked a thousand late-night teenage bedrooms. The band cited Radiohead, Duster, and My Bloody Valentine as influences, which tracks.

Instead of treating the reissue as a nostalgia exercise, Panchiko kept going. They started writing new material and playing shows, suddenly becoming an active band two decades after they'd originally called it quits. In 2022, they moved to a cabin in the Scottish Highlands to work on their first proper full-length album, "Failed at Math(s)," which came out in 2023. The new stuff retained that woozy, intimate quality but with better production and the confidence of people who'd unexpectedly gotten a second chance.

They're still together now, still figuring out what it means to be a band that exists in two different eras. They tour occasionally, play festivals, make music that probably would've found an audience if streaming had existed when they were teenagers. The whole thing remains wonderfully improbable—a band resurrected by a damaged CD and a bunch of internet strangers who refused to let some forgotten bedroom pop stay forgotten.

Panchiko live is controlled chaos. The crowd leans in close, watching their hands like it's a magic trick. You get the sense everyone's listening hard. Minimal banter, maximum focus. The energy builds through complexity rather than volume.

Known for Sick Shit, Jess, Summer, Drown, New Skin

See Panchiko Live