Beacon Theatre, Bristol, 8 November 2025
Consigned to the street by aloof security that promise I’ll be able to bypass the heaving queue leading to the venue once their truant manager makes themselves known, I listen to the first 15 minutes of Factory Floor’s set muffled through Bristol Beacon’s flashy glass layers. As just one gig of many making up Simple Things day, the culmination of the super-cool Bristolian contemporary music festival of the same name, the venue is teeming with fashionable people attracted not by a big headline name but by the promise of a good time.
The good time seems to have been delivered; wristbanded thirty-year-olds with dilated pupils pass me into the smoking area sharing effusive words: “that was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” I’m jealous of their casual egress, ready to have my own transcendent dance music experience and eager to hear more than what from my unfortunate vantage point sounds like a bass line swaddled in soggy cotton balls.
When finally inside, I weave my way to the front like a robot moth to an electronic flame. On the stage, Joe Ward wields drumsticks with which he attacks clear toms and a drum pad, Gabriel Gurnsey sits at a full drum kit and Nik Colk Void stands in front of a mixing desk, synth and Macbook (the wired beating heart of the whole operation). With two drummers and the frequent attack of pingy 808s, their sound compels you to start moving and more importantly, not stop.
The energy is relentlessly high; mid-song breakdowns are not respite from their frenetic hypnotism but rather lull you deeper into their thumping electronic spell. For all their intensity, Void is remarkably aloof. She is clad in a grey cropped T-shirt and black leggings like she’s dropped in on her way home from the gym. She has the air of someone who doesn’t want to be there, but my suspicions of her apathy are dispelled when she periodically jumps up and down on the spot like a greyscale jack-in-the-box. Her bursts of energy aren’t a lot of the time parallel to any rising sense in the music. This is how you know she’s legit – she allows herself to crescendo to an eruption of excitement and then gets straight back to it.
There is an oppressive post-punk half-life in the otherwise high-energy thrumming of Factory Floor. Their recent release, ‘Tell Me’ feels like walking quickly but not quite running through a crumbling concrete industrial estate, where you are at once advancing towards something you want and escaping from something you fear. Void speaks in a low voice into the microphone: “I tell you something… I tell you something… I like the way… You lose control”. Each time she delivers the final vocal blow of the refrain (“you lose control”) and the beat drops, a new layer of tension builds and mounts again. By the end of the song, the sonic texture is like looking down through layers of glass on top of one another, each obscuring the next in a foggying cumulative icy blue.
When their set ends, the band exits the stage swiftly, giving a nonchalant wave of thanks to an effusively loud crowd. Like a sailor disembarking after months at sea, I have to remind myself to stop swaying to music that is no longer there.
