SHELL COMPANY & OLDER BROTHER take their critically-acclaimed record ‘Shards’ to Europe for the first time.
The shadowy hypnagogic-pop of Manchester trio Shell Company is joined by the visceral vocals of poet Older Brother, providing heavy music for heavy times.
Released on 12” by the legendary Numbers in 2025, ‘Shards’ was The Guardian’s pick of the week, who described it as ‘a stunning British romance told in a gruff spoken-word duet’. The group, described by Boomkat as ‘a quartet carrying the torch for classic, mood-driven downbeat UK music’, played the record at a BBC 6 Live Session in April.
‘Shards’, conceptually staged over the course of a night, records the neverending process of life falling apart and picking up the pieces again. Born from voice notes sent between London and Lisbon, the release took shape remotely before being recorded inside Manchester’s The White Hotel, then refined in the sonic labs of Numbers and La Chunky in Glasgow.

Joana de Sá (field recordings, voice, flute, electronics, composition, and electroacoustic improvisation).
Her sound work—intrinsically linked to sound art—combines field recordings, voice, and classical/traditional instruments in musical compositions, using a storytelling approach that often draws on poetry, frequency manipulation, and sound collage.
In 2024, she released the album Absedo (independent), the result of artistic and archival research on the megalithic heritage of the district of Viseu.
In addition to her work in the field of sound art, Joana also works with drawing, photography, writing, and video, combining graphic objects with any of these discourses — the starting point for these practices often comes from personal everyday life, chance, landscape, elements from personal archives or the public domain that are considered relevant to address.
Over the last few years, Joana has presented her work solo or sharing the stage with other artists such as Manja Ristić, Tiago Sousa, Joana Guerra, and the Lisbon Contemporary Music Group.

Coming from an artistic-artisanal family background, Alcaide’s path is marked by a strong connection to humanistic expressions. He founded REIF – a record label, cultural agent and movement – with the epicentral motto of curating programmes or events that instigate plural forms of union, intellectual expression, exploration and interaction of identity, with the aim of promoting atypical experimentation in production methodologies, curation and artistic practices.