Keo have spoken to NME about their upcoming debut album, ‘Put A Smile On For Me’.
Interviewed backstage at Reading Festival, shortly after their performance, brothers Finn and Conor Keogh reflected on the London alt-rock four-piece’s 2025 EP ‘Siren’, which was mostly recorded live.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t do ‘Thorn’ live,” explained Finn. “I wish we had, but that’s kind of why we’ve redone it now for the [album]. But for the most part, it was all done live. It was before we had any label backing or anything. So we just had to do what we could do in five days. I really like it, actually.”
Finn was then asked if, as a self-proclaimed perfectionist, he was tempted to tinker with the recording after the fact. “There is the temptation,” he said, “but my idea of perfection, when it comes to music, is the sweet spot between sounding like a record and sounding spontaneous. So, I don’t obsess over a glossy, perfect-sounding record.
“I kind of obsess over the perfect middle ground between that and a live performance – which is a really hard way to work, to be honest with you.”
Conor added: “Sometimes the most well-played take isn’t the best take you’ll go for, either. It’s a lot about the energy of the take and the emotion in that take.”
“We’ve had examples where clearly something is out of time,” Finn said, “but for whatever reason, that take just gives you goosebumps or something. You all look at each other and go, ‘Isn’t that the reason we’re doing this? To make people feel something?’
“That’s kind of what we did with this [new] record: we just spent a good amount of time in the studio, essentially just playing these songs over and over and over again until we felt like all of the dots aligned in those takes. And those were the tracks that made the record.”
Asked to pick a favourite record that encompasses those qualities, Finn immediately chose John Martyn’s ‘Solid Air’: “I think he was super-high and he didn’t care… [But] he’s that talented and the musicians he was performing with were that talented, so it just kind of worked out really nicely.”
Conor opted for Nirvana’s ‘MTV Unplugged in New York’, explaining: “From start to finish, [it’s] full of mistakes – but it’s those mistakes that [make it]. In ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, [Kurt Cobain] makes a pretty bad howler, but you look forward to that bit in the song. It’s those bits that aren’t perfect that almost make it perfect.”
Asked what the band could tell NME about ‘Put A Smile On For Me’, Finn said: “I can tell you loads of things about it. I love talking about it. It’s not perfect – at all – but I like the edge it has. We definitely obsessed over not giving it much production. That was kind of the idea of the production around the record. We would really debate whether one harmony should be on it.
“Our friend Harry Jordan just basically captured us in a big room, and we had the amps bleeding into the drum mics. It was mostly a live vocal, as well. We have cut our teeth through live music and have built a fanbase through live music, so why not make a live record? I think people need that right now.”
Keo’s ‘Put A Smile On For Me’ is due for release on September 25 via Island Records.
Reading 2026 continues today with performances from Holly Humberstone, Westside Cowboy, Loyle Carner, Violet Grohl, Florence + the Machine and Kneecap – plus a secret set from Lola Young.
Check back at NME here for the latest news, reviews, interviews, photos and more from Reading & Leeds 2026.
