Dark­wave synth pop band Mag­net­ic Skies have an upcom­ing Lon­don gig in Decem­ber, at The Grace, High­bury Corner.

Mag­net­ic Skies first came to our atten­tion in 2023 with dreamy and anthemic track You Shine On. The pop­ping synth open­ing notes imme­di­ate­ly trans­port you back to the ’80s, evok­ing shades of Depeche Mode. There’s a over­rid­ing sense of dra­ma that per­vades the track. An equal­ly dra­mat­ic and elec­tri­fy­ing album fol­lowed called Empire Falling, mix­ing moments of eupho­ria with melancholy.

Since then Mag­net­ic Skies have con­sis­tent­ly built on their sound, lead­ing to the release of their sopho­more album Frag­ments in 2025. Instru­me­nal open­er The End sets the scene with its doomy, cold and cin­e­mat­ic vibe before launch­ing the lis­ten­er into the album. There’s less of the 80s feel in Frag­ments, instead the band embrace a more nuanced feel with a per­son­al expres­sive­ness com­ing across. They bal­ance glacial synths with emo­tion­al imme­di­a­cy and cre­ate a sound that man­ages to be both retro and cur­rent. Frag­ments shows that the band has side­stepped the ‘dif­fi­cult sec­ond album’ syn­drome with this tri­umphant col­lec­tion of songs.

Ini­tial­ly set­ting out as a duo in 2019, Mag­net­ic Skies was born as a stu­dio-based project cre­at­ed by lead vocal­ist and keys play­er Simon Kent and addi­tion­al keys play­er Jo Womar. They were dri­ven by a shared love of 80s synth-dri­ven post-punk, using puls­ing, vin­tage ana­logue synths and pump­ing bass to cre­ate their sig­na­ture sound. The band is now a 3‑piece, with Lenin Ale­gria on drums.

Mag­net­ic Skies play live at The Grace, High­bury Cor­ner, Lon­don. Mag­net­ic Skies links
Date Thurs­day 3rd Decem­ber, sup­port­ed by: Mor­tasha Kinski