RiotWeekend Are Here and They’re Not Leaving Quietly

There’s a moment in a RiotWeekend show – and if you’ve been to one, you know the exact one – where the room stops being a collection of individuals and becomes something else entirely.

It lands somewhere between Holly Nunn’s vocals going from a whisper to a full-throated roar and the guitars of Tomma Moulard and Rab McGowan locking into a riff that sounds like it was written specifically to make your spine straighten.

Salvatore Bertolone’s drums are doing something to the back of your chest that you’ll feel for hours. That’s the trick RiotWeekend pull off that most bands spend careers chasing: they make you feel like you belong there. Like the show was always meant for you, even if you only found them last week.

The Guildford-based quartet – Holly on lead vocals and bass, Tomma and Rab on guitars, Salvatore on drums – have been building toward this moment since their self-titled debut EP in 2022 earned them BBC Introducing airplay, international coverage, and a fanbase who respond to their music with the kind of personal intensity that the best punk always provokes.

That debut got ears turning. Pop-Punk Pizza Podcast called it “energetic and exciting,” name-checking grunge, punk, post-hardcore and emo in the same breath, which tells you something about the breadth of what RiotWeekend are drawing from. The debut showed a band with instincts.

‘Table4Four’, their sophomore EP – out now on CD and digital download via Bandcamp – shows a band who’ve fully grown into them.

Four tracks. Four members. Recorded, self-produced and mixed at Blackberry Studios in Chichester, mastered by Pete Maher – the same Pete Maher who’s worked with Jack White, Linkin Park and Liam Gallagher – this is RiotWeekend at their most focused and most themselves.

Blending pop-punk catchiness with hard-hitting heavy riffs and wide-ranging soaring vocals, they’ve arrived at something that sounds like no one gave them any rules, and they were fine with that.

We caught up with the band to talk lineup stability, the stories behind the songs, what it’s like to hand your record to Pete Maher, and why they’d rather make you feel something than squeeze neatly into a genre box.

Four Tracks, Four Members, One Statement.

The title isn’t accidental. TABLE4FOUR arrived from a very specific, very RiotWeekend moment – the band going out for lunch together, talking through their release plan, and landing on a name that captured exactly where they were as a unit. Four tracks. Four members. One table. It’s simple and it’s perfect.

“Yeah, exactly that,” Holly confirms. “We’ve been through a few lineup changes as a band but this feels like we’ve finally found the one. Early on in our current form, we’d started working on the tracks and were super excited. We went out for lunch to make a plan for release and that’s where we came up with the title.”

That detail – a band sitting down together, excited about music they’re making, a title emerging from the energy in the room rather than a marketing session – tells you a lot about how RiotWeekend operate. There’s no distance between the people and the music.

What you hear on this record is the same thing you’d encounter if you sat down at that table with them: genuine enthusiasm, real stories, no performance of being a band. Just a band.

Lineup stability is something that gets talked about in rock circles with a particular reverence, and rightly so. Some of the greatest records ever made came from a unit that had been through enough together to trust each other completely in the room.

RiotWeekend have done the hard work of finding their four. TABLE4FOUR is the first proper document of what that looks like.

“We’ve been through a few lineup changes as a band but this feels like we’ve finally found the one.”

The Rollercoaster: Sequencing An Emotional EP.

Short-form releases live or die by their sequencing. An EP only has a handful of moves, which means every track placement is a decision that matters. Get it wrong and the record feels like a playlist. Get it right and it becomes a journey – something with a beginning, a shape, and an ending that makes you want to start again.

RiotWeekend got it right. “We definitely thought about the order of the tracks,” the band explains. “The whole EP is personal and emotional and the flow reflects the ups and downs of life.”

That framing – ups and downs, a natural human arc rather than a calculated commercial sequence – is key to understanding what TABLE4FOUR is trying to do. It’s not front-loading the bangers and hoping for the best. It’s a considered emotional journey across four tracks, one that mirrors the kind of non-linear mess that real experience actually feels like.

‘Days In December’ and ‘Harry’ feel genuinely different from each other – one tender and aching, the other charged and kinetic – and the way they sit together on the EP makes that contrast work for the listener rather than against them.

There’s range here, and the range is intentional. When the record ends, you’ve been somewhere. Ask what they hope a first-time listener feels by the time the last track closes out – not thinks, but feels – and the answer arrives without hesitation: “We hope they feel like they’ve been on a rollercoaster, and immediately want to go again!”

That’s not a throwaway quote. It’s a precise description of what TABLE4FOUR actually does. Four tracks with enough momentum at the end that turning it off feels like the wrong call.

“We hope they feel like they’ve been on a rollercoaster – and immediately want to go again!”

Days In December: Love, Loss, And The Pause Before The Final ‘You’.

‘Days In December’ rewards close listening. On the surface it’s a breakup song – someone in love, the other person moving away, the confusion and fallout and slow, unsteady healing that follows. It’s the kind of subject matter that shows up across every genre because it never stops being true.

But Holly’s breakdown of what’s actually happening in the track reveals layers that a casual first play might not catch.

“I think the whole song runs along the same theme of loss and processing the pain that follows,” she explains. “But I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s a resolution – because even at the end of the song the character is still begging her partner to stay. There’s a conscious shift in the emotion in the vocals, from sadness and pain in the chorus to confusion and anger in the latter ones.”

That vocal architecture – the deliberate journey from one emotional register to another as the song progresses – is the kind of thing that separates singers who perform emotion from singers who inhabit it.

Holly is firmly in the second category. The track doesn’t just describe the experience of processing a loss; it recreates the texture of it. The confusion. The anger that arrives after the sadness, unexpected and slightly embarrassing. The way you can know something intellectually and still feel the opposite.

Then there’s the detail that makes ‘Days In December’ genuinely special as a piece of songwriting: “At the end there’s the slight pause before the final ‘you’ where the character realises that she shouldn’t be in love with such a person, but hates the fact that she is and can’t do anything about it.”

That pause. That single beat of self-awareness before the word lands. It’s the kind of moment you can’t engineer – you have to have lived it, and you have to be a good enough songwriter to trust the silence rather than fill it.

RiotWeekend talk about writing from real experience, and this is what that actually looks like in practice. Not just emotion in the lyrics, but emotion encoded into the structure of the song itself. Listen for it.

“At the end there’s the slight pause before the final ‘you’ where the character realises she shouldn’t be in love with such a person – but hates the fact that she is and can’t do anything about it.”

Harry: The Statement That Still Belongs.

‘Harry’ already had a life of its own before TABLE4FOUR arrived. Photogroupie named it Video of the Week. BSB TV hosts went on record: “I really f****** like that, really unique, so much potential.” Eric Alper, one of the most respected voices in music commentary, called it “fearless, and full of heart – just the way punk should be.” For a standalone single from an unsigned band, that’s a serious reception.

Which raises a genuine question: when a track has already established its own identity, how do you fold it into a larger body of work without it feeling like the odd one out?

For RiotWeekend, the answer was straightforward. “We knew we wanted to announce ourselves in our current lineup with a big statement, and Harry definitely is that – but it’s still a part of the collective EP.”

Sitting at track two – between opener ‘Last Of The Autumn Leaves’ and the aching ‘Days In December’ – ‘Harry’ functions as the EP’s charged centre of gravity. It’s the moment where RiotWeekend shift gears: the track that hits hardest and fastest, the one that reminds you what this band sounds like when they’re fully letting go. The sequencing earns it that position.

‘Last Of The Autumn Leaves’ sets the table; ‘Harry’ kicks it over; ‘Days In December’ picks up the pieces. By the time closing track ‘Smile’ arrives, you’ve been through something. That’s not accidental.

“We knew we wanted to announce ourselves in our current lineup with a big statement – and Harry definitely is that.”

Self-Producing: Risks, Synths, And Being Proud Of The Result.

Self-producing is a choice that carries real risk. Without an outside ear to push back, to redirect, to hear things the band have gone deaf to from familiarity, you can end up with a record that sounds exactly like what was in your head – which is great if your head is right, and less great if it isn’t.

RiotWeekend backed themselves, and Blackberry Studios in Chichester became the space where that bet paid off.

“We messed around with a lot of ideas in the studio – layering harmonies and adding synths and bits. Some worked and some didn’t – but we’re so proud of the finished product and think it sounds killer!” The honesty in that is worth sitting with.

Not every idea on a RiotWeekend session makes the cut. They tried things. Some of them didn’t land. Those things got cut. What’s left on TABLE4FOUR is the record they wanted to make, unfiltered and entirely theirs – and the confidence in that final sentence, think it sounds killer, is earned rather than assumed.

The layered harmonies and synth textures the band experimented with add dimension to a sound that could easily have stayed in guitar-bass-drums territory and been fine.

The fact that they pushed further – and kept what worked – is part of why TABLE4FOUR sounds more expansive than a four-track EP by an unsigned band has any right to.

Pete Maher handling mastering brings an additional layer of context. This isn’t a name dropped for credibility – RiotWeekend have history with him. “We’ve worked with Pete before so know how amazing he is! He always does a great job with the tracks and loves to help out unsigned artists.”

That last part matters as much as the credits. Maher choosing to bring his craft to a band at this stage of their journey isn’t a small thing. It’s a vote of confidence from someone who works at the very top of the industry, and it shows in the finished record.

“We messed around with a lot of ideas – layering harmonies and adding synths. Some worked and some didn’t – but we’re so proud of the finished product and think it sounds killer!”

Not Pop-Punk. Just RiotWeekend.

The comparisons to Green Day, Blink-182 and Paramore are flattering and not entirely unearned. There’s a lineage in TABLE4FOUR that any honest listen will confirm – the melodic hooks, the emotional directness, the way the heaviness and the heartache coexist without either diluting the other.

But if you go into this EP looking for a genre exercise, you’ll miss what’s actually happening.

“We have so many different influences as a band and pop punk is definitely a big part of that – but we wouldn’t call ourselves a pop punk band. It’s also not a conscious decision to try to do anything new. We all bring our own flavours to the songs and the end result is RiotWeekend.”

That last sentence is the one that matters. The end result is RiotWeekend. Not a genre. Not a reference point. A band. Four specific people with specific histories and specific tastes, all of it filtering through the same songs until what comes out the other side belongs only to them.

That’s what the best guitar bands have always done – absorbed influence so completely that the output stops sounding like the inputs.

The songs on this EP are drawn from real life – past experiences that still resonate, still sting, still make you laugh sometimes, because as the band puts it: “Life is an emotional rollercoaster and things have a way of coming back round.” Write from that place, with that honesty, and the genre question stops being interesting. What matters is whether the music is real. On TABLE4FOUR, it undeniably is.

“We all bring our own flavours to the songs and the end result is RiotWeekend.”

For The Misfits, The Outsiders, and Everyone Who Needs To Belong.

Something runs through RiotWeekend’s music and their approach to being a band that goes beyond the songs themselves – a genuine commitment to the people who show up for them.

Holly has talked about the band being on a mission for everyone who feels like a misfit, left out, or searching for somewhere to belong in their own identity, whatever that looks like. That’s not marketing language. It’s the reason the music exists.

“We love hanging out, connecting, hearing and sharing experiences at shows – at ours or those we go to.” That community-first mentality is threaded through everything RiotWeekend do. Shows aren’t performances to be observed; they’re gatherings to participate in.

RiotWeekend ‘TABLE4FOUR’ EP Tracklisting

Last Of The Autumn Leaves
Harry
Days In December
Smile

‘TABLE4FOUR’ is out now on CD and digital download at riotweekend.bandcamp.com

When Holly talks about audiences leaving gigs having made new friends and grinning for days, she’s describing something that goes beyond music delivery. She’s describing what it means to be genuinely welcomed in.

TABLE4FOUR is a record made for those people. The ones who’ve felt the thing the songs are about. The ones who recognise themselves in a lyric and feel slightly less alone for a moment.

“We’re passionate about righting wrongs in the world, but certainly don’t take ourselves too seriously!” That balance, between caring deeply and carrying it lightly, is what makes RiotWeekend the kind of band people actually hold onto.

“We’re passionate about righting wrongs in the world – but certainly don’t take ourselves too seriously!”

Buy The CD. Here’s Why It Matters.

TABLE4FOUR is available on CD and digital download from Bandcamp, and in an era when most music consumption happens through streaming platforms that return fractions of a penny per play, RiotWeekend are refreshingly direct about what that actually means for a band trying to keep making music.

“Buying CDs and merch is the best way to support bands. When you stream songs the band will get peanuts – but when you buy a CD or t-shirt, it helps the band keep making music!” It’s not a complicated argument and it’s entirely true.

The economics of streaming are brutal for independent artists, and RiotWeekend are operating without a label safety net. Every CD sold, every shirt bought, every show ticket purchased is a direct vote for there being more RiotWeekend music.

The CD format also matters for another reason: it’s an object. Something you hold, something with artwork and liner notes, something that exists in the physical world rather than on a server somewhere.

For a band whose music is as tactile and embodied as RiotWeekend’s – you feel it in the room, you feel it in the chest – there’s something right about it existing in a form you can actually hold in your hands.

“When you stream songs the band will get peanuts – but when you buy a CD or t-shirt, it helps the band keep making music!”

TABLE4FOUR is the sound of a band who’ve found themselves – their lineup, their voice, their confidence – and committed to it completely. Four tracks, no filler, no hedging. Heavy where it earns the right to be heavy, vulnerable where the songs demand it, funny and strange in the margins in ways that remind you these are real people writing about real things and refusing to be grim about it.

RiotWeekend have been building toward this since 2022. They’ve road-tested these songs, honed them, taken them into Blackberry Studios and added the magic that only a studio can give you – and then handed the result to one of the best mastering engineers in the business.

The craft is there. The heart was always there. TABLE4FOUR is the record where those two things finally arrive together.

Get on it before everyone else does. And then go see them live – because if the record is the argument, the show is the proof.

‘TABLE4FOUR’ is out now on CD and digital download at riotweekend.bandcamp.com