By the end of Julia Cumming’s set at Moth Club, it felt like everyone in the room had been let in on something they would want to keep for themselves. The kind of gig you walk into with curiosity and leave feeling quietly converted. Outside, Hackney carried on as usual. Inside, under dim lights and a glittering wall of streamers, Cumming turned a small room into a charged, dreamlike pocket of sound.
Moth Club is the perfect setting for a show like this. It has that rare ability to make a performance feel close without feeling cramped, cool without becoming self-conscious. On 12th May, the room was full, packed with an indie-leaning crowd that also pulled in older listeners, suggesting Cumming’s world reaches beyond one scene or generation. There was a sense that everyone had arrived for slightly different reasons. Some knew her through Sunflower Bean, some through her new solo work, some perhaps through the mythology that surrounds her as a musician, model and New York creative figure. By the end, those distinctions felt irrelevant. The room was listening as one.
Cumming’s debut solo project arrives with a different kind of weight. After years as the bassist and vocalist of Sunflower Bean, she now stands in a more exposed space, carrying songs that feel personal in a way that live performance can either sharpen or flatten. At Moth Club, they sharpened. The set did not feel like an artist testing out a new identity. It felt like one stepping fully into it.
Opening with ‘Revel in the Knowledge’, Cumming established the night’s atmosphere with immediate confidence. There was no theatrical overstatement, no need to force the room into attention. The song set the tone through feeling. Dreamy in texture, slightly gritty around the edges, it eased the crowd into the world of the show with a quiet certainty. Behind her, the glitter streamers caught the light in little flashes, giving the stage a strange softness. Near her sat a tiny keyboard, almost toy-like in scale, which made the performance feel more intimate and carefully handmade.
That intimacy mattered. Larger venues can sometimes turn a performance into something you observe from a distance. Here, every glance and pause became visible. Standing near the front, you could watch Cumming clearly, but also let your attention move across the band. That balance gave the show a real richness. The focus never sat in one place for too long. During some songs, her voice became the centre. During others, the band’s texture pulled forward, giving the set a fuller shape.
Her voice was one of the night’s clearest strengths. Even for listeners unfamiliar with every lyric, it cut through with crispness and control. There was rawness in the feeling, but the delivery stayed precise. That clarity made the songs accessible in the moment, which is not always the case with dreamier, mood-led live music. You could follow her. You could feel where she was taking you.
As the set moved into ‘Hollywood Communication’ and ‘Please Let Me Remember This’, the show began to reveal itself as a sequence of emotional rooms. Each song seemed to open a different door. Some carried the haze of memory, others had a sharper nervous energy. The titles themselves felt almost cinematic, full of half-confessions and private meanings, but the performance kept them grounded. Cumming did not drown them in mystery. She let them breathe.
‘Ruled By Fear’ brought a darker pull to the set. Live, it carried tension without becoming heavy for the sake of it. Cumming has a way of making vulnerability feel active. She does not perform fragility as decoration. She uses it as a force. That quality became even clearer during ‘I Dream of a Fire That Stays Burning When Nobody Tends It’, a title that already sounds like a thought you might write down at 2am and never show anyone. In the room, it felt like a private feeling being made public with surprising steadiness.
Then came ‘My Life’, which landed as the night’s centrepiece. It had the energy of a statement, the kind of song that seems to gather the rest of the set around it. On record, it introduces Cumming’s solo world. Live, it felt bigger and more immediate. There was something quietly commanding in the way she delivered it, as though she had already decided what the song meant and was inviting the room to catch up. The crowd did.
One of the most memorable moments followed with ‘Fucking Closure’. It was the song people seemed to carry with them instantly. In the crowd, admiration for it was audible, that small buzz that happens when a track hits harder than expected. The title suggests bluntness, but live it had more than bite. It had release. Cumming gave it enough edge to feel cathartic, while still keeping control of its emotional mess. It became one of those moments where a song seems to announce itself as a future favourite before the set has even ended.
The emotional high point came with ‘Emotional Labor’. By then, the room had settled into a deeper kind of attention. The performance did not need a huge gesture to make the song land. Its power came from stillness. Cumming’s voice felt especially clear here, carrying the weight of the song without pushing it too far. There are moments at gigs when the room becomes aware of its own quiet, when people stop simply watching and start absorbing. This was one of them.
That was the real magic of the night. Cumming understood the value of space. Between songs, she would take in the crowd for a moment, letting the silence sit. Those pauses made the performance feel human and unvarnished. They gave the audience time to meet the music where it was. In a show built around feeling, memory and release, those gaps mattered as much as the songs themselves.
‘Sounds of a Secret’ and ‘Do It All Again’ continued the set’s sense of movement without breaking its spell. The concert did not chase one obvious peak. It built through accumulation, through small shifts in atmosphere, through the growing realisation that the songs were connecting more deeply than expected. For someone arriving without a fixed idea of Cumming as a solo artist, that was the surprise of the night. The music did not simply sound good live. It made emotional sense live.
By the time she closed with ‘Forget The Rest’, the room was ready to give something back. It drew the biggest reaction of the night and gave the set its final charge of defiance. After so many songs that seemed to sit with fear, memory, closure and emotional weight, the ending felt like a release valve. The crowd responded with the energy of people who had been slowly pulled in and suddenly realised how far they had come.
What stayed after the show was the image of Cumming framed against that glimmering wall, neon light catching behind her while the room watched closely. There was something beautifully unfussy about it. No excessive production, no barrier between artist and audience, no attempt to make the night feel larger than it was. Its power came from the fact that it was small enough to feel held.
Julia Cumming’s Moth Club show made a convincing case for the kind of solo artist she is becoming: magnetic, vulnerable and completely in command of her own atmosphere. It was the sort of performance that reminds you why smaller gigs matter. You do not just hear the songs. You notice the silences around them, the faces in the crowd, the shimmer of light behind the stage, the exact moment when curiosity turns into belief.
By the end, the feeling was impossible to ignore. Julia Cumming is someone worth seeing live now, in rooms where every detail still feels close enough to keep.
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Words: Lola Carron
Photographer: Sophie Barloc