Former Champ - Glasgow, Stereo - 12.12.25

Information

Hand of God presents...
Former Champ
with support from Babyshark
and Hand of God DJs upstairs til late
Glasgow, Stereo
Friday 12th December

Former Champ celebrate the release of debut album i saw you in paradise, which Hand of God is releasing on limited edition vinyl and CD this September 2025.

As its title deftly suggests, Former Champ’s debut album I saw you in paradise is a heavenly power-pop experience delivered with effortless charm. Released on the Glasgow-based five-piece’s own label Hand of God on 19 September, the album’s ten tracks sparkle with melody, character, and sharply recognisable details of love, friendship and contemporary life.

Former Champ both draw from and reach beyond their lineage of Scottish guitar pop, melding the melodic genius of Teenage Fanclub with the anthemic boldness of Thin Lizzy and the breezy excellence of Alvvays. I saw you in paradise follows Vol.1 and Vol.2, the band’s pair of intention-setting EPs, released in 2024 to acclaim from publications including Stereogum and The Skinny. Now, Former Champ have taken their EPs’ no-time-to-lose energy and let it galvanise them to make the best debut album they can. There’s no room in these ten songs for doubt.

I saw you in paradise begins with the irresistible “kawasaki”, a glimpse of an ex turned into two-and-a-half-minutes of bittersweet pop, deftly familiar to anyone who has imagined a parallel life where a summer-long romance lasted forever. Andrew Macpherson and Craig Angus’ guitar countermelodies glisten here – a little Johnny Marr, a little Peter Buck – coming back with insistence on “big surprise”. Here, the band embody the mix of control and coolness that defined the first Strokes album, both melancholy and carefree as McKay admits to a returning lover that “I’ve got no moves without you”. On “porcelain”, each instrument is a distinct character, with the verse driven by the tumbling swagger of Zack Manson’s bass and Ryan Clark’s drums – a gang like the tough girls that populate the song, a 90-second memory from McKay’s Irish childhood (“Remember riots on the peace line/Gonna see it in your lifetime/A whole lotta change”).

Although Former Champ’s music is still written as a group, McKay is lyrically in charge here. Each song builds a cohesive mood of simultaneous overwhelm, displacement and contentment – a result of the choices, relocations and missed chances that we all accumulate by our mid-30s. Each song carries a path not taken, or a mirror image of what our lives could have looked like – but also the contentment with what we have instead; a marked maturity from the pure wistfulness of the EPs. The mournful ballad “Jonny” presents a struggling ex lover with help and reassurance (“I was proud to say that you were on my team”) – the remnants of love made good. Opening with the forward propulsion of a Springsteen song, “running back” turns a moment of past clarity into determination not to fall back into destructive cycles. The album’s particular emotional quality is neatly encapsulated in the outro of “now you see me”: “I was hoping something good could come out of the thing”.

Like many of their influences, Former Champ’s identity is one of a tight gang, with strength in the collective. This all-for-one attitude was the basis of the album’s sessions, which took place at Analogue Catalogue in Ireland, and saw the band work more collaboratively than ever before, with a shared instinct for Former Champ’s sound. Studio owner and producer Julie McLarnon (Lankum, The Vaselines) introduced a fuller sound than before, encouraging the band to push further and into more unexpected realms – most notably on the hard-edged dreampop of “i promise (i’m not usually like this)”, which was made slower and woozier in the studio, and the similarly sun-drenched “crooked little line”, a vintage summertime single with some lyrical bite to balance its lounging instrumentation. This bite continues through to “more than u give”, which has darker shades of post-punk in its crystal clear portrait of an energy vampire (“You always take more than you give… Lucky you were born so good lookin”). In true Former Champ style, even this more solemn moment incorporates an addictive guitar solo.

Former Champ are defined by dichotomies: determination and effortlessness, magic and hard work, the potential and the real. I saw you in paradise is a result of the realisation that you can be cool and still give a fuck at the same time; that you can be happy with your lot and still think about your parallel selves living out variations on your life. Rich with alchemy, sly wisdom and complexity, it’s a perfect-ten of perfect pop.