An intimate voice, hazy guitars and electronics that can shift from melancholy into club-driven sound in an instant. On her third album Lean In, Art School Girlfriend, aka Welsh producer Polly Mackey, transforms anxiety, love and the fragility of life into music that feels just as powerful through headphones as it does on a loud sound system. She wrote, recorded and produced the album entirely herself in her London studio – after seriously considering giving up releasing music altogether. She arrives at Spectaculare with a record that, rather than marking a retreat, represents the exact opposite: her freest and most confident work to date. The evening will be opened by Berlin-based Blone, the new duo of Tara Nome Doyle and Erol Sarp of Grandbrothers.

Lean In emerged when Mackey set aside the expectations of the music industry and began creating purely on instinct again. The result is a record that moves freely between hazy guitars, ambient soundscapes and club electronics, held together by her attention to detail and her resistance to a “perfect” sound. She deliberately leaves mistakes in the recordings, embracing the imperfections of authentic creation. In recent years, Art School Girlfriend has quietly evolved from a cult bedroom artist into a respected figure in British alternative electronic music. She has collaborated with Daniel Avery, Lane 8 and Ghostpoet, performed for HÖR, been invited by Bonobo to his Outlier series, and toured the US with The Japanese House and Marika Hackman. Rather than sounding like a search for a new direction, Lean In feels like the moment Mackey finally allowed herself to embrace everything she had learned along the way.

Berlin-based Blone bring another unexpected collaboration to the same evening. Vocalist Tara Nome Doyle joined forces with Erol Sarp, pianist of Grandbrothers, despite their musical worlds previously moving in almost opposite directions. Spectaculare audiences will remember Sarp from Grandbrothers' 2025 concert at Palác Akropolis; this time, he returns with a project blending electronics, powerful vocals, dream pop, trip-hop and soul. Their debut album This Time Next Year is due in January 2027 and grew out of an experiment that was never originally intended to become a band. That is precisely what makes Blone work: rather than smoothing two distinct musical languages into one, they allow a compelling tension to emerge between them.

The concert is part of the 14th edition of the multidisciplinary Spectaculare festival, taking place at various venues across Prague in March and April 2027. Tickets are already available at spectaculare.cz.

This concert is supported by Liveurope – the first pan-European initiative to support concert clubs in their efforts to host concerts by emerging European artists. Liveurope is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.