The debut album from rapidly rising London-based four-piece Keo was initially born out of one intense 10-day writing and recording session in 2025. During a period of severe personal turmoil, vocalist Finn Keogh poured himself into the songs, laying his pain and self-criticism out with a red-raw honesty. “It was a very emotionally heavy summer, and it was super therapeutic to get all this stuff off my chest,” Keogh tells Apple Music. “Every morning, I would go in and write a song, and every evening, I’d be up writing one for the next day or staying up until three in the morning, laying down an acoustic track. It was the best musical experience of my life.” The results were viscerally powerful, but the band felt they could elevate it into something even more impactful, so Keogh and guitarist Jimmy Lanwern took the step to rerecord and produce the album themselves. Incorporating a handful of live favorites and older tracks (the wounded “Thorn” appeared in a different form on their 2025 Siren EP), Put a Smile on for Me shows the gamble more than paid off. A whirlwind of feedback and catharsis, the likes of “Best I Can Do,” “That’s Me,” and “Blue Song” recall Nirvana’s In Utero (not coincidentally, Keogh and Lanwern are avid students of noisenik In Utero producer Steve Albini), Neil Young’s bleak masterpiece Tonight’s the Night, and the more recent work of neo-grunge/alt-rock outfit Wunderhorse. It’s a record that manages to be simultaneously vulnerable and ferocious, but ultimately life-affirming. Below, Keogh talks us through the tracks on the album. “Be Happy” “We did something like 300 takes and were arguing over which one to use. Then we listened again at 3 am a month later and realized they were all pretty much identical. I’m a huge perfectionist anyway and combined with the pressure of making our debut record—in my head, my whole life was depending on it—it maxed it out a bit. One night, our manager came to the studio and took us out for dinner. We all had a few drinks and came back to the studio, it was more like a party, and we performed ‘Be Happy’ for him, and that was the take we used. It just had its own spark of life in it.” “That’s Me” “We’d recorded it in that first stint and that version had totally the right feeling, but some of the parts weren’t quite figured out yet. When we came back off our February tour, it was the one track we felt we needed to redo. We could see that the crowd knew it so well from what we did live and I didn’t feel like the recording that we had was representative of that. So we went back to it, and to make it feel new, we dropped it down half a step. It was like we were playing a song I’d just written for the first time. What you hear on the record is that very first take of when we tried it like that.” “Fly” “I grew up with folk music, the legends like Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and Bob Dylan, the list goes on and on. I didn’t really fall in love with bands until years later, maybe not until I was 19. Before that, I was listening to things like Ben Howard and Nick Drake. I wrote ‘Fly’ during that period. It’s the oldest song on the record, so maybe you can hear some of that on it. Subconsciously, I think there was some of that folk influence on it. It’s kind of an outlier on the record, but that’s what makes it a debut album. That’s how songs like ‘Fly’ and ‘Thorn’ found their place on this album.” “Best I Can Do” “In the build-up to writing it, I went through a phase of rediscovering Nirvana. I’ve listened to them so much over the years because they’re my brother [Keo bassist] Conor’s favorite band, but I found it really interesting diving back into his songwriting. It reminds me a bit of the Elliott Smith song ‘Speed Trials,’ but it does have that droning ‘All Apologies’ thing going on. Lyrically, it was a solidifying moment in regard to toxicity being a theme of the record. In a self-deprecating way, and also in a self-improvement way. It was like I had to speak these things out of my soul in order to get rid of them.” “Bird on the Wire” “When I approached making the record, I told everyone that this was the greatest song I’d ever written and we could not fuck it up. It was one of those songs where I knew exactly how I wanted it to sound, the parts, the production. It’s probably the least collaborative song on the record. I’d written pretty much all of it before the guys had even heard it. I hadn’t heard the Leonard Cohen song, but in the back of my mind, I did think that someone might have already done a song with that title. I’m not too fussed though; they don’t sound anything like each other.” “Pistol” “On ‘Pistol,’ it was more of a challenge to not sound like The Smashing Pumpkins than it was to sound like The Smashing Pumpkins. [1995 The Smashing Pumpkins track] ‘1979’ was the song that soundtracked being a teenager for me. Every time I hear it, I still get this euphoric feeling of being a teenager, and this song was kind of a nod to that. I actually had the riff lying around for ages before I wrote the song. I don’t like writing things in different segments because it feels like you’re working rather than expressing, but that song redefined the way I thought about songwriting because I was able to get into just as honest a place when I revisited it.” “Loser” “It was the final song that I wrote for the album. I like the honesty of it. It was the first time I questioned the stability of my life. It was a really tough time; I did feel like I only had the band in my life. The line, ‘This time it’s really hit me/And I hope it’s hit you too/There’s no one up above me/That’s going to show me what to do’ is about not having anyone to turn to, to ask for advice when you feel like you’ve done something wrong. It was on the nose, but I felt like it was more important to be on the nose than to appeal to a lot of people.” “Black Dress” “It was quite a dark vibe in the room when we recorded it. I don’t think it was necessarily enjoyable to play that; everyone understood how dark it was for me. We played it so many times in one day, and then once we got it, we never played it again. It was like being trapped in the darkest scene in a movie for eight hours. We wanted it to sound like a kid calling out for help. What you can hear is me in this massive room just shouting these lyrics into these different mics that were placed around the room.” “Blue Song” “It was written in that first writing stint, but we never got it right. We came back to it almost as an exercise in taking some pressure off, it was never meant to be on the record. I remember putting an acoustic guitar on it, but then we kind of forgot about it. One night, we stayed up way too late in the studio, it was about 2 am and we put it on just to hear what we’d made, and we were taken aback by it. Once it was recorded, it became everyone’s favorite. It felt like a moment of magic within the recording process.” “Thorn” “The situation that had occurred to make me write ‘Thorn’ was so heavy. When I wrote it, I knew that it was this person’s song, this person who had had four or five years of my life, and when I wrote it, it felt like it summed that up and it allowed me to let it go. It always felt like a very important song for us. We recorded it for the EP [2025’s Siren] but it’s better and bigger on this record than the EP version. It’s become such a big song for us. It’s a much bigger song live than what it is on that recording, but it did take some persuasion for us to go back and redo it.” “Spent on You” “Our very last moment in the studio was finishing ‘Spent on You.’ It’s possibly my favorite song on the record. We so nearly dropped it, which is crazy. I don’t think we understood whether it was good or not for a long time. I just liked listening to it, and when I played it to my family and friends a lot of people became super emotionally attached to it. It’s stood the test of time live. We played it in Glasgow the other day and I saw a girl crying and screaming her heart out to it. It’s the relief of letting go. That period of time was upsetting but it’s over—just let it go.”