If you've been at all active online this year, you'll have seen the same name pop up again and again: one you think could be a solo artist or maybe a group, or, actually, you might have no idea what it is, but it's always there swirling around the hyper-speed fevered world of socials.

What's interesting about Keo is that, yes, they are a band, but the buzz and hushed whispers and mysterious rumblings are coming primarily from TikTok, a platform that while once synonymous with bedroom pop, sad girl/boi crooners and one-off viral crazes, e.g. sea shanties (urghh), is now proving a legitimate discovery tool for a new generation of indie-rock fans looking to find something of their own to change their lives. Despite not having any music out until March of this year, Keo are already that band.

A bit of background to begin with, then. Keo are from London via Portugal and Ireland and all different places in between. They are made up of chief songwriter and singer Finn Keogh along with his brother Conor, Oli on drums and Jimmy on guitar. They signed their record deal only this year, have already sold out London's Oslo and have a fully sold-out UK tour booked for this autumn. As they prepare to release 'Siren', their debut EP, it's obvious that Keo are about to be a very big deal indeed.

"It's been relentless," reflects Finn from his London flat. "It's been long with extreme ups and downs. It's been enjoyable and ultimately rewarding, though. I feel like it's finally starting to gain at the speed that I always imagined it deserved."

A couple of years ago, Keo took their very first steps as a baby band and soon discovered some of the transcendent organic magic that has fueled their rise. "I remember two years ago, I always lose track because it feels so long," says Finn. "There was this show at the George Tavern and it was our first gig with our guitarist Jimmy because we'd gotten rid of the old one. There were these kids in the front row with Radiohead t-shirts and they were just singing the one song that we had out that we've since removed from streaming. That was the first fan interaction where someone was actually there. It was the first time there were actual fans there to see us because they discovered us and not from friend groups or things. That's the gold dust. It's hard to explain to anyone how you get that, and no one really knows how to get it."

There was a passion for Finn to make his dreams of music happen after a nomadic childhood with his entertainer and comedian dad, who did events all around the world - but drive doesn't mean you don't go through the struggles and hardships of sparsely attended shows, unscrupulous promoters and trying out things until something sticks. "I moved to London in the summer of 2021," he explains. "I had just turned 18. I had been consumed by my Portugal life; it was just so comfortable. That always scares me when you're incredibly comfortable. My dad was in bands when he was younger, and he was like, this dream of yours isn't going to happen unless you go to London. I believed him and went to London. I recorded this whole folk album in a small flat in Stoke Newington. At the same time, I was trying my best to get four musicians into a room and create a band."

With his brother coming on board, Keo started to take shape in 2022. "We did these full band open mic nights to get some gig experience," he continues. "There's some pretty fucked up promoters that poach these small bands. It's the only way to get gigging to start with if you haven't got an agent. If you're a band that doesn't have any nepo connections or doesn't know anybody, then it's the only way to go. They basically make you charge your friends loads of money to get into these shows. You've got to do what you've got to do.

"We were doing that for a while and started to get more of these organic... I guess you could call them 'scene' gigs, as shallow as it sounds. From there, we were picked up by our old manager and an agent, and it started to snowball a little bit. Tav, our manager now, took us on with his company. I must have played 40 gigs before any of that happened to pretty much empty rooms. Having a full gig was rare for us for 2 or 3 years. It's important for every band to go through that. Now that it's taking off for us, we know that we're ready. You see these bands who blow up in their first year and you feel a bit concerned for them because it's a lot to ask for a band that doesn't have that experience to suddenly get on every festival bill of the summer."

In 2025 things started to really ramp up for Keo. "In January of this year, it was all about signing a record deal," says Finn. "It was a very stressful time as we moved to a new manager, but it was very relieving as we signed our first deal with AWAL for an EP whilst we were in a van travelling around Europe supporting Nieve Ella and then other bands asked us to go on tour with them and everything started taking off online."

The buzz was being generated by devoted fans rather than the band themselves doing anything to particularly push it. In fact, Keo were doing everything that received wisdom says you shouldn't do for a band in 2025. "I don't want to do everything by the rule book," says Finn passionately. "I wanted to be the realest thing you can go and see because I know it's real to me. These days, you have a lot of people posting on TikTok and all these higher-up people saying they know how you need to do it and you need to post on TikTok every day. We're pushing back on that, and it's working. If you can just get the main thing right, which is the music, then everything will follow. It's been so interesting everything working for us this way and doing it so differently to other people. We didn't have any music out. The first song came out in March. We sold out Oslo with no music out and had an organic fanbase that cared about it. We've got people who know an album's worth of tracks that will come to the shows. Neither the fans nor us are too bothered about them being on Spotify."

Scarcity and mystique have fuelled Keo's buzz in a way that mirrors one of Finn's most cherished artists from a very different musical era. "I always go back to the artists I love," he says. "The best example is Nick Drake. Nick Drake had a tragic story; you can barely find a picture of him online. There's no footage of him playing live. There's nothing to consume, but all those fans are cult fans. People who like him love him and think he's a legend.

"For me, the magic in being in love with an artist is having to fill in the gaps. Not knowing what they were like and what they were up to or how they felt about something because they never give you enough to let you discover it. We did a similar thing but nowhere near as extreme as Nick Drake. Letting fans fill in the gaps rather than putting a camera on everything we've ever done. That's what they like about it. You don't always have to give everything away."

Keo are already deeply loved, and the fans are the ones building their nascent legacy. For the band themselves, their philosophy is very clear. "The broad vision and ethos of Keo is to never create music in order to appeal, but to do it out of necessity," proclaims Finn. "It's more of a therapeutic process. It's quite hard to do. I get this voice in my head that goes, 'Oh, this song's great; try and write a song like that because everyone will love it'. The ethos is to keep reminding ourselves that it all needs to come from a true place. I think it should be uncomfortably honest, whatever the songs are about, and completely to the point. The performances need to echo that, as well as the live recordings. I want our albums to be live and be a performance in the moment. I don't ever want our live shows to be the same as the night before. It's all about how we feel at that moment."

Keo's debut EP is a powerful example of that room-filling, heart-swelling sound. Five very big and very intense songs, it was actually recorded before any of the hype really took hold, making it a special moment for the band. "Me and Oli were both, on separate occasions, brought to tears," admits Finn of the recording process. "I have a particular way of thinking; I guess you could say I'm a perfectionist, maybe to a fault, and it often can be hard for me to let go of something already in my head. When we recorded those songs, it wasn't just about the songs. It was about Jimmy, Conor, Finn and Oli as people. It was a very intense experience. We were against the clock and didn't have this buzz to rely on. It felt like there was pressure on it, but that created something I love.

"'Stolen Cars' in particular, we love that song. I imagined it so differently, and it was the first time a producer came and showed me a better way to do my song than I had imagined. It sounded much more interesting. I love how roomy it is. At the end, you can hear me in the take just singing into the room mics as we were all in this garage, and it was raining outside, with big massive sunflowers outside the windows in Froome in Somerset. It was such a moment. Everyone really did feel how the song sounds."

Keo's success now is validation that they made the right call in doing things differently. It was hard, though, to tear down their early songs and essentially completely erase them from history and start again because they knew they could do better. They had to do better. "Ego can get in the way of so many amazing things," says Finn. "A lot of it was letting go. My ego almost got in the way of probably the best decision we ever made. The idea was to go onto Soundcloud and make people have to find us rather than us going out there and saying, please listen to me. It worked perfectly. Finally labels decided that they believed in us. When the fans start to believe in you suddenly the labels do."

The feeling of excitement for Keo is palpable as they are caught up in the intoxicating swirl of a new generation of kids discovering music online, talking about it and finding their own heroes. "We're in such a good time for music," says Finn excitedly. "People always talk about the 60s and the 90s but I think we're in such a special moment. We're of a time when our parents listened to that kind of music, and we've been heavily put on to it and told about these legends like Kurt Cobain, and now you have all these fans looking for things like that in their own youth, and you've got these amazing bands like Fontaines DC and Wunderhorse. I'd love to be on that list and part of that movement towards more honest and less sanitised music. It's really exciting. It's guitar music. I love it."

Finn is conscious of the pressure on Keo right now. "There's a lot that scares me about it but equally excites me," he says. "Recording a record is the big dream. When you're approaching that, it's suddenly, wait, this is actually happening now. This thing that I've been fucking battling for and manifesting the fuck out of is suddenly upon me, and I'm going, have I got the songs for it. What excites me is recording a record where we do have the time and facilities to fully flesh out what's inside of us and can give it our all. Equally there might be something special in not having all that. We'll find out.

"We've got a tour in October that we're all very humbled by because it's sold out, and sold out in a matter of hours. We've only had a handful of headline experiences; doing that for two weeks will be surreal. I'm excited for people to hear this EP. There's so much opinion surrounding us, but ultimately, there's not much music out."

You'd imagine not much music is swiftly going to change as Keo contemplate their next moves in their own distinct way. "It's almost coming back to my roots of loving folk music, being honest and not tainted by what's in at the moment," says Finn of the possible vibes for the debut album. "It's Keo with their blinkers on recording and making what they want to make. It's a bit more challenging, a little bit more acoustic in places, but I don't really know what the record sounds like either," he laughs. "We'll fucking find out." Yes, yes we will. Enjoy the ride.