The EP itself started earlier than any of that, in Liverpool at the end of 2024, before its predecessor was even finished. 'Run Kid' arrived first, put together out of ideas they'd been playing about with for a while and couldn't make click. "Once it took the form of 'Run Kid', we knew it had to be on the next project," guitarist Finley Rubens explains. "Especially with how it was received by crowds at live shows. It very quickly became a high point in the set."

Then the band's drummer Dylan Murphy told them about his great-grandad.

Matt Kelly was head zookeeper at Belle Vue, and in 1946, the day before his daughter was born, a snake he'd been transporting to the BBC bit him. As Dylan tells it, there was no antidote in Manchester, and the only supply in the country sat at London Zoo, so police were dispatched to fetch it while Kelly went partially blind and paralysed from the venom. The doctor whose sign-off they needed was off duty, at the cinema with his wife, and someone had to walk into the screening and find him. Kelly lived. When he was finally well enough to meet his daughter, the family named her Vivian, after the man who'd saved him.

"The storytelling element became something we'd focus on," says Dylan of the momentum that followed, which, if you have stories like that, fair enough.

Belle Vue itself is gone. The zoo and pleasure gardens ran for 140 years before closing in 1977, and the site is now a greyhound stadium and retail units. What survives is in family albums, and the band have gone through Dylan's, collaging the artwork from his great-grandad's photographs and old news write-ups about the place. "Belle Vue is also a really culturally significant place for us, being a band from Manchester," Joey says, "which ties it all together nicely. I think Belle Vue as a cultural symbol grounds this record and makes it a proper succinct piece of work."

It's also changed how they wrote. "In the past, the writing felt a bit more fractured song to song," he says, "whereas this time round it's a lot more focused."

'Doba' proves the method, though it rather did take the scenic route to get there. The name belongs to Aleksander Doba, the Polish explorer who crossed the Atlantic by kayak twice and died at the summit of Kilimanjaro well into his seventies. Fin found him during an evening doomscroll. He turned up at rehearsal with an Instagram reel and a line: "Doba, Doba, you crossed the sea."

It turns out, the music had been sitting around waiting for him to show up without anyone realising. "Fin had an idea demoed about a year prior, which had this sort of trudging thing going on that felt almost like wading through a swamp," Joey says. "We didn't touch it, and then in a rehearsal I was looping this bassline, which is the intro to the song, then we mashed the two together and had some semblance of a structure." Doba arrived months later and made sense of both halves of the puzzle. "It was only right that he became the subject of the song. We felt it was an appropriate homage to a relatively unknown man, considering the incredible feats he achieved."

What links a zookeeper, a kayaker, and four lads from Manchester is stubbornness, and Joey has clearly given it some thought. Kelly's story, as he reads it, "shows how such fine margins can have such a profound impact on the future". That runs through everything. There's the rallying cry of 'Run Kid' and the sheer willpower of 'Doba', and then there's 'My Number', where the same quality turns out to be considerably less admirable. Persistence there, he says, is "a bit of a nuisance sometimes".

This is also the first record this version of the band has built from nothing. Vocalist Cal Blakebrough and Fin had the whole debut EP written before Joey and Dylan arrived, which means this is the first time they knew what the band at full strength was really capable of. That meant the extra attention mattered less than you'd assume. "The added spotlight did influence us a bit directionally," Cal admits. "We knew we wanted the EP to be made for the stage." The ambition was to take what they'd done last time and push it further, into something that would, in his words, "both capture the imagination and electrify our live shows".

Manchester is unavoidable when you're a young guitar band from within its gravitational pull, and Arkayla have never pretended anything different. They've simply found that the shared musical inheritance doesn't work the way everyone assumes. "What makes it so special is that it has always been about carving out your own path, and so to truly embrace it that's what you've got to do," says Joey. "Anyone can rehash what's already been done."

Which is why he won't be pinned to a definitive sound. Set the raw aggression of 'Doba' against the soul of 'My Number', and they're certainly a little more flexible than some of their peers, currently catching strays on the internet. "An Arkayla song is about capturing the essence of that moment when we're jamming an idea, and everything seems to click, and staying true and authentic to that."

The size of the early fanbase has grown faster than anyone had really planned for, and what's struck Joey isn't the size of it so much as the effort involved. There are homemade banners at every show, T-shirts, and novelty sunglasses. People travel distances that make no economic sense. He'd particularly like to mention Junko, who flies in from Japan to see them and brings Japanese chocolates and sweets every single time. "Their commitment to live music cannot be overstated," he says. "It's truly humbling."

Ask him where it turned, and he doesn't hesitate. Neighbourhood Weekender, the big top, their biggest festival slot to that point and a tent he walked towards feeling distinctly apprehensive. "As soon as we started playing, I was struck by the sheer energy of the crowd. It was the first time we'd had that number of people singing basically every word back to us." They closed on 'Run Kid'. "I remember looking up and seeing the biggest mosh pit we've ever had at a gig, people sprinting laps around the outside of it waiting for the chorus, and just being absolutely stunned. It's a moment I'll remember for the rest of my life." Something shifted that afternoon, he says, and all four of them felt it coming off stage.

A year this busy will teach a new band things that will set them up for the next decade or more. "I think we've improved at commanding the stage the more practice we've had," he says, crediting festival season with getting them comfortable in bigger rooms. Cal and Fin have got sharper at the back and forth with a crowd, too, "although the standard of the jokes is still somewhat questionable at times".

They do still go to festivals as punters, just barely. Cal is the keenest of the four, and he and Dylan had been raving about Kendal from the moment the offer landed, so the band found the time to camp the whole weekend. Free weekends are always scarce, though, when you're playing the festival circuit. Joey isn't complaining about that. He did Leeds a few times as a teenager, and going back as a band has, he reckons, "definitely enhanced the magic of it and also made me appreciate just how much work goes into these festivals behind the scenes".

Which brings him to next week, opening the main stage there, and to a song called 'The Middle' that he's itching to play again after its debut at Kendal. It's been kicking around a while, but by his reckoning, it's a proper festival tune. Beyond that, the ambition is unglamorous and entirely reasonable: more songs, more shows, more people hearing them. Though he does note, with the air of a man who has been practising manifestation, that Glastonbury is back next year.

And the turtleneck? Some things you don't get back, mostly because they absolutely stink.

Arkayla's EP 'Back To Belle Vue' is out 21st August. They play Leeds Festival on 27th August.

Photography: Manuella Jaramillo Giraldo
In Collaboration With: Pretty Green (prettygreen.com)