Panchiko

Panchiko is a Nottingham indie rock band whose origin story reads less like a press release and more like a peculiar internet fable. Formed in 1997 by four school friends, they pressed roughly thirty copies of their debut EP D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L onto CD-Rs in 2000, sent a handful to labels who never wrote back, and quietly dissolved the following year. One of those discs found its way to an Oxfam shop in Sherwood, where in 2016 a stranger bought it for forty-nine pence, uploaded the badly corrupted audio to an internet forum, and accidentally ignited a years-long international search for the people behind it. Four years later, fans traced vocalist Owain Davies through a Facebook barcode and a hunch about Nottingham; his reply — a simple "Yeah" — set off a reunion none of the members had thought to want. Their sound, rooted in late-nineties shoegaze and dream pop but sharpened by two decades of distance, has since accumulated millions of listeners; their second studio album Ginkgo arrived in April 2025, and their first proper headline tours have repeatedly sold out before the announcement is cold.