Dead Actors is a London based anti-rock group formed in 2021, which started life as the solo-project of songwriter Jonah Hartley. It soon grew into a quartet, exploring the territory of the outer fringes of rock. They have played numerous shows around the UK, self-released an album, two singles and two EP’s.
After recording and releasing the Dead Actors debut album, Dancing Plague of 1518, Jonah enlisted the help of Daniel Brown, who plays a modified ‘evil guitar’, for live performances. A chance encounter on a street corner led to the induction of Ciarán Harris on bass and the more recent addition of Nico Wood Oliván on drums came after he engineered a recording session. The expansion of the project has allowed a more far-reaching approach and the traversal of sonically more ambitious territory.
Dead Actors’ live performances are lauded for their theatrical intensity, as well as their ability to seamlessly shift from quiet lullabies to animalistic howling that sees the band hurling themselves across the stage with abandon. The quartet shares a belief that the role of music in the world we occupy is to rouse people into their humanity, a view equally inspired by the Theatre of Cruelty of Antonin Artaud as it is by Marx’s theory of alienation.
The group’s most recent release is the EP, Abused and Pampered Horses, released in 2025. It spans from the Iceage inspired cowpunk of ‘Exit Through the Fire Escape’, through to the metamorphic sludge of ‘Liquid Mercury’, which draws equally from Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England as it does from delta blues. The post-rock dreamscape of ‘Nearly Valentine’s Day’, Drive Like Jehu indebted ‘Bullet Train to Leeds’ and the theatrical dirge of ‘Bright White Blinding Light’ complete the picture of a band taking larger steps much further apart than the first astronauts on the moon.
Dead Actors has a winding and blood-spattered history playing in venues like Brighton’s Green Door Store, London’s Old Blue Last and the Sebright Arms, as well as a number of impromptu appearances in Leeds. Their music has been featured on the radio shows of Wire’s Colin Newman and Graham Duff, who included Dancing Plague of 1518 in his best albums of the year list of 2021. In his review of a 2023 show at the Green Door Store, Christian le Surf described their set as “easily one of the most visceral experiences of any live show [he’s] watched!”
Photos by Alex Creamer.
Dead Actors 