Gallows' Orchestra of Wolves gets a 20-year look back

Robert Davidson has written an anniversary essay on Gallows' debut album Orchestra of Wolves, published 9:00am on 25 September 2026, twenty years on from the record. Gallows formed in Watford in 2005, playing hardcore punk, and built a reputation on chaotic live shows in the early 2000s at venues around Watford, St. Albans, Canterbury, Nottingham and Brighton.

When the band erupted in 2006, some heard a second coming of the Sex Pistols. The essay reaches back further, pulling in Greil Marcus, whose 1989 book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of The 20th Century asked: "Were the Sex Pistols a major event in history?" It also sets the era alongside Simon Reynolds' line: "Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again, all again at once."

The piece also notes that the Sex Pistols sold their back-catalogue to Universal Music Group in March 2006. For now, the anniversary rests on the essay itself: the record, the reputation, and the question of what a band is worth twenty years later.