Live musician of the year 2025: ELLiS-D’s electrifying 158-show year
What is music for if not making memories, and a gig is the most sure-fire place for a musical memory to be made.
The heart and soul of the music world, the bread and butter of it all, is the good old-fashioned gig, and in an industry that seems too desperate to move more and more online, the rattling of our favourite local venues serves as a necessary reminder that the game is so much more than streaming numbers and sales.
It’s about nights with sweaty walls and sticky floors at a rock show, or the hushed, almost religious silence of a room while someone sits at a piano, or the shadows of limbs dancing on the walls. It’s about people, about collective experiences, about that indescribable feeling of being hypnotised and hooked onto what you’re watching, and even when I type that, one vision comes to mind: ELLiS-D, the man with a guitar, and the room of people before him, unsure whether to frantically move or stand very still with their jaws dropped open.
Far Out have been climbing onto the proverbial rooftop and screaming the name of this Brighton artist for some time now, and will continue to do so until everyone listens, and luckily, the sheer number of people who already have is growing.
Through ELLiS’ own good list-keeping, he counted that in 2025 alone, he had played 158 shows, wherein 68 of those audiences saw the artist brandish his guitar like a gun and move like he’s been electrified, roaring through the insane stop-start riffs he uses to mess with them and tearing through the tunes held on his latest EP, Drifting. During one of them that I caught, ELLiS and his band literally rocked out so hard that something started burning plastic, threatening an electrical fire, while the whole room stayed dancing.
But part of the thing that makes the artist so interesting is that it’s only half of it, and the other 85 crowds he was in front of this year saw him playing drums for Fat Dog, taking on a completely different position in a completely different band, but doing that just as expertly, which is a rare thing. Usually talent like that runs down one lane, or at least expertise does, but where ELLiS is concerned, his power as one of the most exciting and talented live musicians around can’t be boxed in.
“2025 has been such a whirlwind year for me personally, and it’s only really now that the gigs have finished that I’m able to take stock and reflect on how much I’ve enjoyed it!” he told Far Out.
It’s been a long-awaited and hard-earned victory of a year, to which he said, “I’ve been pursuing music since my early teens in many different bands and guises, propping it up with countless other hospitality and desk jobs where I would spend all day dreaming of what it would be like to be on the road all the time instead. So to have achieved this in the last 18 months really is a dream come true.”
At the end of a hectic year, the artist’s primary reflections are personal ones and a humble pride in the ways he’s developed as a person more than anything. “In a way it feels as that the touring schedule has led to more progression on a personal level than as a musician,” he said, explaining, “It’s harder to feel as though you’re breaking new ground musically when you’re performing the same set every night for such a long time, compared to when you’re slogging it out in a rehearsal room between day shifts. I feel a whole lot more prepared to deal with the pressures of constant touring and the strain of being away from friends and family all the time than I was 18 months ago, when it could sometimes get a bit overwhelming.”
Whatever happens next, I’ll always be really proud of this,” he said as he looks forward to 2026.
We’re willing to bet that ‘whatever happens next’ is a levelling up and up. Of all the team members who have witnessed ELLiS live, there is one prevailing understanding, which is that talent like that surely has to rise. What we have here is a star and a really, blindly bright one.
