Keith are four lads from four parts of England (Essex, Ealing, Shrewsbury and Leeds) who met in (Greater) Manchester whilst on a music course. Keith are all headstrong characters with wildly differing musical roots who somehow maintain an emphatic democracy. Impossible to pigeon-hole, their eclectism is viewed either as their greatest strength or as their greatest weakness.

Sure enough, there's a world of different sounds on their debut album Red Thread, whether it's Smiths-influenced pop with echoes of African hi-life guitar on debut single Back There, ethereal atmospheric balladry (Gunshot Revelry), sparkling shoe-gazing indie (Down Below), twisted disco imagining a concoction of peak-period Moroder, Baker & New Order on second single Mona Lisa's Child, or Eno-esque avant garde textures on The Miller. Red Thread is an ambitious, challenging and rewarding album that clearly marks Keith out from the ordinary.

In addition to their Road to V winning Festival performances the past 12 months have seen Keith eliciting a rapturous response at Japan's prestigious Summersonic and British Anthems festivals and France's breakthrough Les Inrockuptibles. They have worked with high-class producers such as Matthew Herbert, Dan Carey, and the impressively pervasive James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco who has also remixed them, alongside the cream of Europe's leftfield dance cognoscenti, Braxe & Falke.

The readers of Japan's influential Snoozer magazine recently voted Keith the second best new act of 2006 (above Klaxons, Lily Allen and everyone else bar Artic Monkeys) - and, like this competition, the Japanese are usually pretty good at this seeing into the future malarky...

Look out for the band's second album later in 2007.