Cobrah
O2 Ritz, Manchester
14th March 2026
Cobrah brought the Torn Tour to a heaving, disgustingly sweaty and very sold-out O2 Ritz in Manchester on Thursday for a night of industrial fetish-pop, emotional ballads, and at least one airborne thong. Thomas Sidwell was there to witness the madness.
Maybe the hottest venue in Manchester, in temperature and in Paris-Hilton realness, proved the perfect setting for one of the hottest artists on the planet right now. The O2 Ritz was already sweating before a note had been played, packed wall-to-wall with an extraordinary crowd: leather harnesses, thigh-high boots, tanktops, fishnets, mesh, face glitter. A congregation of gorgeous people who had dressed for the occasion.
Cobrah, the Gothenburg-born, Stockholm-raised artist who, with Torn, her long-awaited debut album, has elevated from underground fetish-pop cult figure to genuine crossover force, emerges through a wall of dry ice flanked by two dancers, her silhouette framed by an imposing orange light box. The room detonates. Eight years since her first recordings rattled the Stockholm underground, she has never looked more in command.
HUSH, the recent single capturing the charged, wordless electricity of dance-floor desire, pulsed with that exact energy live, before SUCK arrived with full theatrical force, with leg splits, chair choreography that drew the kind of ecstatic crowd response usually reserved for encores. Excusez-Moi, a genuine bop of the highest order, turned the Ritz into something approximating a Parisian pleasure palace. Then the show took a turn nobody quite expected, and revealed why Cobrah’s reputation has grown so far beyond her origins. Emerging from behind the screen mid-silhouette, she launched into the title track, Torn itself, its dubstep drop arriving after an emotional synth build that had the room completely still, before exploding every phone skyward. It hit hard.
Cobrah breaks up the songs with a word for the crowd: “When I released this very intimate album, I was afraid you’d only want to suck clit together, and not want these deep tracks – but we sold out. Sold out for the deep stuff.”
The biggest applause of the night came after the most vulnerable moment. Cobrah addressed the crowd directly: she’d been afraid the album’s emotional weight would alienate people who came for the club bangers. The confession was met with a roar that shook the Ritz bones. And genuinely, a 5 minute scream cum round of applause as Cobrah fluttered her eyelids to the crowd. Then she produced Charming, a soft, genuinely gorgeous ballad about love, compromise, and wanting different futures from the same person, and a writhing, sweaty slow dance ensued. Hundreds of people, swaying, phones lit, in a room that moments before had been grinding to industrial fetish-pop. A beautiful gear change that allowed us to catch our breath, however briefly.
Brand New Bitch, all fan-dance choreography and weaponised confidence, arrived from 2022, the song that introduced Cobrah to a wider world via Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness. Emma Stone’s iconic parking lot dance became a viral sensation and is featured prominently in both the film’s promotional teasers and its closing credits. And then, as the finale, she sniffed the air theatrically: “There was something I could smell, it was the feminine energy.” The room erupted before the song even started. Feminine Energy closed the show in a storm of noise.
Please note: Use of these images in any form without permission is illegal. If you wish to contact the photographer, please email: mel@mudkissphotography.co.uk
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Words by Thomas Sidwell, more work on his author profilehere
All photos by Melanie Smith –Louder Than War|Facebook|Twitter|Instagram|Portfolio
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