A window, a way in. That's all we wanted tonight. Packed like soot into a pokey Soho dancehall, we've already missed one window of opportunity by arriving five and something songs into These New Puritans' six-song set. Useless. We catch the last minute or so of 'En Papier' before Jack Barnett leads his band from the tiny White Heat stage, with a punnet of (not entirely sincere, you feel) "I love you"s. There'll be more shows before the debut album arrives in October, but TNP at White Heat was something worth looking forward to. Useless.

No matter: we've still got Liars. The smoking ban is pushing everyone upstairs and out, into the gutters of Brewer Street. News reaches us that the only confined, public spaces that still permit smokers are chicken shacks; as they are, in fact, tax islands and exempt from UK law. The long-haired proprietor of Madame Jojo's is running up and down the stairs, scraping the hair from his face and looking the epitome of 'flustered'. Transvestites are never subtle, are they? Are they?

We strip away one-by-one from the fuming gaggle, fags like dying aircraft, and push our way into whatever crevices we can find for the inevitable onslaught of Liars. After making 50 tickets available on the door tonight and selling out the original allocation in hours, space is the most scarce I've ever seen it at White Heat, especially at this decent hour.

It's all set-up, it's ready, it's waiting. But expectancy proves to be our downfall tonight - baited breath and folded arms don't do. So, the 'onslaught' we thought 'inevitable' never comes. Nothing does - there's no release, no window, no way in. All Liars accumulate is a rolling ball of tension; leaving no space between the span of blurred guitar strings and the spit and kick of two percussionists that spend the night hissing at each other.

Songs from albums past ('Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack') and future ('Plaster Cast of Everything') come and never really go, hanging in the humid air like an unspoken grudge. The only time things open out is when 'Pure Unevil' lopes and bowls into view, bass oscillating through the abyss while guitar splinters on either side, shooting off and sharding like glass in The Matrix. If you let your eyes go out of focus you can weave your way through the comet storm and find a path, a thread, and the whole thing suddenly has a dynamic. It's short-lived.

Sound comes constantly, the gap between a) and b) is always bridged. This'd be fine towards the end of a set, but we're still trying to find a window, a way in. Like I've said, and will say again: it's like walking between streetlamps and looking up for the dirty light to relax so you can see the stars. Something to navigate by. Liars keep our necks bent back but never show us the ornaments of galaxies; keeping us at ground level, wracked and fraught as they seem to be tonight (see photo). Blinded by the lights and distant, arms crossed over our chests, static at the peripheries.

Photography by Jenna Foxton