Location: Drizzly Grizzly, Gdańsk
Date: 21/09/2026
Organizer: Winary Bookings
I’ll be honest with you. Part of the reason I ended up working in Ireland in 1999 was the music. Not entirely, not rationally, but somewhere in the decision there was a pull that had something to do with that specific ache you get from a good Irish tune, the kind that sounds ancient and urgent at the same time. And once you’ve lived inside that tradition even briefly, once you’ve heard it played in the right room by people who mean it, you don’t come back unchanged.
So when a band does it right, when they take that Irish DNA and run it through a punk band that genuinely believes what it’s playing, it touches something real. The Rumjacks do it right. They always have. Every time I put them on I’m reminded why this music grabbed me in the first place, and every time I see them announced for a show I feel that specific kind of excitement that only a handful of bands still manage to produce.
September is going to feel a little different in Gdańsk this year. Winary Bookings is bringing The Rumjacks to the Drizzly Grizzly, the shipyard-district concert club on ul. Elektryków that’s become one of the most honest live music rooms in the Tri-City. There’s something almost inevitable about the pairing. A venue built in the shadow of the Gdańsk Shipyard, soaked in the memory of collective action and working-class defiance, and a band who just released an album called “Dead Anthems” with a pro-immigrant anthem up front and a tribute to Shane MacGowan near the back. It fits.
“Dead Anthems“, their sixth studio LP released in February 2025, is the record that quietly announced The Rumjacks as the most vital force in their genre right now. Recorded in Asbury Park, New Jersey, co-produced by frontman Mike Rivkees alongside The Bouncing Souls’ Pete Steinkopf and mixed by The Interrupters’ Kevin Bivona, it is twelve tracks of furious, generous, hard-won music. Dropkick Murphys’ Ken Casey turns up on “Cold Like This“, a sea shanty that reportedly began as a hummed melody on a freezing Boston walk home. That’s the sort of band The Rumjacks are. The songs come out of real cold, real streets, real grief.
Live, they are relentless. The banjo, the Irish flute, the mandolin, the bouzouki, the accordion, all crammed into a punk band that doesn’t slow down. Crowds who’ve seen them once tend to come back repeatedly, which tells you everything about the gap between listening to the records and standing in the room while it happens.
The Drizzly Grizzly is exactly the right room for this. Tight & atmospheric. You’ll feel the bass in your chest and the night will end with your throat sore and your heart surprisingly full.
Tickets go on sale this Friday, 8 May, at winiarybookings.pl. Don’t sit on it.
