Space Ballroom Weekly Round Up: 10 shows announced
The Surfrajettes return in March
Space Ballroom announced Deal with God, Redscroll Records Showcase with Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean, Comeback Kid, The Surfrajettes, Habibi, Cold: Performing 13 Way to Bleed Onstage, Diesel Boy, Youth Lagoon, The Browning and Chris Farren this week. Tickets are on sale now via spaceballroom.com
Deal with God
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
January 24, 2025
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Deal with God
Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
February 9, 2025
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Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean
Comeback Kid
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
February 28, 2025
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Comeback Kid
Originating in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and first gaining recognition with their 2002 demo and the acclaimed Turn It Around in 2003; Comeback Kid has consistently balanced a DIY ethos and dependability with a humanitarian approach, breaking down hardcore boundaries and elevating the genre to a global stage. Career-defining album Wake The Dead launched the band to new heights in 2005, and 2007 found Andrew Neufeld taking over vocal duties on the band’s third full-length, Broadcasting. Giving hardcore notoriety across the world, Comeback Kid released four albums between 2011-2022, the latest being the critically acclaimed Heavy Steps.
Earlier this year, Comeback Kid released the critically acclaimed Trouble EP through Sharptone (Worldwide) and New Damage Records (Canada). Produced and recorded by the band and John Paul Peters (Propagandhi, Cancer Bats) at Private Ear Recording in Winnipeg, the EP stands as a powerful testament to the band’s steadfast commitment to forging ahead on their own terms. Described as a “must-listen” that captures the band at the height of their creativity, the 4-track EP features the infectious, tongue-in-cheek lead single “Trouble In The Winner’s Circle”, the festival anthem “Disruption”, and the gritty, pulse-pounding “Chompin’ At The Bit.”
The Surfrajettes
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
March 12, 2025
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The Surfrajettes
What’s thicker, our eyeliner or our guitar strings?
The Surfrajettes are a four-piece instrumental combo from Toronto, ON, Canada. Since forming in late 2015, the band has charmed audiences with their clever mix of psychedelic rock and reverb-drenched surf music, sky-high beehives, go-go boots, and eyeliner as thick as their guitar strings.
The band achieved viral online notoriety from their home-made performance videos and their feature by Norman’s Rare Guitars in LA. The debut 45 single “Party Line / Toxic” released late 2018 on Hi-Tide Recordings to immediate success. The band has toured extensively in its support, including performances on The Beach Boys Cruise, The Melissa Etheridge Cruise, at Nashville Boogie, Wild O Fest in Mexico City, The New England Shake-Up!, Surf Guitar 101 Convention, Tiki Oasis & Hi-Tide Summer Holiday: Asbury Park.
The band released the follow up single “Hale’iwa Hustle / Banzai Pipeline” in 2020, supported by a festival appearance at Hi-Tide Winter Holiday: Pittsburgh. The group spent the rest of 2020 and most of 2021 writing and recording their debut LP “Roller Fink” – in stores NOW from Hi-Tide Recordings.
The Surfrajettes are guitarists Shermy Freeman and Nicole Damoff, bassist Sarah Butler, and drummer Annie Lillis. When not on tour, the group is busy woodshedding in their secret beach hut, sewing new miniskirts, debating vintage gear, and daydreaming about performing in a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Habibi
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
March 22, 2025
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Habibi
Co-founded by Detroit natives Rahill Jamalifard and Lenny Lynch, Habibi got its start in Brooklyn in 2011, earning early raves everywhere from Pitchfork and NME to All Things Considered and The New Yorker, who praised the band for infusing “the Colgate-white glisten of sixties-girl-group pop with an uncensored edge.” Dreamachine, Habibi’s mesmerizing new record releasing on Kill Rock Stars, marks a major sonic evolution for the band, rising beyond the critically acclaimed five-piece’s garage rock roots to arrive at a singular swirl of analog and digital elements that underpin their search for spiritual and physical transcendence. Produced by Tyler Love and longtime collaborator Jay Heiselmann and featuring MGMT multi-instrumentalist James Richardson, the collection draws on a mix of post-punk, experimental pop, and vintage disco, calling to mind Tom Verlaine, Diana Ross, Kate Bush, and Kim Deal, all filtered through the band’s shared love of Middle Eastern psych music. The songs here are their own distinct worlds, each an immersive quest in pursuit of something greater, and the band’s performances are relentless and hypnotic to match, driven by lush synthesizers, sinewy guitars, and a muscular rhythm section. The result is a record as fearless as it is enthralling, an alternatingly fierce and joyous work that ascends to new heights as it reckons with desire and escape, love and surrender, rebellion and reality.
Cold
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
April 10, 2025
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Cold
Diesel Boy
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
April 12, 2025
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Diesel Boy
2023 was a banner year for Diesel Boy. After twenty something years away from the spotlight, the California skate punk quartet brushed off the dust, chipped away the rust, and released a new album, “Gets Old,” which found the band receiving the best reviews of its career.
The band also hit the road for the first time in decades, playing shows in both Europe and the US, closing out the year with a sold out show in their now-hometown of Seattle with their old pals in MxPx. Though their backs may hurt after a gig more than they used to, the live show is as energetic as ever.
“Is it a reunion if no one cared we were gone or that we’re back,” singer/guitarist Diesel Dave quips on “Lost Decade,” the leadoff track from “Gets Old.” It turns out that some people, at least, ARE glad the band has returned. And the excitement has reinvigorated the band’s members, which include founders Diesel Dave and Greg Hensley (bass), along with Jack Miller (guitar) and Christopher Thomas (drums), the former of whom moonlights as The Punk Historian on YouTube, and the latter of whom also drums for indie rock vets Mansions.
Though the band splits its time between grown-up jobs, raising families, and the rigors of middle age (except for Jack!), they’ve got plenty to crow about in 2024. Diesel Boy will be playing dates across North America, including a handful of summer festivals like Pouzza, Red Bridge, and Camp Punskylvania. They’ll also be releasing a seven inch on SBAM with a pair of new songs, one about falling in love with music via cassettes (“Tapes”), and the other about a family road trip to see punk rock landmarks (“Punk Rock Minivan”).
Though they are firmly focused on the future, Diesel Boy has plenty of history. The band formed in California’s wine country in 1993, made four records for Fat Wreck Chords imprint Honest Dons in the ‘90s and 2000s, and crisscrossed the globe endless times before taking a decades-long break. While on hiatus, their songs continued to rack up millions of streams on the various streaming services, as offers for festivals and new music persisted, prompting the band to relaunch their career. Humbled by enthusiastic fan response and grateful to still have an opportunity to play music together, Diesel Boy is hoping to stick around for good this time.
Youth Lagoon: Rarely Do I Dream Tour
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
April 26, 2025
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Youth Lagoon
“Life itself is a thunderstorm,” says Trevor Powers, the Idaho-based songwriter and producer behind the Youth Lagoon moniker. “Life itself is brothers on walkie-talkies… it’s your dog at the backdoor, or a speeding car off in the distance. It’s a gentle voice on the radio. Mom smoking on the porch. The color of sunlight. It’s always right under your nose and so easy to miss. Often, a simple treasure.”
In the fall of 2023, that treasure came in the form of a shoebox filled with home videos Powers found in his parents’ basement while he was looking for a pre-war harmonica that once belonged to his grandma. “When I took the tapes home and popped in the first one, it was my brother Bobby and I at the state fair. I was 4 years old choking on a corn dog,” he laughs. “If anything’s a summary of life, that is.” Powers spent the following week recording his favorite moments off the TV — Easter egg hunts, backyard baseball, bloody noses, birthday parties, road trips, and all the life in-between. “I was like a ghost in a lost memory,” says Powers.
The vivid intimacies of life and boyhood depicted in Powers’ home movies not only began shaping his songs, but infusing with them. He started sampling the audio and manipulating it into a kind of musical cinematography, fusing past with future. “What I was really consumed with was how much I could zoom in on my actual history,” says Powers. “I wanted to really make someone feel like they were inside my living room in 1993, but rearrange the furniture a bit. Something about combining that level of hyperreality with fairytales of devils and detectives weirdly felt like the truest way to immortalize these pieces of my family.”
Rooted in love and childhood memoir, Rarely Do I Dream is a triumph of American gothic imagination — where storybook innocence dissolves into a radioactive billow of teenage drifters, drug-addled hustlers, and old-world folklore. Drifting between propulsive electronica and hallucinatory rock songs, Powers’ singular voice always glows front and center as the neon road sign pointing home.
“The more I rewind the tapes of my life, the more I can hear the voice of my soul,” Powers says. “This isn’t nostalgia. Life’s much more messy than that. It’s a dedication to all the parts of who I was, who I am, and who I’m going to be.”
With a bent toward rural noir, Powers has found a home in a world where his personal journals and poetic confessions are indistinguishable from the twisted mythologies of habitual sinners and devout barflies. “The summer taught me that life’s a baseball bat to the jaw,” Powers sings on “Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)” — painted with western tremolo guitars, proto-ambient recordings of dogs barking, family talking, and a distorted drumbeat circling it all. On “Neighborhood Scene,” the album’s opening track and one Powers describes as “a postcard to everyone I’ve ever loved,” he turns a remote Idaho cul-de-sac into a land both eternal and sacred, inverting the privacy of home into an open invitation to sit down for dinner. “Do I, do I belong in a country house? Every angel and devil out marchin’ on the lawn. / Do I, do I tell Tom that I saw his dad at the ‘No Romance’ bunny ranch? Cowgirl ain’t his mom,” he sings.
“Speed Freak,” a dark joyride that showcases Youth Lagoon’s glaring metamorphosis, unleashes a grungy beat while synth bass struts and splinters into a technicolor post-punk spectacle. “This song came from a thought I had of giving the angel of death a hug,” Powers says. “We spend our whole lives running from this thing we can’t outrun. The more I’ve learned to die to myself, the more I’ve learned there is no death. Only transformation. A door opens when you learn to let go of the identity you’ve been building your whole life. Someone told me a couple years ago, ‘I have good news for you and I have bad news. The bad news is Trevor is doomed. There’s no hope for Trevor. The good news is — you’re not Trevor.’ When I heard that, it clicked.”
After taking an eight-year hiatus away from Youth Lagoon, Powers returned to the alias with the acclaimed Heaven Is a Junkyard in early 2023, an album of warped Americana that brought his focus back home. Youth Lagoon’s first album in nearly a decade pushed the project into a neo-western realm both deeply literary and musically vast, centered around an upright piano and static-coated electronics. “I had ended Youth Lagoon years ago because I lost who I was,” Powers says. “Then life jumped me in an alley and gave me a beating. That suffering changed my frequency. Now my ideas are a river. I can’t keep up.”
Delicate yet aggressive, innovative yet classic, Rarely Do I Dream is Youth Lagoon’s most comprehensive and audacious album to date. A treasure trove of home movies, twangy fuzz guitars, sun-bleached synths, classical pianos, blown-out drums, and Powers’ spellbinding melodies all feel like an old photograph that’s been reanimated in a strange and distant future. “This was the first time I’ve ever used guitar instead of piano as my main writing tool,” says Powers. “Anytime I’m horrified and on a knife-edge creatively I know I’m doing something right. I need that feeling of knowing I could either be making the greatest thing I’ve ever made or something so bad it could be career suicide. Anything short of that, I’ve failed myself. After the Heaven Is a Junkyard tour, I was fully in the moment and appreciated all of it… then I said to myself, ‘Ok, moving on.’ I have zero interest in repeating myself.”
Powers’ ability to relentlessly push and evolve the project forward has taken Youth Lagoon into a territory both fiercely original and strikingly expansive. Recorded with co-producer and mixer/engineer Rodaidh McDonald, Rarely Do I Dreammarks a seismic transformation, a mammoth leap forward, and an instant, indelible landmark in Youth Lagoon’s revered discography. With a profound love and dedication to family, along with his own brand of genre-bending noir rock, Powers’ has achieved what he set out to do.
“I wanted to make an album that feels like life itself…” says Powers.
The Browning
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
May 1, 2025
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The Browning
Chris Farren
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
May 10, 2025
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Chris Farren
Ask Chris Farren how he feels when he finishes an album and he won’t hesitate to respond with: “Miserable. Miserable. Miserable.”
At least, that’s how it’s been over the years he’s been writing and recording solo. When the time came to make a record, Farren would be overtaken by an unparalleled anxiety, forcing him into the home studio he describes as “barely bigger than a closet,” where he agonized over the minute details of his work in progress. “Looking back on those records… I have no good memories of making them,” he admits. “It’s always been a lonely, doubt-ridden process.”
It’s surprising to hear this, knowing Farren’s reputation as a prolific songwriter who made his name recording with Jeff Rosenstock in Antarctigo Vespucci and before that, the Floridian punk band Fake Problems. In 2014, Farren started releasing music under his own name all while continuing his project alongside Rosenstock, and his first album, Like a Gift From God or Whatever endeared him to fans of the now-defunct Fake Problems and new listeners who had yet to experience the delight of a new Chris Farren song. Like a Gift From God or Whatever was followed by Can’t Die and Farren’s Polyvinyl debut, Born Hot. Last year, Farren wrote what he describes as a soundtrack to a spy film he invented that will never be committed to film. Inspired by Marvin Gaye’s soundtrack to Trouble Man, Death Don’t Wait (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) was a creative exercise, one Farren completed in mere months that stands apart from the extensive, at times arduous, process of making a Chris Farren album.
After releasing Born Hot in 2019, Farren knew he needed to make changes to the creative process, but he wasn’t yet sure how to. Enter Frankie Impastato, drummer of Macseal, who Farren met on tour and who became one of his dearest friends and confidants. He told Impastato about the misery, the barely-bigger-than-a- closet studio, the barren memory chest, and together they hatched a plan: they’d make Farren’s next album together. So, Farren got in touch with multi- instrumentalist/producer, and Jay Som mastermind, Melina Duterte (also, a Polyvinyl labelmate), who invited him by her studio where she’s collaborated with a steady stream of notable artists since first opening it in 2020. That’s where Doom Singer, his new full-length album due out August 4th, would be made.
“Looking back, I feel bad, because Melina brought me in to show me her space and was describing the gear to me and I was totally checked out,” Farren says. “I mean, the space is amazing, she’s super talented, but I told her: ‘I don’t care about any of this stuff. I just want to make a record with you and have fun. I want to make
a record and have a good time.’”
Collaboration not only untethered Farren from his misery (fun was had) but also his overbearing need to control every aspect of the creative process. While on previous albums like 2019’s Born Hot or 2016’s Can’t Die Farren might’ve spent hours on end tweaking a single canned drumbeat, Impastato’s live drums offer a spontaneity that breathed new dimensionality into the Chris Farren project. He wanted this new effort to be “bombastic,” to sound like it could fill the immense negative space of an arena. “I wanted to open these songs up, make them less frenetic, and not feel the pressure to cram every moment,” he says. You hear that impulse on lead single “Cosmic Leash,” which opens with a wall of sound that careens to a halt, as Farren delivers his interlude over the slight strumming of a guitar. That sense of reprieve lasts only a moment, before the enormous chorus shreds through the silence as Farren wails: “Change your heart/ Wait your turn.”
The choruses on Doom Singer are all like this, huge, cathartic, catchy as hell, and inspired by what Farren describes as the “sixties-tinged girl group vibe, not retro, but playful” employed by Belle and Sebastian. “First Place” is a shining example, a song Farren describes as being about worrying you might grow apart from your partner and, “Not being able to cum because of Lexapro.” It’s hard to describe the single as anything but “jaunty,” the buoyancy of Farren’s delivery belying any sense of disquiet humming beneath its surface.
Farren says Doom Singer communicates an “optimistic nihilism,” and that lyrically, he’s trying to embrace nuances inspired by films like TÁR and I’m Thinking of Ending Things. “In these movies, the truth of the narrative isn’t handed to you, and it’s not easy to figure out where your sympathies should lie,” he says. Against certainty, Doom Singer opens with a confession. “I don’t remember how to do this,” Farren croons on “Bluish,” admitting to feeling codependent in his marriage, worried he is too much to manage, that his neuroses might disrupt a delicate domestic balance. It was the first song he wrote for the album and the one that determined its narrative course. We’re made to believe aging makes you wiser, but as Farren has grown into the prodigious songwriter you hear on Doom Singer, he’s only grown less certain. “I’m constantly processing the way I feel about things, and I didn’t want any of these songs to sound sure of themselves, or to communicate any clear message,” he says.
Citing My Bloody Valentine, TV on the Radio, and Camera Obscura as clear influences, Farren says he can’t listen to much music until it’s time to make a new record, but when it’s time, he submerges himself in music that moves him. “I wrote between fifty and eighty songs for this album,” he says. The final cut is as genuine, empathetic, and of course, funny, as Farren is, and though he claims nihilistic tendencies, it’s the dogged optimism that endures. On “All We Ever,” Farren compiles a list of things he wants (to stop paying rent, to love the government, to
get drunk with friends) that accumulate into a three-minute reminder that no life is ever pristine, that there will always be wants unfulfilled, and that that’s okay.
“There will be struggle in everything. I’ll always be fighting with myself, and I need to find a certain peace with that,” he says, but on Doom Singer, Farren rejects closure, and he’s still seeking that sense of peace. Maybe we all are, whether we’re bold enough to sing about it or not.
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