Space Ballroom weekly round up: 10 shows announced, Foxing returns

Space Ballroom announced Christian Lee Hutson, School of Rock AllStars, Nation of Language with Safe Mind, Foxing, Glass Spells, Madball with Badway and Soulless, Elias Rønnenfelt, Bob Mould, Melvins with Redd Kross and Pile this week. Tickets are on sale now via spaceballroom.com

Christian Lee Hutson
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
July 18, 2025
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Christian Lee Hutson

Paradise Pop. 10 feels a lot like finding an unpublished collection of short stories, scrawled hastily on the sides of airsickness bags and cocktail napkins, each one detailing the life of the unwitting passenger fortunate enough to be seated next to Christian Lee Hutson on their flight to Fort Worth.

Anyone who has had the good fortune of falling in love with his earlier albums – 2020’s Beginners and 2022’s Quitters – knows that he is a keen observer of both himself and the world. Those albums earned the Californian singer-songwriter international attention, with Pitchfork noting that, “Few lyricists can paint such clear portraits in such a small space; even fewer can set them so naturally to such long-breathed melodies,” the UK’s Guardian commending his work as “small films in song, delicate and devastating, lingering long” and No Depression heralding the arrival of “an artist fully formed and wise beyond his years.”

From the first line of the first song on this new album – “Tonight your name is Charlotte / In a play within a play” – he reminds the listener that he is again weaving a web of autobiographical fiction. However, this time he has somehow both simplified and sharpened his style.

On Paradise Pop. 10 you will visit the CC Club in Minneapolis, a San Francisco stage production of a Tom Stoppard play, a bowling alley at the Jersey Shore, and a 2003 Subaru where two dads consider kissing each other after a game of pick-up basketball. Despite how broad the world Hutson creates is, the album gives you the impression that you are at an airport gate of sorts, and all these characters are gathered together, waiting for their lives to begin. They make light conversation with each other as their flight continues to be delayed… just another 15 minutes.

Recorded at Figure 8 Studio in Brooklyn NY, the lifelong Angelino and his frequent collaborators – 4 x GRAMMY winner Phoebe Bridgers, GRAMMY-nominated producer & songwriter Marshall Vore, and GRAMMY-nominated engineer & multi-instrumentalist Joseph Lorge – ventured east to make Paradise Pop.10 and picked up some friends along the way. Lauded singer-songwriter Maya Hawke – whose latest album credits Hutson as producer and co-writer – co-wrote and sings harmony on the sharp and shoegaze-y earworm “Carousel Horses.” The song is a spiritual sequel to “Age Difference,” a single from Christian’s last record,Quitters, which depicts the crumbling of an unbalanced love affair: “You shouldn’t feel stupid/ I just knew before you did/ Now I’m sitting here spinning my wheels/ I bet you know how that feels.“

Recorded in the depths of winter, the close-knit talents from Los Angeles hunkered down to craft a brilliantly constructed and tender album. A captivating, breezy charm permeates every track, with each song hooked around Hutson’s warm, earthy vocals and dexterous story-telling. Whether fragile, finger-picking folk or rousing, beachy, power pop, these songs are informed by a sense of creeping melancholy about the place Hutson had spent most of his life; the sprawling, inscrutable city of Los Angeles had become haunted in his mind. A move to the East Coast, and the “eyes up” city of New York, was required to refresh his memory banks. “I wanted to make an eyes up record. A looking forward record,” he says.

He explains, “Sometimes when you live somewhere for a really long time, the place starts to feel like a memory graveyard. Every corner becomes kind of haunted in a way, kind of dragging you out of the present. That’s the street that Mikey used to live on. I smoked a cigarette in that alley with Zoe. There’s the rooftop we used to watch planes land from… y’know? That’s what LA became like for me, in the time after I made Quitters.” He expounds, “My last two records were really about exploring the past and mapping a little “star tour” of memories. Spending so much time revisiting all these emotional landmarks ended up giving me the feeling that I was missing my life. Like it was passing me while I was looking the other way. It felt really connected to the city. I would spend half my life in the car, just completely on autopilot, reliving my life from the beginning on repeat every day.” Having relocated to New York City he says he feels a very different energy around him, one he describes as,“You’re alive right now. You’re living your life today.”

Accompanied by Shahzad Ismaily‘s synths, Hutson’s rich voice shines most clearly on the album’s first single “After Hours.” He sings from a condominium in a corporatized Heaven to the woman he misses back on earth. “Big budget productions of the lives of your loved ones / The good stuff is behind a paywall.” Though the citizens of this Heaven are offered daily glimpses into life on Earth, our narrator prefers to imagine the minutiae of his love’s routine while he waits for her to join him.

One of the album’s most sparse tracks, “Flamingos,” finds Hutson at the piano backed by longtime musical collaborator, and the album’s co-producer, Phoebe Bridgers singing harmony. In this song we catch a glimpse of an anxious traveler, fresh off a flight from Tokyo, as he weaves and bobs through a crowd to reunite with a girlfriend. “I’m taking the red eye over the dateline / A sea of slow walkers all taking their sweet time.” As he describes what he sees in her, we see him struggle to resist the urge to point out the differences between them, always reminding her of the score. “Losers remember the people who won / Winners are never afraid to lose / You only think about falling in love / I only think about you.” The listener is left with the question: If you love someone as they are, could you ever really lose?

The album is somehow both literary and unpretentious, maybe best exhibited in the final track, “Beauty School.” Singer-songwriter Katy Kirby sings backing vocals on this surprising pop-punk tinged dose of poolside folk rock. “In a mirror universe / Time is moving in reverse / I’m gonna turn my life around / everything is different now.” The lyrics to this chorus call back to that of another song from the record; “Candyland.” “Dismantling my time machine / I’ll probably put back together for the final scene.”

Again, Hutson gives the keen listener the impression that he is actively re-narrativizing his life. That he has wound up somewhere he never thought he would be and is trying to wrap his head around how not to ruin it.

Paradise Pop. 10 takes its name from a real life “town” set deep in the woods of Parke County, Indiana, near where Hutson spent some of his childhood. There, just past the population sign, you’ll find a row of five houses on one side of the road and a cemetery on the other. Hutson shares, “When I was a kid, my dad used to take me up there, mostly because of the novelty of the town limits sign, but also because it was so quiet and peaceful. For years, he would say that if life ever got too crazy, we could go up there and start living our real lives; be the people we were always meant to be. It occurred to me while making this record, that most of our lives we spend waiting to “be the people we were always meant to be.” I wanted to name this record after that town because it always symbolized an arrival to me. It was the ‘when’ that I looked forward to as a child. ‘When’ it all made sense and I was finally who I was meant to be.”

Such a sleepy backwater could feel like a limbo of sorts, like time is frozen; leaving room for your mind to wander either backward into your regrets of the past or forward into the future, into the unknown. But if you can learn to quiet these thoughts, you might realize you aren’t waiting at all. There is no delay. You are living. You are here.

School of Rock AllStars
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
July 23, 2025
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School of Rock AllStars

The School of Rock AllStars Tour takes the very best students from around the world and sends them on a country-wide summer tour, playing classic and modern rock and roll hits across the United States. Less than 1% of School of Rock students are selected each year to represent School of Rock as an AllStar.

Becoming an AllStar is the highest level of achievement for a School of Rock student. These students often go on to have accomplished careers in the music industry. Former AllStars have gone on to become touring artists, star in Broadway musicals, get signed to record deals, become finalists on talent competitions like The Voice and American Idol, or have other notable roles in the music industry.

Nation of Language with Safe Mind
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
August 21, 2025
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Nation of Language

Four years on from the release of their unexpectedly self-assured debut album, NYC based Nation of Language have attracted a rapidly growing international audience via their danceable and impassioned take on new wave, post-punk & shoegaze genres. Following the critical acclaim of their their first LP Introduction, Presence, its 2021 follow-up A Way Forward pushed them to a wider audience—landing them their late-night TV debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and a string of sold out tours—and their 2023 record Strange Disciple has continued this momentum, landing Rough Trade’s coveted #1 album of the year spot. Now a mainstay atop lists of the best live acts of recent years, the band continue to charge synth-first into their latest chapter as a major festival draw at recent iterations of Austin City Limits Festival, Desert Daze, Pitchfork Festival, Primavera Sound, Corona Capital, Outside Lands, Bonnaroo and many others.

Foxing
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
August 28, 2025
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Foxing

Beneath the audible progress of Foxing’s 13 year career – from the chamber emo of debut The Albatross to the art pop of 2021’s Draw Down The Moon – has been a gradual movement towards self-sufficiency. Appropriately, the quartet of vocalist Conor Murphy, guitarist Eric Hudson, drummer Jon Hellwig, and bassist Brett Torrence (who recently joined after years as a touring hired gun) chose to self-title their fifth LP simply, Foxing. The album was entirely produced by the band and mixed by Hudson. The cover art was created by Murphy and Torrence, and it is being released on the band’s own Grand Paradise label.

DIY requires doing, and Foxing was not an easy album to make. I share a studio space with the band and was an onlooker to the tedious two year process of its creation. I heard good songs emanating from their room at the bottom of the stairs, only to be abandoned and later reborn as incredible songs. I also witnessed some absolute garbage – a testament to the quartet’s willingness to entertain any idea and push it to its furthest conclusion before filling their iMac’s recycling bin. I was jarred by explosive cheering as the band turned the basement hallway into a makeshift putting green during breaks. I overheard arguments that were decibels shy of shouting matches. There were some moments when their creative stalemates seemed unresolvable and others where the enthusiasm of making a transcendently great album was intoxicating.

It is fitting that tension is at the core of Foxing, an album that balances hopefulness and nihilism, the pastoral with the tumultuous. Whether oscillating between visceral noise rock and intimate bedroom cassette experiments on opener “Secret History” or cruising at the edge of collapse on “Barking,” the dramatic dynamics that have long permeated Foxing’s music have never felt so extreme. Five albums into a discography defined by its own restlessness, Foxing is a document of a band finding comfort in their own chaos.

Glass Spells
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
September 5, 2025
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Glass Spells

Glass Spells is Anthony Ramirez (Bass / Synthesizers) and Tania Costello (Vocals). Glass Spells have won the attention of many by their nostalgic synth-driven sound with a modern twist, incorporating several elements from Indie, post punk, and modern electronic to create rhythms that will not get out of your head.

Madball with Badway and Soulless
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
September 17, 2025
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Madball

Maintaining urgency, authenticity and integrity has never been an issue for New York City’s hardest, and hardest working band, MADBALL. Twenty-five years along as a recording and touring entity, MB brings forth its ninth aural chapter, »ForThe Cause«; a signature collection of lionhearted, groove-laden, street-level New York Hardcore as only MADBALL can bring it.

The aptly titled album doesn’t so much revisit where the group has been since 1994 – although MADBALL released its first EP, »Ball Of Destruction« as a virtual AGNOSTIC FRONT side-project back in 1989 – but forges forward and represents where the fellas find themselves collectively and personally a quarter-decade down the road.

Throughout the band’s storied history, MADBALL has asserted its mission; carrying forth a simple yet righteous cause, and this time around, they’ve chosen to define that cause more succinctly than ever before. Tornadic vocalist/front man Freddy Cricien explains, “If you’re not fighting for a cause, you’re not participating in life. Simple as that. Speak up, fight, educate yourself, make a difference and make sacrifices for what’s important to you.” Words to live by.

»For The Cause« sees the return to the fold of guitarist Matt Henderson, who hasn’t appeared on a MADBALL album since 2000’s »Hold It Down«, for which Henderson also served as producer. “To have him record with us again was really special,” offers Freddy. He adds, “Matt’s been playing ‘commemorative’ shows and tours with us on-and-off over the years, so, obviously, the love and friendship is there. He’ll always be an honorary member… A MADBALL lifer.”

Unique to this album is the stellar production work by RANCID’s Tim Armstrong, who clearly helped express MADBALL’s distinctive voice powerfully and dynamically without stepping on the trademark formula the band has forever carried, yet constantly seeks to improve upon. “It’s a tricky thing, producing. You can truly enhance something, but you could also ruin a record if a band lets you,” says Cricien. Freddy continues, “Tim has always respected our band and how we do what we do. He knew we had a vision for how this album should sound, so he let us do our thing, but was there every step supporting and cheering us on. Whenever he did chime in, it was well thought out and he made strong suggestions. He even helped write the hook on ‘For You.’ He was there for us in a non-meddlesome role, which for this particular record, was the best-case scenario.” Danish studio veteran Tue Madsen (MESHUGGAH, DARK TRANQUILLITY, SICK OF IT ALL) skillfully handled mixing duties on »For The Cause«.

Also, noteworthy on »For The Cause« are the various cameo appearances by some of MADBALL’s friends, as well as several artists with whom the group shares a mutual respect; namely PSYCHO REALM’s Sick Jacken on the track ‘Rev Up,’THE BUSINESS’ Steve Whale and producer Armstrong on ‘The Fog,’ plus legendary emcee Ice-T on the hardcore banger ‘Evil Ways.’ Freddy discloses, “Jacken is our homie. He just came through to say what’s up and check out the spot and I happened to be recording ‘Rev Up.’ He was really digging the song and just freestyled. It really drove the message of the song home. As for Ice-T, he added a good flavor to ‘Evil Ways.’ It was a real honor to work with someone I’ve been following and have respected since I was a kid. He genuinely supports our band and the scene we come from. Tim and Steve jumping on ‘The Fog’ happened organically like everything else with this record.” The UK Oi! legend provided the spoken intro and a guitar lead to the street punk tinged anthem.

What’s maybe most notable on »For The Cause« is its various twists and turns both musically and vocally to keep MADBALL’s brand of NYHC fresher than it has ever been. Freddy presents, “How do you grow as a band or as a person if you don’t take chances? We feel obligated to ourselves and everyone else to evolve, at least somewhat. We took more ‘chances’ on this record than on any previous one, and we’re happy about that! We’re proud that it’s still very much us; it’s real and honest. There is plenty on there to satisfy the people that support us from every era of this band.”

As for MADBALL’s astounding longevity in the hardcore game: “We don’t know how to do anything else at this point. We raise our families to the best of our ability; we do MADBALL to the best of our ability… So far so good, and we don’t feel that we’ve reached our full potential in either of those areas just yet.”

Elias Rønnenfelt
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
September 20, 2025
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Elias Rønnenfelt

Elias Rønnenfelt is a Danish musician and poet, best known as the singer of Iceage. In late 2024, he released Heavy Glory, his first solo album under his own name, followed by Lucre — a collaborative record with Dean Blunt and Vegyn. His live shows draw from his career spanning exploration in raw and intimate musical language.

Bob Mould
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
September 21, 2025
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Bob Mould

When he calls, Bob Mould is finishing work on his 15th solo album, Here We Go Crazy. A distillation of the unfailing melodic skill, the emotional lucidity and dynamic fluency he’s developed over more than four decades, it’s also a typically bold realignment of his sonic paradigm. Its turbulent vignettes are scored by Mould’s familiar bruised tunefulness, but the sound is pared back to its fundaments, 11 songs blistering past in just over 30 minutes. “I’ve stripped things back to what excited me as a young guitarist,” he explains. “The energy, the electricity.”

Part of the inspiration for this more primal aesthetic is the heavy itinerary of touring he’s lately undertaken, several years spent circling the globe, either in the company of bandmates Jon Wurster (drums) and Jason Narducy (bass) or just by himself. “I was really throwing myself in the songbook and feeling where the audience is at,” he says. “And they were really responding to this very simple, just-me-and-a-guitar setup. And I thought, maybe I shouldn’t be overcomplicating things, ‘word’-ing or ‘craft’-ing it up. Just grab for the simple bits of life we still have control over: our emotions, our relationships.”

After shows, Mould would hang out signing merch and talking to fans. “Sometimes people bring a lot of their lifetime emotional content to me,” he says, “like they’ve compressed all this coal into a tiny little diamond. Sometimes I’m surprised at the weight of it, the heaviness. I’m like, ‘I’m here for you. I’m listening.’ I’m shocked and grateful they share so readily with me. I don’t know what I did to earn that trust.”

Mould has earned that trust with every record he’s made, channelling his own “lifetime emotional content” for songs of wisdom, honesty and volcanic intensity. His first band, Hüsker Dü, bared his angst over furious noise and turbulent melody, an indelible influence on generations that followed. But by the time Nirvana infiltrated the mainstream, Bob Mould had already moved on, having sequestered himself in a farmhouse to lick his wounds and learn new ways to sing his songs. His solo debut, 1989’s folk-rock masterpiece Workbook, was a record of depth and sophistication. Then he pulled another sharp turn, his power-trio Sugar alloying his most melodic songs with his fiercest noise, yielding his most commercially successful work yet.

Over the solo career that followed Sugar’s own mid-90s flameout, he’s displayed a maturing gift for songwriting, transcending the ‘alternative’ tag and recognised alongside key influences like Pete Townshend and Pete Shelley. He’s adrenalized classic forms, alchemised angst into something addictive and powerful. “I’m just trying to figure myself out,” he says. “After 64 years of life – 55 spent writing songs – it’s what I do.” The concepts that shaped the songs of subsequent albums reflect those years. The ruminative Beauty & Ruin (2014) and Patch The Sky (2016) were written in the wake of losing his parents and other loved ones. 2019’s Sunshine Rock was a homage to the early Capitol singles of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, constant companions through his turbulent childhood. The terse, political Blue Hearts (2020) was written and recorded amid the dying days of the first Trump administration.

Here We Go Crazy, meanwhile, arrives at another moment of uncertainty, a time of disruption and fear. Mould sees the songs unfolding like the three acts of a play, each act exploring distinct but related themes. The first handful of songs concern “control versus chaos”, Mould explains. The opening title track contrasts images of nature – deserts, mountains, fault-lines – with the tumult of human life. Inspired by a riff that Mould says “sounded like a fistfight”, ‘Neanderthal’ is “a snapshot from inside my head as a young kid: growing up in a violent household, everything being unsettled, feeling that fight-or-flight response at all times,” while ‘Breathing Room’ is “about feeling isolated, cramped-up, and literally needing that breathing space”.

The furious, dynamic ‘Fur Mink Augurs’ signals the second act, where the darkness descends. The song channels claustrophobia, and “the cold, crazy, late-winter feeling I grew up with in the Adirondacks and in Minnesota. When the cabin fever really sets in deep – when the permafrost is set and it never gets warm – you become frayed, and things can really unravel, quickly.” ‘Lost Or Stolen’ chronicles lives undone by “people losing themselves in their phones,” Mould explains. From this focus, he pulls back and digs into “ideas about depression, addiction, self-medication and collapse… The words just fell out of me.” This anguished middle-passage of the album concludes with the cathartic ‘Sharp Little Pieces’, exploring “the end of innocence, the idea of a young child’s trust being violated. For those of us who lost trust as children, it disappears in a flash, and we spend years struggling to regain that innocence. And maybe it never comes back.”

The song ends bluntly (Mould says the album’s “lack of sophisticated ornamentation is key – I was trying to stay out of the way of the songs, to strip away all the things I used to think were important, all those extra colours and complexities. I didn’t want to get deep into decorating the tree. I wanted to keep it simple, to use the simplest words”), raising the curtain on the closing act. The theme here is lifting oneself out of the darkness; ‘You Need To Shine’ is a song about “looking for the bright sides, the good parts of life, despite everything that’s happened”, Mould says, a sentiment borne out by the song’s spirited holler that “all that madness doesn’t matter anymore”. ‘Thread So Thin’ is “about trying to protect the one you love, and trying to feel protected”, Mould explains, while the closing ‘Your Side’ is a powerful love song from the edge of the darkness, Mould howling “If the world is going down in flames, I want to be by your side”. “We’re heading into a great unknown here,” Mould says, of the wider geopolitical and climate anxieties that inspired these songs. The message here is, simply, focus on that which can save you and deliver you from this moment. “This album talks a lot about uncertainty, helplessness, being on edge,” Mould adds. “How much can we control? How much chaos can we handle? In the end, the answer, the remedy, is placing your trust in unconditional love.”

Mould knows Here We Go Crazy is an album freighted with darkness; “There’s soothing melodies, and there’s lyrical discomfort,” he deadpans. “It’s manic, frantic, complex.” But no one ever came to Bob Mould for good news, for the easy answers. Pop music runs through his veins, as surely as the electricity that drives his chiming hooks into the realms of distortion, but he’s here to give you the truth, his truth. To give you songs that ring true when howled against a tornado of guitar, that compress all that “lifetime emotional content” into some kind of sonic diamond. There’s eleven of those precious gems here, sculpted to make the heaviness easier to bear, somehow. Treasure them.

Melvins with Redd Kross
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
September 30, 2025
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Melvins

The Melvins are one of modern music’s most influential bands. Having formed in 1983 Montesano, Washington, the group – founded by vocalist/guitarist Buzz Osborne, with drummer Dale Crover joining a year later – has been credited with merging the worlds of punk rock and heavy music, forming a new subgenre all their own. Over their 40-plus-year career, they’ve released more than 30 original albums, numerous live records, and far too many to count singles and rarities. Recent releases include 2024’s Tarantula Heart, a really good collection of what the Melvins do, what they can do and what they want to do, and Five Legged Dog (2021), an ambitious 36-track acoustic collection that reimagines their heaviest songs alongside covers of their favorite artists. Throughout their discography, the Melvins have collaborated with Jello Biafra, Mudhoney, and Fantômas for individual releases and toured the world many times over. Remarkably, they had the misfortune to be in both Christchurch and Tokyo for their 2011 earthquakes. In 2012, the Melvins completed the “51 States in 51 Days” (50 states +DC) tour, which was chronicled in the film “Across The USA in 51 Days.” The current incarnation of the band is Osborne, Crover, and Steven McDonald (Redd Kross). Previous line- ups included a pairing of Osborne and Crover with Jared Warren and Coady Willis of Big Business, a four-piece featuring the current trio plus Butthole Surfers’ Jeff Pinkus, as well as Melvins Lite, which partners Osborne and Crover with Mr. Bungle’s Trevor Dunn. Sometimes, if you’re extra lucky, one version of the Melvins will open for the Melvins.

Redd Kross

In 1979, two school-kids all hopped-up on punk-rock started their own group in their hometown of Hawthorne, Los Angeles (birthplace of the Beach Boys) and soon found themselves opening shows for notorious scene pioneers Black Flag. Jeff McDonald was 15, his brother Steven only 11. But that didn’t stop their group from becoming one of the most remarkable, enduring and unique outfits punk- rock ever belched up.

2024, then, marks Redd Kross’s 45th birthday – an important anniversary for any group whose heart pulses at 45RPM – and the brothers are celebrating the event with a veritable multimedia extravaganza. There’s a memoir, Now You’re One Of Us, due in November, author Dan Epstein telling the group’s story in the McDonalds’ unmistakable (and occasionally contrary) voices. A brilliant rockumentary, Born Innocent, directed by Andrew Reich, will premiere later in the year. Most exciting of all, a new album – an eponymous double-album, no less, packed with 18 of their sharpest, most addictive songs yet – will hit the racks, courtesy of In The Red Records. These years of joyful service to rock’n’roll have seen Redd Kross evolve into a killer pop-rock concern, dealing in dayglo power-chords, choruses as tall as skyscrapers and a lyric sheet thick with acid couplets and arch pop- cultural references their loyal following will gobble up like quaaludes.

Tell the McDonald brothers they’ve cut their best record 45 years deep into their career, and they grin with the confidence of dudes who know they’re on a hot streak. “We grew up with industry gatekeepers telling us you’re only allowed to do what we do up to a certain age, that if you haven’t attained some certain status of success it’s time to hang up the dream,” says Steven. “But I’m still hungry and ambitious, trying to figure out what I want to say and how to say it. I give the correct amount of fucks. I’m ready to start our third act, and for it to be magnificent.”

The roots of the new album lay in their previous full-length, 2019’s Beyond The Door – or, more accurately, the pandemic’s ethering of a planned Redd Kross world tour in support of that record. “We were bummed Beyond The Door had to die with the advent of Covid,” nods Jeff. But, as you might expect from such pop-culture mavens, for the brothers McDonald there was one silver-lining to the gloom of the pandemic era: Peter Jackson’s documentary, The Beatles: Get Back. Like all of us, the duo pored over every frame of the limited series: every bum note and moment of brilliance, every tetchy squabble and pregnant silence. “I got very inspired by this bird’s eye-view upon their process,” says Steven. “Get Backdemystified it: ‘Oh, when they’re writing a song, they sound a bit crappy too, just slugging away.’”

Suitably inspired, Steven wrote a batch of new songs in isolation and sent them over to Jeff, who was honing a clutch of his own tunes. “It was a fit of inspiration,” says Steven. “I put the fire under Jeff’s ass. He realized if he didn’t step up, I’d write the whole album myself.” Indeed, as soon as they were allowed, the brothers began convening in the bijou studio at Steven’s house and began writing a bunch more songs to join the solo tunes they’d already penned. They worked hard, yes, but the emphasis was on fun: they’d spend most of the sessions jamming on favourites by their heroes, or watching YouTube clips of historic moments of musical brilliance (and also copious documentaries about cults), then suddenly dash out another sublime power-pop nugget in the last 20 minutes before Jeff set off for dinner with his family. Don’t knock the process: the results speak for themselves.

Tunes written, the brothers were itching to record, but Dale Crover, the legendary Melvins sticksman who drummed on Beyond The Door, had recently undergone spinal surgery and couldn’t step up.

Instead, Steven reached out to his friend Josh Klinghoffer, perhaps best-known for his years as guitarist with Red Hot Chili Peppers and as a touring member of Pearl Jam and Jane’s Addiction, but hereafter to be most-famed as the drummer and producer of Redd Kross. The pair first met two decades ago, as members of Beck’s backing band, and later played together with the inimitable Sparks. “Josh is 13 years younger than me, and he’s like the younger brother I never had,” says”

“Steven. “He’s a super-talented musician who’s really good at being supportive, and he’s really in-tune with a band’s internal dynamics. And he had us on our best behaviour, not wanting to disappoint Josh! His studio is like the most incredible vintage guitar shop – he would take great delight in pulling out some rare instrument or effects box to inspire us.”

In Klinghoffer’s company, the brothers tore through their new batch of songs. And what songs… “I’m usually the one who says our albums have to be ‘ten songs, no more’,” nods Jeff. “But we had all these great songs, and we wanted to let them all breathe. So the album had to be 18 songs.” But if the prospect of these unabashed Beatles-heads delivering an eponymous double-album with a sleeve of a single colour has you expecting a meandering, eclectic set like the Fabs’ ‘White Album’, Redd Kross is all-killer, no-filler, more akin to their Exile On Main Street, their Double Nickels On The Dime, their Zen Arcade: 58 minutes of solid-gold power-pop, driven by melody and dynamic, with a lyric- sheet that’ll reward all your perusing.

‘Candy Colored Catastrophe’ opens proceedings with the perfect vibe: an itchy, unforgettable acid- pop nugget taking impish swings at what Steven describes as “the fine arts career of a well-known pop star who we love-love-love, and also love to make fun of”. “Our message is, ‘What is art?’,” adds Jeff. “Who gets to decide? And maybe these rock-stars who suddenly decide they’re fine artists and Hollywood actors who decide they’re punk-rock singers should, you know, stay in their lane.” From there, this revivified Redd Kross tear into the heaviest rock banger of the set, ‘Stunt Queen’, which Jeff says is “the closest we come to a ‘political song’. It’s about these total fame-whores in politics who’ll do anything to be on TV – people like Lindsay Graham, who doesn’t care how humiliated he gets, as long as he’s on TV. It’s like some weird kink.” Then there’s the “unbearable man” in ‘Terrible Band’, inspired by Jeff and Josh’s obsession with documentaries about cults, and the number of musicians they know who behave like cult-leaders. There’s ‘The Witches Stand’, a downbeat psychedelic power-ballad stringing together a narrative involving Brian Jones, and Jean Harlow, and DeeDee Detroit of early LA punks UXA, “who disappeared off the face of the earth, though I see her at the grocery sometimes,” grins Jeff. “Fame – and surviving it – is the joining thread of that song.”

The album boasts some absolutely killer couplets, like ‘Cancion Enojada’’s snarling “I revoke your pass / You’re such an ass”, or “She dumped the leader of Kiss / Because he was not fine”, from ‘Emmanuel Insane’, inspired in equal parts by the Rolling Thunder Tour documentary on Netflix, David Bowie’s glam-era and the later Emanuelle sequels. Prime Redd Kross, in other words. But there are deeper themes here, too – the cosmic ‘The Main Attraction’ derives its power from the brothers’ dual vocals and Beatles-y harmonies, and its tracing the motivation for the ever-expanding universe’s kinks and twists to love. And sometimes they just boil everything down to a perfect pop song, as in ‘I’ll Take Your Word For It’, a perfect blast of 60s-shaded harmony and guitar tangle. But perhaps the finest song on Redd Kross is the song that closes Redd Kross – that is, in no small part, the ballad of Redd Kross, or at least their early days. ‘Born Innocent’ retells the early days of the group, the first thrill of punk-rock, their nascent explorations of that wide-world they’d later become synonymous with. “It’s like the Cliff Notes version of our formation,” laughs Jeff. “It was the first song we wrote for the album, and actually we wrote it for the documentary, Born Innocent.”

“We’d been doing the interviews for the movie, and for our memoir,” adds Steven. “We were in a reflective mood, perhaps.” But Redd Kross is not the sound of legends resting on their laurels – rather, it’s Redd Kross spreading their wings and grasping their true potential, after 45 years in the game. The best record in the Redd Kross discography – or should we say, their best record, until the next one. “We’re on a schedule,” nods Steven. “It’s our 45th anniversary, but we’re still defining who we are.

We put our noses to the grindstone for this album, and we did it! And it feels like the beginning of something. It’s so exciting to us that there’s still more to discover. We’re publishing the memoir, the movie’s coming out, we’re releasing this new album – and getting the machine started up again makes me nervous, and that’s thrilling. Our third act is going to be badass.”

Pile
Space Ballroom • 295 Treadwell Street, Hamden, CT 06514
October 10, 2025
Click here to purchase tickets

Pile

Sunshine and Balance Beams, Pile’s ninth album, alchemizes metaphors with its title. The first: finding happiness in nature and oneself. Second: the woozy posture one must strike to stay afloat in commercial society. These concepts seem antithetical—“But they might actually be the same thing,” hints guitarist, songwriter and singer Rick Maguire. On its newest record, Pile weaves a Sisyphean fable concerned with labor and living. “The fulfillment I receive from pursuing art has been a guiding force for me,” says Maguire. “But it can be damaging when that pursuit teases capitalist expectations of where you might be able to go, and then doesn’t square with the reality that follows.” Pile presents this parable with jagged guitars, sputtering drum bombast, eerie synths and aqueous strings, with panoramic production and loud-quiet dynamism matching the emotionality of the band’s thunderous performances.

Pile formed in 2007 as Maguire’s solo outlet, soon joined by time-warping drummer Kris Kuss (in 2009) and fuzzed-yet-melodic bassist Matt Connery (in 2010), among other friends; with its explosively intricate take on heavy music, the band found devoted fans amid Boston’s bustling punk scene. Since then, Pile’s released eight acclaimed albums, each showcasing different facets of its members’ talents. Dripping, the post-hardcore 2012 breakthrough, encapsulated the frenetic power of epic basement gigs. 2017’s A Hairshirt of Purpose twisted Pile’s angularities for greater clarity, incorporating strings without losing menace. Connery’s temporary departure after this record brought respected engineer and peer Alex Molini in on bass; the electronic experimentalism of All Fiction (2023) deepened the production relationship between Maguire and Molini, proving the band’s exploratory commitment as lifelong. That doesn’t scratch Pile’s dozen other releases, including B-side compilations, outtake EPs, demo cassettes, and live reworkings. They’ve earned a reputation as workhorses, crafting thought-provoking riffs while maintaining a tour schedule of international headlining, festival slots, and support for legendary and likeminded artists like Jesus Lizard and Cursive.

Their accomplishments are numerous, but the bandmates’ lives extend outside the tour van. “I’ve had to do a lot of unlearning when it comes to the ego-trap of capitalism,” admits Maguire. “Money and recognition are helpful tools, but the pursuit of those things for their own sake is somebody else’s idea.” And so Sunshine and Balance Beams drew influence from rejecting expectations. “A lot of the story came through trying to enjoy my life—connecting with people and animals, experiencing the world through art, being in nature, cooking food, exercising, talking about ideas.” He joined a basketball league, relishing the physical exhaustion and camaraderie, connecting with his dad over game recaps. It helped him escape the headspace of “Rick from Pile”—a nickname-turned-solo moniker—and work on being Rick. Separating his personhood from his job let Maguire explore workaholism, the myth of meritocracy, and acceptance of mortality—all through a devilish allegory of trudging through a shadowy forest towards the uncertain dream of a bright clearing.

Some Sunshine songs grew over a long timeframe—“Carrion Song” and “Meanwhile Outside,” the ecstatic final tracks, were in progress nearly a decade—but most came together at home during the pandemic, an acoustic guitar or Rhodes accompanying ambient street noises Maguire heard from his apartment. The full band finessed the arrangements in practice, with Molini’s insights tying the song’s movements inventively, and a now-rejoined Connery squaring the quartet on second guitar. “An Opening,” Sunshine’s second track and first with vocals, illuminated the narrative arc, with its introductory line—“Beyond the trees that lean toward the sun, things will open up”—becoming “a compass for the story.“ Soon, each song “felt like a revelation”—including lead single “Born at Night.” To write it, Maguire inhabited “a dark place,” wrestling with the concept that there is no enlightenment, no end to suffering. With Kuss’ accelerating tom stagger and Connery’s rainlike, Neu!-indebted guitars, the track moves from resignedness to meditative nihilism, augmented by swelling strings—a sonic embodiment of light and shadow’s equilibrium.

Pile enlisted collaborator Miranda Serra as co-producer and engineer; Serra has toured as the band’s front-of-house mixer since 2018, though her primary background is recording (Kal Marks, Kira McSpice). “She intimately understands the music, and because it was her studio work that got my attention in the first place, it seemed like a natural choice,” explains Maguire. The group traveled to Pawtucket, RI for two weeks of initial tracking at Machines with Magnets, storied for it and owner Seth Manchester’s (Lightning Bolt, Mdou Moctar) tremendous drum sound. This trip overlapped with 2024’s election, magnifying the album’s politics—like on “Uneasy,” in which Kuss’ slapback percussion and Molini’s dialed-in synths give body to the anxiousness that follows losing control. Serra foregrounded goals of “articulation” and “coherence” in the session, ensuring the messages were captured evocatively.

Mostly ditching a click track, Pile favored freewheeling performances that would animate the storytelling; Kuss’ drumming, shifting from groove to sputter to freakout on a hair-trigger, paves sinuous roads in sound and pace. “Kris has a way of understanding the music I write in a way that no other musician has; the life he breathes into the songs is on full display,” remarks Maguire. “Deep Clay,” written about the nastiness of tying self-worth to productivity, is hallmarked by Kuss’ unstoppability, subtle beat changes corroding into cathartic chaos. As on the past few albums, Pile enlisted a string section, though this time the arrangements were co-composed by cellist Eden Rayz and Maguire himself, with guiding tips from Molini. They drew inspiration from cinema and opera scores by Chopin, Bernard Herrmann, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, lending Sunshine a larger-than-life sound that intensified Pile’s immediate performance.

To match this expansiveness, Maguire varied his vocal approaches, with plainspoken recitations, falsetto lilting and low-register growls joining his throat-shredding wails. Manchester, who mixed the record, suggested an “ASMR-like clarity” with use of the revered U47 microphone; this upfront vocal character grounds “Bouncing in Blue,” a rejection of certainty in which sweetly-sung hooks are subsumed under pummeling distortion. Candace Clement, the guitarist-singer of erstwhile Western Mass rockers Bunny’s A Swine, added octaves and harmonies throughout, complementing her former tourmate Maguire’s leads. “Her pitch is something I envy,” notes Maguire. “It was restorative to work with a friend like that after knowing each other for fifteen years.” Sunshine also marks a first collaboration with some other old pals: Chicago-based Sooper Records. Though Pile’s previous records were self-released or through Exploding in Sound, teaming with Sooper felt natural; Maguire’s been a fan of the collective label since it was launched by Glenn Curran and two of Pile’s favorite artists. “Nnamdi and Sen Morimoto are musical powerhouses, so it appealed to me to be on their team,” he says. “I admire the ethos of the label: art-forward and politically-minded.”

During recording, one more friend came to visit: photographer Mark Lapriore, who offered to take behind-the-scenes shots. “I wanted the album art to be black and white photography, and for it to involve nature,” recalls Maguire. “Looking through Mark’s photography, the negative image of the trees and rock wall struck me. The other images also related to the story—the flood, the clearing, the different perspectives.” It was a culminating creative decision that gave Sunshine and Balance Beams its cover, and helped tie together the album’s motifs: finding a path in the darkness, accepting life for its contrasts and shading, and taking solace in art—especially when you get to make it with cherished friends.

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