“It’s been way sold out… some guys came here all the way from Indiana for the show, they were camping out for it”, says my doorman friend at Johnny Brenda’s as we hustle past the small queue of folks who actually need their IDs to verify over-21 status (there are countless perks to going bald and grey!). I had been looking forward to this gig since it was announced a few months prior, as all three acts are personal faves that have yet to hit their artistic peaks; it’s rare to catch a diverse sonic bill that goes three-for-three with popularity and creative output on upward trajectories. Unlike most hot tickets for guitar music these days, this was set to be a night of freshness and originality as performed by relatively young people. I had timed it perfectly with my seasoned show-going companion: it wasn’t more than five minutes we were in the door before Morgan Garrett and his band had taken the stage.

(As a quick aside, it’s about time I addressed the elephant in the room: my resolutely atrocious band photography. I have taken every single accompanying live photo since I started posting show reviews, and if I’m being generous with myself, the best I’ve ever gotten is “not terrible”. Let’s say I only share them here for basic documentation purposes, so please excuse the extreme lack of artistry, color correction, clarity and depth as this series continues onward. Pretty much any artist I’ve written about, save for Bill Nace, has some sort of social media presence where you can surely find far superior live photos. Again – I apologize.)

Keen Yellow Green Red readers will recall that I wrote up a Morgan Garrett performance earlier in 2025 (it’s easy when I review ten shows a year), and all my previous glowing praise rings true once again. Quick summary in case you missed it: Garrett is a towering figure on vocals and acoustic guitar, centered between Jackie McDermott on drums and Zach Darrup on electric guitar. Their music remains a horrific amalgamation of noise-rock, sludge, noise and ASMR, as if Sightings went black-metal or Swans were torn to shreds by Lisa “Suckdog” Carver. More than anything, it occurred to me that if Art, the ultraviolent clown from the Terrifier series, had a band back in his high school days, this would’ve been it. With the addition of an interconnected strobe, the performance reveled in extremes, from scalding mayhem to silence inversely deployed as a jump-scare. Garrett goes harder while sitting down than most hardcore frontpeople do standing up, to be sure. Perhaps it’s honest to note that my band, Pissed Jeans, has enlisted Morgan Garrett and his band to join us for some shows in January of next year, but doing so is a confluence of interest, not a conflict of interest. Why do you think I want to play with this guy, because it will somehow make us all rich?? Precisely not – I want to return to that sensation of having to perform after the crowd already had their scalps blown back, a shock I still deeply recall from having to follow Vexx multiple days in a row some ten years ago.

Invigorated by Morgan Garrett, I rode that energy into Her New Knife, one of Philly’s most promising gaze-wave upstarts. Their Chrome Is Lullaby EP from late 2024 struck such a chord with me that I cold-called the band a few months earlier to see if I could put it out on vinyl for them, but no worries – Julia’s War has since stepped up to provide the physical form such a work demands. Their music picks up on the most pensive Sonic Youth moments, loops them into a paranoid spiral and then kicks on the overdrive pedals right before we start clawing our own faces. Whether quiet or loud, Her New Knife are writing consistently engaging and memorable tunes, emo but guarded, pretentious but real, shoegaze but definitely not shoegaze. They have been road-dogging it lately, to the point where the drummer on stage was a fill-in for their actual drummer, who was also in attendance at the show but tired from a recent flight(?). These Zoomers and their self-care! The fill-in brought more energy to the performance than I’ve heard in their recordings (and was the set-opening, Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity-esque song a new one?), though the band’s presence remained quizzical and slightly detached – I never got a good look at the taller guitarist’s face, as he kept his head down and to the side for the entirety of their set, even when switching guitars! While sharing thoughts with a new pal from our spot in the balcony during their performance, we actually got shushed by a random guy who is going to have a very frustrating time if he continues to expect silence from the surrounding crowd at amplified rock shows. We respected his wishes, though immediately after the set, I told a certain world-renowned avant-harpist about it (she was also there enjoying her evening), and in true Philly fashion, she was offended on my behalf and ready to start some shit with him. What’s more humbling, being beaten up by a guy at a Her New Knife show, or having your harp-playing friend beat him up for you? Thankfully we were all too dignified to find out.

Two impressive local performances in the books, it was time for Water From Your Eyes to kick off their United States tour in support of their newest Matador full-length, It’s A Beautiful Place. I saw guitarist / songwriter Nate Amos grinning devilishly as he watched Morgan Garrett’s set off the side of the stage, so he clearly knew he had to bring it himself. Having found myself in the front bar area on the other side of the venue’s hourglass layout, I had relinquished my choice balcony spot (in favor of unscolded socializing), and rather than break any more rules of social decorum, hanged back for most of Water From Your Eyes’s set. Their recorded music is so fluent in the way electronics and programmed trickery are intertwined with big grungy guitars and pop vocals that I was surprised to see a full live rock band on stage, vocalist Rachel Brown wandering freely while singing in her wraparound shades. Integrating the electronic elements as appropriate, the group easily maneuvered through even their trickiest material, like the single “Playing Classics”, which resembled Daniel Lopatin soundtracking the hardest Crash Bandicoot levels on the studio recording and the chaotic fourth hour of an LCD Soundsystem set live on stage. Water From Your Eyes songs demand concentration from their listeners, let alone the people playing them, but the group generally seemed unimpressed by their own talent, young yet old enough to carry some of that seen-it-all-before NYC aloofness. Perhaps in a different time and place I would’ve connected more strongly with their performance, but the studio trickery and omnivorous sound palate of Water From Your Eyes’ recordings appeals more to me than the traditional rock setup that interpreted those songs on stage, vocals direct, guitar direct, drums live. Everyone is sick of laptop-karaoke by now and wants to see actual musicians doing actual musician-things on stage, and yet here I am wishing Water From Your Eyes somehow came across more artificial in person… maybe that shusher had the right idea all along.

Smack in the middle of a week-long heatwave, Safe Mind were set to make their second Philadelphia appearance in support of their debut album, Cutting The Stone. Their single “6′ Pole” was my favorite tune of 2024 (if I haven’t mentioned that enough times already), so I had no choice but to venture up to the second floor of Johnny Brenda’s, easily the most revered of Fishtown venues (neither too revoltingly corporate nor falling-apart dumpy). It’s unsettling to reflect upon any significant passage of time, but I have been patronizing JB’s for over twenty years. My personal shoestring fry-count must run into the tens of thousands.

Opening the merciful two-band Tuesday-night bill was Chemical, a newly-homegrown act of whom little was publicized. Of all the contemporary band-naming conventions, I think I prefer the ungoogleable-due-to-ubiquity route to quirky misspellings or stylized alternate text. No need to be Chemi_kul, or ¢hm¢l, you know? “Chemical” is so droll and commonplace as to be functionally useless, like calling yourself Band. I appreciated it in the mid ’90s when the UK duo Chemical released their sole LP of hazy psych, and I appreciate it with this new group now.

Chemical’s bio on the Johnny Brenda’s site was, in its entirety, “devotional philadelphia insurgence group [sic]”, almost as meaningless as the band name, though it ensured that the few people who actually read opening-band descriptions on the club’s ticketing page could expect an aloof mystique. As Chemical took the stage, this traditional guitar / bass / drums rock trio looked like college dropouts who hang out at Graffiti Pier after dark, bearing none of the paramilitary monk style relayed in their bio. I keep forgetting that cruddy late ’90s fashion is once again in full effect with the youth, as the guitarist’s sleeveless white undershirt and extra-length jorts resembled the style of someone I would’ve been close buds with in eighth grade. There must be a German word for the combined emotion of endearment and unease brought about by the cycling of trends.

Ready to accept whatever style of music this intriguing group had to offer, I found myself pulled into their vibe right off the bat. Theirs is an arty and morose post-grunge style, and alongside their stern on-stage presentation, I’m guessing that they’re fans of the Julia’s War label and its roster’s opaque, left-field interpretations of today’s prevailing shoegaze / dream-pop trends. Their opening tune bore the subdued threat of violence I hear in Her New Knife; both groups seem to reinterpret Sonic Youth’s moody discordance with an added blackened sense of doom. I would’ve been content with variations on that basic template, but Chemical clearly had a number of musical ideas at work, the guitarist chopping it up Gang Of Four style, shimmering like Billy Corgan in a silver tuxedo and meekly picking at chorus-washed strings like some petrified ’90s goth, sometimes all in the same song, his feet (white athletic socks with velcro Teva sandals) tapping at a finicky chain of pedals. He brought three guitars on stage and admirably used them all in their brief opening set. For as much as I admired his style, the drummer was noticeably cool too, tall and Ramones-y and hunched over in dark sunglasses, though the bassist (also in dark sunglasses) may have been my favorite of the three, confidently delivering her own unusual bass-lines that didn’t replicate the guitar’s melodies so much as dance around them. There was one song in particular where her bass-line was so busy that it seemed to loop beyond the 4/4 timing of the song; I hope to hear it again on their debut EP. They had CDs for sale ahead of the official Bandcamp release date, which in true Y2K-throwback fashion were packaged in clear jewel cases with the name stamped on the CD, ready to be tossed on the passenger-side floor of your boyfriend’s Honda Civic next to back issues of Transworld SKATEboarding and the remnants of last night’s Taco Bell. I’m gonna go pull up the Bandcamp now!

Johnny Brenda’s layout is defined by its bottleneck – this can result in varying pockets of crowd density, though both floors were starting to fill up before Safe Mind took the stage. Gus Muller found an extremely charismatic vocalist in Jae Matthews, storming the world’s dance-floors with sultry, after-hours minimal-wave as Boy Harsher. It would seem he landed an equally enthralling vocalist in Cooper B. Handy, the wage-worker-turned-GQ-profiled-outsider-hunk, for their Safe Mind project. Handy’s solo music (confusingly under his own name as well as the moniker “Lucy”) is preposterous and cool, flipping the stink one might anticipate from say, a trap beat thrown over the Titanic soundtrack into something substantial, catchy, and desirable (that’d be “Rhododendron”). His elusive pop-star quality is given ample room to play with Safe Mind, as Muller’s beats and melodies for this project are bright and upbeat, no sign of the dark-velvet-n’-chains goth that defines the Boy Harsher experience.

Wandering on-stage in their windbreakers as if it wasn’t sweltering outside, Handy grabbed his guitar as Muller settled behind two full-size, right-angled tables of synths and electronics. The contrast between their musical resumes was on full display, what with Handy’s meager Peavey combo amp dwarfed by Muller’s cutting-edge synthesizers and hardware devices, the sort of synth-wave buffet one can amass through Boy Harsher-sized paydays (or, if you can find one, a wealthy deceased grandparent). From there they jumped into the entirety of Cutting The Stone with all the excitement of a fresh new band that only has one album to pull songs from. Leaning on their patented 75% New Order / 25% Paula Abdul formula, songs that sounded sleepier on record (“Standing On Air”, “Life In A Jar”) bounced with energy into the eager, supportive crowd. When Handy wasn’t playing guitar, he bopped in place with simplistic and repetitive b-boy moves in his now-signature bandana, not unlike a six year-old recreating a Bell Biv Devoe music video from memory (and nearly as cute). The charm of this confident duo shined throughout, though most clearly when busting out “6′ Pole” second in the set list. They closed their performance with “Autonomy”, the Boy Harsher song that features Handy on vocals (and logged over two million views on YouTube). The crowd cheered as the opening arpeggio hit, one last dance before wandering back into the oppressive, stagnant air outside.