21+

$15 adv | $20 dos

7:30pm doors | 8pm show

THUS LOVE (Insta | Spotify | Youtube)

Stimulation is easy to come by these days. Streaming platforms and social media offer us endless fleeting moments of diversion that keep what we call the “pleasure zones” of our brains lit up morning till night. But for such a supposedly hedonistic time, real pleasure—the kind that feeds our soul rather than draining it, that makes us feel good instead of just distracting us from the fact that we feel bad—is in shockingly short supply.

The second LP by Brattleboro, Vermont’s THUS LOVE is full of that kind of nourishing euphoria. It swoons, shakes, and swaggers with a combination of grit and sensuality that’s been hard to locate in music lately. It fills your brain with barbed melodic hooks that once they sink in don’t budge. It punches at the clouds and makes you want to do the same. It’s called, fittingly, All Pleasure.

The album came out of a period of dizzying growth and transformation for the group. When they began work on it, vocalist/guitarist Echo Mars (they/them) and drummer Lu Racine (he/they) were still reeling from the runaway success of their 2022 debut full-length, Memorial—a set of lush, elegant post-punk that brought praise from The FADER, the NME, and the Guardian, plus a leap from quiet Brattleboro to stages across the US and UK—along with processing the departure of founding bassist Nathaniel van Osdol. Meanwhile, new bassist Ally Juleen (she/they) and guitarist/keyboardist Shane Blank (he/him), longtime musical partners, had uprooted their lives to relocate to small-town Vermont and join a band that was a month away from recording the follow-up to a cultishly adored album.

“We were all coming together to make this new thing and take a new step,” Mars says. “We've all been making music for a while, and we’ve all been confronted with aspects of it that are grueling and not pleasurable.” When the group convened in a barn in the woods that Mars had transformed into a recording studio the band calls her “Hobbit Hole,” they kept one simple rule at the forefront: “If it's not joyful,” says Mars, “don't do it.”

What emerged from that simple mission is a stunningly gorgeous album, full of big, arcing melodies and a whole range of kinky stylistic twists that will surprise listeners who know the group just for their first album’s chorus-drenched 80s-style psychedelia. “Birthday Song” gives grungy glam rock with a stride that’s new for the band, but fits them perfectly, via a transcendent hook that underlines Echo’s lyrical tribute to communal joy. “Get Stable” transmutes existential panic—“I can’t get stable / Is that what I’m afraid of?”–into sharp-angled punk pop. The anthemic title track—the last song written for the album, and the first to be written by the entire quartet—is something like the album’s mission statement, with Echo and Ally splitting vocal duties as they pay tribute to the power of joyful creation: “I ain’t high but I feel good,” Echo sings, “Like a drug but I don’t come down.” 

Mixed by Matthew Hall and Rich Costey (on “Birthday Song”, “All Pleasure”, and “Get Stable”) and mastered by Bob Weston, All Pleasure was recorded as live as possible, with a bare minimum of overdubs, capturing the sheer infectious ecstasy that comes from a group of people sharing space together, making a divine racket. On top of being just a great album, it’s also a persuasive argument for ditching the algorithm, going off the grid, and finding a barn to hole up in with some friends and a bunch of instruments. On “House on the Hill,” Echo sneeringly sums up the empty feeling of living for nothing but likes: “Anything for convenience / anything for the gram,” she sings. “It feels like we’re never gonna get out of here.” Put on All Pleasure, tap into the energy and the message that THUS LOVE is putting out, and you just might find an escape.

Robber Robber (Insta | Spotify | Youtube)

All movement – and consequently, a lot of art – is a product of tension and release. In 2017, when multi-instrumentalists Nina Cates and Zack James decided to begin writing songs together, it was an exercise to see whether they could collaborate and anyone would be interested in anything they came up with. Now, Robber Robber’s debut album, Wild Guess, feels more like an exercise in tension and release than an indie record. For all of its nods to its post-punk predecessors and the eclectic Burlington, VT music scene that fed into it, the album feels more like an attempt to translate imagery into sound, communicating all the shades of light and dark you could visualize – and it’s better for that reason.

Everything is driven by sheer curiosity and loose, if any, creative parameters, the band says. A person’s twenties is guaranteed to be a tumultuous time in their life anyway, regardless of who they are or what they do, but the members of Robber Robber found themselves in a world that’s maybe never been more chaotic or difficult to move through. It’s a chaos that’s evident in what they create, even if it’s only the obstacle they’re reacting to. In even their most polarizing musical moments, you get the sense that these are gut reactions being expressed, that truth is the grist of the overflow.

Recorded with Benny Yurco (Grace Potter) and Urian Hackney (The Armed, Rough Francis, Iggy Pop) at Little Jamaica Recordings in Burlington with band members Will Krulak and Carney Hemler in tow, Cates and James (who also co-produced the album) have honed the most fully-realized version of Robber Robber to date, capturing the tangible group dynamic they’ve cultivated on stage. Much of that stage presence hinges on those same principles – flow and strain, the transfer or withholding of energy – opening with a track like “Seven Houses” and watching the crowd lean forward to catch the moment where the barrage of instrumentation will let up. On Wild Guess, that song is preceded by the almost stilted, unsettling “Letter From the Other Side of the Operation,” making its full-on attack of an introductory verse even more impactful in its recorded form.

Elsewhere, that sense of release is playful, like with the more accessible, almost poppy relief of “Dial Tone.” That track in particular marks one of the few points where Cates’ vocals are clearly decipherable, letting a crack form in the towering barrier of sound the band spends much of the album’s runtime building up. Of course, something else like closer “Machine Wall” lives up to its name in fortifying that barrier again, grinding on in an emphatic, beautiful finishing statement – deeply felt even as it tries desperately to throw you off its back, appearing more human as it rolls to a halt.

And maybe that’s the key here: these are impressionistic sketches, mimicking the visual material the songwriting might pull information from. Take the back-and-forth ringing of the guitars in “Backup Plan,” eventually clouded by fuzzier layers that seem to war with each other in a test of endurance – this kind of gradually overwhelming choice relies so much on gut reaction, on adjusting your ear to understand when it suddenly jerks you sideways.