Monday, November 24, 2025 at 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM
Zebulon, Los Angeles
**Font** Austin quintet Font — Thom Waddill (guitar/synth/vocals), Jack Owens (drums), Anthony Laurence (guitar/synth/sampler), Logan Wagner (percussion/sampler), and Roman Parnell (bass/synth) — announce their debut album, Strange Burden, to be released July 12th via Acrophase Records, and present its blistering and irresistibly dancy lead single “Hey Kekulé.” Strange Burden shows Font both translating the intensity of their live shows into the studio and polishing the surfaces of their music to juxtapose and dislocate genres with a quick-footed, nearly pop-art sensibility. Leading up to the album’s release, Font will support Yard Act throughout the west coast. Font create driving music of sampled stabs, dance beats, and euphoric choruses. As drummers Owens and Wagner lock into a co-constructed groove, Parnell’s bass bridges the kinetic back line to multi-instrumentalist and environment-shaper Laurence. From this density emerge frontman Waddill’s associative lyrics and electric-shock dance. They chose their name because it’s the archaic word for “fountain”; it implies both an abundance and the receptacle that holds it. To watch the band is to experience a tension of excess and containment as each member pulls the music into something that transcends its starting terms. In creating Strange Burden, the band referred increasingly to Talking Heads’ writing process with Brian Eno for Remain in Light, where the rhythm section would lay down grooves and loops for Eno and Byrne to later structure and write over. The first real flash of success with this process came with “Hey Kekulé,” the blistering and irresistibly dancy lead single for Strange Burden, which was a big step forward for the band and how it could live and grow together as an organism. Waddill’s lyrics draw from dreams, automatic writing, mythology, and childhood. He begins with rhythm and emotion and sound rather than subject. He loops the music, hits record, dances around and sings nonsense until a vocal part sticks. Then, he fills in the syllables as quickly as he can with culled lines from nonsense poems, scribbled phrases, and whatever occurs to him in the moment of movement and singing. Sometimes there’s a frame story or scenario, as with “Hey Kekulé,” but for other songs, the lyrics are meant to serve only a sonic function. **Dutch Interior** When Jack Nugent, Connor Reeves, Shane & Hayden Barton, Davis Stewart, and Noah Kurtz started making music together as **Dutch Interior**, the lifelong friends living between houses in Los Angeles and Long Beach had been in and out of each other’s lives for the better part of two decades. The best relationships come easy, and the band is the product of a creative union brought on by already-established trust and familiar insularity. Beginning as a fluid experiment of songs born in the moment, initial recordings Kindergarten and Blinded By Fame trace an uncanny and distinctive world of their own design. You can begin to pick up the separate stylings and personalities of the band members by the songs they independently write before bringing to the band at large, where the tracks often grow into new forms all together. Despite this individual approach to songwriting, they describe each other as “branches of the same core life” whose colliding influences and experience all bleed into the songs. Describing Sandcastle Molds as a “fucked up Fleetwood Mac song,” Nugent elucidates that “this song grew from the realization, while driving down the 405 after a long night, that I might be losing my edge. Sandcastle Molds deals with holding on to your sense of self as the world descends into madness at a nauseating pace. How does one hold on to hope when the state of all things seems to be in rapid decay?” The band’s music has always been filled with both introspective yearning and outsized emotion and ambition, and the new single refines the band’s genre-less rock music with an undercurrent of compelling melody. All of Dutch Interior are internalized romantics, enraptured with fragmented moments that appear almost slapdash in their lyrics as well as the naive belief in human connection as the only way to save ourselves. It’s this stark romanticism that makes the music of the band expand outside the confines of the spaces they dwell into something more universally compelling, a manifestation of hope and faith that, together, they can create something bigger than themselves. With influences spanning from ambient to southern rock to jazz to dance music, the band shapeshifts and oscillates between alternative country, sharply hewn indie rock and hints of dissonant ambience, all while still sounding like a band who both speak their own private language and translate it into something universal.