Last Saturday, Feb. 15, indie pop band Sub-Radio performed at the Crystal Ballroom in Somerville, Mass., on their Sunrise City tour.
Sub-Radio has been my favorite band since I first discovered them in 2023 via the Spotify algorithm. I wish I had a better backstory for it, but it is what it is. Them doing funny parodies on YouTube (“Stacy’s Dad, “I Don’t Wanna Dance With Nobody,” “Bi Bi Bi” and “Mr. Darkside”) only furthered my interest. Also, there’s a special kind of bond that forms from discovering a good breakup song while trying to get over one.
I’ve only been to three live concerts before, but Sub-Radio’s was by far my favorite. For starters, I was just a fan of the venue overall. The Somerville concert was in the Crystal Ballroom, which was smaller than anywhere else I’d ever been, but that wasn’t a bad thing — it just meant that the band was closer.
True to its name, there were a pair of crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. There was also a disco ball, which they made good use of (except during the song “Disco,” when they didn’t use the disco ball at all). But it was also just the funniest and most heartfelt concert I’ve been to yet.
Indie pop duo DOUBLECAMP opened for the concert. They initially struck me as generic, and I wasn’t particularly impressed, but they grew on me quickly. Maybe the occasional emo singer over acoustic guitar can be kind of good, I don’t know. Whatever it was, they had me jumping along by the end of their second song.
It didn’t hurt that they were also funny. While introducing a song, they claimed one of their members had written a song when he was six that had won a Grammy, and so of course, they just had to play it, before launching into a cover of Chappell Roan’s “HOT TO GO!”
Sub-Radio themselves were a treat. They opened their portion of the show with one of their newest singles “Pink Lemonade,” a very danceable summer song. Soon after, lead singer Adam Bradley informed the audience that he was still shaking off a virus, and so they might need to cut the show short. But Bradley’s sickness didn’t show throughout the entire show, nor did it stop Sub-Radio from keeping up the high energy with “Better Than That” and “Room For You,” two of their older songs about missing and rekindling a romance that has already peaked.
For a lot of Sub-Radio songs, I think it’s really easy to get lost in the catchiness of the music and just dance without listening too hard. But so many of Sub-Radio’s lyrics are about growing up and missing people and reconnecting, and that strikes a chord with me.
My sister once told me that my music taste is just sad songs that sound happy, and I’d say that describes Sub-Radio too. Even in the midst of groovy guitar and singing about summer sunshine, the lyrics are still drenched in so much sadness and nostalgia. Take “Everything I Had,” an upbeat punk rock-type track. Despite the high energy and the rhythmic guitar, it’s got lyrics like, “Anyways I’m a mess if you can’t tell / Getting older, ain’t it real swell”, and the chorus, which is sung like a battle cry: “Everything I had / I want it, I want it, I want it back.”
The band leaned into that sadness with “Clark Kent” and “Cool.” The lights dimmed, painting the ballroom blue (blue and red for “Clark Kent”), and during the bridge, the disco ball spun slowly. These songs were quieter and slower. And the lyrics, which Bradley sang angelically, matched the more somber mood. “I couldn’t touch you if I tried / I couldn’t touch you if I wanted to” and “I hope the world will hold you the way that I tried to” will be bouncing around in my head for a long time.
About 30 minutes into the concert, Bradley, who is openly bisexual, started talking about his sexuality. He started off his speech lighthearted, announcing, “I’d like to welcome you Boston, officially, to the gay part of the show,” before launching into “King of My Heart,” which is arguably their gayest song. Even after the song, though, Bradley wasn’t done talking about sexuality. He took a moment to address the current political climate and its impact on the LGBTQ+ community. He proclaimed to the audience that if they wanted to take action to support the LGBTQ+ community, they could donate to transgender-supporting charities but also asked everyone to do something much more unexpected and simpler: be mean.
“Boston, I invite you to be rude to bigots,” he announced, encouraging the audience to call out people in their lives who would say homophobic or other similarly bigoted things.
The invitation to be mean to meaner people was met with a chorus of cheers. Sub-Radio then plunged into a cover of Weezer’s “Buddy Holly,” while Bradley put on a rainbow feather boa.
Sub-Radio also played a few songs that will be coming out on their album later this year. I don’t want to give too much away, but Adam prefaced the last two songs with a beautiful introduction.
For the first one, he spoke about his mental health, “I am someone who has struggled with my mental health for a lot of my life, and a lot of that has boiled down to a feeling of being a burden on other people … and something you have to realize is that, that is so untrue,” saying that it was the message he wanted to share.
For the second song, he declared it was “the thesis statement of Sub-Radio,” before once again coming back to nostalgia: “We spend a lot of the song thinking about the past, wallowing in nostalgia … God, it would be so great if I could just get back to then, if I could just get back to when things were easier, or better, or simpler … and then in the last minute of the song, we come to this realization that in fact, no, heaven is not — heaven was not in the past, it’s right now … Heaven is here, right now.” And for the next few minutes, it really was.
Aside from the music, the band members were also extremely entertaining. Bradley had serious charisma, but the band itself was fun to watch too. They’ve been friends since middle school and it’s very easy to see that with them constantly pointing and smiling at each other throughout the show.
Each band member played a part in engaging the audience too — the drummer, Michael Pereira, would stand up and clap whenever he wanted the audience to do the same, at one point getting so caught up in riling up the audience that he had to run back to his seat to play the drums in time.