Chasing Fridays: Big Boy, Addison Rae, Denzel Curry live, more
Some complaints, some praise, some measured analysis, and some hyperbolic glowing. The usual.
New York Fuckin City, babyyy. That's where I'll be located by the time this edition of Chasing Fridays goes live, and that's where I'll be all weekend in celebration of the second-annual Slide Away shoegaze festival. I'll be seeing the pre-show at Market Hotel on Friday and the main show on Saturday at the Brooklyn Paramount, so if any of my lovely subscribers are going to be attending either of those events and want to say what's up, don't hesitate to tug my shirt and do so. I'm a friendly guy, don't be intimidated by my occasionally brooding, fitful tone in the pages of this newsletter.
Speaking of which, I wrote about some new and old music this week. The new Big Boy EP, the new Addison Rae single, a song from a band with a horrendous – and I mean HORRENDOUS – name, a rap show I went to, and then an older hardcore album I've been obsessed with for the entirety of 2025. As always, that final portion of Chasing Fridays, in which I go in on an older record I've been spending time with, is for paying subscribers only, so you can toss me $5/month to read that and any other paywalled content on my site. Thanks to everyone who supports me monetarily, as I wouldn't be able to dedicate as much time as I do to this site without your generosity.
Big Boy - Love Songs EP
Everyone's complaining that Turnstile are charging $100 for their NYC album release show with Teezo Touchdown, Boy Harsher, and Big Boy. Personally, I'm more upset that Turnstile are putting on for Teezo Touchdown, one of the corniest and worst rappers in recent memory. Regardless, I have no dog in that race since I don't really care to see Turnstile again until they fall off and go back to playing small hardcore rooms. I would, however, see Big Boy again. The Bay Area band are one of the most reliably fun groups to see at any hardcore fest I've been to post-lockdown. They write short, punchy beatdown hardcore songs that make kids go apeshit in the pit and stage dive like maniacs, but with an affect that's more chaotic good than chaotic evil. They make a fundamentally tough and scary style of music sound fun and lighthearted, which is difficult to do without feeling gimmicky or hamfisted.
I've never been into rocking Big Boy songs on my headphones with any regularity, but every time I see them live, I instinctively shout along to the hooks of "Spades" and "Identity" as if they're among my all-time faves. The songs on this new EP, Love Songs, aren't switching up the formula. The grooves are bouncy and elastic like a trampoline, and singer Brandon Flores yells at the pitch of someone crying out for help from the bottom of a 30-foot well. The five-song project begins with a needless spoken-word intro and ends with a cover of Life of Agony's "Other Side of the River" – an uncharacteristically melodic choice for Big Boy. The three songs in the middle are pummeling. The hook of "Now?" – "you said you loved me before/do you love me now?" – already feels destined for crazy pile-ups, and the breakdowns in "365" are gnarsty. I probably won't listen to this again until I'm doing festival prep for a show Big Boy are playing, and then I'll shout along to "Now?" as if it's been in constant rotation for me this whole time.
LATE 90s - "Intrepid"
I stumbled into this band's existence earlier this week and was physically revolted. Like, I audibly groaned and made the Clint Eastwood scowl. At first, I couldn't believe their name was real. That what I was seeing on a Neck Deep tour flier wasn't some cheeky description of the headlining band's basic pop-punk sound, but the name of an actual band on the bill. LATE 90s – styled all caps like that. They are a literal band made up of four adult men who are finding some semblance of success operating under the name LATE 90s. "Hey what's up, we're LATE 90s." "Yeah, I play in a band called LATE 90s." "Oh shit, did you hear the new LATE 90s single?" Give me a fucking break, man.
On some level, I admire the audacity. To drop the veil of chicness around 90s nostalgia worship that so many alt-rock and pop-punk bands have been mining from since I was a tween and just outright game the SEO privileges by leading anyone who searches "late 90s band" to your Instagram page. But wow, if it isn't depressing. What do you think LATE 90s sound like? Given they're touring with Neck Deep, who sound like New Found Glory filtered through The Story So Far, I figured they were either a bland pop-punk band or a shitty hardcore act. Those are the types of bands who usually tour with Neck Deep, at least.
But no. Everything about LATE 90s is so painfully on the nose that the band's latest single, "Intrepid," sounds like a totally anonymous blur of pre-Y2kish rock genres. Music that could only really be described as "late 90s" because nothing about it offers a new or interesting idea that could form the basis of an artistic identity. Because LATE 90s have no artistic identity, and as their name suggests, that's precisely the point. "Intrepid" sounds like a parody of every alt-rock cliché from the last five years' worth of late-90s pilfering. An algorithmic jumble of playlist pop-punk, TikTok nu-gaze, and sexless Deftones worship. The singer's obnoxious, nasally voice is filtered through horrific layers of chintzy reverb that offer nothing in the way of ethereality or atmosphere. Just a wet, murky filter on a dry, saltine cracker of a song. Do you want to know what a soggy saltine cracker sounds like? LATE 90s have you covered. Good riddance.
Addison Rae - "Headphones On"
If you told me one year ago that I'd be more enthused by Addison Rae's new single than Lana Del Rey's...I don't know, I would've gawked or something. "Diet Pepsi" was one of my favorite songs of last year, but I kind of thought it might be a fluke. I didn't care for Rae's 2023 AR EP, and I didn't care for her second 2024 single, "Aquamarine." Then, she dropped "High Fashion" earlier this year, and my interest was once again piqued. Now, she's released one of my favorite songs of the year thus far: "Headphones On," an introspective trip-pop gem that masters in one fell swoop what that band After have been inching toward for a couple years now. It's sleeker and ritzier than the obvious reference material (Massive Attack, Portishead) but just as sexy and svelte, gliding like bathrobe linens traipsing across cool tile floor. My song of the summer senses are tingling.
Denzel Curry, Kenny Mason, 454, CLIP @ Stage AE
I'm always curious to see how marquee rap shows go in Pittsburgh. Since Wiz Khalifa fell off and Mac Miller and Jimmy Wopo died, there hasn't been a strong local hip-hop culture here for most of my tenure in the city (going on eight years). Up and coming rappers don't really come through here (see: Nettspend and Xaviersobased skipping Pittsburgh on their recent run) until they're established enough to play a venue like Stage AE, the 2,400-cap room where I saw Denzel Curry's Mischievous South tour the other night. This is the same venue (though the smaller of the two stages) where I saw Ken Carson detonate his rage maelstrom last fall, and I was wondering how the mostly-white, mostly young 20-something Pittsburgh crowd would react to a more technical, dynamic, and lyrical rapper like Denzel Curry.
The response was more or less exactly what I anticipated. The crowd was lively as hell and super engaged with Curry's music, mouthing along to his lyrics when appropriate and moshing up a storm during the rage-iest beat drops. I've never been a huge Denzel Curry fan. Always respected the guy and appreciated his eclectic body of work, but never developed more than a surface level relationship with his music. That didn't matter. I didn't know a single word and was totally entranced by his infernal energy. He actually rapped almost every one of his lines (not just lip-syncing and thrashing about) and seemed to genuinely be enjoying his time onstage, jogging from side to side and inflating the crowd's ferocity in quick back-and-forths with his hype man. It was infectiously thrilling to watch, and I walked out of there with a deeper respect for everything he does.
That said, I went to this show for the openers. I've been a big CLIP fan for a while now and was one of the few people in the crowd who seemed to know who she was before she stepped onstage. Her emo-inflected drill 'n' b got kids jumping and she was a charismatic and goofy presence, throwing ass and laughing the whole way through. 454 got a much more muted response. The Florida MC was the non-aggressive outlier on this bill, and while he attempted to get people amped, his hook-less, breathless monologues just weren't landing with the room full of antsy moshers. At two points he shouted out his beatmakers, evilgiane and BNYX, and asked the crowd if the fucked with them. I was one of the few "woo!"-ers who responded. Painful. Kenny Mason didn't steal the show from Curry, but if the headliner was having an off-night, he might've. I've been into the Atlanta rapper's grungey, woozy, metal-tinged trap for a while now, and it was really impressive to see him whip the room into a frenzy. I feel like he's been on the precipice of a serious breakthrough for a while now, and if his command of the crowd in Pittsburgh could be rekindled in every venue he plays, then I don't see how he doesn't headline this venue in a year or two.
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