The Music For Listeners day shows are a longstanding tradition at SXSW. The unofficial day parties have been running for fourteen years now as an offshoot of the San Antonio radio program of the same name and they were back again this year for a week-long series of shows at Lazarus Brewing Company.
Music for Listeners programs a wide range of music for their SXSW shows with a big focus on American indie rock and Britpop-ish stuff. And on Saturday afternoon, we made our way further west on 6th Street to check out what they had to offer, taking in sets from Wishy and Noah and the Loners.
Admittedly, we only caught the tail end of Wishy’s set so they didn’t have time to make much of an impression on me either way, but I did detect a fair bit of ’90s influences in their sound so I made a note to follow up and give them another listen. And the songs on their Paradise EP, which Pitchfork described as “nostalgic misrememberings of the dreamier side of ’90s indie rock” do indeed have a strong ’90s flavour. Check out the video for “Spinning” below.
Up next were Noah and the Loners, a young punk band who I first caught during SXSW 2023, where they impressed with “God Save The King,” a revamped version of the Sex Pistols classic with the lyrics updated to “God save the king/Same fascist thing.” The Brighton-based band were playing a whole bunch of shows throughout the week and brought a fair bit of energy to their afternoon set … though they were likely conserving some of that energy for the two shows they’d be playing later that night.
Singer Noah Lonergan introduced one song by saying it was about wanting to be young forever, adding, “I don’t know why I wrote that, I’m only 19.” This, of course, had us immediately doing the math in our heads to figure out exactly how young Lonergan was when we started going to SXSW. The answer? Quite young.
Yes, we are old, but not too old to appreciate a good punk show – provided that there’s good craft beer and some nice picnic tables for us to sit on.