The festival is delayed today, as am I. While cleanup crews scramble to consolidate the muddied wasteland of Zilker park into manageable heaps, I scramble to figure out how to jump my car battery that has mysteriously died overnight. Both pursuits end in success!
By the time I arrive at the festival it's nearly four, and I'm immediately off to interview Flight by Nothing—check out the transcript here! They're incredibly kind people, and the whole band has known each other since they were young. It must be so rewarding, to have played for so long with a group of people: to see others and be seen yourself in so many different incarnations.
After the interview wrapped up, I bounced over to see Fai Laci. This Boston-based five-piece has some groove to 'em! Their sound reminds me, loosely, of some of Cage The Elephant's early work. The band's namesake and vocalist, Luke Faillaci, carries such a wistful tone that gives the band a texture equal parts alluring and illusive. Although I hadn't heard of them before ACL, I've had their music on repeat since then! Their latest album, Elephant in The Room, is my favorite in their discography.
After Faci Lai's set wrapped up, I endeavoured to find some food and rally a bit of strength before my most anticipated set of the festival—Snow Strippers. P. Terry's, reliable and affordable as always, got the job done, and in no time at all I was shouldering into the great lunette mass gathered at the edges of the Beatbox stage. It's fairly easy to maneuver through people when you're on your own, and I was able to slink up as close as I dared to the stage. I made small talk with eccentric fan-wielding divas, decked out in labradorite studded leather harnesses and glittering electric with anticipation. It felt like being suspended in a thunderhead, lightning flashing in everyone's eyes and the rumbling of hundreds of overlapping conversations. We were on the brink of a downpour—but it wasn't quite raining.
The floodgates opened immediately when Tatiana Schwaninger swaggered out onto the stage, her voice expertly digitized by the ski-mask clad Graham Perez. “Just Your Doll”, a fan favorite single from 2023, was all the crowd needed to boil over, jumping and shouting along with the music. I found myself captivated with the energy of the duo, backlit through silver careening streams of fog that reduced them to stark shadows.
Soaring on the luff of the Indie Sleaze Revival in the early 2020s, Snow Strippers sound glitters with such a painfully nostalgic edge. Since they originally blew up in 2022, Snow Strippers has been ceaselessly compared to the 2000s Canadian witchhouse duo, Crystal Castles. The similarities are definitely there, but I think that Snow Strippers has a discordant edge to them that Crystal Castles lacks. At times, Snow Strippers leans into that jagged, hypersawed sound in a decidedly non-melodic manner—but it just works!
I find the overall tone of their music fascinating as well. Even in their most energetic songs there is a palpable sense of longing, of lack. “Aching Like It's” is a wonderful example of this sensation, which they played around the middle of their set. Of course, everyone was dancing wildly—no one stopped moving the whole time, it was one of the most energetic crowds I saw at ACL—but the lyrics of the track were just haunting: "Never stick around to hold me / Stay a minute more then slowly / Walk out the door, walk out, walk out the door."
I think that sense of incompleteness—even in the name and chorus of the song "Aching like it's, aching like it" repeated over and over—is one reason why Snow Stripper's music is so popular among the younger generations. It's a confusing time to be young. The standard myth of progress that has been in play in America since the 1950s is peeling back all around us. And yet we persist! We dance on! In frantic, in-exact motions, lit in low light, with hands raised high in exaltation and voices wailing out to share in the infectious melodies of our Neomodern deities. How appropriate, then, that the duo closed out their set with “Under Your Spell.” I genuinely felt myself levitating during this one—although that might’ve just been the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd leaping the whole way through and carrying me with them.
After the mysterious conductors of our ecstasy slipped away, the crowd broke up in swift streams as we carried on up the hill, over the road, and down the mud-slick wasteland on a pilgrimage to the T-Mobile stage. Lorde had already begun by the time I trudged to a sensible viewing spot—maybe fifty yards off from the stage. If I squinted, and she walked past just the right spot on stage, I could see the New Zealand pop star in a microscopic flash. Luckily for me, two great images of her were projected on either side of the stage, raised 2001 obelisk style in all their glory.
The original muse of Indie Sleaze movement, Lorde cracked open the final set of the evening with her 2013 classic, Royals. Although this was one of the only songs of hers that I have a deep connection to—distinct memories flash of back-seat car rides with my mother and the radio churning out the Top 100—I truly enjoyed the rest of her performance that I saw. She’s a wonderful performer—such incredible passion!
I was a bit perplexed, though, as she addressed the audience between songs and declared that, “The currency of the future will be a feeling of freedom you can generate in your body.” I gnawed on that line all night, and for the next few days. What does it mean? I couldn’t shake the connection between this line and—stay with me—Thomas Hobbe’s notion of liberty, which is, essentially, the absence of external impediments to motion. The ability to move freely. A feeling of freedom generated inside one’s body, to me, reads as some kind of strange abstraction of this principle. Because if freedom is localized inside oneself—what does freedom look like in the external world? How would we recognize it? And this doesn’t even touch the fact that this whole notion of freedom is connected with currency!
Oh, but anyways, the rest of the show really was beautiful! At one point Lorde was hoisted atop a small platform in the middle of the stage, raising her up high enough to be seen clearly even as far back from the stage as I was. Images flashed upon a screen attached to the flying platform: a close up of a ring, a man’s hand tossing an abstracted heart, side view of the jaw, two people eating an apple together, the stage itself. Pan out. Face tipped back in the semi dark. Vital signs. I slunk out before the last couple songs, but Lorde’s words and these brief pictures weighed heavy on my mind the whole bus home.
Cover photo by Dusana Karam