I saw the Front Bottoms last Friday night and I loved every minute of it. Brian Sella and his merry men delivered something truly special and different, something that was fascinating and a step beyond what I think I ever could have expected. For context I think it’s important to remember that I got seriously into pop punk (And specifically the emo tinged sadboi pop punk of bands like The Front Bottoms) significantly after I was deep in the world of black metal. My day to day revolves around underground metal marketing — I’m not really the sort of person who would attend a Front Bottoms show. Hell — this is probably the only time this year that I actually would be in a room with a thousand people who are college aged, my age. Suffice it to say, that in my lifetime of weird and unique experiences this, perhaps more conventional one, would end up being a very strange and moving moment for me, one I will never forget.

I think my obsession with The Front Bottoms (And obsession it is, their hit single ‘Twin Sized Mattress’ was, as per Spotify, my most played song of 2018) stems from the fact that they speak to a sort of nostalgia and angst of a time forgot. This has always been a part of my obsession with pop punk. Ever since my life started to take a turn in early high school and I really leaned into my Cameron Crow-esque music journalism career I felt almost robbed of the world of lost loves and wasted nights that The Front Bottoms frontman, Brian Sella sings about. Yet I think the beauty of The Front Bottoms is that in most cases it’s not the explicit that matters, it’s not the fact that most of their songs are catered towards a youth culture I felt no participation in, their music is really about the sort of wandering meaninglessness that films like Clerks also struggle with. The same sort of struggle depicted in the Arcade Fire classic The Suburbs.

Arriving at Brooklyn Steel just a few minutes before the Front Bottoms hit the stage I was immediately struck by the fact that the audience was a fair bit older than I had anticipated. Not only were there large congregations of bearded hipsters, but even a few couples in their early forties who seemed to not even be hipsters! I imagine many of them were there for Manchester Orchestra, but I was shocked by how many, like me, knew every word to the Front Bottoms songs. That being said, the youth contingent was strong, especially closer to the stage. For better or for worse, this is the kind of sound young people go too for rock music now. Brian Sella and the gang come out to massive applause — with Brian announcing, “We haven’t warmed up or anything, so we’re just going to do it, fuck it!” to a gleeful throng. The band broke into a rowdy rendition of ‘West Virginia’ and they were off.

What gets me about this band though is the simple fact that so much of it seems half assed. Brian takes requests from the stage and admits that he doesn’t know how to play certain songs. It’s fairly clear he’s not a great guitarist and many of his vocal melodies are off pitch — but that’s not really the point. He’d rather be talking with audience members about how they got in trouble for passing beers out to the audience at a previous stop. These guys are just a few years removed from playing dive bars and they aren’t afraid to cop to that. Even Brians floppy haired bounce during more intense moments seems taken straight out of a college basement show. With a setup that includes a bar on stage from which various crew members sip craft beer, it almost feels like the band is still playing in a dingy bar. Toss in a backing band whose members clearly all have bands of their own back home who love to play house shows and you start to get a sense of what this band is about. They have captured that aesthetic, the sad stageless college basement, the struggle of being young in America and the need for group absolution and managed to package it into something visceral and powerful, without, y’know, feeling overtly packaged.

Perhaps what makes The Front Bottoms feel so visceral is not just the fact that their stage show is sometimes almost gleefully sloppy but also the fact that the lyrics are explicitly brutal, moreso than I think many outsiders might expect. When people see a sad looking emo infused pop punk band with a largely under 25 fanbase I don’t think they are anticipating lyrics about heroin addiction and suicide, but here we are. That’s just part of being young in America in 2018. When the band breaks into their classic, ‘Twin Size Mattress’ to close out their set you can see fans of all ages singing along, all of us having been damaged by the struggles of addiction, be it personally or through friends. Tears are shed and strangers fall into each others arms. In a world that increasingly loses its unifying monoculture, it feels like The Front Bottoms have managed to tap into something far too real.

So yeah, the fact that I love this band is a little bit silly and they definitely shouldn’t be taken too seriously by anyone trying to prove how ‘grown up’ their music taste is. But if you want to spend a night with a floppy haired, depressed Jersey kid who seems to be perpetually 16, then The Front Bottoms might very well be the band for you. Though their band may have bloated to seven members and they are packing out massive rooms multiple nights in a row, The Front Bottoms still speak to the scene kid, the kid who just wants to go to DIY shows at their all ages venue, the kid who is embracing the almost frightening struggle of real life, the kid who lives inside every single one of us. The worst part of this all is that I’m completely serious in my love of what is objectively a terrible band and seeing them live only confirmed that.