By Nic John.

When the duo 100 gecs released their debut album, 1000 gecs, in May—23 minutes of careening, tentacular pop—Laura Les and Dylan Brady didn’t expect to perform it much. Not only had they grown accustomed to cowriting songs from across the country, she in Chicago and he in Los Angeles, but they had little reason to think they could fill venues even if they were in the same place.

“Extremely late,” Les said backstage before gecs’ sold-out show at Elsewhere in Brooklyn on Tuesday night, when asked when the pair started figuring out how to bring the album to a stage.

“When people started liking this album,” Brady added. “All our other stuff, there wasn’t an insane demand to see live shows.”

Les and Brady met in “2011-ish” in St. Louis, and have worked together in various capacities since, releasing a debut self-titled EP in 2016. They had the shorthand rapport of longtime collaborators, noting a shared preshow taste for Fritos and hamburgers and eagerly discussing a remix album 1000 gecs & th3 phant0m m3nac3 that they say is in the pipeline. “What is this?” Les excitedly asked at one point, when a song that caught her ear played on the venue’s sound system.

Six months after the release of 1000 gecs, and the considerable word-of-internet-mouth and critical praise that followed, the tightly packed, 200-capacity room was thrumming as gecs’ set time approached. Several blond wigs, in presumptive homage to gecs’ own platinum locks, were on display, and a brief “gecs! gecs! gecs!” chant broke out just before 10:30. Gecs had played a pair of shows in New York over the weekend on a concurrent tour where they’re opening for Brockhampton and Slowthai, but this was their one headlining show in the area, and one of six shows under the banner “Secret Tour.”

“The venues are like 5,000 people and they’re not as intimate,” Brady said when discussing the difference between the two tours. “The energy is very different.”

“In the Secret Tour shows,” Les said, “it’s huge energy, everyone is packed in and going hard. It’s sweaty and amazing.”

In its glitched-out palette and embrace of various musical influences (3OH!3 and Skrillex, to name maybe the two most frequently cited), there’s a hyper-referential chaos to 1000 gecs that could be said to mirror the experience of being online (see also: the inventorying of the number of gecs/geckos, a bit of in-humor that shouldn’t or couldn’t be explained). It’s a narrative that both writes itself and has already been written. “That is a big part of it,” Les was quick to point out when asked about the internet-fueled aspect of the music. The duo recently announced on Twitter that the stems, instrumentals, and vocals for 1000 gecs can now be downloaded at 1000stems.com.