It’s been 15 months since the intrepid New Jersey indie troupe went silent after Pinegrove bandleader Evan Stephens Hall posted on Facebook in November 2017 explaining that he had been “accused of sexual coercion” by a woman he had been in a relationship with. Hall’s statement was both murky and long-winded, but he accepted responsibility for his actions — even though it remains unclear what those actions were. In respect to his alleged victim’s wishes, Hall put the band on hold for a year and started therapy. Then, in September, Pitchfork ran a deep and intimately-reported profile of the band that aimed to account for the staggering complexity of Pinegrove’s imminent return.

Illuminating as the story was, it still left fans stranded in a glowing fog — and with decisions to make. Stick with this band? Buy a concert ticket? Walk through that door and get your hand stamped? Buy a T-shirt? Sing along?

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Talk to more than two dozen Pinegrove fans queued up outside of the Black Cat and you’ll find them mulling these questions with great nuance. And yet, the same words keep popping up. Many say they were “confused” by Hall’s original Facebook post, mainly because it was so “vague,” but that the Pitchfork story was “clarifying,” and that Hall’s return might be the “right way” for public figures implicated in the #MeToo movement to try to rehabilitate themselves — “maybe.”

Before the club opens its doors, you can almost see the question marks floating over the sidewalk. “I’m very involved in sexual assault awareness at my school,” says Rebekah Boggs, 20, a student at the University of Virginia. “So it’s definitely an uncomfortable position to be in as a fan… I don’t really know how to feel. I’m still uncomfortable telling my friends, ‘I’m going to the Pinegrove concert.’”

Some of those friends have “canceled” Pinegrove, exercising their right to excommunicate a public figure for unconscionable behavior — at least in digital space, where public opinion frequently obeys a tidy binary of “cancel” or “condone.” But out here on 14th Street, where real fans are trying to establish a real sense of resolution in real time, it’s much cloudier.

“I definitely feel that in a lot of situations, cancel culture doesn’t help anyone, that it’s a reductive and regressive way of addressing societal ills,” says Nicholas Kohomban, 23, down from Brooklyn for the show. “Especially in Evan’s situation, here’s someone being very open, and honest, and vulnerable, and admitting that they probably did something wrong, and inviting criticism.” (In the Pitchfork article, Hall said, “We don’t want listeners who are like, ‘We don’t care about this sort of thing.’”) Kohomban adds, “So he’s not Ryan Adams, right?”

As far as we can tell, Hall is not Ryan Adams. Ryan Adams, that famously petulant songwriter who was recently exposed in the New York Times for his alleged transgressions against women. Ryan Adams, who, according to the Times report, sent explicit texts to a teenage fan who thought the guy on the other end might help her achieve her own rock-and-roll dreams. Ryan Adams, a star who got away with all kinds of ugly behavior for nearly two decades, just because enough people still believe the old myth of rock-genius — that is, an artist’s temper and aggression are byproducts of their eccentricity and zeal (but only when that artist is a man).

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In the days following the Times report, distributors shelved Adams’s forthcoming album, radio stations yanked his songs from the air, and the FBI launched an inquiry into his relationship with that young fan. But let’s see how he’s doing a year from now.

Meantime, as the world watched Adams squirm out of owning his alleged misdeeds on Twitter, Pinegrove’s more devout fans say they’ve seen Hall “doing the right thing” over the past year. He didn’t dismiss the accusation. He accepted responsibility, publicly and completely. He followed his alleged accuser’s wishes while respecting her anonymity. He sought help. Now, Pinegrove fans want to feel like they’re doing the right thing, too — which means showing up to the club with all of their skepticism and whatever’s left of their enthusiasm.

“Cancel culture can be very toxic when the situation is hazy. So I didn’t want to come to any assumptions, and it’s been very difficult to come to terms with his [Facebook] statement,” says Alyssa Dahle, 21, of Ellicott City. “In terms of what actually happened, nobody knows. And we won’t know.”

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Dahle’s coworker, Jake Quimby, 28, of Baltimore, seems almost painfully vexed. “I don’t think it’s forgiven by any means, or forgotten, and I don’t think it’ll get any clearer,” he says. “But we’re here.”

And once we’re all inside, Pinegrove takes the stage, almost cautiously, slowly setting that metaphorical gray-fog aglow with music. These songs feel as delicate as rock songs can, with old lyrics that now mean new things. For instance, on “Rings” — composed and recorded before Hall was accused — the frontman delivers a line about self-exposure that feels as if it had been written for the audience now assembled before him: “I trust you so much.”

Between numbers, Hall thanks the crowd in a silence-filling kind of way, but he still radiates sincerity in the right amounts. He doesn’t want to look needy or solicitous. He doesn’t want to look overconfident or glib. He’s trying to do everything right. He thanks the volunteers who hosted a bystander intervention harassment training before the show. He thanks his cousin, and his aunt and his mom, all of whom are in the audience. He says nothing about remorse, or loyalty, or contrition, or healing — but he does thank everyone in the building for “being so kind to us and so kind to each other.”

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Hall isn’t trying to change your mind, but the music might be. A good Pinegrove song teases out the confessional commonalities between emo and country music to do something mysteriously empathetic. It’s the kind of music that can make you feel like it hears you.

And when it’s billowing off the stage like this, it becomes nearly impossible to drag your brain back out to the sidewalk, back to those hours leading up to the show where you were thinking about all of the unknowns, all of the missing pieces in this story, the anonymous accuser that we’ll never know, all of the absences. But try to imagine the absent. Imagine everyone who made different decisions and stayed home. Now, imagine if they could hear everyone here singing along. Does it sound like anything other than forgiveness?