New Colossus: Friday
Landing at Baker Falls, Arlene’s Grocery, Berlin, Bowery Electric, and Pianos on March 7, 2025
Constant Smiles collects the collective at Berlin on Friday, March 7 2025.
Garden Centre goes solo and Drew Citron has new band I Met Clyde at Baker Falls.
They call this music festival the New Colossus. That’s no joke. Hump Day News counted one hundred and ninety-six bands, playing on twelve stages, spread over six days in this sixth edition of the festival. That’s the kind of critical mass you can reach when you’ve timed your event as a landing pad for international acts on their way to an even bigger festival, SXSW. But New Colossus does just fine on its own merits, thanks. Local, national, and international talent converge on the Lower East Side to play music, make memories, and trade notes on chopped cheese. “Hey, I’m walking here!”
Garden Centre at Baker Falls
Garden Centre
Garden Centre is a five-piece band out of Brighton, UK. Airfare is expensive and indie rock doesn’t pay, so only the frontman Max Levy flew over. Lucky for us because early afternoon gigs can be dicey affairs, and Levy puts on a show.
With English wit, castrati voice, guitar and keyboard, he spun a set of warm and wyrd indie rock. The samples and backing tracks during the electropop portions gestured toward the bigger sound of the full band. But on a springlike day at Baker Falls, Levy was at his most remarkable when he leaned into the solitary wyrdness and serenaded the room with a little guitar – or, when he segued into a capella, nothing at all.
Ample opportunity was found to plug Garden Centre’s Kanine Records releases, Searching For A Stream (2023) and A Moon For Digging (2019). Much appreciated by the label owner, who enjoyed the set at stage right.
WATCH GARDEN CENTRE LIVE ↓
I Met Clyde at Baker Falls
I Met Clyde
Guitarist Drew Citron only has 25 Instagram posts, which makes it easy to discover that approximately 262 weeks ago (it’s always weeks with Instagram, eh?) she was scheduled to play the 2020 edition of New Colossus.
The ex-Beverly and ex-Drew Citron Drew Citron returned to this year’s edition with a new band, I Met Clyde. The ultimate vision seems to be a trio, with Citron on guitar, Nico Hedley on bass, and Jeff Widner on something. Presumably, drums?
The newly-minted outfit performed a buzzy, droning set of indie rock strummery as a two-piece, guitar and bass, which occasionally did battle with drum machine accompaniment.
Sunhill at Arlene’s Grocery
Sunhill
Sweden’s Sunhill opened with an elevated garage rock set in the first slot of the Friday bill at Arlene’s Grocery. An early 6:15 PM set, which doesn’t qualify as early anywhere except for nightclubs. If you were already four days deep into New Colossus, though, you might have needed a little eye opener and energy boost.
The beer-and-shot combo comes recommended, I hear, but the combo beer options are limited to Narragansett and “Arlene’s Ale.” The rebranded house liquor is always the best or worst thing on the drink menu.
Rumor has it that bands performing at the fest were spotted one freebie drink per musician. Does the freebie apply to combos? Not that Sunhill, who played their latest single “Wide Awake,” needed artificial stimulants to get up to speed. They’ve got that all-natural Gothenburg juice running through their veins.
Panik Flower at Arlene’s Grocery
Panik Flower
Local indie rock band Panik Flower performed as a five-piece. I think. They played their entire set in the dark, with some gentle backlighting, so a little guesswork was involved. More bands should play this way. Like silhouettes. Very mysterious. A definite complement to their dreamy, gazey set, which included “ocd,” which dropped in March. Shades of Blondie-style rap meets Shirley Manson-style rock in the vocal delivery. Add to the mix another single “alkaline” that dropped in January, and it looks like this band could be gearing up for a new EP release.
Telos Vision at Berlin
Telos Vision
Jam boogie, southern-style, from Sweden. It’s Telos Vision, which counts as the second forced pun on “television” at New Colossus. See: Tell A Vision, a German artist who played Thursday at Pianos. A meaningful pun with brand name staying power is hard enough to manufacture in your native tongue, never mind a second language. But all these bands from abroad, who have steeped themselves lovingly in the Anglo-American rock n roll idiom, can’t help themselves when it comes to naming bands, albums, and songs.
If forgiveness is necessary (it’s not), we forgive them, because they forgave us the magical umlaut of Motörhead. The Scandinavian version of the Allman Brothers Band cooked.
Velveteen at Berlin
Velveteen
Loud guitar washes with a sober melodic lyricism. Shades of dissonance. Velveteen is no fuss, no muss shoegaze from the UK. You couldn’t always hear the vocals. You couldn’t always hear the drums, guitar, or bass. But whatever you did hear was loud, and it filled Berlin, a venue the size of two shoe boxes set at a right angle, like a humpback whale trying to impregnate a field mouse.
Forest at Berlin
Forest
Los Angeles’ Forest was on fire – you would’ve thought the club was named Dresden, not Berlin. The alt rockers performed as a five-piece, which is a tight fit for the subterranean stage (but was soon to be outdone by a six-piece Constant Smiles). The extra proximity only seemed to ramp up their energy, and they leaned into the headbangable riffery while the singer floated on top. Forest is one of those “hard juxtaposition” outfits where noisy guitars accompany angelic vocals. An Evanescence sort of thing. Works every time.
Constant Smiles at Berlin
Constant Smiles
Constant Smiles is an indie rock collective, a ship which seems steered primarily by Ben Jones and Spike Currier (hat tip, MV Times). You never know what you’re going to get, night to night. On Friday, the band set up on the Berlin stage with six musicians. A lot, but not the New Colossus record, now that we’re on the subject. Peer Pleasure offered eight musicians on Wednesday – though, if we’re splitting hairs, at least two of them were topless and roaming the pit at any given moment. The collective included a violin and saxophone, which stirred up a fine froth when they started to scrape, screech, and honk. The rest of the set was dedicated to quieter and more contemplative indie pop fare.
WATCH CONSTANT SMILES LIVE ↓
Gamblers at Bowery Electric
Gamblers
Gamblers brought the electropop to Bowery Electric. With a little rock n roll grit to boot, befitting a joint with a floor-to-ceiling reproduction of a magazine cover photo featuring – who is that? – Blondie’s Debbie Harry and one of the Ramones?
The band is another local offering from a music festival that wildly and gloriously oscillates between artists from around the block and around the world. All except this bill, which fielded four NYC locals, plus a Berlin, Germany capper for the hell of it.
Gamblers performed “Pulverizer,” the title track off their latest album. The catchy song gets by on a pulsating beat and autotuned tagline: “Pulverizer!” Autotune might be the disco beat of our era, a love that, sooner enough, will dare not speak its name. But we’re not there yet, and that song cooked.
Ranch Ranch at Bowery Electric
Ranch Ranch
Ranch Ranch. The band so nice they named it twice. This outfit’s got a stutter-step delivery reminiscent of Talking Heads. It’s a post punk rhythm you can dance to. Does their tribute to junk food “American Cheeseburger” stack up to the wry social critique of David Byrne’s poetic lyricism? It all depends on what you mean by “stack” and “up.”
Bakers Eddy at Pianos
Bakers Eddy
Bakers Eddy isn’t asking for it, because they can’t afford it. So goes the tagline for the alt rocker’s song “Can’t Afford It.” A poppy, uptempo banger with an anthemic chorus that 99% of us can relate to. Also included in the set, a sweet ode upon their native Wellington, New Zealand, called “Manners Street.” Sounds an awful lot like Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” if anyone is asking, which they’re not.
A touching tribute, nonetheless, to the home of the Battle of Manners Street, which was less a battle, more a drunken brawl between American and New Zealand servicemen during WWII. Apparently, the locals were pissed off that the Americans were stealing their women. So everyone started clobbering everyone. The Greatest Generation, amirite?
Winkler at Pianos
Winkler
Indie rockers Winkler brought the psych-informed flavors of their latest album Bazooka Baby to the stage at Pianos. The five-piece loves vintage pre-punk pop sounds and subtly complex arrangements, which you could hear in their performance of the title track “Bazooka Baby.” A medium tempo waggle, interlacing vocal harmonies, and refrains that shrink and stretch like the limits of a rubber band being tested. The song feels like a Jenga structure that wobbles in the breeze but never quite falls over.
Mister Motivation at Pianos
Mister Motivation
“Anything you want to do in life. Anything you want to be. Be that, do that!” So spoke Mister Motivation, who is actually a motivational speaker. Sultry, medium tempo rhymes carried along positive messages like fallen leaves floating down a stream. What other way to end the night and TGIF than the closing set at Pianos? The Venn diagram between rapper and motivational speaker is as large as you want it to be. So be that, do that.
That’s it. You survived. Or is there another day of music at The New Colossus Fest? The massive indie music festival on NYC’s Lower East Side is already booked for 2026. Hump Day News, in all likelihood, will see you there.
Photo Gallery
Constant Smiles collects the collective at Berlin.