Alien in a Dive Bar: Touring a Data-Driven World
The tour supporting our new album wasn’t a traditional series of gigs. It was part performance art, part dystopian opera, part dance party. From the moment we stepped onto stage, the intention was clear: create a visual and sonic language that mirrored the album’s descent into surveillance, control, and eventual collapse.
The band appeared suited and anonymous, each member wearing stark alien masks. These figures represented the faceless, data-driven machinery of control and the alienation inherent to technological disconnect. In contrast, our two vocalists embodied a kind of corrupted memory, dressed in flamboyant vintage disco attire, like echoes of a more expressive past. This tension between future and past, between cold uniformity and warm exuberance, sat at the heart of our stage aesthetic.
We played four venues in Boston, Massachusetts, New Haven, Connecticut, Providence, Rhode Island and Philadelphia, PA. These were small venues and intimate room settings that made the visuals all the more surreal. The friction between the kitschy nostalgia of the singers and the ominous anonymity of the masked players disoriented people, but in the best way. It made them look again. It made them listen differently.
The most powerful moments came in the way the vocalists moved through the story. The album’s arc follows a central protagonist, a symbolic human figure, who begins the record in resistance but is gradually overtaken, digitized, broken down. On stage, this unraveling was physical. You could see the collapse in their posture, pacing, and delivery. Each night the performance transformed slightly, as if even the characters were trying to escape the fate written for them.
The response was striking. People weren’t just clapping…they were watching intently. Feeling. Asking questions after the set. This wasn’t spectacle for spectacle’s sake. It was a way of making the album legible to the body, not just the brain.
We wanted people to realize that the control mechanisms we're singing about aren’t abstract. They’re already here. And our job as performers, as creators, as citizens is to unmask them. Or at the very least, dance in their face before they shut the lights off.
