It was a December night, and as finals’ hush fell across campus, we fled north to the Aragon Ballroom for their Twisted Xmas. Little did we know just how sick and twisted it would be. (Although there was no punk-Christmas music played, thank God). We went for Lovejoy, an up-and-coming band in the pop-punk scene whom we had found by misremembering the name of Grouplove.

Under the Ballroom’s eaves, nestled in a crowd of teenage girls and their mothers, we caught sight of a woman’s lock screen next to me: “I’m nothing without you” scrawled in gothic handwriting. We weren’t sure what we had gotten ourselves into. Were we joining some kind of cult? Something that might continue to fill us with stories and motivation long after the concert, long after the holidays, through this winter and into the coming years? Then, lead singer Wilbur Soot, a teenage girl’s dream, stepped on stage with tousled hair. His toothy smile put me at ease and his mellifluous British accent calmed and enthralled us as the music came on.

While Soot was the center of the show, what’s a boy band without its boys? Bassist Ash Kabosu stood to Soot’s left, rocking shoulder-length hair and dark shades, in front of drummer Mark Boardman. Lead guitarist Joe Goldsmith flanked Soot to his right, performing in front of Alan Osmundson, the band’s touring trumpeter and keyboard player (who’s also an MIT Aerospace Engineering grad).

Lovejoy opened with a rolling drum beat, a groovy bass line, and an upbeat guitar melody. “Concrete” displayed all their charms. Soot counted his friends into the jam session before recalling a perhaps-fictional night out at 3 a.m. Someone, barely described, is making quite a commotion over Soot’s late-night kiss, enough that both our charming British boy and the bar’s bouncer is upset. Is this just a jealous fan? A long-term girlfriend? Someone a little too invested in that lovely accent? Soot recommends they “sleep on the concrete.” This tall, lanky boy, thin enough to be blown over by a small gust of wind, has a naughty streak in him! Soot’s music plays into emo and punk tendencies, writing about the dark sides of relationships and fighting the system, yet nastiness also comes from within him, giving him power and control.

And yet, somehow all the twisting only adds to this British boy’s allure. Soot’s songwriting is unconventional. It does not hold individual lines of lyrics like many other artists but instead rambles like prose, where one line is only understood by the context of the three lines before and after. With every song, the band publishes a short story. These short stories are just as much musical and emotional as they are lyrical. You would be forgiven for not knowing the names of “Concrete” or “It’s Golden Hour Somewhere” while they played. The refrains are so much less punctuated in his style, and it is hard to hear Soot sing those words over the sound of the entire crowd. Those of us at the concert experienced his stories collectively, uniting in these twisted and tousled emotions. Maybe this is a cult. We chose to join it by buying a hoodie, and they rewarded us with a trading card. What a great souvenir for my night with Wilbur the Hero.