The back room of a packed dive bar screams to life as the new stars of alt-pop arrive.
Tonight, Beat Kitchen is a portal: San Diego transplanted into Chicago’s soul. almost monday—alt-pop, sun-drenched, adolescent in the way only California can be—commands the room with a studied nonchalance. Their sound is a composite: guitar rock that flirts with funk, pop melodies sanded smooth by salt air, a restlessness barely contained within its own rhythms.
The Californian band burst onto the scene in 2020 and have since garnered over 600 million streams and five charting alternative radio songs, with “can’t slow down” being crowned No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart.
almost monday steps onto the stage and, suddenly, winter ceases to exist.
The set begins with “dive,” the eponymous opener of their debut album. The lyrics summon a dream of chromatic perfection—“to a dream that I want to see / where all of the colors shine.” But this sound is not mere nostalgia. The lyrics are dreamy, longing for “the place that I want to be / where the summers don’t stop;” the fantasy of eternal summer turned into a sound, a way of moving through the world.
“How are you doing, Chicago?” Dawson Daugherty, frontman, guitarist, vocalist—conductor of this particular fever dream—asks the crowd. The response is a roar, a full-bodied exhale from the audience. Bassist Luke Fabry nods, flashing the knowing grin of someone who has seen this scene before. Guitarist Cole Clisby prepares himself to take the crowd on a sharp left turn, launching into the hook of their first infectious guitar-driven track.
The band’s history—San Diego high schoolers turned surf shop performers turned festival fixtures—isn’t just a biography but a blueprint. This music is about ease, effortlessness, the choreography of youth performed so well they might have found the mythical fountain.
The riffs are bright, the basslines elastic. Songs like “is it too late?” and “can’t slow down” act as wormholes, leading not to a particular place but to a mood, an imagined paradise: beach bonfires, car windows down, time slowed to the beat of a song on repeat. DIVE leaves one imagining vignettes of summertime love and longing, recalling memories of a misspent youth.
Then, a rupture. Daugherty, mid-song, urges the audience to dance. Not just move, but dance. The request is both command and communion, promising that he “only wanna dance with you.” The crowd, already electrified, obeys.
It helps that Adrian Lyles has primed the room, opening the night with raw, emotional lyricism. His presence, like the band’s, is an argument for sincerity as spectacle, or perhaps spectacle as sincerity. Pairing personal authenticity with a fresh sound for pop, the young singer-songwriter is bound to generate excitement with his upcoming album, just as he brought the energy to the venue tonight.
Singing through their setlist, almost monday reminds us of the people who stick with us like “sunburn” and that we “look so good.” The crowd crammed into the beloved, no-frills music haunt unanimously welcomes the warming weather, now seemingly incited by the infectiously summery indie pop band’s arrival. By the time the band winds through the rest of DIVE, the night has fully surrendered to the fantasy, knowing “the sun keeps on shining.”
The audience sings the lyrics back, willing it into existence, if only for the duration of a chorus.
In Chicago, it is February. But for this moment, it is summer.
