Noise Pop is one of San Francisco’s most reliable musical smorgasbords: Every year, the festival — distributed all over San Francisco and the broader Bay Area — wraps up a few dozen musical acts into an all-encompassing showcase of the city’s musical spaces. It skews left-of-center and local, prioritizing more intimate shows and experiences over the bombast of a traditional music festival. (Case in point: headliners St. Vincent and Ben Gibbard both performed at the Grace Cathedral this year.) Many of my favorite musical memories in San Francisco have come from Noise Pop’s programming. It is great and eclectic and we are lucky to have it.
To that end, I spent two evenings this weekend at vastly different shows — in audience, genre, and general vibe.
Friday: Oddly Satisfying with Ky Newman and atlgrandma at Gray Area
I’ll just get this out of the way: I spent Friday night watching a DJ set featuring a guy who is best known for producing, not hosting, a podcast.
Ky Newman is the behind-the-boards guy for the Gen Z brain-rot podcast Emergency Intercom, of which I am an avid listener. He has cool co-signers, palling around with The Dare and opening up for hyperpop musical duo Frost Children. Based on the amount of thirsty fan videos of him on TikTok, he’s something of an internet heartthrob. There’s also a local tie: He grew up in the North Bay. (He shouted out his parents in attendance at the show, before joking that they would get back together if the show sold out. It did, but no word on his parents’ relationship.)
If the last paragraph felt like reading Wingdings, I don’t blame you: The core demographic of the show was terminally online late teens and twentysomethings. Judging by the crowd, I would hazard a guess that the average age at this show was the youngest of anything on Noise Pop’s bill this year. A group of girls behind me were double-fisting their Sonny Angels and snuck-in Fireball shooters; the screen projected, among many other surreal images, an AI-generated photo of a pregnant Dobby from Harry Potter. Newman’s online-chic persona might’ve been the thing that got people through the door, but they stuck around because the mix was certifiably good.
The DJ set, a collaboration with cool-guy L.A. producer atlgrandma titled Oddly Satisfying, was akin to watching those split-screen TikToks showing Subway Surfers and Family Guy and soap-cutting videos all at the same time. Mashups abounded, from the obviously brilliant (“Dancing On My Own” and “HOTTOGO!”) to the truly baffling (The Smashing Pumpkins into Ice Spice into Troye Sivan; or for the real heads, “Here’s Where the Story Ends” into “Faceshopping”). Grooves would cut out and segue into an entire first verse of a Sufjan Stevens or Alex G song. By my count, at least six Charli xcx tracks were played. Nightcore and Brazilian funk and NewJeans all shared space together. At its best, it boggled the mind, the sort of thing that only comes after growing up with a limitless library of music at your fingertips at any moment. I felt giddy and overstimulated.
Saturday: Soccer Mommy at The Fillmore
The preoccupations of the crowd at Soccer Mommy felt decidedly less youthful than the night before; around me on the Fillmore floor were folks sipping IPAs as they griped about sleeping well on airplanes and taking the dog out for pee-walks. On the second evening of her two-night Noise Pop headlining stint Saturday, there was a clear “this is a rare night out” energy throughout. It struck me as strange: Soccer Mommy is the musical moniker of Nashville-based musician Sophie Allison, who emerged in the mid-2010s as a college student making youthful homespun guitar music. (One of her earliest albums was titled For Young Hearts.)
But we grew up, and so did she. There is a workmanlike quality to her music; every two years or so, she has reliably dropped a very good album with at least a couple of essential songs. Her recent output, in particular, has been muscular, increasingly large-scale alternative rock informed by shoegaze and grunge. Even as the instrumentation (and the audiences) around her have grown big enough to fill ballrooms, her songs still carry the emotional honesty and thoughtfulness of her early bedroom pop. She is one of the most consistently great rockers we have right now, a part of a lineage that extends from Liz Phair to Olivia Rodrigo.
A consummate professional, Allison put on a great show: Just the songs, a quick “thanks, guys” chirped in between, an encore, requisite thanks. A no-band performance of early-career breakthrough “Still Clean” drew a hush throughout the crowd. Opening track “Abigail” — a love letter to the beloved character from the video game Stardew Valley — sparkled like her guitar. The crowd favorites, like “Circle the Drain” and “Your Dog,” reliably got folks moving. Her voice, one of the more emotive in the genre, was in fine form.
But I’ll take this time to gripe about the crowd, which increasingly feels like a constant at indie rock shows. We’ve really got to stop the "yelling out mommy/mother at the female indie rocker gig" epidemic. I get it: Her name is Soccer Mommy. But it’s played out. It’s corny. It’s almost always reserved for women making this sort of music, some of whom have already publicly expressed their disdain for it. And the less I say about the guy who inexplicably yelled “DJ Khaled!” like it’s a frat party in 2017 midway through the set, the better. Apparently crummy concert etiquette doesn’t just extend to The Youths.
