The Regrettes at Majestic Theatre on May 14, 2022 has been postponed. Your ticket will be honored for the rescheduled date when announced. For any further ticket inquiries please reach out to point of purchase.

A message from The Regrettes:

hey y’all. after the toronto show on tuesday night, lydia started feeling some intense stomach pains. after returning to the hotel, they persisted and she ended up going to the er early the next morning. we found out that she was having some serious complications in her appendix and went into immediate surgery. we are so happy to say that the surgery went smoothly and she is doing much better today. unfortunately, we have no choice but to reschedule the rest of our upcoming tour dates through may 24th so that she can get the proper care that she needs to recover. we are heartbroken but endlessly thankful that lydia is safe. we love you. thank you for understanding. more info to come on rescheduled dates soon.

Based on the latest local guidelines, attendees are no longer required to provide proof of negative COVID-19 test AND/OR vaccination for entry into this event. Other shows on our calendar may still have specific health and safety requirements based on artist request.  Be sure to check our venue website for the latest updates and guidelines as entry requirements are subject to change. 

ABOUT THE REGRETTES

How Do You Love?, the sophomore LP from L.A. power-pop outfit The Regrettes, is a an album about the most universal of emotions: love. Throughout the record, 18-year-old frontwoman Lydia Night details the rise and fall of a relationship—from that first rush of butterflies, through a destructive break-up, to ultimately finding peace and closure.

The album arrives on the heels of a few explosive years for The Regrettes. In 2018, the band— currently rounded out by members Genessa Gariano (22, guitar), Brooke Dickson (24, bass) and Drew Thomsen (22, drums)—released their critically acclaimed Attention Seeker EP, as well the passionate standalone anti-Kavanaugh anthem “Poor Boy,” which ELLE deemed “a feminist call to arms.” The group also dominated the year’s top summer festivals, from Coachella to Reading + Leeds, landing on the covers of LA Times and LA Weekly and earning praise from the likes of Rolling Stone, Billboard, USA Today, Variety, and The Guardian. Together, the group has graced the stages of CONAN and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, toured extensively across North America and Europe, and garnered widespread acclaim from NPR, Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, Consequence of Sound, and many more since the 2017 release of their breakthrough debut album, Feel Your Feelings, Fool!

Taking that momentum in stride, The Regrettes are excited to move into their next era. Night, who wrote the vast majority of lyrics on How Do You Love?, came up with the idea after writing a group of songs about her experiences in various real-life relationships. From there, she says, she “realized that they all fit together and tell a story.”

This story begins with a spoken-word poem, as Night diagnoses the listener as being “infected” with a “love disease.” From there, the album is off to the races: the first song is the recently released standout “California Friends,” a danceable track about the excitement—and the nerves—that come with meeting someone new. “[It’s about] not knowing your feelings towards that person, really,” Night says, “but your gut is telling you that you like them, or love them, but you just know that it’s not what’s easiest [for you].”

A little less than halfway through the record, with the sauntering “Stop and Go,” Night pumps the breaks a bit: “Stop before we lose control,” she sings, “Let’s take a breath before we go, go, go.” She explains that the song is about realizing that her new relationship isn’t perfect: “A lot of times,” she says, “at the beginning of a relationship, there’s just nothing wrong. But then the problems start popping up. [You discover] there’s a lot you don’t like about the person—a lot of [qualities] you don’t think you can be with.”

By “Dead Wrong,” these problems have become insurmountable for Night. And in the last quarter of the record (“Go Love You,” “Hasn’t Hit You,” and “Here You Go”), she makes the decision to leave—and she’s not looking back. “I feel strong in this decision and I am right,” she says of the emotion that inspired those latter songs. “I’m doing what’s best for myself—have you learned that yet for yourself?”

Although Night ends up alone in her story, the tone of the album’s closer (and title track), “How Do You Love?” is hardly bitter. Instead, it’s a self-reflection on the journey of falling in and out of love—with hope for the future: “It’s about finding bravery through [love],” Night says. “It’s about learning and accepting that, yes, you went through a shitty breakup, but that’s amazing—because all that means is next time you’re in a relationship, you know so much more about yourself and about what you want.”

Returning to Night’s original diagnoses of the listener being “infected” with love, the record makes it very clear that The Regrettes are infected, too—but that’s not a bad thing. The band hopes that the album will provide “the cure,” by showing listeners that no matter how they’ve experienced love—whether it’s romantic, platonic, or self-love—they’re never alone.

ABOUT ALEX LAHEY

An Australian singer/songwriter with a sardonic streak and a flair for crafting melodically charged and relatable pop-punk anti-anthems, Alex Lahey broke through in 2016 with her instant-classic ‘You Don’t Think You Like People Like Me’. Since then she has released two Top 30 ARIA-charting albums, I Love You Like a Brother in 2015 and 2019’s The Best of Luck Club. In 2021, Alex returned with her explosive single ‘Spike the Punch’, which The New York Times called a “potent blast of sweetly spring-wound power-pop”. Lahey has also recently appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and wrote & performed original music for the Oscar-nominated animated film The Mitchells vs. The Machines. Her highly anticipated third album is expected in late 2022.

Based on the latest local guidelines, attendees are no longer required to provide proof of negative COVID-19 test AND/OR vaccination for entry into this event. Other shows on our calendar may still have specific health and safety requirements based on artist request.  Be sure to check our venue website for the latest updates and guidelines as entry requirements are subject to change. 

ABOUT GANG OF YOUTHS

Gang Of Youths frontman David Le’aupepe isn’t like other singers. A charismatic man apart,
a creative livewire who’s a deep thinker at the same time as being an incessant talker, a
militant look-forwarder who has no intention of resting on any of the success his band have
achieved over the past decade.
Take this answer to a question about his group’s back catalogue, for instance. “I don’t want
to hear the last two albums,” he says. “I want to wake up in a world where they didn’t
happen.”
But they did happen, so let’s have a quick recap: Gang Of Youths were formed in Sydney,
Australia in 2011 by Le’aupepe and some like-minded mates. Within months of their first
gig, they’d started to attract a rabid fanbase enraptured by their expansive, widescreen take
on indie-rock, the sort of black magic music that manages to feel universal and personal at
the same time. They honed this sound over two records, on 2015’s The Positions and 2017’s
Go Farther In Lightness, and won four of Australia’s prestigious ARIA Awards on the back of
their Platinum-selling second album. Word spread further afield too, helped by an extensive
support tour in the US and Europe supporting Mumford & Sons. They relocated to London
towards the end of 2017, all living in a house together in Angel, North London. Their current
line-up is completed by Max Dunn (bass), Jung Kim (guitar, keyboards), Donnie Borzestowski
(drums) and Tom Hobden (keyboards, guitar, violin).
“After the first album, we were getting pushed and pulled a little bit,” Le’aupepe says. “In
Australia we got too big, I think.” Living in the UK has given him the chance to reassess what
he wants from being in a band and where he wants Gang Of Youths to go next. “Instead of
trying to play to every seat in the house, I realised I wanted to play for an audience of one. I
spent so much of my early twenties giving too much of a fuck about what people thought.”
The band had planned to have a creative reset before COVID enforced a downing of tools in
early 2020. They took it as a sign for complete artistic overhaul. “I think it’s been challenging
for us, this whole process,” says Dunn, “but it’s probably going to be good for our music.
We’ve gone in a less safe direction and it’s going to be more in line with Dave’s actual vision,
rather than Dave pumping something out to get a deadline met.” “We’re exploring so many
different territories and sides of ourselves and that’s manifesting in the music,” adds Kim.
“We’re doing things that have never really made an appearance in Gang Of Youths.”
Gang Of Youth’s new music fuses their knack of soaring melodies, indelible hooks and
dynamic rock uplifts with a love of neoclassical, minimalist composers and experimental
sampling. They’re embarking on the most vital phase of their career so far. “We’re trying to
use a lot of samples of indigenous music recorded by a guy named David Fanshawe,”
explains Le’aupepe. Fanshawe was an English composer and globe-trotting musicologist
who compiled a comprehensive archive of indigenous music. “I reckon his family have got
vaults and vaults of the shit he recorded when he went to the Pacific.”
Moving into their own studio in Hackney has given the group an excuse to go deep-diving
with new ideas. “It’s life-changing,” says Dunn. “You can come in and try and a random
instrument on a random part for four hours on your own, and you’re not wasting an
engineer’s time or costing the band money.” “There’s not the pressure of a studio
environment to workshop a song,” adds Borzestowski.
For Le’aupepe, working in their own studio and learning how to engineer and produce
themselves has been a liberating experience, all part of a collaborative new approach in the
band. “The songs feel more written together, structurally at least, which is something that
never happened before.”
Lyrically, the new material inhabits a similarly fascinating space. Le’aupepe will tell you that
he’s had writer’s block for five years, but he’ll also shift mesmerically through the gears as
he explains the themes of these songs, tracks about his relationship with his father, who
died recently, about Pacific identity, marriage, colonisation, missed conversations, life and
how it all boils down to those innocuous small print moments. “Lyrically, I used to wait to be
all grandiose and romantic, big fucking sweeping fields of Bruce Springsteen-isms and Nick
Cave,” says Le’aupepe. “Now I want to put beauty to the nothingness of most
conversations.”
Despite and indeed because of frontman Dave Le’aupepe’s father’s absence, his influence
permeates every talking point that the album offers. At times it’s solely focused upon the
precise, personal experiences of loss: the dichotomy of intensity and peace that comes as
someone passes through their final days; the overwhelming feeling in the wake of their
death that life will never be the same, even if the rest of the world at large remains utterly
unchanged.
Although the album is eclectic – influences range from American minimalism and
contemporary classical, to drawing upon the legacy of Britain’s alternative/indie scenes,
from drum ‘n’ bass to the most transcendent moments of Britpop – it’s equally rooted in
Le’aupepe’s Samoan heritage, with the majority of tracks featuring samples from David
Fanshawe’s recordings of indigenous music from the Polynesian islands and the wider South
Pacific.
Living in Angel and London has had an effect on these songs, too. The theme of angels is a
recurring symbol in their new music. “It’s a very London album,” says Dunn. For Le’aupepe,
moving to the UK capital offered the opportunity to disappear into a city of millions. “It just
feels like a nice place to be private. It’s a good place to blend in.”
Often, bands who taste success early in their career, as Gang Of Youths did with huge sales
in their homeland, fall into the trap of turning into a photocopy of a photocopy of
themselves. Every decision becomes wrought with the fear that it might all fall apart. Gang
Of Youths are setting fire to the photocopier instead. “I don’t have to try and remake the
same album 50 times. I just want to invest time in new sounds and being open to the
world,” says Le’aupepe. “We just wanted autonomy to fuck around.”
Singers in rock bands rarely require a second invitation to wax lyrical about their success
and life in the glorious limelight. Rarer still if that singer has all the ingredients for a major
breakthrough sitting in his back pocket: such as, say, three captivating studio albums and a
burgeoning mass of diehard fans.
But Le’aupepe operates in the here and now. Gang Of Youths are making new music that is
primed to connect with the masses; crafting songs that match the age-old anthemic thrills of
rock music with a forward-thinking approach.