AJR @ Ball Arena

AJR brought their infectious beats to Ball Arena in Denver, CO on July 18th, 2024. Almost Monday & mxmtoon warmed up the stage and had the crowd moving in no time.

Almost Monday

San Diego trio, Almost Monday, make shiny, upbeat pop with glossy production and catchy hooks. They broke onto the music scene with their disco-infused 2020 track, “Broken People,” which appeared on their first EP, Don’t Say You’re Ordinary. Their sophomore EP, Til the End of Time, arrived in 2021. Festival appearances, tours with bigger bands, and a steady stream of new songs all set the stage for the band’s 2024 debut album.

Pulled from AllMusic

mxmtoon

The world first met Maia when she was a 17-year-old singer with a ukulele and a now-famous screenname: mxmtoon. In 2017, and from the guest bedroom in her parents’ California home, the high-school student began posting covers of pop favorites and her own catchy confessional musings. Tunes that spoke frankly of her setting’s assorted tribulations — dates and a lack thereof, online socializing and offline loneliness.

A queer kid of mixed Chinese, German, and Scottish ancestry, Maia sang songs that expressed an interiority of the underrepresented with honesty, understanding, and hooks that could not be forgotten. mxmtoon became a streaming sensation. Her teenage ditties defining a new era of what it meant to make bedroom pop. Stepping into the studio proper for her 2019 debut, the masquerade, mxmtoon became an avatar for the new bloom of representation and inclusion in American pop. When “prom dress” became a hit, Maia was still a teenager.

In truth, only five years have passed since Maia’s self-made songs and videos began shaping a new sort of star through mxmtoon. But at least two of those years have, of course, passed like decades. Each packed with enough worry and woe and loss and hope to catalyze aging at large. And so it goes with rising, mxmtoon’s bold and compelling and wise second album, a 12-song set that looks at the hardest lessons of these recent dark days and opts to surge forward through triumphs of pop-and-disco confessionalism.

pulled from Spotify

AJR

Re-envisioning what pop can be in the 21st century, AJR unassumingly emerged as a ubiquitous hit-making outlier and one of the biggest indie bands in the world. Since 2012, the multiplatinum indie pop trio—Adam [bass, vocals], Jack [vocals, guitar], and Ryan [ukulele, piano, vocals]—have generated billions of streams and earned one triple-platinum single, one double-platinum single, four platinum singles, and one platinum album. 2019’s Neotheater marked their biggest first-week debut, bowing at #8 on the Billboard Top 200, #1 on the Top Alternative Albums Chart, and #1 on the Top Rock Albums Chart.

Cemented as part of the modern zeitgeist, Spotify touted “Sober Up” [feat. Rivers Cuomo] among the “Best Rock Songs of the 2010s,” while Apple Music included “Weak” on its “Best Alt Songs of the 2010s.” Not to mention, they remain one of the “500 Most-Listened to Artists” on Spotify. On the heels of Neotheater, they dropped the 2020 platinum blockbuster “BANG!”, which they performed on TODAY, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and even at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and raced up the Alternative and Pop Radio charts. Now, the band has opened up their world like never before on their fourth full-length album, OK ORCHESTRA.

pulled from Spotify