Citizen and Knuckle Puck
With members hailing from northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan, Citizen makes its first headline appearance at Observatory North Park on June 1. If you don’t live in a windowless basement, you may be unfamiliar with this five-man emo band that you probably wouldn’t take a second look at if you saw one of their soporific videos while flipping through channels. Visually, they’re a model of low-key anonymity. But if you were to spin a radio dial and come across an audio track from one of their three deceptively rich and evocative albums, you’d probably either be checking the playlist readout to see who the hell this mopey angst-filled group is, or (for those with less 21st century rides) you’d be sitting in your parking space with the car still running, hoping the DJ would ID the track for you while backed-up drivers get all emo (and even aggro!) over your parking spot.
Opening band Hunny began as the solo project of singer-guitarist Jason Yarger, who eventually expanded the lineup and released a debut single, “Cry For Me,” that quickly topped many tastemaker charts at Hype Machine and elsewhere. Their debut EP Pain/Ache/Loving was produced by Eric Palmquist (Trash Talk, Bad Suns) and yielded another viral hit single, “Natalie.” The bill includes Chicago pop-punk-emo band Knuckle Puck and a relatively new (since around 2015) emo group from Long Beach called Oso Oso, who released their first EP for big-time Warner Brothers subsidiary Triple Crown Records last year.