boygenius w/ illuminati hotties at KettleHouse Amphitheater

Doors @ 6:30 pm

Acclaimed indie rock supergroup boygenius, will perform for the first time in Montana with opening band illuminati hotties at KettleHouse Amphitheater in Bonner on Tuesday, August 1.

Tickets on sale at The Top Hat, The ELM, online, or by phone at 800-514-3849. General Admission standing pit tickets, reserved stadium seating tickets, and general admission lawn tickets are available. Shuttle and parking tickets for this event are also available for advance purchase here. All ages are welcome.

boygenius is a supergroup that formed in 2018 when singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus came together to collaborate on a series of songs. The resulting EP, also called “boygenius,” was released to critical acclaim and quickly became a fan favorite.

The band’s forthcoming debut studio album, The Record, releases March 31st and is already making waves. One headline from Rolling Stone reads “The Debut Album From Boygenius Is Even Better Than Everyone Had Hoped” while NME is calling it “the instant classic we were hoping for.”

The music of boygenius is known for its emotional depth, introspective lyrics, and haunting melodies. The three singer-songwriters each bring their own unique style and perspective to the group, creating a sound that is unlike any other.

It’s going to be an extra special experience to see all of them performing together on stage. Don’t miss it!

(Fun fact: all three artists have played at the Top Hat in Missoula!)

About boygenius
Once, when boygenius was on a road trip in Northern California, Phoebe asked Julien and Lucy to listen to a very important song, and pushed play, and got on the freeway headed in the wrong direction. The song was “Trapeze Swinger” by Iron & Wine—about a dead person telling the living how he wants to be remembered. It was impossible to interrupt this ten-minute-long song. Because of how the exits were spaced, “Trapeze Swinger” added an hour to their travel time. Phoebe felt like an idiot. Lucy turned that drive into the song “Leonard Cohen.”

What happens when you see an hour-long detour, not as a detour, but as part of the trip—the part where you listened to “Trapeze Swinger” while driving the opposite direction from your destination. Does that become the most valuable hour on the trip? Does time transform into something other than alternating “valuable” and “not valuable” hours? What if the right song can dislodge, for its duration, this piece of capitalist furniture?

the record started in June 2020. A week after Punisher came out, Phoebe sent Lucy and Julien a demo of “Emily I’m Sorry” and asked if they could be a band again—for the first time since those five short months in 2018, when the boygenius EP was conceived, written, recorded, released, and toured. Nobody had wanted to be the first to ask—to make such a demand on everyone’s time. Now, Julien made a Google Drive folder called “dare I say it?”, and everyone flooded it with potential songs.

the record is about recapturing joy—about the wasteful detour that turns out not to be the most important thing. Julien wrote “$20” after realizing that what she wanted for the band was More Sick Riffs. It’s hard to say such things as an individual artist, when it’s your music, soon to be collapsed with your identity. You don’t want to seem like—or be—a superficial meathead. But it’s things like sick riffs that made you truly giddy when you were first learning how to play, making music with your friends “for no reason.” Why do non-reasons sometimes feel so much more urgent than reasons?

the record is about making time, and finding new ways to record it, over time. The opening track, “Without You Without Them,” picks up where the EP left off—with “Ketchum, ID,” and an old-school Carter Family vibe—and it’s a song about picking up where something else left off, about everyone who came before, and made the person you love now. Lucy had been singing this song for years, while she did the dishes. A recurring theme: what we see about each other is a tiny fraction of a huge glacier that shifts over time. On a historical scale, that means you were shaped over hundreds of years, by people you’ll never know. On a human scale, who you are is constantly revealed, as you live, to the people who are paying attention. History loses its mystery. (Lucy: “I find comfort in knowing that I’m going to know you two a long time, and get to see the different iterations of the person you are.”) Because it’s disclosed over time, truth is constantly changing: the theme of “True Blue.” It comes together and disperses, like planetary formations.

The first thing boygenius did after getting vaccinated last April was meet up to write music together. That’s where the record changes. The first four songs were written individually. The rest are conversations. Sometimes, each person takes a verse, and writes their own version—like on “Satanist,” which Julien, who was raised religious, wrote, after watching the documentary “Hail Satan?.” She could, she thought, be a Satanist—and would her friends join her for this phase in the journey? In other words: “Do you want to be in my life a long time?” Or, as Phoebe put it: “Would you still love me if I was a bug?” Isn’t that what time is—the thing that makes everyone into a bug?

Lucy first sang “We’re In Love” a cappella to Phoebe, in Phoebe’s bed, on New Years Day in 2022. They were holding each other’s faces: a function of totally legal drugs. Lucy was weeping and did not blink. Later, in the studio, Julien thought the song was too… long. In retrospect, Julien hadn’t been ready to engage. When the truth sank in, the truth of a love song, she went away for six hours. (Julien: “It’s still a learning process to know the difference between being scrutinized and being seen.”) Then she came back. She was ready.

The album was recorded in January 2022, at Shangri-La, in Malibu: ten-hour days every day, for a month. Nobody questioned the schedule. (Julien: “We are all at least one type of the same psycho. The Venn diagrams overlap in ‘Every day for a month.’”) At one point, Julien was freaking out because there weren’t a thousand guitar tracks on “Emily I’m Sorry.” Lucy comforted her by pointing out that Phoebe was definitely going to rewrite that song a thousand times: the neuroses smoothed each other out. Back home, Julien made a thousand guitar tracks and emailed them to

Catherine Marks, the co-producer, while Phoebe re-recorded “Revolution 0” and changed the words at the last minute. She “did the Flaubert.” (Julien: “That’s the old mot juste, my guy.”) The mot juste was “spiraling.”

Now the record is on the sound system and you’re merging onto the freeway. Glen Campbell’s guitar is doing the Sad Beatles, as the wrong exit comes up on the left. Soon you’ll be at the ocean, which Julien still sort of thinks is a creek, and the Venn diagrams are overlapping, and the years are rushing by in descending order. This interchange has way more than four levels. 2018 rushes past, and the EP—there’s Phoebe, and her dog!—and the illegal fireworks, and your mother’s father’s mother. Then the track changes, and it’s time for the overdue U-turn that isn’t actually overdue, and “spiraling” is the mot juste and the crack in your plan is where the light comes in. Why is this song is so long? How can it take this much time? Can we afford it? And meanwhile the time keeps unfolding, until the only think you had to sacrifice was the idea of sacrifice: everything was the important thing. Six hours later, you’re ready to engage, and 2023 is here, and the record is now.

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About illuminati hotties
After years of uncertainty including label disputes, unpaid royalties and a surprise (and successful) album drop,And she is ready to make some noise. Her new album Let Me Do One More is three years in the making and Tudzin’s most defiant and accomplished record to date. Let Me Do One More will be out on October 1st via Snack Shack Tracks (in partnership with Hopeless Records.)

After the success of her debut album, Kiss Yr Frenemies, and coining the term “tenderpunk,” illuminati hotties were on their way to recording and releasing a highly-anticipated sophomore album. However, things at the label started to fall apart, and illuminati hotties found themselves stuck in a contract with a label who didn’t have the infrastructure to put out the album the band had been crafting for months. “It felt like any momentum came to a screeching halt. It felt painful to pick up a guitar, to write, to record any loose ends that needed to happen to wrap up the album,” Sarah recalls.

With the emotional turmoil and uncertainty building over the label situation, Tudzin turned her focus to a new batch of songs that would become FREE I.H. Funneling all the raw feelings and letting go of any inhibitions, illuminati hotties released the collection of songs, carefully not defined as the “new album.” The critically-acclaimed, fan favorite, release closed the chapter on the label drama, and opened up the band musically to a whole world of possibilities.

The positive response to FREE I.H. brought back the energy and intention that had seeped out after the label fallout, and Sarah dove straight into the new album, Let Me Do One More. According to Sarah, “The songs tell a story of my gremlin-ass running around LA, sneaking into pools at night, messing up and starting over, begging for attention for one second longer, and asking the audience to let me do one more.”

With the album shaping up, Sarah knew that she didn’t want to sign a traditional label deal anymore. After all the work to get herself back creatively, she wanted to maintain as much autonomy and creative control as possible. She started an imprint label, Snack Shack Tracks, and partnered with Los Angeles-based, independent label, Hopeless Records. Together, they’re gearing up to release Let Me Do One More.

While FREE I.H. felt like an experimental conduit for self-expression at breakneck speed, Let Me Do One More is the fully-realized creative vision of two years of ambition, heartache, uncertainty, redemption, and ultimately triumph. Sarah reflects, “I love these songs and they’re a part of me and I’m proud of them.”

I have this pal who insists that all writers, all makers, all people who put anything in the world outside of themselves – we should all come to terms with the fact that nothing we do is finished. An acceptance, this pal says, that will bring so many of us closer to contentment with the fact that we sometimes age beyond whatever it is we create, and there’s no real way to adjust for that except to honor our emotional evolution and the work that allowed us to crawl our way towards it.

I’m not always invested in this idea as I should be, admittedly, but there’s something I love about knowing that the work can be revised as I revise the self, or that old work can be tended to in the search for new work.

But before I get into all of that, the high-reaching impact of aging beyond our creations and aching for corrections before they slip through their fingers, let me say that most importantly, I love any Illuminati Hotties album because Sarah Tudzin is one of my favorite types of writers: A writer who takes their craft seriously, but refuses to take themselves seriously. It is an achievement for album to hold a song as fluorescently tender as “Threatening Each Other,” teeming with an ever-growing longing and also a song as raucous and thrilling as “Pool Hopping,” which feels and sounds like the unfurling of a mischievous summer’s night with nothing to do other than cause some trouble with yourself and a small and eager crew.

To retreat to my initial point, though, what makes this album even more of an achievement is how the album arrived in the world and what it carries with it. For those who fell in love with Free I.H., as I did, you perhaps were drawn to it, as I was, by the miracle of an album that sounded unrestricted and autonomous. Not messy in an unrefined way, but messy in a way that was held up by risk-taking, and discovery.

To have that album and all of its brilliance exist by way of exit from a sticky and untenable label situation led Tudzin back here, to these songs that were, largely, written and put together before Free I.H. was made. But this is how the process works when it comes to the creation of almost anything: the work makes a path to the work. It’s unromantic, probably. But with any luck, every time any of us sits down to create something, we walk out of it a little better or a little more skilled or a little more tender than we were before. And, also with any luck, we get to take all of that back into the world.

All of this brings me to the somewhat joyful act of revision as a tool not to correct your past self, but to revel in what you’ve created, what you are capable and might not be capable of again, with the reality that nothing is promised. It might be the darkness of the year – leaving me with no choice but to seek optimism around every corner – but Let Me Do One More is an album that sounds, to me, as hopeful and thrilling as newly discovered freedom. The lock you’ve been picking at for hours, finally falling to the floor, and the door opening to the weather you love most. Even the songs that sound winding and beautifully anguished, like “Kickflip,” feel like a release. To say nothing of the slow-moving cocoon-like nature of “Growth,” which encases me in something that feels like warmth. I love an album like this one: an album that doesn’t spare any complexity but still manages to be life-giving, and oh, how it is needed now.

Before even pressing play on the music, I suggest sinking into the title. If you, like me, are a sucker for titles and the joys of what they can hold. You might be like me, in that you maybe know a pal or love a pal who knows how to pull a night past whatever its logical ending point may be. The person who, when you are exhausted and dragging at 2am (though I am being generous to my present self here, it is more like midnight these days) turns up the radio and encourages a singalong, or finds a bit of mischief to collapse into right at the last minute. I’m thinking of those people now, the people I love, aching for a little more time together, a little more moonlight and a little more of the possibility it brings.

The outdoors are treacherous and in many ways untenable at the time of writing this, though I am trying for optimism. I love this album beyond its title, but I love its title for what it awakened in me. The memory of a different time, when touch was not at a premium. A time that might be slightly obsolete by the season you spin this record in. A time when I’d hear Let Me Do One More as a small and affectionate ode: let’s stay together a while. Let’s share something else. I’m not done yet.

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