Black skinny jeans, thin scarves, tattered flannel shirts, distressed tights, studded hardware, chunky combat boots, and even the occasional, potentially performative, wired headphone set adorned a sea of feverish fans for The Hellp’s headlining show at the Brooklyn Steel last week.
Though there was no official dress code, the fans seemed to just collectively operate on the exact same wavelength. The Hellp have perfectly established the world in which their music lives, and they required no effort to get their audience to cross the threshold. I can’t remember a time where I have stepped into a venue and felt such a jarring temporal shift; it was as if I had walked right back into 2014, completely enveloped in a cigarette-smelling haze of indie sleaze.
Noah Dillon and Chandler Lucy have been making music together as The Hellp for just over a decade. It wasn’t until the 2020s “indie sleaze comeback,” however, that they began to gain traction. They built a cult following among fans of fellow underground artists, opening for and collaborating with acts like 2hollis, Yves Tumor, and The Dare. At the end of last year, they dropped their third album, Riviera.
I took up my post in the photo pit minutes before the show was set to begin. Every fan along the barricade seemed as though they had texted beforehand to coordinate their outfits. The whole crowd looked like a carefully casted editorial. I spoke to two girls, complimenting their outfits, and asked them what time they arrived to get their spot at the front. Camping culture for concerts has gotten so out of hand, I’m always curious.
“6:30,” they said.
The venue was packed full of fans front to back, wall to wall. It was a rare, forgiving spring evening, and yet the fans hadn't felt the need to waste it camping on a sidewalk for twelve hours. They drifted in whenever, claimed whatever pocket of floor they could find, and settled in. There was a rare absence of the usual ‘barricade’ desperation. No one was fighting for the perfect TikTok angle or vying for a moment of manufactured artist eye contact, they were truly and wholeheartedly there for the music, to lose their minds and dance.
When Noah & Chandler took the stage, the lights went out completely. The light leaking in from the exit doors was just enough to illuminate their silhouettes for the eyes to see, but my camera couldn’t capture a thing. Usually the arrival of an artist is met with a sea of screens, but this show flipped that on its head. They opened with two tracks off of their most recent album, “Country Road” and “Pray to Evil.” The collective voice of the fans singing the words back nearly drowned out the microphones on stage, and the room genuinely shook as everyone jumped up and down in the pit. It was truly a unique crowd to watch, in all the best ways.
The fans were the embodiment of “effortlessly cool,” but at the same time, did not shy away from dancing their hearts out. Hands flew, combat boots stomped the ground, and bodies became one as the crowd moved with the music, undulating with each beat like an ocean during a storm. There is something special in abandoning being nonchalant; a beauty in being unafraid to care, and in dancing like no one else is in the room, despite being shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands of other people. As they closed their show with long-time fan favorite, “Ssx,” fans showed no sign of fatigue, moving with the same energy with which they began the night.
The Hellp only have a few more shows planned thus far, but keep on the lookout for more from them on the horizon. You can view the full gallery of photos from the show HERE.