REVIEW: Ty Segall and Snowmen Keep it Chill at Basilica Hudson
Photos by Pete Perry
“The onslaught of new songs shredded, meandered, slunk down winding and weird little corridors, surged up, and slowed back down, all stealthily leading into the next.”
In between scanning for friends, the bar, and the bathroom at a show, one can’t help but assess the audience, too. Afterall, if you’re driving 45 minutes to see a beloved musical act from your teens, the crowd is likely to give some insight into a genre, a generation, or maybe yourself.
In this case, things were pretty firmly spread across a few distinct cross sections of indie-music-enjoyers: graying millennial dads (three of which cut listlessly in front of me in the line outside, but it’s fine, I’ll channel my impotent irritation into this article); “Totebags,” a clever name given to “the latest iteration of the hipster,” as dropped recently by the video essayist Broey Deschanel in a YouTube video entitled When the City Becomes Content; and the only group that matters in my eyes in any room: stylish, cool girls.
And yet, maybe none of this is of much import in the end, because when the lights go down and it’s just you and your sweaty plastic drink cup, everyone turns together like giant sunflowers in a field toward the stage.
Ty Segall was joined by longtime collaborator Mikal Cronin (bass, vocals) as well as Emmett Kelly (guitar, vocals), Ben Boye (keys), and Evan Burrows (drums), frontloading the night with a marathon tidal wave of new material I hadn’t expected. Segall is known for being prolific. He’s no stranger to releasing multiple albums a year and has played in a number of psych punk bands in his time including Fuzz, the CIA (with his wife!), and GØGGS to name a few. His latest album, Possession, was released almost one year ago last May on Drag City.
It would be easy — and well received, I’m sure — for the group to lean into a sort of nostalgia tour. The old garage-rocky flavor of Lemons-era Ty Segall is what I grew up on and fell in love with, so it was surreal to hear early 2010s hits “Imaginary Person” and “Finger” off Melted and “Wave Goodbye” from Slaughterhouse played live. The onslaught of new songs shredded, meandered, slunk down winding and weird little corridors, surged up, and slowed back down, all stealthily leading into the next. Sometimes jammy, sometimes lightning fast, and quite a few containing sweet harmonies between Segall, Cronin, and Kelly. Around the one-hour mark, Ty and the guys left the stage and reemerged a minute or two later for an encore, their collectively impressive heads of hair wreathed in a thick, strawberry-red fog.
NYC’s SNOWMEN opened the night with songs off their 2025 album, A Kick To The Face, which ran the gamut from dancey, Parquet Courts-inspired tracks like “Prophet Margins” and B Boys-adjacent slower burns like “Primordial Soup”. Originally conceived as a Strokes cover band, the four-piece has since morphed into a band of their own within the last few years. Summed up simply and humbly in their Bandcamp’s bio: “Thank you for listening to and supporting our music - Zac, Kendall, Josh, Adam.” This sentiment, along with the night as a whole, was far from a kick in the face; much more like a new lease on a dear blast from the past.
