Article & Photos by Kyle Ostrander
Brooklyn, NY – Every year, shoegaze band Nothing curates Slide Away Fest, a bicoastal music festival showcasing both legendary and emerging bands across shoegaze and its related genres. This year’s New York City edition featured an opening night party at Market Hotel with genre-bending titans Cloakroom headlining the show.
Fresh off the release of their latest record Last Leg of the Human Table, which dropped last month, Cloakroom had just spent the past month on an expansive North American tour. The album brings together a blend of influences, ranging from post-rock to punk, and almost everything in between. The new songs are a continued musical evolution and exploration for the trio, underscored by their views on the current state of the world. Fans at Friday night’s performance buzzed with excitement at the chance to hear the new songs live, and Cloakroom did not disappoint.
Having brought a second guitar player on tour to make the loud even louder, the four musicians walked on stage as the house lights turned a deep blue and fog rolled across the crowd. Immediately, hard-hitting fuzzed out chords resonated through the walls as the first notes of “The Pilot” rang in the venue. The steady groove of the track, embraced perfectly by the band’s rhythm section, had the crowd bobbing and swaying to the beat. The tempo soon sped up and ambient reverberated tones took the air as the group dove into “Story of the Egg” next. “New York! How are we living? How are we feeling? How are we doing tonight? We’re Cloakroom and we’re stoked to be here!” said singer/guitarist Doyle Martin, before elevating the energy to an even higher level with the fast-paced upbeat “Ester Wind”.
The approximately 50 minute set consisted mainly of tracks from their new album, with a few cuts pulled from their previous release, 2022’s Dissolution Wave. The group was clearly having fun together playing through the songs, as they often flipped and thrashed their instruments, oscillating to the distorted majesty of sound that entranced the audience. Showing appreciation at the end of their set, Martin took a moment to thank their sound engineer, lighting tech, the opening bands, the venue, Slide Away Fest for having them, and most importantly their fans for supporting them and the fest.
If you missed Cloakroom on this tour, you can still catch them at the West Coast installation of Slide Away Fest in Los Angeles, where they’ll be playing the fest’s closing show at The Echoplex on May 25th.