Monday, April 6, 2026 - 8:00pm

7 PM – Doors
8 PM – Show

ART BRUT: Bang Bang Rock and Roll plus Greatest Hits

This story begins like all other sagas just like it: They formed a band. Imagine the squeaky play button of a Sony Cassette Player pressing down into place as we chart the genesis of Art Brut, the London pop group formed to fulfill their destiny of writing a song with the same reach and popularity of “Happy Birthday”. On the other hand, main man Eddie Argos once claimed, “One of the main reasons I’m in a band is to watch other bands for free.” The choice of myth is yours.
Whatever their mission, Art Brut were aided by the taste-making scribes at Pitchfork right around the time the phrase “The Pitchfork ESect” was entering the indie rock lexicon. This was 2005, the height of the Chicago website’s ability to break new artists, so bestowing the band’s debut album Bang Bang Rock & Roll with a 9.1 score – and, later, ranking it the third best LP of the year – was the kind of boost that every indie kid armed with a cheap guitar was dreaming of. Everyone around Argos was excited about it, and maybe he would have been too if he wasn’t an extremely oSline person. When promotional commitments demanded it, Argos would trek to the McDonald’s on Kilburn Road and put coins into a public computer that would drip him some precious internet. (It’s a funny thing, then, that the computer-unsavvy singer ended up writing a regular blog for The Guardian in 2007.)
Argos’ dreams centered not on websites and blogs, but Top of the Pops and the New Musical Express. Except Top of the Pops only had about a year left in its original run, and NME was navigating the downfall of print by seemingly searching for the kind of cover bands not named Oasis that could sell copies. This was definitely not Art Brut, five kids who embraced a kind of English art college hipster nerdism, performing songs about experiences that typically occur when the second bottle of cheap red wine has been opened. Arriving at the intersection of all these diSerent eras, they comfortably fit nowhere. Even the decision to hide a song in the pregap of the CD edition of Bang Bang Rock & Roll felt antiquated. (Remember those? When the first track needed to be rewound to hear the song?)
And yet, Art Brut evidently struck a chord with listeners who wanted smarter music than what most landfill indie bands were serving, but weren’t above monster choruses. They seemed tailor-made for an audience who could register in Argos their own High Fidelity existence of obsessing over music and girls. The singer’s fantasies of miming UK top 40 singles in a BBC studio reflected his artistic philosophy – it’s about pop music and what happens when kids discover it, are captivated by it, and enlightened by it. It’s about the moments that happen when pop songs play in the background, and how they linger in our ears and in our lives.