Rock · LiveFP-014 · Side A
wave to earth Fill Radio City
Six thousand seats, a living-room stage set and a second album that reaches past lo-fi jazz. The Seoul trio played Radio City like a band that already knew it belonged in the room.
On Tuesday, September 29, the Seoul trio of Daniel Kim, John Cha and Dong Q walked onto the stage at Radio City Music Hall, a room of about six thousand seats, and every one of them was sold.
That is a large step for a band that came up on the quiet end of indie, built on brushed drums, chorus-soaked guitar and Kim's soft, close-miked voice. It is also not a surprise to anyone who has watched the numbers. "seasons" has passed 500 million streams, "bad" went to No. 1 on Spotify's Viral 50 Global chart, and the band arrived on this tour with more than seven million monthly listeners, according to the tour announcement.
A room built for something bigger
Radio City is a hard room for a soft band. The proscenium arch swallows small gestures, and the three balconies sit a long way back. wave to earth answered with a set that looked like a living room scaled up: warm lamps, tall lit windows behind the players, and a wide screen over the stage that cut between close shots of hands on frets and grainy black-and-white footage. When the stage went red, the whole arch went with it.
The balconies were full to the top rows.
The new record, out loud
The tour is named for the band's second full-length album, bad pieces, and the show leaned on it. Sports Kyunghyang's report on the night describes songs that move past the lo-fi jazz base into new instruments and wider sounds, and the room met them with enthusiastic cheers. In a hall this size, that range is what lets a trio fill the room.
Where it goes from here
"the pieces tour" is a 21-city North American run promoted by Live Nation, with eight Asian dates from Bangkok to Tokyo in November and two Seoul shows at the end of the year. New York came straight after the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Both sold.
The band debuted in 2019 and put out its first EPs in 2020. On Tuesday six thousand people bought tickets to see it in one of the most famous rooms in the country, and it played like it expected them to.