After a month of touring – and making a quick stop at Furnace Fest in Alabama – Glare closed out their Fall 2025 tour in Carrboro, NC at Cat’s Cradle. Joining them on tour were Cloakroom (Northwest IN), JIVEBOMB (Baltimore, MD) and Destiny Bond (Denver, CO). The tour began with two shows in Glare’s hometown of McAllen, TX and ultimately hit 18 cities across the U.S. and Canada.
Glare and I hail from the southern border region of Texas known as the Rio Grande Valley, yet despite being from the same place, I kept missing the opportunity to see them play live in front of a hometown audience. It took being 1,500 miles away from home to finally see them in concert, and they did not disappoint.
Starting off the show was punk band Destiny Bond, making their Carrboro debut. I walked into the Backroom towards the beginning of their set and immediately took note of two things: the high intensity of the lead singer and the low intensity of the crowd. The vocals were shouty, the instrumentation was loud and fast, and the main vocalist had a strong stage presence. But being the first band on stage can be hard, especially when your job is to warm up a crowd that is cold – and this initial Carrboro crowd was icy. To make matters tougher, only a few people arrived early despite this being a sold-out show.
Despite this frigidity, Destiny Bond kept up the energy throughout the entirety of their set and pushed through the awkwardness. That push was eventually rewarded with some crowd engagement. Destiny Bond is persistent, high energy, and definitely deserving some two-stepping in the pit.
By the time JIVEBOMB took the stage, the crowd was warmed up and more engaged. Being a hardcore band, I always expect the intensity of sound in smaller settings to feel overwhelmingly loud. This wasn’t the case at Cat’s Cradle, but the bass was heavy. Like, feel it in your chest, your heartbeat is out of sync, heavy. As the set progressed, I found myself enjoying it more. I wouldn’t say the set started out slow, but the songs they played in the middle and at the end were just more exciting and dynamic. The pit was going hard, which I love to see.
During Cloakroom’s soundcheck, I met a man who came specifically to see Cloakroom and realized he wasn’t the only one. I wasn’t super familiar with Cloakroom, but I firmly believe that some of the best live music experiences happen when actively listening to live music that you haven’t heard before. This was the right choice.
There was so much to love about this band. The saturated distortion of the guitars created this fuzzy tone that is emblematic of shoe gaze, but there was also this dark undertone that countered the brightness of the guitars. On many of the more shoegaze tracks, the vocal tone of the main singer was almost a breathy, airy, high-pitched whisper. There were some great vocal harmonies between the two guitarists. The drums, and at times the bass, really drove the music forward, which was also very cool. There were some indie/alt songs mixed throughout, but most of the set was swimmy. As a stood in the crowd, the only way I could really conceptualize how the music felt was “That feeling you get when watching a horror movie after the villain has been defeated and the sun is beginning to peak over the horizon.”
(When I got home, I Googled Cloakroom and learned that their debut album Further Out recently celebrated its 10th anniversary – so guess I’ve been living under a rock.)
According to Wikipedia, Glare is a nu gaze band, but when I described them to that Cloakroom fan I met, I said that Glare plays “moody shoe gaze music with some wall of sound stuff happening.” By the time Glare came out, the Backroom was packed. Both guitarists and the bass player sing lead on different tracks, and their vocals are buried in the sound, which adds an ethereal element to the music. Some songs felt floaty while others had a heavy undertone (check out “Nü Burn”). One of my favorites things about this set was the use of these computer electronic sounds to fill in tuning moments and segue into the next song. As an audience member, it keeps you in the moment – the atmospheric bubble doesn’t pop.
This is my call to action: go see the bands you want to see and stay for the bands you’ve never heard of.
