Julia’s War Fest Plays Hooky

· 5 min read
Julia’s War Fest Plays Hooky

The Ukie Club scene Saturday night: Glowing vapes, <3 for fentanyl, and an intriguingly fancy menu I didn't get to try out.

Hooky at Julia’s War Fest
Ukie Club
847 N. Franklin St.
Philadelphia
May 19, 2024

Two-person indie electronica band Hooky adapted their lo-fi recorded tracks for live listening Saturday night, turning up the volume and playing up their stage presence for the hundreds who showed up to a two-day celebration of Philly’s DIY and shoe gaze scene.

The duo, made up of musicians Sam Silbret and Scott Turner, performed at the Ukie Club as part of a weekend concert hosted by Philly recording label, Julia’s War Recordings, and the 4333 Collective.

Julia’s War distributes music from artists like MJ Lenderman, Melaina Kol, and Acid_freek, some of whom played at the recently annualized event, ​“Julia’s War Fest.” Hookey, Menu, Joyer were just a few of the bands represented by Julia’s War to perform this year. The Friday-Saturday ​“festival” also featured groups like Full Body 2 and Feeble Little Horse, the latter of which headlined Saturday night’s show.

I played my own game of half-hearted hooky through the weekend, missing most of the performances included in the event ticket and showing up Saturday night in hopes of catching Feeble Little Horse, under the assumption that their act would include a ketamine-tranqed pony limping its way to a microphone and ultimately to singer-songwriter stardom. Before Feeble Little Horse, I found an implicatively dissociative lo-fi boy band feeding distorted themes to a glow-in – the-dark audience.

The two-boy band I’m talking about is Hooky. Unlike most of the other do-it-yourself groups that played last weekend, Hooky primarily puts out songs that are entirely electronic, focusing on developing catchy, simple riffs (maybe why they call themselves Hooky?) while skipping out on the manual instrumentals (also maybe why they go by Hooky?). Their recorded sound is soft and non-abrasive, with hidden, pitched-up vocals that sometimes sound like Alex G sleep singing while consolidating tumultuous memories.

“Hope for the best/ Gotta freak out/ Over horsepower/ And a big house,” rang Turner’s processed vocals over the band’s translucent, pipe-laden track, ​“Fucking Up.”

“Everyone just wants to sound like Alex G,” one of my friends reflected real-time. They made that claim without any apparent judgment, continuing to smile and nod along at Hooky’s set.

Onstage, however, Hooky looked and sounded separate from the critically acclaimed, Pennsylvania-raised Bandcamp success story. Other than Feeble Little Horse, who inspired moshing and crowd surfing partly by virtue of their headlining popularity, Hooky delivered one of the highest-energy performances of the night, encouraging crowd engagement from emotionally conflicted loners through pseudo-shyness paired with boldly concrete melodies.

Turner retained a kind of stoicism while punching away at his guitar, suggesting the humble embodiment of a disillusioned surfer bro while Silbret provided a comparatively comical but simultaneously sincere stage presence. Queuing all of the electronic parts that promoted Turner’s auto-tuned vocals and guitar from intriguing poetry to captivating dopamine producers, Silbret moved playfully in his place. At times he shook uncontrollably as if overtaken by seizures. Every so often he grinded against the controller, giggling at himself, before placing his face in palms to showcase ironically loud despair or wiping sweat into his wild bob of hair before confining it under his baseball cap.

The presentation worked. At the front, a boy who looked like a young Michael Cera lost his shit, dancing as if he was a third stage member while donning a Spiderman trapper hat. The rest of the audience was obscured in the dark but neon-light dotted room, the drummer from Feeble Little Horse standing out in a fittingly phosphorescent, Shrek green Monster Energy tee.

I thought about the phenomenon of copycat musicians while observing an array of audience members ostensibly fixated on maintaining a sense of individualism. There are definitely plenty of bands concerned with nothing more than recreating Alex G’s — or fill in the blank artist’s — sound and story. But the amount of diversity displayed across the music showcased through Julia’s War Fest, virtually all of which is inspired by overlapping artistic interests, went to show how much creativity, novelty and interesting interpretation can occur when different medleys of people continue to pose variations on their favorite sounds. The festival also effectively paid homage to Philly’s strong reputation as a consistent producer of beloved shoegaze bands.

Toilet stall fan art at the Ukie.

Later in the night, the members of Spellbinder shred frantically while one guitarist stared wide-eyed at the ceiling as if tripping on acid and as another drew applause with an ​“I Love Fentanyl” shirt. Afterwards, Feeble Little Horse’s Lydia Slocum sang eerily beautiful, voice-cracking lyrics that married teenage sensitivity with grown-up disgruntlement.

It all made me further appreciate the thematic cohesion of Hooky — which, as I saw it, is experimenting with sound to convey and validate the root emotions of childhood that plague and motivate us at any age.

That’s an aim I often associate with Alex G himself, who has written plenty of coming-of-age and knowingly naive tracks like ​“Treehouse” and ​“Growing Up.”

Hooky takes that apparent prompt down its own path, fracturing the highs and lows of life into toddler-like proportions and centering in on emotive soundscapes over lyrical storytelling. But noting the lyrics that otherwise escape comprehension through obfuscating electronic effects helps clarify Hooky’s project.

For example, in one of my favorite songs of theirs, called ​“Company,” a twanging, country-informed track that the pair skipped over on Saturday, Hooky writes loosely punny lines like, ​“I won’t wait around aching for somebody/ Who will pass me by/ In the long run.”

In ​“Heart Eyes,” one of their better received and widely played songs, they continue that associative word game: ​“Heart eyes can’t choose/ Stars in the sky I don’t care anymore/ I’m looking down, waiting/ Hoping it comes natural/ One day I will change into a nicer shade.”

Hooky is not bothered with formulating full-fledged stories, but rather with capturing chemical truths. Their songs are non-specific in a way that promises universality, riffing anonymously on the realities of dating, death and life trajectories.

I might have at one time considered their artificially-constructed songs their own game of hooky. But rather than copping out from bare-your-soul artistry or, far worse, chasing clout lord status, Hooky is studying — and actively participating in the process of reflecting, capturing and feeling a generation.

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Follow Julia’s War to find out about upcoming shows and music releases from their artists. Check out this link to find tickets to shows taking place this week at the Ukie Club.