Since their inception in 2007, New Jersey-based outfit The Front Bottoms have made a massive impact on the alternative music scene. The past few years have seen a massive surge in popularity for the group; in September 2015, they released their fifth album, Back on Top, with the ensuing positive reception of the album gaining them enough popularity to be able to sell out Stylus last Friday at Leeds University.

This gig was something I, among many others, was looking forward to for a long time. The venue seemed packed out from almost immediately after the doors opened, with the sense of anticipation only building with every minute. The opening act, Brooklyn singer-songwriter Kevin Devine and the Goddamn Band, capture the audience’s attention with a sound that I would describe as America’s answer to Frank Turner, with introspective lyrics and a vocal delivery that reminded me of bands such as Cloud Nothings and Jimmy Eat World.

The Front Bottoms take the stage not long after Kevin Devine’s set comes to a close. The reaction from the crowd is ecstatic; as frontman Brian Sella leads the band through their opening song, ‘Skeleton’, the majority of the crowd are singing the lyrics back to the band. Their set is varied, with the band playing songs from many different eras throughout their folk-punk discography. The atmosphere throughout the gig is constant throughout, with songs from their most recent output elliciting as much of a reaction from the crowd as material from other albums such as their self-titled. For me, highlights were ‘Flashlight’ and the anthemic ‘West Virginia’; the latter in particular definitely displayed the much more energetic avenue that the band took their more recent material.

For the encore, Sella takes to the stage to perform a solo rendition of ‘Twelve Feet Deep’, before the rest of the band joins him in the show’s finale of ‘Twin Size Mattress’. For a band with a singer-songwriter temperament and an acoustic guitar as a primary instrument, the song is played in a very energetic manner. As the song comes to its climactic finish, there is a sense of euphoria from the crowd, with Sella’s vocals being echoed by everyone in the venue singing the lyrics back at him in a perfect finish to the concert.

Zygmund de Somogyi