The Hold Steady (Night 2)
Constructive Summer 2025 w/ Labrador
Event Info
Brooklyn Bowl Philadelphia
1009 Canal Street
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19123
Doors 7pm / Show 8pm. All ages welcome. This ticket is valid for standing room only, general admission. ADA accommodations are available day of show. All support acts are subject to change without notice. Any change in showtimes, safety protocols, and other important information will be relayed to ticket-buyers via email. ALL SALES ARE FINAL.
Brooklyn Bowl is now a cashless venue. As of July 8th 2024 we will no longer accept cash as a form of payment in all areas of the house. The venue has the capability to load cash onto a debit card, which you can use at the venue or anywhere that accepts Mastercard.
PUB QUIZ UPGRADE INFO: Join a local quiz master and compete in a trivia contest alongside a THS band member! Test your rock knowledge in a fun, friendly atmosphere. Doors 4pm / Event 5pm. (MUST BE PURCHASED SEPARATELY DURING CHECKOUT)
The Constructive Summer 2025 merch bundle includes:
- Philly / Constructive Summer Event poster
- Philly / Constructive Summer Event tote bag
- THS Constructive Summer keychain
- THS Constructive Summer drink koozie
- (MUST BE PURCHASED SEPARATELY DURING CHECKOUT)
Artist Info
The Hold Steady
Formed in 2003, The Hold Steady have released nine albums, numerous singles and have played over a thousand shows.
The Brooklyn-based band has performed in all 50 states in the USA and throughout Canada, Europe and Australia. The Hold Steady’s music has appeared in movies, advertising and TV, including on Game Of Thrones and Billions. In addition, the band has written original material for the Seth Meyers cartoon The Awesomes and Meyers’ 2019 stand-up special Lobby Baby.
In 2023 The Hold Steady released their ninth studio LP, The Price Of Progress, to immense critical acclaim, while also releasing a book chronicling their first 20 years as a rock band. The Gospel of The Hold Steady: How A Resurrection Really Feels is an oral history written by journalist Michael Hann, featuring essays from authors Isaac Fitzgerald, Rob Sheffield and others, and included over 40 contributions from fans around the world.
The Hold Steady is: Bobby Drake (drums), Craig Finn (vocals), Tad Kubler (guitar, vocals), Franz Nicolay (keyboards, vocals), Galen Polivka (bass), and Steve Selvidge (guitar, vocals).
Labrador
The sort of lean, sharp pop music that you get from a steady diet of Motown, The Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival. The short-story wit of Paul Weller, Smokey Robinson, Nick Lowe. Labrador’s My Version Of Desire is that rarest of modern marvels: an impeccably crafted sonic story collection as replete with hooks as it is heartfelt insights into our todays and yesterdays. Guitars chime and fizz in the power pop tradition; choruses burst in technicolor, memorized before they’re even over. You sit down with My Version Of Desire — or you drive with it, let it guide you to the bus stop or the corner store — and hear the tangles of life pulled at like snarled-up guitar cables. It’s an album that’s lived-in and lived-with.
Led by guitarist, singer, and songwriter Pat King, Labrador has been around for a handful of years — seen moves to a new city (Philadelphia), seen a handful of lineup changes (the band is now officially King, Will Hochgertel and Steve Kurtz), and an excellent full-length breakthrough in 2023’s Hold The Door For Strangers. As you might guess from the title, Strangers was an album about empathy, full of poignant character studies and patient witching-hour ruminations.
Consider My Version Of Desire the big, beating heart to that earlier album’s busy, roving thoughts. The songs this time around turn inward, lessons in love and acceptance and mercy, via the lens of how we might learn to love and accept and forgive ourselves. The beauty here is that these self-portraits are delivered with so much dynamism, so much electricity. Confessionals set to mid-60s confections. “Dry Out In June” is a song about sobriety delivered with the excitable pop charge of Small Faces or My Aim Is True-era Elvis Costello, roaring like a mid-80s Replacements single beneath a corona of soda-pop electric organ. “Someday I’ll Pay” stomps and blooms in the key of Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, guilt and trauma wrestled with in a major key. “Heavy Hearts” has both Nashville and Memphis in its wall of twanging Les Pauls, Stax hooks, and widescreen harmonies (“I’ve got a heeeaaavy heart”).
More often than not these songs start loud and get louder (credit engineer/mixer Heather Jones and mastering engineer Chris Walla for their brilliant work in helping make these pocket symphonies burst). King and company get down to the tough stuff of figuring yourself out, but the warmth here, the melodies and energy and ebullient blend of alt-country and mod-soul, always frame that soul-searching as a thing of beauty. My Version Of Desire — a true masterpiece -- is an album about love in all of the complexity that the word, in its truest depth, underlines. It’s a real kindness offered to all of us that Pat King and Labrador trace the rocky garden paths we have to take with such a joy for living, and with such a keen sense for the beauty of the flowers.
- Chad Jewett, Perennial
Winter 2025
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