Your Brooklyn Weekend: Aug 13–16
Four nights, four flavors of loud, all of it north Brooklyn. If your weekend plan is "leave the apartment and let a PA system fix my mood," we've got you covered from Thursday's post-punk to Sunday's Eurovision-grade catharsis. Here's the slate.
Thursday, Aug 13 — Yard Act (with The Armed) at Warsaw We start in Greenpoint, at the church-basement-pierogi-and-punk institution on Driggs Avenue. Yard Act, the Leeds outfit who turned deadpan British social observation into unlikely dancefloor fuel, headline the roughly 800-capacity Warsaw — a room small enough that frontman James Smith's between-song monologues land like he's heckling you personally. The kicker is the support slot: The Armed, the Detroit chaos-collective whose live show is less a concert than a controlled demolition, are opening. That's a genuinely unhinged pairing — dry wit against pure adrenaline — and Warsaw's low ceiling is going to hold every decibel of it. Get there early; the opener is not the warm-up act you skip.
Saturday, Aug 15 — Eagles of Death Metal (with Mountain Head) at Warsaw Back to Warsaw two nights later for something considerably sleazier. Eagles of Death Metal — Jesse Hughes' boogie-rock party machine, no relation to actual death metal, no relation to the actual Eagles — bring their falsetto-and-fuzz strut to the same Driggs Ave. stage, with Mountain Head opening. This is a hips-first, brain-optional Saturday night: mustache-forward garage rock built for exactly the kind of sweaty 800-cap room Warsaw provides. Wear something you don't mind ruining.
Saturday, Aug 15 — Agalloch (with Profanatica & Yellow Eyes) at Brooklyn Steel If EODM is too much sunshine, the borough offers a much darker Saturday a few blocks away. The reunited atmospheric black-metal titans Agalloch — Portland's masters of cold, folk-tinged, cinematic dread — headline the 1,800-cap Brooklyn Steel, with Profanatica and Brooklyn's own Yellow Eyes on the bill. This is a rare one; Agalloch broke up in 2016 and their shows since reuniting have been event-tier for the extreme-metal faithful. (Full spotlight elsewhere on the site.) Two very different definitions of "metal" are happening in Brooklyn on the same night — choose your allegiance.
Sunday, Aug 16 — Jamala at Music Hall of Williamsburg End the weekend with something genuinely singular. Jamala — the Ukrainian singer who won Eurovision in 2016 with "1944," a song about the Soviet deportation of Crimean Tatars, her own family among them — plays the 650-capacity Music Hall of Williamsburg on North 6th. Her voice is an instrument built for rooms much larger than this one, which is exactly why an MHOW show is the catch — a world-stage talent at close range, singing music that carries more weight now than it did in 2016.
Why it matters: This is the north-Brooklyn live circuit doing what it does best — four rooms, four genres, all walkable-ish, no train transfer to Manhattan required. In a summer when the borough's biggest electronic room is counting down to closure (RIP Brooklyn Storehouse, Halloween), it's worth remembering that the small-and-mid rooms are the actual bedrock. Warsaw, Brooklyn Steel, and Music Hall of Williamsburg aren't going anywhere, and this weekend is a four-course argument for why that matters.
Pace yourself, hydrate, tip your bartender, and pick at least one show that scares you a little. See you in the pit — or the pierogi line.
Sources: Warsaw (JamBase); Brooklyn Steel (setlist.fm); Music Hall of Williamsburg (JamBase)