The City Sings Back

It’s a familiar feeling — your heart rattles and your shoes stick to the floor. Bass so deep it thuds in your ribs. Glitter smeared across someone else's cheekbone. The shared gasp when the lights drop and the scream that follows. For me — a city kid with a complicated relationship to noise and strangers — it's also the feeling of coming home.

Philadelphia is always loud. Its streets honk and hiss and groan, and on some days the weight of it is unbearable. Then, on nights when this feeling arrives at the forefront of your being, the city’s noise changes. It harmonizes. It becomes music. In the echo of that music, something else rises — something quieter but stronger — community.

At two very different shows in Philly during the past month — Beach Bunny’s sold-out stop at The Fillmore and Chloe Moriondo’s Oyster tour next door at The Foundry — I felt that current of community come together. On paper, they are indie concerts. One is bedroom pop meets bubblegum grunge, the other dreamy queer rock filtered through a fishbowl, but labels don’t matter much when you’re pressed against a stranger’s shoulder, scream-singing the chorus to a song you both love. What matters is the current, the surge, the recognition that you’re not alone.

Openers don’t always get the recognition they deserve, but in both cases, Pool Kids and Sex Week helped set the tone for everything that followed: inclusion, chaos-with-care, and joyful participation.

At the Beach Bunny concert, Pool Kids took the stage first, their sound a rush of mathy emo pop and power chords you could feel in your teeth. Their frontwoman radiated chaotic-good energy. Jumping, spinning, grinning between songs as she shouted, “Let’s make this the friendliest mosh pit in the city!”

That’s exactly what it was. People clapped for guitar solos like it was jazz. A girl next to me lost her earring in the first three minutes and found it again by the end of the set — thanks to five people crouching with phone flashlights to help her search. That’s the kind of crowd Pool Kids cultivated before Beach Bunny even struck a chord.

At Chloe Moriondo’s show, the opener was Sex Week — a punk band whose vibe felt like a love letter to your cool friend’s basement shows. Their lyrics were biting and vulnerable, their sound fuzzed-out and warm. They joked between songs about train delays and shared their pronouns onstage without fanfare — just part of the fabric.

During one track, a fan in the crowd yelled, “You’re hot!” and their bassist yelled back, “You too, babe!” The whole room laughed. Just like that, we were all on the same wavelength.

Beach Bunny’s Lili Trifilio once wrote in a personal blog post, “I feel lucky to have supporters that always make me feel safe and respected — that should be the standard, but I recognize that isn't the case.” 

Yet, this was exactly the case during the show. Every corner of the venue buzzed with that unspoken pact: you protect the people around you, even when you’ve never met.

Someone handed me a friendship bracelet without saying a word. It was blue and pink and spelled “MR. PREDICTABLE.” I later found out that’s a song title, but at the time, it felt like a prophecy. Nothing about that night was predictable — not the stranger who helped me tie my shoe in the pit, not the way I cried to a song I’d never heard before, not the hug I exchanged with a girl named Eliza from South Jersey after the final encore.

“I came alone,” she told me, breathless and beaming. “But now I have five new mutuals and a plan to go see MUNA next month.” She waved her phone in my direction, showing off her camera roll: blurry lights, blurrier selfies, joy in pixel form. “It’s crazy, right? How fast people can matter.”

It is crazy, and it’s necessary.

After a year of working two jobs and feeling like a background character in my own life, that show cracked something open. I remembered what it’s like to be seen — not as a worker, a student, or a face in a crowd — just as myself. I didn’t have to perform competence or hide softness. I could sweat and sob and smile and still be held.

That kind of unspoken permission — that communal softness — isn’t something you can plan. In Philly’s concert spaces, it shows up anyway.

Ten days later, I found myself back at The Fillmore complex, this time squeezed into the Foundry for Chloe Moriondo. The room was smaller, warmer, and gentler. There were more rainbows. I saw someone in fishnet sleeves helping another concertgoer in a binder adjust his eyeliner. A group of friends held hands through an entire set. Someone passed around stickers that said “you are valid,” and no one questioned it.

That kind of atmosphere doesn’t just happen — it’s nurtured. Chloe Moriondo’s shows have been described as “not just about music; they are safe spaces for communal healing and celebration of shared experiences,” according to Vinyl Me, Please.

“I’m not even from here,” said Reed Michaels, a nonbinary fan visiting from Bethlehem. “But tonight it feels like I live in this building. These are my people.”

Moriondo’s music is confessional, strange, and tender in ways that make it feel like she’s singing directly to your bedroom ceiling, but it was the audience that stunned me. Between songs, fans shouted affirmations — not just “we love you” to the stage, but “you look amazing!” to each other. I saw an older queer couple gift a fan their extra Pride flag. I saw someone cry alone and be comforted by four people from three different states. I saw belonging enacted in real time.

This wasn’t a concert — it was communion.

For Philly — a city known for its tough exterior, sarcastic charm, bruised knuckles, and big heart — it felt like a reclamation. The same city that gets flattened in headlines for crime or chaos was here, healing itself with music.

We talk a lot about civic life in terms of policies, protests, and participation, as we should. However, I’d argue that a sold-out concert full of strangers learning each other’s names is just as much a civic act as any vote. A local review of Chloe Moriondo’s Philly concert echoed this, noting the show’s impact on the community fabric and the collective energy of care that filled the room.

Civic engagement doesn’t only happen under fluorescent lights in a polling station or at a town hall podium. It happens when someone lets you cut in line for water, when a crowd collectively shifts to make room for someone shorter to see, and when a stranger hands you a hair tie or lifts you out of the pit when you slip. These aren’t small gestures. They’re rehearsals for the kind of world we say we want — one built on care, not just convenience.

When you zoom out past the merch lines and stage lights, what you’re really seeing is civic infrastructure in motion. Concerts turn chaos into cooperation. They turn a roomful of strangers into a self-regulating, care-focused community. No one handed out a manual. No one had to legislate kindness. Yet, somehow, these temporary spaces manage to succeed where public forums often fail: they build trust.

Philadelphia has a long history of grassroots movements — block parties, mutual aid, neighborhood clean-ups, and community fridges — but it also has trauma.

Displacement, poverty, and policy gaps that have chipped away at the social fabric. It’s easy to feel powerless against systems so big they barely feel human. That’s why these micro-moments matter. They are human. They remind us that showing up for each other doesn’t always require a ballot box or nonprofit budget. Sometimes it just takes one person asking, “Are you okay?” loud enough to be heard over the bass line.

Music becomes a civic tool — a way of organizing not around issues, but around feeling. That emotional solidarity spills over into the larger community.

Fans meet here and become co-volunteers. Roommates. Protest buddies. Mutual aid organizers. I met someone at a Mitski show in 2022 who now co-runs a community garden in West Philly. I’ve seen tables at punk venues for Narcan distribution and voter registration. I’ve seen poster boards for missing persons and GoFundMes passed through the pit with more urgency than a setlist.

Beach Bunny’s 2025 tour reflects this kind of soft power too — activating kindness through sound. In fact, their 2025 tour announcement described their mission as “bringing joyful catharsis to every room,” and fans across North America responded by forming rideshares, zine swaps, and mental health support circles.

That’s the secret: concerts aren’t escapes from reality. They’re rehearsals for how we could live differently within it.

A venue becomes a temporary town. The merch line becomes a micro-economy. Bracelets are traded like currency. Attendees share sunscreen and gum and heartbreak. You shout lyrics that name the things you haven’t figured out quite how to say. At concerts, you relearn the social skills that bureaucracy can’t teach: compassion, compromise, and celebration.

It’s worth noting that many artists encourage this ethos. Chloe Moriondo’s official site includes a zine, fan forum, and resources for LGBTQ+ youth. She’s not just building an audience — she’s cultivating a neighborhood.

Concerts also provide a space for mutual aid — quiet but powerful. At the Chloe Moriondo show, I watched someone with a sensory processing disorder begin to panic, overwhelmed by the strobe lights and crowd noise. Before security could even clock it, three nearby fans gently ushered her to the edge of the room, gave her noise-canceling earbuds, and offered their shoulders to lean on. No questions. No judgment. Just action. Later, I overheard her say, “That was the kindest thing anyone’s done for me in months.”

I met Kennedy, 25, a longtime Philly resident, outside after the Moriondo show. She sat on the curb, eyeliner smudged to her chin, her arms around two new friends. “I didn’t come out in high school,” she said. “Didn’t feel safe. But here? I’ve danced with more lesbians tonight than I knew existed back then. And nobody asked me to shrink.”

Even in the rougher moments — the swirl of a mosh pit or the adrenaline of a sudden crowd-surf — there’s an attitude of watching out for your neighbor. At the Beach Bunny show, I saw a girl get lifted by her friends during the bridge of “Good Girls (Don’t Get Used)” — her Doc Martens flying, her laugh sharp and bright — and almost immediately, five different hands reached out to keep her steady.

When someone fell in the pit during “Sports,” the crowd split instinctively, arms grabbing, lifting, checking: You good? You good? When someone lost their glasses, a mini search party formed. The energy was wild, yes — but it was also watchful, communal, built on the unspoken rule that we all get to be wild safely.

These are acts of civic muscle — interpersonal votes for the kind of society we want to live in. In a time where so many of us feel disconnected — politically isolated, emotionally tapped out, unsure how to plug back into the world — music becomes a framework for gathering. It’s a chance to exercise, in miniature, the solidarity larger systems struggle to achieve.

When the show ends, no one ever leaves right away. The crowd lingers like steam rising off pavement after rain. Some fans gather near the stage, still holding their phones aloft in hopes of a setlist or a wink from a roadie. Others sit on the floor, legs splayed and mascara streaking down their cheeks, laughing about the girl who crowd-surfed during a ballad or the guy who screamed every lyric even when he didn’t know them. 

It’s in this glow — this soft aftermath — that the real magic happens. Looking around, it’s easy to realize that for two hours, everyone agreed on something. It’s the rhythm, pure joy, and offering each other the space to be a little unhinged and a little more alive.

Outside The Fillmore, I spoke to Myles Grant – a staff member who has worked security and front-of-house for a decade. “It’s funny,” he told me, leaning on the barricade as the last fans trickled out. “You see people come in guarded, nervous, sizing each other up, but by the end of the night, they’re best friends. They’re hugging, crying, swapping Instagrams. It happens every single show. I’ve seen more real kindness in this job than anywhere else in my life.”

There’s something profound about that. In a city that so often asks you to be tough, concerts offer a way to be tender, to be known — if only for a night — not as a demographic or a voter or a commuter, but as a person with feelings that echo.

I walked home both nights, earbuds in but music off, letting the residual noise settle into my chest. I passed muraled walls and shuttered stores, street lights flickering like slow applause. In those moments, Philly felt full — not just of noise, but of meaning. I thought about all the ways this city sustains itself not through perfection, but through the thousands of small ways people show up for each other when no one is looking.

When the lights come back on — when the stage dims and the amps cool and the glitter settles — what’s left isn’t just a memory. It’s a blueprint for how people should show up for each other in real life, every single day.

Philly doesn’t just host concerts. Its community sings them back.

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