Dayglow, a funky indie rock band from Austin, TX, provides one of the happiest and high energy concerts to come to Raleigh. The release of their newest album, Dayglow, lines up with the starting dates of the Fall tour in Mexico.

Dayglow opens the set with a contrasting aura to their front-facing personality, with a darker atmosphere consisting of only backlighting lacking any color. Sloan and his crew remix.

I didn’t recognize the opening song at first, with heavy synth and a slow beat. After the first two lines, it clicked to me that it was a slower take on their song, Junior Varsity, off the Fuzzybrain album. Junior Varsity is the perfect opener for this tour; as this song includes themes of growing up and the ‘slap in the face’ mindset that comes with that. More discussion of that from Sloan, the lead singer of Dayglow, and his mindset towards that can be found later in this article.

Halfway through the opening ballad, the blinders come on, and Sloan loudly claims, “Wait, wait, wait.” Guests looking around the room, unsure of what is happening, turn to him for answers. “I can’t hear the counter’s in my in-ears, can we start over?” Following that with multiple apologies, and an eruption of crowd giggling, the band exits the stage and the lights re-dim. Pretending like nothing ever happened, Dayglow re-enters to complete the entire first song again.

Something fun to look out for at your tour is Sloan’s potential custom shirt for your city. For example, in Mexico, Sloan’s shirt remixed the country name to ‘Mexiglow’ to match the band name. Raleigh’s custom shirt read, ‘What People Raleigh Do,’ which I assume should be read ‘What Raleigh People Do.’ The next day, at the Charlotte date, his shirt read, ‘Char-Lit.’

Although this stop of the tour wasn’t sold out, you’d be completely unable to tell from the crowd. This was one of the highest moving crowd’s I’ve ever seen, which checks out because of the dancing nature of Dayglow’s upbeat music. 

Many talk breaks of the night were spent by Sloan discussing growing up as the face of Dayglow and how his life has transformed, referenced by the music released at the time. With the release of ‘Can I Call You Tonight?’ Dayglow and their album, Fuzzybrain became an internet sensation. Their music was a staple in the early stages of the development of Tik Tok and VSCO-related trends. To open the title track from this album, Sloane opens up about writing this album at age nineteen with no intention of making it that big.

With a four-song long encore, Dayglow rapid fires some of their greatest hits. These include Close to You, Listerine and the final song, Run the World!!! In the final guitar solo of the night, the crowd goes crazy, energy higher than ever, and Sloane can be seen running in circles on stage while playing guitar.

Dayglow was accompanied by Sun Room on this tour- a surf rock band from California. Just four years after the genesis of Sun Room, their growth has been exponential; such as opening for artists like Louis Tomlinson, having solo tours of their own, and performing at festivals such as Austin City Limits. If you like carefree and relaxed music in the rock genre, I cannot recommend Sun Room enough.

The energy of their music exudes outward into their demeanor; they also possess this difficult to grasp ‘cool guy energy’ I describe in bands such as Quarters of Change. This carefree lifestyle can also be seen during their performance, whipping through each song with the flow that fits them best without many talk breaks. At the end of their set as well, the drummer’s stick got caught in their hair, but proceeded to play with one hand rather than removing the stick. You could also find them hanging out throughout the venue talking and taking pictures with fans during the Dayglow set. Because of the size of this venue, it’s uncommon to see talent lurking in the venue while attendees are present, so it was a treat being able to interact with the band during the time they decided to be social.

Dayglow is just about halfway finished with their Fall American tour. Tickets are still available, so don’t miss them when you have the chance.