Armor For Sleep, Boys Night Out Help Us Relieve The Good Days

On Friday, March 14, Armor For Sleep, Boys Night Out, and HelloGoodbye swung through Detroit at one of the best venues in the city, St. Andrew’s Hall, to uncork a bottle of nostalgia.

 

 

HELLOGOODBYE

 

 

 

 

I’l admit it. I was in High School when Hellogoodbye was a thing, and my friends and I were obsessed with their keyboard sounds and high energy. Their songs still hit extremely hard at Emo-adjacent events like an Emo night or in a setting with a bunch of former Emo Scene Kids. Unfortunately, we never got to see them back then, but fortunately, I got to experience it live on this tour.

 

The band put on some of their more mellow and silly chops toward the beginning of the set, but were positively wonderful to witness. We unfortunately didn’t see the full setlist and there’s not one listed online from the St. Andrew’s Hall show, but we can confirm that we did hear “Shimmy Shimmy Quarter Turn” and “Here (In Your Arms),” which are some of their most iconic releases to date.

 

 

BOYS NIGHT OUT

 

 

 

 

You can’t keep a good Canadian band down! Boys Night Out played as the direct support for this tour, and we had a brush with lead singer Connor Lovat-Fraser back in November 2024 when he guest DJ’d LA’s Emo Nite Tour, so I was extremely excited to see him in action with his band for the first time.

 

Out of the three bands of the night, Boys Night Out led with the most energy. Connor was from side to side of the stage, and the band kept an engaging presence while throwing down the post-hardcore vibes of the night.

 

After the set, there was an enormous line of almost half the attendees that came over to merch, and band members took photos with the fans that came to hang out. You can always tell who people were there to see when you see that type of reaction for a band that’s direct support.

 

Check out their setlist here:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ARMOR FOR SLEEP

 

 

 

 

It seems as if we’re seeing Armor For Sleep more now than we did back when they dropped their essential emo album ‘What To Do When You Are Dead.’ Over the past year or so, they’ve been on multiple lineups with Ohio-based band Hawthorne Heights, which makes perfect sense since their albums came out right around the same time frame and have a similar fanbase.

 

Armor For Sleep sounds exactly like you want them to sound, staying true to vocal and instrumental inflections. The difference is that you’re experiencing it live, encompassed by a mass puff of clouds and dark lighting at a very loud volume. ‘What To Do When You Are Dead’ was an album that I obsessed over. Did my LiveJournal have coding that matched song lyrics? Yes. Yes it did.

 

So, trust me when I say, that particular album and its full body of work has a specific way I feel it’s listened to: the chronological way. I can confirm that “Car Underwater” and “The Truth About Heaven” are the top streamed songs on Spotify, and while I understand the musician psychology of putting your best and most popular songs last, I definitely prefer the way that most bands do their anniversary tours, as Monday’s Disturbed show at Little Caesars Arena, where the ‘The Sickness’ on its 25th-anniversary tour was played front to back in the order it was released.

 

In the era in which the album was dropped, we spent time using CD players to listen to these creations, so we have a specific ingrained memory as to how we heard it back then. I’ve always viewed this album as a long-form story being told between the songs, and the way it was presented with the setlist made it feel as if we were going ‘Fight Club’ on the order of the songs. The nostalgia of what we remember it being is, quite frankly, what draws us to buy tickets to these anniversary shows — to bring back the good days, and use our adult money to do so.

 

It’s not a dealbreaker. Armor for Sleep has a great act going, and you can catch it now by looking up their next date on their website.

 

Check out the full setlist here: