half•alive plays Hell at The Masquerade on Friday, October 30 — the night before Halloween, and one of the more visually ambitious bookings on the room's fall calendar.
The Long Beach trio broke through in 2017 with "still feel.", a track whose video did as much work as the song itself: Josh Taylor, J Tyler Johnson and Brett Kramer moving through tightly drilled choreography in matching palettes, more dance company than indie band. That instinct never went away. Where most guitar-adjacent acts treat staging as an afterthought, half•alive builds the show as a piece — bodies, blocking and lighting arranged around the music rather than behind it.
Musically they sit in a slippery spot between funk, gospel-inflected pop and art rock, with Taylor's falsetto riding basslines that owe more to disco than to anything on rock radio. Records like Now, Not Yet and Conditions of a Punk lean into that tension, and the live translation is where the band tends to win people over.
Hell is the Masquerade's mid-size room, which puts the choreography close enough to read every gesture — a better fit for this act than a shed would be. Doors are at 7 p.m.
