By the time almost monday took the stage at The Pearl on Wednesday night, the mood had already been set by openers Sun Room. The San Diego band brought the kind of sun-soaked surf rock that felt unmistakably Californian, pairing garage-rock energy with breezy melodies. Formed in 2021, Sun Room emerged from San Diego’s surf-rock scene and built a following through energetic live shows and tracks that found their way into the Netflix series Outer Banks. Their sound was a natural fit for the evening, sharing almost monday’s coastal sensibilities while leaning a little further into guitar-driven rock.
almost monday’s arrival felt like turning up the colour. The trio—vocalist Dawson Daugherty, guitarist Cole Clisby and bassist Luke Fabry—have built their sound around bright melodies and danceable choruses. Their music sits somewhere between indie pop and alternative rock, with shades of Arctic Monkeys and Two Door Cinema Club in the rhythmic guitars and restless grooves.
Daugherty was impossible to ignore. Dressed in striking wide-leg white jeans, he moved across the stage with an outstanding level of enthusiasm, mixing groovy dancing with sudden jumps, exaggerated gestures and bursts of onstage aerobics. He committed to every movement with enough confidence to make it infectious, giving everyone permission to stop worrying about how they looked.
The audience needed little convincing. The room was filled largely with young people in couples and groups of friends, and the energy spread quickly. Hands went up immediately, and people who had started the night standing relatively still were soon dancing. The men in the audience joined in, abandoning any attempt at looking cool for loose, goofy, almost ’70s-style dancing.
There was something particularly refreshing about watching a band make that kind of unselfconscious fun feel natural. Daugherty’s stage presence played with a less rigid kind of masculinity, one that left room for silliness, flamboyance and enthusiasm.
Musically, the show carried the bright, kinetic feeling of an early-2010s summer indie playlist. almost monday’s sound has the polished hooks of modern alt-pop, but its breezy guitars and buoyant rhythms still feel rooted in the California surf and skate culture from which the band emerged.
The band came to Vancouver for the first time as part of the THANK GOD IT’S ALMOST MONDAY tour, supporting their second studio album of the same name, released in September 2026. The record expands on the sunny alt-pop of their 2024 debut, DIVE, while making room for more reflective songwriting in songs such as “no more regrets”, “delicate” and “better late than never”.
At one point, a sign reading “THANK GOD IT’S VANCOUVER” offered a local variation on the tour’s title. It was a small gesture, but it captured the spirit of the evening: playful, welcoming and a little ridiculous in the best way.
Perhaps that was the real appeal of the show. almost monday embodied a kind of millennial optimism through a Gen Z lens, with the feeling that a good night of music and dancing with friends can be enough. There was a release in that feeling, a brief return to an era when indie music seemed inseparable from the promise of summer and the future still felt wide open.
