“We’re not 18 anymore / But we’ve still got our habits / You’re the creature in my heart / And you’re about to devour it / ‘Cause I remember when” – Surf Curse, “Nostalgia,” Nothing Yet (2017)
On November 16–my nineteenth birthday–I watched Surf Curse play at the Warfield in San Francisco while on tour supporting their fourth album Magic Hour (2022). I had seen Surf Curse once before, in November of 2019 at Tropicalia, a music festival in Pomona, California. My younger brother Magnus lost one of his shoes in the crowd as they played and traversed the festival grounds wearing a single hand-me-down Vans slip-on for the next eight hours. Although Surf Curse at an outdoor festival was a different Surf Curse than the one which played the Warfield three years later, the band continues to draw a seemingly never-ending supply of energy from their audience.
In 2013, drummer and lead singer Nick Rattigan and guitarist Jacob Rubeck formed the indie rock group Surf Curse in Reno. Unlike many two-pieces, Surf Curse was drum-driven. Initially a garage rock band with surf inflections like many lo-fi indie groups at the time, Surf Curse has since traversed many meanings of the word “rock” throughout their four (and counting) albums. They quickly became a fixture of Los Angeles’s all-ages and D.I.Y. scene. [“I see the Smell, now I’m ready for hell / If this is the end, well I guess it’s the end / Because my California dream, it came true” – “The Smell Saved My Life,” Buds (2013).] The youthfulness of such scenes permeates their music to this day, though the band’s sound has grown considerably in recent years.
Surf Curse’s emergence from the underground scene and their ability to retain dedicated fans along the way has shown that their sound has lasting power. The scene Surf Curse was born into influenced its sound, and the band influenced its sound right back. The name Surf Curse evokes more than a single band’s catalog for me; it is the feeling of a whole scene that I did not think I would experience live in this way.
The Warfield opened one hundred years ago this past spring. It is a grand concert hall, with ceilings that feel impossibly high adorned with paintings of cherubs (read: a far cry from the warehouses and garages of Surf Curse’s origins). Fans packed the venue before the opener, Toner, even began to play. Hailing from West End, California, a neighborhood in Oakland, the four-piece band makes driving noise rock filled with nineties influences. Although often a bit heavier and darker than Surf Curse, songs like 2020’s “Dark Ecstasy” seem perfectly fit for a Surf Curse show. This hometown show finished out Toner’s fourteen-show stretch of opening for Surf Curse.
In between sets, Vundabar, Hot Flash Heat Wave, The Garden, and Car Seat Headrest blared from the speakers. People jockeyed with each other to get to the floor. In the pit, the audience’s eagerness was palpable—sweaty and heaving. The same eagerness prevailed as Surf Curse took to the stage. Just as one would think that the crowd’s energy was finally waning, another song would begin and throw everyone spinning yet again. Although eventually separated from my friends in the pit, I felt comfortable jumping on my own. Songs I had listened to for ages rang throughout the air and mixed with newer Surf Curse works, creating an atmosphere of familiarity. Surf Curse did not interact much with the audience or with each other onstage, except when Rubeck accepted a hat that an audience member had knit and when the band reminded everyone to take two steps back from the barricade. Their music did the work for them.
The simple phrase “if you feel the way I do” from Surf Curse’s early track “Goth Babe,” captures the essence of Surf Curse. Whether taking the perspective of nihilistic teenage movie protagonists or yearning for companionship, early Surf Curse songs hold space for not only adolescent angst but a tenuous hope for connection. Film and television have influenced Surf Curse since before they were Surf Curse. (Rattigan and Rubeck’s middle school band was called Buffalo 66). Their debut album Buds (2013) directly references the worlds of Heathers, The Outsiders, and Twin Peaks. Such decidedly dark adolescent references contrasted with the band’s buoyant sound. It did not stop there; the band supported the 2019 release of Heaven Surrounds You by organizing a series of film showings that influenced the album and the band’s artistry.
“Disco” (played as the encore) and “Midnight Cowboy,” both singles from Heaven Surrounds You, marked a transition into more complex storytelling and instrumentation than prior releases, yet do not forgo their catchy choruses. On the dreamier album, Rubeck and Rattigan feel more reflective. After a pre-pandemic tour, the duo expanded their circle with the addition of bassist Henry Dillon and guitarist Noah Kholl, who joined the band full-time. Its follow-up, Magic Hour, holds space for snippets of surf rock, peeks of power pop, angsty lyricism, and grown-up rock and roll, all in one.
Surf Curse’s one-hour set contained songs from all eras of the band and elicited a wild response from the audience. Songs from Magic Hour like “TVI” feel constructed for a live show—screamable with bursts of energy, time to sway, and even a “one, two, three, four” built in. You can learn a Surf Curse song from the crowd. Surf Curse is a band that performs, and their audience performs with them. The band saved hit songs like Magic Hour’s “Sugar” and the Buds track “Freaks”—during which Toner’s lead singer stage-dived—for the end of their set. “Freaks” enjoyed a resurgence in the past year, but I still associate it with being in Santa Barbara the summer before I began high school. Clocking in at under two and a half minutes, the outsider anthem adapts to its environment, just as Surf Curse effortlessly inhabits the stage of the Warfield with sounds from the past nine years.
Surf Curse has always seemed mythic in terms of live music: they had once played somewhere, or someone knew them, or had seen them back when (what exactly “back when” means is fluid). Even as their sound changes, Surf Curse evokes the sensibility of a scene that I was too young to experience live, so being part of a crowd that clamors to hear tracks from Buds like it’s 2013 again is exhilarating. Surf Curse leaves my body feeling heavy, with the haze of exhaustion that can only come from a night spent slamming into strangers to the sound of “take your time, free your mind, I can do this everyday.”
Article by Liv Bjorgum
Photos by Dorothy Eck