The chaos of catharsis: Doom Loop Festival, starring Yeule

Doom Loop at the Regency Ballroom wasn’t your standard music festival—some six-stage, three-day festival with name-brand flags and sponsored water stations. Instead, Doom Loop was a one-night, five-act festival, which delivered a gutsy and consistently engaging concert experience. Each artist pulled something different out of their hat. 

Blimp, a modern shoegaze band with a bit of a bite, kicked off the night with a chaotic set. On top of the Christmas tree included in their stage design and the psychedelic graphics behind them, their sound—abrasive guitars mixed with untethered wailing vocals—set the tone for the night. The crowd was still filling out, but Blimp woke the audience up, with their drummer aggressively tackling and punching the on-stage Christmas tree after their last song.

Midrift, another contemporary shoegaze band, tackled their performance a little differently. With a slow-burning increase in pace, their set slowly unfolded, pushed ahead by their spectacular drummer, who stole the show through his theatrical performance.  After the second song, the crowd was warming up and pulsing with the energy of Swervedriver-esque shoegaze rock.

As the last notes of Midrift’s set faded away, the cheeky lighting designers began to play videos of Giraffes grubbing on trees and schools of fish swimming in never ending circles for changeover, seeming to clearly read the chronically online audience.

In a tactful change of pace, Jane Remover took the stage in a legendary cowboy hat. “Cage Girl / Cam Girl” began the set, punctuated by moments of melancholia and tenderness. One dedicated fan in the center of the pit was keen to chat with Remover, which the artist playfully entertained. After every song, the audience member hollered “let’s make some money together on stocks,” to which Remover eventually chuckled and answered, “that’s what’s up.” Remover’s set was a perfect storm of vulnerability, poise, and grit.

Taking the final slot before the headliner, Quannnic, an electronic-tinged shoegaze act, strolled to center stage—illuminated by ever more psychedelic visuals. Another drastic change of pace, Quannnic came out of the gate with an equally gut-punching and cathartic scream on “Defense.” The hum of the velvety guitar shook the floorboards. The crowd was finally buzzing, and things started to get really, really sweaty.

Jane Remover

Quannnic

Midrift

That is, until Yeule took the stage. As they glided elegantly into the spotlight, crimson shadows cast the dancing singer-songwriter’s features in chiaroscuro. In contrast to the leaden, metal-scraping noise of the openers, an anchor heavy enough to sink ships, Yeule’s opening song “Electric” floated the audience back to the heavens. Cataclysmic bass booms reverberated through quaking floors, while strobe lights that resembled shooting stars soared over the crowd. Dressed in a pressed button down accented with a schoolboy tie, Yeule’s angelic lilt transcended any semblance of meddlesome human realms. The audience swayed, transfixed, in the radiation of bittersweet longing. As they sang, their eyes were trained on a point beyond the horizon—perhaps a ghost from “this lovely dream [that] is ending slowly;” perhaps a memory of “touching you, electric.”

Yeule is known online for their posthuman presentation, with styling inspired by “NieR:Automata” battle doll androids, and eyeshadow encircled to look like tearstained bruises. During the downtempo, eerie chants of “bloodbunny,” Yeule uses digital transcendence as a coping mechanism for love: “don’t you feel so pure, when you don’t have a body anymore?”

After the opening songs held the audience in hypnotic contemplation, Yeule seized control over the crowd, grabbing an electric guitar and grinding into their selection of rock-heavy ballads. On “sulky baby,” “x w x,” and “dazies,” Yeule laced bedroom pop melodies with jagged guitar feedback and caustic screams. When the backdrop screen exploded aglow, Yeule’s image became cast into comic book relief. The world felt like it was rushing towards you in exhilarating technicolor sweeps. And in a literal sense, the ever-growing mosh pit of people flung across the dance floor did just that. With a laugh, Yeule affirmed: “in the pit, we take care of each other!”

In real life (or as Yeule would say, IRL) at the show, Yeule toyed with their dual identities. Yeule is a project, a dream pop techno angel, alongside the artist’s “IRL” self of Nat Cmiel. The rhythm of “bloodbunny” ticked like a countdown timer. The audience held their breaths in anticipation, waiting for the guitars and drumming to roll back into a natural thunderstorm, rather than this eerily robotic persona.

With ribbons trailing off of their sleeves, Yeule hovered in front of the microphone, as if their rigid dance choices were a pained rejection of vulnerability, in contrast to the lush, romantic opening song. 

In between songs, Yeule’s personality shone through, complementing their pop star stage presence. At one point, Yeule praised a fan’s “great rizz” after receiving a gift from them. At another, when giving a shoutout to their friends and former bandmates, they joked around with a prolonged, vocal fried “sure, bruh.”

But when they commanded the crowd to bounce during the closer “bites,” the crowd heeded their divine request. As Yeule sprung across the stage, the hardwood floor shook, to the point where one worried about the building’s structural integrity. In the middle of the song, Yeule threw a pair of seraphim angel wings into the mosh pit. By the end of the show, they were found on the floor crumpled, but forever soft.

Article by Rushaad Mistry and Selina Yang 

Photos by Can Goker