Inside Portland’s Post-Lockdown Guitar-Band Explosion

If you’re a musician turning 21 this year, there’s a good chance your formative years of being a punk were rudely interrupted. Maybe you caught a few shows during the tail-end of rock’s long season of pre-COVID innocence, but the sad fact is that subsequent generations of DIY kids will have never known a live music scene untainted by the specter of the pandemic. And if it seems like Portland, Oregon is suddenly filled with ambitious young bands barely of drinking age who emerged fully-formed on the other side of the pandemic, the truth is a little more complicated. “We all started playing shows before COVID,” says 20-year-old Ezra Chong, who formed the prog-punk band Rhododendron in 2019. “I feel like we all were about to gain a ton of momentum in the spring of 2020.”

What would’ve happened if COVID had not abruptly shut down Portland’s live music scene is impossible for any of these bands to speculate. Yet the community of young rock bands that’s emerged since the first generator shows in spring 2021 feels like a scene, with a strong sense of community and a coherent sonic identity with an emphasis on loudness. “I was talking to a friend once and he was basically saying pretty much everyone who was in DIY post-pandemic either got into modular synthesis or my bloody valentine,” says Carl Taylor of the rising young Portland band Growing Pains. “I think that holds true, except we didn’t get into modular synthesis.”

It’s not just younger bands who’ve benefited from Portland’s musical zeitgeist pivoting towards the loud and overdriven. Mo Troper, the 32-year-old producer and singer-songwriter who’s cut ear-splitting records for local acts like Bory and Stoner Control, claims he rarely gets asked to turn down his amp at gigs anymore. “In my experience as a 32-year-old who still makes loud guitar music, I feel like everybody is just more receptive to that kind of thing right now,” he says.

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One key precedent to the current spate of noisy Portland bands is Alien Boy, whose lustrous wall of shoegaze guitars and explicitly queer lyrics have made them one of the city’s most distinctive bands. “When Alien Boy first started playing, people were like, what the fuck is going on with you guys? You guys are so loud,” says Alien Boy singer and guitarist Sonia Weber. “And we were like, that’s the point. We would fight people on it and double down on it, but now it does seem like it’s all kind of like that now.”

Weber spent many years as an educator at Portland School of Rock, where she mentored young bands like Growing Pains and Rhododendron and helped them book some of their earliest gigs. Weber named her band after a song by the early and legendary Portland punk band the Wipers, and she sees the same reverence for Portland’s musical past among these upstarts: “We were all talking about the same bands and the same records from the last 10 or 20 years from Portland.” Weber, who at 31 has experienced both sides of the pandemic as a regular gigging and touring musician, sees the explosion in guitar bands less as a new thing than as a continuation of Portland’s long history as a mecca for loud and raucous music; “I just think it’s getting done on such a bigger scale right now,” she continues.

The earliest inklings of live music in Portland on the other side of the pandemic were outdoor generator shows, which were easy to host clandestinely away from potential noise or COVID complaints. Many of these shows took place in the industrial districts under Portland’s many bridges across the Willamette River. “There was an entire city block, and anybody could set up a generator show there,” recalls Dustin Holtz, who co-founded the band Common Girl in May 2021 just as shows were beginning to start again. “So some nights there’d be like three shows on this block alone, just kind of encircling it, and then there would be another show a few blocks over. They were not the safest shows to have, but they were fun.”

Holtz cites one early generator show where their slot was given to another band called Chainsaw Girl. “Me and Damian were so pissed a different C-Girl name was on there, but then they became like close friends of ours after that.” Generator shows all but disappeared once congregating indoors became less dicey, and it was only during the explosion of house shows later in 2021 that many of these new bands began to notice—and benefit from—the ravenous post-lockdown demand for live entertainment.

“A lot of bands and friends were reminiscing about going to shows,” says Kalia Storer, lead vocalist of Growing Pains. “So people felt a peculiar motivation to dive deep into making music and being a part of the scene.” “In the pandemic people got really into the idea of house shows,” adds Growing Pains drummer Kyle Kraft, who detailed being stunned by the size of the crowds at their post-lockdown gigs in a Willamette Week interview. “They were really into this idea of having access to a space that seems inaccessible or underground.”

Despite the shattering effect of the pandemic on musicians’ livelihoods and the complete shutdown of live music, lockdown afforded many of these young bands an opportunity to focus on promoting themselves on social media. Without gigs to promote or music to rehearse and record, young artists instead spent time learning how to get the attention of fans who might want to see them perform once shows were viable again.
“It’s really easy to post a little clip or a reel and then you can scroll past something like that and be like, oh wow, that looks like a ton of fun—I want to be there,” says Taylor

“There was this kind of democratization of social power in the music scene after lockdown,” says Garty Smith, whose Really Rad label has signed young Portland bands like Mauve and Swiss Army Wife. “There were all these other tools that artists had to develop to get known.”

Yet even in the few years since live music returned to Portland, the infrastructure of the scene has shifted dramatically. Generator shows have dried up almost completely, and in favor of house shows, and yet many of the house venues that once hosted shows no longer exist. “We’ve played so many shows at a house and it’s the only time that house will ever have a show,” says Taylor.

All-ages spaces are few and far between. Honey Latte Café, one of the main gathering places for under-21 members of the scene after lockdown, recently stopped hosting shows. At the time of this writing, one of the main haunts for young Portland bands is the Mission Theater, owned by the local entertainment mini-empire McMenamins. “There’s a sound engineer and staff and security and everything that comes with a normal show,” says Taylor. “But it’s not that different from what we’d call a DIY show. I think it all comes down to the crowd’s energy.”

“There’s a middle ground between shows like the Mission Theater and super small house shows, and we need that middle ground for bands to come into their own,” says Chong. “It’s really hard to get shows together when venues shut down every two months because of landlords or cops or neighbors or liquor licenses or 16-year-olds getting drunk in the parking lot because they don’t know any better.”

Yet many rising American rock scenes have transcended this issue to find national buzz. Chicago’s largely underage indie-rock scene is the subject of rising national buzz thanks in part to the efforts of its local community to make it a big deal—take the relentlessly self-promoting Hallogallo collective, for instance, which has benefited tremendously from DIY methods like printing zines.

Troper believes the Portland scene has an advantage thanks to its young members’ rejection, or simply lack of awareness, of established (and expensive) methods of self-promotion like touring relentlessly across the country or playing South by Southwest in Austin—something both Troper and Smith cite as an example of the kind of bad advice older bands often give younger bands. “There’s no wisdom I could really impart on someone like Carl [Taylor],” Troper says. “I think that younger bands just sort of know what it actually takes to be a band that people care about.”

Daniel Bromfield is a writer, editor and musician from San Francisco, CA. He currently works as Calendar Editor at the Marin Independent Journal and is a prolific freelancer, with bylines at Pitchfork, Atlas Obscura, Resident Advisor and local media in the Bay Area. He runs the popular @RegionalUSFood Twitter account, highlighting obscure dishes from across the US. Find him on Twitter at @bromf3.