Words & Photos by Anthony Abu-Hanna
Summer’s just kicking into high gear, and what a treat it was to spend a perfect evening at Westville Music Bowl. The skies were cloudy, sure, but the bowl was teeming with energy and excitement for what the night would bring.
Things opened with Thao, formerly of Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, and her band warming up the crowd for the folk-country-rock experience ahead. It was a solid set that did exactly what an opener should: get the room ready without overstaying its welcome.
Lord Huron, led by Ben Schneider, are currently touring behind their most recent album, The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1. One thing to know about this band is that each album is an experience unto itself. The records are meant to be heard front to back, not as a collection of individual songs, but as one congruent unit. Schneider is adamant about that, and once you’ve seen them live, it’s easy to understand why.
The stage reflects that philosophy too. Schneider said in 2025 that The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1 is about aging, and that theme comes through in the setup: an old-school payphone doubling as a microphone sits front and center, with a gigantic jukebox looming behind it. Before a single note is played, the stage is already telling a story.
Spectacle is the best word for a Lord Huron concert. It can feel more like a rock opera than a show built around a random song selection. Every song is meticulously chosen, placement included, to tell a unified story for the evening. That’s evident when you look at the setlist: only a handful of classic songs made the cut. They’re focused on the now and want to present exactly that.
After the first few songs, Schneider leaned into the mic and told the crowd: “This first act takes place in a strange and foreign land… Connecticut.” The place erupted.
“Ends of the Earth,” the song that put Lord Huron on the map, came early in the set and drew a full sing-along from a crowd that clearly knew every word. Worth noting as an aside: the song holds a special place for a lot of people as the final thing you hear in the Community series finale, a show with its own deeply devoted following. Hearing it live always pulls me back to that show.
Schneider owns the stage. He moves side to side, dances like a crooner, and has a natural gift for pulling the audience in without forcing it. At one point, a group of girls cheering loudly from the upper balcony caught his attention, and his reaction sent the entire crowd into a roar. From that moment on, their cheers could be heard from different spots around the Bowl all night long, almost like their own running commentary on the show.
Schneider circles back throughout the night to his philosophy on listening. He’s not prescriptive about format, but he is clear about sequence: listen front to back. “Just not backwards. It’ll open a portal and some shit will come out that you don’t want.” The crowd laughed hard at that one, but the point landed too.
One of the night’s best moments came with the intro to “La Belle Fleur Sauvage,” where the screen played a black-and-white film clip before dropping to complete darkness, and then the song just took off. It was cinematic in the best way. But the band hit a different level entirely near the end, turning in an electric run through “Meet Me in the Woods” and “The Night We Met” to close out the main set. The crowd felt every bit of it.
The night wrapped with a three-song encore: “The World Ender,” “Not Dead Yet,” and “It All Comes Back.” And just like that, it was over.
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