Studio 52 is a community artist space located in the heart of Allston, and is proud to support the Boston music scene and local artist community.
Late last year, a new Boston band called No Hope/No Harm caught our attention, for a variety of reasons. First, it featured members of The Sheila Divine, The Field Effect, and long-lost ’00s indie lads The Good North. Second, they were named after a Smiths lyric, pulled right from Morrissey’s “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” journal. Third, their debut single “This Living Wage” was pretty spectacular.
Tonight, No Hope/No Harm play their first ever live show, sharing a bill with Choke Up, Taking Meds, and Beach Boy at O’Brien’s Pub in Allston. With The Sheila Divine, guitarist Aaron Perrino is used to playing places like the Paradise, so this is a nice, intimate jump-off point for a band with some impressive pedigree and unlimited potential. You should probably get tickets in advance.
So what’s No Hope/No Harm’s deal? Frontman Luke O’Neil, the Esquire writer and occasional Vanyaland contributor, explained to us back in October: “I suppose it sort of sounds like the Sheila Divine meets the Good North, surprisingly! At least on this first song ‘This Living Wage,’ for sure — sort of melancholy grandeur — but a lot of the songs are really tight pop-punky type stuff, and some are sort of classic ’90s emo sounding.”
And the Smiths-ian name is quite intentional. “Aaron proposed the name, and we were all into it right away, which is so much easier than the usual endless process of picking a band name,” O’Neil said. “I think he must have subliminally thought of it by looking at my tattoo of those Smiths lyrics during practice. Obviously he and I are huge Morrissey fans, and there can never be enough bands named after the Smiths.”
Word to that.
For those missing tonight’s Allston gig, fear not: No Hope/No Harm play ArtsEmerson’s Black Box Sounds series on March 31.
