On tour
Every date the ticketer lists, worldwide · venue time
The profile · researched 19 October 2026
The Killswitch and the Cubicle: How Evan Lo Turned a Modified Telecaster into Flawed Mangoes
Flawed Mangoes is Evan Lo, a Boston guitarist whose ambient, loop-built instrumentals became the house sound of "hopecore" video montages in 2023. Three years on he is a signed artist with a touring band, a March 2026 album, and a European run in November that includes Pitchfork's London weekender.
Newton, Rochester, and a job he walked away from
Evan Lo grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, in a Chinese American household where his parents put him through piano lessons. The guitar arrived in middle school, via Green Day and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and he played in high school bands before enrolling on an audio engineering programme in Rochester, New York. That training led to a job at Bose after graduation — the conventional outcome for a kid who liked both circuits and chords.
He did not stay. Lo left the engineering career and came back to music during an emotionally difficult stretch following a breakup, recording in a bedroom in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and posting guitar fragments online. The project had a false start: an earlier moniker, Fla.mingo, produced chillwave recordings on SoundCloud and Bandcamp that went largely unheard. The Flawed Mangoes name dates from 2020.
His reference points were not the ambient producers people later filed him alongside. He has described coming up on math rock and post-rock — Battles, El Ten Eleven, Tera Melos — then detouring through the vaporwave and lo-fi production scenes before returning to the guitar as his primary instrument. The two halves of that history explain the records: loop-based composition built by an engineer, played on an electric guitar rather than programmed.
A utility knife, duct tape, and 100 million streams
The break came in July 2023 with "Killswitch Lullaby". The title is literal. Lo and friends had fitted a homemade killswitch to a guitar using a utility knife and duct tape; the final version lives on a modified Mexican Telecaster carrying parts salvaged from a J Mascis Jazzmaster, with an MXR Dyna Comp compressor holding the sustain open underneath. The stuttering, cut-and-return figure that results became the track's signature, and the track has since passed 100 million streams on Spotify.
What happened next was not of his making. Through 2023 and 2024 his recordings were adopted wholesale as the backing for "hopecore" edits — sentimental montages, often cut with motivational speeches, engineered to produce a lump in the throat. Millions of listeners arrived through other people's videos. Lo's own account of his intent is less cynical than the format suggests: he has said he is trying to evoke strong emotions, and that how people choose to interpret the music is their business, adding that he is at least grateful it attached itself to something positive.
The commercial apparatus followed the attention. He signed to APG in April 2024, four months before an appearance on Kai Cenat's Twitch channel, a stream that routinely draws tens of thousands of concurrent viewers, where he told the audience never to doubt their own potential. Touring representation came later: UTA signed him in May 2025, with Jbeau Lewis and Noah Friedlander handling the account.
Four Anomalies and an Afterlife
The catalogue moved quickly once the audience existed. Killswitch Melodies arrived in 2023, followed by The Unwavering Hand in September 2024. Then came the most unusual thing he has done structurally: beginning on 29 January 2025, Lo released a full-length album in monthly instalments, the Anomaly sequence, which ran to four parts across that year.
The Anomaly records are where the project stopped being purely instrumental. They brought in Jonathan Zonenshine — a former Bose colleague — on drums, and on the track "mk4" they brought in Lo's own voice for the first time, over a country-leaning arrangement that sits oddly and deliberately against the ambient material around it. Reviewing Anomaly IV on 9 August 2025, Radio UTD gave it four stars out of five and singled out the restraint: the deliberate withholding of climax in certain tracks, the instrumental "Butterfly Effect" landing emotionally without a lyric, "Somniferous" reaching for something close to Bon Iver's intimacy, and "mk4" lurching into punk-adjacent noise. The reviewer's summary was that Lo makes the music he wants to make rather than music aimed at trends or charts.
Afterlife, released on 6 March 2026 through APG, is the most recent album: thirteen tracks, fifty-seven minutes, and a user score of 77 from thirty-three ratings on Album of the Year. Singles have continued around it, including "Anthem". Collaborations across the catalogue include work with Scarlet House and aldn.
Standing, October 2026
Lo spent 2026 arguing, politely, against the label that made him. In a cover interview with Guitar.com he set out the case for not restricting himself, and the recent work backs it: "Surreal" carries vocals and leans into shoegaze textures rather than the clean, recursive guitar figures that the montage edits latched onto. The phrase he is trying to get out from under is one his listeners invented, not one he chose.
The touring record is still short, which is part of what makes the current run notable. Setlist.fm has three Flawed Mangoes shows logged for the whole of 2025 — the first run as a headline act, three sold-out dates in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, which he prepared for with roughly eight months of rehearsal to convert bedroom recordings into something a full band could play. The Killswitch Memories Tour in June 2026 was the proper expansion: Atlanta on 2 June through to Boston's Paradise Rock Club on 26 June, taking in The Regent Theater in Los Angeles, Swedish American Hall in San Francisco, Ophelia's Electric Soapbox in Denver, Chop Shop in Chicago, Irving Plaza in New York, Union Stage in Washington, The Garrison in Toronto and The Fillmore in Philadelphia.
The European leg follows in November 2026 and opens at Cactus Muziekcentrum in Bruges on 1 November, then Ekko in Utrecht on 2 November and MTC in Cologne on 3 November, with Paris on 6 November. The British and Irish dates — the three currently on sale — are Pitchfork Festival's Dalston Takeover in London on Saturday 7 November, The Deaf Institute in Manchester on 8 November, and the Soundhouse in Dublin on 10 November, the last of which went on sale on 9 September 2026 through Singular Artists and Ticketmaster Ireland.
Eighty minutes, seventeen songs, one encore
The live show is a band show, not a laptop set, and it runs shorter than a stadium-length bill. At Swedish American Hall in San Francisco on 10 June 2026, doors opened at 7pm, Flawed Mangoes went on at 9pm and came off at 10.20pm: seventeen songs in eighty minutes, fifteen in the main set plus a two-song encore.
The set is sequenced to delay the obvious. It opened with "Riff 2", "Cold", "Birdsong" and "The Beginning" before "Mk4" and "Dark", with "Killswitch Lullaby" placed seventh rather than saved for the end. The back half ran "Revelation", "Circle of Death", "Shooting Star", "Missing Pieces", "Medulla", "Palindrome", "Swimming" and "Surreal", with "Dramamine" and "Scattered" as the encore. Scarlet House, a collaborator on record, opened that night.
Audience reaction from the June run centred on the playing rather than production: repeated notes about the musicianship of the young guitarists on stage and the connection with the room, and praise for venue sound. Several attendees mentioned that Lo stayed behind to meet people afterwards. The Dublin promoter's billing puts the project above 600 million streams globally, 1.6 million TikTok followers and 480,000 on Instagram — numbers that explain why a catalogue assembled in a Cambridge bedroom is now selling out rooms on two continents.
The show, now
The current show is the Killswitch Memories Tour, played by a full band rather than solo with backing tracks — Lo rehearsed for around eight months to translate the recordings into live arrangements with drums and expanded instrumentation. At Swedish American Hall in San Francisco on 10 June 2026 the set ran eighty minutes, from 9pm to 10.20pm after 7pm doors: seventeen songs, fifteen in the main set and a two-song encore. It opened on "Riff 2", "Cold", "Birdsong" and "The Beginning", put "Killswitch Lullaby" seventh rather than holding it back, then ran through "Revelation", "Circle of Death", "Shooting Star", "Missing Pieces", "Medulla", "Palindrome", "Swimming" and "Surreal", closing with "Dramamine" and "Scattered". Scarlet House, who has collaborated with Lo on record, opened that night and shared the bill at Boston's Paradise Rock Club on 26 June. Audience feedback from the June run focused on the guitar playing, the band's rapport with the room and the venue sound, with several attendees noting that Lo stayed afterwards to meet people. The November 2026 European leg starts at Cactus Muziekcentrum in Bruges on 1 November and reaches Pitchfork Festival's Dalston Takeover in London on 7 November — a multi-venue day across EartH, Shacklewell Arms, The Victoria, Cafe OTO and St Matthias Church with doors at 4.30pm and roughly thirty acts including DIIV, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets and Working Men's Club — then The Deaf Institute in Manchester on 8 November and the Soundhouse in Dublin on 10 November.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · wbur.org · guitar.com · radioutd.com · setlist.fm · setlist.fm · gignoise.com · songkick.com
Pictures
The ticketer's photographs
