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The profile · researched 25 October 2026
Gooseberry and the ten-song gamble: how a Brooklyn trio narrowed its sound and took it to Europe
Asa Daniels, Will Hammond and Evin Rossington have spent seven years turning a Brooklyn rehearsal-room band into a touring unit with two albums behind it. The second, Simple Sucker, landed on 25 September 2026 and sends them to the UK, Germany and Austria for fifteen shows between 29 October and 22 November.
A trio that learned the job in vans
Gooseberry formed in Brooklyn in the autumn of 2019 as a three-piece and has never been anything else: Asa Daniels on guitar and lead vocals, Will Hammond on bass, Evin Rossington on drums. Daniels writes the songs and the lyrics. The first several years produced a steady run of singles rather than an album — "The Protagonist", "Orbit", "Sleep", "Panic!", "Kikiyon", "Amaretto", "Swindle", "Cherry Blossoms" — plus two EPs, Broken Dance and Validate Me, the latter released in 2023.
Those early singles turned out to be the band's spine rather than juvenilia. Setlist.fm's running tally has "Orbit" performed 137 times, "Sleep" 128, "Panic!" 127, "Kikiyon" 116 and "Only One" 105 — every one of them older than either LP, and every one of them still ahead of the album material in play count.
The band keeps a public tour diary, and it reads like the actual job rather than the press version of it. A single week in June 2025 took in Kung Fu Necktie in Philadelphia on the 19th, a packed Sultan Room in Brooklyn on the 20th, a Cape Cod booking where the room wanted classic hits instead, Firepit Fridays at Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, and a brewery in Burlington. The drive from Charlottesville to Philadelphia took close to eight hours, roughly triple what it should have. Fo Daniels' band opened the run.
All My Friends Are Cattle, and the case for doing less
The debut album, All My Friends Are Cattle, arrived in September 2024. It was produced by Colin Bryson, who had already worked on the Validate Me EP in 2023 and whose background takes in Electric Lady Studios and country records. Daniels has described the working relationship in plain terms: "He's a good friend first and foremost, and we've built up a relationship where we can speak the same language."
Cattle was a demonstration record, and Daniels says so himself: "On the first one, we wanted to show all the things that we could do." Folk-rock, prog structures and Beatles-shaped melody all sat alongside the grunge. It did the job it needed to do — the band headlined Bowery Ballroom in New York, has supported Ringo Starr, and Guitar World named Daniels in its round-up of fifteen New York guitarists worth hearing, a list that also took in Horsegirl and Geese.
What came next was a decision to throw most of that range away. "We decided to make it more cohesively grunge," Daniels said of the follow-up. Rather than writing dozens of songs and cutting the weakest, the band develops ten to fifteen it actually believes in and takes them out on the road before committing them to tape.
Simple Sucker: five card games and a fool
Simple Sucker was released on 25 September 2026, ten tracks: "Gnash", "Durak", "Go Fish", "Fault Lines", "D.B. Cooper", "Solitaire", "Bluff", "Daffodils", "King of Wit" and "Gin Rummy". Five of those titles are card games. That was a writing device before it was a theme — Daniels used the mechanics of each game, its bluffs and its scoring, as a way into song structure.
The unifying idea only showed up once the songs existed. "This throughline of the 'fool' made itself undeniable," Daniels said. "It's nice when things work out that way." The record turns that lens on bigotry, arrogance, fear, nostalgia and obliviousness, with shout-along hooks doing the ironic heavy lifting. "Durak" is Russian for fool, which makes the pattern explicit about a third of the way in.
The opener sets the terms. "Gnash" is a nineties-shaped guitar song in 7/4 about zero-sum competition and who ends up the mug in it — ego and greed on one side, hope and decency on the other, with the outcome left unresolved. Daniels has called it an unarguable rock song, which is roughly the point of putting it first.
Standing in October 2026
The critical response so far has rewarded the narrowing. Writing on 29 September 2026, Carlos Flaqué Monllonch at Crazy Minds called the band "no longer just a promise of the New York scene, but a crushing reality of contemporary alternative rock", and the album "wonderfully imperfect". He singled out "Durak" as a sardonic punk-rock discharge, "D.B. Cooper" as a hypnotic indie-blues, and "Gin Rummy" as a dense garage blues that closes the narrative properly. The abandonment of the debut's folk-rock and prog detours is treated as the reason the record works rather than as a loss.
The touring year behind the album has been relentless and regional, split into named legs: a West Coast run, a Southeast run in the spring, a Midwest run in July. Logged stops include Nowhere Bar in Athens, Georgia on 8 April; Beaver Island Hideaway Campground in Michigan on 18 July; Subterranean in Chicago on the 22nd; Cactus Club in Milwaukee on the 23rd; Raccoon Motel in Davenport on the 24th; Bethel Woods Center for the Arts on 31 August; Higher Ground in South Burlington on 17 September; Avant-Garde Bar in Ottawa on the 19th; Turbo Haüs in Montreal on the 20th; then Golden Light Cantina in Amarillo on 2 October and a Dallas date on the 3rd.
That sequence — a 200-capacity bar in Athens in April, an amphitheatre site at Bethel Woods in August, a Texas cantina in October — is a fair picture of where the band actually sits. The audience is big enough to carry a transatlantic tour and small enough that the rooms are still mostly clubs.
The European run
Fifteen shows across three countries make up the autumn itinerary. The UK leg opens at the Sunflower Lounge in Birmingham on 29 October, then Northern Guitars Cafe Bar in Leeds on the 31st, Heebie Jeebies in Liverpool on 1 November, Lions Den in Manchester on the 2nd, Camden Assembly on the 3rd, Nice n' Sleazy in Glasgow on the 5th and Komedia in Brighton on the 6th.
Germany and Austria follow after a short break: Gleis Neun in Bochum on 11 November, Beben in Mainz on the 12th, Hebebühne in Hamburg on the 15th, Lark in Berlin on the 16th, Elfer in Frankfurt on the 17th, Subway Club in Cologne on the 19th, Cafe Festung in Traunstein on the 21st and Club Lucia in Vienna on the 22nd. Every one of them is a club or a bar; there is no theatre on the sheet.
For most of the European audience this will be a first encounter with a catalogue that now runs to two albums, two EPs and a long tail of standalone singles, and the band is arriving with material that has already been tested over a full year of American dates before it was recorded.
The show, now
A Gooseberry show in 2026 is a plain three-piece set of roughly 45 minutes to an hour, with setlists logged at between eight and twelve songs depending on the room — twelve in Montreal on 20 September, eight in Ottawa the night before, ten in Dallas on 3 October. The shape is consistent: open hard with a new single, work backwards into the older material that the regulars came for, and build to a long close. The Southeast Tour set at Nowhere Bar in Athens on 8 April ran "Go Fish", "Bitter", "Swindle", "Start Over", "Daffodils", "Cattle", "Gnash", a cover of Radiohead's "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi", "Fault Lines", "Kikiyon", "King of Wit" and "Dying To Meet You" — five songs from Simple Sucker played months before the album existed, which is how the band tests material. The Radiohead cover is the one moment of stretch in an otherwise compact set. Staging is minimal; the venues on the current run are bars and small clubs where the band loads its own gear, and Daniels has said the recorded versions and the live ones are not the same thing. The pre-album sets leaned on the singles — "Orbit", "Sleep" and "Panic!" remain the three most-performed songs in the catalogue — and the European dates are the first run where the new record is available to the audience beforehand. Support on the 2025 American summer run came from Fo Daniels' band; openers for the UK and German dates are being billed locally by each venue. Reviews of the record have praised the move to a tighter, grunge-weighted sound, and the band's own tour diary is candid that the reception swings on the booking: a packed, partisan Brooklyn room one night, a tourist crowd asking for classic hits the next.
Researched from gooseberryband.bandcamp.com · broadwayworld.com · idioteq.com · shepherdexpress.com · crazyminds.es · setlist.fm · setlist.fm · songkick.com
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Jonathan Cardy · CC BY-SA 3.0
