Vundabar & Yot Club

From No Nada to Gawk

Vundabar started as school friends in the suburbs of Boston. Brandon Hagen and Drew McDonald had played together in an earlier group called No Nada from around 2009, and when that band ended in 2012 the two kept going under a new name, Hagen on vocals and guitar, McDonald on drums. The bass position changed hands more than once in the early years. Cliff Bowe held it briefly in late 2015 and Grayson Kirtland from 2016 to 2018, before Zack Abramo settled in on bass and backing vocals. That three-piece has been the band ever since.

They did things the slow way. The debut, 'Antics', came out in 2013 on Gawk Records, a cassette label the band founded themselves, and the second album gave that label its name. 'Gawk', released in 2015, carried 'Chop', 'Oulala' and a song called 'Alien Blues' that would take six years to show what it could do. 'Smell Smoke' followed in 2018 and 'Either Light' in 2020, with 'Devil for the Fire' arriving in 2022. Somewhere along that road the band added Loma Vista Recordings to the self-run imprint, but the essential shape never changed: a trio from Massachusetts that made records between tours rather than the other way round.

The afterlife of 'Alien Blues' and a sixth record

The turn came from an unlikely direction. 'Alien Blues', by then six years old, went viral on TikTok in 2021, and the band responded with a redux version in 2022. A song written by teenagers on a cassette label became the reason a new audience turned up at the door, and the setlist data from the years since shows it has never left the set.

The record that followed was 'Surgery and Pleasure', the band's sixth studio album, released on 7 March 2025. Toni Elton's review for New Noise Magazine, published the same day, called it 'one of the most interesting personalities the band have delivered yet' and argued that 'Vundabar have never let the confines of genre limit where they were able to take their music'. Elton read the album as a piece about resilience and 'how music keeps us alive and connected', picking out 'Feels Like Forever' and 'I Need You', and describing the closing track, 'Why Is It So Hard To Say Goodbye', as something that 'feels more like a spoken word poem' and 'sheds its armor and exposes the true heart'. Two of those songs now bookend the live show.

The band then looked backwards as well as forwards. Their Wikipedia entry, updated on 1 September 2026, records that Vundabar announced United States and European tours for spring and summer 2026 to mark the tenth anniversary of 'Gawk', the album that started all of this.

Yot Club: from Hattiesburg to a platinum single

Yot Club is one person. John Ryan Kaiser grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, started playing guitar at eight, and began putting music on SoundCloud in 2014 under the name Amateur Observer. The Yot Club moniker arrived in 2019 along with a rush of EPs: 'aquarium', 'Bipolar' and 'bleach beach' all appeared that year. One track from 'Bipolar', 'YKWIM?', found its way onto TikTok and changed the terms of the project. Kaiser has said the music had been 'a hobby' until that point. The Recording Industry Association of America certified the single platinum in November 2022 and the BPI awarded it a silver disc in 2023.

He moved to Nashville in May 2021 and released a debut album, 'off the grid', in June 2022, with the 'Santolina' EP the same year. Speaking to Northern Transmissions in March 2024, ahead of his second album, he was living in New York and already talking about leaving it, describing the city as 'not sustainable for me' and floating Philadelphia as the next stop. The same interview caught him explaining the nostalgic pull in his songwriting in plain terms: 'People like a little bit of predictability, it's comforting. It's kind of like comfort food.' 'Rufus' came out on 29 March 2024. His discography also includes collaborations with Jordana and with Vundabar, which explains some of the ease between the two acts on a shared bill.

'Simpleton' and the suburbs

The third album turned the lens on where he came from. In a Q&A with The Luna Collective, Kaiser said he had wanted the record 'to revolve around a central theme in terms of song meaning and aesthetic', and the theme was the manicured Mississippi suburbia of his childhood. His summary of the place was blunt: 'the lack of culture is the culture'. By this point he had settled in Los Angeles, and the album moved towards acoustic instrumentation and cleaner production, with a cover painted by the Los Angeles artist Jake Longstreth. He said he hoped listeners would 'listen from start to finish'.

Northern Transmissions reported the details of the release: 'Simpleton' came out on 17 April 2026 through Amuse, runs to thirteen tracks, and was led by the single 'Projecting', with a video directed by Nathan Castiel. 'Here and Now' followed as the second single. Kaiser told the site that 'I want the lyrics to cut through now because I'm putting a lot more care into what I'm saying.' The same report set out a twenty-five-date North American headline tour from 15 May to 17 June 2026, taking in Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Denver, Chicago and Brooklyn, with zzzahara and Renny Conti in support and Vundabar sharing a co-headline night in San Francisco.

The co-headline habit

The two acts first toured together properly in spring 2025, on a run that setlist.fm files as the 'Co-headline with YOT Club 2025' tour. Twenty-three Vundabar setlists from that tour were logged on the site, and the shape of the set was strikingly consistent: 'I Got Cracked' opened every one of the eleven full setlists analysed, and 'I Need You' closed ten of them, with 'Alien Blues' taking the closing slot on the one remaining night. No encores were recorded on any of them.

That pairing has now crossed the Atlantic. The September 2026 run is billed as Vundabar and Yot Club, and it includes Village Underground in London on Wednesday 16 September 2026, with doors at 19:30 and tickets listed by Songkick from £22 to £26.48 across Gigantic, See Tickets and DICE, followed by Chalk in Brighton on Thursday 17 September. Songkick lists Vundabar as the headliner with Yot Club in support, so the running order on this side of the water may be less even than the co-headline label suggests. Both acts arrive with new material: Vundabar with 'Surgery and Pleasure' and the 'Gawk' anniversary sets they have been playing since late 2025, Kaiser with 'Simpleton' five months old.

What the numbers say about the show

Setlist.fm's averaged data for Vundabar in 2025, drawn from twenty-three full setlists out of forty-nine logged, describes a twelve-song set with no encore. It runs 'I Got Cracked', 'Acetone', 'Chop', 'Spades', 'Ash in the Sun', 'Beta Fish', '$$$', 'Oulala', 'Alien Blues', 'Darla', 'Feels Like Forever' and 'I Need You'. 'I Got Cracked' opened twenty-two of those shows and 'I Need You' closed nineteen. The pattern is easy to read: two 'Surgery and Pleasure' songs at either end, the 'Gawk' material and 'Alien Blues' clustered in the back half, and the band walking off rather than coming back for more.

Yot Club's live set is less thoroughly documented on the open web, and this profile does not guess at it. What is on record is that Kaiser has toured his last two albums with a support bill of his own choosing, and that he and Vundabar have now shared stages across two countries and two calendar years. For a British audience the September 2026 dates are the first chance to see that pairing on home ground.