AJR has released their first-ever live album, Live from the Hollywood Bowl. The record immortalizes the brother band’s 2025 performance at the famed Los Angeles venue, which marked the finale of their Somewhere in the Sky tour.
“It’s probably our #1 favorite part of the job is, like, planning out the tours and coming up with weird new illusions that haven’t been done before,” Ryan Met tells ABC Audio.
“A lot of times those illusions are very visual and they’re very, like, you had to be there to experience it,” Ryan continues. “It felt like at the Hollywood Bowl, our last tour, was the first time where it’s like, ‘OK, we’ve done enough interesting musical things that will actually translate to a live album and make you feel like you were there.'”
The Live from the Hollywood Bowl track list includes renditions of “Way Less Sad,” “Bang!” and “Sober Up,” as well as a medley titled “A Bunch of Songs We Haven’t Played in a Long Time” and a closing performance of “Weak” featuring the USC Trojan Marching Band.
“You sing with more emotion and more power when it comes to a live show than you would on the record,” Jack Met says. “You really wanna get across that emotion.”
That emotion is part of what Ryan feels contrasts live concerts with music generated by AI.
“The more and more people that can just, like, click a button and make an AJR song is gonna be, like, ‘OK, that made me feel nothing, I have an end product that sounds like an AJR song,’ but what’s the actual point?” Ryan says. “It’s to be in a crowd, it’s to experience it, it’s to be surprised by the artist. Just all that stuff exists in the live space.”
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