Outside the Fonda Theater in Downtown Los Angeles stretches a queue of 5000 people or more. They’re waiting to get inside one of the most monumental DIY events of the year: the one-off Friday Therapy performance from American’s greatest boyband, BROCKHAMPTON. It’s the first time the collective has had the opportunity to showcase their brand new record, GINGER, live and in full (it dropped earlier that day), but as the doors burst open and they take to the stage, the ride-or-dies down the front seem to know every word anyway.
Enter the most prolific cult rap-pop phenomenon of the century: a dozen or so boys from across America, bound together by a love for frenetic, soul-bearing, sonically skewed hip-hop. There’s a reason the world has rallied behind them, and it ties back to their beginnings, so far removed from the humdrum repetition and factory-line formation of major music acts today.
BROCKHAMPTON’s new era sees them loop in some of the most prolific figures in pop culture — including actor and artist Shia LaBeouf — to form a new, optimistic vision of their future. You can feel it in the room tonight: old news stories of former members’ fuck ups, and the hysteria that stemmed from becoming part of a major label roster after being so fiercely independent, are sidelined. The DNA of BROCKHAMPTON runs through everything on a far deeper level; you can feel it in the thick air that floats like dizzying, teen-fueled smog above their shows.
And so, the show began, bringing in boys like Dominic Fike and JPEGMafia as warm-up treats too. To celebrate the occasion, i-D went backstage to capture shots of Friday Therapy as it unfolded. Later, we slid into the guy’s DMs to ask them more about how it went down, the reactions to GINGER so far, and the song they’d ask Taylor Swift (a fellow pop culture icon whose album also dropped Friday) to add a verse to. Check it all out below.
