Review: Alter Boy at Freo.Social

Alter Boy at Freo.Social
w/ Boox Kid, Shorehaven
Friday, October 11, 2024

A lot can happen in five years. Since breakout singles Frankenstein’s Dream and Love Machine took Perth by storm in 2019, Alter Boy have endured stylistic and personnel changes that have both ‘altered’ them (sorry) and solidified their current iteration.

A phenomenal live act from the very beginning, this openly genderqueer ‘boy band’ featuring hard-of-hearing members also incorporates a live Auslan interpreter into the performance. Rather than having someone off side of stage, they have featured interpreters as dancers and performance artists, creating an aesthetic that’s all their own.

For their debut album launch last Friday, the support acts were also on board. Shorehaven opened to a sparse number of early arrivals, but it wasn’t long before co-singer Hannah Gill had the crowd amping up, first with her potty-mouth signature tune Feminine and later with a cover of Paramore’s Still Into You, which along with Milly’s Car Ride closed their set, all in the jangly vein of fellow Perthians Spacey Jane. Fun.

Like Shorehaven, Boox Kid in the main support featured an AUSLAN interpreter (two in fact, taking turns), and whilst not part of his usual line-up, they got the memo and danced along enthusiastically. Aside from the obvious benefits to the hard-of-hearing community, it was a major mood lifter, and you could sense the community amongst the crowd.

The nom-de-plume of Jarred Wall, Boox Kid might’ve played the gig of his life on Friday. Taking advantage of the increased lighting and production care of Freo.Social’s impressive rig, the First Nations beatmaker captivated the crowd with his native tongue and amazing voice.

The majority of his electropop excursions were more conventional English-language tunes through the second half, veering into euphoric Coldplay territory under the spectacular lights and booming synths of standouts like Me and the Birds.

Alter Boy’s Molly Priest is more of a focal point now than in the band’s early days, when they were a performance art, indie-electronic start-up. On Friday night, the only thing onstage demanding as much attention was the aforementioned production, which was first class.

With her signature body art and magnetic presence still the main visual cues, Freo.Social’s lighting and spectacular stage show accentuated the best parts of this star-in-the-making’s performance. You might miss some of the theatrical impulses and choreography of days gone by, and personally I missed the subversive Love Machine, but there are plenty of great new tracks from the album they’re launching, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, including a move towards affecting ballads.

Mercy is the most powerful of these. Priest has always been vulnerable, and there’s an emo element to plenty of their lyrics, but she’s never penned something as affecting as “There was someone who hurt me when I was young/ Show me a little mercy when we’re done.”

Don’t Hurt Me (I Used to Be a Baby) and Portrait of God appeared late in the self-proclaimed “monster tracks” section of the night and were suitably huge, but perhaps the highlight came, appropriately, with Boox Kid returning to the stage for I Don’t See You as he does on the album.

(Without quite stealing the show, his set had been such a perfect support that seeing this poignant duet made for quite the exclamation mark on a wonderful night.)

In the end, those big production moves succeeded in taking Alter Boy to a new level live—a necessary step up if they’re going to become the (inter)national success story we all think they’re destined to be.

Friday night certainly felt bigger than your usual local launch and more like a tour. Whatever the future holds, theirs is a truly unique journey that, now with an album in tow, is hopefully just getting started.

HARVEY RAE

Photos by Adrian Thomson