Never underestimate how TikTok has the power to bring new music to a younger generation especially bands that have been around for a long time. Bôa from London, England are a perfect example of that.
Forming in 1993 and releasing their first studio album in 1998, The Race of a Thousand Camels (renamed and rereleased as Twilight in 2001), the band far predate TikTok. One of the tracks from that album, “Duvet,” was used in the cult classic anime Serial Experiments Lain, first airing in 1998 in Japan and making it onto DVD/VHS in North America a year later. Although the band gained popularity because of the anime, it wasn’t until TikTok in 2021 that the song and the band gained a wider audience. Cut forward to 2024, and the band are on tour here in North America and one of the stops was in cloudy Portland, Oregon at Wonder Ballroom.
Bôa’s performance was hypnotizing to watch, pulling me in with this feeling of melancholy, yet there was a warmness to it as well. Their vocalist, Jasmine Rodgers, sells the band performance being hard hitting and yet having a mellowness of it all. I want to point out their guitarist has this small “twang” throughout their songs (you can hear it in their song “Fool”) that I get some audio pleasure listening to. Their whole set fit the feeling of the cloudy day that was happening in Portland that night.
Along with blowing up on TikTok, of course, comes exposure to a younger crowd, and there were many high school- and colleg-age kid at the show. The majority of the crowd that night was a young age group, and I’m betting that this was their first show. I thought it was pretty cool to see so many young faces appreciate the band’s mix of hard rock and indie rock.
Their upcoming album, Whiplash, will be released on October 18, and I encourage you to check it out if you’re a fan of The Cranberries or Dido.
Bôa
