Just yesterday, sister trio The Warning announced the theatrical release of The Warning Live from Auditorio Nacional, CDMX, a feature-length concert film which documents the band’s February headlining performance in Mexico City, which will play at a plethora of local venues on August 21st, before a double live album of the audio portion drops the next day. However, this past Saturday, July 19th, Union Transfer hosted a far more intimate edition of the show, which proved to be the best rock show the (aptly nicknamed) City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection has seen all summer. The tour comes in support of 2024’s Keep Me Fed, the Mexico-based band’s fourth full-length and possibly best hard rock record of the decade.
While the Eraserhood venue is best known for housing “hip” twentysomethings coming to see the biggest acts of indie rock, The Warning’s classic hard rock sound brought a crowd that looked more along the lines of the people whose summer concertgoing primarily takes place at Camden’s 25,000-capacity Freedom Mortgage Pavilion, where they can have their faces rocked off by legends of Ozzfest (Last season the shed hosted headlining shows from Korn, Rob Zombie, and Slipknot, in addition to the annual MMRBQ, which featured The Warning playing alongside The Offspring and Halestorm.)
Despite the fact that the sisters — Daniela, Paulina, and Alejandra Villarreal – are all in their early-mid-twenties, the audience ranged from teens whose bedrooms are shrines to the trio to rock fans old enough to be the girls’ grandparents, donning shirts of Pantera, Alice In Chains, Faith No More, Metallica, and Led Zeppelin for probably the most intimate rock spectacle they’ve seen since their own teen years. And the performance didn’t seem to disappoint any of the 1,300 lucky enough to get tickets to the show that sold out well in advance, many of whom lined Spring Garden hours before doors opened.
Although Union Transfer doesn’t exactly have room for pyrotechnics, the show featured a light show fit for an arena, along with the sweaty intensity and charisma of nearly any monsters of rock on their last tour of nightclubs. The 17-song, 75-minute set (including a two-song encore) featured 11 of Keep Me Fed’s 12 tracks (including Latin Grammy-nominated “Qué Más Quieres; lead single “MORE,” a perfect embodiment of Charlotte Sands’ definition of “brat rock;” and “Satisfied,” the album’s best track and something that sounds like it could’ve come from a band double-headlining the world with Lacuna Coil in 2006), along with a handful of tracks from the band’s 2022 breakthrough third LP, ERROR, which The Warning premiered for a Philadelphia audience on their first full-scale North American tour with a soon-to-be-considered legendary performance at our very own Brooklyn Bowl.
*Photo courtesy of The Warning
