Melrose Avenue

About Melrose Avenue

Melrose Avenue started in a practice space in Silver Lake around 2016, which feels almost too on-the-nose given their name. The original lineup was college dropouts who'd been playing in different pop-punk bands around LA and decided to try something that leaned more into indie rock textures. Guitarist Sam Chen and vocalist Riley Morrison wrote most of the early material, stuff that split the difference between third-wave emo and the kind of shimmering guitar pop that was having a moment on SoundCloud.

Their first proper release was an EP called Afternoon Traffic in 2017. It didn't do much commercially, but Sunset Boulevard got picked up by a few Spotify playlists and started racking up streams. The song works because it sounds exactly like driving the 101 at golden hour—nostalgic and a little melancholic without being precious about it. That track became their calling card, the one that still gets the biggest reaction at shows.

The breakthrough came with their 2019 debut album Westside Stories. By then they'd added keyboardist Jordan Lin, which gave them more sonic range. Neon Lights was the single that actually crossed over to alt radio, probably because it had enough pop-punk energy for the Warped Tour crowd but enough production polish for indie playlists. The album title is extremely LA, but the songs are more universal than you'd expect—mostly about being in your early twenties and feeling like you're supposed to have things figured out but very much don't.

They toured pretty relentlessly after that, built a solid fanbase in the usual markets. Their second album, Echoes, came out in 2021 and showed them pulling back from some of the pop-punk urgency. The title track is almost seven minutes long, which felt like a statement. Some longtime fans thought they were getting too serious, but songs like Velvet showed they could do moodier material without losing what made them compelling. The pandemic meant they couldn't tour it properly, so it kind of came and went without the momentum they'd built previously.

Strangers dropped as a standalone single in 2023 and suggested they were trying to split the difference between eras—tighter than Echoes, but more refined than the early stuff. They've been working on a third album that keeps getting delayed for reasons that remain vague. Morrison mentioned in an interview that they've scrapped and rerecorded a bunch of tracks, which either means they're chasing something specific or can't decide what kind of band they want to be.

Right now they're in that middle zone where they can headline mid-sized venues and festival afternoon slots but haven't quite broken into anything bigger. They're respected in indie rock circles, still draw the pop-punk nostalgists, and seem to be figuring out how to age into their thirties without completely abandoning what worked initially.

Small venue crowds that actually pay attention. They don't command rooms so much as create them. People tend to stop talking when they start. The energy is more introspective than ecstatic, but that works when you've got tunes this carefully arranged. Expect intimacy over spectacle.

Known for Sunset Boulevard, Neon Lights, Echoes, Velvet, Strangers

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