Fox Theater

Five Dice, All Threes is a record of uncommon intensity and tenderness, communal exorcism and personal excavation. These are, of course, qualities that fans have come to expect from Bright Eyes, nearly three decades into their career. The tight-knit band of Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis, and Nate Walcott tends to operate in distinct sweeping movements: each unique in its sound and story but unified by a sense of ambition and ever-growing emotional stakes. Even with this rich history behind them, these new songs exude a visceral thrill like nothing they have attempted before. Oberst has always sung in a voice that conveys a sense of life-or-death gravity. At times throughout Five Dice, All Threes, you may feel worried for him; other times, he may seem like the only one with the clarity to get us out of this mess.

On the self-produced Five Dice, All Threes, Bright Eyes embrace the elusive quality that has made them so enduring and influential across generations and genres, bringing their homespun sound from an Omaha bedroom to devoted audiences around the world. In Oberst’s songwriting lies a promise that our loneliest thoughts and feelings can take on grander shapes when passed between friends, blasted through speakers, or shouted among crowds. This time around, the band invites such like-minded voices onto the record with them, with notable guest appearances from Cat Power (“All Threes”), The National’s Matt Berninger (“The Time I Have Left”), and Alex Orange Drink, the frontman of the New York punk band The So So Glos, who co-wrote several songs and shares a climactic verse in the surging “Rainbow Overpass.”

Despite this range of collaborators, Five Dice, All Threes is as confessional and unguarded as Oberst has sounded in years. Throughout these timelessly constructed yet unabashedly modern songs, he earns his place among a rare class of songwriters who have grown more fearless and boundless with age. In the scenic “Bas Jan Ader”—which takes its title from the 20th century Dutch performance artist whose final act found him sailing into the Atlantic Ocean, never to return—his writing traces the course of a bad memory smoothing out to invite the onset of nostalgia. “I never thought I’d see 45,” he sings to a lapping, chiming melody. “How is it that I’m still alive?” For an artist who has explored unflinching questions of mortality since his teen years, the writing on Five Dive, All Threes conveys a new sense of urgency—and empathy, too.

“For whatever reason, I was born with a brain that’s preoccupied with that kind of thing,” Oberst says of his lifelong penchant for dark subject matter. “When I was young, there was a performative aspect to it, which got reflected back at me. Now I’m at a point where I don’t care what the reaction is going to be. Before it was a little out of my hands—I didn’t know how to write if it wasn’t specific to my actual life. Now I do it by choice.”

Throughout these reflections on the American landscape, Oberst shuttles us from Los Angeles to New York: two cities he has called home and the locations for his recent series of rapturously received, career-spanning solo residencies. Along the course of his journey, he takes shots at tech billionaires and the rise of artificial intelligence; he offers heartfelt wisdom and slips into clipped, surrealist imagery that earns its place among namechecked literary heroes like Vladimir Nabokov and Mark Twain.

For every striking turn in his lyrics, the band knows just how to complement him. On one level, Five Dice, All Threes may be the most fun album in the Bright Eyes catalog, filled with singalong hooks and buzzing performances. “I think it revisits the spirit of our older records,” Walcott says. “There is a real quality of chaos and ecstatic urgency in the performances.” And yet, sitting alongside these adrenalized rockers that sound beamed in directly from the garage, you will find contemplative, psychedelic material like the heartbreaking “Tiny Suicides” and “All Threes,” a song whose jazzy piano solo and free-associative lyrics feel totally unprecedented in the Bright Eyes catalog.

This vivid, cathartic music arrives four years after the band’s 2020 comeback album Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was. That record’s zoomed-out lyrics and meticulous studio atmosphere resonated during the peak of COVID lockdown and led to Bright Eyes’ long-awaited return to the road in summer 2021. By this point, they were also deep into their Companions project, in which the band reissued their back catalog via new label Dead Oceans along with newly recorded reinterpretations of material throughout their songbook.

In the aftermath of these exhaustive endeavors, the band felt grateful to be back together and somewhat uncertain about their future. It wasn’t until Oberst invited Alex Orange Drink to stay with him in Los Angeles in winter 2023 when a group of new songs started forming. At first, these back-and-forth sessions on Oberst’s porch were just for fun. Recalling his early days of collaboration and scrappy home-recording, the pair sought to keep each other entertained and inspired, with little thought as to where the material would take them. But after completing gems like the anthemic, self-lacerating “Bells & Whistles” and the punky duet of “Rainbow Overpass,” it became clear that Oberst was tapping into new territory.

When they hit the studio with Oberst’s longtime bandmates—the multi-instrumentalist and producer Mike Mogis, the keyboardist and arranger Nate Walcott—they opted for a fast-paced approach that drew inspiration from formative influences like The Replacements and Frank Black. They sought textures that burst from the mix like gnarly splashes of paint on a blank canvas; they opted for first takes and spontaneous decisions. Referring to 2005’s starkly produced landmark, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, Mogis laughs, “It took us 20 years to make another record that sounds like a band playing live.” But where those songs exposed the raw beauty of the group’s folksier side, Five Dice, All Threes thrashes and squirms and resists classification. In the brilliant expanse of “El Capitan,” they blend a galloping rhythm you might find in a Johnny Cash standard with a swell of funereal horns, shouted vocals, and lyrics that read like a sobering farewell between twin souls. “So they’re burning you an effigy,” Oberst sings. “Well, that happens to me all the time!”

As per usual, the music comes loaded with subtext that invites deep listening—the signature touch of a band who has always honored the album as its own exalted work of art. In the background of these songs, you can piece together a story about love and fate and identity, stitched together from samples of the 1954 Frank Sinatra film Suddenly, a layered orchestra of people sobbing, and a game of dice that borders on cosmic and lends the album its framing device and winking title: In the game of threes, the titular move would indicate a perfect roll. Perfection, however, means something different in the world of Bright Eyes, where our flaws are what grants us authority and finding meaning is only possible if we bear witness to the dark, winding journey to get there. On Five Dice, All Threes, Bright Eyes embrace these beliefs with music that feels thrillingly alive, as if we were all in the room with them, shouting along and gaining the strength to move forward together. It doesn’t just sound like classic Bright Eyes. It sounds like their future, too.

On her third album as Blondshell, Sabrina Teitelbaum is digging in. After introducing herself as a vital new voice in rock on 2023’s Blondshell and 2025’s If You Asked for a Picture — filled with loud-quiet guitars and whipsmart songwriting that earned her global acclaim (“an alt-rock supernova.” – NY Times) — her third record, Violins, goes deeper. Teitelbaum now has the freedom to say exactly what she wants, how she wants. “I felt like I didn’t need to overexplain anything, like I can trust the people listening more,” Teitelbaum says. “It feels like every time I make a record, I get closer to making the thing that I really want to make.”

With its evocations of grandeur, drama, tragedy, and skill, Violins is an appropriate title for an album that spends its 11 tracks asking how we balance the world’s violence with its beauty. Teitelbaum’s songs are satisfyingly-structured as ever, with virtuoso hooks, swelling guitars, and telling lyrical nods to Leonard Cohen and Pavement. Pulling in fresh influences—Gang of Four and Teenage Fanclub’s singular tones, The Go-Betweens’ indie-pop precision, Sade’s calming synths—Violins carries you like a wave.

“This record’s heavy in a way,” Teitelbaum says, though her songwriting breathes anew. “It’s gotten a little bit less literal,” she says. “There’s more imagery. But my main goal with this record was to have songs that hit hard. I wanted big lead lines.” Three albums on, Teitelbaum’s working relationship with producer Yves Rothman has fully locked in—fleshing out the demos of songs Teitelbaum wrote on her own, then recording live with the band. “I felt like I wasn’t walking in the dark anymore,” Teitelbaum said of her increasing studio fluency. “I spend more time with Yves than almost anybody—we just have such an efficient working relationship.”

Previous Blondshell albums used romantic relationships as prisms to confront power, addiction, and body image, augmented with dry wit and nonchalant humor and confident scream-along choruses. On Violins, Teitelbaum explores these subjects without “the veil of bad romantic relationships,” she says. With more maturity, Violins addresses themes of violence, religion, and troubled friendships, taking creative lyrical liberties without sacrificing catharsis.

The daydream “Lucky” captures a dually solemn and buoyant energy. In a sunny, insomniac haze, Teitelbaum sarcastically pushes herself to express gratitude—“I got lucky, I feel beautiful and rested”—and names small pleasures (a Dublin cafe, lemon cake, her late mother’s necklace) even as they exist in her mind alongside images of a world on fire, and the weight of her own past. “She’s alive in my memory/She said that she had cancer/The truth is too complex for a kid,” Teitelbaum sings disarmingly in the second verse, glimpsing a deep-rooted rupture. The anthemic “Heart Has to Work So Hard” uses filmic exposition to describe a vexed-but-enduring friendship with a person who is struggling: “I think that it’s brave you choose to live,” Teitelbaum sings in her tactful, powerhouse alto. She approaches this subject more delicately on the biting acoustic song “New Shape”: “Banquets and pearls/Alone at concerts,” goes its opening line, contextualizing a relationship that finds her “Cutting up my soles/Walking on your eggshells.”

A mind-body tension flows through Violins. Teitelbaum writes about the body with her characteristically clever finesse on “Two Fried,” using a food metaphor involving eggs to revel in the feeling of simply liking her figure; on “New Age Trojan Horse,” she sings bluntly about periods, and the supposedly enlightened men who find them repulsive. “I care to stick to you like a clot,” she sings elsewhere, on “Stone Fruit,” another corporeal metaphor on a song that underscores how the body and mind are inseparable. Alongside these somatic inquiries, “Sea Legs” invokes the spiritual, exploring a personal relationship with a higher power not through organized religion but in the makeup of one’s earthly life. The song ultimately exalts the things and people she loves – the rain, harmony, her boyfriend – as realer deities.

The titular opening track is Violins’ North star. On the chorus, Teitelbaum puts music to an unassuming, everyday piece of dialogue — “It’s not overnight / It takes all my focusing / ‘It’s like watching paint’ / Wait, what’d you say?” — to capture how true healing from trauma takes a lifetime, but its resonance extends to anyone clawing their way towards growth that requires patience. Someone else might not understand (might even find the process as boring as watching paint dry), but the song is powered by the conviction of a person who knows that a good life is worth fighting for. As a 29-year-old staring down her Saturn Return, having gotten sober at 22, Teitelbaum knows this dynamic well—she spent her 20s feeling out-of-step from her peers (“We’re not like our friends at all,” she sing on “Reinstall”) but the wisdom of her decisions shines through in her eloquent writing.

At the end of Violins, “Fur Elise” closes the album by gesturing backwards toward a beautiful, simple classical piano song that Teitelbaum learned in her youth. Blondshell’s “Fur Elise” narrates the crosshairs of growing up and not knowing exactly how to, turning on a deliberately wonky central metaphor: walking down the aisle to “Fur Elise,” fully aware that no one would actually get married to it. The mismatch is the point. “You’re trying to figure out what you want your life to look like, and what you want playing at your wedding, but you don’t even know where to start,” Teitelbaum says. “You’re picking the wrong song.” Growth, self-possession, and the ongoing process of healing might seem to another person like “watching paint dry,” as she sings on Violins’ opener. But on “Fur Elise,” she puts forth a statement-of-self on her own terms: “Paint a wall with the things you want spoken out loud / And you get the choice to forget / And you render art / And the truth of it is separate” – a beguiling truth in itself, and a path forward.