If you have been sleeping on Keep Flying, Empire Underground on Friday, May 22nd is the correction you need. The six-piece Long Island band — guitars, bass, drums, and a horn section built around saxophone and trombone — hits Albany at 7:30 PM for a show that has no business being this affordable.
About Keep Flying
Keep Flying came together between 2015 and 2016 with members drawn from across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. What sets them apart is right there in the lineup: alongside the standard punk rock configuration, John James Ryan plays saxophone and Ricky Coates plays trombone. They call their sound “Horny Punk / Nudist Punk Rock,” they are signed to SmartPunk Records, and they have played Vans Warped Tour and SXSW, sharing stages with The Bouncing Souls and Bowling For Soup.
If you show up for Less Than Jake or The Planet Smashers, this is already your scene.
Their 2024 debut full-length Time & Tide — written and produced during what the band describes as a relentless touring schedule — is the album that crystallizes everything they have been building toward. Their recent single “Delusional” is a strong entry point if you are coming in fresh.
Frontman Henry Menzel’s lyrics are described as “defiantly optimistic yet brutally honest” — which is a pretty accurate summary of the Keep Flying ethos. These are not people chasing commercial success. As John James Ryan puts it: “Keep Flying to me is therapy. It heals me.”
The Venue
Empire Underground is at 93 N Pearl St in downtown Albany. It is a club room in the heart of the Capital District, and for a six-piece band with a horn section, a tight club room is exactly where you want them.
Tickets
Tickets start at $29. Per the event listing, they are moving quickly — do not sit on this one.