Dove Ellis at the Bowery Ballroom. Photo by Allison McWhite. 

Come or Don’t

Even after deserting New York for the third time in eight years, I still find myself on red-eye flights back into the world I keep denying, stepping back inside the venues that raised me. At the sticky beginning of summer, it was the Bowery Ballroom to see Dove Ellis.

I’ve spent many nights in that room, throwing myself into crowds, rushing back from the bar in time for sets, talking to every person I recognize, and showing up with too much time to spare. On this night, years removed from these memories, I arrived alone 15 minutes before the lights dimmed and chose the balcony instead. I pressed myself against the wall above the crowd and decided that tonight I would be an observer rather than an instigator.

Dove Ellis has been conjuring a quietly devoted fanbase in the post-punk, folk-rock channels since the release of the single, “Love Is,” cementing his standing in a world booming with frantic pianos, anthem-sized arrangements, and lyrics steeped in longing and grief. Since his debut album, Blizzard, a haunting and honest collection of songs appropriately released in the early days of last December, he has become known without undoing the myth behind him.

When Dove Ellis and his band walked onstage, the room shuffled into silence. His movements were deliberate and slightly disjointed, and he gave no introduction, as if the set had begun somewhere we had not yet arrived. The set demanded attention in a way that feels increasingly scarce: it was less about who was on stage or what moments would later translate into a viral video clip, and more about the artist’s total focus.

I mouthed every word of Blizzard on the walk over, sure of what the evening’s pace would be. I was wrong. I learned quickly that Dove Ellis and his band refuse stability. Instruments change hands mid-set. Piano becomes guitar becomes saxophone. Everything is in motion. There was humor and disorder threaded through the songs I thought I already knew. The best part about hearing a song you love played live is watching it become something else entirely.

From the balcony, I kept looking away from the stage and at the crowd: people holding onto each other, trying to mosh even though nothing in his discography warrants it, and yelling lyrics with a certainty that felt involuntary. Dove Ellis’s voice is large in a way that feels disproportionate to the body producing it. Each belt broke something open in the room. I had to stop myself from cheering too soon, worried my applause would break the veil we were in. The audience’s complete attention to every note created something closer to reverence than consumption.

There’s a counter-movement forming around artists like Dove Ellis, acts that aren’t packaging themselves for the masses but still attain word-of-mouth loyalty and sold-out rooms anyway. Many of these artists remain partially out of frame by offering limited interviews and refusing to fully explain themselves. In a digital culture where we are optimized to reveal ourselves immediately, these artists remain less obvious, allowing space for projection and intrigue that feels harder and harder to find. I came across Dove Ellis through various conversations that I couldn’t escape over a single weekend and finally, at a friend’s party, three separate times; I couldn't remember the last time something like that had happened, and I’d forgotten how good it felt. I find myself hungry for it all the time, not just for music but for anything that doesn't come served on an algorithmic platter. Everything feels increasingly engineered: campaigns, captions, content. Even “discovery” feels premeditated. I keep wondering if it’s just me looking for an exit to this system or if other people are also responding to the same fatigue.

Seeing Dove Ellis reminded me of a similar feeling I’d had a few months earlier at Carnegie Hall, watching Cameron Winter perform on a grand piano with his back against a room of nearly 3,000 people. I walked out of the venue hand in hand with my friend Olivia, recounting our experience and feeling sure it would be a long time until I felt that way leaving a room again—only for it to happen 50 blocks away a few months later. I wondered if I had witnessed something rare or if, in a time where attention is so fragmented, holding focus long enough has started to feel like something closer to devotion.

The question is timely because we are living through a moment of unprecedented access to artists and their work. Music arrives before we ask for it. Algorithms anticipate our desires before desire has the chance to fully form. Every day, we are offered more songs than we can properly absorb, consumed in fragments, led by virality. Audiences latch onto a carefully marketed chorus and forget to engage in the full body of work and world around the artist, their collaborators, their references. What does this mean for taste? Do we still have the tools to build our own? The space to?

Though I’m always nostalgic for a pre-digital past, and do too much to stay honest in that pursuit, I Still Love the Internet. What feels interesting right now is that the pull towards artists like Dove Ellis doesn’t feel rooted in rejecting digital culture, but in a growing appetite for the now-rare experience of encountering something that feels entirely itself, art for art’s sake, rather than a constructed and delivered product. It’s an appetite for artists more interested in their work than virality, which ironically gives them just that. Dove Ellis’s performance, though obviously deliberate and well rehearsed, carried the reminder that we as the audience could take it or leave it, that he was pursuing something else entirely. That lack of persuasion, but pursuit, is evident in his digital presence: there’s not a single photo of him on his main Instagram page, TikTok probably couldn’t pay him to join, and all that remains on his only active social page is a link to the music and a polite post to let us know where we can hear the music live, on its own terms: Come or Don’t.

The admiration this process produces in me isn’t entirely attached to the music. It feels like the broader relief of coming face to face with something that isn’t constantly trying to win me over. It feels like the evidence that artistic conviction not only exists outside of optimization but still has a place to work. I feel a sense of aliveness every time I leave a room like that, and it’s hard not to go back for more.

To close the night, openers Mary in the Junkyard rejoined Dove Ellis and the band on stage for a cover of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” a love letter to New York, the city that Dove Ellis reminded us he really loved throughout the night. On the walk home, I immediately searched for his upcoming tour dates, contemplating where I would fly next.

Dove Ellis at the Bowery Ballroom. Photo by Allison McWhite.