If your New Year’s Resolution is to get out of the house more often, you might as well start now because there are some very cool events happening in Los Angeles for this first weekend of 2026, including The Smell’s weekend-long anniversary bash, the L.A. Fights Back benefit show with Sextile, Automatic and Choir Boy, a David Bowie-themed skate party, film tributes to Bowie, David Lynch, Rob Reiner and Udo Kier, plus lots more. Keep reading for the breakdown.
(more…)I’m trying to think of the last time I had been to The Smell. It was so long ago that I nearly forgot to enter through the alley in the back. Maybe I haven’t been here since before the pandemic? The last show I remember seeing at the venerable L.A. DIY space was that dog and Graham Coxon. It was a night hotter than this one, sometime during the summer before the timeline went awry. A lot has changed since 2019. That The Smell still exists says a lot about the venue. I probably should go to shows here more often, but the thing is that, once you hit a certain age, hanging out at an all-age punk venue with no specific purpose can be a little awkward. Like, do I really need people to assume that I’m a mom keeping an eye on her weird kid when I’m still, mentally, the weird kid?
Tonight, though, I have a specific, age-appropriate purpose. I’m going to see HLLLYH, which is the new band spawned from The Mae Shi, who I saw at The Smell more than once back when I was young and downtown was still a ghost town after dark.
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Tim Byron wanted to get The Mae Shi back together. It had been about 20 years since the synthpunk band formed in Los Angeles and a decade since the original members reunited for a one-off show at Pehrspace. “It was the cliche of we’re getting the band back together,” he says on a recent video call. And, despite the fact that three of the members— Byron, as well as his brother Jeff Byron and Ezra Buchla— now live in the Bay Area while Brad Breeck and Corey Fogel are in L.A., he was able to do that. They recorded what was intended to be a new album from their old band. “But, at the end of the day,” Byron says, “it was different enough where we decided to give it a different name and have a separate identity from The Mae Shi.” The band morphed into HLLLYH and includes new members Dan Chao, James Baker and Burt Hashiguchi. Debut album Uruburuis out on June 27.
HLLLYH played their first show, opening for Brainiac at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco, last January. Throughout this past spring, they’ve released three singles, “Dead Clade,” “Uru Buru” and “Flex It, Tagger,” with a cover song B-side included with each release. Byron is right, the music is different enough from what they did in the ‘00s to warrant a different band name. But, the energy of The Mae Shi is still there.
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