Photos and Words by Christian Sarkis Graham
The Raveonettes have made a career out of the retrospective. Coming up in the early aughts among the likes of the so-called garage rock revivalists (The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives, The Vines, The Kills and other such “The’s” posturing toward some erstwhile chapter of rock history or another,) the Copenhagen duo seemed keen on cranking the tribute concept up to 11.
From their very beginning, they appeared animated by more than a mere frustration with the Nirvana-runoff buttrock of the late 90s. For them, it was an almost academic obsession with the periods of music they admired. They fused the feedback sleaze of The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Velvet Underground with the hooks of ’50s rockabilly and ’60s pop, taking nearly a decade to evolve into a moodier distortion-heavy dream-pop sound that has defined them for the past 15 years.
In 2025, the concept has come full circle. If The Raveonettes were paying tribute to anyone at Tuesday night’s Philadelphia show at Underground Arts, it seemed to be themselves.
To start, nominally, the tour marks the 20th anniversary of Pretty in Black. Functionally, only four songs from the 2005 LP made the setlist — shaking out to the same amount allotted to this year’s similarly bubblegum-colored Pe’ahi II (itself a surf-rock sequel album, calling back to 2014’s sunny, synthy Pe’ahi.)
The set kicked off with the haunting Blackest, followed up by the equally vital Killer and Speed, also off of the recent release.
The rest of the night made for a thorough sweep of their catalog, with stops at nearly every major release, stretching back even to the darkly electrifying debut EP Whip It On. (The lone omission: Atomized, the ambitious albeit questionably executed one-track-per-month compilation album of 2016, which had seemed to leave fans and perhaps the band a little lost.)
In an admittedly far cry from the retro pastiche, singer-lyricist Sune Rose Wagner took the stage dressed in Gen Z garb (baggy tee and cargo pants, topped off with a floppy dad hat) while Sharin Foo stood as the pristine porcelain angel, perfectly preserved in her original form. Together they guided the crowd through their history, with their trademark blend of gentle harmonies and dreamy distortion serving as the reliable throughline for an understatedly eclectic body of work.
The intimacy of the Underground Arts room made for more warmth than one might expect from a band long associated with artistic detachment and a vague hipster cool (or from a subterranean Philly rock venue, for that matter). The audience offered up repeated gratitude, sincere to the point of saccharine, just for coming to their city – on top of repeated pleas to hear deeper cuts gone terribly underappreciated. It was all enough to crack a tender smile on even the most stoic Scandinavian face.
The set wound down with a nod to longtime Rave heroes: a cover of The Velvet Underground’s Venus in Furs, lifted from 2024’s Sings…, their true-to-form cover album honoring the band’s most cherished chapters of pop music history.
The encore flipped the script, with the singers taking turns shedding their guitars and stepping in a rare spotlight to assume lead vocals – breaking from the signature harmonizing that has typified the band since the Whip It On days. Wagner led with “Recharge and Revolt,” the anthemic single off of 2011’s Raven in the Grave. Foo followed with “I Wanna Be Adored,” the Stone Roses cover that’s come to enjoy among fans the reaction it portends to desire, ever since its 2013 release.
By the end, it wasn’t just a retrospective of rock history. It was The Raveonettes revisiting themselves — with a crowd more than happy to indulge in the journey.
Listen to more of The Raveonettes here!
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