At 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 14, the line for the KWUR Fall Show was only a few people long. By 7:30, when the doors opened, the line filled an entire hallway, doubled back on itself, and stretched almost to the bar of Blueberry Hill.
“I’m pretty sure this is a fire hazard,” one attendee said, peering down the hallway at the mass of bodies.
Established in 1976, KWUR is WashU’s underground radio station, and has served as a hub for local, punk rock, and alternative music in St. Louis since. Apart from their concerts, KWUR streams music 24/7, as well as hosting the shows of student disc jockeys, which feature independent artists and talk shows.
The Fall Show is one of the two live shows that KWUR puts on annually, the other being KWUR Week in the spring. The Duck Room, in the basement of Blueberry Hill, serves as the venue for the fall show, which aims to platform a variety of performers. The headliner is typically a larger indie artist, supported by student and local acts.
This year’s Fall Show featured three bands: openers Underpass, a six-person band composed of WashU students; local St. Louis group Four Degrees Colder; and headliner, indie rock singer Eliza McLamb. All three artists — a student group, a local band with a unique sound, and a classic indie singer — continue KWUR’s focus on creating a platform for lesser-known artists and bringing together the WashU community through music.
Underpass, named after the short tunnel that connects the South 40 and the Danforth Campus, slowly assembled into a band last year, beginning with then-first years Sara Gelrud and Ceci Oses.
“My roommate, Sara…brought her guitar last year, and every once in a while, she’d start playing, and I would sing along with her, and she would say, ‘Oh, we should start a band’. And I would just laugh. I didn’t think anything was going to come [from] it. And then we learned that our neighbor also had a guitar, and she became one of our good friends, and we started practicing in the Danforth music room. It’d just be three of us with a little metronome, figuring it out. And then, slowly but surely, last semester, especially in the spring, we found a drummer and we found a bassist, and we became a real thing,” sophomore Ceci Oses, the band’s lead singer, said.
The all-sophomore band opened the evening with warm voices and familiar cover tunes, pulled from a playlist of favorites.
“As long as we don’t stray too far from a girl band, punk rock kind of energy, I think anything goes,” Oses said.
Oses, wearing a dark brown long-sleeve top with a deep V-neck fringed in lace, a black miniskirt, and sleek knee-high heeled boots, welcomed the crowd with smooth, flowing vocals in a rich contralto, while guitarists Gelrud and Maya Tylis ratcheted up the energy with vibrantly electric sound. The drums (played by Noah Beyer) reverberated through the floor, while Sage Jones on the bass added a rhythm that had the crowd jumping. Adding another layer to the lyrics was Ava Silverstein, playing the keys as well as blending her voice with Ceci’s.
After several scheduled shows fell through last year, the KWUR Fall Show served as Underpass’s debut gig. While they focused on covers in this concert, the band does intend to write and perform their own music in the future.
“It’s something we’re pushing for. I think we just all have to sit and put our heads together and we can make it happen,” Oses said. “I’m an English lit major. I love words, I love reading, poetry is one of my favorite forms of consuming literature. I just think it’s so beautiful the way that you can strip language down to its very base form and express emotion through that. I just think it’s very vulnerable. And so the idea of putting something like poetry to music really entices me, and it’s something I’m very excited about, and something we’re excited about.”
When asked about the band’s long-term plans, Oses explained that for her, the band was about community, bringing people together, and having fun, rather than a specific goal.
“If we have fun, it doesn’t matter what else happened; this was a successful night,” she said. “Going into practice, going into gigs, it’s just like, these are people I love, and I love spending my time with them, and I love performing with them. And so as long as we’re having fun, I feel very successful. So whether or not we have fun for all of college, whether or not we have fun for 20 years after college, doesn’t matter to me as long as it’s a good time.”
Local two-person band Four Degrees Colder swept in after Underpass, bringing with them a sharp, electric sound. Filled with the crashing of cymbals and the heavy beat of drums, the energy of the music was matched by the physicality of lead singer and bassist Jamie Saylor’s performance. She swept back and forth across the stage, head bent over her bass or thrown back towards the sky, at one point even descending from the stage, the crowd parting before her like the Red Sea.
Four Degrees Colder, comprised of Saylor and drummer Kendall Abner, described their music not by genre, but rather using color and shape.
“It’s a little spiky, but more on the rounded side, a little softer,” Saylor said.
“Live [shows] give more of an orange [color]… there’s a few more spikes,” Abner added.
Abner and Saylor started the band together in high school, after meeting during a health class. Abner played guitar, and Saylor played the drums, but Abner didn’t sing. Rather than letting that stop them, the pair decided that Abner would learn the drums, allowing Saylor to be the vocalist.
“Instead of adding a vocalist or a guitar player … we decided, ‘we’re just gonna switch the roles. I’ll play bass and sing, she’ll learn the drums, and we’ll just figure it out.”
Since forming in 2019, Four Degrees Colder released their first EP, “Pretty Men in Suits,” in 2024.
In the St. Louis music scene, Four Degrees Colder is unique.
“I feel like the St. Louis sound is very much rock ‘n roll, four-piece band, or Midwest emo, which we don’t do,” Saylor said. “We definitely do stand out on a bill.”
“The sound itself comes out of necessity, of what we’re able to do,” Saylor said. “We don’t want to write a guitar solo, and nobody’s playing guitar. Obviously, we have drums, I play bass, and there’s vocals, but everything else, we decided to lean more into synths with. That sound was kind of pushed out of us having to use that kind of sound.”
The band’s outfits are drawn from their overall lore as much as the lyrics are; Saylor and Abner performed dressed as characters from their upcoming LP, wearing matching greyish-black factory worker jumpsuits, with bright yellow circular patches on the right side of their chests reading “crash test dummy.” The LP addresses the rise of AI and its impact on human employment. At the Fall Show, they played one song from that album, as well as using the album’s story for their intro.
“We are working on a full LP, and that album will drastically change a lot of what people know of Four Degrees Colder. We’ve been in the scene for just over a year, and people kind of see us as a Depeche Mode, ’80s, synth pop group. We’re completely flipping the script … there’s guitar, new instruments, it’s way more developed of a sound,” Saylor said.
The final performer of the evening, Eliza McLamb, arrived on stage a little before 9:15 p.m., wearing a black scoop-neck tank top, dark gray flared, and classic Doc Martens, wielding an acoustic guitar. She started her first song with a softer, slower rhythm, similar to Underpass, but quickly took off into a whirlwind of acoustic guitar and indie rock. A few songs in, the show hit some technical difficulties with the complex sound system, and the concert paused temporarily while the tech remedied the situation. However, McLamb and her band recovered smoothly, and soon the audience was singing along to her next song.
McLamb, who is originally from North Carolina but is now based out of Brooklyn, released her second album, “Good Story”, on Oct. 24, 2025. This album featured heavily in her performance at the KWUR show, and explores the practice of narrativizing. She switched seamlessly between explosive, high-energy music and soft, slow melodies.
The audience was enthusiastically engaged throughout all three performances, singing along to the songs they knew or bopping their heads to the ones they didn’t. Between the debut of Underpass, the energetic chaos of Four Degrees Colder, and McLamb’s captivating performance, the basement Duck Room of Blueberry Hill was filled with fans dancing, cheering, and singing along.
“That’s all anybody wants, really, is to make other people have a good time,” Oses said. “And so seeing people at the end, singing along, jumping up and down, dancing, oh, my God, it was just the best feeling.”
