We Are Scientists Revisit With Love & Squalor at AM/FM Dallas
There are records that belong to a specific moment, and then there are records that somehow keep finding new ones.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
With Love & Squalor did both. Released in 2005, We Are Scientists’ debut arrived right in the middle of indie rock’s early-2000s guitar rush, but songs like “Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt,” “The Great Escape” and “It’s a Hit” have proved considerably harder to leave behind. More than two decades later, Keith Murray and Chris Cain are taking the record back on the road and playing it in full.
That tour lands at AM/FM Dallas on Thursday, November 12, giving Dallas a chance to hear an album usually associated with much bigger rooms in the kind of setting that actually makes sense for it. Doors open at 6 p.m., with the show beginning at 7 p.m. in AM/FM’s Backyard.
With Love & Squalor remains an unusually efficient record. Twelve songs, very little wasted motion and guitars that seem permanently impatient to get to the next chorus. It helped establish We Are Scientists as one of the sharper bands to emerge from that era, but the interesting part of an anniversary show like this isn’t simply getting to hear the singles again. Album-in-full sets bring back the songs that disappeared from regular rotation too, rebuilding the sequencing and small connections that get lost once a record becomes a handful of streaming favorites.
We Are Scientists also have the advantage of not sounding like a band that has spent the intervening years waiting for an anniversary. Murray and Cain released their ninth album, Qualifying Miles, in 2025, returning to a more stripped-back, guitar-forward approach after the studio experimentation of Huffy and Lobes.
The record itself deals heavily in memory and nostalgia, which makes revisiting their debut now feel less disconnected from the band they are today than these anniversary tours sometimes can.
And, because this is We Are Scientists, the night isn’t being positioned as a solemn museum tour through 2005. The anniversary shows are billed as With Love & Squalor in full plus the hits, leaving room for two decades of music on either side of the record.
For anyone who remembers when “The Great Escape” first seemed to be coming out of every indie club speaker in existence, November 12 offers an obvious excuse to go back. For everyone else, it is a chance to hear why a scrappy, ridiculously catchy 2005 guitar record is still giving We Are Scientists a reason to build an entire night around it.
