The crowd at The Bowery Electric was decked out in gowns and suits when Whisper Doll took the stage. Frontwoman Fiona Tagami’s blush pink dress glimmered under a blue spotlight as she leaned into the mic, launching into tracks off the dream rock band’s 2024 debut album, Perfume Palace. The night’s theme? Prom.

The show was hosted in collaboration with arts publication Kitsch Magazine. At the door, patrons received “Kitsch” stamps on their hands, and stickers for the magazine were passed out through the night, which also featured performances from artists FLEET, Detranslate, and Hardly Davidson.

This wasn’t Whisper Doll’s first themed concert. For their album release show last October, the audience came dressed as dolls. Tagami looks back fondly on the night now, deeming it her favorite live performance to date — sometimes, it’s just more fun to have a dress code. The outfits also seem to create a sense of camaraderie within the venue.  

“Ultimately the reason why I started the band was because I wanted to feel like a part of something, a part of the community, and [be] able to make music and play with the bands that I looked up to when I was younger,” Tagami, a fourth-year Culture and Media student at The New School said. 

In addition to the April 29 show, Whisper Doll played a set at New Colossus Festival last March and holds frequent performances at live music bars around Manhattan. Their next show will be on May 21 at Nightclub 101.

At The Bowery Electric, the introduction of “june is frozen over” is met with raucous applause. Tagami’s powerful vocals and Shawn Majeed’s building drum beats energize the crowd, which shuffles closer to the stage amid lines like, “June is the cruelest month of summer.” 

Then, the mood shifts. Tagami prefaces the next song by saying it’s “a slow one,” and invites the crowd to find a partner to dance with — a salute to the prom theme. The band’s influences, including Mazzy Star and The Cranberries, are detectable in the hazy opening notes of “Cheap.” Maya Lagman’s guitar strums mingled with Tagami’s voice as she sighed out the words, “Darling woman, you found washed away / Waiting for the haunted moon to reach the bay.” Yes, some of the crowd did start slow dancing. On the ethereal “Lady In Blue,” Kara Lu’s bass took center stage while she and Tagami exchanged smiles through kaleidoscopic instrumentals. 

From the tapes and CDs sold at the merch table by the bar to the handheld camera given away in an end-of-show raffle, the night felt distinctly analog. With its grainy purple color scheme, even Whisper Doll’s Instagram seems reflective of the band’s ethos. But Tagami isn’t trying to project a filmy, faux-90s grunge aesthetic through feed curation — in fact, she finds Gen Z’s image-consciousness counterproductive to creativity. 

“It’s really fun to create images and to kind of be able to control that narrative … But I’m also trying to lean away from curation to a certain degree just because I think our culture and our generation is so, so, so visual,” she said.

Tagami attributes her wariness of hyper-visual culture partially to the classes she’s taken within Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts’ Culture and Media major. But performing with Whisper Doll has helped her relish in the authenticity of the here and now.

“I’m very aware of online presence and visual culture,” she said. “And I think that it definitely helps to have some sort of visual brand, but it also definitely goes against the ethos of the music scenes that I look up to in terms of the ‘90s DIY grunge scenes.” 

Tagami wrote many of the songs on Perfume Palace in high school and recorded them with her friends in Atlanta. She says Whisper Doll has been playing the tracks live for about a year and a half, but now, the band is working on a new album. 

“I will write a song on acoustic guitar and then I’ll play it for them,” she said. “And each person will add their own elements. Shawn will add the drums, Kara will add bass, Maya [will] add lead guitar.”

Collaboration early on in the writing process is a shift for Tagami, but she’s enjoying it. “What is definitely different is taking the shells of the songs to the band and then working it out with them as a team,” she said. “That’s the first time it’s been collaborative for me in the beginning stages.”

At the end of the night, Tagami crowned the winner of the camera raffle, deeming them “Prom Queen.” The gowned crowd slowly dispersed, and the venue looked not unlike a high school cafeteria after a dance — pink balloons spelling out “PROM” hung above the stage, streamers waved at the retreating guests, and a disco ball glimmered overhead. The party was over, but who knows what Whisper Doll will ask their fans to dress up as next.