The Airborne Toxic Event

Everyone who was a certain age in the late 2000s has a version of the same memory: a string section swelling, Mikel Jollett half-singing half-confessing about a girl and a bad night, and the specific feeling of a heartbreak that felt like the end of the world and secretly kind of thrilling. That is what The Airborne Toxic Event does — literary, orchestral, unashamedly dramatic rock for people who feel things at full volume. Under the open sky at Humphreys, with a full band and strings and the bay behind them, songs like Sometime Around Midnight stop being nostalgia and become the catharsis they were built to be. This is a room full of people who will know every word and are not embarrassed to mean them. Saturday, September 12, 2026, 7:30pm, on Shelter Island. Come feel twenty-three again, in the best and most bittersweet way, with a few thousand people who never stopped playing that record.