Last Saturday night, Oberlin was treated to back-to-back performances from folk pop band The Army, The Navy at the Cat in the Cream, and freak folk singer-songwriter June Henry with folk punk iconoclast Cyprus Hartford at The ’Sco.

The Cat in the Cream was illuminated by warmly-colored curtain lights, packed to capacity from the start of the opening set at 8 p.m. College second-year Ebun Lawore, also known as Eboon, kicked off the night with sparse, gorgeous bedroom pop. Electric guitar, clean and clear with just the right amount of reverb, was the only live instrument; when compositions weren’t limited to Lawore’s angelic voice and deft fingerpicking, synth and strings loops played through an iPad connected to an amplifier. If she was nervous about performing solo for the first time, it didn’t show. The confessional sounds of Eboon were a hit. The audience clamored to scan a QR code to presave her upcoming single, “to be strange,” which closed the set with dazzling vocal layering and shimmering synth.

The Army, The Navy’s Maia Ciambriello and Sasha Goldberg, accompanied by pianist and guitarist Jess Kallen, settled right into their cozy all-acoustic set, no fuss, no frills. Ciambriello and Goldberg laid enchanting vocal harmonies over delicate fingerpicked guitar. After playing a few tracks from the two projects they’ve already released, the band announced to thunderous applause that they would play some unreleased songs. It felt like we were in on something precious, all sitting close on the hardwood floor.

Ciambriello and Goldberg said the show was a memorable one; it was their first acoustic performance in a long time. 

“It just felt really intimate and special … to go back to that first mode of performing because we never really get to do that anymore,” Ciambriello said.

Goldberg emphasized how much it meant to have an attentive audience.

“Everyone was a really good listener,” she added.

Between songs, Ciambriello and Goldberg talked about how their time in college brought them together and influenced their music. After the show, Ciambriello revealed that she and Goldberg had grown up in the same hometown — they even went to the same voice coach — but only truly connected when they were roommates at Loyola University New Orleans. The duo called the hauntingly beautiful “Alexandra” the “song that started it all,” written when they moved to Los Angeles together post-college.

Other highlights included the sharp, rousing “40%” and “Play the Music,” which Ciambriello said was one of her favorites to play live. The latter opened with low, plucked guitar notes, haunted by the occasional ghostly harmonic, then built to one of their trademark hypnotic refrains: “What comes to me is mine.” It felt close to religious.

Most powerful of all was the closer, “Wild Again.” They replaced the line “Santa Rosa, California” with “Oberlin, Ohio” to feverish applause, which erupted into a collective “Wooo!” when they belted the final refrain: “It feels like coming back to you!”

I had to run to Wilder after talking to Ciambriello and Goldberg to catch June Henry and Cyprus Hartford at The ’Sco. Singer-songwriter Alex Ulrich, OC ’25, also known as Snakebird, opened with delightfully idiosyncratic acoustic guitar numbers. College fourth-year Naomi Kuropatwa, also known as w/lson, joined Ulrich onstage to provide rich, husky lead vocals for the latter part of the set. Kuropatwa and Ulrich were at their best in the closing duet “Where You Want Me,” a charming, twee folk punk tune that Ulrich said she had written as a teenager.

The energy shifted as Hartford took the stage, a tenacious punk with the simple but powerful arsenal of an acoustic guitar and a resonant voice. Hartford began with a quick dance lesson, calling up scene veterans in the audience to demonstrate how to skank and two-step.

“My audience is a lot of new showgoers who haven’t really [danced] a whole lot, who are really socially anxious,” Hartford explained before soundcheck. “Having other people go up and do a demonstration on how to [dance] made more people do that. As long as people are moving around and keeping the energy up … it’s a positive thing.”

And people did move around. A small but lively crowd danced with abandon to Hartford’s songs of revolution and solidarity. They started tentatively and gradually let loose during the standout “New River Gorge,” as Hartford sang, “And I’ll leave a piece of me in the New River Gorge / And in your third-story room / And a Pittsburgh squat floor / Till I can’t ever put myself back together again.”

Hartford and Henry’s show proved to be just as intimate as The Army, The Navy’s. After 30 or so minutes of intermittent two-stepping to Hartford’s electrifying set, most of the audience opted to take a seat as they huddled around Henry. Like most of the night’s acts, Henry only sang and played acoustic guitar. She also played a comedian, cracking jokes about her mother’s bulldog and lamenting some clown-related dating troubles.

Henry’s lyricism is nauseatingly emotional; I felt sick to my stomach (in a good way!) during her most popular song, “void-adjacent.” There was a palpable sense that everyone in The ’Sco was holding their breath as she shakily sang, “Kiss me, find out what it’s like to hold thin air / But if you’re too good to me / All I know how to do is disappear.” 

For the final stretch of her set, Henry brought up Hartford for a series of heartrending duets, in which Hartford played mandolin and provided vocal harmonies. Hartford’s mandolin added a certain density to the fan-favorite “somethingfriend,” originally recorded with just Henry’s vocals and acoustic guitar, that made Henry’s verses about gender and the body even more hard-hitting. Their onstage chemistry was easily the most memorable aspect of the show — Henry and Hartford have been together since May. 

Following the trend Lawore set, Henry and Hartford saved the best for last. They closed with “listen to sydney,” some of Henry’s most arresting work. Henry kept her voice low and even, while Hartford’s emphatic melody soared over in a crescendo to the third chorus: “God, we just went around / And around and around,” Hartford and Henry nearly cried out, “till she hates you and you hate me / And you hate her, too.” The audience was rapt, devastated in the best possible way.

It makes sense that Henry’s music resonates with so many Oberlin students — her songwriting deals with themes of queerness, love, friendship, and the pains of growing up. She was candid about her experience baring her soul onstage for a living.

“I like to play a lot of older stuff that I wrote when I would have been embarrassed to play it when I wrote it,” Henry said. “It’s like a little time capsule. With so much of my audience being the age that I was when I was writing it, it feels very important … to be where I am now and perform the songs that I wrote when I was doing really poorly … It truly does get better.”