Houston’s own The Mathletes, “Your Favorite Band You’ve Never Heard Of,” are proud to announce their second first show in over a dozen years of the year, to take place on Saturday, November 23 at Cactus Music. Optional refreshments will be provided by Saint Arnold’s Brewery.
Originally incorporated with little fanfare in the shadow of the Enron collapse, The Mathletes quickly pivoted from oil and gas to music, becoming Houston’s first and to date only legally-recognized indie rock band sometime in the early 21st century. With their signature mixture of evocative wordplay and pained yelping noises, the Mathletes quickly secured their place in music history as of the all-time most popular and influential bands named The Mathletes. Their 2010 masterpiece “Aboard an Ornithopter O’er the Ocean,” an emotionally wrenching concept album inspired by The Diary of Anne Frank, was described by critics and lawyers alike as “already a Neutral Milk Hotel record.”
Aside from their outspoken and often controversial political views, their prolonged legal battle with Habitat for Humanity, the infamous gambling scandal that led to their permanent ban from both the Rock and Roll and Baseball Halls of Fame, various controversies involving former band members including Anna Delvey and Sam Bankman-Fried, their decades-long feud with the estate of Fred Rodgers and their stated intention to collaborate with the machines in the event of a “The Matrix”-style AI overthrow of the human species, the Mathletes have largely avoided the public eye for the past several months.
The November 23 performance will be the Mathletes’ first show in Houston since January, their second since 2011, and their final performance of all time ever. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in the form of buying some of their stuff, including the new greatest hits LP “The Mathletes Present the Mathletes.”
