Actors at the Red Party at Mercury Lounge

Living in Vancouver, Canada, a teen-aged Jason Corbett was playing guitar in a heavy metal band when he switched gears and moved into cowpunk and rockabilly with the Saddlesores in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, Corbett was leading a straight rock band called Speed to Kill, which evolved into TV Heart Attack. In 2012, he gravitated to synthwave pop and formed Actors. The band consists of vocalist/guitarist Corbett, synthesizer player Shannon Hemmett, bassist Jahmeel Russell ,and drummer Adam Fink. Actors released one album, It Will Come to You, in 2018.

The monthly Red Party at Mercury Lounge is a sanctuary for lovers of 1980s-style new wave and its darker descendents in the gothic, darkwave, and post-punk genres, so this was a fitting venue for Actors' edgy, danceable grooves. Throughout the performance, steady drum beats, ground-scraping bass lines, light synth lines, and reverberating vocals repeated monochromatically, anticipating another layer of electronic slaps or a variation on the vocal line. Actors was not pioneering new sounds; rather it was basing new songs on the kinds of musical arrangements popularized during the early MTV years. Actors' music matches well with your all-black wardrobe; the music might even inspire you to dig deep for the leftover black lipstick from decades ago.