The Head and the Heart lets the light in on 'Aperture' Tour at the Fillmore

“Virginia don’t sound like it used to,” Jonathan Russell once sang. But on Saturday night, just a few miles across the Potomac, Maryland sure didn’t either.

At the Fillmore Silver Spring, The Head and the Heart brought their Aperture Tour into full focus, flooding the room with the kind of earnest emotional build-up that’s become their trademark. But before the main act hit the stage, the crowd had already been treated to two standout sets.

Anna Graves opened the night solo, quietly powerful in that way some performers are when they don’t try to fill the space—they just trust you’ll come closer. Her songs were mostly soft bruises: sad love stories and quiet longings, punctuated by an offhand confession that she often writes about birds out of jealousy, explaining, "they can just fly away whenever they want."

Futurebirds followed with the opposite strategy: flood the zone. Three frontmen and a drummer who snagged his own lead vocal moment—there was a real democracy to their chaos. One minute it felt like early-aughts Southern rock, the next like a fuzzed-out folk revival. By the time The Head and the Heart joined them for a sprawling final number, it felt less like an opener and more like a preamble from a band that belonged there just as much.

Check out more photos from Futurebirds' set here.

Later that night, Charity Rose Thielen would reflect on it: “It’s pretty rare to have a band with three singer-songwriters who weave in and out” She was talking about Futurebirds, but maybe a little about herself too.

Then came the band everyone was here for. The Head and the Heart took the stage like they were slipping into something familiar—somewhere between muscle memory and ritual. With a setlist that touched every corner of their discography, they moved effortlessly between their brand new material and the kind of songs that have made them festival favorites for over a decade.

But make no mistake—Aperture is the focal point now. Russell introduced “Cop Car” as his favorite from the new record, and the band leaned into its moody pacing, drenching the stage in flashing red and blue. It was cinematic without being overcooked, and Russell’s vocal—what guitarist Matt Gervais dubbed “heroin”—landed with a slow sting. Russell’s delivery was slow, immersive, addictive.

Gervais himself couldn’t have been more different: a whirl of energy who bounced between the front row and the backline, doing everything short of crowd-surfing to jolt the audience awake. And then there was Thielen, holding the stage like gravity—singing, sawing the violin, and pulling the others into balance.

Russell paused wish a happy anniversary to a couple in the crowd before “Honeybee,” which got an audible “awww” as soon as they played hit the first few notes. And then there was the live debut of “No Guarantees,” a 2017 release from the band's Stinson Beach Sessions, a mix of acoustic demos and unreleased material born during the writing of Signs of Light.

When the final notes of “Rivers and Roads” faded, the takeaway wasn’t just about nostalgia or newness. In the end, the night mirrored the album’s namesake. An aperture controls light. It decides what’s too much, what’s not enough, and what’s just right to see clearly. The Head and the Heart let a lot in on Saturday night—grief, joy, memory, melody—and in doing so, reminded a packed room in Silver Spring that music still knows how to focus us when we need it most.