University Union announced their first artist of this year’s Bandersnatch concert series on Monday night. Alt-rock  breakout story X Ambassadors will be playing at Schine Underground October 7, with doors opening at 7:30 p.m. and opening act Tribe Society going on at 8 p.m. To give you a good idea of their sound, I’ll break down some of their top songs so you know what to expect from their upcoming show.

“Renegades”

Their most popular song by far, “Renegades” has been everywhere since its release as a single in March. The song, written quickly as a commercial tie-in for the new Jeep Renegade, found plenty of success outside of the massive marketing campaign. The song’s combination of a catchy acoustic guitar riff, vocal harmonies, a pulsating bass drum, and the ever-popular clapping sound effect makes for a different kind of pop hit. And the song resonated — it hit the 28th spot on the Billboard Top 40 and dominated the Alternative Songs chart for months.

“Jungle”

This song found considerable mainstream popularity too as the band’s first single from their2015 studio album “VHS.” A collaboration with British blues singer Jamie N Commons, the song was featured on commercials for “Orange is the New Black,” “Pitch Perfect 2,” “Battlefield:Hardline” and Beats by Dr. Dre. The song is much less dance-style than “Renegades,” but so much more fist-pumpable. This is the band showing its genre-bending ability at its best —strong influences from rock, pop, R&B and blues are all over the place on here.

“Unsteady”

The closest thing that X Ambassadors has to a pop-rock ballad, “Unsteady” sets vocalist SamHarris’s chilling falsetto against a slow-jam keyboard section and an R&B-style beat, taking the band’s knack for genre fusion to a new level. This is the hangover for the highs of the band’s other hits, and it hits harder than anything else I’ve heard from them.

“Unconsolable”

This song is literally what put this band on the map — Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds called KIDinaKORNER Records as soon as he heard this song, and X Ambassadors met with the label within days. It’s easy to see what Reynolds saw in this song; “Unconsolable” heavily borrows from Imagine Dragons’ well-known pop-rock formula. But musical elements like backing vocal harmony, booming percussion, some subtle brass instrumentals and even a little toy piano gives X Ambassadors a sound of their own evident from this early single.

Brett Weiser-Schlesinger is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. He can be reached by email at bweisers@syr.edu or by Twitter at @brettws.

Published on September 28, 2015 at 8:03 pm