The Urge w/ N.I.L.8 and 18andCounting @ The Pageant November 28th, 2025

Friday night The Urge played a sold out show for their annual night after Thanksgiving show. This years lineup consisted of the legendary NIL8 out of Springfield, IL and local St. Louis musician 18andCounting.

The Urge holiday show has become a tradition. I remember several Christmas Eve’s leaving a family members house early to go pick up friends and heading down to Mississippi Nights for some crazy Urge shows. Sometime after the band started to play shows at The pageant they were moved to the Friday after Thanksgiving, with exception over the handful of years that they were disband. This years show was the second full circle moment that I have had this year with music. The first was seeing “Weird Al” Yankovic as he played the first concert that I ever went to back in 1987. The second is with NIL8 as they were the first band that I had ever photographed twenty years ago at Mississippi Nights. I even had the chance to talk to lead singer Jeff Williams for a few minutes at their merch booth and showed him some of the photos from that first show. He joked and said he thinks he still has the pants that he had on that night.

After both openers warmed up the crowd fans started chanting ‘Play that mother fucking Urge shit’, a chant that has been done at every Urge show that I have ever been to. The band took no time to get the crowd going and kicked things off with ‘Brainless’. The setlist featured heavily with songs from both Receiving the Gift of Flavor and Too Much Stereo as it was the 30th and 25th anniversary of the albums. Fans were even treated to ‘Killing is Easy’, a song that was originally on Receiving the Gift of Flavor but after the band was signed to Immortal Records, the album was re-released switching out the song ‘Killing is Easy‘ for ‘Take Away‘. Steve even made a comment that if you had the original copy of the album the song would be on it. During ‘Open All Night‘ aka ‘Going to the Liquor Store‘ or just ‘Liquor Store‘, several inflated pickles were tossed into the crowd. Drummer John Pessoni even came out from behind the drums to play a little guitar on ‘What Do They Know’, a song that was being played for the first time live in St. Louis and has only been played live a couple other time. The band closed the night with two covers Bob Marley’s ‘One Love‘ and The Brand New Heavies ‘It’s Getting Hectic’ , which always gets the fans to go crazy. Steve even ended up crowd surfing during ‘It’s Getting Hectic‘ Even after all these years Steve and company put on a high energy show that cant be missed.