Austin five-piece Culture Wars touched down in Bangkok this week to open LANY's Soft World Tour show at UOB Live, EmSphere — their second lap around Asia with the US pop act, after joining LANY and Amy Shark on a 2024 tour across Asia and Australia.

The band is touring behind its first full-length album, Don't Speak, produced by their own guitarist Caleb Contreras. Formed in 2017 around vocalist Alex Dugan, guitarists Caleb Contreras and Josh Strmic, bassist Dolln Randh and drummer David Grayson, the group spent years grinding through Austin's regional gig circuit while deliberately avoiding the "Austin band" label — the city's scene is famously crowded, and they wanted to stand on their own.

Their sound is a blend rather than a manifesto: alternative rock with electronic, pop and R&B textures, plus 1980s romanticism and country hints that Dugan admits seep in simply from growing up in Texas, alongside '90s and 2000s influences. It clicked with the 2025 single Typical Way, an Alternative Radio top 20 hit, and earlier with Lose Money and the Leave Me Alone EP — the latter reaching the US Alternative top 30 and earning a Grammy nomination after appearing on the Bill & Ted Face the Music soundtrack.

Dugan is refreshingly unimpressed by the accolades. "We always feel like we're not successful," he told an online Q&A, framing the band's focus as simply figuring out what they want to sound like and chasing it. Handing production duties to Contreras let them experiment freely without adapting to an outsider's established methods — patience he describes as "obviously very patient with us" while they find their own thing.

Touring has shaped them as much as the studio. Playing established acts like Maroon 5 and Kane Brown taught them the craft of a polished big-stage show: tight transitions between songs, no dead air, attention to crew logistics. Their first run with LANY sent them home to rewrite and re-record much of the album; now they feel they're returning as a more mature band with better songs. In Bangkok, Dugan set modest goals — no formula for winning over another artist's crowd, just play well, engage the audience as people, and warm the room up properly.

For travellers, this is a good snapshot of Bangkok's live music calendar. UOB Live at EmSphere, the newer mall-arena complex in the Sukhumvit area, has quickly become a regular stop for international touring acts — worth checking the listings if you're in the city, since mid-size arena shows here often cost far less than equivalents in Western cities.