Alphaville

Overview

Bushwick bar, kitchen, and soundproofed back-room stage, opened 2014 by Skyler Insler and Scott Rosenthal (Beverly), closed in the COVID shutdown, and revived in August 2022 by a new collective of musician-owners, as a neighborhood anchor for touring indie, punk, and garage acts.

Alphaville occupies a ground-floor commercial space at 140 Wilson Avenue, on the corner of Suydam Street, in the heart of Bushwick. It was opened in 2014 by Skyler Insler, who had previously run the Alaska bar at 35 Ingraham Street (2012–2016) and the DIY space Cheap Storage on Wyckoff Avenue before that, in partnership with Scott Rosenthal, a Brooklyn musician then playing bass and guitar in the indie-rock duo Beverly (and previously Crystal Stilts, Frankie Rose, and Class Actress). Insler, whose Italian family had roots in Bushwick and Coney Island before he returned to the neighborhood in 2008, framed the move as a deliberate upgrade: where Alaska had never functioned as a proper venue (three booths, a couch, no stage) Alphaville was built from the start as a hybrid of neighborhood dive bar and actual music room. The back room received soundproofing, string lights, and a dedicated stage; the front of house got a long wooden bar, exposed brick, a tiled floor, a full operational kitchen, and an outdoor patio. Insler described the step to Brooklyn Magazine in 2015 as 'so serious... more grown up. It's more of a business,' placing the project consciously in the context of the post-Williamsburg DIY collapse: 285 Kent and Death by Audio had both closed in 2014, Glasslands in 2015, and Alphaville positioned itself as a licensed, professionally run successor to that ecosystem without abandoning its ethos. The room that emerged was deliberately small (the back-room capacity sits at roughly 75 to 100) and the programming reflected a consistent logic: adventurous booking across indie rock, punk, post-hardcore, bedroom pop, and garage, with touring artists testing new material alongside Brooklyn upstarts packing the calendar with release shows. The room's width-over-depth geometry put every spot within a few steps of the stage. Sunflower Bean shot the fan-interview footage for their 2018 single 'Crisis Fest' inside Alphaville, making its interior briefly canonical for a certain strain of 2017 Brooklyn indie-rock self-portrait. Black Midi played the room before their ascent in the UK press. On October 28, 2019, Selena Gomez (in New York promoting 'Lose You to Love Me' and 'Look at Her Now') attended a Goodbye Honolulu set at the venue; the resulting press cycle briefly made Alphaville a national shorthand for Bushwick cool, with Rolling Stone citing the moment in its 2020 survey of Brooklyn's music scene. Alphaville shuttered with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In April 2022 a new collective took over the lease: Kallan Campbell and David Johnson, both members of the psychedelic garage-rock band Max Pain and the Groovies (originally from Salt Lake City, who had relocated to New York permanently three months after their touring van caught fire near Wilson Avenue during a 2016 show), joined Insler and friend Eric Schroeder. The new ownership reopened in August 2022, flung open in something close to the venue's original raw state ('We needed money, so we just started letting people in,' Campbell told the Columbia News Service) before completing renovations over subsequent months. The back room received hand-painted blocky signage, black-and-white stripe murals on the dance floor, upgraded acoustic treatment, and two skee-ball machines; the grungy front-bar aesthetic was preserved. Weekly karaoke nights on Mondays have coexisted alongside regular live programming (indie, punk, garage, and electronic) continuing the booking philosophy of the original tenure. As of 2026 the venue remains active under the same ownership.

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