After several months of extensive touring and writing new material, GGOOLLDD returned home to Milwaukee on Friday night, to a crowd of enthusiastic friends, family, and newcomers. The band seemed eager to show their hometown how they had developed from life on the road.

Led by the always charismatic stage presence of frontwoman Margaret Butler, the band turned the Johnson Controls World Sound Stage into a party, with a smattering of selections from their first three EPs, as well as some road-tested new material that fans were treated to for the first time locally. The set also prominently featured the band’s most recent single, “Success”, with the band donning gold jackets, while Butler wore orange, reminiscent of the release’s cover artwork.

In some ways, this was a homecoming for GGOOLLDD. While the band had formed in Bay View and received their initial success here, Butler and bassist Nick Ziemann now call Baton Rouge, LA home while the rest of the band is still local. The indie pop outfit tour somewhat frequently though, and that seems to keep the band glued together somewhat. By the time they had made their way to Milwaukee, GGOOLLDD had the look of road-savvy veterans. The band felt a little more comfortable playing tracks from their first three releases, because there was a high demand from the crowd of friends, family, and acquaintances.

In some ways, the newer material felt like a showcase of what the band was up to outside of Milwaukee; a musical show-and-tell of sorts. Those songs mostly populated the front half of the set, along with material from their most recent album “Teeth”, before getting into more tracks from initial breakout “$tandard$” and “For The Night”. With a crowd comprised mainly of longtime fans, it felt like a celebration of everything that the band had become.

Before you knew it, the band was winding into one of their first singles, “Boyz”, which was accompanied by bags and bags of balloons bouncing around the Johnson Controls World Sound Stage. Butler thanked the city for always being there for the band, and then confided that she had bought too tight of an outfit, so she was going to change and head to Boone And Crockett. GGOOLLDD is a band that Milwaukee should be proud to call their own, and for those in attendance Friday night, the band gave all of that love back to the city.