Listening to the Milk Carton Kids—Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale—talk about their creative process and making music, it’s easy to imagine them running in opposite directions even while yoked together. “Joey and I famously have an adversarial relationship,” Pattengale says. They dig at each other in interviews and on stage, where Ryan plays his own straight man while Pattengale tunes his guitar. Their songs emerge somewhere in the silences and the struggle between their sensibilities. The Only Ones, the group’s new record (out now on the band’s own Milk Carton Records imprint in partnership with Thirty Tigers), finds Ryan and Pattengale performing a stripped-down acoustic set without a backing band. On The Only Ones, the pair returns to the core of what they are about musically: the duo.

For tickets, visit https://www.gpacweb.com/event-list/milk-carton-kids.

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