There’s always this feeling I have right after leaving the movie theater, a sort of de-realization. It feels like the world isn’t real anymore, like it all stopped moving while you sat in your folding seat and were transported to an alternate universe. You have to stop and ask yourself, “What just happened?” Standing in the back of the pit at The Pageant around 10:30 p.m. on Oct. 26, I got that same sort of feeling as the lights went down at the end of AJR’s “Neotheater” tour.

When you look them up, Google will tell you AJR is “an American pop band composed of multi-instrumentalist brothers Adam, Jack and Ryan Met. The band is a pop group who write, produce and mix their material in the living room of their apartment.” This doesn’t quite cover exactly who they are, though. When recommending them, I always tell people to listen to their albums in full and in order. In an increasingly single-centered music industry, AJR is focused more than ever on creating whole albums as an art form in itself, and they distinguish themselves from other ‘pop’ artists in doing so.

In an interview with Atwood Magazine, Ryan Met said of the writing process for “Neotheater” that halfway through they decided to “come up with something totally new that surprises people and that you can’t really compare to ‘The Click,’” referring to their 2017 album. In the same interview, Met explained that the band “conceptualized the tour [at] the same time as writing the album because [they] wanted it to be one whole cohesive piece of art.” From everything I experienced during their show at The Pageant, it was clear to see how much AJR cares about the art of the performance.

Towards the end of the show, following a rendition of “Dear Winter” performed alone onstage, Jack Met explained that the goal of the tour wasn’t to create a show where you forgot about your problems for 90 minutes. Instead, AJR wanted to create a show where we, referring to the band and the audience, acknowledge those problems and collectively don’t care about them for 90 minutes. But why did this work? I have found myself asking “What makes good music?” since the release of “Neotheater” in May of this year. What makes a good concert? Why and how are these things so cathartic and such helpful coping processes in life?

Authors Jun Jiang, Daphne Rickson and Cunmei Jiang published an article entitled “The Mechanism of Music for Reducing Psychological Stress: Music Preference as a Mediator” in The Arts in Psychotherapy in 2016. During a mental test that induced stress, they measured “tension and state anxiety levels before and after music listening, as well as their levels of valence and arousal for music, music preference and familiarity, after listening.” Essentially, they measured how much the music lowered anxiety for the participants in addition to how much the participants liked the music.

They found that “The most important factor in reducing stress was the degree of liking for the music, but not the degree of familiarity with the music.” Music preference was a predictor for tension and anxiety levels and it mediated the effects of music valence and arousal on stress reduction.

This holds true for most of us throughout our lives. Nothing beats the feeling of being at a party, in the car, listening to the radio or anywhere else and having a song you love come on. No matter the style or the setting, music that you love makes life just a bit better, and the science agrees.

So what does this mean for my love of AJR? Maybe I just really like their unpredictable style of writing, where every song and album is so different, yet so distinctly AJR at the same time. Maybe that style will attract more people with even more diverse tastes in music because it’s so unpredictable. But either way, the people who love AJR will continue to reap the cathartic benefits of their music, as will music lovers of any kind. And maybe that’s why concerts, especially ones as artfully crafted as AJR’s, continue to transport us to a world where we don’t care about our problems for 90 minutes. Maybe that’s just what music does, and if that’s the case, I’ll take it.