Boston alternative-pop and funk band Ripe have released a live version of “First Time Feeling,” capturing one of the group’s longtime fan favorites inside New York City’s Brooklyn Paramount.
Released July 17 through Ineffable Records, “First Time Feeling (Brooklyn Paramount)” is the second preview of Ripe’s forthcoming live album, Brooklyn Paramount, arriving July 31. It follows the band’s live performance of “Goon Squad” featuring Allen Stone.
Ripe originally released “First Time Feeling” as a standalone single on January 31, 2020. The studio version arrived during a transitional moment for the band, after its 2018 debut album Joy in the Wild Unknown and before the major disruptions that temporarily removed live performance from nearly every touring musician’s life.
Ripe began as a group of friends at Berklee College of Music, gradually moving from informal parties and basement performances into a national touring career. Frontman Robbie Wulfsohn and drummer Sampson Hellerman have described the band’s development as an organic process built around friendship and a shared desire to make people move.
“First Time Feeling” fits naturally within that mission. The song’s central idea is the rush of encountering a connection powerful enough to make familiar emotions feel new again. In the live setting, that sense of release becomes larger as the arrangement is shaped by the room, the band’s rhythm section and the voices responding from the audience.
The Brooklyn recording does more than reproduce the original single. It documents how Ripe’s music functions when the separation between performer and listener begins to disappear. Wulfsohn’s vocal presence, the band’s horn-driven attack and its ability to stretch pop songwriting into a communal experience have remained essential to Ripe’s appeal.
The forthcoming Brooklyn Paramount album will add to a growing live catalog that already includes Live From MGM Music Hall at Fenway. Its release also follows a productive studio period for the band. Ripe issued Play the Game in 2025 before returning with an expanded deluxe edition in March 2026.
Rather than choosing between studio development and its reputation as a live band, Ripe have continued pursuing both. The studio records provide increasingly polished songwriting and production, while the live albums document the energy that helped build the group’s audience in the first place.
Ripe’s 2026 summer schedule begins August 8 at the Eagle River Jamboree in Colorado. The band will then continue through dates in Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and New Jersey, along with additional festival and headline appearances.
“First Time Feeling (Brooklyn Paramount)” offers a preview of that environment. It is both a new release and a record of how a six-year-old song can continue changing each time Ripe place it in front of another crowd.
The full Brooklyn Paramount live album arrives July 31 through Ineffable Records.
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