Whimsical folk-pop duo The Army, The Navy fostered a night of relaxation and love in Isla Vista in the midst of midterm season, playing their first show of 2026 in Anisq’Oyo Park on Jan. 30. The concert was put on by UC Santa Barbara’s Associated Students Program Board as part of their free Park Show series, bringing artists to Isla Vista’s outdoor stage.

The duo consists of childhood friends Maia Ciambriello and Sasha Goldberg, who have been performing together as The Army, The Navy since 2022. (Maddy Bryce / Daily Nexus)

Maia Ciambriello and Sasha Goldberg (aka The Army, The Navy) took to the stage just before 5:30 p.m., accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Jess Kallen in the pale beginnings of sunset. They paused for a moment to briefly look out upon the audience, an eclectic sea of brown boots, lace tops with flowy skirts and a patchwork of picnic blankets covering the grassy hill under warm string lights.

The duo, with their fiery scarlet wolf cut (Ciambriello) and bold blue eyeliner (Goldberg), opened with “Gentle Hellraiser,” a tangle of oxymoronic lyrics on love and sacrifice. They continued to dance lightly into “Rocket,” another song highlighting the effortless, playful blending of Ciambriello and Goldberg’s voices. 

This sort of harmony stems from a deep connection that the pair has certainly achieved. Childhood friends from Northern California turned college classmates at Loyola University New Orleans and then roommates in Los Angeles, Ciambriello and Goldberg have built their unique sound on a lifetime of friendship. 

“I love when they do dissonance on stage when they’re singing a note right next to each other,” third-year biology major Nicky Gulizia said. “It sounds wrong, but when you do it right, it’s so right and they’ve executed it perfectly.”

After their opening selection of songs from 2024 albums “Fruit For Flies” and “Sugar For Bugs,” The Army, The Navy had exciting news to share.

“We are currently sitting on a mountain of unreleased music,” Goldberg said, announcing for the first time ever the band’s upcoming third album. 

The duo then played a couple songs from their upcoming album, including “Cling,” which will be released on March 6. 

The band returned to a few familiar songs, including “Little Bug.” While Ciambriello strummed the guitar and Kallen accompanied on the keyboard, Goldberg’s hands were free to make mesmerizing hand gestures which mimicked butterflies and blooming flowers, mirroring the lyrics “So my / Favorite flowers would bloom in your lawn / Live by the water where sirens alarm / Send me a daughter to chase the little bugs.”

Following this, Goldberg briefly acknowledged the “National Shutdown” happening across the United States on the same day, where thousands of demonstrators abstained from going to school and work, as well as shopping, demanding “justice for … all victims of [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] terror” and an end to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns. 

“I just want to say that Maia [Ciambriello] and I stand in solidarity with everyone out there today, protesting, fighting the good fight,” Goldberg said. “No human is illegal on planet Earth, right? Right.”

The crowd, majority of whom were UCSB students, responded with applause and whistles of approval. On campus, many instructors chose to cancel Friday classes in light of the protest.

As the sky grew dark and a breeze rolled through the park, The Army, The Navy performed some of their more popular tracks. For “40%,” they asked the audience to “use [their] imagination[s]” and pretend they had a full band up on stage. This invigorated attendees to stand up, the cool feeling of grass underfoot as they danced around. 

They kept the momentum going with several more tracks, including “Dirty Laundry,” “Alexandra” and “Persimmon,” the last of which prompted a wave of cheers from the crowd on the hill.

The Army, The Navy continued to sing through the cool evening, sharing story crumbs of their songwriting inspirations. After the last strums from Ciambriello and Kallen on “Vienna (In Memoriam),” Goldberg shared that the lyrics are much more literal than listeners may have thought. 

Lines like “Looks like the cat did a number on you, Vienna” and “She runs across the wooden fence in the yard /Looking for Vienna” reflect the story of a rat infestation that Ciambriello and Goldberg experienced while in New Orleans, where they named a rat (that saw an unfortunate demise at the claws of a cat) Vienna Sausage.

It is this quirky storytelling, a mix of poetic articulations and silly college anecdotes, that gives The Army, The Navy another layer of charm that fans adore. Ciambriello and Goldberg cultivate this whimsy within themselves — in a post-show interview with the Nexus, when asked what “fruit for a fly” (in reference to their debut album) they would be, they chose a little pomegranate seed and a kiwi, respectively, to embody themselves.

To close out the night of whispery consonance, The Army, The Navy played “Wild Again,” swapping the lyrics “Santa Rosa, California” — near where Ciambriello and Goldberg grew up together in the Bay Area — for “Santa Barbara, California,” which elicited excitement from the crowd.

The free concert seemed to be just what many students needed on a Friday evening in the face of mid-quarter stress. With an outdoor venue and intimate atmosphere, the approximately 250 attendees (an estimate by Goldberg herself) were welcome to snuggle up with friends, stretch their legs out in the grass or dance atop the hill.

“The show was very grounding, and I felt very in the present moment, which I really loved, especially around midterms,” second-year history of public policy and law major Lizzie Teeter said. 

“With a small band, they’ve really hit it out of the park, so this was a perfect show in I.V.,” Gulizia added.

A version of this article appeared on p. 8 of the Feb. 5 print edition of the Daily Nexus.