Live albums are tricky. They tend to function as either documents or products, and the best ones manage to be both without feeling like either. Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Live Forever, recorded over two nights at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago in the summer of 2025, is one of the good ones.

Alynda Segarra has spent the past few years building toward something that is hard to name precisely but easy to recognize. The Past Is Still Alive from 2024 was one of the year’s best records, a rooted, searching album about identity and loss and the particular weight of choosing where you stand. Live Forever

The 14-track set opens with material from The Past Is Still Alive, and the intimacy of the Old Town School suits it perfectly. These are songs that breathe. They are not songs built to echo around arenas. The audience is close, and you can feel that proximity in the recordings, a warmth that studio versions achieve differently or not at all.

Older favorites like “Pa’lante” and “Precious Cargo” hit with renewed context here. “Pa’lante” in particular lands differently after the years of political climate change since it was written. It has always been a statement of survival. Live, with this specific crowd, it becomes something closer to a vow.

Segarra has described this touring lineup as family, and that register comes through. This does not sound like a band on autopilot, running through a set they have done a thousand times. It sounds like musicians who are genuinely invested in each other and in the songs, which is rarer than it should be.

The production is clear without being overproduced. Someone made smart decisions about what to include and what to let breathe. There are no stadium-scale crowd noise inserts, no studio touchups that would have sanded down the edges. What you hear is close to what was in that room.

Live Forever is framed as a tribute to working-class musicians and to the audiences who show up for music made by human beings, which is both a statement about art and a quiet broadside at the AI-generated content flooding every corner of the industry right now. The title earns its meaning by the end. These songs, played this way, in front of these people, do seem like they might.