New York instrumental trio City of the Sun play Zagreb's Vintage Industrial Bar on September 15. This is a band with no singer and no lyrics, which means the entire weight of the night falls on two acoustic guitars and percussion - and the audience has nowhere to hide behind a chorus everybody already knows.

The line-up is guitarists John Pita and Avi Snow plus percussionist Zach Para, together since 2011. They did not start out on the club circuit but literally on the street: they played the pavements of New York and the subway before anyone gave them a stage. The turning point came in 2013, when they performed at a TED conference and reached a far wider audience than busking can ever produce. The album "To the Sun and All the Cities in Between" came out in 2016.

Their sound is a mix of indie rock, flamenco and gypsy jazz, which critics describe as a reinvention of acoustic music. In practice that means a piece can open as broad post-rock dynamics and finish in syncopations that sound closer to an Eastern European wedding than to an American band. A Balkan ear picks that up instantly, even when the group is from New York.

Vintage Industrial Bar is a club whose capacity rarely goes past a few hundred people, so this is the kind of gig where the distance between the front row and the back is measured in metres. Doors at 8pm, music from 9.15pm, and tickets run from 17 to 20 euros, roughly 1,047 to 1,232 denars through entrio.hr.