Kevin Bronson on October 30th, 2015

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You know you’ve made it when guys are selling $10 bootleg T-shirts outside your show. Or when your fans are ponying up $30 and $40 for the real items inside.

On the eve of the release of their sophomore album, the Neighbourhood achieved that status Thursday night at the Shrine, giving a triumphant but uneven performance to a crowd that was more juicebox than flask. The Los Angeles quintet’s latest single might be “R.I.P. 2 My Youth,” but cherubs were in abundance Thursday, much to the dismay of bartenders who spent a lot of time with their hands in their pockets.

The night was significant not just because it coincided with the Neighbourhood’s release of “Wiped Out!,” but because it was a true hometown affair. It was the penultimate date on a 28-stop North American tour that featured the headliners with L.A. compadres Bad Suns and Hunny — all of whom hail from the same general neighborhood in the West Valley.

“This tour is the best thing that ever happened to us,” Hunny’s Jason Yarger told the crowd early on. “We’ve been talking about doing something like this since we were kids.”

The sheer scale, especially of Thursday’s show, would have been hard to imagine — the cavernous Shrine and its boomy sound that often propelled the bands’ bombast toward swampy squalor, and its sea of adoring young faces.

Performing in front of a big screen showing black-and-white animations and movies, Neighbourhood frontman Jesse Rutherford basked in it all, flexing his star power for 70 minutes, particularly in an “interlude” during which he soloed six songs from last year’s “#000000 & #FFFFFF” mixtape over backing tracks. The hip-hop-inspired music from their 2012 EP and 2013 debut, “I Love You,” revved up the masses more than the new songs, probably owing to familiarity, but the Shrine’s sonics did no favors to some of the pop nuances in new songs “Prey,” “Daddy Issues” and “Wiped Out!”

Rutherford and crew launched the show with “W.D.Y.W.F.M.?” (What Do You Want From Me) from the first album and sprinkled more of “I Love You” — highlighted by “Let It Go” and “Afraid” — along with highlights from that first EP, including the merry marriage of pop and rap “Female Robbery” and, next to last, the hit “Sweater Weather.” As he is wont to do, Rutherford made palpable the emotion in every one of his hymns to love lost and gained.

The Bad Suns, who broke from recording their sophomore album to hop on this tour, didn’t have much luck during their set. Blame the sound gremlins. They started strong with the big single “Cardiac Arrest” and finished strong, but in between the set was marred by a strange delay in the sound system that made their songs sound out of time. (Close to the stage it was better; back in hall, it was puzzling.) Uber-earnest frontman Christo Bowman gave it his all, even fielding some female undergarments thrown onstage, but it was clear it was not the quartet’s night.

Hunny fared much better, performing songs from their new EP “Pain/Ache/Loving.” With their lithe post-punk rhythms cutting through the room’s echo, Yarger was disarmingly visceral, sounding more like an ’80s U.K. idol (especially on “Natalie”) than a kid from the West Valley. It’s not hard to imagine that someday the sextet will be the third of three at a concert like this, not the first.

Photos by Chad Elder