Corn

I probably should have wrote this down the minute I was on my way back to Montreal, but let's argue that the high speed blur of bands, friends, merch and exotic gas stations is better hazy and half-remembered. This was my first time attending and my first time in Pittsburgh, but I had been hearing about it for years as most of us have—always considered as the top of DIY punk fests with psycho lineups and generalized chaos throughout. Not to cut suspense in the first paragraph, but it obviously d...

When we rented extra smoke machines for our last show, we just kept blasting THE NOT until they were completely wreathed in that foul cotton candy shit. It fit them perfectly - lead singer stalking the stage imperiously cutting through the fog looking roughly 6'11", drowned in squalls of feedback and pounding bass and drums. You know, a fucking band, right? THE NOT have been crushing sets in town recently, and now that they have recordings up we can hear the extremely solid songwriting underpin...

It was a cold November Saturday at the Van Horne underpass, people wandering back and forth across the train tracks as the sun was going down. Not a super attended show, the last one of the year and it felt like it. I know I'd seen them before in some loft, but in this context, scrappy and bittersweet, I felt like they were my favourite band in the city. FEELING FIGURES' newest record is a perfect meal for those of us who grew up with SHOP ASSISTANTS and TIGER TRAP on rotation with the more har...

Montreal has a legendarily wet, cold and irritating winter, which people sometimes cite as the reason this city has such a wild scene come summer. People spend 5 months in shotgun apartments and cramped jamspaces, then emerge with some extremely fresh shit. When PUFFER came out of the even longer sequester of the COVID lockdowns, it felt like a tri-plex exploding. Comprised of core members from the already canonical ULTRARAT and the massively underrated F.I.T.S., PUFFER comes through with a sou...