Concert Reviews

Osheaga weekend has come and gone, and I along with 151,000 other attendees were able to spend the weekend on Jean Drapeau watching incredible artists do what they are great at. Here are my rankings for the top 10 concerts of the weekend! 

10. Tate McRae

Tuesday July 28 was a pretty dark and rainy evening, but that’s not what the crowd at La Sala Rosa noticed during the KT Laine / boyhood / Eliza Niemi performances that night. As the audience grew throughout the night, it felt like a microcosm of the Plateau culture – with a mix of people in their 20s to 30s in classic Montreal styles. Before anyone took to the stage, it already had the intimacy of a university dorm show.

Neon, black and snapbacks colored the crowd around the booth this Friday night for the TECHG1RLS set at Bar le Ritz PDB. With support from whyhaze and beamskii, the Miami-based DJ duo of Paris and Rosey brought high energy, and despite playing to a relatively small crowd they made it an iconic night – bringing a set that felt like the afters you never want to leave.

The rain trickled its steady stream in one of the most classic, heat-breaking Montreal summer storms outside of the Sala Rossa concert hall this Thursday night, where Fireball Kid, Frownline and Knitting took the stage to celebrate Knitting’s release of their latest album, Souvenir. It takes a pretty phenomenal bill to pack the ballroom of the Sala Rossa, but I can say with full certainty that this bill was one of them. Equal parts millennials, sporting shag cuts and tote bags, along with cotton candy-colour-haired Gen Zs with wired earbuds made up the crowd. The commonality was our tepid slightly-dampness which brought our spirits together for the show we were about to see. 

Tuesday evening marked the first North American stop for Black Country, New Road on their 2026 tour – lucky for us, the first show was here in Montreal at MTelus.

To start the show, everyone arrived early to catch Horsegirl – a Chicago indie-rock trio consisting of Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein and Gigi Reece. Their sound felt true to their album name, with a phonetic-like beat marching alongside iterative lyrics. The set was tight and playful, a perfect intro to a lovely evening with Black Country, New Road.

Photo Credit: ZaneBurkoMedia

The city towered beneath the cold weather in the midst of May–an unfortunate but regular occurrence during the Montreal spring. Yet, splatters of an unspoken but mandatory tartan, red and blue painted the streets, brightening the ordinarily bleak sidewalk of rue Sainte-Catherine in preparation for UK singer-songwriter and producer PinkPantheress. Shivering hands gripped onto umbrellas in line, awaiting the OK to be welcomed into the contrasting heat of the Theatre L’Olympia and to rush to secure their barricade spots. 

“It’s okay to take a minute, if you need one,” Montreal’s RnB popstar Magi Merlin tells us, “this is a reminder for life”, but a minute is not what at all what Magi (pronounced Mahd-j-eye) is taking. The single Spicekick came out on April 1st (not a joke), officially announcing her second album, POWER HOUSE, to be released this July.