POP Montreal has announced the full lineup for its 25th anniversary edition, running September 23 to 27 across the city. The bill includes Luna, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, High Vis, Chad VanGaalen, Spencer Krug, La Sécurité, Les Hay Babies, Julie Doiron, Think About Life, Uffie, Nardwuar the Human Serviette, Lucrecia Dalt, Cutty Ranks, Infinity Song, and dozens more across the five days.
Luna’s set is curated specifically for the festival, drawing from both their own catalogue and that of Galaxie 500, the band Dean Wareham dissolved before forming Luna in 1991. It’s a rare configuration, collapsing two distinct and influential chapters of Wareham’s career into a single evening. A Winged Victory for the Sullen, the duo of Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid, brings their slow-burn neoclassical work to the program. Their sets tend to feel like weather events more than concerts, and they don’t play often. High Vis rounds out the headliner tier with their particular brand of hardcore that keeps pulling toward Britpop without ever quite arriving there.
Chad VanGaalen, Calgary’s most reliably strange musical presence, appears alongside Uffie, who helped define the Ed Banger bloghouse moment in the mid-2000s and whose inclusion here reads as a considered nostalgia pick rather than a reactive one. Infinity Song, the New York sibling group that sold out their last Montreal date, returns. Squirrel Flower, the project of Ella Williams, brings her atmospheric indie-rock to the bill, as does Automatic, the Los Angeles post-punk trio whose motorik minimalism has been accumulating real traction.
The local and Canadian programming carries the most weight this year. La Sécurité, the art-punk outfit that has spent the last couple of years becoming one of the more talked-about bands coming out of Montreal, appears alongside Think About Life, returning after years away with all the joyful chaos their catalogue promises. Spencer Krug, whose work across Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown helped define what Montreal sounded like in the 2000s, is on the bill, as is Julie Doiron, one of the key figures in Canadian indie going back to her years with Eric’s Trip. Les Hay Babies, the Acadian trio, return with their indie-folk-country blend. Thunderheist, the Canadian club-rap duo, also feature, and their presence on any bill is a reliable indicator of a good late night.
The festival is also marking the 20th anniversary of Secret City Records with a multi-act showcase featuring Klô Pelgag, Basia Bulat, Brad Barr, La Force, Shad, Antoine Corriveau, Unessential Oils, Bye Parula, and more. Secret City has been one of the more consistent homes for ambitious Quebec and Canadian indie music since the mid-2000s, and the lineup reads less like a celebratory gesture and more like a working document of what that label actually built.
One of the more unexpected announcements: Divan Orange, the beloved Mile End venue that closed in 2018, will reopen for three special nights during the festival, two of which feature Plants and Animals. The venue was a central node in Montreal’s DIY and indie ecosystem for the better part of a decade, and its temporary return is the kind of detail that will mean something specific to anyone who spent serious time there. Plants and Animals, veterans of the Montreal scene, are a fitting choice to anchor those nights.
On the experimental end, Colombian composer Lucrecia Dalt continues her run of work that refuses easy classification, bending avant-garde electronics and bolero into something that consistently sounds unlike anything adjacent to it. Legendary guitarist Fred Frith and Québécois composer René Lussier, a central figure in the city’s musique actuelle tradition, round out the programme’s more challenging corner. Nardwuar the Human Serviette, whose live appearances function as their own genre, is on the bill as well.
Film POP brings two screenings to Cinema Moderne. Sam Jones’s I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco, which documented the recording and fraught release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, screens September 24. It has history with the festival: it screened at the very first POP Montreal in 2002. Ken Kwapis’s We Are the Shaggs, a 2026 feature following the Wiggin sisters and their father’s improbable musical experiment, screens September 25.
The festival is also teaming up with bookstore Joie des Livres for a Heated Rivalry live show and book launch on September 28, featuring Dumas, La Bronze, Phillipe B, Peter Peter, Night Lunch, and others.
Single-day tickets and festival passes are available now at popmontreal.com. The full Film POP programming will be announced in August.
