Three bands, three provinces, three completely different ideas of what an indie rock set is supposed to do to a room. The bill that landed at La Sala Rossa on July 30 put Toronto’s PACKS, Montreal’s Ribbon Skirt and Halifax’s Nap Eyes on the same stage in that order, and the night ended up with an arc nobody appeared to have planned: easy and conversational, then physical and communal, then quiet and drifting.
PACKS opened loose and unhurried. Madeline Link’s project has grown well past its bedroom-recording origins, and the version that showed up in Montreal was a six-piece, backup vocals included, which gave the songs more body and more harmony than the band’s records might lead you to expect. The extra voices did most of the heavy lifting: choruses that sit thin on tape arrived filled in.
What carried the set, though, was the talking. The vocals were conversational between songs and during them, and the room settled in fast, closer to a living room than an opener slot. The most memorable moment was an accident. Madeline Link became convinced, mid-set, that her guitar had stopped working, and from the floor it did seem like she was onto something; the guitar either was not working properly or was sitting too low in the mix. The confusion ran on long enough to become a running joke, and the band let it play out rather than trying to smooth it over. It was the kind of small, unpolished thing that a bigger venue would have swallowed.
Then Ribbon Skirt turned the room over.
The Montreal band, built around Anishinaabe songwriter Tashiina Buswa and multi-instrumentalist Billy Riley, plays with an almost total disregard for standing still. Members moved constantly, crossing the stage, ducking around each other, changing where the sound was coming from every few bars. The crowd had room to move at La Sala Rossa, and they used it.
The set peaked near the end, when Buswa left the stage entirely and walked into the audience, singing at close range to people who were suddenly a foot away from her rather than watching from the floor. She stayed there. She ended up in a group hug with a knot of audience members, and the performance stopped being a performance in any conventional sense. That kind of thing only works if the room allows it, and La Sala Rossa did.
It is worth remembering how quickly this band has moved. Bite Down, their debut for Mint Records, arrived in April 2025 and was shortlisted for that year’s Polaris Music Prize, with the PENSACOLA EP following in October. A little over a year later they are the band on this bill that a hometown crowd responds to physically, and they are clearly comfortable with what that lets them do. Always a band worth catching if you ever get the chance.
Nap Eyes had the unenviable job of following that, and made no attempt to match it. Their set went the other way: slower, hazier, more interior. Nigel Chapman’s songs work on the delay between a line and its meaning, and the band plays them with a patience that suits a room this size. The material from The Neon Gate, their 2024 album for You’ve Changed Records, sat particularly well in the space. Nobody in the band is short on ability, and none of them were interested in showing it off.
There was one theme running through the set that nobody onstage bothered to hide: everyone was completely exhausted. The band joked about it repeatedly between songs. Members yawned onstage, visibly, more than once. It spread. By the back half of the set there was yawning throughout the room, some of it clearly sympathetic rather than bored. Given the schedule, it made sense. Nap Eyes have been touring heavily, including US dates with Pavement, and had played New York the night before. Montreal got the tail end of that run, and the band was honest about it.
The tiredness did not sink the set so much as tint it. Music this unhurried does not need adrenaline, and there is something appropriate about a band playing songs about drift and fatigue while running on very little sleep.
La Sala Rossa is small enough that the distance between stage and floor barely exists, which is what made Buswa’s walk into the crowd possible and what let PACKS’ between-song rambling land as conversation rather than stage patter. It also meant Nap Eyes could play at a volume and pace that would have evaporated in a larger hall.
Three bands, three registers, one room that fit all of them.
Review & photos – Steve Gerrard
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