On two hot, sticky evenings during the late May Bank Holiday heatwave, Boston’s finest alt-rockers Pixies took over the Andrew Law Hall at Aviva Studios. The Hall has a capacity of just 1,500, meaning Pixies unsurprisingly sold out both nights well in advance. The band could have opted for one night in the venue’s Warehouse space, but instead chose to celebrate their fortieth anniversary in a more intimate setting with some of their most devoted fans.
Pixies have a knack for picking brilliant opening acts: for their 2025 tour, they were joined by the genre-bending duo Big Special. Funnily enough, the fortieth anniversary tour saw them joined by another Black Country band, who began as a duo but have since evolved and taken on an extra member in the form of Tommy Lawther. “Good evening motherfuckers, we are GANS, roll up and get in out of the sun”, drummer and vocalist Euan Woodman stated as he strolled onstage, sporting a Big Special shirt that didn’t stay on for long.
Lawther makes a brilliant addition to the band, impressively balancing saxophone, flute, and synth throughout their live set. This was complemented by Woodman’s ferocious drumming throughout, and basslines bordering on menacing courtesy of Tom Rhodes. When traditional percussion was replaced by a wall of synth, Woodman took the opportunity to join the crowd and writhe around the stage, at one point demonstrating an impressive attempt at the worm. “This is the fucking privilege of our lives”, Rhodes insisted as their set came to an end, before encouraging the crowd to hug one another and “love each other” in an invitation that proved GANS really is good for the soul.
In recent years, Pixies’ live shows have received mixed reviews, mostly stemming from the perception that they aren’t as good as they were in their prime. Attending a Pixies show in 2026, though, and expecting the band to sound like they did in 1986, is simply ludicrous, and it can’t be denied that they know how to keep a crowd on their toes. As soon as he arrived onstage, the band’s iconic founding frontman Black Francis announced “we’re going to see how many songs we can play that we didn’t play last night. We’ll play some old songs, and the children of the old songs, and I guess what you could call the grandchildren of the old songs”.
This was no lie, as the entire setlist was reshuffled. ‘Cactus’ was swapped as an opener for ‘River Euphrates’, before appearing towards the end of the set. ‘Hang Wire’, the song that provided the band’s 1990 album Bossanova with its title, came as an early highlight with its driving guitar and abstract lyricism, but it was the band’s debut Surfer Rosa and sophomore Doolittle that was bound to provide their set with its best moments. ‘Bone Machine’ saw a mini mosh pit form, which erupted at the first few notes of ‘Debaser’. ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ led into ‘Hey’, and ‘Wave of Mutilation’ was given its UK surf treatment.
‘Here Comes Your Man’ saw the entire crowd moving thanks to its jangly guitar riff, before the previous night’s closer ‘Vamos’ was introduced. “We do this song pretty much every night, unless Joey [Santiago, the band’s founding guitarist] says the song goes on vacation”, Francis informed the audience, “he has to make the guitar fresh every night”. This materialised as Santiago motioned to David Lovering for one of his drumsticks, using it to play the song’s riff while his guitar was stood in its stand: moments like this demonstrated the band’s continuing inventiveness,
All in all, it seemed that Pixies created their setlist spontaneously, choosing what to play in the moment rather than deciding in advance. “‘The Night the Zombies Came’, let’s do that”, Francis suggested at one point, and it was this unpredictability that made their performance so exciting. With nine studio albums and forty years of B-sides to pick from, the band were far from lacking in choice. Every Pixies show is guaranteed to be a different experience, but all of them prove that they’ve still got it.
