Nostalgia is a funny thing. Through a certain lens — one I’ve personally gazed through many times — it can be lazy, reductive, even dangerous. Spend your time longing for a past that you imagine to be your best years, and you hobble yourself from building a meaningful present or, for the luckiest of us, a meaningful future. This isn’t a novel observation, and yet it’s one so many of us have a hard time putting into practice. Don’t believe me? Just scroll through the YouTube comments section of any song over 10 years old.
For indie acts who hit their stride in the early to mid 2000s, nostalgia becomes an especially formidable force, looming like a slow-motion tidal wave as they enter middle age. These aren’t just people who experience nostalgia like the rest of us — they’ve created and energized it for the entire world with their art, however willingly or unwillingly. How do you handle that without going backwards? Do you surf the crest of the cascading water or just let it wash over and pummel you?
Find 'All the Feelings Tour' Tickets Here
Which brings us to Stars, Broken Social Scene, and Metric, legacy indie stalwarts whose bands may not all have formed in Canada, but whose members are all more or less from there. And that’s important. I could draw you a byzantine family tree, Venn diagram, beehive, or — most appropriately — Ian Malcolm-esque Chaos Theory graphic that illustrates how all of these respective folks are connected; their triangulation between Toronto, Montreal, and yes, New York; their individual arteries to the central heart of Arts & Crafts Productions; their various relationships, marriages, and feuds that, in some cases, date all the way back to elementary school. But I only have so many words and so much time. So just know that these artists are friends. Very, very old friends. And their triple-headed half-hydra “All the Feelings Tour” was always going to feel like a grade/middle/high-school-cum-young-adulthood reunion custom-made for Gen-Xers and elder Millennials like myself — for better or for worse.
Fortunately, Thursday night’s show at Brooklyn Paramount (the first of two on their schedule; tickets for all their dates are available here) was very much for the better. Because unlike some larger musical acts of older generations, all three bands have decided to confront nostalgia head on, rather than just pretend they’re something they’re not. Metric and Broken Social Scene have both released albums this year (Romanticize the Dive and Remember the Humans, respectively) that actively engage with the past — not just with fondness, but reflection and interrogation. Should we romanticize the dive bars and late nights of our youth? Can we still remember that we’re all human in the wake of AI and the tendrilling darkness of, well, everything?
As if striving to answer these paraphrased questions from their comrades, Stars kicked off the bill with “Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It,” which ultimately became a kind of thesis for the night. When frontman Torquil Campbell bellowed the lyric “Take the weakest thing in you and then beat the bastards with it,” he notably changed the word “bastards” to “Nazis,” driving home the idea that love, warmth, and human connection are often our greatest weapons — if not for actual combat, then at least fulfillment and survival. The phrasing takes on extra weight in 2026 than it did all the way back in 2012 for obvious sociopolitical reasons, but also because of the emotional and familial miles since treaded by the band. Frontwoman/guitarist Amy Millan and bassist/multi-instrumentalist Evan Cranley (both also in Broken Social Scene) are married with two kids, and for this tour, Stars was flanked by BSS horn players Dave Hodge and Dave French. (Campbell joked that there was the “Dave side of the stage” and the “Chris side of the stage” in reference to keyboardist Chris Selgiman and guitarist Chris McCarron).
It also helps that, with a back catalog that now consists of nine albums and nearly as many EPs, Stars easily packs their set with nothing but bangers. While I’m sure there are fans out there who prefer the slower introspection of crystalline ballads like “Dead Hearts” (accompanied here by animated album art from The Five Ghosts), the rest of their stage time came alive with shoulda-been-club-hits like “Elevator Love Letter,” “Trap Door,” and “Ageless Beauty,” proving that it’s often easier to absorb a message when you can dance to it. Campbell and Cranley punctuated the songs with a few reminiscences, including getting arrested in Rudy Giuliani’s NYC, a reminder that the past is never as halcyon as we experience it in our bodies. “Live through this and you won’t look back!” chanted the crowd as the band led them through a singalong during the bridge of set closer “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead.” Except that we always look back. And that’s okay, as long as we’re doing so truthfully.
If Stars was recapturing (or perhaps reframing) the nights out of our youth, Broken Social Scene transformed the stage into a laid-back house party from that same era. The size and revolving-door nature of the lineup has been a running joke for literal decades at this point, but it’s still hypnotic to see it all expand and contract in real time. People often forget that a BSS show rarely starts with all the present members onstage. Rather, opener “Cause = Time” began with just the long-running core of co-leaders Kevin Drew and bassist Brendan Canning, guitarist Andrew Whiteman, drummer Justin Peroff, Swiss-army musician Charles Spearin, and later addition Sam Goldberg (though even he’s been a regular presence for close to 20 years now).
But as the set progressed, the roster gradually extended its anacondian body, with at least five or maybe even eight horn players for the now-iconic finale of “7/4 (Shoreline)” (including Campbell, who also guest-belted the chorus of “Fire Eye’d Boy”), latter-day vocalist Hannah Georgas for her Remember the Humans standout “Only the Good I Keep”, and fellow newbie Jill Harris and Millan tag-teaming an absent Feist’s “Hug of Thunder.” Drew’s wife, filmmaker Rachel McLean, even got in on the action as a constant backup vocalist and auxiliary percussionist.
Given the shared billing and the fact that they’re also in Broken Social Scene, it wasn’t exactly a surprise when Metric’s Emily Haines and James Shaw joined the stage for the former’s signature tune “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” but that didn’t make it any less thrilling. The song’s slow transition from restraint to catharsis, from bubbling to building, from internal journaling to external rooftop shouting is the kind of musical moment that reminds you that, as you get older, true nostalgia isn’t just longing for the past — it’s holding a wider scope of time within your mind, heart, and soul. Hearing it live with its original singer and so many of her friends creates an inner-montage of your entire life (even the parts you haven’t lived yet) that gets faster and faster and more and more intense. Kids play, friends party and fall in love, lovers marry and divorce and stay together, more kids are born, friends die, life goes on, you die, and it all starts over until everything settles into a comforting darkness speckled with starlight. It’s like the final moment of Vanilla Sky, only with real people and moments rather than pop culture ephemera.
If that sounds like I’m overblowing it, remember that Broken Social Scene is a band which, as of late, is keenly aware of its own mortality. Drew has spoken at length of the grief that informed the recording of Remember the Humans (nearly half a dozen band members lost their parents while making the album), as well as the importance for a collective as large as theirs to stay healthy as they age. At one point, he even revealed that Peroff was now back to work after missing the last tour due to an injury. Couple that with him dedicating set closer “Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)” to the recently deceased Glen Hansard and the presence of newer and younger blood like Georgas and Harris, and it’s only natural that you think about your own finite time while watching everyone play.
Of the three acts, Metric seemed most aesthetically focused on the future — at least at first. Some of that just comes from the cybernetic nature of their synth-pop, further modernized by a sleek light show and glitched out projections. During a set front-loaded with material from Romanticize the Dive, the energy and visuals were more chromatic and spartan than the two preceding bands, with Haines mostly addressing the audience through strange and robotic monologues that referenced the past while also feeling disconnected from it.
“I’m still the 17 year-old girl in the anthem,” she intoned as a lead-in to “Crush Forever,” before stressing the importance of passing the torch to the next generation. But the lack of emotion made it hard to believe — perhaps because she sounded so cold and confident about what was going to happen many years down the line. But later on, she pivoted by inviting Goldberg onstage for “Synthetica.” With his shaggy beard, jean jacket, acoustic guitar (the first time such an instrument appeared in Metric’s set), and looser nature, he came off — and I promise I don’t mean this as an insult — not quite as cool as Metric. “You’re definitely a human,” quipped Haines, before welcoming the BSS horn section out for a finale that immediately segued into “Gold Guns Girls.”
By the time the rest of Broken Social Scene joined for a campfire singalong on “Loyal,” it was clear that Haines had been teeing up the most daring, exciting, and thematically resonant moment of the night — a stretch of songs that, after an hour or so of cyborg chic, fully humanized the stage. The light show largely stopped (or at least became less kaleidoscopic), and for the rest of the night, she spoke casually to the audience, admitting that she’s not sure where the world is headed or if forces as nebulous as friendship and harmony can actually defeat evil. And yet at the same time, playing with her friends is the only thing that feels right and natural to her. It’s the only thing that’s ever felt right to her. The sentiment was nostalgic, yes. But also futuristic. Maybe even eternal.
