Strange Brew, a little venue lodged down a side street in central Bristol, would be easy to miss if not for the Deerhoof shirt-clad crowd formed outside.
The inside is a mosaic of posters and wall graffiti, beers with colourful labels - it has a dive-bar atmosphere, and a simple stage setup. The lack of separation from the stage promises the kind of cultish live shows that Deerhoof are renowned for. If you have never seen any fan footage of them on YouTube, I would recommend doing so.
There are not one, but two openers, the first of which is Foot Foot, a Bristol band who have combined a math-rock rhythm section with wavering, seasick violin. They “long out” (in the lead singer’s words) an impressive set, unafraid of diving into lengthy, abstracted instrumentals, before returning to mournful folk melodies.
Next is Rosymary Sauce, and a nice surprise: Greg Saunier, Deerhoof’s drummer and founding member, is out on percussion for this set, too. The vocalist delivers a string of playfully weird vignettes, and Saunier drums with one hand stickless. The sound they make could be described as Deerhoof-lite; a little twee, and a little unsettling.
Deerhoof themselves are out shortly afterwards, and before they start the set proper, vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki leads a tribute to the late God of Metal, Ozzy Osbourne. She conducts the crowd in an a Capella rendition of ‘Magic Man’, and certainly, there was a bittersweet feeling about the evening. Just as many Black Sabbath shirts could be spotted as Deerhoof shirts, and you felt that the latter were about to make a fitting tribute in the form of thrashing, uncompromising noise-rock.
Their first few songs passed in a blur, and the band were immediately in lockstep. You would expect this from musicians who have worked together for so long, but you might not expect them still to play with such ferocity. Saunier’s drumming is the manic pulse at the centre of the sound. It is something like the clattering of machinery and provides such dense texture that it is far more than just percussion; on songs like ‘Future Teenage Cave Artists’ and ‘Sparrow Sparrow’, it borders on melodic. With the added tension in the guitar parts of Ed Rodriguez and John Dietrich, the band sounds almost hydraulic, both jittery and precise.
But the brilliance is in the fact that Deerhoof are playing pop songs here, and despite all the complexity, it is surprisingly addictive music. On the glam-inflected ‘+81’, the band morphs into a kind of warped New York Dolls, a heavy rock-and-roll riff paired with Matsuzaki’s nursery-rhyme vocals. The band takes great joy in shattering pop music and shackling it back together, pushing songs to their structural brink by shifting tempos in weird moments, creating a live experience which is both pleasurable and weird. They are not the kind of live band to just do play-throughs of the records; you get the sense that the songs are mutating, becoming less like the originals in each performance. Each track passes into the next at wicked pace so that it feels more like a suite than a set, or like a needle on a turntable jumping suddenly ahead. The effect is entrancing. They even include a cover of Silver Apples’ ‘Oscillations’, a 1968 psychedelic dance track which, in its blissed-out weirdness, seems to have been made for this set.
This stitched-together quality is also present in Matsuzaki’s lyrics, such as new song ‘Return of the Return of the Fire Trick Star’, a whittled-down version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “Have some sympathy / Did I mean to be?” she sings with piercing simplicity, distilling the sadness of the story into a quaint couplet. Her fragmented lyrics work like a broken mirror, reflecting shards of meaning back into the listener’s ear, and despite the chaotic nature of the set, this meaning is caught by the crowd. On their newer albums, particularly 2025’s Noble and Godlike In Ruin, Deerhoof’s anxious sound is reflective of a real political and environmental angst. ‘Overrated Species Anyhow’ is full of angry sorrow: “Love to all / My savages / You are why I'm here … / Lost, despised, or feared / You are why I wrote these passages”. The mass death and disappearance of animals hangs over these lines, and on these songs, the band are at their darkest and most distorted. Matsuzaki, in a very real and literary way, uses words to express pain, and here more directly than ever.
The set is over as quickly as it begun, and the crowd is left slightly dazed. Despite now being in their third decade, Deerhoof show no signs of relenting on their weirdness and their intensity - in fact, everything points to the fact that they are becoming more experimental. This is a band who, both sonically and politically, are moving totally against the establishment, having just removed their music from Spotify in the wake of CEO Daniel Ek’s despicable military investments. This is all the more reason to go and see them live. For fans of genuinely experimental music, Deerhoof are a holy grail - they simply will not stay still and keep on shattering the limits of what is possible for a band. In performance, this is spectacularly evident.
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