by Victoria McGrath
May 31, 2025

Coming home with mud coated all the way up my jeans and relentlessly ringing ears, my weekend at Pouzza fest was a smash success. Spanning three days and over 150 performances, as well as live podcasts, yoga, wrestling, and a tattoo pop-up shop, the festival truly had something for everyone. Its setup, which consisted of venues that were largely within a 15 minute walking distance (MEM, Foufounes Electriques, Turbo Haus, etc.), flooded a tangible slice of the Quartier des Spectacles with a sea of impressively decked out festival-goers in studded and patched leather jackets, fishnets, stretched lobes, and creative variations of shaved and coloured hair.

I was impressed with how Pouzza did justice to the vastness of punk with performances ranging from squeaky clean pop-punk, thrash metal, Oi!, grindcore, queercore and more. I don’t know many situations where I could see both long time international punk legends like SUBHUMANS and local queb emo gems like DOGO SUICIDE with the same wristband. While the extravagant hair metal of VOIVOD or more polished pop punk acts are not personal favourites, I cherished the palpable enthusiasm of old friends, families, and diehard fans coming together in shared appreciation for punk rock music in all its forms.

The crowd was noticeably more intergenerational than what I normally see at shows, and kids perched on their parents shoulders making the sign of the horns was a fairly common sight. Pouzza fest is self-admittedly targeted to an older crowd looking to see the punk bands who were big in their youth (https://www.vice.com/en/article/pouzza-fest-hugo-mudie-interview-2016/). Questions of living a long life of nonconformism shone through in songs such as Apes of the State’s snowflakes, which announced,

“And we will buy our children punk CDs and
Tell them they can live their dreams
Grow up to be whatever it is that they wanna be
And if anyone calls them freaks we’ll say
That freaks are fucking beautiful
And we wouldn’t love them any other way”
Similarly, Sister Wife Sex Strike’s “Barefoot Dirty and Free” was a rallying cry against growing up and abandoning authentic existence in the face of conservative ridicule;
“You might think that I’m just a grown up teenage anarchist
Could learn some moderation and let go of my idealist streak
Maybe you’re on to me, a shower is all that I need
But I remember eventually a shower could wait another week
But if I wanted to live in a box, I would build me a coffin
And if I wanted to stay in one place, I’d dig the hole myself”

Watching a gray-haired woman swirling up a tornado of punks in the muddy outdoor mosh pit at the Subhumans set, I felt like I was witnessing a follow-up to Penelope Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization, and was happy to see that despite the time passing, Gen X’s zest for anti-establishment music had not.
The lineup was teeming with awesome bands, some of which I discovered for the first time, and others who I found out were even better live.

RAT BATH was an electrifying rock orchestra, and I watched in awe as lead singer Frankie jumped around the stage and into the crowd like a fearless conductor. Their theatre-inspired stage presence delivered a mesmerizing symphony of hair thrashing and dramatic vocal inflection, reflecting the fantastical tales of immortal vampires and body-doubling that inspire their songs. The crowd went absolutely apeshit for their new single, “Fuck you and fuck yur god too”, a song which I learned through interviewing the band is directed against the pro-life lobby. This clearly hit a resonant note with the crowd, whipping up an energetic circle mosh in the front.

Angry but technically sophisticated, Lung’s set was a hit. I was shocked to realize that their sound mainly came from a drum set and a cello, the latter of which I never knew could sound more violent and heavy-hitting than any guitar I’ve heard. Talking to the members of RAT BATH afterward, I remember saying something to the effect of, “there is no WAY that’s just a drummer and a cellist!”. While cellist Kate Wakefield looped and distorted her vocals live on stage and Daisy Caplan drummed samples including recordings of a Catholic radio show, I felt like I could have easily been listening to one of those experimental octet bands that play at Casa del Popolo and the like. Channeling operatic-grunge sensibilities through a rightful rage towards themes such as sexual assault, Lung stood out as an over-achieving oddball at Pouzza fest.

Archdeacons of the local hardcore scene, PUFFER’s performance was good, clean old-fashioned fun. At the notoriously no-moshing dancefloor of Turbo Haüs, PUFFER’s heavy-hitting sound, a reinvigorated Oi!, meat-and-potatoes style punk sparked a modest pit anyways. It hit like a sonic stimulant, and I was helpless against the impulse to jump around. I left the set coated in sweat, a fat smile plastered across my face.
I would say that SUBHUMANS’ set was a time machine to the angst of early UK 77 punk if their antifascist anthems weren’t excruciatingly relevant to current politics. Before launching into mass anthem “No”, frontman Dick Lewis reminded the crowd that it was written in response to the Reagan era, revived during the War on Terror, and now aimed squarely against Trumpism and the unprecedented scale of wealth accumulation by the 1%.
Safe to say, the presidency down South hung over the festival like a wet sock dredged from the beer garden mud pit – foul, sludgy, and impossible to ignore. Nearly every performance either started or ended with a denouncement or rallying call against the rise in conservative authoritarianism in the form of encroaching homophobia, sexism, and the unchecked concentration of wealth. From catchall condemnations of lying politicians across the spectrum to the specificity of anarcho-punk rockers SISTER WIFE SEX STRIKE, who called for a free Palestine, opening of prisons and burning of precincts. LUNG’s Kate Wakefield ferociously dedicated their song “Brock” to “rapist Brock Turner, your rapist, my rapist and rapist Donald Trump”. The APES OF THE STATE set closed with the band and crowd huddled in a circle, gently chanting “they can’t kill us all” to a hauntingly soft, strangely upbeat tune, ending their song “Snowball” with “if you fuck up I’ll still be your friend, but we need all of us to fight all of them”, urging against chronic leftist infighting in the face of greater threats.

This had me wondering where this left Pouzza Fest™, an institution tasked with securing the funds to run a major festival at a time where doing so is increasingly expensive, while also being indebted to the deeply anti-commodification if not overtly anti-capitalist values held by many artists and fans. In a musical landscape dominated by streaming giants, where live music makes up an increasingly large cut of industry earnings, Pouzza finds itself in a particularly precarious pinch. It’s no surprise that some of these more radical tenets have to be checked at the door, with SPVM presence at the outdoor shows being an eyebrow-raising testament to this. At one point, I literally watched a police man patrol the festival as Dick Lewis sang, “No I don’t believe in the police force, police brutality isn’t a dream!”. Where artists like Buckie Harris and others praised Pouzza fest for being a rare case of a festival “for musicians by musicians”, a different sentiment surfaced at a secret show at Batiment 7 that weekend featuring Pouzza-playing bands. There, a member of a sound crew inaugurated the show with a land acknowledgement and asked, “What if awful things happen and in twenty years in Israel they’re gonna be doing land acknowledgements about fucking Palestine?” condemning the hypocrisy of “liberal punk festivals that will remain nameless that are happening right now that they do land acknowledgements that fucking mean nothing because they do nothing about it”. To this, a band member shouted “fuck Pouzza fest!”.

In light of this, I found myself asking: Can an anti-institutional institution ever truly exist? And can punk music ever ethically build its own large-scale establishment that survives without comprimise to the anti-establishment foundations that built it? All things considered, my experience at Pouzza Fest 2025 was unforgettable and genuinely a treat. Still, the festival walks a fine line: it offers a rare chance to celebrate punk, past and present, on a movement-sized scale, while risking ideological compromise in the very process of reaching that scale.