Maggie Lindemann brought her I Feel Everything tour to Melbourne’s Forum last night.
I love seeing artists at Maggie’s stage of their career. She’s popular enough that she’s got a loyal and engaged following showing up for her this evening, but hasn’t blown up to the point where people just want to be ‘in the room’ for her shows, and it vastly changes the energy of the crowd. At one point in the evening she asks who has listened to her debut EP and most of the hands in the room go up, and when the music kicks in the whole crowd then start screaming the lyrics of the songs back to her.
You can also measure this energy in the stillness of the crowd. Stillness in the sense that there’s very little coming and going through the entirety of her set. People are here to listen. And dance. There is a lot of dancing!
Opening the evening are Friends of Friends with a short but punchy set of their energetic punk rock tracks. It’s a great way to set the tone for the evening and I love their use of sound to start and end their set – it really helps command the audience’s attention. I would have appreciated a little more crowd engagement and a proper introduction to each band member wouldn’t have gone amiss as a way to leverage this opportunity to build their fan base, but these are minor quibbles of an exciting set that was a hell of a lot of fun.
With the crowd already hyped, Maggie Lindemann struts onto the stage to an ecstatic response. Carrying her confidence with an alluring swagger and ready for a night of hyperactive pop rock, she launches into her first song and the party truly gets under way.
Probably most well known for breakout pop single “Pretty girl”, much of her music since is more heavily rock influenced and she does a great job to pay homage to both the pop and punk rock elements of her back catalogue without it feeling jarring. It’s an impressive feat and a great reflection on the obvious care Maggie has put into weaving together this setlist.
She is on absolute fire tonight. You can sense her feeding off the energy of the crowd before her, as well as the virtuosity of the musicians she has surrounded herself with on stage. Everyone is on phenomenal form, ripping through the setlist at a blistering pace during the harder rock infused tracks, slowing it down for the softer and more intimate songs. The lighting floods the stage with the rich vibrancy of warm reds and purple hues before machine gun strobe effects electrify the stage. At other times darkness envelops, reducing Maggie to a shimmering figure silhouetted against the hazy smoke of the backdrop. The whole night feels calibrated to perfection, with Maggie’s powerful and flawless vocals always front and centre, anchoring the entire performance.
Everything about Maggie and the show she puts on is filled with contradictions. The vocal effects, the recorded snippets, and the fact she doesn’t play an instrument – even the fact she is wearing the most stunning outfit that wouldn’t look amiss on Sabrina Carpenter – it pushes the boundaries of what rock should be. Yet it’s clear to everyone in that room this is what she represents.
The heaviest tracks, such as Scissorhands from her first EP Paranoia are the ones that elicit the strongest crowd responses. And I love this! It always makes me feel a little warm and fuzzy inside when I realise we’re placing the future of rock music into hands such as Maggie’s. The ones that say THIS is what it looks like now and I don’t care what you think about it.
Tonight, she showed us all how bright that future can be.