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| Lydia Lunch - Photo: Tim Gruar |
Tonight the high priestess of No Wave, Lydia Lunch brought Suicide & Alan Vega to life in Wellington.
She's been a catalytic force in underground culture since she blasted out of New York’s No Wave scene in the late ’70s. As the teenage frontwoman of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, she helped define a movement built on abrasion, minimalism, and confrontation. Her early work wasn’t just music — it was a rupture. Since then she’s sprawled across spoken word, film, photography, and literature, becoming one of the era’s most relentless cross‑disciplinary artists.
I first encountered her through zine culture and her brief but unforgettable stint with My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult — a perfect collision of her sleaze‑drenched provocation and their Wax Trax!‑era industrial‑disco hedonism. Her snarling guest vocal on Cuz It’s Hot was a staple on my radio show, a fusion of No Wave bite and electronic decadence. It was one of those rare crossovers where two underground sensibilities lock in and spark.
But that’s only one chapter. Collaborations with Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, Thurston Moore, and Marc Hurtado cemented her reputation as an artist who thrives on intensity and reinvention. Her spoken‑word work carved into themes of power, trauma, desire, and resistance long before they entered mainstream vocabulary. Her musical projects — from 8 Eyed Spy to her long history with Alan Vega — show a restlessness that refuses nostalgia. What defines her isn’t a medium but a stance: fearless, confrontational, fiercely independent.
Before Lunch made the stage, local outfit, Birdparty The Wellington‑based duo blends the skills of metal drummer William Barrett and electronic producer Emma Bernard into a incredible cinematic, semi‑industrial sounds that fuses live percussion, deconstructed vocals and experimental electronic textures; formed in 2023 and sharpened through an 18‑month run of Aotearoa festival sets, they released their self‑titled debut album Birdparty in September 2024. They went on to win Favourite Album at the 2025 Aotearoa Alternative Awards. Tonight, we saw evidence of that plus some new material - all works, a dense, atmospheric statement. What they delivered was unannounced but beautiful and intense, electronic industrial sonic-scapes that really surprised me.
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| Birdparty - Photo: Tim Gruar |
When it was her turn, Lydia Lunch simply walked on stage, without fanfare. She owned the room and there was no need to stake any claims. Yesterday she'd earned respect, I heard, in her Q &A sessions after the showing of her film The War Is Never Over (her biographical film). There were several fans in the audience who were raving about the session and I felt just a little bit FOMO for missing it.
This evening Lunch was joined by Andrew Coates of Melbourne’s Black Cab — a natural partner with his minimalist, machine‑driven electronics. Coates built the throbbing architecture; Lunch channeled the raw, incantatory spirit of Suicide. Together they rebuilt Vega and Rev’s material into a stripped‑down, high‑voltage ritual.
Lunch's vocals swung between scream, snarl, purr, and sermon — sometimes indecipherable, sometimes razor‑sharp. My favorite moment came over a grinding industrial loop where she launched into a tirade about surveillance capitalism: “They know who you are — your Insta, your Facebook, your email, where you are, what you shop, when you pull out your phone. You’re at a live fucking. So keep it in your pants.” It was fascinating watching Vega’s sound re‑emerge through Coates’ laptop and keys.
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| Photo: Tim Gruar |
Vega worked with primitive gear; the limitations were part of the aesthetic. Now the challenge is the opposite — how to stay jagged when the tools are limitless. Coates nails it, and Lunch turns the whole thing into a live transmission from the New York underground. This isn’t a tribute. It isn’t nostalgia. It’s continuation. Meow’s low ceiling and tight layout turned the room into a pressure chamber. Every pulse hit harder. Lunch didn’t perform these songs — she summoned them.
I caught fragments of Ghost Rider, Dream Baby Dream, Rocket USA, and the suffocating centerpiece Frankie Teardrop, a song she’s carried for decades. But the set blurred into one molten, minimalistic mass — a sonic soup where recognition was less important than immersion. Those stark synth lines were the perfect foil for her incantatory delivery: no excess, no sentimentality, just voltage. Her history with Suicide — knowing Vega and Rev in the ’70s, performing and recording with them — gives these shows their charge. That lineage is what makes this tour feel alive rather than archival. Tonight wasn’t a greatest‑hits parade. It was a ceremony — angular, confrontational, dark, and utterly alive.
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| Lydia Lunch - Photo: Tim Gruar |
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