Making ingress to tonight’s venue offers up a most unexpected utterance from a middle-aged lady walking in the opposite direction toward security staff at the entrance. “Hi, I’m here with my daughter and I’m a bit bored, do you mind if I…” Tantalisingly, the question fades out of earshot as I turn a corner but presumably, she’s asking if she can leave the venue and pop back in later to retrieve her progeny. It’s not the sort of thing one expects to hear ten minutes before 35-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter Mac DeMarco is due on stage.
However, taking a spot in the main hall brings with it confirmation that DeMarco’s appeal has seeped impressively into a younger generation of fans. Amongst the sold out 3,000 strong audience – the Prospect Building’s main hall now boasting the largest capacity of the city’s live music venues – are what looks like a majority of fresh-faced undergrad types and early twentysomethings. Though it’s been comfortably over a decade since DeMarco’s break out albums (2 in 2012 and Salad Days in 2014), his free-spirited goofball persona and languidly tuneful indie rock – filtered through an expedient use of Instagram and Tiktok – has clearly chimed with many a fledgling gig-goer.
DeMarco’s oddball charisma asserts that boredom isn’t on the cards. Before a chord is struck, he bungles his opening remarks and induces a round of playful boos when he accidently speaks the first syllable of “Birmingham” before backtracking and addressing the appropriate city. He also introduces his band right away and it somehow suits DeMarco perfectly to have a guitarist called Pedro and a frizzy-haired bassist wearing nothing but his instrument and what looks like a large pair of boxershorts.
Opener ‘Shining’ is from DeMarco’s stripped back latest album Guitar. The laidback groove has Mac in romantic mode and it provides a test of his solid enough falsetto skills. It’s nice to hear that his signature shimmering guitar effect is intact and, despite the album being just a couple of months old, large sections of the audience appear to know the words. ‘For The First Time’, one of Mac’s most played tunes on Spotify, induces a huge cheer at its intro; the hypnotic chime of the keyboard parts meld with another mass singalong and it’s resoundingly received.
‘Sweeter’, another of the new ones, is both stark and sparse on the record but has a pleasingly dreamy cadence when realised with a full band. Despite its leisurely pace, an animated Mac – and he is very animated throughout – both sways and hops around, with occasional mannerisms somewhere between meerkat and praying mantis. During ‘On The Level’, he encourages a mass swaying of audience hands in concert with the song’s oscillating synthesiser riff.
Between tunes, Mac is full of absurd but affable badinage landing somewhere between comic aside and non-sequitur. ‘We’re ready to die here with you tonight,” he says using a gruff, Exorcist style voice before ‘Salad Days.’ The title track from the 2014 album is – despite its more-than-passing similarity to The Kinks’ ‘Picture Book’ – a standout tune within which DeMarco laments something of a quarter-life crisis. At one point, Mac, for no particular reason, launches into an unhinged shrill cackle, and in introduction to a later song, he says “we’ll give you meat, fish, bone, sweat and tears. Let’s go baby girl.” Before the welcome appearance of another old favourite ‘The Stars Keep On Calling My Name,’ DeMarco declares “It’s time to make a deal, I shake mine if you shake yours” as he bends over and aims his arse toward the crowd.
It’s all very enjoyable stuff and there is an atmosphere of both adoration and high spirits in the room. A couple of fans are holding signs and, in spotting one being held by a gentleman called Fred, Mac dedicates the loungey, falsetto-fuelled ‘One More Love Song’ to “Fred again. Sweet Fred.” A custom of throwing items stage-wards has also imbedded itself; after ‘Passing Out Pieces’, DeMarco is rewarded with two Labubu toys (collectible figures created by Hong Kong illustrator Kasing Lung, apparently) and he subsequently jokes that he would’ve preferred “a pair of boo-boo-boobies.”
‘Home’, another one from Guitar, is – with its slow, contemplative shuffle and lyrical desire to be free from the past – perhaps revealing of a more mature attitude that pervades the new material (“There are faces and names/That have memories attached, that I’d sooner let go”). Later, the dual cascading guitar solo provided by Mac and Pedro at the outro of ‘Viceroy’ sounds glorious through the venue’s state of the art sound system.
‘Another One’ is another big singalong and an enticingly lethargic groove that concludes with DeMarco getting a huge cheer after performing a headstand with legs splayed apart in mid-air. The riveting ‘Freakin’ Out The Neighbourhood’ is the moment when the audience gets most animated, and its callowness is revealed in a mass sighting of smartphones. After Mac performs an onstage bout of air-golfing, ‘My Kind of Woman’ contains momentum-building arpeggios and reverbed chords that, once again, positively glisten through the venue’s sound equipment.
During the single song encore of ‘Nobody,’ Mac performs with both Labubu toys stuffed in each of his top pockets. From start to finish, it’s all been something a little different. Despite the oft-discussed evils of social media, it’s encouraging that someone like DeMarco – a likeable, authentic and rather absurd character making good and honest music – has managed to connect with so many of 2025’s youth.
Scott Hammond