“I’ve just released a new album, I’m gonna be playing some songs from that tonight”, Mac DeMarco says, dressed in muted colours, cargo trousers and a baseball cap that shadows his eyes. It’s not the first thing you want to hear your teenage music idol say. But the collective intake of breath in the Eventim Apollo on Monday night is released when he finishes his sentence: “I’ll be playing some old ones too.”
DeMarco’s slacker rock-god status always transcended his music. Straddling the cusp of Gen-Z and millennial fanbases – a gap-toothed, flannel-shirted Colossus of Rhodes – he embodied a more innocent time of the internet. A time of Odd Future compilations and peak Nardwuar, of Vine and Tumblr, where DeMarco became the smiling staple of the post-indie scene, with his hilarious interviews, devastating baby blues and penchant for Viceroy cigarettes. Today he’s found a resurgence through TikTok and a much younger audience – a fact that’s very apparent in the Apollo – ballooning streaming figures of previously obscure tracks, such as Heart to Heart, to almost a billion plays on Spotify.
His live shows in the 2010s were stuff of legend; raucous affairs, packed with gross-out humour and tomfoolery. One infamous video circulated back in this era, showing a young Demarco on stage, backside exposed, in a compromising position with a drumstick (well, perhaps half a drumstick is more accurate).
The party had to end at some point. In 2020, he took a well needed step back from the booze and cigarettes, moving from LA with his wife and child to a secluded farm on an island in rural British Columbia – becoming a kind of Carhartt-clad Aldo Leopold. This change of scene marked a shift in DeMarco’s persona. And there is an air of anticipation, as the crowd shuffles into the Apollo, of what DeMarco we’re going to get.
Will it be the stripped back, matured Mac of his most recent two records, 2023’s One Wayne G and 2025’s Guitar? Or, will his show maintain its unhinged hilarity of old, with ironic guitar shredding, standup style adlibs and public nudity? The answer, as always, is both.
We still have the onstage antics – albeit PG-rated: an impromptu handstand competition, a fictional ditty DeMarco wrote “in the Midlands”, apparently, called Tears in my Yorkshire Tea or a frankly bizarre cameo from Italian funk expert Ryan Paris (the man behind Dolce Vita if you’re wondering). Paris’ presence is largely well received, though there's an ambiguous atmosphere in the room when the 72 year old takes off his belt in front of an audience of largely 16 year olds.
The show quickly establishes a rhythm, alternating between lesser known stuff from the new albums and classics like Chambers of Reflection or Ode to Viceroy. This stark switching between old and new is clear from the sea of phones that is raised with every other song, a feature of the show that detracts from the romance of his crooning classics like For The First Time.
Unperturbed, DeMarco adopts the physicality of a sea lion raised on old tapes of Ian Curtis, bobbing sporadically and violently around the stage. He’s got a completely new band behind him too, that, again, reflects the age of the crowd. DeMarco plays grandfather, marshalling his young troupe with paternal affection. At one point, he even calls his guitarist, Pedro Martins, his “beautiful Brazilian boy”.
They’re a tight outfit with a cleanliness to their sound – think synth pop Steely Dan – fleshing out Home and Holy, songs that are stripped back on his latest record, with considerable groove and heft live. The synth driven tracks, such as On A Level, pack a particular punch. They whip through songs at breakneck pace with virtually no interval between, aside from the occasional tourettes-style adlibs DeMarco peppers his set with. Moonlight on the River, as the longest track he plays by far, stands out from the rest, descending into a satisfying mesh of feedback and drums.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Mac DeMarco show without some form of nudity, even in his newer, pacified form. The encore is Dolce Vita, which Paris makes a return for, and ends with about fifty shirtless people on stage singing the 1983 classic.
DeMarco might have grown up, but his classics haven’t. His tracks are perennial teenage-fuel and the crowd on Monday night testified to this. If there was ever a benefit to social media and TikTok, this was it: DeMarco’s new found audience, singing every word and dancing to these cryogenically youthful songs.
