bReview: Pixies
w/ support from Elliot & Vincent
at the Auckland Town Hall, Monday 24 November 2025
Written by Imogene Bedford
Photography by Calum Dewsnap
Having cool parents is both a blessing as a curse. When I was 14, I was an edgelord in the way only teenagers can be — convinced my superiority complex was itself a personality and certain that my Gen X tastes made me simply impossible to understand. And yet, I was always reluctant to credit where those tastes came from in the first place.
I can admit now that the Pixies were one of my dad’s staples: Gigantic on the motorway and Debaser crackling over a Makita speaker. He's somewhere in the room tonight for the band’s second Tāmaki Makaurau show, blending into a sea of other oldheads kitted in Tool hoodies and Sonic Youth shirts. They all wear the same expressions: nostalgic, excited, quietly smug.
I’m hoping to have one over them as the opening act begins. Special guests Elliot & Vincent transform Auckland’s Town Hall into a distorted horror-scape. Lit all in red, the duo cast metaphorical shadows across the arches, their silhouettes flickering like something half-remembered from a Lynchian dream.
Perhaps no other local band has excited me as much in the last few years, effortlessly atmospheric and totally self-assured since their inception in 2023. Piggyback pulses with a nightmarish thrum, Elliot Finn totally in control, her drumming both tightly wound and feverishly precise. The reverb of her vocals recalls Kim Deal, which seems fitting in the founding Pixies bassist’s absence.
The Town Hall isn’t always acoustically sound, but that really only seems to work in the duo’s favour. Indecipherable lyricism and warped sounds abound throughout, particularly on Doberman. The insistent beat is lent a melodic sweetness by Vincent Cherry’s Japanese lawsuit guitar.
There are also moments of quietness amongst the noise, like Month of May, which is tempered by a fragile, bleary softness Finn wears between songs. “Thanks so much for watching”, she says. “It’s very nice to be home.” Still barefoot, she carries her shoes off stage with one last shy wave; a soft exit after a set that oozed snarling hunger.
But the evening ultimately belongs to the Pixies, who enter twenty minutes later, bathed in light as a tape announces their arrival. They open with In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song), a David Byrne and Peter Ivers cover made eerie and angry by Frank Black’s vocals.
“Thanks for coming to our show”, Black says with a laugh as they finish, “we’re just gonna play a bunch of songs and try not to talk too much.”
It’s a statement that doesn’t prove true, and the crowd is all the more grateful, eager to bask in the band’s mythologized nostalgia. In another brief interlude, Black explains how they were first billed as the P’xies. “Had to make our deal with the devil”, he opines, as if the band’s success could only be chalked up to supernatural intervention.
By the time they reach Nimrod’s Son, the crowd is already well primed. The song is entirely Joey Santiago’s, a veritable chorus of “go Joey” swelling every time he so much as shifts his head. Similar shouts for Emma Richardson recur throughout the set, and it’s moving to see a band have such meaning to its fans.
The Bostonians' ten-album catalogue is hugely influential, particularly most of the tracks that make up tonight’s classic set. The stop-start backbone of college rock is on full display: a constant lesson in contradiction, punk and surf existing together in a kind of frantic harmony. It’s music that makes chaos feel choreographed.
And that absurdity reigns. After all, we have the Pixies to thank for Cobain’s lyricism on Smells Like Teen Spirit. Their subject matter is nonsensical, apocalyptic, darkly funny. Would you believe Wave of Mutilation is about suicide? Hard to believe, given how breezily cheerful it is. That’s the point: existentialism tinged with sunshine and rollicking disorientation.
(Pixies at the Auckland Town Hall, November 2025 / Photo: Calum Dewsnap)
All of the Doolittle tracks seem to heave with the weight of the decades behind them. Black often screams more than sings, lending Debaser a primality that borders on ecstatic violence. He has a sleazy simmer, distilling sex itself into a hypnotic croon. Lovering’s frantic drums surge through Mr Grieves, and Monkey Gone to Heaven hits like a hymnal for the doomed.
The hits feel even sharper with age, but it’s the deep cuts that prove the band’s strangest instincts were also their strongest. “Sometimes I feel like a chicken, pecking my way through the trees”, Black sings on Chicken, and somehow, what should be ridiculous works. There’s salience in the softness, a dreamlike tremor to the tremolo-soaked chorus.
Tame and I Bleed follow, heirlooms I can’t help but feel I haven’t earned, yet claim anyway, communion in the cult fandom around me. During The Holiday Song, Santiago takes his cap off and points it to each section of the crowd like a blessing.
Of course, Where Is My Mind? is inevitable. Made iconic by Fight Club, the song’s cinematic quality predates the association, a meditative clarity to it’s madness. There isn’t a phone in sight. Then the room dissolves into white light as, literally, Into the White swallows us whole. There’s no encore, and no one is so bold as to demand one from a band of their stature. Instead, we applaud reverently as the quartet steps to the front of the stage.
(Pixies at the Auckland Town Hall, November 2025 / Photo: Calum Dewsnap)
It’s been a study in contrasts: oldheads and newcomers, absurdity and sincerity, noise and tenderness all colliding into each other without ever cancelling out. Much more about mood then they are sense, the Pixies chase the meaning in the melodic, the messy, the unhinged. A love letter to weirdness, an outlet for the freaks.
I don’t see my dad before the set is over, but the guy standing behind me may as well have been him, head thrown back, smiling, awash with memories. One day I’ll be like them, seeing a band that made me feel seen as a teen. Gen Z can roll our eyes at our parents all we want, but some inheritances seem to me worth keeping.
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