Their breakneck guerilla-style live shows the stuff of underground legend, Lightning Bolt have built a name on over 30 years grinding out freaked-out noise rock that transforms every space they play into a relentlessly shambolic whirlwind of euphoria. The last time the Providence, Rhode Island duo played Toronto was in 2010, and they only gigged the city once before then, in 2005, so when Project Nowhere put Lightning Bolt at the top of its 2024 poster, buzz got around fast.
With show tickets sold out well in advance and limited rush spots available for festival pass holders, fans queued up early outside 1978, a line snaking through the parking lot and down the sidewalk, latecomers looking on in dread.
Contrary to their own time-honoured mythos, drummer Brian Chippendale and bass guitarist Brian Gibson forewent their customary practice of eschewing venue stages and mounting sets in the middle of the floor, a shin-high concrete mini ramp at the back of the vintage clothing store offering serviceable novelty without putting them on much of a pedestal.
Chippendale stationing his kit at the edge of the ramp, his infamous ragged mask holding his phone receiver mic in place, the duo kicked off the set off with a howling rendition of "The Metal East" as the crowd heaved around them and the room descended into madness, a pit opening in the first seconds.
Pulling most recognizably from their Thrill Jockey releases, the hour-long marathon of distorted bass riffs and dizzying, pugilistic blitzes that followed plunged the audience into a frenzied, gargantuan minimalism. That was only periodically spliced with peals of bad-trip feedback that offered the closest thing to relief, pacing out the pummeling and cooling down the pit.
The whole room needed it. The cinder blocked warehouse space stuffed to the gills and permeated with stage fog, even the walls were sweating, Sonic Citadel's "Air Conditioning" a particularly apt inclusion on the setlist. Eventually, some brilliant hero of a civilian climbed a structure and repositioned an industrial fan to improve the room's circulation, but it could only do so much.
Well-seasoned veterans of such conditions, Chippendale and Gibson took it all in stride. His rotten mask flapping with every word as he affected a lunatic snake oil salesman, at one point Chippendale even took an extended aside to hip the crowd to how consciously inhaling fog machine air can harness the cooling potential of microplastics in the body.
Don't try this at home. Even Chippendale had to succumb to the conditions by the end of the hour, ripping off his mask for a final push-pull ravaging. The crowd rallied for an encore, but there wasn't a chance. Within seconds Gibson was in the crowd with everyone else jostling for the exit crying "Let me out of this place!"