After spending the early afternoon with SHEBAD for a Sun Stage session, Toronto's Altered by Mom made their way to Hillside Festival's Lake Stage for their main performance on Sunday night. One of Exclaim!'s must-see acts at the 2024 edition of the long-running Guelph festival, the waterside tent was packed with the usual early-evening suspects, kids and the elderly alike hitting their second wind as the July sun's fury began to subside.
The band matched that energy from the get-go, with the co-vocalists Devon Lougheed and Gina Kennedy making their spirited entrances in step with Max Trefler's bounding percussion. Taking turns egging on the audience and bouncing off various stage equipment, the band ripped into "Joanne" from 2016's Body Feels Weird EP. Battling on its opening verses, the Weezer-indebted tune showcased the group's throwback indie rock, later going literal Weezer-mode on an interpolation of "Hash Pipe."
With a massive catalogue to draw from, the group went on to dole out a spread of veritable crowd-pleasers, including the cuts on their latest EP, AHEM ("Everygirl," "Waiting on a Sign") that didn't make it into their earlier performance. With less than an hour-long set, they packed the show with recent faves and some unreleased material from their forthcoming new album. "High Rise" was an especially electrifying moment of the performance, with the band splitting the audience down the middle (into Devos and Ginos) for ah-ah-ah gang vocals that led to a sleazy MPC1000 breakdown, plus a flute solo in the crowd from Kennedy. Another newer cut in "Sucking on a Lemon" saw the vocalists trying their hands at a rap battle, capping off the badassery of the first half.
Winding down, the show's back half included the group's now-signature rendition of Walk the Moon's "Shut Up and Dance," a bisexual anthem in Kennedy's capable hands; as well as slow-burner new song "Queen of My Mental Health," a Jagged Little Pill-style exorcism that neatly balances power with vulnerability. The group glowed as they exited, again matching their environment as the orange-pink sun began its final descent on Hillside 2024.