Pixies – P40 Celebrating 40 Years at Aviva Studios
Johnny James, Managing EditorBook now
Pixies – P40 Celebrating 40 Years
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
Pixies bring two nights of feral alternative rock to Aviva Studios this May, marking 40 years of the band.
Few bands loom larger over the sound of late-20th century guitar music. Formed in Boston in 1986, Pixies fused surf rock, punk velocity and surrealist lyricism into something that felt entirely new – the famous loud-quiet-loud dynamic that would later echo through everyone from Nirvana to Radiohead and become part of rock’s basic grammar.
Their early records remain the centre of that legacy. Surfer Rosa announced a band with a taste for both menace and melody, while 1989’s Doolittle brought structure and immediacy to their oddball sound. Speaking on that latter record, David Bowie called it “the most compelling music outside of Sonic Youth in the entire 80s”. Songs like ‘Debaser’, ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ managed the improbable trick of pairing twisted humour and bizarro imagery with hooks that stuck, while the bright, jangling ‘Here Comes Your Man’ briefly nudged Pixies into the mainstream.
Two further albums – Bossanova and Trompe le Monde – followed before Pixies disbanded in 1993. When the band reunited in the 2000s they gradually returned to recording, releasing a run of albums that extend their strange musical world into new territory. The most recent of these is 2024’s The Night the Zombies Came, which folds everything from country-tinged ballads to frantic punk into the band’s familiar mix of menace and melody.
On stage, Pixies remain a formidable live band, with Emma Richardson now handling bass duties alongside founding members Black Francis, Joey Santiago and David Lovering. We caught the current show a few months ago in Tokyo (get us), where the set roamed across cult oddities like ‘In Heaven’ and ‘Vamos’ as well as the more obvious crowd favourites. No theatrics, no stage banter – just a relentless onslaught of music that still feels as strange and vital as ever.
Four decades in, the band’s peculiar magic remains intact: brutal, melodic and gloriously unhinged. With its scale and its relentlessly powerful – read loud – sound system, Aviva Studios feels like a solid venue for it.
