Some fine upstanding gentlemen and even finer ladies welcomed us at the Fine Fine Fine Café, Saturday night, where our POP Montreal 2026 adventures began.
There, The Sauce Piquante Soundsystem held a raucous slow simmer that built to an eclectic, world-tier jambalaya hosted by The Mighty Sampson himself.
Mixing African, Caribbean, Portuguese/Brazilian, Québ/Canadian, Funk, Rock, Electronic and Hip-Hop influences, The Sauce Piquante Soundsystem cooked up a savoury one-pot, one-stop shop, with all the fixings, exactly the kind of musical collision that makes POP Montreal what it is.
The beast from the eastern shores, Oonga the Selecta, menu-engineered top-tier ingredients, properly blending dish after dish to delight the palates. A cornucopia of artists makes up this found family, and we all got a taste. Bianca Rocha rocked the mic with some sweet Brega stylings but this wasn’t some Genival Santos shit. This was that “get them asses out the seats” shit.
Most of the crew minus CC Melanie Vallieres
With Kizaba on percussions, Galamba on guitar, and Gioco tying up the roast with his vocals (among many others) the lights were flickering, the people were sweaty and the asses were shaking. A definite vibe, you should partake, next time they come across your feed.
Record scratch and a beat break…
Over at Le Ministère, chests bumped with Keroué. Streets meet backpack, and a philosopher’s pen, Keroué embodies lyricism, with that gully-real energy all old heads know prevails. His live set is a chef’s kiss better than any previews. The crowd was hype for something real and this male “man’s-man” delivered.
French puns exploring a life of performance with one of influence. Fakeness, realness, and showmanship vs authenticity, healthy living vs a life at play. He can mix metaphors in a single line combining “saine”, “scène” and scenes into a clear picture of boom-bap militainement. A course-book in course correction and a manual for keeping the faith, Keroué seems uninhibited and transparent, heartfelt and unrestrained.
Keroué performance CC Melanie Vallieres
The way he speaks is lyrical with an unabashed, candid cadance, and he never forgets to bring the audience into the fold.
Harkening from l’école du micro d’argent, his old school anecdotes and punchy one-liners, delivered with a super Frenchman’s swagger, remind you why these folk from The Hexagon are always up in arms and on the streets. He’s a student of history and a masterclassman himself.
Keroué loves this city, he let us know, and by the vibe in the room, we love him right back. I’m not so sure about his newest project, it seemed to take a dip into the kinds of beats that don’t favor his specific flow, but by then the spirits were taking effect and we had to head to the next location so what the Fk do I know anyways…
A smoke, piss, and a laugh took us to Sala-Rosa where lesbian piano music reigned supreme.
Klô Pelgag is Fking good guys. In the extremely popular genre that is “a chick at a piano”, she’s a master and commanding presence, a top-of-the-class, Cool Hand Luke of the keys.
Klô Pelgag at the piano CC Francois Roy
Her storied career began in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts way back in 2012 and she’s been collecting well deserved awards and accolades like Pokémon ever since.
Pelgag’s voice is celestial, her style, ethereal; she evokes something ancient, while having a girlish charm. Powerful and beautiful in her music, it hits you gutturally someplace deep and far away. Her live performances blow anything you’ll find online straight out of the water.
She feels effortless, tapered yet spontaneous; her comedic bent and storytelling make her performance all the more disarmingly striking. There’s often a sense of foreboding in her music, a cinematic eeriness, like a PG-13 Del Torro flic come for a visit. What you get is a unique sort of monster you hold in your heart, without ever wrapping your head around.
Her crowd work is the summum of the art, she wraps you in like a warm blanket before pulling the rug out from under you. Like Coeur de Pirate’s darker, older, more soulful sibling that suddenly tells you a story about her boyfriend getting puked on and how he deserved it. The audience is in a constant state, regularly transitioning from entranced, to laughing their asses off, to enraptured in a seamless effervescent flow.
Klô Pelgag is a skilled musician. She charms the ivories and her fingers tickle your spine and unconscious. A fresh face on an eternal vibe, and it’s heartwarming with a set of skills that command respect.
She has a verse (in french) about pools of light always allowing something to come in through the darkness. Just a woman with a piano, in a dark room, under green lights, transporting a full house to someplace beyond their surroundings, yet familiar. Magical.
We wrapped up our Pop-Montréal amblings over at Casa del Popolo in a sold out sweat lodge catered by Sook-Yin Lee.
Sook-Yin Lee performance CC Melanie Vallieres
Her self directed visual aids and projections were off the yelzabub. In a word, the whole show was dope. Very much tucked into my little pleasures, the vibes were a 90s grunge balm: fun vocals, cool af instrumentations, sick guitars, all tethered by a powerful voice that’ll knock you flat on your ass.
I had quickly gleaned her online stuff, and I don’t know what I’d been smoking cause none of it hit. Then suddenly in person, it hit, hard, fast and unchained.
Ranging between electro and dub, with deep basslines, electro highlights and an expansive banshee’s vocal timbre. It was industrial, it was transporting. Her lyrics are quirky, fun and fresh.
Effortless, authentic, badass. Yoko on crack with a rhyme and rhythm the old hat never knew. She’s a hype woman surrounded by hype people, all of whom brought an artistery all their own.
They looked like they marched out of a post-punk apocalyptic desert, they looked like they lived like fae in an enchanted wood.They looked like they belonged on a beach, half sunken pirateship in the distant background as their base of operations.
The crowd was there, rugged and alive.
Kizaba / intimate venue shot CC Melanie Vallieres
In the truest of Best Kept Montréal traditions we ended the festivities over at el jefe Alistar’s Old-Port pleasure dome. Stories, summaries, warm friends and party favors are the modus operandi here and laughter the order of the day. Crawling away in the wee hours is par for the course, some traditions need no course correction.
In the end Pop-Montréal gave us the best this city and its clandestine cell systems have to offer in music, entertainment and connection. The revolution might not be televised, but it’s still alive, and its entertainment branch, exemplified by this varied body of movers and shakers brings hope to us unwashed, dirty masses. It took the world a couple years to come around from its latest viral apocalypse. But we’re back, and shit is finally poppin’ off.
And if your appetite for Montreal’s beautifully unconventional side still isn’t satisfied, see what happens when Le Monastère brings its greatest circus stars back to Montreal.
Thanks Pop, it’s been twenty-four years and the champagne is still flowing. To all those who participated, have one on us. Best Kept Montréal
