Just about every three years, PUP emerges with a new batch of bangers about being a directionless loser fuck-up. Then they go on the road and cajole crowds of fans to sing along with every word. That requires at least some direction and charisma, doesn’t it? It’s like that famous Nora Ephron line: “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh.” When frontman Stefan Babcock collapses on the floor after a break-up, it’s pathetic. But when he sings about collapsing on the floor after a break-up? And turns it into a supremely catchy song like “Hallways”? And people sing along? That’s catharsis.
That quippy, down-bad anthem, from 2025’s Who Will Look After the Dogs?, draws some of the loudest cheers and singalongs on the punk band’s new live album, Megacity Madness. The release, a vinyl exclusive, documents an unusual hometown run—the group played six Toronto venues in one week, ranging from a house show to clubs they came up in to the 2,500-capacity History—and prioritizes scuzzy punk veracity over polished professionalism. At its core, it showcases the sense of communal release that’s always been central to this band’s appeal: PUP’s business is churning self-loathing and discontent into screamable hooks, and judging from the raucous sound of these live recordings, business is booming.
Recorded a few months after Dogs came out, Megacity Madness spotlights several of the album’s most potent feel-bad anthems. “No Hope” thrashes and burns like the best of PUP’s early tantrums, “Hallways” already feels like one of their most quotable downers (all together now: “When one door closes/It might never open/There might be no other doors!”), and the reggae-punk hybrid “Hunger for Death” gives Babcock a chance to blurt out “Fuck everyone in this venue/Especially me!” at the historic Danforth Music Hall. These songs are full of pessimism and bile, of course, but, as these performances prove, they’re also rousing and empathetic and often funny.
Because these gigs carried a nostalgic glow, Megacity Madness also honors PUP’s back catalog, a reminder of how many great songs these guys have written in only 12 years. They give us not one but two selections from their relatively neglected 2013 debut (the blistering “Reservoir,” the apocalyptic “Dark Days”), and three or four apiece from career-best albums The Dream Is Over and Morbid Stuff. (2022’s THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND is conspicuously absent from this release, though not from the shows themselves.)
Megacity Madness was recorded across wildly different venues, which means that from track to track, the sound varies dramatically in quality. The songs captured at larger venues, like History and Danforth Music Hall, invariably sound clearer than those recorded at the Flat Top, a tiny “DIY rooftop garden.” A concert film would more clearly bring audiences into the spirit of the venue-hopping exercise (there is, in fact, a mini-documentary series), but without visual accompaniment, you need considerable context to understand why the set-opening “Morbid Stuff” sounds like it was recorded in a men’s room on an Olympus voice recorder. More jarringly, “Hunger for Death” switches mid-song from the muffled Flat Top recording to the triumphant Danforth take, a bizarre effect reminiscent of that one Sparklehorse song with all the radio static.
There are live albums where you don’t hear much from the crowd—where the assembled masses have been edited out or mandated to be quiet. This is not that. Here, the audience is a full and enthusiastic participant: screaming every word of the homicidal fan favorite “If This Tour Doesn't Kill You, I Will,” whoah-oh-oh-ing along with the bridge of “Sleep in the Heat,” taking over the chorus of “Dark Days” when Babcock retreats from the mic, and reveling in the band’s sophomoric sense of humor. At one point, after Babcock jokingly announces that the band is “recording this for CBC” and he isn’t supposed to curse, the whole audience joins in a spirited chant: “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
Towards the end of the album, during a Flat Top recording, Babcock lightly admonishes the crowd that “crowd-surfing on the roof” probably isn’t a good idea, a situation he seems to find both funny and concerning. Isn’t that the spirit of PUP: funny and concerning at the same time? You read the lyrics and song titles and wonder if these guys are OK. Then you hear the perverse exuberance in the songs themselves, and the primal-scream catharsis they bring to PUP’s live sets, and realize they’re doing just fine.
