Dayglo Abortions For XMas

Bruiser

23 Dec 2025 — 4 min read

Photo by Max Muselmann (Unsplash), Edited/Rendered by gpt-image-1

The kid behind the merch table at The Shelter looked like he'd been living on energy drinks and ramen for about six months too long. His band's demo—a CD-R with the track listing scrawled in Sharpie—sat in a cardboard box next to stickers that read "INDIE IS DEAD" in bleeding letters. When I asked him about the local scene, he just shrugged and said, "Man, everything's fucked. Nobody comes out anymore."

Welcome to rock and roll in 2025, where the patient isn't just on life support—someone's actively pulling the plug.

I've been haunting dive bars and basement shows for almost four decades, watching the slow-motion car crash of what we used to call a music scene. The symptoms are everywhere: venues closing faster than they can book farewell shows, bands breaking up before they finish their first EP, and kids who'd rather stream lo-fi hip-hop than sweat it out in a room that smells like everyone there.
We're watching the systematic abortion of the very idea that music should be dangerous, communal, and alive.

The venue ecosystem is hemorrhaging. Rent goes up, attendance goes down, and suddenly the only live music left is either arena spectacle or coffee shop background noise. There's nothing in between, nothing with teeth.

The streaming economy has turned music into wallpaper. Playlist culture means bands chase corporate approval instead of writing songs that matter. When's the last time you heard a song that made you feel anything other than vaguely entertained?

But the basement shows still happen—the kind of places where the bathroom door doesn't lock and the PA system runs on a prayer. Three bands play to maybe thirty people, and every single person in that room is present in a way that feels extinct everywhere else. No phones recording for social media clout. No one checking their notifications. Just bodies and noise and the kind of communion that happens when music stops being content and becomes sacrament.

The bands that matter still play like their lives depend on it. Amps held together with electrical tape, drummers who look like they haven't slept in a week, making more honest noise in forty minutes than most platinum artists manage in entire careers.

That's what we're losing. Not just the music, but the context that makes music matter.

Sure, there are counter-arguments. Streaming has democratized music distribution. Bedroom producers can reach global audiences without label gatekeepers. Young artists have more tools than ever to create and share their work. These aren't lies, but they're not the whole truth either.

What good is reaching a global audience if nobody's really listening? What's the point of infinite creative tools if they're all being used to make the same safe, corporate-friendly sounds? We've traded the possibility of transcendence for the guarantee of mediocrity.

The real crime isn't that rock is dying—genres die and get reborn all the time. The crime is that we're killing the conditions that allow dangerous music to exist at all. We're sanitizing the chaos, corporatizing the rebellion, and turning the underground into another content vertical.

What keeps me coming back is that the music that matters has always existed in the margins. The Stooges didn't need streaming revenue. The Ramones didn't need playlist placement. They needed rooms full of people who understood that music could be a weapon against everything that wanted to make them small and safe and quiet.

Those rooms still exist, if you know where to look. The kids are still out there, plugging in guitars and hitting drums like they're trying to wake the dead. They're not waiting for permission or playlist placement. They're just making a very, very loud noise because the alternative—silence—is unacceptable.  Christmas is coming, and for once I'm not being cynical about it.

So maybe this isn't an obituary after all. Maybe it's a birth announcement. The old music industry is dying, choking on its own bloated corpse, but something else is being born in its place. Something smaller, weirder, more desperate and more alive.

The revolution won't be streamed. It'll happen in rooms that smell like spilled beer and cement, played by kids who look like they've been living on energy drinks for six months too long. And when it does, those of us who never stopped believing will be there, sweating and screaming along, because we know the secret the corporations will never learn: the best music has always come from the gutter.

Rock isn't dead. It's just hiding in the basement, waiting for the rest of us to remember where we left our souls. 

So here's your Christmas sermon, congregation: Get off the couch. Put down the phone. Go find your people—blood family, chosen family, the brothers and sisters you only see when the amps start buzzing. If you're anywhere near Sarnia, Ontario tonight, December 23rd 2025, the Dayglo Abortions are playing AJ's Bar and Music Hall with Rapid Tension and Lime Ricky, and that's exactly the kind of sweaty, beautiful communion I'm talking about. But if that's not your scene or your geography, find your own version. Find the basement show, the dive bar, the room where the music still means something.

Because Christmas isn't about the streaming playlist or the algorithm-approved holiday content. It's about being in a room with people who remind you that you're alive. That's the gift. That's the whole goddamn point. Now go unwrap it.

https://fannatickets.com/event/dec-23-dayglo-abortion-rapid-tension-and-lime-ricky-at-aj-s-bar-and-music-hall-671/register