This June, Lydia Lunch returns to Australia not to gently revisit the past, but to drag it, still twitching, back into the light.
Marking ten years since the death of Alan Vega, Lunch will perform the songs of Suicide alongside Andrew Coates of Melbourne’s Black Cab, with additional collaborators folding into the project across select shows. It’s the first time this body of work has been formally staged in Australia, but the history behind it stretches back decades.
Lunch’s connection to Suicide isn’t archival, it’s lived. Arriving in New York as a teenager in the 1970s, she moved within the same scorched ecosystem that produced Vega and Martin Rev, an environment where confrontation was currency and restraint felt almost irrelevant. She shared stages with the duo, stepping into the psychic void of ‘Frankie Teardrop’, and later recorded with Vega himself.
The performances themselves are framed less as homage and more as confrontation. Suicide’s music has always resisted containment, primitive electronics, repetition pushed to the brink, vocals that felt closer to incantation than song. In Lunch’s hands, that intensity doesn’t soften. It sharpens. Her delivery, still charged with the same feral clarity that defined No Wave’s most volatile edges, sits comfortably inside Vega’s world without attempting to replicate it.
Importantly, this isn’t nostalgia packaged for safe consumption. Lunch has never operated that way. Across decades of music, spoken word, film and writing, she has maintained a refusal to dilute, whether collaborating with figures like Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard or Sonic Youth, or carving out her own singular path through underground culture.
If Suicide’s original performances felt like something on the verge of collapse, this iteration doesn’t attempt to stabilise it. It leans further in.
LYDIA LUNCH PERFORMS THE SONGS OF SUICIDE AND ALAN VEGA featuring Andrew Coates (Black Cab)
AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND – JUNE 2026
Sun 14 June – Meow, Wellington, NZ (as part of Lōemis)
Wed 17 June – The Tote, Melbourne (with Black Cab)
Sat 20 June – Brisbane Powerhouse, Brisbane
Sun 21 June – Factory Floor, Sydney
Wed 24 June – Ed Castle, Adelaide
Thurs 25 June – The Milk Bar, Perth
On sale Monday March 30th at 9:00AM AEDT
via pressplaypresents.com
