A Torrential Rainstorm Outside Tropical Fuck Storm: TFS @ Lee's Palace

• OCT. 29, 2025
• //
• WRITTEN BY MAIA CASSIE

In the week before seeing Tropical Fuck Storm (TFS), I lost both my voice and my hearing in my right ear. It never became entirely clear why either of those things happened, but by 7 PM on September 21, I had the perfect combination for a concert: my hearing was, blissfully, back to full capacity, but my vocal cords remained dysfunctional. In other words, I was still relishing the return of sound, but I wouldn't be able to hear myself screaming in the background of any videos I recorded.

TFS was performing at Lee's Palace, decently close to where I live, so my boyfriend and I walked. He was happy to go see the band, but didn't know them—admittedly, I didn't either until a few days earlier, when I saw a killer performance from them on KEXP. As we walked there, I wondered aloud (or rather, in the loudest whisper that my vocal cords would allow) what the demographics of the show might look like. My expectations of a younger crowd were disproven as soon as we got in, when I immediately sensed a big age and gender divide; I spotted only a few other girls among a sea of shining bald heads. It was the kind of crowd that shouts "fuckin' A!” after a fantastic, sweaty drum solo. A very linguistically North American reception for TFS, an Australian band, I suppose.

We were a bit early, so my boyfriend asked me if I wanted a drink. Almost everyone around us was drinking a can of beer, which struck me as the perfect idea. Lee's, I was suddenly sure, was the place to stop hating beer. It's a grungy and intimate venue, and was brimming with middle-aged, beer-loving men that evening. Accordingly, I asked my boyfriend for a Coors and took intermittent sips as the opening band, Montreal-based Tha Retail Simps, made their way onto the stage. Their songs were short, urgent, whiny, bursting with heavy drums and catchy, ‘60s-sounding guitar. Since their music was loud and frenzied, I was surprised to see that the pit (which was directly below where we stood) was sparse. Those who came early enough to see Tha Retail Simps, though, were loving it, myself included. They played silly, unruly, wonderful garage punk, and their presence on stage was just as lighthearted yet passionate as their music.

Around 9 pm, an influx of younger people entered and integrated with the older folks, congregating near the middle of the venue. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the pit—which was too aggressive and overwhelmingly male for me to have wanted to join—became quite intergenerational and lively. I watched middle-aged men join the 20-somethings to gaily push and collide with each other, while the attendees standing closest to the stage transitioned from head bopping to jumping and chanting, "TFS! TFS! TFS!”

Incidentally, as TFS began their first song, "Braindrops”—the title track of their 2019 album—I realized I had been sipping the Coors in front of me and enjoying it. The drink felt so perfectly suited for the venue and music that I was barely surprised by this. I typed a message in my Notes app and showed my boyfriend: "music so good I'm a beer drinker now!” I have never had such a gustatory experience with music—perhaps it was a result of my other injured senses.

The sense of sight though, thankfully, didn't fail me. The members of TFS were terrific performers, by which I mean they seemed largely unconcerned with how they performed. The lead vocalist, Gareth Liddiard, bared his teeth and squirmed as he belted out his imaginative lyrics, and bassist Fiona Kitschin often turned away from the audience to privately concentrate on her playing. Far from detracting from the show, these moments of focus brought me into it. We got to witness the concentration and effort necessary to make each song sound so good, yet they also erupted into their fair share of energetic freakouts.

Though their sound was consistent, each song covered a lot of ground. TFS easily pivoted from catchy, controlled melodies to an overflow of looped vocals and chaos and sirens—from sinister, warped guitars to desperate, devastating climaxes. The standout song for me was the same one I watched on KEXP earlier that week, "You Let My Tyres Down.” Its noise and energy was so big that it was impossible not to feel like I was part of it, like it was coming out of me, even when my swollen vocal cords told me otherwise.

They closed the night with an unexpected (to me, at least, who frankly knew little of their discography) rendition of "Stayin' Alive”—one of those brilliant and energized covers that makes you understand why people listen to the original. The song, their version specifically, was stuck in my head as we funnelled out of Lee's.

Upon stepping outside, we found ourselves almost immediately drenched by a rainstorm, but it was hard to feel perturbed under the haze of our post-concert euphoria. Following a procession of fellow attendees along Bloor, we made a half-hearted attempt to shield ourselves with my boyfriend's jacket. I suddenly understood why TFS calls themselves a "storm”; the pouring rain felt fitting, matching the explosive, chaotic intensity of their music. As they sing on their 2021 album Deep States: "I say let it rain, rain, rain, rain/Rain harder.”