Alex G & Nilufer Yanya

Alex Giannascoli has outgrown club shows. On October 1 he played Stubb’s, the second of two sold-out nights in Austin, touring his tenth album Headlights. The contrast couldn’t have been clearer. He used to stand at Mohawk, fielding requests from fans desperate to hear “Serpent is Lord.” Now he tours with a lighting crew, haze machines, and a setlist that runs like a well-oiled machine. It’s tempting to say this is just what happens when a Bandcamp star signs to RCA, but that undersells what makes Alex singular.

Headlights raised an obvious question: could the lo-fi icon keep his DIY ethos once a major label started paying for polish? Critics leaned on the Elliott Smith XO comparison, pointing to Smith’s leap to DreamWorks. But that take reduces Alex G to Smith’s successor. A sharper analogue is Conor Oberst, who’s made a career out of detonating expectations across punk, Americana, electronica, and protest music. The difference is Oberst always had collaborators to help steer the vision. Alex does it alone. Which is why when “Brick” tears out of the speakers at Stubb’s, it still feels like one of the most deranged choices any major-label artist could make in 2025.

Nilüfer Yanya opened with a 40-minute set from My Method Actor, her 2024 record that topped critics’ lists for its taut precision. Live, she smoothed and slowed its edges, starting in deliberate restraint. “Like I Say” felt more like a meditation, and the younger crowd pressed against the barricade listened politely, almost reverently. But what began slow tightened as the set progressed, the band layering more urgency until the closing stretch carried real momentum. By the end, she had shifted the room’s energy on her own terms, even if it never tipped into frenzy.

That release came the second Alex walked on. With longtime bandmates Sam Acchione, John Heywood, and Tom Kelly, he opened with six Headlights tracks, weaving them between mid-career staples. The sound was clean, the lights overwhelming, the haze swallowing the stage in a kind of stadium-sized intimacy. For thirty minutes, it felt like confirmation Alex had entered his post-Rocket phase for good.

Then came “Bug.” Followed by “Kicker.” The crowd waited, cautiously optimistic this was the point he’d look back. He barely spoke, except for one moment of accidental comedy: “I love Austin. Daniel Johnston is from here. A Star Is Bornwas filmed here,” he said, grinning. For the record, it wasn’t, but the crowd laughed anyway. He stumbled into a cover of “Shallow” that twisted without warning into “Brick,” “Horse,” and “Blessing.” That three-song run was the set’s apex: unpredictable, messy, undeniably Alex G.

Hearing that sequence blast through Stubb’s felt like a declaration. The polish, the shine, the high-def production — all of it is part of who he is now. But it’s on his terms. The spectacle doesn’t cancel out his lo-fi beginnings. It’s simply part of the package now.

Words and fotos: Victor Gonzalez