Ashnikko has never been interested in meeting pop culture halfway. The blue-haired, North Carolina-born provocateur built her reputation on a particular brand of maximalist chaos, grotesque imagery, candy-coated production, lyrics that weaponize femininity rather than soften it and her sophomore album Smoochies doubles down on all of it, trading the high-fantasy allegory of 2023’s WEEDKILLER for something rawer and more autobiographical. The Smoochies Tour landed at Montréal’s MTelus on May 18th, the penultimate North American date before the run closed in Toronto, and the room felt it. 2,400 people dressed in pink, inside the MTelus theater, already behaving like a congregation before the first note played.
Royal & the Serpent opened with a 10-song set that earned every second of its runtime. Ryan Santiago alt-pop’s most restless shapeshifter, arriving fresh off her debut full-length Emptiness Is Godly opened on “Bleed for It” and immediately established the terms: high intensity, no easing in. “Carry Me Home” followed with enough emotional gravity to reorient the room, and by the time “overwhelmed” arrived third in the sequence, its Gold-certified familiarity landed like a reward rather than a safety net. The newer material “Steering (So Fast),” “Fiona,” “Ponyboy” showed an artist actively outgrowing her own ceiling, while “Wasteland,” the Arcane-era fan favourite, closed the set and sent the floor into the changeover already warmed past comfortable. She didn’t open the night so much as raise the stakes for whoever came next.
Ashnikko rose to them without hesitation. “Sticky Fingers” detonated the room from the jump, not the coy entrance of a headliner playing it cool, but a full-throttle statement of intent before the crowd had even finished screaming. From there the set moved with the logic of someone who has thought deeply about how a room should feel at every moment: “Microplastics” landed with political weight she let the silence carry; “Trinkets” turned casual cruelty into a communal singalong; “Smoochie Girl” felt like being let inside something private. The Toxic/Invitation medley mid-set was the kind of sequencing decision that separates good tours from great ones, two tracks bleeding into each other as energy crested, the crowd losing the thread between where one song ended and the other began. And throughout it all, the fans gave it back in kind, the handmade hats and painted faces that had filled the lobby two hours earlier now pressed against the barricade, matching the artist’s outfits with a devotion that felt less like fandom and more like collaboration.
The back half of the set was relentless. “STUPID” into “Tantrum” into “It Girl” hit the room like a sustained wave, each song refusing to let the energy drop before the next arrived. “Slumber Party” brought the crowd in as genuine collaborators, and then “Daisy” closed everything. The WEEDKILLER closer, saved for last, produced the kind of crowd reaction that shakes a room structurally recognition becoming something closer to need, 2,400 people screaming a song back at the person who made it like they were returning something she’d left with them years ago. MTelus went dark on that note, and Montréal filed back into the May night having been reminded what it feels like when a live show and the people who show up for it genuinely earn each other.
See all the photos of the concert below by Drew Halle: Website // Instagram
Ashnikko
Royal And The Serpent
