When of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes released The Sunlandic Twins in April 2005, it was a different world. That same month, Jawed Karim uploaded the first ever YouTube video, “Me at the zoo,” and George W. Bush’s imperial war killed 1,145 more Iraqi civilians. Barnes, for their part, pivoted to synths. The Sunlandic Twins was a masterpiece, the indie pop band’s seventh album and its first mainstream breakthrough; it offered, by means of abstraction and sensory overload, a way through the rubble of Bush-era capitalism.

This was how, in “Forecast Fascist Future,” Barnes could sneer “Boredom murders the heart of our age / While sanguinary creeps take the stage” — and then breezily flip “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games,” one of the album’s most enduring hits, into an Outback Steakhouse jingle. It’s been two decades since 2005, and Elephant 6 is largely dead and gone, but Barnes’s chipper engagement with brand deals and fascist violence feels more prescient than ever. 

At the Royale on March 25, for the album’s 20th anniversary, Barnes and their band play through The Sunlandic Twins from back to front, plus a couple of encores at the end. Barnes is one to put on a show. They have brought theater to the dancefloor through skits, sword fights, live animals, and performance in the nude. But they’re also 50 now, and after a chill opening set from indie pop band Layzi, we wonder if Barnes would retire their theatrics. Then the Sunlandic Twins themselves step out. 

The twins, dancers in skintight morph suits, shapeshift throughout the night, returning as 80s aerobic instructors, disco balls, and crows as goofy psychedelic animations paraded behind them. At one point, they haul out a 10-foot-tall puppet god waving gloved hands over an earth alit with flames. Once you experience The Sunlandic Twins with this visual component, it’s hard to imagine that it could ever have existed separately. Framed against the sexy, overflowing dancers, of Montreal’s abstract lyrics are not just psychedelic but camp; Barnes is not just a veteran pop singer but an old queen.

Upon its release, Barnes characterized The Sunlandic Twins as a “foray into 21st century A.D.D. electro cinematic avant-disco” that climaxes “in a blackout darkness one only discovers in warm solitude.” The studio album layered drum machines, canned synths, and compression to create a psychedelic pop masterpiece, the obvious work of a single person playing around. On stage at the Royale, the band has the space to expand its sound, and these iterations of Twins songs are full and inviting: If we’re all in warm solitude, we’re in it together.

Barnes’s voice has grown richer and more complex with time. When they croon “May we always stay, stay gentle” at the end of “Forecast Fascist Future,” they twist the final word into a yelp, no longer an invocation so much as a plea. With the full band behind them, “October is Eternal,” originally a fucked-up gothic carnival ride of an instrumental, becomes a straight-up rock anthem. Barnes waltzes with bassist Ross Brand.

For their encore, donning an ascot fashioned from a trans flag, of Montreal pays homage to Bowie — “one of our queer icons, who paved the way for so many of us” — and shuts the place down with a cover of “Suffragette City.” Barnes turns the flag into a cape and sashays off stage. Even as our world goes up in flames, it’s nice to see that Barnes still knows how to have fun.

// Amber Levis ’25 and Bea Wall-Feng ’25 are DJs and staff writers for Record Hospital.