3 indie giants turned South Side Ballroom into a family reunion for All the Feelings Tour

The band members of Metric, Broken Social Scene and Stars have been friends since childhood, rising through the Canadian and New York City indie music scene together, trading members and memories as they went.

This year, the three bands launched a nationwide tour together, and on Tuesday, June 9, they delivered a raw, nostalgic performance at the South Side Ballroom.

Dallas got an early chapter, only the second stop on the tour, and it was energized and unguarded, before any tour fatigue could creep in. The performance was full of reminders that these people genuinely like each other, and the threads of their connections ran everywhere; it separated them from a typical tour relying on nostalgia. There was looking back, old anthems, old friendships, old wounds, sure, but the “All the Feelings Tour” justified its sweetly millennial name by treating feeling as something alive, communal, generous and loud.

Stars open the room’s heart

Stars went first, and they wasted no time reaching for the chest cavity. The Montréal romantics built their reputation on cinematic songs and the back-and-forth of Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan’s voices, and their roughly 40-minute set leaned hard into emotional literacy.

They opened with “Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It,” a title that doubles as a mission statement, then moved through “Elevator Love Letter” and “Take Me to the Riot.”

“This one’s for your ghosts. If you got them, bring them,” Campbell said in an early dedication before playing “Dead Hearts.” It landed like a melodic séance.

They closed with “Ageless Beauty” and the devastating “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead,” and the room sang every word back like a confession.

Broken Social Scene throws the party

If Stars set the emotional thermostat, Broken Social Scene cranked the chaos. The Toronto collective has always functioned more like a community than a band, and roughly 11 people rotated across the stage like an orchestra that wandered into a house party and never left.

They opened with “Cause = Time” and the odd-metered swirl of “7/4 (Shoreline),” then aired new material from “Remember the Humans”, their first album in nine years, including “Not Around Anymore,” “Only the Good I Keep” and “Hey Amanda.” Kevin Drew kept the looseness front and center, joking he’d entered his “teleprompter years” and leaned on bandmates when lyrics slipped. The mess-ups had a tenderness to them — proof of people, not playback.

Then came the apology. Drew nodded to a 2009 Dallas cancellation.

“We have a history with Dallas and Austin,” he said. “One time we canceled the show in Dallas… I always come here thinking, ‘don’t mess up the Dallas show. You owe them.’”

Mea culpa accepted, especially once former member (and Metric front woman) Emily Haines walked out to sing “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,” the band’s classic that her voice made famous. “Fire Eye’d Boy” and “Superconnected” sent the set out on a high. Drew called the whole thing “a dream.” For about an hour, it was a shared one.

Metric closes with neon and force

Headliner Metric proved that four people can sound like a marching band. The band has spent over two decades as a self-possessed art-rock unit, born in the early-2000s indie scrum and now openly prioritizing friendship over hollow spectacle. On stage, that ethos arrived dressed in light.

Across a 90-minute set, live cameras threw each player onto the screen behind them, color-washing in time with the beat until South Side felt like a nightclub, pulling everyone toward the stage. The set opened with the new single “Victim of Luck” and tore through “Youth Without Youth,” “Monster Hospital,” “Now or Never Now” and, of course, “Gold Guns Girls.” Despite the lean outfit on stage, the sound felt full, immersive and, frankly, enormous.

Haines made a point of the band’s North Texas DNA, noting that bassist Joshua Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key are both University of North Texas alums. The two met in Denton in the early ’90s, played together in a string of local bands and eventually relocated to New York City to join Metric — a hometown connection that gave the night an extra charge.

Newcomers among the crowd stood mesmerized, some pulling out phones like moths drawn to a sonic flame. “Gimme Sympathy,” “Combat Baby,” “Help I’m Alive” and “Black Sheep” turned the closing stretch into a singalong. Members of Stars and Broken Social Scene drifted back on, trombones and all, blurring the line between three sets and one long catch up between old friends.

The reunion show easily earned its name, and if a second lap passes through Dallas, you won’t want to miss it.