Mac DeMarco literally swung from the rafters at the Longhorn Ballroom

You might not be a fan of his work, or maybe you just haven’t sought it out yourself, but if you’ve been part of any alternative art scene in the last 15 years, you’ve absolutely orbited the waves of Mac DeMarco’s reputation. 

You’ve seen his influence, perhaps manifested as a surge of thrifted flannels and beat-up baseball caps with obsolete film cameras wrapped around necks and Viceroy cigarette cartons stuffed into back pockets. If not visually, you’ve absolutely heard his work, whether literally, in the background of college parties and the foreground of any melodramatic late-night drive, or by influence, as a generation of DIY recording artists tried to mimic his signature lo-fi twinkly guitar melodies. The garage bands of the 21st century don’t play the Ramones anymore; they play DeMarco’s “My Kind Of Woman.” 

All that to say, it was no surprise that his show at Longhorn Ballroom on Monday night almost immediately sold out when it was announced nearly a full year ago. In 2022, a North American tour was planned, including a stop at South Side Ballroom, but it was canceled before it began, making last night’s show his first North Texas appearance in a decade. 

As a result of that hiatus, the roughly 2,000 DeMarco disciples who made their pilgrimage to the Longhorn could be separated by a generational divide. A large base from before DeMarco’s mainstream discovery, who recall the cultural shockwave that his lo-fi sound and Tumblr-era grunge fashion sent through a stomp-clap world of curled mustaches and IPAs in the early 2010s, was joined by youthful reclaimers who were learning the periodic table when “Chamber Of Reflection” came out in 2014, but have revived his music’s relevance.

DeMarco took the stage around 8:45 p.m., dressed irreverently in navy blue firefighter pants and a plain t-shirt, and met with rapturous cheers. The beginning of the set pingponged between four cuts from his latest album, 2025’s Guitar, and classics like “For The First Time,” “On The Level” and “Salad Days” that minted him.

“Horn so long there’s barely any ballroom,” DeMarco quipped before transitioning the set into older stuff.

At the core of DeMarco’s project lies a friction between a career in soft, romantic songs and his outsized, weirdo shock-jock persona on stage, the kind of persona songs like “Freaking Out The Neighborhood” were written about. There always tends to be high-octane on-stage hijinks, as if he needs to get his energy out in one way or another, and it’s not coming out through his languid music. 

Last night in Dallas, it manifested in tossing the microphone over a metal bar above the stage, singing into it as it hung from the rafters like Michael Buffer announcing Sugar Ray Leonard to the ring and then using the cables to hoist himself up to the ceiling like Tarzan. 

Just a little over halfway through the set, DeMarco, on an Eddie Vedder-esque tilt, sang “Another One” with only his dangling legs visible hanging from above the stage. For such mellow music, the crowd was as rowdy as ever. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more passionate crowd singalong than on “Ode To Viceroy,” a tongue-in-cheek ballad about the vintage cigarette brand. In the early post-COVID days of touring, a solo DeMarco enlisted his audiences to sing the lead guitar rather than the words themselves. With his full band, it got one of the biggest pops of the night. 

After several extended outros to “Freaking Out The Neighborhood,” including one where every member of the five-piece band picked a different key to play it in at the same time, DeMarco closed the show with a one-two punch of his two biggest hits, a synthy playthrough of “Chamber Of Reflection” and a scream-along encore of “My Kind Of Woman.”

It’s hard not to be nostalgic seeing indie music’s eternal darling play through his 21st-century canon one hit at a time. But DeMarco, now 36, appears to be as reinvigorated as ever, at least as a live performer. Here’s hoping that his next stop in Texas will be sooner rather than later, and perhaps with an entirely new generation of artists at his beck and call.