Aldous Harding Delivers an Intense and Rich Set at Underground Arts, Philadelphia
Updated: 6 hours ago
New Zealand’s Aldous Harding touched down in Philadelphia last week for an intimate show at Underground Arts. Touring in support of her 2026 album Train on the Island, it was her first U.S. tour in four years, and there was a fitting buzz in the crowd before her show.
A couple of weeks ago, while searching for information about Harding’s tour, I came across an unexpected Reddit thread that asked the question: “Are her shows normally unusually intense?” At the time, I shrugged it off with a laugh – it was an odd result to come across in my search, and completely irrelevant to the information I was looking for. Flash forward to seeing Harding in a small, (very) dimly lit basement venue with a packed crowd, and I found myself thinking back to that thread. I didn’t need to go back and read the responses to know that the answer was yes. Yes, her shows are intense, but in the best way possible: the kind of intensity that roots you to the ground, leaving you mesmerized by the art unfolding in front of you.
There was a tinge of shyness to her brief interactions with the crowd, which matched the rest of her stage persona. It came off more as someone lost in their own world than being deliberately ignorant of the crowd. Her presence shifted from song to song, sometimes playful and strange, sometimes unnervingly still, making it hard to look anywhere else when she was onstage.
There were moments of silence in between songs, as if Harding and the band were performing their own strange ritual in between, something that the rest of us weren’t exactly privy to. Rather than disrupting the momentum of the show as some pauses can, these let the room breathe, making everyone more attentive. Although there were a few song requests and shouts of “We love you!” in the silences, the audience seemed to understand that these weren’t moments to fill with chatter; we were all waiting for Harding to show us what’s next.
Underground Arts is an intimate venue to say the least, with a low stage that put Harding and her band almost at the same level as the crowd in the front. From farther back in the room, however, the intimacy came with a drawback: it was often difficult to see Harding or her band, who remained seated for much of the set. When Harding did stand up, her eccentric dance moves took over – they were the movements of someone truly lost in the music.
Most of the set was from her latest album Train on the Island, a genre-blurring record that feels difficult to pin down to any one sound. On it, Harding moves between folk, psychedelic textures, stripped-back arrangements and stranger, more unpredictable moments, and the live performance kept a lot of that same sense of spontaneity.
Palestinian-American artist Sam Burton started the night off with his gentle indie-folk songs. He has a new album coming out in October, and his set was a good preview of the record. Full of tender lyrics, Burton’s music is as hopeful and uplifting as it is melancholy, an apt reflection on the duality of love. Fairweather Friend will be out on October 30, and I’d recommend listening to his past catalogue beforehand.
Harding’s set passed quickly, and before I knew it, she had come back for a two-song encore and was thanking us for coming out. Ultimately, that Reddit user had the right question.
Aldous Harding’s shows are intense, but the intensity isn’t necessarily loud or explosive. It comes from being pulled so completely into the world she creates that, for a little while, everything outside of it seems to disappear.
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