SLIFT Revisits Toulouse With Live From the Street

SLIFT’s latest live offering is not a polished venue shoot. The Toulouse trio took “The Day of Execution” and “Secret Mirror” from their Sub Pop album Fantasia to the street outside La Ravelin, the 60-capacity club where they played their first proper show a decade ago. Filmed during June’s heat wave by visual artist Guthio, Live From the Street documents a Fête de la Musique performance that guitarist and vocalist Jean Fossat sees as central to the band’s relationship with public space.

“If I was SLIFT’s booking agent, I would book all the shows in the streets,” he says. “I really love the way you can take the public space and make art inside.” The band already learned how unforgiving street sound can be. A previous attempt two years ago was, in Fossat’s words, a complete nightmare. This time monitors helped, but so did years of playing together. “We know each other perfectly, so we can play just by vision,” he says.

The video arrives as the songs from Fantasia continue to shift on tour. Recorded with the band playing together in a large room at Daft Studios in Brussels and mixed by Kurt Ballou at GodCity Studio, the album was built around pushing SLIFT’s power trio sound to a rawer limit. Fossat says the band has yet to meet Ballou, but a U.S. tour starting October 6 in Boston may change that. The run continues across North America, the U.K., and Europe through February 2027.