Our Lady Peace Marks 30 Years by Looking Straight Ahead at 2029

Our Lady Peace opened a sold-out Orlando show with 1997’s “Superman’s Dead,” but singer Raine Maida has little tolerance for the backward glance. “That word makes me want to throw up,” he said of nostalgia. Thirty years after their debut Naveed, the band’s U.S. tour is built around the idea that energy, not anniversary arithmetic, defines a group.

The Toronto band’s Nineties alt-rock singles — “Starseed,” “Clumsy,” “Somewhere Out There” — all cracked Billboard’s top 10, a rare cross-border dent for a Canadian act. Bassist Duncan Coutts insists the music always carried a thread of light beneath its heaviness. “There’s always this hopefulness,” he said.

That forward tilt turned uneasy at the edge of the millennium. Reading Raymond Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, Maida grew alarmed by technology’s accelerating power and channelled the worry into 2000’s Spiritual Machines. Kurzweil himself provided monotone spoken interludes, including a track that forecast the year 2029: “The machines will convince us that they are conscious… they’ll embody human qualities and claim to be human, and we’ll believe them.”

Maida now thinks that moment is about three years off. “Live music and live sports — that’s what’s going to survive, that communal moment people just run to,” he said. For a band refusing to call this a nostalgia trip, the future remains the only room worth playing in.