Despite 13 editions under his belt, Hugo Mudie still gets nervous as Pouzza Fest rolls around. Every year since founding the legendary Montréal punk and DIY festival in 2011, the same worries come back. Will the weather cooperate? Did he forget an important detail? And, most importantly, will festivalgoers be happy?
For the past 15 years, Pouzza Fest has occupied a unique place within the punk scene ecosystem. Originally conceived as a relatively modest gathering for punk fans and touring bands, the festival has grown into one of the most respected DIY events in North America.
“Pouzza gets bigger every year, so you keep adding new tasks, but we’re not a big team,” says Mudie, the festival’s only full-time employee. “The rest of the staff are seasonal workers, or friends, or just nice people who want to help.”
Despite that growth, the founder and his team have held onto what defined the festival from the beginning: a strong sense of community. Even as it expanded across dozens of venues and hundreds of artists, Pouzza has never fully lost touch with the local scene that gave birth to it. Montréal has maintained a long history with punk, hardcore, and related scenes since their early days, from institutions like Foufounes Électriques to internationally recognized bands like The Sainte Catherines, for which Mudie serves as frontman.
Emma Riot
Through his various projects, Mudie has spent much of his life touring through North American and European DIY networks. That experience heavily shaped Pouzza’s philosophy. Rather than building a traditional festival centered around corporate logic or VIP installations, the goal was to recreate, on a city-wide scale, the communal spirit of independent punk touring.
That approach remains central to the festival’s identity. Instead of being confined to a single site, Pouzza spreads across multiple downtown venues within walking distance of one another, alongside a free outdoor program. Festivalgoers move from bars to concert halls to theatres throughout the weekend in an atmosphere that feels more like a massive community gathering than a conventional festival. The format also encourages discovery. Someone might come to see an established headliner, only to find themselves an hour later packed into a tiny room watching a young local band.
“When it comes to programming, we try to find what nobody else is finding. We want to be the first festival for the next big bands. So we build a varied lineup to mix generations. We don’t want to just be nostalgic, and we don’t want only the cool bands of the moment,” says Mudie. “We want young bands, francophone music, bands with women, queer bands. Sometimes we pull it off!”
This year, the gamble appears to have paid off, with close to 150 artists spanning punk, hardcore, ska, post-punk, metal, garage rock, and the independent scene. The lineup includes acts like Toronto punks PUP, British pioneers Buzzcocks, Bedouin Soundclash, Baroness, and Pinkshift. Anniversary performances from Cancer Bats and The Sainte Catherines also highlight the festival’s close ties to multiple generations of the scene.
Pouzza extends beyond concerts themselves. Alongside performances at venues like Foufounes Électriques, Turbo Haus, Café Cléopâtre, and Théâtre Sainte-Catherine, the festival also presents free outdoor activities, community events, artist meetups, children’s performances, and yoga sessions. This year, Mudie is also realizing a longtime ambition by adding an exhibition curated by We Are Wolves member Alex Ortiz.
“It’s kind of like a summer camp for punks,” Mudie says. “When I was a teenager, I imagined the punk scene as what Pouzza has become today. We managed to create a microcosm where people meet and connect, and artists mix with the crowd. There are no rock stars.”
Olivia Rodrigo wears a baby doll dress during her performance for Spotify's Billions Club Live
The Olivia Rodrigo Dress Outrage Feels Like Bot Behavior
Olivia Rodrigo wasn’t wrong — it is quite brutal out here, especially if “here” is the desecrated place that is the internet and its ridiculous outrage over a pop star’s preference for babydoll dresses. The internet melted down this week because Rodrigo chose to have a sense of fashion. (Honestly, that place is really only good for stalking crushes).
As Rodrigo gears up to release her third LP, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So In Love, she’s been twirling around in the loose, fluttering silhouette, a signature of her preppy-meets-edgy style. She donned a bubblegum-pink, floral collared dress for the album’s artwork; a blue, ruffled one for the “Drop Dead” music video; and most recently, rocked out at Barcelona’s Teatro Greco for Spotify’s Billions Club Live while wearing a floral babydoll dress and matching bloomer shorts underneath.
Apparently, this was all too much for users on X and Instagram, who have been losing it, claiming that the frilly silhouette both infantilizes and sexualizes the 23-year-old star. “She is wearing pink dresses that are similar to what toddlers wear with frilly underwear beneath it,” wrote one X user, referencing Rodrigo’s Barcelona outfit. “This is giving child clothes and with all the sexy moves she tries to pull, it kinda looks weird,” wrote another X user. One post that refers back to the same outfit racked up 21 million views and simply reads, “Maybe I’m too woke.”
These looks are nothing new for the singer, who has been pairing feminine dresses with combat boots since she kicked off her musical career in 2021. Rodrigo’s style has also always been referential; it’s a hallmark that’s helped her gain fans across generations. Back in 2023, she told Rolling Stone that her mom used to wake her up by putting on Babes in Toyland’s Fontanelle. “Rock in that feminine way, that’s just the coolest thing in the world to me,” the pop star said at the time.
It’s no wonder the singer has taken a page from Babes lead singer Kat Bjelland’s book when it comes to clothes, too. Bjelland was one of the icons of the riot grrrl scene in the Nineties, and along with Courtney Love and Bratmobile’s Allison Wolfe, she was known for sporting hyper-feminine, girly dresses. This harmless, doll-like look juxtaposed with the anger running through their punk discographies and unruly performances and was meant to subvert the expectations of women as docile objects in the patriarchy.
It’s not that shocking that folks aren’t picking up on Rodrigo’s blatant references. What is surprising is the insistence that she must be supporting something nefarious by dressing this way. If anything, that all feels contrived and brings to mind the manufactured outrage online bots are so great at. Could it be yet another example of a bot-coordinated attack? It’s possible.
In the past year, GUDEA, a behavioral intelligence startup that tracks viral, reputation-harming claims on the internet, flagged two separate bot smear campaigns against Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan. These attacks happen when fake profiles create incendiary echo chambers by continuously posting about something, giving the appearance that there was viral consensus amongst internet users, the last place one would expect it. So far, there hasn’t been a confirmed bot attack to explain away the anger at Rodrigo and her fashion. But the weirder the outrage, the more likely it is all totally baseless.
It may all be as simple as good ol’ misogyny, something Rodrigo knows all too well. “Putting out music in the age of social media can be really daunting,” Rodrigo told Alanis Morissette back in 2021 for Rolling Stone’s Musicians on Musicians. “I think people hold young women to an incredibly unrealistic standard.”