After an absence of seven years, the Irish cult band Meltybrains? bring their visceral, genre-smashing live show This-Topia to the 2025 edition of the Dublin Fringe Festival, exploring 21st-century digital life through a collaborative ritual of fear, escapism, addiction, collective catharsis and transcendence. Part theatre, part rave, part group therapy - the members of Meltybrains? introduce This-Topia below.
Meltybrains? are, in every sense of the word, a cult band. We're five Irish men who started a band with the intention of making great music and putting on great live shows and we’ve been doing just that for over ten years. In this time, we've built up a reputation for creating imaginative electronic soundscapes, as well as performing highly theatrical live shows with an infectious and incendiary energy. We have played in festivals and venues such as SXSW, Iceland Airwaves and London’s St. Pancras Church. Some of our favourite Irish shows include elaborately staged audio-visual spectacles in Dublin’s Academy, Button Factory and an Abbey Theatre Show for Dublin Fringe Festival 2018. We're are a group of friends who get together to play music, make art and be a positive influence in each other’s lives. We're also a bunch of messers!
In the last couple of years, the music we've been writing has begun to reflect the growing anxiety and fear found in global media and popular culture, and a lot of our recent songs contain increasingly dystopian themes. In order to explore these themes in the most expressive way possible, we're putting together, what we hope will be a sensational live performance show – This-Topia!
The gig will be big, bright and bold, full of flashing lights and loud noises; part rave, part theatre, part performance art.
Of course, there'll be live music and it will be big and bombastic, but there will also be 3D visuals, detailed lighting design, dance, and elements of physical theatre and performance. This-Topia is a 80 minute-long performance piece built on vast, expansive soundscapes, insightful lyrical themes, intensely stimulating visuals and explosive, energetic performances from the band-members and guest performers. Though the subject matter is serious, we're hoping to squeeze a few laughs in there as well!
This-Topia is a live musical performance of a set of electronic songs and tracks that deal with the over-bearing themes of catastrophe and apocalypse which are prevalent in contemporary discourse. The show aims to provide entertainment, but also to challenge the audience members, provoke a wide array of emotions, and provide some much needed discussion of our contemporary fears. The songs are about our current society, our often unhealthy relationship with technology, self-surveillance and what we can all do about it. It's a collaboration with director Katie O'Halloran, visual artist Ross Ryder and dancer Jessie Thompson.
The gig will be big, bright and bold, full of flashing lights and loud noises; part rave, part theatre, part performance art. If you come to This-Topia, we promise to take you on the most exciting doomscroll you've ever been on; a sensory bombardment of dystopian, cataclysmic themes, a dive into our apocalyptic ideation... and probably a lot of pictures of cats!
This-Topia is at The Complex, Dublin on September 20th and 21st, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2025 - find out more here
