REVIEW: The Luna Collective and Bright Antenna’s SXSW Women to Watch Showcase
REVIEW
REVIEW
☆ BY EMMI SHOCKLEY ☆
Photos By Isaac Garza
IT’S A SXSW FRIDAY NIGHT ON SIXTH STREET—The Luna Collective and Bright Antenna Records have taken over Las Perlas for their 2026 Official SXSW Women To Watch Showcase.
I arrived early to interview Mia Madden of Lovpune on the bar’s back patio. The lineup is stacked, the sun is starting to set and the Texas spring day is just starting to cool. After the interview (which you should read next) concludes, Madden bounds off to sound check and I’m joined by my friends. The success of the interview only further adds to the enthusiasm for the night. We’ve been talking about this showcase all week, and here we are wearing great outfits, posing for photos and drinking cocktails. We’re ready.
I go on to review each set, and each set equates to another paloma. I begin to believe that my music journalism is getting all the more hard-hitting and my notes app musings are becoming increasingly insightful with each one (pretty good logic). My group and I alternate between front and center of the crowd and the back patio where vendors are set up, tacos are served and artists hang out before and after their sets—most notably Meg Elsier and her band (pictured below, enjoying a well-earned cig celebration after an electrifying performance).
It was a perfect night. I’m sorry if you weren’t there. But keep reading; I’ll help you feel like you were.
First to take the stage is Lovpune: the indie-electronic-pop project of songwriter and producer Mia Madden. Madden is all energy. She translates her dance-y, intricately produced, dark-synth style to a live setting by joining forces with Austin bass player Kinseli Baricuatro and LA drummer Sierra Leuschen. Madden’s layered, ethereal vocals reverberate against the walls of this mezcal bar like it’s a cathedral and the crowd, even at this early hour of the night, is mesmerized.
Unfortunately for her rapt admirers (okay, I’m talking about my friends), but fortunately for anyone who loves public displays of devotion in an artistic context (me), she makes it clear early on in the set that she is blissfully in love with her girlfriend, who is here tonight. As an introduction to her song “Paola,” Madden swoons, “this next song is for anyone who’s ever been in love and been absolutely geeked about it. It’s about my girlfriend, and it’s called Paola.”
The song kicks in, and another girl group gathers just in front of ours. One of them turns to her friends, and I hear her say, “This song is about me!” There’s Paola, front and center, wearing Lovpune merch. This moment, along with the entire set, is so joyful.
Unsurprisingly, my friends and I rush straight to the merch table to buy Lovpune baby tanks and make plans to see her the very next night at Hole in the Wall.
I have to admit, I had never listened to Meg Elsier before this showcase, and that was a huge mistake. Won’t make it again. If you (like me) are a fan of Momma, Bully, Sydney Gish, Blondshell, Prewn, Liz Phair and the like, seek out Meg Elsier right now. She’s not hard to find.
Meg Elsier erupts into the second set of the night, and as she leads her four-piece band, their sheer kinetic energy is truly about to explode off the bar’s modestly sized stage. (Elsier later told me it felt like a core exercise to hold herself centered and keep from colliding with her bandmates up there.)
My highlights from the Meg Elsier set include “baby,” off Elsier’s 2024 album spittake (via Bright Antennae Records). They tore through their performance of the song–with its sludgy, driving lead guitar, crashing cymbals, and an earworm of a hook: “I fake it till I make it then I break it and then do it again.” Then, a few songs later, Meg asks the audience, “Anyone here from New England?” She’s met with a few modest hoots and hollers, then responds, “Even if you’re lying, thank you!” She dedicates the next song to New England landscapers and the band proceeds to blow our minds with the unreleased, untitled track where Elsier howls out the hook, “People in New England have really nice lawns!” The crowd is loving it.
The band triumphantly closes the set with “forlyleinsanfrancisco,” also off of spittake. This is the kind of song that builds, and builds, and builds, then combusts into reverberations, even more satisfyingly so when played live. When Elsier sings, “I'd be your good girl / But I’d do bad things / And I talk dirty / But I keep the house clean,” my best friend Rachel and I just look at each other and say, “f*ck.” It was one of those sets.
The night hits a poppy high in the middle of the lineup, when Avery Cochrane, followed by Olivia Morreale, take the stage in quick succession. Cochrane launches into her opening track, “Losing Streak,” a dreamy pop track that gets the crowd moving. Cochrane works the crowd with a charming ease, and her band is all smiles, seeming to be having just as much fun as she is. A high point of the set arrives as Cochrane plays a synth-driven, unreleased track currently titled “75.”
Olivia Morreale takes the stage, now packed by her 5-piece band, wearing a full-sequined, Britney-esque ensemble complete with major stilettos. She shouts out her friend Jeremy in the crowd, who created the look for her. Morreale is jazz-trained, first cutting her teeth in New York City’s improvisational jam sessions, and that shows in her performance. She blends her jazz foundation with soulful indie pop and even leans into a glam rock sound at times—her band definitely doesn’t shy away from a big guitar solo. The room feels like a rowdy, family affair at this point—I take stock of Morreale’s friends and fans who showed up for her. Morreale tells the crowd that this set has been a long time in the making; The Luna Collective covered Morreale during the early days of her career, while both the artist and the magazine were gaining momentum.
After the stage is broken down and reset, Anna Shoemaker takes the stage to begin the quieter, singer-songwriter end of the evening. Her set-up is simplified: a two-piece acoustic guitar setup, just herself to her boyfriend and guitarist Gabe Pietrafesa (back to that public display of devotion in an artistic setting thing. Love.) They nimbly strip down Shoemaker’s melodic, indie pop tracks to their bones, and from here, the easy gravitas of Shoemaker’s vocals fill the space. This set slows the tempo, but the floor is still populated with dedicated midnight listeners leaning in. The duo closes their set with Shoemaker’s presently most-streamed track, “Holly.” In this acoustic arrangement, the opening lines, “Did you mean to put your cigarette out on my heart? / If you want to you can hold onto my flaming arm,” ring even more earnest than on the recording.
Most of our group is in the backyard at this point because they’ve gotten too rambunctious for the midnight songwriter sets, but the aforementioned Rachel and I aren’t going to miss Camille Schmidt close out the evening. Rachel knows of Schmidt from her “being funny on Instagram” (which she is), but now we’re both about to meet her in a new context: onstage, alone, just her and her electric guitar. Schmidt’s lyrics are diaristic, gutting, and at-times hilarious. As she plays the most stripped-down set of the evening, her storytelling sensibilities are center-stage and impossible to ignore.
Schmidt, who also holds an MFA in fiction writing, breaks into “Fish Pills,” where she somehow manages to reference Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation (“Screaming in the streets at another protest / Aaron’s on fire, no one’s noticed”), reflect upon the time a gynecologist overlooked her adolescent eating disorder, and throw in a Leonard Cohen quote for good measure, all in the same upbeat indie-pop song that I still can’t get out of my head. She introduces her song “Heaven” with another story: the one of the bizarre, momentary, incel-manosphere obsession with her and the song. She tells us that “Heaven” had grabbed the attention of that nightmarish corner of the internet, and for a short but intense period over the past year, she was getting a ton of profile hits, death threats and insults from basement-dwelling virgins all over. After the show, I ask her what set them off. She tells me it was the lyrics, “In college I blew this guy, for over an hour. / My knees got bruises, I took a long hot shower. / When we met up years later, he said he thinks about it to this day. / He asked if I do too, and I said yeah, but not in the same way.” If those weren’t some of my favorite lyrics of hers before, they sure are now.
It was a gorgeous night. I learned some things, discovered music, made new friends, danced with old ones, and only felt mildly hungover the next morning. I can’t wait for next year.
