Meltt at London Calling: A Set That Felt Too Short

2026-05-18

Meltt | Paradiso | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Photo by ©Sylvia Wijnands

Amsterdam, The Netherlands — For a rising band, a spot on the London Calling lineup is often seen as a sign of bigger things to come. The festival has built a reputation for hosting future stars right before their breakthrough. Acts such as Nirvana, Radiohead, Blur, Tame Impala, Arctic Monkeys, and Fontaines D.C. all appeared on the bill early in their careers. In other words, bands playing London Calling tend to be the ones worth paying attention to. This year, Vancouver-based psychedelic rock band Meltt joined the ranks of artists playing the renowned festival at Paradiso.

Although you could describe their music as psychedelic rock, Meltt are difficult to pin down to a single genre. Their sound moves between shoegaze, indie pop, and dreamy, atmospheric, guitar-driven psychedelia, while still managing to remain surprisingly melodic and accessible.

And even though this marked Meltt’s first performance in the Netherlands, it quickly became clear that I wasn’t the only one already familiar with the band. Before the show had even started, people in the crowd around me were talking about how excited they were to finally see them live, while several audience members had already shown up in Meltt shirts.

The set opened with “Hesitate”, one of the first singles from their upcoming third album Pathways, due out on June 12. Even within the short festival set, Meltt seemed determined to show every side of their sound, weaving together older tracks with songs from the upcoming album without ever losing the flow of the performance. During “Up All Night”, people started clapping along almost instantly, while “Within You, Within Me” loosened the audience up even further. Closing track “Deeper Water” felt like the emotional climax of the set, stretched out into a more expansive finale that left the crowd wanting more.

And how they did. Almost immediately after the final notes faded, calls for an encore followed — though with the constraints of a festival set, one never came. At times, the vocals struggled slightly to rise above the instrumentation, though this felt more like a technical issue than a weakness in the performance itself. If anything, the biggest criticism of the set was simply that it ended too soon. Judging by the crowd’s reaction, it hopefully won’t be long before Meltt returns to the Netherlands for a full headline show.