Ezra Furman @ The Art School, Glasgow, 1 Feb

The first night of February is a drab one. January may be over at last, though the incessant drizzle and pre-5pm sunsets that plagued the first four weeks of the year have not yet subsided, and only someone with tickets to see Ezra Furman would consider leaving the house tonight. Tricky though it may have been to ditch the central heating and schlep up Garnethill to The Art School, those that make it to see Furman are richly rewarded for their efforts. Fervently thrashing her way through a 90-minute set, not one of the sold out crowd leaves regretting their decision to venture outside on a Sunday evening.

With the crowd suitably warmed up by intriguing art-rock outfit Modern Woman, Furman shuffles rather meekly onto the stage, as though afraid of the baying Glasgow crowd. Alas, her shyness is only a charade, and the Chicago-born rock‘n’roll revivalist looks entirely at home as she and her band blast through an arresting rendition of Grand Mal, the lead single from her tenth and most recent studio album, Goodbye Small Head. Furman’s latest show, like all gigs in 2026, takes place against a particularly bleak, volatile political backdrop. Just a week before the Glasgow gig, word of another killing carried out by Federal Immigration agents in Minnesota spread quickly around the world – and Furman looks forlorn as she tells the crowd – "We’re from America, we are not okay."

The music continues on a high tempo trajectory, and the five-piece sound well oiled as they career through more than half a dozen hits plucked out from Furman’s extensive back catalogue. Though 20 years deep into her career, Furman plays with the exuberance of an artist playing their first ever headline gig, and even snaps a guitar string during a particularly spirited solo on Body Was Made. Furman smiles as she tells the Glasgow crowd: "I know this as the place where people shout things out," with one audience member happily playing into the stereotype later in the gig when Furman brandishes a harmonica, dutifully shouting: "You cannae break that!" Needless to say, Furman and her bandmates can’t make out a word of what the Glasweigan is saying.

At somewhere around the halfway mark, the band departs, leaving Furman alone with an acoustic guitar. It’s at this point Furman launches into an unreleased track, on which she begs Carly Rae Jepsen to record one of her songs so she can get some of that Call Me Maybe Money and stop writing Netflix jingles – a self-deprecating jibe at the fact Furman has soundtracked all four series of the hit Netflix show, Sex Education. The band soon return and sound incredible through The Art School's soundsystem on Suck the Blood from My Wound, The Queen of Hearts and Furman’s Alex Walton cover, I Need the Angel.

In 2023, Furman made the understandable decision to embark on a hiatus from touring, citing, among other reasons, a sharp rise in transphobia across the board. It’s a commendable decision and one can only imagine the immense pressure and fear that comes with being a trans artist at present – which makes it all the more rousing to hear Furman cry out for trans liberation and equality for all before capping off the evening with her trademark anthemic showstopper, Tell Em All to Go to Hell.