Annie-Claude Deschenes

Screaming at sixteen

Annie-Claude Deschênes has been part of Montreal's independent music scene for around two decades, and for most of that time she was known as the frontwoman of a band rather than as a name on her own. She grew up with formal musical training that she has described as giving her "solid musical foundations" while also being, in her words, "traumatizing". The singing came later. As she told SOCAN's Words and Music magazine in August 2025, "I started singing – or rather, screaming – at 16!"

Duchess Says formed in Montreal in late 2003, with Deschênes on vocals and guitar alongside Ismael Tremblay, Philippe Clément and Simon Besre. The band released Anthologie des 3 Perchoirs on Alien8 Recordings in August 2008, followed by In a Fung Day T! on the same label in October 2011 and Sciences Nouvelles on Slovenly Recordings in October 2016. They supported Yeah Yeah Yeahs on a winter UK tour in 2009, played Eurockéennes de Belfort and Osheaga, and over the years shared stages with The Hives and Buzzcocks. Deschênes's stated philosophy for the band was to keep things "as raw as possible" and to push attention away from herself: "I didn't want people to focus on me, I wanted people to focus on the artistic performance."

A second group, PyPy, brought together three members of Duchess Says with Roy Vucino and pushed towards psychedelic rock with a punk undertow. PyPy was still active in June 2025, when it appeared at Sled Island in Calgary alongside Deschênes's own solo set.

A lockdown record about cutlery

The solo album began in the pandemic lockdown and, according to her label, was not originally meant for release. Deschênes has said that her attempts to escape one creative mould kept landing her in another: "I realized that in trying to break out of the mold, I always ended up in another mold." The project took proper shape after she won the 2022 PHI NORD programme, which gave her a creative residency, and the record that came out of it was Les Manières de Table.

It was released digitally on 5 April 2024 and physically on 26 April 2024 through Italians Do It Better and Bonsound, the Montreal label she signed to for the project. The concept is table etiquette. The title track delivers dining instructions in a directive, almost rude manner over new wave synths, and the album as a whole picks apart social codes of politeness across several languages. Bonsound cites Steve Reich's minimalism, Kraftwerk's synthetic textures and Herbie Hancock's stylistic range as touchstones, along with drum machines, sequencers and the look of obsolete surveillance technology. Sled Island's 2025 programme summed the result up as the soundtrack to a "dystopic discotheque".

The shift from her bands is one of temperament as much as sound. Louder Than War noted on the eve of release that the urgency of Duchess Says and PyPy remained, but that frustration and aggression had given way to introspection and vulnerability. Deschênes framed it as a narrowing of focus: "I've set aside the performance side a bit, and moved away from the visual arts. I've realized I really like focusing on the music." The performance side, as it turned out, did not stay set aside for long.

The album was longlisted for the 2024 Polaris Music Prize and nominated in the Electro category at the 2024 GAMIQ awards in Quebec.

Main de Fer and the awards run

The follow-up arrived a year after the album. Main de Fer, released on 22 April 2025 through Italians Do It Better and Bonsound, is a minimal techno track that opens on an off-kilter, almost meditative rhythm and builds into a thundering club record. The label describes it as an exploration of emotional isolation through "disturbing soundscapes and fragmented textures". Three remixes followed later in the year.

The single did more for her profile than a one-off usually does. It picked up a GAMIQ single nomination in 2025, and on 28 January 2026 it was nominated for Underground Dance Single of the Year at the JUNO Awards. In the same period her Winterruption YEG show in Edmonton earned a nomination for Live Performance of the Year at the 2026 Canadian Live Music Awards. For an artist who spent two decades being described as a cult figure, that is a run of mainstream recognition in a little over eighteen months.

Touring behind the record has been steady rather than spectacular in scale. Autumn 2025 took in Pop Montréal on 25 September, Toronto and dates around Quebec, then a European leg through the Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg, Brussels, Strasbourg, Lyon, Luxembourg and Paris. On 31 October 2025 she played Wavelength's Dysco-pia post-punk electro night at WL 902 in Toronto. May 2026 brought a short run through The Oak in Brighton on 15 May, The Grace in London on 18 May and Le Chinois in Montreuil on 30 May.

Whipped cream, gelatin and chocolate rocks

The clearest account of what the show now involves comes from The Gateway, which interviewed Deschênes around her Winterruption set in Edmonton in February 2026. She described the performance as "more like performance art" and explained the intent plainly: "I try to include the public in my performances. I'm serving food, cooking food, and just testing stuff on people, having fun with them."

In Edmonton that meant filling audience members' mouths with whipped cream, bringing spectators up on stage, and seating two of them at a table where they were served white gelatin and pieces of chocolate shaped like stones. She then wrecked the meal, tipping a vase of chocolate rocks over it and sitting on their laps while demonstrating exactly the poor table manners the album is about. Musically the set is built from a beatbox and synthesisers, more electronic than anything in her bands, and she is clear about how far it sits from the dance mainstream: "I'm not doing conventional structures of EDM." She also insists the music keeps "a kind of punk side of it".

Her own description of what happens to her on stage is less controlled. "When that happens, I lose track of what's happening, I no longer have control over anything," she told SOCAN, describing the state she goes into mid-set. Pop-Kultur's programme for its 2026 edition asked the question the format invites: "Is this still a regular concert? Or is it already performance art?"

Autumn 2026: New York, Washington and eight British rooms

The current run started at the end of August. On the night of 29 to 30 August 2026 she played Pop-Kultur in Berlin, a one-hour slot from 00:40 to 01:40 in the Maschinenhaus at the Kulturbrauerei, presented in cooperation with M for Montreal. On Thursday 10 September 2026 she is the support act for Angine de Poitrine, the Quebec duo built around drums and double-neck microtonal guitar, at LPR in New York, with doors at 7pm, the show at 8pm, tickets at $26 in advance and $31 on the day, and entry for ages 16 and over. Songkick then lists her in Washington, DC at The Atlantis on 15 September and the Lincoln Theatre on 17 September.

The UK tour in October is the most extensive she has done as a solo act. It opens at the Golden Lion in Todmorden on 11 October and runs through The Hug & Pint in Glasgow on the 14th, The Old Blue Last in London on the 16th, Heartbreakers in Southampton on the 19th, the Pink Room at YES in Manchester on the 21st, Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds on the 22nd, Future Yard in Birkenhead on the 23rd with doors at 7pm, and Just Dropped In in Coventry on the 24th. These are small rooms, and for a show that depends on pulling people out of the crowd and sitting on their laps, that is the point.

After the UK she returns to the United States for the Lodge Room in Los Angeles on 4 November and the Momentous Festival in Bentonville, Arkansas, on 6 and 7 November. No new album has been announced. The most recent release remains Main de Fer and its three remixes.