Alex Lahey Turns Café du Nord Into a Power-Pop Basement Thursday Night

There is no better place in San Francisco to yell along to a chorus than a basement, and there is no better basement than Café du Nord. On Thursday, July 16, Australian power-pop force Alex Lahey brings her hooks to the low-ceilinged former speakeasy at 2170 Market St., doors at 8 p.m., and the room is going to feel every decibel.

Lahey has spent the better part of a decade perfecting a very specific trick: songs about anxiety, jobs, exes and existential dread that somehow make you feel great. It's catharsis you can pogo to. In a 300-ish-capacity room with a stage barely above the crowd, that trick lands like a body-check — no barricade, no distance, just a very loud Australian and a couple hundred people who know all the words.

The venue is half the story here. Café du Nord opened in 1907 and spent Prohibition as an actual speakeasy beneath the Swedish American Hall; the candle-lit, wood-paneled room still trades on that clandestine feel. It's the kind of space that makes a mid-tour Thursday feel illicit, like you're getting away with something. For a songwriter as sharp and self-deprecating as Lahey, the intimacy is the point — you can see her roll her eyes at her own punchlines.

This is also a smart get for SF. Touring acts at Lahey's level increasingly route around the city for the cheaper, roomier suburbs, so a proper 415 headline date at a beloved independent room is worth showing up for on principle. Vote with your ticket stub.

Go in expecting big choruses, dry between-song banter, and the specific joy of a guitar-pop show in a basement that has been keeping secrets for over a century. Thursday-night plans: solved.

Sources: Songkick: Alex Lahey at Café du Nord, 16 Jul 2026