Nowadays Festival: Cass McCombs at the Sanctuary Arts Centre

NOWADAYS FESTIVAL 2026

Cass McCombs live at the Sanctuary Arts Centre

With special guest Ada Lea

Over the past twenty plus years, Cass McCombs has journeyed a singular path as an uncompromising song-carver, guitarist and singer.

Along with the finest squadron of collaborators and bandmates, his music travels gracefully over seemingly contradictory terrain, from infectious guitar riffage to intensely personal lyricism.

In August 2025, Cass released his newest album “Interior Live Oak” to rave reviews including 5 stars from the Guardian, an 8.1 from Pitchfork who said “16 songs and not a throwaway among them…,” a 9/10 from Uncut Magazine, and a rave from Mojo magazine who said “…this is the kind of record it’s impossible to be casual about.”

Interior Live Oak is his most personal album to date, and, more than any previous record, shows his vast range as a lyricist and musician. It draws from everything Cass has created over two decades of experimentation to cut through with a direct and clarifying light.

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“The hand knows best,” the painter Margaux Williamson says. “A shape produces itself, where I go toward what is intuitive, rather than logical.” The shapely, intuitive songs that comprise Ada Lea's third album, when i paint my masterpiece, are surprising, imagistic, tactile. They stand before us and we feel their brushstrokes. Alexandra Levy holds her guitar against the backdrop of a sea of her paintings on the album cover and it’s tempting to ask: is painting a metaphor here, for music or life? No! As ever, she resists tidy metaphors. She’s a master of this kind of thorny lowercase title that germinates and grows with time. In a real, profound way, music and painting go hand-in-hand as she unveils a new style of subversion and surrealism inspired by her transdisciplinarity.

Presented by Nowadays and the Sanctuary Arts Centre