It’s Ice Cream: Phish Steps Into Freezer On New Year’s Eve At Madison Square Garden

As the calendar turns to a new page at the new year, it’s a good time to think about numbers and for Phish, performing their 91st show at Madison Square Garden in New York City, the magic number seemed to be four.

MSG is appropriately located at 4 Penn Plaza, the band is a quartet over four decades into their career, everyone in the band — Trey, Page, Mike and Fish — all have four letters in their name and New Year’s Eve is the fourth show of a four-show run.

They took the stage at 7:54 p.m. and hopped right to it with an opening trio of “Free,” “Birds of a Feather” and “Bouncing Around the Room,” or in four-letter setlist call signs Free/BOAF/BATR. The band was sharp throughout the first set, even as they eschewed opportunities for long-form jamming in the fourth song of the night, “Stash.”

After the lovely ballad “Waste,” “My Friend My Friend” (aka “MFMF” or “MYFE”) provided the first opportunity for serious improvisation. As the show clock reached its 40th minute, the band gelled as a four-man unit, getting dark and gnarly on an extended foray, foreshadowing some of the deeper jamming to come.

The rest of the first set interleaved slow-downs like “Life Beyond a Dream” and “Monsters” with uptempo crowd-pleasers like “Kill Devil Falls” and the set-closing “Life Saving Gun.” When Phish plays a New Year’s Eve show, the third “bonus” set could really be any of them, and as the last couple of hours of 2025 ticked away, this year’s first set felt more like the extra warm-up for the rest of the night.

The second set built on the jams in “My Friend My Friend” and “Life Saving Gun,” each of the first four songs offering thrilling extended sections. The opening “Sand” showed off the next-level mindmeld playing that’s been typical of the entire run, a 4-D musical chess wherein each member seems to be reacting to the other three in real time. The bizarro prog-rock “Fuego” bounced between triumphant arena rock and squirrely orchestrated sections, with Chris Kuroda’s expert light rig coming low over the stage, giving serious alien-autopsy vibes and then spiraling high in the air with the musical peaks.

The band found a groove to open up and phased through several sections of jamming, from fist-pump to dark groove, to ambient meandering and back again. The ensuing “No Men in No Man’s Land” was an interlude of pure four-on-the-floor shred before “What’s Going Through Your Mind” (“MIND”) seemed to pick up on the jamming torrent in “Sand” and “No Men,” as if there was just one long jam of continuous wallops from the band’s musical 2×4, the “songs” merely jumping off points in between.

There are many four-letter words in the Phish lexicon, many of them of the “what the F$%^ just happened?!?” variety, but there is none more sacred than the “SHIT!” that comes midway through one of the most cherished songs in the catalog. The “SHIT!” in the New Year’s Eve version of “You Enjoy Myself” was the inflection point of the show, with everything before it merely a prelude to everything that came after.

A long, slinky groove evolved out of the tramps section, and the foursome went hog on it, building, building, building to an explosion that ignited the crowd all the way up to the 400s of MSG, coming down in Mike’s bubbly bass solo and the four-part vocal jam. They returned to their instruments, weaving the “Fuego” theme into the jam until coming full stop, a short calm before the coming storm.

While Phish’s New Year’s Eve productions are still lovingly called “gags” by the fanbase, they really are more of a “spectacle,” and this year’s spectacle came in, appropriately, four loosely connected phases.

The first of these began when they started up “It’s Ice,” perhaps seeming a little out of place at the end of the second set of a New Year’s show, but no one around me seemed to be complaining. The reason for its appearance became apparent when they entered the “tick tock” section of the show and a dairyman/ice cream man (looking a bit like one Harry Hood) came out on stage, the words “Cold Cold Cold” across his hat and “It’s Ice Cream” on the back of his white coat.

He matched Fish’s drums with a giant cowbell, pacing back and forth across the stage for dramatic effect as the band finished the song. As he walked off the stage, Phish proceeded to play a cover of Prince’s “Cream,” turning the “It’s Ice Cream” from the back of the coat to the setlist reality of “It’s Ice” > “Cream.”

The crowd ate it up, half dancing to the popgroover and half wondering what was going to happen next. And what happened next was the band finished the song and abruptly walked off stage as Foreigner’s “Cold As Ice” came up on the P.A., and the lights turned on for set break. The break was filled with songs whose titles alternated between containing the word “ice” (like Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby”) and the word “cream” (like Beck’s “Peaches & Cream” and Herb Albert’s “Whipped Cream”).

After a giddy “what. is. happppppening!!??!!” set break, phase two of the spectacle began. The dairy man was back, ringing his cowbell and, lo and behold, it summoned cows (or people dressed like cows, hard to tell) from the back of the arena, which mooed and ambled towards the stage, which was now filled with human-sized milk cartons.

A larger milk carton emblazoned with a “MISSING: Spock’s Brain” graphic was lowered from overhead as the band opened up the last set of the year, their longtime favorite “Harry Hood.” Of the four food groups, this night would be prominently focused on dairy, it would seem.

As the band approached the apex of the song, singing “where do you go when the lights go out!?” the lights in the arena went out, and the milk cartons were discarded, revealing a set of dancers elegantly clad in flowing white. As the blissful ambient Hood jam started to flow, the large overhead milk carton poured “milk,” which was a flowing satin cloth providing a rather beautiful visual of high-art milk and milky dancers.

The troupe interpretively danced as the band flowed themselves, a gorgeous version of the song punctuated by the movement of the dancers. As the song came to an end, several dairydudes wheeled out a large freezer with “It’s Ice Cream” written on the side and each of the dancers jumped in, disappearing from the stage.

At this point, I will admit, I was expecting “Tweezer” – 20,000+ people had just watched a bunch of people literally step into a freezer, after all. But, obviously, trying to predict what might be coming next in a Phish show, on New Year’s Eve, nonetheless, the middle of the “spectacle” is a fool’s errand.

No, the band kicked off phase three with the opening to “2001,” and rather than wondering what it had to do with milk or dairy or ice cream, the audience opted to erupt with joy and dance their asses off. Phish extended the opening with a travel-the-Milky-Way spacefunk that kept everyone grooving as the clock ticked close to midnight. White smoke started to swirl around the freezer still sitting front and center.

As they worked into the “2001” theme, the ice cream men opened the freezer and with each big peak they revealed a giant sized ice cream novelty: first a Drumstick, then a Strawberry Shortcake and then… They indicated that the next thing to come was quite large and eventually a giant-sized classic “Firecracker” showed its nose over the edge of the freezer.

The weird got weirder as Trey moved to the drumkit, Fishman walking to the front and the Page/Mike/Trey trio keeping the funk going. There was some play-acting with the ice cream men giving Fish a helmet, and then he climbed into the freezer himself as a voice boomed over the P.A., “90 seconds!” and then “60 seconds” and then a countdown from 10 as midnight approached.

As 2026 became our reality, the surrealness on stage kicked into high gear with the “Firecracker” lifting into the sky, a dummy Fishman strapped to the back like a kitsch version of the finale of Dr Strangelove or something, and confetti cannons filled the room with jubilance. Hugs abound in the crowd while “Auld Lang Syne” played to ring in the new year properly. On to phase three and here’s that “Tweezer” you ordered.

Of all the magic “fours” in the Phish world, both on NYE and in their history, perhaps the most uniquely Phish is their navigation of the proverbial fourth wall. No band winks their eye at the audience quite like these four dudes. Inside jokes on top of inside jokes that have been running for decades, self-referential, a ramshackle mythology, and more contribute to a band/fanbase relationship that is unparalleled, one that oftentimes leads to some pretty strange “either you get it, or you don’t” spaces.

It’s not so easy to say that the fourth wall doesn’t exist, but in reality, it’s a more complicated, unique, and just plain weird relationship. The third phase of the NYE spectacle was a bizarre reworking of this relationship, almost completely detached from the previous two phases as the freezer doors opened and out popped four sets of performers, each from a different country/region of the world, each singing a verse of Tweezer in the appropriate language.

It was a throwback to a previous “Meatstick” “gag” and also, in a more accurate way, a reference to a reference to that gag. Several years ago, the NYE “spectacle” was an homage to previous spectacles, and this year’s third section, as “Tweezer” wailed away in its opening jam, was somehow an homage to the homage, but also with more recent themes (like the Gamehendge year) mixed in.

The four-corners-of-the-world dancers were joined by characters from the spectacles-upon-spectacles, and if I explained every detail, it would be like a comics geek explaining the nuances of the Marvel extended universe. Indeed, the Phish spectacle is now its own extended universe with its own canon, and there are levels of “getting it” that would require a four-year degree to fully understand and disseminate.

To me, there is nothing more “Phish at the end of 2025” than a spectacle that is simultaneously both a retread and a reinvention of past ideas. The fact that the songs featured were “Hood,” “2001” and “Tweezer,” all decades-long staples and favorites, only further drives the point home.

Eventually, the chaos cleared from the stage, and Phish used the weirdness to launch into some of the best improvisation of the weekend. The next 40 or so minutes reads “Tweezer” > “Piper” on the setlist, but it really felt like one long stretch of jamming.

Often, New Year’s Eve is musically less about where the band is going in the next year and more of a summation of where the band was in the year just ending, and this stretch of music perhaps delivers that theme more than any. The playing was just a relentless stream of ideas, each more awe-inspiring than the next, but none developed in any way. The band moved between them almost effortlessly, giving a coherence to totally disparate musical themes, a notion echoed in the multi-part spectacle of the night that went from milk to a rocket launch to a fourth-wall demolishment without a hiccup.

Metaphors (metaFOURS?) abound, even in the lights overhead, which often twisted into a helix reminiscent of DNA, constantly mutating and evolving, one after another after another, processes that should take generations to unfold, flipping through in mere seconds. There was a lot in those 40 minutes of music, and it rolled out of this foursome with an expert ease. The set ended with “Say It To Me S.A.N.T.O.S.,” perhaps a wink to Fish’s flight into the space above The Garden floor, or perhaps just a rollicking fist-pumping way to end a night.

After an extended encore break, the band returned, now all dressed like ice cream men for the fourth and final phase of the NYE spectacle.

First, they sang, in four-part a cappella harmony, the song “Sincere,” which references ice cream (remember the ice cream from back when?). And then, in another wink at the audience, they played the 30-year-old rarity “Spock’s Brain,” making good on the milk carton ad and self-referential’ing their self-referential-ness as only they can, fourth wall be damned.

And finally, how else to end a night like that, than with the still-undefeated four best syllables in the Phish vocabulary: “Twee-Zer-Re-Prise.”

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