Phish Rings In 2025 With Thunderous New Year’s Eve Gag At Madison Square Garden

For much of Phish's history they have been a cult phenomenon, a vanguard of whatever counterculture Gens X & Y had, both consistently selling out the country’s largest arenas while eschewing commercial success. That all seemed to change in 2024, the year, perhaps, that Phish entered the mainstream.

A run at the Sphere in Las Vegas put them in the same conversation as U2, the Grateful Dead, and the Eagles, man!, a summer-ending run in Delaware reminded the music world that Phish essentially invented the modern American music festival, podcast appearances, articles in publications like GQ, and an enthusiastic endorsement from the host of the Price Is Right, perhaps the most mainstream of all game shows, put the band in the mass-media spotlight like never before. With that as a backdrop, it was even more eyes than usual on the Vermont quartet as the band took the stage at Madison Square Garden for the annual New Year’s Eve show.

If the year was one of a new kind of success for Phish, 2024 was a different kind of strange one for the rest of the country and the band’s first two sets seemed to reflect a mixed mood, alternating between incredibly dark improvisation and their characteristic soaring blissjam, perhaps the balance tilting more towards the evil side, take that however you best see fit.

The night opened with longtime favorite “Mike’s Song” which kicked off a set filled with songs from oft-featured in their early 90’s sets, including a sandwiched “Bouncing Around the Room,” a fast-paced “Weekapaug Groove,” “Stash,” “Llama,” “Split Open and Melt” and “Squirming Coil.” The crisp, inspired playing of the previous three shows was on display early, with several improvisational highlights. Punctuating the darker energy, Mike Gordon’s bass seemed to find comfort in the round room, reverberating bombs and inventive playing in stand-out jams in “Melt” and “Carini.”

Perhaps no song in their repertoire has been as consistently interesting over the past 4 decades as “Split Open & Melt” which reached a chaotic furor Tuesday night, Chris Kuroda’s lights adding the tension, a first set exorcism for the end of 2024. “Coil’s” infusion of prog-complexity and lightness somehow managed to come off dark as well, feeding off the energy of the set’s preceding jams. Any fans looking for “love and light” might have been disappointed, but from the raucous setbreak send-off, I think the set fit the crowd’s mood perfectly.

Read on after The Skinny for the rest of the recap and more.

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A mood that carried right into the second of three NYE sets. “Sigma Oasis” slipped into the oft-menacing “My Friend, My Friend.” Looking back, if a fan were looking for one song to sum up Phish’s 2024, “My Friend” is not a horrible selection. Its growth from a short hell-raiser to a river-Styx-crossing jam vehicle was on display, doubling down on the “Melt’s” vibrations.

Guitarist Trey Anastasio summoned the spirits and led the band through a musical doomscroll, layering one idea on the next, all four musicians locked into each layer before finally succumbing to “Sand’s” dark boogie. “Sand” and “Golden Age” gave the set a thick funky dance party groove with multiple triumphant peaks. “What’s the Use?” provided the night’s only real breather, perfectly placed ethereality, slow and quiet but not without heft, Trey’s guitar twinkled and soared, drummer Jon Fishman putting on a clinic of less-is-more. The set’s flow from start to finish was a reminder of the band’s power and building to the dark-but-cathartic “First Tube” was the expert move of a group that got their cult status for a reason.

As they departed the stage for the second setbreak, they left behind an audience satiated with tentpole jams, brilliant setlist flow, and enough dancing to ensure they entered 2025 sweaty and happy. But, this being New Year’s Eve, the night was also kind of just getting going. When they returned a couple songs before the midnight hour, the band had gone through a wardrobe change, donning blue jumpsuits, and the stage had been ensconced in sails and spirals of cloth while a large disembodied mask hovered above, somewhere between menacing and inviting, depending on your perspective.

After a blood-pumping “Character Zero,” the NYE antics began in earnest. A yellow-robed chorus joined and the band started up “Pillow Jets” as screens dropped on either side of the stage. Kaleidoscopic projections of geometric shapes and flowers pulsed on the overhead Jumbotron and screens, perhaps a nod to their run at the Sphere, as the sheets billowed and smoke puffed. With that in mind, the scene felt lifted out of a high-end Vegas act, simultaneously high art and masses-friendly spectacle.

The singers slowly moved around the stage and the band entered the jam, another foreboding bit of improv, unfurling large yellow sheets and singing “Thunder!” as lightning cracked on the screens. High drama. As the clock wound down to the last minutes of that strange year of 2024, Phish wound the jam down into the expected “Auld Lang Syne,” hitting midnight accompanied by loud cheers and lots of confetti.

You never know what they’ll open the year with, so it was either a surprise or not a surprise that the first song of 2025 was the pretty new “What’s Going Through Your Mind.” What was probably a surprise was how the repeated line “mind, mind, mind” got flipped into an electronica groove while the yellow-robes were shed for rave-ready light-up accessories and Madison Square Garden turned into the biggest EDM party in town. It was, perhaps, the most mainstream of NYE spectacles, another side of Vegas brought to NYC.

Trey Anastasio was content to lay into a strummed groove as Page McConnell, Jon Fishman and Gordon brought the groove to new places. These spurts of electronica were interleaved with the band singing select lyrics to other Phish songs in the style of “Going Through Your Mind,” including “Bouncing Around the Room,” “Martian Monster” (“about to take off!”) and “Halley’s Comet” (“lots of spaghetti!”). It was like a Vegas revue medley on LSD, a blend of Phish’s silly past and their current big-time-ness, inventive and weird, yet deliciously simple.

Perhaps it was this meeting of the band’s past, present, and future that inspired the choice of “Chalk Dust Torture.” Even as the band members enter their 60s and their audience starts showing some greys as well, the line “can’t this wait til I’m old, can I live while I’m young” still seems to resonate. This got the foursome embarked on a fist-pump victory tour to end the night, with plenty left in the tank for an inspired “Slave to the Traffic Light,” more collectivist improv in “Life Saving Gun” and a roof-raising sing-along in the set-closing “Say it to Me S.A.N.T.O.S.” For the time being, the darkness seemed to have ebbed – for how long into 2025 it’ll last, we shall see.

The encore highlighted three different ways Phish can fill five minutes. There’s the arena-inappropriate a capella “Grind,” the band again showing their age, literally, and putting a smile on everyone’s face. That was followed by their goofy side coming out in earnest with the Gamehendge “Icculus,” Trey explaining why it was skipped during last year’s otherwise-inclusive production, and inadvertently playing their least mainstream song (I wonder what Drew Carey thought of it!). And finally, of course, the most savage, hair-raising 5 minutes in rock and roll, “Tweezer Reprise” chasing the demons, welcoming the noobs and normies, delighting the vets, and sending the crowd out of MSG and into 2025 with all the love and light they’ll need for the time being.

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