Liner Notes: The Encore Is a Lie

There is a set list taped to the floor by the monitor at every gig you have ever been to, and near the bottom of it there is a line, and under the line there are two songs and the letters ENC. I have watched a guitar tech write them in with a marker during soundcheck, four hours before the room had decided anything at all.

The encore is choreography sold as spontaneity, and I would like it to stop. Nobody is fooled. The house lights stay down. No one is coiling a cable. The band walks off, we supply ninety seconds of applause on cue, they return wearing an expression of pleasant surprise, and everyone agrees to pretend the end of the night is being negotiated live.

What the ritual actually costs

Four minutes. That sounds like nothing until you cost it out. Four minutes is the difference between the last train and a night bus and a long walk. It is the length of the merch queue in a 300-capacity room, which is the queue the support act is relying on. It is a security team tipping into overtime, a real line on a thin budget.

It costs the band more. They wrote an ending. Then they severed it, stood in a corridor counting, and came back to perform that ending as an afterthought to a room already checking its phones for a taxi. The best closing song I saw in 2025 was spoiled by the two that followed it, and the band knew: you could see the singer waiting for it to be over.

Two bands who abolished it

Low Ceiling print it on the door. NO ENCORE, in the same type as the ticket price. They play seventy minutes and finish twelve minutes inside the curfew, which means the last song lands while the audience is still standing where it chose to stand rather than where the crush has pushed it. I have watched a room hold four seconds of silence afterwards. That does not happen when everybody knows there are two more coming.

Barometric solved it from the other end. Their set finishes when the weather does: pressure and wind speed drive the machines, as they explained to us in October, so a set runs fifty minutes or eighty and the ending is not theirs to hand out. You cannot fake a curtain call with a low-pressure system.

I am not asking for less music. Play the two extra songs. Rehearse them, love them, put them in the set where they belong. I am asking for the four minutes back, and for the ending you wrote to be the ending we get. The real encore still exists, the unplanned kind, the room that will not go, the band scrambling for something they half remember. Keep that one. Retire the other. Play the last song last.