Armed with a new alternative country sound and four generations of family legacy, Noah Cyrus arrives fully realized, conjuring a night of raw, healing magic in the heart of Montreal.
Text By Jamie Xie
Photos By Louis Alson
MONTREAL – Fans were transported into the twilight grove of the moss-covered MTELUS, where there is smoke but no mirrors behind Noah Cyrus’ enchanting October 4th performance on the 2025 I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me Tour, promoting her album of the same name. A spiritual successor to her 2022 debut album The Hardest Part, Cyrus has since tempered her perspective with the privilege of three years of experience. He looks to deliver that authenticity to the Montreal stage just in time for the Halloween season.
Maturing towards a folk sensibility with bluegrass influence, Cyrus’ latest work channels her family heritage as a living musical legacy, crafting a sophomore album that feels both personal and timeless. Weaving a multi-generational tapestry, she centres the 11-track project around her identity as a sister, daughter, fiancée, and “real woman in this world” as seen in Rolling Stone. Inviting direct musical influence from her great-grandfather, grandfather, father and brother, she aligns herself with a longstanding cultural tradition of singer/songwriters, and grounds herself among four generations of lyrical prowess.
“Country music just feels like a part of me,” Cyrus told People, “This album did feel like coming home, but it also just felt like me.”
Beneath a soft, eerie glow, MTELUS is reborn as a misty forest of barren trees and moss-clad stones. The band, spectral figures shrouded in head-to-toe black accompany a microphone stand entangled in vines, awaiting her arrival. From the heart of the haze emerges the silhouette Noah Cyrus. In a floor-length green gown with floral lace, lantern in hand, she opens the show to uproar with the haunting memory of “I Saw The Mountains.”
Yet, for all of its reverence, the levity of the audience was never quite lost on her. Midway through “Unfinished,” Cyrus’ disarming humour surfaced as she playfully remarked upon a certain toy ape in the crowd. With a contagious laugh, she leaned into the absurdity, retrieving her unsettling new dance partner, swaying with it in her arms as her bandmate Liam Kevany rallied the crowd with a Quebec flag. Even a brief stumble became part of the charm—handled with grace, she would later infuse the situation with lighthearted fun, attributing the mishap to the “haunted Annabelle doll” which she proclaimed would soon after be banned from the next Montreal concert. Through these spontaneous, unscripted chaos, Cyrus shines, not as a distant star but as a relatable friend, creating a space where being real—and making mistakes—are all part of the magic.
What began as playful chaos soon softened into something more heartfelt as Cyrus turned towards her roots, offering a heartfelt homage to her childhood, treating the crowd to a tender rendition of “With You,”, her father’s first-ever composition, which had served as a childhood lullaby during her early years. Playing along with that theme of nostalgia, she continues with a country arrangement of Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California,” another song her father used to sing—a song she proclaims has “something for everyone.” The set became a conversation between generations through “Apple Tree,” which would feature Cyrus’ great grandfather’s hymn sung by her grandfather. And with key collaborations from her brother Braison Cyrus, notably on “Don’t Put It All On Me,” Cyrus defines her project as a collaborative one that comes as the natural succession of her family’s collective joy. Tapping into her lineage as a songwriter, Cyrus defines the record as a love letter to the music that she grew up around and the I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me tour as a celebration of belonging.
“For a long time, I couldn’t really trust in my own choices,” she told iHeartRadio, “But I’ve found who I am, I know who I am, and this record shows what I had inside me all this time. This album is me.”
It was a privileged night at MTELUS, where fans were the first to witness the live debut of “If There’s a Heaven.” A collaborative work with Stephen Wilson Jr. released just one day prior, the song captures the heart of the concert, exploring the fear of being left behind and the equal fear of leaving others behind—a yearning to keep loved ones close through life, through death, through everything.
The night’s most profound moment arrived not in a song, but in a confession. Before playing her breakout hit,“July,” Cyrus revealed to the crowd that her record label at the time had initially dismissed the single, failing to see it as a commercial hit with the outreach potential it has today—granting her just 500 dollars to shoot the music video. “I was headed in a direction artistically where I was ready to morph and ready to grow and if only you would just give the song a chance and where I am a chance…I am ready to go because I am ready to change,” she shared.
After an uproarious end-performance chant, Noah Cyrus took a victory lap, performing an encore of her first released single, “Make Me (Cry),” followed by the final track on her latest album, “XXX”. The set reflects the music that has defined her career and the music yet to come. She views the world through the cultural memory of nostalgia and is able to find a clear lifeblood throughline, revisiting the melodies that raised her time and time again.
The title itself—a prayer, a wish, a hope—that no one has to face the hardest or even the best parts of life alone. Acknowledging both the musical foundation she inherited from her family and the career she has built with the support of her fans, she says to the crowd visibly moved, “It was everything that you guys did with the End of Everything EP that ensured I can release what they don’t call commercial and they don’t call a pop album but it’s the artist I am standing here today. I appreciate that you guys have afforded me this artistic freedom….you freed me as an artist, thank you for everything.”
