Rochester filed the request; Matt Lorenz is answering it. The show is billed as “The Much-Requested Return of The Suitcase Junket,” and the title says what it needs to: the one-man-band project that Rochester City Newspaper once described as a “lo-fi, low-tuned, low-down blast of end-times folk blues…crude; magnificent…captivating” has been away long enough that people noticed. He plays Abilene Bar & Lounge on Saturday, September 26, just six days before releasing his seventh album, his most personal and most profoundly felt record.
About the Show
Matt Lorenz has spent two decades building The Suitcase Junket into something that resists easy genre assignment. He blends early blues and rock ’n’ roll with jazz improvisation and Tom Waits-influenced songcraft, doing all of it alone on a stage with a suitcase bass drum, a box-of-bones hi-hat, gas cans, and pots and pans, handcrafted and salvaged into an instrument set that looks like it belongs in a photograph from another century. Boston Globe heard the result landing somewhere between the Avett Brothers and early Black Keys, with Tom Waits-esque reverb underneath. WBUR Boston compared his voice to “a cross between Hound Dog Taylor and a Tuvan throat singer who has swallowed a bird.” NPR’s World Café Live calls him a “master of musical imagination.” American Songwriter hears “indie Americana with a rootsy blues backbone.”
The occasion for this return is To Go On, his seventh album, releasing October 2, 2026 via Bad Chef Records/Symphonic. Lorenz wrote it in the wake of losing his sister Kate Lorenz (herself a singer-songwriter and former musical collaborator), and it has been described as “a tender, beautiful, and arrestingly moving record,” one that serves as an internal dialogue and conversation with the departed, “enormously resonant to anyone who ever loved anyone.” The first single, “One More Mile,” arrives with an upbeat tempo that Lorenz acknowledges is in deliberate tension with its subject matter. “There were certainly times when I just wanted to make the saddest record ever,” he told Americana-UK, “but I like a well-balanced piece of art, where you can tap your toe, or dance even, and still think about death.” The second single, “Put Your Phone Down,” followed in August.
Venue & Logistics
Abilene Bar & Lounge, on Liberty Pole Way in Rochester, is a close, attentive room well matched to a performer who makes an improbable amount of music by himself. Doors at 7:00 p.m., show at 8:00 p.m.
Tickets
Tickets are $22 in advance and $27 day of show, available online at abilene.showare.com or at the bar. Buy tickets