A near-religious experience. If this is what middle age sounds like, let’s all grow old disgracefully.
The air inside the Hordern Pavilion crackled with the kind of electricity only a band like Bloc Party can conjure, part post-punk prophecy, part rave-like revelation.
On the final night of July, they conducted a high-voltage séance, summoning the ghosts of Silent Alarm while charging forward with the ferocity of a band still hungry for the future.
From the moment So Here We Are unfurled like a slow-motion detonation, it was clear this wasn’t a mere nostalgia act.
Kele Okereke, a silhouette against a storm of strobes, wielded his voice like a weapon: soft and haunting one moment, a serrated cry the next.
Russell Lissack’s guitar lines slithered through the mix, alternating between surgical precision and controlled chaos, while the rhythm section (Louise Bartle’s artillery-grade drumming and Harry Deacon’s seismic bass) turned the floor into a trampoline of limbs.
The setlist was a carefully orchestrated riot. She’s Hearing Voices mutated from a cult B-side into a full-blown rave anthem under the Pavilion’s kaleidoscopic lights, while Banquet detonated with the force of a thousand festival singalongs.
Even newer tracks like The Love Within, its synth hooks gleaming like neon, felt at home among the jagged post-punk relics.
The band’s alchemy was most potent during Song for Clay, where Okereke’s whispered “Disappear here” felt less like a lyric and more like a command, the crowd dissolving into the music.
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But the encore was where they ascended. Helicopter wasn’t just played; it was unleashed, Bartle’s drums like gunfire.
And when This Modern Love arrived, drenched in liquid light, the room became a cathedral, every voice shouting the outro like a secular hymn.
Bloc Party didn’t just revisit their past on July 31st. They rewired it, proving that their music isn’t frozen in 2005, it’s a living, thrashing thing.
By the time the house lights rose, the Hordern Pavilion was merely a time machine with its circuits blown, stuck forever in that perfect, sweat-drenched moment.
