bReview: Bloc Party
at Spark Arena, Tuesday 12 August 2025
Written by Imogene Bedford
Photography by Brenna Jo Gotje
The cardinal rule of any gig, let alone a gig review, is you always make it in time for the opening act.
We weave through the throng of punters as the first song bleeds into the second, craft beers in hand to blend in with the rest of the crowd. It’s like stepping into the Tumblr party I went to this weekend: denim jackets, battered Converse, man buns worn with defiant sincerity. Young the Giant feel like a time capsule of those early twenty-tens, when Ra Ra Riot and Two Door Cinema Club ruled independent radio airwaves.
Sameer Gadhia makes a compellingly yearning frontman, perhaps one of the most important qualities of an early-2010s alt-rock band. It’s not wholly lyrical (though the refrain of “I want you, to want me,” on Superposition is particularly longing), but in the way he draws out his vocals, suspending the vowels to wring out their emotion.
(Young The Giant at Spark Arena / Photo: Brenna Jo Gotje)
He introduces the next track with a tender confession. “This is the prelude to a song that was a failure,” he says, setting the scene for Mind Over Matter, which swells with layered harmonies and shimmering synths. “You know you’re on my my mind,” he sings, and by the third chorus you’re convinced of feelings you didn’t have five minutes ago.
The smell of someone’s burnt vape coil hangs like incense over the crowd, and the band sounds better than ever; Cough Syrup, made iconic by a feature in the evergreen Glee and still a cornerstone of millennial indie lore, remains melancholically upbeat. Silvertongue snaps with a sharp, rhythmic guitar line. The foot-stamping My Body drives a kinetic charge through the front of the mosh.
It’s the kind of rock that recalls high low skirts and cherry red doc martens, going to Albert Park indie gigs with my dad at twelve, and scouring Real Groovy for Gossamer at fourteen.
Back then, I couldn’t wait to be a grown up. Now that I am (barely), the nostalgia doesn’t make me melancholy. Instead, it’s like the past and present have contracted into one.
Not everyone shares my sentimentality. In the bathroom, someone mutters,“people who enjoy the opening act are the worst.” It’s a funny thing, how some punters seem intent on gigs being a demure affair. I bite my tongue, pushing through the dirty looks in the crowd.
We’re sonically transported back nearly another decade as Bloc Party open with So Here We Are. A twinkly cacophony of chiming guitar, taut drums, and Kele Okereke’s vocals, the track is expressive of what makes their music so enduring, raw emotion delivered with precision.
Electronic and house influences can be heard on several tracks, like Mercury and The Prayer. There is a unique kind of noise created by the band’s blend of rock, punk, and industrial textures, genre bending that brings to mind The Chemical Brothers.
(Bloc Party at Spark Arena / Photo: Brenna Jo Gotje)
Silent Alarm, the album tonight’s tour celebrates, is indie perfection - complete with wiry guitar, edgy percussion, and a restless momentum. I was only four when it came out, yet the record still feels wired into my memories: Veronica Mars needle drops, FIFA 06, and my mum’s pirated mp3s on her iPod Nano.
The music of the 2000s often feels like it comes from a simpler time, though it was anything but. Hunting for Witches is absent tonight, but it’s post-9/11 paranoia - “the Daily Mail says the enemy is among us, taking our women and taking our jobs” - could have been written yesterday.
So could Price of Gasoline, a critique of how domestic life props up state violence. The irony of a crowd shouting “we’re gonna win this” in 2025 is not lost on anyone.
There’s a reason indie sleaze is making a return. Anxiety about the future, anger towards institutions, nihilist hedonism: it’s all timeless. Millennials had the war in Iraq, Gen Z has genocide in Gaza. Aging is inescapable, but there will always be more kids growing up, and there will always be bad things they remind us to care about.
Some of my fellow gig goers may have forgotten what it was like to be that young. Tonight, Okereke seems determined to remind them. Banquet universally stirs movement from the crowd after he urges us to stop being so polite. “If you liked that Auckland, there’s plenty more where that came from,” he promises, and delivers with ease.
The wistful Blue Light is particularly designed to evoke memories of errant youthfulness. “I still feel you in the taste of cigarettes,” is oddly romantic to anyone who’s shared a dart with a person they have feelings for: painfully so. As the crowd sings “if that’s the way it is, then that’s the way it is,” there seems to be a collective shrug, a bittersweet exhalation.
One of my favourite tracks, Like Eating Glass, is similarly breathless and serrated in tone. “It’s so cold in this house,” not only refers to the mid-winter chill literally frosting my flat windows but the frigidity of political status quos. When the house lights rise, it seems impossible that anyone could have resisted being swept into the propulsive energy of tonight’s set.
(Bloc Party at Spark Arena / Photo: Brenna Jo Gotje)
Of course, there is an encore, all in contrasts. Only He Can Heal Me sees the band become explorative, developing ambient soundscapes in the vein of Aphex Twin. Then heady Helicopter explodes with electroclash urgency, the most perfect mohawk I’ve ever seen surfing over our heads.
These shifts in tone have a clear intentionality, drifting into the blooming This Modern Love and the hedonistic Ratchet. Okereke forgets a lyric; it feels fitting.
Nothing should make you feel older than bag checking your work laptop at a gig, but with my hair thrashed and tights ripped, I feel fourteen again. I’m glad I didn’t miss the opener, glad to be reminded of the hopefulness I had when I was younger.
“Are you hoping for a miracle,” Helicopter asks. Maybe not. It sounds to me like a call to action. The world’s fucked, so what are you going to do about it?
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