Kodaline are back in Sydney tonight, but this time everyone in the room knows there will not be another tour waiting somewhere down the road. After more than a decade under the Kodaline name, the Irish band are saying goodbye, and Sydney is part of that long final lap.
Before they arrive, Isobel Knight has the job of welcoming a steadily filling Enmore. Accompanied by Esther Lukin on violin, the Sydney singer-songwriter keeps things beautifully simple, her acoustic guitar and voice given room alongside the violin.
Then comes Kodaline, and the significance of seeing Steve Garrigan, Vincent May, Mark Prendergast and Jason Boland together on an Australian stage for the final time is impossible to ignore. Farewell tours can sometimes feel like carefully engineered exercises in nostalgia, but tonight there is a genuine sense of a chapter closing. Audience members hold up handwritten signs, hoping to catch Kodaline’s attention.
Originally called 21 Demands, the band changed their name to Kodaline in 2012 as their music began moving in a new direction. Their 2013 debut album ‘In a Perfect World’ established the template. Kodaline sit somewhere between indie rock, folk and widescreen pop, with Garrigan’s voice providing the emotional centre. There are obvious connections to the grand scale of U2, Coldplay and Snow Patrol, but the band gradually built their own identity around songs that make vulnerability feel communal rather than private.
‘Coming Up for Air’ followed in 2015, ‘Politics of Living’ arrived in 2018 and ‘One Day at a Time’ in 2020, with the band moving between acoustic intimacy, alternative rock and increasingly polished pop without entirely abandoning the melancholy that first drew listeners to them.
The band announced their decision to separate last year, bringing an end to Kodaline rather than leaving things indefinitely unresolved. Before that happens, there is still one final studio album to come, ‘We Were Only Young’ due for release in October, giving the group the chance to close the story with new music rather than simply looking backwards.
It makes tonight at the Enmore feel less like a retrospective and more like the last pages of something still being written. Kodaline have travelled a considerable distance from childhood friends in Swords and busking on Dublin streets to arenas and theatres around the world.
Images Deb Pelser
The tour moves to Brisbane and Melbourne next, tickets HERE.
