There’s a particular kind of darkness that settles over Manning Bar — not theatrical, not decorative, but lived-in. The room feels less like a venue and more like a holding space for whatever people bring in with them. Tonight, it’s anticipation edged with something heavier. The Horrors haven’t been here in over a decade, and the gap hasn’t softened them — it’s sharpened the mythology.
Before they arrive, G.U.N. fracture the room open. Their set doesn’t so much begin as accumulate — long, coiled build-ups that stretch time until it feels elastic, then snap into crescendos that land somewhere between confrontation and release. It’s part performance art, part sonic endurance test, but never detached. The tension they build isn’t abstract; it’s physical. You feel it in your chest before you can name it.
By the time The Horrors step into it, the air has already shifted. They don’t acknowledge the wait — they inhabit it. Nearly twenty years into a career built on refusal — of genre, of expectation, of repetition — they move with the kind of confidence that doesn’t announce itself. It just exists. There is little banter between songs.
What’s striking is how they balance the new against the old. The set leans heavily into Night Life, with a strong run of newer material sitting alongside key moments from Primary Colours, Skying, Luminous and V. It doesn’t play like nostalgia. The older songs aren’t treated as relics, but folded into the same space as the new ones. Night Life becomes the centre of gravity, pulling everything inward — less about spectacle, more about interior space, the version of nightlife that happens when everything else goes quiet.
Live, that translates into something immersive rather than explosive. Songs expand, contract, dissolve into atmosphere and then reassemble without warning. Faris Badwan stands at the centre of it, not as a focal point but as a conduit — his voice threading through the band’s shifting architecture. Around him, the rest of the group operate like a single organism, reshaping sound in real time.
It’s clear that The Horrors are still searching — still pulling apart their own instincts to see what remains. That restlessness is the throughline, the thing that connects every version of the band that’s existed so far.
The tour continues to Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, tickets HERE.
Images Deb Pelser
