The O2 Academy Brixton knows how to hold a crowd, but on Sunday night, it became something else entirely. A thunderous, heart-thumping sanctuary for the bold, the broken, and the ready to feel everything at once were primed and ready for Alexisonfire who were joined by Birds In Row.
Alexisonfire – Birds In Row
O2 Academy Brixton – 13 July 2025
Words And Photography: Ash Nash
Birds In Row opened the evening with a performance that was nothing short of breathtaking. Emotionally charged and intense, this was the kind of set that rattles your ears and shakes something loose in your chest. Every note felt like a statement, and every silence carried weight.
And then came Alexisonfire. If anyone needed a reminder of why this band holds such legendary status in post-Hardcore and beyond, this was it.
From the first crashing chord to the final howl of the night, Alexisonfire were utterly relentless and deeply connected with their audience.
There was sweat. There were screams. There were moments that felt genuinely transcendent.
It was everything you want from live music: cathartic, wild, and impossibly loud. In a world that is often spinning too fast to keep up with, this show felt like slamming the brakes on one defiant moment of roaring togetherness. What a night.
Birds In Row: Crushing Catharsis and the Beauty Between
Opening a sold-out O2 Academy Brixton show might daunt many acts, but Birds In Row do not approach performance like entertainment. They approach it like a reckoning, with that kind of menace that submerges through a fog of soft light and restrained tension.
The French trio did not greet the crowd with grand pleasantries, just a few words of thanks and glee between.
No fanfare. No front. Just three figures standing in silence, tuning, pausing, then launching into what felt less like a song and more like a confrontation with everything you would rather keep buried.
Their presence was lean but loaded, the music immediate and unflinching. Within seconds, they had transformed the cavernous venue into something far more intimate, almost uncomfortable in its emotional intensity.
Every note was delivered with surgical precision, not in a technical sense, but in its purpose. Guitars did not so much soar as scrape against the inside of your chest. Basslines rumbled beneath the skin, dislodging whatever defence mechanisms you had brought in with you. Drums pulsed like a heartbeat under pressure.
With the zest of vocals, richly cathartic half scream, half chant, half plea – cut straight through the haze.
There is something deeply serious about Birds In Row, not in a self-important way, but in the urgency of their message. They are not here to entertain. They are here to articulate despair, resistance, hope, and collapse.
Each song unfolded like a monologue halfway between grief and protest, and although the lyrics were not always crystal-clear, the intention behind them was unmistakable. This was about survival. About the kind of personal and political trauma that doesn’t come with clean endings or easy refrains.
They opened with Water Wings, a jagged slow-burner that seemed to stalk the edges of vulnerability. Then came Daltonians and Confettis, each delivered with a sharpened edge – relentless, confrontational, almost accusatory in tone.
Noah and Cathedrals followed like storm fronts, each laced with a bruised defiance. It was not just the volume that carried force. It was the conviction behind it.
Nympheas brought a haunting shift in atmosphere, delicate and devastating all at once. Bouncing between the tracks in their inventory, 15-38 arrived like a gut punch, brief and brutal, while Grisaille slowed the tempo only to plunge deeper into that liminal space between fury and sorrow.
You could feel the weight of it all, the grief, the confusion, the quiet rage that often has nowhere to go.
Trompe l’oeil unfolded with that characteristic Birds In Row tension, subdued, then explosive. Rodin, hypnotic and meditative, reminded us how sculptural their sound really is: chiselled, patient, and full of ghostly negative space.
Then, in what felt like the emotional climax, Last Last Chance tore the air open, only for I Don’t Dance to bring the set full circle, its title a provocation, its delivery a scream against indifference.
What’s remarkable is how they move between the intensely personal and the pointedly universal with almost no transition. One moment, it feels like you are witnessing a private breakdown. The next, it’s a rallying cry for collective action.
Through it all, the band remains almost anonymous. Even with recent shifts toward visibility, no longer shrouding their identities as they once did, Birds In Row reject the spotlight. No egos. No banter. Just an unspoken agreement with the audience: we will give you everything. Meet us in the ruins.
Whether familiar with the band or discovering them for the first time, people listened, not passively, but seriously. The atmosphere was still, like holding your breath in a room full of smoke. A few heads nodded. Some eyes closed. A handful of people cried quietly at the back. This was not the kind of set that provokes crowd-surfing or call-and-response. It provoked something internal: an ache, a memory, a recognition.
As the set drew to a close, there was no crescendo, no forced climax. Just a slow unwinding, a parting glance, a final chord that lingered longer than expected. Then silence. The kind of silence that is not empty but full, like the air after a difficult conversation you are grateful to have had.
Birds In Row dismantled the idea that a support act is just a precursor to the main event. What they delivered was a serious and deeply affecting meditation on what it means to carry pain and keep going. And in that space, with that sound, they were not just a band. They were a mirror.
Alexisonfire: Fire, Flair, and Ferocity
And just like that, all hell broke loose. There are very few bands who can swing from poetic introspection to pure, unfiltered chaos without giving the crowd whiplash, but Alexisonfire has made an entire career out of that tension.
Since bursting out of St Catharines, Ontario, in 2001, these post-Hardcore pioneers have worn contradiction like a badge of honour: aggression and beauty, melody and mayhem, screamed catharsis and soulful clarity.
As the haunting intro of Young Cardinals rang out across Brixton, the room ignited. Arms shot skyward, feet left the ground. George Pettit tore onto the stage like a sermon set alight, veins bulging, limbs flying, voice a ragged blade of noise.
This was not an entrance. It was a reckoning. What followed was nothing short of a masterclass in how to age without losing your edge. The setlist traced their journey from their 2002 self-titled debut right through to 2022’s Otherness, an album that arrived after a 13-year gap and proved they have not only still got it but have grown.
Sweet Dreams Of Otherness hit hard, groove-driven and thick with feeling. It was the sound of a band who have lived through fires and now know how to shape the smoke. Dallas Green, now as well-known for his solo work as City And Colour, lifted every moment with a voice that cuts like light through fog.
He commands the space. Every note soared, anchoring the chaos with clarity. Pettit and Wade MacNeil, who between them summon everything from throat-shredding screams to shimmering reverb-drenched textures, added an electric unpredictability. Chris Steele, barefoot and wild-eyed, danced like a man with thunder in his chest.
They did not just revisit the hits; they recharged them. Boiled Frogs and This Could Be Anywhere In The World sounded seismic. You could feel the floor shift with every chorus.
Tracks from Otherness held the room just as tightly, especially Sans Soleil, with its shimmering melancholy and aching vocal interplay showing just how much the band’s palette has deepened.
Then came something truly rare. The live debut of Survivor’s Guilt. The crowd held its collective breath. A slow-building juggernaut of melodic despair and thunderous release, it landed like a monolith. People stared, stunned. And then the floodgates opened with cheers, fists and tears. The moment it ended, it already belonged to the fans.
And what fans they were. A sea of patched denim, black band tees and weathered tattoos, some just discovering the band, others who had grown up with Watch Out! and Crisis as their soundtrack. This was a homecoming. Everyone sang, everyone moved. It felt like collective memory, like ritual.
The chemistry of Alexisonfire on stage was a joy to witness. Pettit, now grey at the temples but no less possessed, joked, “We’re older, louder, sweatier. Let’s see what breaks first. Us or the floor.”
MacNeil toggled effortlessly between punk fury and shoegaze elegance. And Steele? He may just be the most delightfully unhinged bassist in rock ‘n’ roll, flailing, stomping, rapturous.
The set rolled on like a hurricane. Rough Hands bled like a bruised lullaby, To A Friend was screamed like a confession hurled from a rooftop. Even deep cuts like It Was Fear Of Myself That Made Me Odd sparked joyous roars. Little Girls Pointing and Laughing, one of their earliest tracks, still snarled with untamed ferocity.
And when This Could Be Anywhere In The World brought the main set to a head, the place erupted. Voices cracked, bodies surged. For a moment, it genuinely felt like the floor might collapse. And if it had, no one would have cared.
When Alexisonfire returned for the encore, it was not just to tick boxes. They gave us the urgent and unrelenting Accidents. But it was the final song, World Stops Turning, that left the deepest mark. A song steeped in grief and quiet devastation, it offered space to breathe.
As Dallas crooned those final trembling lines, the crowd fell silent, suspended in stillness. It was elegiac. Sacred. They did not end the show with noise. They ended it with trust.
What makes a night like this unforgettable?
It is never just about the setlist, not really. It is about how a show makes you feel right down in your bones, the kind of feeling that lingers for days afterwards, echoing in your chest. On this night, Alexisonfire and Birds In Row transformed O2 Academy Brixton into something far greater than a concert venue. It became a sanctuary, a shared space for grief, for anger, for release and for joy.
Birds In Row reminded us that vulnerability and rage are not opposites, they are two sides of the same storm. Their performance was a serious emotional outpouring, proof that sometimes the loudest scream into the void is also the most honest expression of survival.
Alexisonfire were living proof that getting older does not mean burning out or fading away. It means knowing yourself better, sharpening your intent, playing with purpose and embracing the fire instead of fearing it.
Their joy was contagious, their pain worn with pride, and the connection between them was absolutely unbreakable. This was not just another night of post-Hardcore. It was a reminder of why this music still matters, why it is still vital and why it heals.
Because tonight, it did not just sound powerful. It sounded like salvation.
