Bloc Party – Spark Arena: August 12, 2025 (13th Floor Concert Review)
It had been almost twenty years since I first heard Bloc Party, tucked away in my room with a copy of A Weekend in the City and the strange, liberating sensation that someone else’s words and guitar riffs had finally caught up with my life.
I was nineteen then, all elbows and restlessness with a beer in hand. I’m thirty-eight now, standing in Spark Arena with a beer spilled on my shoes by a coked-up dude in his mid-50s who looks like he hasn’t left the house in over a decade. It’s funny how music has a way of throwing you back into your own timeline without warning.
Young The Giant
Young The Giant opened the night with the sort of warm confidence that only comes from years of playing together, a point that was touched on twice in two quite vulnerable and beautiful speeches to the crowd.
The first was about pushing yourself into uncomfortable places so you can grow, about the way they’d learned to become fearless together on stage since they were nineteen. The second was about a song they released after their debut, one that flopped until it didn’t, and how they’d never apologised for being who they were. It’s a rare kind of sincerity in an opening act, and by the time they played that very song, now their biggest hit, you could feel the crowd leaning in.
Bloc Party
When Bloc Party stepped out, it was without theatrics or long introductions, just a quiet confidence, that wonderfully British mix of relaxed and high-energy, as though they’d already decided the music would do the talking. The opening of So Here We Are rolled in slow, deliberate waves, like dipping into cold water before you’re ready. She’s Hearing Voices arrived as a twitching jolt with flashing red and blue stage lights, snapping the crowd fully awake, and Mercury followed like a fever dream, metallic, manic, impossible to stand still to.
Price of Gasoline snarled across the room before Blue Light cooled it down again, proof that Bloc Party still understood how to bend the night’s energy without breaking it. Song for Clay (Disappear Here) was as sharp and restless as I’ve always remembered, with sharp distorted guitar slicing through the arena like neon in fog, and Banquet landed with the sort of precision that made it sound like it could have been written yesterday. For a Tuesday, the Auckland crowd was certainly eager to expel some latent and long-overdue energy.
What struck me most was how the set refused to settle into a single mood. Traps barrelled forward like a getaway car, Skeleton gave you space to breathe before Team A reeled you back in, and The Love Within detonated into euphoric chaos. And somewhere in all of it, I realised I was holding two versions of myself in my head; the nineteen-year-old who’d once clung to these songs like instructions, and the thirty-eight-year-old who now knew those instructions were meant to be rewritten. That’s the strange magic of a band like Bloc Party; the songs don’t just survive the years, they survive your own growth.
The final stretch was relentless. Like Eating Glass shook the floor, while Helicopter turned the arena into one pulsing body, a crowd-surfing mohawked fan screaming into the microphone as Kele Okereke jumped from the stage and into the front row of the floor crowd – and finally Ratchet closing the main set as every fan expended what was left of their eager, grinning energy. There was no sense of nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, no false attempt to pretend it was still 2005. They played as if the intervening decades had only sharpened their edges, as if the songs themselves had been living their own parallel lives.
There was something deeply grounding about seeing them again now, in this exact moment of my own life. Live music does that – it stitches together past and present in ways you can’t plan for. You hear the same chords, but the person hearing them has changed entirely.
By the end, the lights came up on a crowd that looked half-dazed, half-exhilarated, people clutching scraps of melody still rattling in their heads, talking too loudly as if volume might preserve the high a little longer. For me, it was a reminder that bands like Bloc Party aren’t just playing songs; they’re keeping alive the strange, messy ritual of gathering in a room with strangers to feel something real. I’ve waxed disgustingly lyrical about this shared experience in the past, but there’s something beautiful about the bond created in experiencing something perfectly imperfect.
In an era when so much music exists in playlists and algorithms, when we have legions of precision-heavy slop being churned out into the ears of the masses, this was the antithesis; imperfect, immediate, and entirely unrepeatable. Bloc Party didn’t just celebrate twenty years of Silent Alarm and the rest of their catalogue; they proved why live music is worth protecting.
Because whether you were hearing Banquet for the first time or the fiftieth, there was no mistaking the feeling: this night, this room, these people, these songs… all of it only happened once, a rare and unrepeatable magic.
The kind that settles in your chest and stays there, colouring the years ahead the way that first discovery did decades earlier. Back then it was the rush of something new; now it’s the quiet certainty that music, at its best, doesn’t just mark time; it folds it in on itself, letting us feel nineteen and thirty-eight in the very same breath.
Oxford Lamoureaux
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Bloc Party:
Young The Giant:
