The Hordern Pavilion doesn’t feel like a venue tonight; it feels like a fortified outpost. By the time the houselights dim, the room is thick with heat, sweat, and anticipation — a pressure chamber waiting to erupt. The air holds a charge familiar to anyone who’s ever walked into a festival tent just before the headliner: you can sense the spectacle before it even begins.
Amaranthe arrive not as openers but as co-conspirators, their set unfurling like a challenge to the night itself. They balance opposites with brazen ease: sugar-slick choruses colliding with djent downstrokes, Elize Ryd’s crystalline voice cutting through the dark, while Nils Molin’s melodies hover in between. It’s a deliberately unstable formula, yet it works because instability is the point. Where most bands file the edges down for cohesion, Amaranthe revel in contrast, and the crowd — fists in the air, bodies in motion — surrenders to it. Their presence feels less like support and more like a provocation, a reminder that metal’s borders are there to be breached.
When Sabaton finally storm the stage, they do so with the force of ritual. For more than two decades, they’ve built an empire on martial riffs and the histories they carry — songs that transform battles, trenches, and regiments into communal hymns. At the Hordern, that history becomes embodied. Warfare imagery forms the backdrop, lights flash like shellfire, and pyro bursts cut through the haze of dry ice. The band’s front line moves with a drill-sergeant precision, but there’s a knowing theatricality: this is war not as tragedy, but as parable, a spectacle reimagined for a generation of fans who chant each chorus as if it were gospel.
What could easily slide into camp instead lands as communion. Sabaton’s gift is the ability to make heavy metal’s obsession with power feel less like machismo and more like collective storytelling. The audience is central here — not just watching but enlisting, their voices joining Joakim Brodén’s in waves that seem to rattle the pavilion’s steel bones.
The night works because of its dual structure. Amaranthe ignite the room with relentless energy, and Sabaton take that momentum to full scale, commanding the Hordern with precision and power. The production, the performance, and the crowd all lock together, turning the venue into a single force. The night works because every element—sound, spectacle, and audience—connects in the moment, making the experience as immediate as it is overwhelming.
In a cultural moment where live performance often reduces to content fodder, here is a show that resists flattening. It is oversized, overblown, and yet deeply earnest.
The tour moves to Brisbane and Auckland next, tickets HERE.
Images Deb Pelser.
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