Live Review: Breaking Benjamin - O2 Academy Brixton, London 17/07/2026.
After almost a decade away, Breaking Benjamin’s UK return was long overdue. Bringing with them Chevelle and Return To Dust, their final night of their European tour was a hot, sticky, glorious mess.
Back in 2017, Breaking Benjamin sub-headlined Reading & Leeds’ Lock Up Stage and squeezed in a warm-up show at the O2 Forum Kentish Town. Before that, a duo of shows in 2016, which marked their first ever shows outside of North America… but that’s it. Nine years is a hell of a lot of time for fans to wait, as could be seen by the plethora of dates with upgraded venues on their tour. And now, almost nine years later, they finally rolled back into London.
California newcomers Return To Dust had the unenviable task of opening for them, likely particularly tricky an irritable, sweaty, slowly-filling crowd. With plenty of fans still filtering in after initial queues stretched around the building, the quartet leaned into their distinctly ‘90s grunge sound — weirdly perfect given the rest of the line-up, both of whom formed in the ‘90s themselves.
Dual vocalists Matty Bielawski and Graham Stanush complemented each other brilliantly, Bielawski’s soaring rasp hovering over Stanush’s darker, more melancholic delivery on tracks like ‘Abyss’ and ‘Bored’, all while the living lightning bolt of Sebastian Gonzalez blurred about the stage, likely causing at least a few photographers to curse his name.
There was little time for chatter, the band instead packing as much music as possible into their half-hour slot. Their cover of OutKast’s ‘Hey Ya!’ was an unexpected highlight, transforming the hip-hop classic into a wall of distorted guitars, before ‘Belly Up’ finally got the crowd bouncing… although the band may have had to restart the song from the pitiful participation, the non air-conditioned room making recalcitrant fans want to cling stubbornly onto their energy.
A fantastic end to their first official UK tour, barring their own headline show at Camden’s iconic barfly the next night, though hopefully they won’t wait as long as their tour partners to come back.
As much as Breaking Benjamin’s absence feels awful, it’s somehow now the worst on their tour — that honour instead lies with Illinois’ own Chevelle, with the tour marking their first UK appearance since 2014. An ocean of nodding heads greeted opener ‘An Island’, the band living up to the name in their oasis of rock on the still heavily partitioned stage and ‘Family System’ simmered from haunting chants into full-blown, intensely vitriolic rage; meanwhile, ‘Self Destructor’ — one of only two tracks on the set taken from any of the three albums they’ve released since last playing the UK — exploded beneath frantic strobes and the ever-so-slightly shoegaze ‘Send the Pain Below’ happily creaked by.
‘The Red’ though, unsurprisingly, saw the crowd come fully online. Opening the song alone, Pete stood, bereft of anything but his trusty guitar and the beam of a spotlight, and got all 5,000 fans present passionately roaring along. Add in brother Sam Loeffler on drums and bassist Kemble Walters, crashing in for the second chorus, and the venue reached a comfortable boiling point before erupting. ‘Comfortable Liar’ showcased the dynamism of Chevelle, Pete’s near-whispered vocals if inviting the packed room into a shared sense of intimacy, of betrayal, before a sudden, inexorable scream wrenched itself free from his throat; the final ‘Mars Simula’, then, felt a little anticlimactic — although no one there minded the track’s Korn-like menace, as it just meant another five minutes of Chevelle.
As the trio left the stage, drumsticks and picks flew into the crowd, the band flitting between smiling and smirking as they enjoyed their well-deserved applause — eventually ending up with Pete tossing his water bottle in there for good measure.
A quick interlude of karaoke — ‘Break Stuff’ probably claimed the loudest singalong of the night, though ‘Last Resort’ and ‘Chop Suey!’ — left spirits as buoyant and high as you could ask for. Well, for the most part anyway; security distributing endless cups of water and likely dragging attendees out of the throes of heatstroke, or even accessibility customers reportedly having to outright leave the venue because of the temperature, isn’t ideal at any venue, let alone one that went through refurbishments and reforms recently for crowd control and endangerment. You’d think air conditioning might have been one of them, but you’d sadly be mistaken.
Though all of that went out the metaphorical — and probably still closed — window the moment Breaking Benjamin finally emerged; although, given the expansive light bar set up, the Benjamin Burnleys (with the frontman joined by his son!) remained curiously shrouded in darkness throughout the show. It didn’t impact anything too much, especially as they broke into opener and fan favourite ‘I Will Not Bow’, just a strange decision to have a lighting dead spot centre stage.
Normally you’d talk about how some songs had a big reaction, this or that causing a venue-wide sing along, but that just became normalcy for their 80~ minute set. ‘Until The End’ was deafeningly loud, the red-and-white lighting bars accidentally resembling St George’s Crosses as if inadvertently supported the just-knocked-out national team — or maybe that’s just a projection on my part? — while ‘Red Cold River’ saw blinding streaks of unsurprisingly
blood red lighting and ‘Crawl’ saw some of Aaron Bruch’s signature unclean roars pierce the heat-filled miasma of the venue, all while sickly green lighting crept across the stage and moshing, meltingly sweaty lesions opened up in the band’s adoring crowd. ‘Blow Me Away’ inevitably drew one hell of a reaction, even without a Master Chief appearance — though commuting from Eridanus II every night is probably expensive, even for a Spartan — with crowdsurfers slipping and sliding themselves to the water-toting security, while the proggy, Tool-esque instrumentals of ‘So Cold’ seemed to sneer at the gasping warmth of the venue; even Ben jr. got some time in the proverbial, still-not-existant spotlight to share vocal duties in ‘Polyamorous’, any nerves at this point of the tour practically non-existent… beyond a slight trembling in the legs, anyway. The more emotional duo of ‘Breath’ and ‘Dear Agony’ went hand-in-hand with the heavier duo of newcomers ‘Something Wicked’ and ‘Awaken’, while the outpouring of euphoric London love for ‘Dance With The Devil’ is always a delight to experience.
“This whole tour has been surreal, and we couldn’t think of a better way to end it than here in London”, Benjamin imparted to the crowd, moved by the sweat-soaked adoration, and hopefully it might have planted a kernel of ‘maybe let’s not wait another nine years to come back’ in the band’s collective consciousness. Though, as the iconic opening notes of ‘The Diary of Jane’ washed through the venue, giving everyone one last chance to make up for nine years of lost time, the band nearly drowned out by the screamed zeal of 5,000 elder emos and newcomers alike, you’ve got to agree with the old idiom. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder.
Just not too much next time, eh?
Words by James O’Sullivan
