4 hours ago
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‘With a little love, we can conquer all,” Simon Neil croons on Biffy Clyro’s opening song A Little Love, over its huge, infectious arena-rock chorus. It’s a line that feels like a mantra for the Scottish band 30 years and 10 albums in: they’re currently touring 2025’s Futique having come through a rough period. They experienced major burnout, band members fell out for the first time and founding member James Johnston pulled out of this tour due to mental health and addiction issues. But their new songs feel rooted in renewal, reconnection and newfound purpose. Neil pays tribute to his departed bandmate on the urgent and zippy Friendshipping, which is an ode to the importance of maintaining such relationships.
Futique was recorded in Berlin; the band said that the ghosts of Bowie, Iggy and Nick Cave’s the Birthday Party “bled into the songs”. No such art-pop apparitions feel present tonight. Instead there’s a rousing pop sensibility to these new tracks. Goodbye is a slow-burn ballad that explodes into an arms-aloft anthem, while Shot One embodies the band’s knack for merging sugary melodies and meaty riffs – existing in the blurred middle ground between rock, pop and metal that they comfortably own.
There’s plenty of older material too. The dual violins on That Golden Rule add a tense and wiry stab that synchronises with the audience’s air punches. Mountains sets the audience into a mass of pogoing bodies and screaming lungs, while the stripped-back acoustic delivery of Machines slows things down to a gentle whisper.
At their most eruptive, the band are brutally loud. Their ability to make taut, tight riffs explode into something enormous and overblown, as on a thunderous Living Is a Problem Because Everything Dies, is piercing and arresting. While occasionally things feel a tad familiar and repetitive over the near two-hour stretch, the closing one-two of Bubbles and Many of Horror is a potent and triumphant sign-off. Huge confetti cannons explode as the band and audience scream proudly in unison: “We are Biffy fucking Clyro!” Then they leave the stage having successfully conquered Nottingham.
