When The Amazons dropped their darker, heavy-hitting sophomore album earlier this year, a few wondered if it could possibly live up to 2017’s self-titled debut record.
But as the four-piece amble onto stage at Newcastle’s O2 Academy on Tuesday and burst into Future Dust‘s ‘Fuzzy Tree’ with a rallying cry from fiery-haired frontman Matt Thompson, it’s clear this is a band that is going nowhere.
90 minutes of The Amazons’ high energy indie turned alt-rock is punctuated by Thompson’s enviable charisma and a raucous Geordie showing. Graduating from the city’s Riverside venue, which the band packed out back in 2017 whilst on the road with The Amazons, this year’s swaggering set to thousands sees promising indie rockers turn into undeniable industry juggernauts.
Whilst it is the fan-favourites from the band’s debut record that make for the night’s highlights, it’s the material off Future Dust that bulks out the group’s show. The foot-stomping ‘Mother’ is dropped early on, ‘Georgia’ sees guitarist Chris Alderton shine and ‘Dark Visions’ comes to life towards the end of the night.
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Amongst the new material, having the likes of ‘Junk Food Forever’ and ‘Ultraviolet’ from that debut record makes for a pretty potent mix. Elsewhere, ‘Little Something’ is mashed up with covers of ‘Helter Skelter’, ’20th Century Boy’, ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Bulls on Parade’ in eight minutes of rock-filled madness.
One last hurrah comes with the fiery riffs of ‘Black Magic’, the band’s brilliant banger that burst them onto the scene two years ago. And one thing that is clear in Newcastle on Tuesday night – that scenes is theirs now.
Are you seeing The Amazons on their Future Dust Tour? Let us know @CelebMix on Twitter.