Review: Royal Blood at The Halls, Wolverhampton

Following its reopening in May The Halls in Wolverhampton has become a popular alternative to venues in Birmingham, having seen performances from bands including Blur, Two Door Cinema Club and The Script. On Thursday night it hosted Royal Blood for the Midlands stop on their UK and Ireland tour in support of their fourth studio album Back To The Water Below which was released in September. Despite being decently sized, The Halls and the other venues on the tour could be considered to be intimate for the band who have played arenas and the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury since their second album How Did We Get So Dark?, making these dates an opportunity to experience a similar magic to that of their early performances in the wake of their acclaimed debut record.

They started the show with the explosive bounce of the new album’s high-energy opening track Mountains At Midnight, an archetypal Royal Blood song with huge, bass-y riffs and ferocious drumming. This marked one of seven tracks from Back To The Water Below which, unsurprisingly, truly shone in person as Royal Blood have always been at their best live. Singles Shiner In The Dark and Pull Me Through were especially good with their polished sounds and arrangements and catchy choruses where the crowd tried their best to sing along with the falsetto parts. The album bridges the sounds of their last three records, incorporating both the visceral sound of the first two and the dance rock of 2021’s Typhoons which gave the set list a great deal of cohesion.

The set combined the new songs with their other hits from previous albums, although out of all of the fan favourites being played, the reactions for the likes of Little Monster, Loose Change and Ten Tonne Skeleton remained on a different level which is a testament to the uniqueness and unrepeatable excitement of their self-titled debut. Despite this adoration though, Royal Blood have managed to avoid being continuously haunted by the success of their first effort like many other bands before them by not straying too far from its intoxicatingly fun, riff-based sound that has remained at the foundations of most of their subsequent experimentation. This undeniable quality and the ability of their early work to excite thousands of people was best on display for the last songs of the main set and the encore, Out Of The Black and Figure It Out  which descended the room into a frenzy.

The show was executed with clinical precision with the songs sounding as close to the studio versions as possible while still retaining all of the nuances of live performance. This has been aided on their most recent tours by the addition of keyboard player Darren James to perform the piano and synth parts for the tracks from the last two albums, a change which at one time would have seemed unthinkable for a band who could be said to have attracted many fans off the intrigue of their unique two-man arrangement. However, most of the focus was very much still on Mike and Ben showing that the drums and bass combo can take them as far as they want for as long as they’re willing. This has been especially apparent on the last two albums which have featured a vast range of at times mind-boggling tones and sounds from Mike’s bass, which proves to have seemingly limitless capabilities and continues to push their work further and further.

After almost ten years the boys are still a must-see attraction, continuing to be one of the best rock bands in the country and can stand alongside anyone in terms of live performance. Their show in Wolverhampton was everything that you could hope for when you go to see a rock band and to see a group of Royal Blood’s stature in such close quarters was an unforgettable experience.