Review by Rick Eaglestone for MPM
A Perfect Circle had not graced British stages in eight years. two consecutive nights at Brixton on the 3rd and 4th of June — marked the opening salvo of the band’s first UK and European tour since 2018, when they had supported their fourth album Eat the Elephant. Eight years is a long time in any life. In the world of a band as mercurial as A Perfect Circle, it felt closer to a generation. A constellation of heavy music’s most restless creative minds, brought back to one of the world’s great stages. The expectation was enormous. What unfolded over the course of the evening was, in nearly every respect, equal to it.
Reclus.E opened proceedings with a thirty-minute set Playing nine tracks across their compact slot, they leaned into a sound that drew from the quieter, more corrosive end of alternative rock with 0pener “A Muted TV” established the group’s aesthetic from the first note: clean guitar lines layering into one another, a vocal performance that sat somewhere between plea and observation, and a rhythm section content to let space do much of the heavy lifting.
“Stain” and “Honey from Lions” followed with a slight uptick in density without abandoning the group’s measured approach, while “Isolationist” proved to be something of an early highlight — a six-minute exercise in slow-build architecture that had the more attentive sections of the floor visibly engaged.
Although the band showed off a harder-edged instinct lurking beneath their more ambient tendencies I couldn’t shake the feeling that the set felt like a soundcheck rather than an opening for such a revered band
Jehnny Beth delivered something altogether more visceral. The French-born, London-based artist built her reputation as frontwoman of Savages.
The set opened with “Broken Rib,” the album’s lead single, and the effect was immediate and decisive. The track hit the room like a controlled detonation — sharp, percussive, and driven by a performance of extraordinary physical commitment. Beth does not simply occupy a stage; she inhabits it entirely, moving with a coiled intensity that makes it difficult to look anywhere else. The crowd, still settling into the evening, snapped to attention.
“I Still Believe” followed, a more melodic but no less urgent offering, before “No Good for People” pushed the energy back toward confrontation. The mid-set cover of Bjork’s “Army of Me” was an inspired inclusion — a song that sits naturally within Beth’s aesthetic, all cold machinery and defiant posture — and she made it entirely her own.
“Innocence,” drawn from her debut album, offered a moment of comparative softness before “Out of My Reach” and “Obsession” re-established the album’s dominant mood of industrial unease. “I’m the Man” crackled with an almost theatrical aggression, and closer “I See Your Pain” brought the set to an end on a note of bruised, complicated feeling that felt perfectly calibrated for the emotional space A Perfect Circle were about to occupy.
It was clear that Jehnny Beth had not merely filled the support slot — she had elevated the entire night. This was the work of a genuinely singular artist operating near the height of her powers, and anyone in attendance who encountered that name for the first time on this evening will find themselves very well served indeed.
APC came in heavy and they came in high-minded. “The Package,” the opening track from Thirteenth Step, is as commanding an entrance as any band in this genre has at their disposal — Howerdel’s guitar tone massive and deliberate, Freese’s drums thunderous without ever being gratuitous, and Keenan’s voice arriving as if from somewhere just beyond the visible. It remains a song of extraordinary construction, and in the Brixton Academy’s acoustics it sounded almost architectural. The crowd was inside it before a word had been sung.
“Disillusioned,” the meditative centrepiece of Eat the Elephant, followed immediately — an interesting choice, pitching the band into the contemplative before the cathartic, but one that spoke to the confidence of a group who trust their audience implicitly. Keenan barely moved throughout the song’s duration. He rarely does. His stillness is not absence but concentration, a quality that lends even the quieter passages of an A Perfect Circle show a sense of barely contained force.
“The Contrarian” and “The Doomed” — both from Eat the Elephant — deepened the opening sequence’s intellectual texture. This is a band willing to confront their audience with challenging material early, unwilling to pander or reassure. “The Doomed” in particular, with its cyclical, escalating fury and its unsparing lyrical content, felt revelatory in a live context. The room received it like a body blow they had been quietly hoping for.
The mid-section of the first half offered a sustained emotional journey through A Perfect Circle’s catalogue, and it was here that the evening began to truly reveal its character. “Weak and Powerless” drew an enormous response, its familiarity offering the first real communal exhale of the night — thousands of voices joining the chorus in the manner that only very specific songs, absorbed over very specific periods of a person’s life, can produce.
“Rose,” from Mer de Noms, and “Blue,” from Thirteenth Step, gave the set a more elegiac quality, the room quieting to something closer to reverence as the band navigated the more delicate corners of their back catalogue. And then came the moments that will be talked about long after this tour concludes.
“Gravity,” a slow-burning piece of rare beauty drawn from the closing stretch of Thirteenth Step, arrived like a message from a past life — gorgeous and slightly unbearable in equal measure. “Orestes” — one of the most beloved tracks in the band’s entire catalogue and a personal favourite for me as this was my introduction to the band as XFM used to play it a lot pre debut and was the reason I purchased Mer de Noms on its release.
The first half closed with three tracks that shifted the energy back toward the propulsive. “TalkTalk” remained as arresting a live proposition as ever — urgent and metronomic, a song that drives forward with the relentless quality of something that cannot and will not be stopped. The aMOTION version of “3 Libras” — the atmospheric, stripped-back reworking rather than the Mer de Noms original — was a surprising and effective choice, its spectral quality lending the pre-intermission stretch a slight sense of dreamlike displacement. “The Outsider” closed the first half with its familiar combination of melodic urgency and visceral release, the crowd moving as one through its chorus.
The 10-minute break was brief and deliberate. The lights came up just enough to remind the room that this was a performance and not a hallucination. Conversations broke out in the window of normalcy before the second half reclaimed the darkness.
The return hit like a fist. “Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums” — the eMOTIVe reworking of “Pet” — opened the second section with a menacing, martial quality that immediately re-established the band’s capacity for genuine unease. The track exists in a strange, disorienting space in the catalogue — familiar, but deeply uncomfortable — and live, with the lights reduced to near-nothing and Keenan motionless at the microphone, it took on the quality of ritual rather than performance.
“The Noose,” one of Thirteenth Step’s emotional centrepieces, followed with devastating effect. It is a song about grace and about reckoning, and in the particular hush that Brixton maintained for its duration, it felt genuinely sacred. Few artists can command that quality of silence from an audience of this size. It is not technique. It is not production value. It is something indefinable about the relationship between these songs and the people who have carried them.
Just days before the tour began, A Perfect Circle released new single “Starless,” The room received it with a mix of curiosity and something very close to elation. It is an epic piece — unhurried, layered, and bearing the unmistakable hallmarks of Howerdel’s most ambitious compositional instincts. Keenan’s vocal on the track carries an older, more weathered quality than on earlier records, and that is not a diminishment — it is a deepening. The song signals clearly that whatever A Perfect Circle do next will not be a retreat.
They closed with “Judith.” Of course they did. The song remains the closest thing A Perfect Circle have to a crowd-destroying finale — an explosion of noise and feeling and catharsis that carries twenty-six years of weight without showing a single sign of strain. For the second night, the band relaxed their strict no-filming policy for the final two songs of the set — a gesture the crowd received with warm appreciation. Phones were raised. The song erupted. The Academy shook in the way that only particular rooms, on particular nights, in particular company, can shake.
This was not a nostalgia exercise. A Perfect Circle are too self-aware, too demanding of themselves and their audience, to offer anything so comfortable. Night Two at Brixton was a masterclass in the relationship between craft and conviction — a band in full command of an extraordinary body of work, performing it with rigour and without compromise.
