Photo Credit: Anthony Hunt
Demand for the O2 Academy stop on I Prevail’s Violent Nature tour ran hot enough that a second Birmingham date, Sunday 27th September, went on sale within days of Saturday’s show selling out. Violent Nature, the album the tour is built around, marked a heavier, more uncompromising turn for the band following Brian Burkheiser‘s exit, and Saturday’s set leaned into that shift rather than softening it for a support-heavy bill. It’s the band’s first UK run built entirely around vocalist Eric Vanlerberghe carrying the whole set alone, clean and unclean, and on this evidence the transition hasn’t cost the band anything at the door.
The bill made sense as an arc rather than a straight support-plus-headliner pairing. Gore.’s more straightforwardly brutal metalcore gave way to Polaris’s blend of melody and heaviness, and both set up I Prevail’s own genre-blurring set without either support act reading as filler.
Doors were punctual for a Saturday show this size, and the queue outside had stretched around the block well before Gore. took the stage, a preview of how busy the room was about to get. Gore. opened to a room already three-quarters full, a turnout most support slots don’t get. The Texan quartet, fronted by Haley Roughton, are barely three years into existence but already carry direct support slots with Motionless In White and Papa Roach, and their seven-song set showed why. Wrath set the tone early under a wash of purple and gold light, Doomsday did exactly what its title promised, and closer Babylon left no doubt about what kind of night this was going to be. Roughton screamed through the set with a rawness the band’s age shouldn’t allow, chain-belt swinging as she worked the front of the stage.
Polaris followed to a fuller room still, the Sydney five-piece trading Gore.’s density for something moodier: hazy orange-red light, less strobe, more atmosphere, matching a band whose reputation has always leaned on melody and ambience as much as weight. Front man Jamie Hails led a set that shifted between those quieter passages and outright surges, with Landmine and Inhumane triggering Birmingham’s first wall of death, the crowd splitting into two banks either side of the floor before slamming back together on cue, and Nightmare closing on a note heavy enough to carry the pits straight into the turnaround for the headliner. Even in a room this size, whole sections sang Hails’ cleaner passages back at him word for word.
By the time I Prevail took the stage, in front of a chain-link backdrop and a lighting rig throwing hard white bursts across the whole band, the O2 Academy was at capacity, and the difference from three-quarters through to sold-out was immediate. Circle pits opened faster and held longer than they had for either support act, and crowd surfers, largely absent through the earlier sets, arrived in numbers: Body Bag alone sent hordes of them over the barrier, bodies passing overhead in a near-constant relay toward the sound desk.
Bow Down and title track Violent Nature did the early heavy lifting, but the set’s best moments came from moves away from straight aggression. The cover of Taylor Swift’s Blank Space isn’t a novelty at this point: it’s the song that broke the band back in 2014, and playing it a decade into their career gave it more weight than most bands manage with their actual singles. The drum solo ran under Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction blasting through the PA, a pairing strange enough on paper to have gone wrong and confident enough live that it didn’t. God landed as the heaviest sequence of the set, but the night’s standout was Paradise. Its recorded version is built around Amira Elfeky’s vocal; in Birmingham that part went to Roughton, back out from Gore’s earlier slot to trade the song’s hook with Vanlerberghe. It’s the kind of crossover moment a support slot rarely gets, and it did more for the room than a straight run through the album cut would have.
Sound across all three sets stayed clean throughout, with none of the low-end mud a room this size and this heavy can produce when the mix isn’t right. Getting Gore’s density, Polaris’s more melodic build and I Prevail’s genre-hopping set to all translate properly, on the same rig, across one night, is no small thing, and it’s part of why a room that started the evening three-quarters full ended it packed to the walls and short of breath.
Words and Photos: Anthony Hunt
