alt-J (An Awesome Wave 10th Anniversary) – 23 September 2023 @ Northcote Theatre, Melbourne VIC

Some albums don’t age. They change shape.

An Awesome Wave has always felt like a living thing. Not a collection of songs so much as a place you stumble into without quite knowing how. Ten years on, inside the low-lit warmth of Northcote Theatre, it didn’t feel like a return. It felt like the album had been waiting patiently for us to catch up.

The room was hushed before a note was played, the kind of quiet that feels deliberate. Lights hovered in soft amber. Shadows stretched. When the intro began, it didn’t announce itself. It seeped in. ❦ (Ripe & Ruin) unfolded slowly, like the opening of a book you already knew by heart but hadn’t touched in years.

Tessellate arrived with its familiar, coiled rhythm, slithering through the room. It didn’t demand attention. It drew it in. Bodies leaned forward. Heads tilted. The audience moved instinctively, as if the song had a gravitational pull. This was not the chaos of a crowd. It was collective focus.

With Breezeblocks, tension crept back in. The jagged edges, the fractured energy. It felt sharper live, more physical, like the song was pushing against the walls of the theatre. ❦ (Guitar) followed, briefly suspending the night, a reset before Something Good and Dissolve Me softened the air again. These songs felt translucent, drifting across faces lit from below, lyrics landing gently but with intent.

Matilda changed the temperature of the room. The noise dropped away. The song hovered, fragile and unguarded, and for a moment it felt like everyone was listening to it alone, together. Ms and Fitzpleasure pulled things darker, heavier. The bass pressed inward. The atmosphere thickened. You didn’t dance to these songs so much as exist inside them.

❦ (Piano) marked a turning point. Bloodflood built slowly, inexorably, the kind of rise that feels less like anticipation and more like inevitability. When it finally crested, it was vast but restrained, power held just long enough to feel overwhelming. Taro followed with quiet grace, cinematic and solemn, a closing chapter written in long shadows and soft light. Hand-Made felt intimate, grounding, like touching earth after floating for too long.

After a pause, the second set widened the frame. Chicago shimmered with warmth. Deadcrush and U&ME snapped the room back into motion, sharper, more kinetic. The Gospel of John Hurt and Every Other Freckle brought a playful looseness, a reminder that alt-J have always balanced the cerebral with the absurd. In Cold Blood pulsed with confidence, the band fully relaxed now, the crowd fully awake.

The encore arrived without ceremony. Hard Drive Gold cut through with swagger, modern and restless, before Left Hand Free finally broke the spell open. Not as a nostalgic singalong, but as release. Movement replaced stillness. Smiles spread. The album’s world didn’t collapse. It simply expanded.

When it ended, there was no rush. No scramble for phones or doors. Just a lingering stillness, as if the room needed a moment to return to itself.

alt-J didn’t perform An Awesome Wave. They let it breathe again. They reminded us that some records don’t belong to a year or a moment. They belong to whoever is ready to listen to them properly.

For one night in Northcote, that felt like everyone.