Bloc Party recently performed live at The Anthem in DC to celebrate 20 years of their debut album, Silent Alarm (2005), and they played through that album’s song and other tunes with impressive power and style. They also made some very smart choices that augmented the intensity of the show, which had the best sound that I had heard in the 6,000-person venue in a long time.
On June 2, Bloc Party arrived fresh and ready for the tasks at hand: 1. To play some scorching hot bangers for an audience ready to dance, 2. to toast their remarkable debut album in a way that kept it exciting, and 3. to leave DC clamoring for more. The quartet firmly exceeded their goals.
One of the smartest decisions frontman Kele Okereke and company made was to sprinkle 10 tracks of Silent Alarm throughout the 21-song set. This meant that the band did not play the album its in entirety; they did not play it in tracklist order; and they did play one Silent Alarm set and follow it up with a set of additional songs. Bloc Party made smart setlist choices that accentuated the power of Silent Alarm’s numbers by placing them next to other selections from the band’s catalog. For example, Bloc Party began the evening as if telling a story by opening with “So Here We Are” and then “She’s Hearing Voices” from Silent Alarm but then broke that up with “Hunting with Witches” from A Weekend in the City, the band’s 2007 sophomore album.
As a result of this smart sequencing, Bloc Party imbued each of these song with their full dramatic effect, giving them space and meaning. The audience digested them in an appropriate manner and hungered for more!
By the time Bloc Party reached the numbers in the middle of their show, the audience was fully immersed and dancing the night away. It was a perfect time then for the Silent Alarm single, “Banquet.”
Watch the official music video for “Banquet” by Bloc Party on YouTube:
At The Anthem, Bloc Party was relentless. Kele’s voice was in top form. Co-founder Russell Lissack was a dynamo on guitar, where he moved like a man possessed by the music. Drummer Louise Bartle was perfectly poised as she infused each song with the clarity and brilliance that characterize the band’s post-punkiness. And bassist Harry Deacon may be the new guy, but his confidence and skill convince you that he’s been there all along.
Bloc Party kept the energy flowing in the second half of the show, again making smart decisions in the order of the setlist. The band followed “Banquet” with “Traps” from Alpha Games (2022), their sixth and most recent studio album, which reminded listeners that the band retain their sonic muscle in more recent offerings. They later brought things down a notch for torch song “Ion Square” from Hymns (2016), which really grabbed the audience. The Anthem, by the way, was pretty full if not quite sold out. It was a terrific showing, which served as a reminder that this is a venue of appropriate size for Bloc Party, who made their debut there in 2019.
Also, the sound was remarkably good. Sometimes in The Anthem, otherwise wonderful bands sound a bit tinny in the rear of the venue, but Bloc Party filled the space wall to wall, not yielding an inch in their delivery of pure, thrilling sonic power. They maintained that thrill and goosed it a bit to close their set on Silent Alarm’s “Like Eating Glass,” which knocked the audience out with its potency.
Block Party returned for a six-song encore, which again wisely mixed three Silent Alarm songs with three tracks from various other albums, complementing all of the numbers in their best light. Encore standouts for me were the relentless “Helicopter,” a song that could serve as a blueprint for jangly post-punk dance numbers and one of the very best songs of the 2010s, and “Flux,” an endlessly melodic (and rather new wave) smackdown from A Weekend in the City.
Watch the official music video for “Flux” by Bloc Party on YouTube:
For this tour, Bloc Party enlisted openers that gave attendees a range of different sounds, which made for a complete evening. I confess that it was disappointing to learn the original plan to tour with Canadian new wave quartet Metric fell through. But this gave Bloc Party an opportunity to build something different with this concert and they took it. And so joan, hailing from Little Rock, Arkansas, was the first band to open the show. joan are a duo who play as a quartet, and Alan Benjamin Thomas and Steven Rutherford played a few new songs, opening their eight-song set with “heart body mind soul” and closing it with “drive all night.” joan have toured through DC previously, performing at Union Stage for example in 2019.
The second band on the bill was Blonde Redhead, yet another stylistically different band. Blonde Redhead’s shoegaze-leaning set drew listeners to the stage as people filled The Anthem in anticipation of Bloc Party’s set. The trio — Kazu Makino and twin brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace — paced through 11 songs that showcased some of the band’s career highlights like “Falling Man,” “Sit Down for Dinner” Parts 1 and 2, and “23.” I had long had an ambition to see Blonde Redhead, and so I appreciated this opportunity to see these three skilled musicians at work. Their focus and attention to detail contributed to their musical excellence, and again they presented a different kind of pop music than Bloc Party, which varied the terrain for revelers at The Anthem for the evening.
All in all, this invigorating tour is worthy of your attention: It will remind you of why Bloc Party are so awesome and maybe introduce you to a new favorite as well.
Here are some photos of Bloc Party headlining The Anthem on June 2, 2025. All pictures by Mickey McCarter. (Keep scrolling for photos of the openers!)
Here are some photos of Blonde Redhead opening Bloc Party at The Anthem on June 2, 2025.
Here are some photos of Joan opening Bloc Party at The Anthem on June 2, 2025.
