Last November, English rock band Wunderhorse supported the Irish band Fontaines D.C. on their European tour. Earlier this year, they announced they would be going on their own headline tour at the end of May. The tour started in Paris on the final day of the month and on the 1st of June, made a stop at Paradiso in Amsterdam.
At 19:00, the doors to the venue opened, and approximately 40 minutes later support act junodream took to the stage. The so-called dream-rock band consists of lead singer and guitarist Ed Vyvyan, guitarists Dougal Gray and Tom Rea, and drummer Jake Gidley. They released their debut album Pools of Colour in 2024 and started tonight’s set with the album’s third track, ‘The Beach’. At almost five minutes long, the track has a long intro and is more instrumental than lyric-heavy, with the singer using that to shout out “how you doing Amsterdam?”. They continued their set with more songs from the album, namely ‘Kitchen Sink Drama’ and ‘Death Drive’. The former talks about the feeling that “the walls are closing in from every direction” when a relationship slowly but steadily goes sour. The song has mostly repetitive lyrics, with Vyvyan shouting out “Now what’s got into you?” as a desperate attempt to communicate with his significant other. ‘Death Drive’, on the other hand, talks not of a personal issue, but of a world-wide one. The band wrote this existential track about how humanity’s existence on earth is so unique, yet instead of celebrating that, the people in charge are making a mess and destroying the earth in the process.
After the third song, Vyvyan stated how this show was “not the first time we are here” and also “not the last time we are here”, as the band is coming to Amsterdam back to play their own show in November. They went on by playing ‘Travel Guide’, ‘White Whale’, and finally, ‘Nobody Wants You’. Junodream’s music as stated before consists more of instrumentals rather than lyrics, making it hard to sing along, but absolutely not hard to move to the hypnotizing riffs of each and every song. While the songs may be perfect as a soundtrack to a modern-day coming-of-age film, they also easily filled the hall of the old church. One fan in particular was having the time of his live; an older man at the front of the audience was jumping and dancing around and his energy impacted the band and everyone around him in the best way during these thirty minutes.
Main act Wunderhorse was supposed to start their own set at 20:30, but because of the small delay that had caused Junodream to end later, Wunderhorse themselves came up at 20:45. The band consists of four members: lead singer and guitarist Jacob Slater, guitarist Harry Fowler, bassist Seb Byford and drummer Jamie Staples. Besides Byford, the men all came on wearing sunglasses. They opened their set with ‘Midas’ – the title track from their latest album – ‘Butterflies’, and ‘Emily’. Their iconic logo hung from the ceiling and created beautiful shadows against the white backdrop that covered the entire wall behind them. Fans were enthusiastic right from the start, but began to jump up and down as soon as the first notes of ‘Girl’ were played. The band did not introduce any of their songs so far, but there was no need: every fan recognized every intro.
After playing ‘Girl Behind the Glass’, which Slater wrote about an old friend of his who was struggling with addiction, Slater addressed the audience for the first time, asking the fans “how’s it going? you alright?” before diving right into ‘Cathedrals’. “The cathedrals are on fire,” Slater sang out loudly while the music banged on. The instrumentals kept going on, and for a rather long time the band just kept jamming until they switched to the introduction of ‘Leader of the Pack’. This caused the fans to jump up yet again: the crowd definitely had its favourites, and this was one of them. The highlights of the evening were right after, however. During the emotional outro of ‘Arizona’, Slater’s raspy vocals really stood out. Continuing on an emotional note, the band then played ‘Purple’, which Slater wrote about a girl he knew that grew up in a tough environment. Near the end of the song, Slater went mental, running around the stage and bumping into his bandmate Harry Fowler, before finishing the song sitting down at the front of the stage.
It was not yet time for the sad notes to go away, as Wunderhorse continued with ‘Aeroplane’, during which the audience waved around their phone lights and lit up the entire room. The band then played the at the time unreleased song ‘The Rope’. Afterwards, Slater thanked the fans for coming out. “We appreciate it,” he stated, before playing the fan favourite ‘Teal’. Slater, besides making music with Wunderhorse, also releases music under his own name, and has decided to add ‘One for the Pigeons’ to the setlist. Before playing it, he asked the audience to help him out with singing it. The fans did start a little too early, which made for a funny moment, but it was still a beautiful rendition of the song. Finally, Wunderhorse – who did not go off stage for the encore – ended their set with ‘Silver’ and ‘Rain’. The latter is a very haunting song that Slater wrote about “the idea that the forces that shape your world are unaware of your existence and beyond your control”. While quite a dark and even sad track, it was also the only track to which the fans finally decided to start a mosh pit – the fans went absolutely wild for these final few minutes. They kept going on as long as it took for the outro to die out and had the time of their lives with this band tonight.
