Live review: Lamb of God, Trivium and Bleed From Within at Hordern Pavilion, Sydney on Friday, October 9, 2026
By BRIAN GIFFIN
IT WAS a big night for major shows in Sydney this evening with Katatonia and From Ashes to New also filling rooms around the city, but the focus here was on a sold-out Hordern Pavilion as two of the biggest metal bands of the 21st century went head to head.
Opening the night were Scottish tourists Bleed From Within. As a band that actually has an identifiably original take on metalcore, they deserve the chance to be on a show like this. I was unfortunately too late to enjoy most of their set but I was reliably informed by a good source that they went off hard and the crowd clearly enjoyed them. Do check them out though if you haven’t already because they should be better known than they are.
Trivium is a band that is very well known. They’ve also apparently been to Australia 15 times, according to Matt Heafy, which makes them virtually citizens when it comes to touring bands from the US.
Such familiarity hasn’t lessened their popularity, as the crowd surgeS and giant roar proved when the house lights went down.
“Rain” came down on the Hordern as Trivium took to the stage with a flourish, enduring favourite “Pull Harder on the Strings of Your Martyr” then featuring surprisingly early in a set that contained several other cool surprises.
Technicality and catchiness combined through “The Sin and the Sentence”, with Trivium’s thrasher side coming out in Shogun’s monstrous “Down From the Sky” fuelled by Corey Beaulieu’s savage riffing. That side of their sound was further celebrated in the mid-set pairing of deep early cuts “Entrance of the Conflagration” and Ember to Inferno’s “Fugue”, a track they haven’t dropped live for 13 years.
The mood shifted back to melodic territory with “Vengeance Falls” being played for the first time ever this tour, the crowd in full voice along with its anthemic hook.
It’s something Trivium does extremely well, blending the melodic and the ferocious, the technical and the catchy. Beaulieu steps forward to take the occasional lead vocal but Heafy continues to develop as a frontman with every hit out. It was weird to see him wearing a shirt at first but that was rectified by halfway through and no one seemed that perturbed when he flubbed a couple of solos, such was the strength of the band’s performance.
A huge version of “In Waves” brought Trivium’s set to a close, a full 70 minutes of anthemic melodies, expansive arrangements and thrash riffing.
Lamb of God did not keep us waiting long. When the immense banner dropped they tore straight into the ridiculous ferocity of “Ruin” to open their own hour-plus barrage.
The band’s contrasting styles are evident almost immediately. Where Trivium builds epics around melody and technical dexterity, Lamb of God unleashes a solid barrage of drop-D grooves.
Those grooves envelope the room as “Laid to Rest” and “Now You’ve Got Something to Die For” follow in quick succession, the latter stirring up an enormous call-and-response from the swirling pit. Newer songs like “Into Oblivion” and “Resurrection Man” lurch even further into gut-wrenching groove, peppered with stabbing leads from Mark Morton and Willie Adler.
Randy Blythe challenges the room to go harder as he prowls the stage, taking a moment or two to thank the other bands, the crowd and a seafood restaurant he and Adler visited earlier. He splits the crowd in two for a vast mosh to Sacrament’s “Walk With Me in Hell” before Lamb of God unleash their own hell – a closing assault of savagery led by “Omerta”, then the gigantic “Momento Mori”. The untold violence of “Sepsis” threatens to bring the walls down, setting the stage for the swaggering bravado of “Redneck” to end the show on a wild note.
The lights come up with the band still on stage, tossing picks and water bottles to the faithful in the front rows. If there’s any energy left, it’s to be expended somewhere else now. Two of the best have battered the Hordern into submission.
