Skillet Live at O2 Academy Brixton, London, 2026

It’s a time capsule, a concert like this. From the eras of T-shirts to the music blasting on the speakers, we’re fully back in the early 00s. There are two grand moments of the hive mind, as the whole room sings along to ‘Animal I Have Become’ by Three Days Grace and ‘Numb’ by Linkin Park. It feels good to be a millennial, even one from the very tail end of that label.

Storm Orchestra

It takes guts to come on stage as an opener and without a moment’s hesitation, yell out “Come on, London, show me your hands“. To then watch a sea of the things sway left and right for you must be such a power trip. But they earn it. Storm Orchestra dabble in alt and prog rock with an epic cinematic sweep more characteristic of orchestral rock (ah yeah, I see the name now). The chorus of ‘Bright Soul’ swells to gigantic proportions, the sort of dome-occupying sound that movie trailers used to fight over, and pays us off with a heavy downbeat to bend the strongest of necks. Breaking out in 2024 with the single ‘Drummer’ (that they dedicate to all the drummers in the room), the French trio have been on the up-and-up and if their stage presence is anything to go by, there’s more fun in the cards for them. Check them out!

1 / 7

Click to enlarge

Skillet

“My tour manager said ‘John, don’t tell anyone this band is turning 30’“, so of course vocalist and Skillet founder John Cooper had to share that with all five thousand of us. The numbers alone are insane: twelve albums, two Grammy nominations, thousands of shows under their belt. I know them because at 15, I made a video edit of the movie Black Swan to their hit song ‘Monster’.

The opening song ‘Surviving the Game’ gets me moving, but there’s was something missing in the sound, it wasn’t really hitting as heavy as I thought it should, but at the breakdown, vocalist John Cooper receives his bass guitar and boom. Big Daddy just walked in. The speakers shake, the crowd sizzles awake and the floor rumbles. It’s awesome. I’m in.

And boy do they put on a show! To someone used to the laidback sets at The Black Heart or The Underworld in Camden, the elevated stage at the back for the drum kit would have been enough to impress me. But the band goes full out, with a full suite of monitors for visuals, moving platforms for guitarists Korey Cooper and Seth Morrison, and twin fog machine guns (oh my God!) that I straight up thought were a jetpack at first glance. All the while, they go from punch to punch, hit to hit, classics like ‘Awake and Alive’ and songs off their latest record Revolution, like ‘Ash in the Wind’

1 / 13

Click to enlarge

Now, I was as surprised as the next person when, reading on the band, I found out they are labelled as a Christian rock band. Their debut album came out on a Christian record label and legend has it the founding of the band can be attributed to the encouragement of a pastor. Now, throughout the show, the songs do speak of saviours, of self-redemption, of courage and going beyond your darkest moment (‘Feel Invincible’ for example), but you could argue those are wide themes tackled by every human ever and by extension every band ever. So I’m not really hearing the connection. My brain is minutes-deep into a monologue on the use of such labels, wondering if they pigeon-hole the bands instead of helping them find their audience, thinking what if there was a label of Atheist Rock, when I hear John Cooper introduce the next song.

No matter who you are, what you’re going through, where you come from, what colour your skin is or what you believe about religion or politics, we want to see you survive another day. I ain’t here to preach to anybody. I can’t tell you how to live your life. But I want to see you survive all right. Keep fighting.

“We’re gonna play a song about the person that helped me get through my hard times. This one goes out to my hero, Jesus Christ“. Ah. Guess that’s my sign.

‘Hero’, with its Linkin Park intro, kicks in and brings drummer and co-vocalist Jen Ledger forward to the front of the stage to jump and bounce with the crowd. “I need a hero to save me now / I need a hero just in time”. It’s earnest and it clearly connects

And nobody writes like this anymore. Or rather, the public mainstream, that music like this was once one of many strong currents, has so completely shifted to be utterly unrecognisable. Bands like Evanescence, Avril Lavigne, early Within Temptation, early Linkin Park, and of course Skillet were all over MTV, blasting out from cars and radio stations. They captured a certain relentless sensibility, a mix of the anxieties of the new millennium paired with an exploration of the self as a stranger, as a container of an angel or a monster. “The secret side of me / I never let you see / I keep it caged, but I can’t control it” is in direct conversation with Linkin Park‘s ‘Crawling’ “There’s something inside me that pulls beneath the surface / Consuming, confusing“. The intro to ‘Awake and Alive’ places the song directly in the same era as Amy Lee’s Fallen album. It was a strong cohesive sound that anyone into rock at the time would be able to pinpoint and it’s testament to the strength of the feelings expressed that these bands still connect and still fill out venues all around the world even 20 years later.

Of course modernity peaks through, not only in smartphones filming the performance (still fewer than most shows, good job us!), but also in the bewildering K-Pop lightstick I spot someone brandishing. Ending with the song that started it all for me (‘Monster’) and a song that hopefully starts up something for us all (‘The Resistance’), we’re driven from nostalgia and self-reflection to the drive for change. Skillet wants us to win. They want us to survive. And the music tells no lie.