Crowbar, Leichhardt — 25 October 2026

Nineteen years.

That’s how long Tom Englund said it had been since Evergrey last played Australia.

Somehow, I missed that visit. In 2007, I was being pulled between work, study and a family with two small children. Keeping up with Swedish progressive metal touring schedules probably lost out to getting through the week.

This time, I drove to Sydney with my two sons. My youngest couldn’t come as he’s 14, but I still purchased a ticket for him that I couldn’t use.

The trip took more than ninety minutes. We used it to work through a Spotify playlist assembled from the setlists we’d seen online. Anticipation has its own soundtrack.

I’ve been an Evergrey fan since “In Search of Truth”.

“The Masterplan” was the entry point. Calling them an influence on my songwriting barely covers it. Their combination of heavy riffs, melodic guitar work and choruses carrying an unreasonable amount of emotional weight helped shape what I wanted my own songs to do.

So yes, this was a dream coming true.

And I brought my sons along to hear why.

Falling From the Sun

We sang the chorus out loud.

Whether anyone onstage could hear us, I have no idea. We weren’t waiting for confirmation.

The betrayal is the sun should sustain you. Here, it burns you.

That can be love. Ambition. Faith.

And they fall together, one after another.

It’s an Evergrey strength. The music gives your personal wreckage enough scale to fill a room, and suddenly you discover other people have been carrying something similar.

Where August Mourn

“I really need life to touch me.”

That line gets past all the usual defences.

You can function without feeling particularly alive. Work gets done. Obligations get met. People ask how you’re going and you give the answer that keeps the conversation moving.

Meanwhile, the dreams that once pulled you forward have become difficult to remember.

That’s what I hear here, someone exhausted by the distance between continuing and actually living.

You can market a song into somebody’s awareness. Getting it into their life is harder.

A line like this does the work.

Heaven

“Heaven show me!”

I hear impatience. Someone has had enough of being told a better existence is waiting somewhere beyond the one they’re enduring.

Show me something now.

Musically, the harmony lead break is my favourite part. It brings me back to the guitar passages before the chorus in “The Masterplan.”

That’s a huge part of why this band matters to me as a songwriter. You leave humming something.

Weightless

Guilt seems to be the only identity left.

Everything went wrong because of me. We got lost because of me.

Stay in that thinking long enough and being lost starts to feel permanent.

Then comes the water.

For me, the shift into weightlessness creates a moment of suspension.

“It’s over, it’s over my friend.”

Even suffering becomes familiar. You can know something is destroying you and still struggle to imagine yourself without it.

Eternal Nocturnal

Some of the best lead breaks of the night, with a chorus that keeps driving forward.

Underneath it is a vow: I’ll become the shelter, the hope, the eyes in the dark.

Evergrey can put that sentiment inside heavy music without sanding the weight off either.

Call Out the Dark

A massive eighties arena chorus, built around a title you want to throw back at the stage.

But the verse is where I keep returning.

“You’re safe when you’re alone.”

There’s comfort in that thought, and a cost.

Nobody can betray you if you stop letting anybody close enough. Eventually, though, protection can become confinement. The place you retreat to starts deciding how much of life you’re allowed to experience.

Then the chorus opens up, and all that private thinking becomes something people can sing together.

A Silent Arc

The opening feels like getting barrelled.

You surface for air, then the next wave takes you under. Up again. Under again.

That’s the physical sensation of the music for me. The passages of relief make the next impact heavier.

Then comes “Our heaven’s dead.”

I hear the death of a shared future. Two people can keep living inside a dream long after they’ve stopped doing anything to sustain it.

There’s grief in that admission, but also the awful clarity of no longer having to pretend.

The World Is on Fire

A world burning, with tears as the only available means of putting it out.

That’s the bill coming due.

Regret is real. So is its inadequacy.

Evergrey return to fire, water, darkness and light so often that these images begin to speak to each other across the catalogue. Salvation in one song becomes danger in another.

Which feels about right.

The thing that saves you at one point in your life can become the thing you need to escape later.

Words Mean Nothing / I’m Sorry

The keyboards deserve attention.

I love hearing arpeggios moving beneath a melody, creating motion and atmosphere at the same time. Those parts help give Evergrey their depth.

With music this heavy, it would be easy to fill every available space with more guitar.

The keys create another dimension for the songs to move through. And in songs concerned with what people say, conceal or fail to communicate, that additional voice matters.

Say

Arena rock.

That’s what this chorus is to me. Whatever genre classification you want to put around the band, they understand how to write a refrain that reaches beyond the technical machinery supporting it.

“Say before I’m getting used to this hurting.”

That’s the line.

Pain becomes especially dangerous when it becomes ordinary.

Architects of the New Weave

“We are the architects.”

I remember watching Englund explain in a YouTube video that he wanted a big chorus with the impact of “Rainbow in the Dark.”

I can hear what he was reaching for.

A phrase with enough space around it for an audience to inhabit.

There’s also a challenge in the title.

If we’re the architects, we inherit responsibility for what gets built. Blaming the design becomes more complicated when your own hands are on it.

A Touch of Blessing

I was so glad they played this.

More than twenty years later, the song still has teeth.

Its place within “The Inner Circle” gives it a particular context, but the language of devotion, manipulation and belonging reaches well beyond that story.

“Climbing walls of an endless circle.”

Working harder without getting anywhere. Every effort returns you to the same place, carrying a little less energy.

A cage with better lighting.

Then there’s “Crown me king and be my servants.”

The promise of liberation becomes a demand for obedience. Someone offers you meaning, certainty, a way out of your confusion. The price emerges after you’ve committed.

What makes that disturbing is how attractive the offer can be.

Manipulation works better when it understands what you’re missing.

And the people left behind? They become necessary sacrifices in the story you tell yourself about where you’re going.

These lyrics still matter because the mechanisms remain familiar.

King of Errors

When the video first appeared, with that shipping-yard setting and Henrik and Jonas back in the fold, my reaction was immediate.

Fuck yeah.

The Queensrÿche influence didn’t hurt either.

At Crowbar, I sang this at the top of my lungs.

There’s something vicious about the relationship between the crown and the fall. People elevate someone, invest their hopes in them, then watch the collapse as though they had nothing to do with building the platform.

The title can point in several directions.

The person making the mistakes. The people rewarding them. The machinery that turns human fallibility into public entertainment.

For a few minutes, though, analysis gave way to singing.

I’d waited long enough.

Leaving the Emptiness

Englund described it as a bouncing riff.

When it returned for the outro, the audience took the instruction.

This is one of those moments when the body understands the song before the brain has finished examining it.

Leave the emptiness behind. Get moving. Believe that change can save you.

Sometimes leaving is necessary.

But distance has limits. You can change the scenery while carrying every unresolved problem into the next room.

And underneath it, that riff keeps bouncing.

Oxygen!

The atmosphere gives this song a vastness.

There’s room inside it for the voice, the melody and the unease to spread.

The wish to be as strong as someone else catches my attention.

We’re looking at the part they can show us.

That’s how I hear the darkness and dependence in this song: someone searching for air while uncertain where it can be found.

Then it was over.

Did they play all my favourites?

No.

Englund had already dealt with that expectation through his humour, telling us early that we weren’t going to hear our favourite songs.

Fair enough.

Following a band for this long means building your own version of its catalogue. Certain songs attach themselves to particular years. Others become inseparable from what you were trying to survive, understand or write.

No setlist can reproduce all of that.

Tom Englund remains the constant at the centre of Evergrey, from “The Dark Discovery” in 1998 through to “Architects of a New Weave”. Musicians come and go. Joining Englund, are two other mainstays in Johan Niemann on bass and Rikard Zander on keys. Stephen Platt was also there on guitars and Simone “Symohn” Morettin from Elvenking was behind the kit for this show.

Keeping a band on the road means adapting, repeatedly, while preserving whatever made people care in the first place.

The evidence that people care is in moments like these.

A chorus starts and you know exactly where you are in it.

Englund spoke about music bringing people together. Music is my religion, and listening to him, I understood the shared conviction.

I’d spent more than two decades hearing parts of my own life in these songs. On 25 October, I finally stood in front of the band playing them.

With my two sons beside me and one who wished he could come but couldn’t.

Nineteen years earlier, life had helped me miss the show.

This time, I got to bring some of that life with me.

One heart. One soul.

Our hearts united.