There is already a healthy crowd packed into Manning Bar when Sydney metalcore outfit Pyrefly arrive, and they waste very little time introducing themselves. This isn’t a set designed to gently ease anybody into the evening.

The band blitz through their opening stretch with the sort of intensity that immediately gets bodies moving, but their singer decides watching the action from the stage isn’t quite enough. He heads straight into the pit and gets the crowd to form a circle around him before encouraging them to charge in. They oblige with alarming enthusiasm and, thankfully, everybody emerges intact.

Pyrefly have another surprise tucked away in the set. Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’ gets hauled into considerably heavier territory, a gloriously incongruous choice that shouldn’t necessarily work surrounded by this much metal, but somehow does. By the time they leave the stage, Manning Bar is properly warmed up and the floor is already looking considerably less orderly than it did when the doors opened.

Avatar, however, operate in a different universe.The stage disappears into blue light as the Swedish band emerge from the darkness. Johannes Eckerström appears carrying a lantern, his face concealed beneath a cloak. For the opening song he remains hidden, before throwing the cloak away and revealing the familiar painted face underneath.

Tall, lithe and dressed in black leather, Eckerström is impossible to ignore. He doesn’t simply front Avatar; he prowls through their songs with the exaggerated gestures and unsettling grin of a ringmaster who knows precisely what is coming next while everyone else is still trying to work it out.

This is only Avatar’s second visit to Sydney. Backseat Mafia caught them on their first Australian tour in 2023, when the theatrical scale of their performance made it immediately obvious why their live reputation had travelled ahead of them. Three years later, nothing about that first encounter feels exaggerated. If anything, they are even more commanding tonight.

There is something wonderfully excessive about Avatar. The riffs are enormous, the movements choreographed without feeling mechanical and the band’s visual language sits somewhere between carnival, horror film and heavy metal theatre. Yet beneath all of that spectacle is a band playing with remarkable precision. Strip away the costumes, lanterns and face paint and these songs still hit brutally hard.

Their return comes behind tenth studio album ‘Don’t Go In The Forest’, another dive into the darker world Avatar have spent years constructing. It follows 2023’s ‘Dance Devil Dance’, the album accompanying their first Australian visit and one that reached number one on the Australian iTunes Rock and Metal Albums charts and number six across all genres.

Eckerström remains the focal point, but Avatar are far from a one-man spectacle. Guitarists Jonas Jarlsby and Tim Öhrström, bassist Henrik Sandelin and drummer John Alfredsson give him an extraordinarily solid platform from which to conduct proceedings. Their collective precision makes all the theatre possible. No matter how strange things become at the front of the stage, the machinery behind him never falters.

And strange is very much the point. Avatar understand something that plenty of heavy bands forget: there is nothing wrong with putting on a show. Metal has always had room for theatre, danger, humour and characters larger than the rooms containing them, and Avatar enthusiastically grab all four.

Manning Bar feels particularly suited to them tonight. There isn’t an arena-sized gulf separating band and audience, so every stare, gesture and flash of that painted grin lands at close range. The crowd isn’t observing Avatar’s world from a safe distance. For the duration of the set, everyone is stuck inside it.

The tour moves to Brisbane and Auckland next, tickets HERE.

Images Deb Pelser

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