[Gig Review] THE DILLINGER Escape Plan @ Northcote Theatre Melbourne (AU), 13.08.25.
Words: Brady Irwin
Photography: Richie Black Photography
Artists: The Dillinger Escape Plan (US) w/ support Ho99o9 (US)
Venue: Northcote Theatre, Melbourne
(see bottom of article for artist links/socials)
This review felt like an impossible ask from the outset, prior to even stepping into the above venue.
Especially so given the limitless wordage one can potentially apply to such a god-tiered, dynamic and ruthless evening of heaviness, precision and punk-rock swagger alike that comes with any show performed by The Dillinger Escape Plan. Let alone with such incredibly importance as this, their final-no-really-final tour.
That’s completely discounting the PhD-thesis level diatribe your average mathcore/math-metal/technical metal lover could dump on any blog, any given day, if asked anything about the seminal genre-defying classic Calculating Infinity. Entire tomes could be written on that album alone, examined forever with new insights gleaned each time. Truly, it is a supreme musical masterclass and pivotal moment in heavy-music canon.
I’ll openly admit that, between the undefinable hugeness of such an appropriately-titled album and tonight none other than original vocalist Dimitri Minakakis returning for the send-off? Yeah, the drive up to Melbourne was wracked with more pre-gig tension and pre-emptive writer/neurodivergent impostor-syndrome than usual.
Thankfully, tension turned to relief in entering Northcote Theatre and noticing that tonights’ sold-out show felt less immediately sardine-packed than some recent prior gigs I’ve reviewed here. I’ve come to truly enjoy and appreciate this space, even if I’m now always making a tactical advance past the central bars’ left and right-hand floor spaces to avoid death-by-compression.
Whilst floor position, tour and endless other factors can make an at-capacity show in here feel either cramped or cosy, the vaulted open space of the venue, great acoustics and hard-working staff really helps shows feel both personable and massive.
Any neurotic tension within my fragile psyche was also shortly redirected in a bombastic and energetic way. Specifically, said nerves were balled up in a tight wad and kicked right across and off the stage via the sheer unadulterated grimy/gritty fun purveyed by sole supports Ho99o9 (‘Horror’).
I’ll admit that on disc, their unique and very Death-Grips-goes-way-punkier meld of hip/trip-hop, hardcore, nu-metal, industrial and tasty late-90’s/early-aughts breakbeat definitely caught my interest and attention, but never held it too firmly.
In a live setting, though?! Wow, man. Just… wow.
(Questionable-quality smartphone Short from our YT channel, courtesy of Yours Truly):
I melded into the throng of booty-shaking, headbanging and jeers of appreciation, dancing like a Dad six martinis deep on your average Pacific cruise ship. You’d be forgiven for feeling momentarily jarred by the playful, broad punkiness of these US upstarts, but there were very few (if any) visible detractors in sight from the expansive floor filling up with curious punters.
Sporting a more tribal body-painted getup than his battle-jacket punk-rocker coded co-vocalist, theOGM was equally as fierce, fluid and dynamic as his stage-mates, doling out an interesting,soulful and impassioned performance. At times tracing air in some hypnotic interpretive-dance moves, others getting purely boogey-on-down or just feverishly sampling and spinning decks, the hooded compatriot utilised his position to spit rhythmic bars that interweaved nicely with some rasped, caustic barks that wouldn’t be amiss in a hardcore band. Aside him and primarily positioned facing towards the tech-wizard, fellow MC YetiBones utilised comparatively freer hands to fling all four limbs into constant fist-pumps, mic-stand grabs and all other manner of pure rock-and-roll stage feats.
And don’t even start me on the drummer. Bah. Gawd. Billy Rymer just casually swerving between d-beat, blasts, disco-ready flourhses and machine-gun precision, all to the ebb and flow of both breakbeat, sample-heavy soul, funky-bass breaks and full-djent riffage pumped out from an incessant, shit-eating-grin-sporting turbine trio onstage.
So much passion, integrity and sheer heat was on display through this eclectic troupe’s set, too. From hearing a Nazi was amidst us with calls to “Fuck that Nazi up!”, warbling repetitive choral refrains like ‘I Feel It In My Brain’ (“FEEL IT IN MY BRAIN!”), reggae-inflected crooning querying “you won’t save yourself?”, remarking “yáll aint ready - what the fuck was that?!” to the requisite you-ready-for-Dillinger clarion-call - it’s a wide spread on offer. Not to mention the myriad of stylistic musical shifts, jazz-smooth dance-moves and the like. Plus a heap of real s t a n k pivots to devilishly simple-but-furious riff-stomps that reminded me of the stupidly-fun band LLNN.
Yep, I can absolutely one hundred percent see how these guys copped such a coveted slot.
Between all the above, served via musical ethos that hearkens straight back to 1999? Can definitely see these only climbing the ranks of live-music infamy. Heck, I’d easily be back to cop a headliner set in future. Colour me impressed, relaxed and having had a grand ol’ time. Perfectly primed for the chaos to ensue shortly thereafter.
And lo, the tension builds once again.
A decidedly X/millenial punk-friendly repertoire playlist through the brief interim (Dead Kennedy’s, Bad Religion, Beastie Boys etc) served well to keep the blood pumped and primed.
Not that anyone in the room would’ve been much less than eagerly anticipating this once-in-a-lifetime event. Around me and in conversation with friends and random alike, the theme was one of sheer gratitude.
This was sure to be a cosmic-level event.
And boy howdy, was it ever!
Cosmic it was, with the lights dimming to a 45-degree-angled slat of multiple laser-like lights, as the familiar horror-film-esque dirges of instrumental opener ‘.#..’ was almost drowned out by the screams of cathartic release upon watching Ben Weinman (guitar), Liam Wilson (bass), James Love (guitar) and Billy Rymer once again helming the kit for a second run on skins. A requisite roar of appreciation given by punters especially as original vocalist Dimitri Minakakis (having previous to late 2024 not performed with the band live since 2001) gave salutations.
As you’d come to expect from such technically proficient geniuses and loose punk-rock live-performance cannons - everything then melted into sheer, technically-precise and barely controlled chaos. For the first of several times tonight (and as a punter during last nights' second show), tears welled in my eyes and a boulder of choke stuck in my throat as personal Calculating fave ‘Destro’s Secret’ was the first ballistic-missile fired in engorged fury unto the audience. The verbal refrains of “Sun-dripped Devil, Sun-dripped Devil/scratched out my eyes/SCRATCHED OUT MY EYES!” delivered with equal ferocity from Dimitri and audience alike.
(Here’s another dodgy-quality smartphone recording for your own judgement, via our YT Channel, from Yours Truly:)
Having seen TDEP twice with Greg at the helm, there was an appreciable difference in performative style but absolutely no dip in quality. Trading Puciato’s higher-register shrieks for a gruffer more barked delivery, the sheer grit and venom flung from Minakakis (in between carefully-precise “woo!”-s and other refrains mid-riff) was nothing short of monstrous. Adeptly shoehorning the pained and howling spoken-word, snarls, barks and screams into its’ own beast live, the room was screaming with outrageous applause before the final note wrapped up in tight mathcore tinfoil.
Prowling the stage like a man ready to punch-on, Dimitri gave it a hardcore-frontman’s best with the amount of mic-sharing, crowd-huddling, jumps and leaps between the impeccably-frenetic fretted bandmates whirling aside him in practiced headbangs we all struggled to match rhythmically. And, rather than provide commentary of the many myriad dime-flips between distorted mathcore and free-jazz-esque interludes that permeate basically every track on offer, I’ll simply comment that Dimitri and co abjectly refused to stay still for an entire second tonight.
Didn’t matter if they were blistering through jagged riffage or off on widdly, warbling off-kilter lead runs and fills - no heads were still, no bodies fully planted for too long in grimaced concentration. That is a level of performative and technical skill that sets Dillinger apart from numerous protege’s and contemporaries; i.e. an ability to seamlessly transition from Bungle-esque jazzy cleans to not-Botch-ed-up barbed clefts of riffwork, all whilst writhing as though possessed by pure, unrefined liquid bath salts.
Our original-but-new-to-us vocalist utilised such moments to either simply sit back and bask in his bandmates’ prowess, hoot “woo!” of appreciation, stalk the stage, pump a pointed arm out or otherwise headbang, crawl, kick or jeer in some physical form.
But at no point tonight did we cop an average crossed-arms-metalhead level firm foot-planting and again - to see music this complex played with such young-punk ferocity this far into their game, demonstrates a band cut from a different cloth to most, if not all.
And excuse my French but erm, fuck me?! ‘The Running Board’?! We’re unironically doing this EP?!
Yep. Holy ever-loving Kentucky-fried fuck. It’s (somehow?!) an even more impenetrable musical miasma of technical fury than its’ punkier predecessor, heightening both crowd energy and astonished transfixed wide-eyed stares from the more stunned-mullet amongst the flock. I had several moments of smirking to myself in catching both others and myself even daring to try keep up with the usual musicians’-glare - hands on guitars and bass became contorted into serpentine labyrinths of twisted suspensions, augments and all other matter of chordal fuckery, whisked and battered like computerised riff-eggs between frantic to-hand-tapping stabs, trills, sweeps, ghost-notes undetectable to even the best of paranormal experts, and more.
All atop a viciously creative choking, pounding, battering and swaying from the twelve octopi that seemed to actually inhabit the physical space occupied behind the drum-throne. Every time I whiplashed my neck between members mid-headbang long enough to catch a flayed limb from Rymer, I just kept thinking the same thing I thought the entire set (aside from ‘fuck yeah’): how?! Sincerely, HOW. Inhumanly precise but artfully playful, this man brought a new dimension of drumming skill to be both feared and respected by the greater metal/alternative music community.
Good luck to any bassist other than Liam Wilson, too, in trying to hold down that amount of notes across that many frets for that extended a period of time without needing new upper limbs, let alone goddamned fingers. I’ll bet his handshakes can break bone.
So yeah, across the band wholesale? This is just pure mathematical precision funnelled through an energy multiple orders of magnitude higher than even the most fresh-faced and pissed-off Gen Z hardcore kid.
And then, as if knowing how to almost induce cardiac-arrest amongst the mega-hardcore fanatics strewn across the venue tonight, a casual drop of ‘The Mullet Burden’.
Seriously?! Okay, sure.
Just drop that on us, and of course do it whilst gyrating like twenty men trapped in fifty electrified medieval torture-chambers. I’m aghast. I’m bewildered, and cheek muscles are feeling stretched to their limit in Cheshire-cat grin. Ripping yet another insurmountably complex riff-tornado out like it’s a trip to the grocery store for milk (if one was having a controlled seizure whilst doing so), the band finally deflate for a brief moment afterwards to a booming, disoriented but ultimately adoring applause.
Minakakis is poised, grinning throughout but also stern, serious and focussed tonight. We get a brief mandatory spiel of gratitude (“NO, THANK YOU!” a bunch of us telepathically bleat back in unison) for an opportunity such as tonight. No pausing proceedings for fanfare, no impassioned diatribes about Calculating or what a lovely and wonderful journey this has been et cetera. Sure, those thanks are given but in efficient, curt and purposeful doses. All business, Dimitri. Tight, precise and efficiently punk-rock, which only adds to the gravitas and sense of inhuman musicianship. Hard, mad respect for bringing himself to us after so long, for a final hurrah, and electing to forgo usual frontman tropes to focus on a tight and blistering set instead.
Diving immediately back into an even higher echelon of brain-melding insanity, there’s raucous howl of appreciative jeers as the spindly web of mathematical corrosion that opens ‘Clip The Apex… Accept Instruction’ really sees the throng upfront unable to contain themselves any longer.
Broken from the initial stunned spell-binding, it’s an interesting mix of boogeying-on-down, circle-pitting, whole-body-headbang (me, ouch today) and more on offer, pit-side. The reaction from the crowd is as diverse as the polyrhythmic switch-ups, with many of us anchoring on either kick-drum, snare, jangled mangle-chord or bass thump - all of us a swarming, howling mass, many needing to reset to either the one’s, two’s, three’s or four’s as the riff-dynamics evolve insatiably fast.
And as if all this so far ain’t enough, it’s time to drop their comparatively droning/drawling (for Dillinger, I might add), snarl-heavy rendition of none other than Crowded House’s ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’. Chopped to bits like so much classic-rock/tech-metal offal and fed through the mathcore teeth-machine, it’s still nonetheless a moment of Australiana made iconically unique with Dimitri crooning and barking throughout.
This (very, VERY) relative ‘simplicity’ is punctuated by a few more brief remarks from a cheekily sarcastic, drunk-Dad-dancing Minakakis before we arrive at again, exactly what you’d expect - a neck-snapping about-face back into the impenetrable math-fortress of fretboard wizardry that is this goddamn amazing album.
Title track ‘Calculating Infinity’ feels less ‘played by human beings’, and more ‘performed by several horrid biomechanical human-cyborg chimeras’. That is, a collection of men managing to swerve, jump off amps, stomp, sway and throw fists and horns in microsecond increments, often whilst bashing out finger-breaking fret antics mid-air.
And then it’s time for things to get real, real fast.
The front four rows I am aimlessly flailing myself about amongst, caught in some telekinetic wireless signal imposed by aforementioned riffage, turns into a body-landslide mere seconds into the intro for the next song. And rightfully so.
You’d expect no less of a response to an immediately universal recognition to ‘Sugar Coated Sour’ - and yes, Dimitri absolutely perfectly nails the feverish, pained vocal build-up to that iconic final scream of the track title, let alone the howling vocal insanity and desperate half-spoken sneer. That is, when he’s not busy crowd-surfing, shoving mics down the front-row, moving stoically along the barrier like we’re in some punk-squat 10-person show in the late nineties. It’s like he never left.
Sure he throws in some necessary japes around not being in the band after his tenure, but the man ain’t past providing a wide entertainment spread tonight either. From some eight-beer-deep-Uncle-on-a-cruise Mick Jagger booty-shaking dance moments, calls to “Kill that guy” (sporting a selfie stick whilst crowd-surfing, albeit grinning hard whilst issuing said command), scat-vocal “bada-bada-bada”-ing and working in quick tsst’s and other instrumental vocalisations with that trademark Dillinger acuity, as the gig progresses the shock of “Oh my god, it’s Dimitri actually in front of us!” has long worn off. This feels as homely and familiar as it does dangerous, jagged, fresh and important.
The spontaneous and discordant feel of the expertly-sliced sheets of riffage mingles with some fantastically-organic moments spurred on by the OG vocalist, bandmates and crowd alike. Clap-alongs, singalongs, jeers, venue-wide gang-chants and more punctuate the the chef’s-kiss tone and florid, kaleidoscopic lightshow on offer, with a sense of equal playfulness and measured arcana emanating from both sides of the barrier. The whole show felt as inconceivably technical as it did loosely punk-rock, all served on the most mathematically precise musicianship finesse you can possibly hope to ever see live outside of Meshuggah.
The setlist was frankly just as “you farken’ serious, kaaarnt?!” in absolute ‘oh, get fucked’ (positive) energy. Through cuts such as Under The Running Board’s brutal ‘Sandbox Magician’, next-level screech-fest ‘Abe The Cop’ and even a ker-blammo from days of yore with goddamned ‘Monticello’ of all things?! Hot damn are we getting a severely fan-serviced treatment tonight! And I’ll a personal/punter addendum that seeing ‘I Love Secret Agents’ delivered via Dimitri himself was an apex moment that almost brought me to tears and certainly ruined my voice during Thursday’s show.
Spun around these complicated webs like Lovecraftian arachnoids, the imperceptible meta-cosmic skill of these questionable-human-beings was lavished even further with ‘Weekend Sex Change’, epic ‘Variations on A Cocktail Dress’ and (MY GOD YES) a snarky, audience-participation-heavy reprisal of Aphex Twin cover ‘Come To Daddy’.
And thus we come to the final number. You’ll know the one. It’s one of their best and most-loved.
Chat, I could write another review of equal length just on the performance of dearly-beloved classic ‘43% Burnt’, as could I the seismic eruption of mosh-fury that exploded in joyful recognition from the get-go. But I have to say - that decision to bring back the most infamous jagged breakdown riff of all time [[b u t s l o w e r]] was such a spiritually nourishing and awe-inspiring moment that I had to, had to, put the phone down from below recording and just bask in the final, skronky, meaty, chunky waves that perfectly sent off one of the best riffs ever.
I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect culmination to such a wondrously-special, rare and gratitude-filled show. And yet both Weinman and Minakakis took ample time out to hit up the barrier after the lights went up and listen to us gasbag appreciation/hug/fist-bump/grab a photo after.
I’ve already waxed lyrical with both a bit too much length and tangentiality, and I don’t want to get too repetitive. But words cannot express the sheer gratitude I have for the staff of Northcote Theatre, to John Howarth (the ‘One Man Army’), the team at Phoenix.au, Richie Black (the skilled lensman of Richie Black Photography fame behind these delicious shots! Hire this man!) and all others who made this review possible.
Calculating Infinity has meant more to me than a blog can possibly relay, and there isn’t a limit to expressing sincere and severely thankful gratitude at such an incredible, unmissable and special gig opportunity.
This will go down in my own personal canon as one of the most important gigs ever attended, and I’m hoping the fine folks in Brisbane and Sydney take serious heed from any incoming media thus far. If you’re a fan, or just interested in experiencing an interdimensional warp into some of the greatest live heavy music possible - DO NOT SLEEP ON TICKETS.
DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN August 2025 Australian Tour Dates:
Sunday 10th August PERTH, Metropolis Fremantle
Tuesday 12th August ADELAIDE, The Gov
Wednesday 13th August MELBOURNE, Northcote Theatre – SOLD OUT
Thursday 14th August MELBOURNE, Northcote Theatre – New Show
Saturday 16th August SYDNEY, The Enmore
Sunday 17th August BRISBANE, The Tivoli
TICKETS ON SALE NOW FROM: