Paledusk’s last London appearance was at The O2, opening for ONE OK ROCK in front of thousands. Seven months on, the Fukuoka quartet were back in the capital on a much smaller stage, but with a clear question to answer. That question being the tour’s namesake, What is Paledusk??, one already posed across a nationwide run in Japan earlier this year.
The London date sold out The Dome and closed the prog-metalcore act’s three-date UK leg. As the band’s first headline tour in the region, there was an air of a band proving their mettle, their first real chance to show that a growing international reputation now translates into packed rooms of their own.
Brisbane’s Headwreck kicked off the night, their glitch-heavy nu-metalcore landing well with a crowd that had clearly turned up for the whole bill. Fresh off an ARIA chart debut for ‘Attitude Adjustment’ and a new EMPIRE signing, the quartet left with a merch queue stretching deep into Greyhaven’s set. The Louisville four-piece followed with a messier strain of mathcore-edged post-hardcore, vocalist Brent Mills going hell for leather up front, before the room reset for the heavier turn ahead.
Knosis came in as the most direct route to bodily harm of the night. Straight hardcore-coded heaviness, built to get pits crashing, but for all the straight-faced aggression, Ryo Kinoshita understands heaviness as both punishment and play. Songs playing over the PA in the lead-up included a remix of the Mii Channel theme and the Dragon Ball GT opening, and the set itself was peppered with samples including Charlie ‘MoistCr1TiKaL’ White’s viral “mags, not clips” line.
Ryo hit the stage swinging, traversing every inch of it like a madman who’d just had his shackles removed. ‘GENKNOSIS / SHINMON’ established the ritualistic, heaviness-as-outlet atmosphere immediately, pulling the floor out from under the crowd. Participation felt like a mandatory obligation that came with the ticket, with Ryo not taking lightly to mere observers taking up vital floor space.
The darker, more oppressive tones of ‘IMIONI’ and ‘KAMIGURAI’ swamped the room with thunderous, drop-heavy instrumentation. Knosis aren’t built on complex lyricism, but their chant-heavy word choices gave even early adopters something to latch onto and get wrapped up in the fray. Ryo’s brutal screams drove the bulk of the set, letting loose with a few speedy rapped bars along the way. Underneath him, black metal riffage clashed against glitched electronics, all built to wring the maximum amount of motion out of a crowd.
The rest of the band tried to match Ryo’s freak, while the moshing and two-stepping on the floor got more intense, the pit opening wider and wider as the danger levels rose. Acting as a surveyor for carnage, Ryo jumped into the crowd to get things moving whenever the pit wasn’t up to standard.
‘DOKUNUMA’ was as heavy as the rest but more of an anthem, pulling chants out of the whole room rather than just the pit, one of the set’s real crowd-connectors. Ryo mounted the crowd as he tore into ‘YAKUSAI’, the closing main-set track giving him one last chance to throw out unrestrained final blows.
The whole thing wrapped up with the band’s Fire Boys cover ‘YARUSHIKANEE’, the drummer laying down a beat while the rest of the crew screamed the title back at the crowd. Ryo jumped in for one final push about, the audience providing solid cable management as he dragged the mic to the edges of the pit.
Paledusk came out in matching Adidas stripes and got straight to it. ‘PALEDUSK THEME SONG #1’, their album opener and an essentially tailor-made walk-out track, previewed their tempo-bending, eclectically mixed and heavy-as-balls sound before they tore into ‘I ♡ YOU BABY!!’, the band shouting their affection at the crowd and the crowd firing it back between gnarly drops and feet-swinging beats.
Early highlights came quickly. ‘SUPER NATURAL HIGH’ and ‘SUPER PALE HORSE’ kept the playful side rolling into the slide-whistling, boogie-woogie pianoing, Metallica-riffing ‘NO WAY!!’, which turned into one of the night’s biggest shout-along moments.
KAITO introduced the heavier portion with ‘AREA PD’, keeping that turn-on-a-dime style going but trading the fun pop-turned rock for larger, louder down-tuned breakdowns. The brutality hit a peak on ‘DIVE INSIDE FOREVER IN THE DARK’, slamming the room over and over. The band’s “where’s this gonna go?” style is their bread and butter, but that unpredictability got a little awkward when the crowd split the floor for a wall of death toward the end of the track, only for the drop to never appear. Luckily, the next song had enough oomph behind it to make the effort worthwhile.
DAIDAI, as always, was the dominant stage presence, shining in the literal sense as the lights bounced off his sweaty sheen and glittery guitars while he flipped around the stage, ripping riffs and solos and moving so much it was hard to believe his hands knew what they were doing. BOB’s drums and the bass came through loud and clear, dropping from thunderous room shakers to funkier lines at a moment’s notice.
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Paledusk’s sound seems impossible on paper; pop hooks, hardcore, metalcore, sax, glitch noise, slide whistle, rap sections, club textures, and breakdowns that arrive like trapdoors. Live, none of it sounded thinned out. They have the whole thing down to a science, knowing exactly when to tear it apart and when to build it back up.
KAITO cut several MCs across the set, joking with the crowd and describing the tour as a dream come true, saying there were times the band never imagined reaching this point, and thanking the audience for letting their music be borderless.
On the topic of being borderless, ‘HUGs’ arrived to one of the night’s warmest receptions, KAITO billing it as one of the band’s most important songs. Their first anime tie-in, the opening theme for Gachiakuta, has clearly done its job as a vessel to the international market. The audience treated it like a celebration of how far Paledusk have come, from starting out in 2015 and working their way up the national scene to international support slots, sharing a National Stadium stage with ONE OK ROCK back home, and now a sold-out London headline show.
After ‘I’m sorry’ closed the main set, the encore opened with Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ playing them in for one last round with ‘RUMBLE’. They left ‘Lights’ to close, the straight-ahead metalcore cut first released on 2018’s ‘Blue Rose’ and later re-recorded for 2020’s ‘HAPPY TALK’. KAITO wrote it in the aftermath of personal loss, and at The Dome he dedicated it to a friend who had passed away. Phone torches rose across the venue as the crowd yelled the “woah” sections right back at them, a life-affirming high to leave on after a set built on frantic energy and genre whiplash.
By the end of Paledusk’s biggest London headline show, you really got the sense the band have finally found the special sauce that works for them. It’s passed the taste test, and they’re ready to go mass market with the same integrity and passion for the ingredients that got them here, refusing to water the mix down even if that might make it more palatable for some (really ran with that sauce analogy, huh?). There are few heavy bands operating with this much nerve and humour while throwing this many ideas into the pot, and even fewer turning it into a live set this coherent.
Not had the chance to catch the band on tour yet? If you’re in Germany, the Netherlands or Belgium, there’s still a chance to see them before the What is Paledusk?? tour wraps on May 27th.
Photos by Room.C Photography
Paledusk
PALEDUSK
Release Date: 26/11/2025
Label: A.S.A.B
CD: Pre-order