O2 Forum Kentish Town, London, 21/04/26

Before you even get through the doors of London’s O2 Forum, the scale of what PRESIDENT has become is impossible to ignore. 

With a red ‘sold out’ sign flashing above the venue’s entrance, if last summer’s Garage headline rally felt like the beginning of something historic, then tonight feels like confirmation that what’s happening here is truly special. The final UK date of the band’s sold-out UK ‘Campaign Trail’, there are almost 2,500 fans crammed into every corner of the room, phone cameras poised and conversations fizzing with excitement. 

Amidst the feverish anticipation, support tonight comes from TheBoyShadow, the new project fronted by former Loathe guitarist Connor Sweeney. Transporting the room into stranger, darker territory before the main event begins, trippy, distorted visuals flicker across screens on either side of the stage, atmospheric and disorientating in all the right ways. An unusual sight with three masked vocalists sharing the stage, electronic textures collide with rap-inflected verses, soaring melodies and bursts of crushing heaviness. Swerving from something hazy and hypnotic to moments of blistering force with little warning, it’s a great introduction to their world, the moments when all three voices lock together bringing goosebumps to the surface of your skin.

Of course, everyone here tonight is here for one thing though, and as the speakers fill with old-time rock ’n’ roll classics – including Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘Great Balls Of Fire’, ‘Elvis Presley’s ‘All Shook Up’, and Bobby Day’s ‘Rockin’ Robin’ – the whole venue briefly transforms into an American diner from another era, its radio cranked up loud. 

The podium at centre stage brightly lit by a pink cross as the now familiar presidential campaign jingle repeats the phrase ‘Ike for President’, the band take to the stage and launch into ‘Fearless’. Circle pits are whipped into action from the moment that first throat-shredding scream cuts through, and from there – the game is on.

With only eight songs officially released, PRESIDENT have to make every second of these headline shows count, and they certainly don’t mess around. During ‘RAGE’, the band’s masked leader holds out his microphone to the crowd before putting it back to his own lips, his voice effortlessly moving from the fragile, angelic ‘ooo’s before collapsing into a feral scream. 

Having built up their story through masks and mystery, none of it would matter if the songs did not land with this much force in a live environment. But luckily, they do. Every track feels bigger than the room holding it, and often considerably more pummeling than it does on record. Take for example ‘Angel Wings’, which has the crowd singing along to its riff before belting out the line, “you never fucking loved me anyway”, or the way every phone light seems to make its way into the air for the opening of ‘Conclave’.

For a band who have had no shortage of baseless ‘industry plant’ allegations thrown their way, there’s nothing novelty about a performance like this. A fantastically curated live show, even the cover of Deftones’ ‘Change (In The House Of Flies)’ lands exactly as it should, a clever tribute to another band who once rewrote the rules of what heavy music could sound and feel like. Every moment of their set is designed to make people feel as though they are a part of something, that what they are witnessing is special, and let’s be honest, it feels that way because it is special. 

It’s obvious when the band leave the stage to deafening chants of their name before the encore, and as a hefty chunk of fans give word-perfect renditions of the spoken interludes between tracks. It’s obvious when the breakdown of ‘Destroy Me’ hits and a huge circle pit opens, hundreds of hands pointed towards the sky as voices scream “get me out of this hell” before the song’s outro. 

With a final address to the “citizens of London” before the band’s debut single ‘In The Name Of The Father’ tips the place over the edge, from the first note of tonight to the last, Kentish Town belongs entirely to PRESIDENT. Encapsulating every drop of the grandeur, menace and mystery that has led this project to be one of the scene’s biggest phenomena in recent history, if one thing’s clear after their whirlwind 45-minute headline set, it’s that there will be bigger venues than this. There will be grander productions, longer sets, and inevitably louder discourse around PRESIDENT.

A band already operating several steps ahead of where they are ‘supposed’ to be, you’d be silly not to be excited about where this is heading.