Helmet – Powerstation: April 12, 2026 (13th Floor Concert Review)
The return of the indomitable Helmet to Auckland saw them releasing their muscular, dense and fierce set on an adrenaline filled and highly appreciative Powerstation crowd.
New Way Home
Opening the night were Auckland alt-metal returnees New Way Home, whose reappearance last year has reignited their local following. Formed in the early 2000s from the lineage of groups like Day One and Sommerset, New Way Home built a reputation on dense, detuned riffing offset by expansive ambient passages and emotional weight.
After a decade-long hiatus, the band resurfaced in 2025 sounding heavy and disciplined, frontman Richie Simpson telling NZRock the group now carries “more sound pressure… more weight”. Counting Helmet as one of their cornerstone influences, their placement on the bill felt appropriate. Their set was full on featuring new tracks like The Oath and Signals alongside earlier work like Face Up. Great to see them back.
Helmet
When Helmet last visited Aotearoa in 2023, the shows sold out quickly and carried the sense of a band reminding the audience of their role in forging a blueprint for modern heavy noisy music that transverses hardcore, metal, industrial and altrock. Three years on, they arrived sharp and assured on the back of heavy touring. From the first locked-in riff it was clear this was a performance built on rigor and delivered at volume. Helmet’s sound has always lived in tension: between groove and abrasion, space and impact, restraint and release. Live, that tension becomes the entire point.
The band played with the kind of intensity that makes even familiar material feel newly confrontational. Kyle Stevenson (drums) with his tight, mechanical timing underpinning the stop-start rhythm, Dan Beeman (guitar) nailed his dense dissident riff structures and provided stage energy, with Dave Case (bass) driving the low-end punch and groove-heavy foundation. Founder Page Hamilton (guitar and vocals) remains a no fuss but commanding presence. There’s nothing unnecessary, no attempt to reframe the moment. Instead, he lets the songs do the work, trusting the angular riffs and staccato dynamics to speak their own language.
It’s a confidence and capability that comes from decades of hard work and from a group of musicians who have been playing, touring and making records together for over fifteen years and in Hamilton’s case some thirty-five plus years since he founded the band in New York.
Helmet’s importance is clear when you hear them play like this. Long before “post-metal” or “alternative metal” became genres with convenient labels, Helmet were already stripping heavy music back to its essentials: drop-tuned riffs, hardcore tempo shifts, and an almost architectural sense of rhythm. Their influence sits quietly but deeply beneath countless bands who have borrowed from Helmet’s vocabulary of tension, groove, and negative space.
Rather than presenting a rigid album run-through or a deep-cut excavation, Helmet structured the set like a statement of intent. New Zealand is the first stop on their new touring cycle, which meant: new tour- new sets. Auckland setlist being about 35% different to Wellington the night before. No problem when you have a back catalogue like theirs.
Songs that define Helmet for most listeners formed the backbone of the night. These are the tracks that introduced their sound to the widest audience — grooves instantly recognisable, riffs honed to lethal efficiency. Delivered live, they came across not as crowd-pleasers, but as declarations: this is the architecture everything else was built on. Ironhead and Milquetoast anchored the front end of the set, Speechless and Unsung the back end with Wilmas Rainbow and In the Meantime delivered as a coup de grace encore.
Around that was built material that long-time followers know carries just as much force. These songs dug deeper into Helmet’s catalogue, emphasising groove, repetition, and tension over immediacy. The band felt at times punishing, yet patient, unhurried, and completely in control of dynamics. Opening the night with Swallowing Everything other key songs that followed including Exactly What You Wanted, Dislocated, I Know, NYC Tough Guy, I Know, Your Head, Repetition, Give It were all delivered with passion by the band and received with glee by the crowd. They even diverted from the setlist a couple of times, including taking a request from the crowd for See You Dead. The night was a reminder that Helmet’s idea of heaviness has always been about discipline over chaos.
Helmet feel strangely timeless as aligned today with modern heavy minimalism as with the era that first produced them. Hearing that live, in a room as tightly focused as the Powerstation, only reinforces how relevant they remain. The Powerstation proved an ideal container for Helmets noise rock. Its industrial proportions, brutalist acoustics, tight low-end response and balcony wrapped architecture amplified the band’s precision, making every rhythmic shift and harmonic scrape feel inescapable. This is music that thrives when there’s nowhere to hide — for band or audience.
Helmet in 2026 are reinforcing why their music garnered a huge following in the first place. This was a performance defined by discipline, weight, and relevance, delivered by a band that understands that they can’t be categorised.
Just Helmet, doing what they’ve always done best.
As once noted by Hamilton “Helmet always sounded like Helmet, we sort of developed our own sound”.
John Hastings
Photos courtesy: Ginny C Photography / Vox Rebelle
