The Horrors Bring a Dark Storm to New Century Hall Manchester

Matt Oliver
3 minutes ago
2 min read

New Century Hall - Manchester – 28 November 2025

WORDS / IMAGES MATT OLIVER

The Horrors Bring a Dark Storm to New Century Hall Manchester — Photo Credit Matt Oliver

Friday night we caught the penultimate night of The Horrors’ UK/Ireland Night Life Tour at a sold-out New Century Hall – easily their biggest Manchester headline show in years after playing the much smaller YES basement late last year. With the new album out earlier in 2025 and the expanded live band now fully settled, this felt like the perfect room to hear the latest version of the group at full power.

Support came from The Ominous Moon, whose slow-burning synth washes and cavernous vocals sounded huge under the venue’s stunning art-deco ceiling – a great mood-setter.

When The Horrors finally emerged through clouds of dry-ice and strobing purple light, the place went mad. They tore straight into The Silence That Remains and Three Decades; the new tracks already sounding massive live, Faris Badwan’s baritone slicing clean through the haze. By the time the shimmering guitars of Mirror’s Image rang out, the whole room was moving as one.

What followed was pretty much the ideal career-spanning set. Sea Within a Sea is still an absolute beast on stage – when it finally drops the floor turns into a single bouncing wave. Endless Blue offered a brief moment of calm before the run of pure bangers: Still Life, More Than Life and Moving Further Away, each greeted with bigger and bigger singalongs.

LA Runaway and a glorious Who Can Say closed the main set on a high, then – after the shortest of pauses – the band were back for the encore. Lotus Eater rolled out in all its glory before flowing into the traditional Bowie section: a haunting Weeping Wall melting seamlessly into a triumphant Heroes that had pretty much the entire hall roaring along. They ended, as they almost always do now, with Something to Remember Me By – eight minutes of euphoric release that turned New Century Hall into the sweatiest, happiest rave in town.

Twenty years on and The Horrors are still evolving, still thrilling, still capable of writing songs that feel enormous in a room like this. Dark, stylish and weirdly uplifting – an absolutely storming gig.

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