Three bands, three eras, three very different emotional languages all thrown into one room. LANDMVRKS, Papa Roach, and A Day To Remember. On paper, it reads like a playlist algorithm gone rogue. Live? It made complete sense.
LANDMVRKS
You know how sometimes an opener feels like background noise while everyone’s still finding their seats? Yeah, this wasn’t that. LANDMVRKS walked on like they already knew they’d win people over.
The stage filled with haze almost immediately. Thick, heavy, the kind that turns lighting rigs into silhouettes and makes everything feel a little more dangerous. Then came the first hit of sound. Tight, aggressive, no hesitation. Within seconds, the floor was shifting.
Frontman Florent Salfati didn’t waste time easing anyone in. He called for chaos, and Auckland answered. Circle pits opened like trapdoors. Bodies moved and collided.
The set itself was short. Seven songs. No filler. But it didn’t feel small — if anything, it felt compressed, like all their energy had been packed into a tight, explosive window. Tracks from The Darkest Place I’ve Ever Been landed hardest. ‘La Valse du Temps’ carried this eerie, almost cinematic weight, while ‘Blood Red’ brought in a French rap intro that should, in theory, break momentum, but instead made the pit hit harder.
That’s the trick with LANDMVRKS. They flirt with genre shifts but never lose control. There’s a push and pull in their sound — brutality on one side, melody on the other — that keeps you guessing, keeps you engaged. And live, it clicks in a way recordings don’t fully capture.
Between songs, Salfati switched between French and English like it was nothing. It could’ve been jarring. It wasn’t. If anything, it added to the connection. Music doing what it’s supposed to do, cutting through language without asking permission. By the time they wrapped up, the early crowd wasn’t early anymore. It was locked in.
PAPA ROACH
If LANDMVRKS lit the fuse, Papa Roach detonated it. No slow build. No easing into nostalgia. They opened with ‘Even If It Kills Me’, a newer track — always a bold move for a band with a legacy like theirs. But it worked. From the first note, it was clear this wasn’t a band leaning on the past. This was a band still fighting for the present.
Jacoby Shaddix is hard to pin down. Part frontman, part ringmaster, part therapist. He doesn’t just perform songs — he drives the room, controls it, lets it breathe when it needs to, then pushes it right back into overdrive. Within minutes, he had the entire arena on its feet.
The setlist stretched across decades. ‘Dead Cell’. ‘Getting Away With Murder’. ‘Scars’. Each one hit with a different kind of weight. Mid-set, the tone shifted. The lights softened. The noise dipped. Shaddix spoke about mental health, about loss, about the reality behind the music. It could’ve felt scripted. It didn’t. It landed because it felt personal.
‘Leave a Light On (Talk Away the Dark)’ followed, stripped back and raw. Phones lit up the arena. Thousands of small lights in a dark room — a familiar image, but one that still hits every time when the message behind it carries real weight.
Then, just as quickly, the intensity snapped back. ‘BRAINDEAD’ offered a glimpse into what’s next — heavier and sharper. Then came ‘Between Angels and Insects’, that unmistakable riff signalling the home stretch. The curveball was the Nu Metal Time Machine — a medley pulling from Korn, Deftones, Limp Bizkit and System of a Down that shouldn’t work on paper, but landed not as a gimmick but as a celebration. A reminder of where this sound came from and how far it’s travelled.
Then ‘Last Resort’, featuring Jason Butler from Fever 333 and Letlive. Thousands of voices screaming every word like it still means exactly what it did the first time they heard it. Maybe more. It wasn’t just loud. It was a shared awakening.
A DAY TO REMEMBER
Headliners don’t just have to be good. They have to follow everything that came before and still make the night feel like theirs. That’s not easy after a set like Papa Roach just delivered. And yet, from the opening chant of ‘The Downfall of Us All’, A Day To Remember had the room back in their hands.
If Papa Roach was controlled chaos, this was something looser. Messier. More playful. The kind of energy that doesn’t demand your attention so much as invite you to lose yourself in it. Jeremy McKinnon doesn’t command a stage the same way Shaddix does. He doesn’t need to. His presence is relaxed, conversational — perfectly suited to that pop-punk metalcore blend that refuses to sit still. The production leaned hard into spectacle. Fire cannons. Confetti blasts. Streamers raining down like it was New Year’s Eve.
The setlist ran deep. Nineteen songs pulled from across their catalogue, including newer cuts from Big Ole Album Vol. 1. Tracks from Homesick still hit hardest — nostalgia, without the weight of being stuck in the past. ‘If It Means a Lot to You’ gave the night its softer moment, thousands singing along, slightly off key, completely in sync emotionally. Then straight back into heavier territory. Pits reopening. Bodies moving again.
There’s a rhythm to an A Day To Remember show. Heavy and light. Chaos and calm. You never quite settle. And that’s the point. Then came the moment where most bands would leave the stage and make you wait. McKinnon skipped the theatrics entirely and asked the crowd straight up: do you want us to go, or keep going? The answer was obvious. Three more songs. No fuss. Honestly, it felt better that way.
By the time they closed with ‘All Signs Point to Lauderdale’, the arena was spent — not exhausted, but satisfied. Like everything that needed to happen had happened.
This wasn’t just a concert — it was a timeline. LANDMVRKS representing where heavy music is heading: experimental, genre-fluid, fearless. Papa Roach standing in the middle, bridging past and present with something real to say. A Day To Remember tying it all together, blending styles and generations into something that just works.
Walking out into the Auckland night, ears ringing, shirt sticking to your back — when was the last time a show hit this many emotional notes in one night? Heavy. Fun. Reflective. Chaotic. All of it.
That’s a big rock show.
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