Balu Brigada
with Ryeberry
The Academy, Dublin • May 5, 2026
by Danielle Holian
There are gigs that feel like a performance, and then there are nights like this, where the room tilts slightly off-axis, and everything starts to feel like it’s happening inside the music rather than in front of it.
On the final stop of their PORTAL EU Tour, Auckland-born brothers Henry and Pierre Beasley, better known as Balu Brigada, arrived at The Academy Main Room with the kind of quiet inevitability that only comes after a run supporting Twenty One Pilots on their Clancy World Tour. Sold out, sweating, already half-alive before a single note hits.
Before they even appear, DJ Ryeberry, self-styled as “R to the Y to the E to the mother f*cking berry,” turns the room into a compressed pulse of house energy. It’s cheeky, unbothered, slightly chaotic in the best possible way. Dropping everything from Doechii to a sly flip of “Backseat,” he doesn’t so much warm up the crowd as detonate it gently. By the time he leaves, the audience is already behaving like the headline act is overdue. And then Balu Brigada step through.
There’s something almost architectural about what they do live: songs built like corridors rather than rooms, each one opening into another space of groove, colour, and tightly coiled melody. The brothers don’t perform at the crowd so much as circulate through it, like they’re testing the air for reactions and getting exactly what they came for.
What stands out isn’t spectacle, but control. Slick basslines snap into place with live-band grit, synths shimmer like heat distortion, and the vocals, shared, traded, and echoed, feel less like lead-and-support and more like a single thought split in two. That sibling chemistry isn’t aesthetic, it’s operational. They move like they’ve never had to explain anything to each other in words.
“So Cold,” “Designer,” “Backseat,” each track lands with a different angle of light. The polish of their recorded sound is still there, but it’s been roughed up at the edges, given room to breathe and occasionally stumble forward. At one point, they drift into a warped, almost ironic, but incredible take on “You Make My Dreams Come True,” like a memory being replayed slightly out of sync.
The crowd, meanwhile, is locked in. Not passive, not worshipful, just fully inside it. When the set briefly drops out, there’s no loss of momentum, just a collective anticipation, like everyone’s holding the same breath.
The encore is where things tip into something looser, more human. One of the brothers vanishes into the crowd, singing from within it rather than above it, dissolving the usual barrier between stage and floor. It shouldn’t feel novel, but it does, because nothing about the night has felt like it’s following the usual script.
By the end, it’s not clear where the set began or ended; only that Balu Brigada didn’t just close a tour, they folded the room into it. A portal, as promised, but less sci-fi spectacle and more shared drift state: pop music as architecture you can walk through, get lost in, and come out slightly changed on the other side. ◼
Featured image is by Danielle Holian.
