Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GY!BE) are touring their new album “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD”, which is an obvious reference to the genocide in Gaza, so it was apt that their London show was in the part of the city where support for Palestine is strongest.

Despite having seen this, what I assume to be some sort of Canadian anarchist collective a few times, I wouldn’t be able to recognise any of them if they were sitting beside me on a bus. They don’t offer anything in the way of chitchat with their audiences either, preferring to let the images and videos projected onto the back of the stage explain the music.

The climate crisis features heavily in the choice of footage. Some pleasant, if grainy, pastoral scenes give way to oil rigs and wildfires. Resistance is represented by clips of people in conflict with cops. I’ll leave it for someone more culturally literate than me to explain the significance of the looped video of a WW1 biplane spiralling to earth which was then followed with technical drawings.

The band’s record label describes what they do as “redefining what protest music can be, where longform instrumental chamber rock compositions of immense feeling and power serve as soundtracks to late capitalist alienation and resistance.” You aren’t likely to hear them on any Christmas party playlists.

The opening track Hope Drone was a thing of great power and beauty. Sophie Trudeau’s violin was for me the musical heart of the show. It reminded me of Martin Hayes’ version of Lament for Limerick. Of course, it was louder and was incrementally supplemented by the rest of the group building to a huge crescendo, but it had something of the same emotion. The video behind it kept repeating the word “hope” to revive a bit of revolutionary optimism.

None of their pieces have lyrics in the conventional sense. Some tracks have vocals which are snatches of recordings of people speaking or announcements in shopping centres. You deduce the politics from the album titles and artwork. For example, Yanqui U.X.O. has an image of American bombs falling on fields in Vietnam and founding member Efrim Menuck has said “All music is political, right? You either make music that pleases the king and his court, or you make music for the serfs outside the walls.” I will use that quote again when I report back on Nick Cave in a few weeks.

GY!BE concerts are as much a sensory as a musical experience. I could see some of the security staff baffled by the sight of so many people enraptured by this wall of melodically alienating noise, but it connects with the listener in a way traditional song structures don’t.