The evening’s opening marked the debut of An Echoes of Love, the band’s freshly released album. Just as on record, Echoes of Grace proved to be a perfect opener. The sound, metallic but with a delicate and subtle corporeality, is in fact the undisputed narrative protagonist of the record.
In its physicality, it remains malleable, in constant transformation, carrying echoes of love through the thinnest telephone wires. The atmosphere coming from the stage was contemplative at first, mirroring the biblical references woven into the new album’s storytelling—a clear evolution from Kerala Dust’s previous work. A process that had already begun with Violet Drive: Edmund, lyricist and voice, has now abandoned obsessive repetitions in favour of textual and musical interlacing that wove through the record and intertwined with one another.
The second track, The Orb, TX, stood out as the most experimental. Analogue in spirit, with sonic elements from sci-fi movie soundscapes, it nevertheless retained Lawrence’s guitar grounding the piece in rock tradition—even if slightly under-mixed compared to the electronic beats. The band clearly had fun performing it, while warming up the audience, anchoring their feet to the dancefloor, but at the same time transporting them into space, through orbital sonic movements. The slight delay in the attack works just like a drop in a club.
From there, the concert flowed smoothly in a crescendo, like an unbroken wave, amplified by a striking light design flooding Zurich’s X-TRA. With How the Light Gets In, Edmund’s energy reached a new peak, while Lawrence’s guitar cut through more sharply. The three founding members vocalised in perfect synergy, with Pascal’s drums punctuating the light spectacle like a heartbeat.
Tracks from Violet Drive blended seamlessly with the new material: a setlist crafted to evoke memories without overshadowing the new album, but rather building unity also on a narrative level, which is the great strength of the new album. The transitions were excellent and fluid, with live set pieces that have grown more intricate, marking the analogue experimentation and creating an overall compact and homogeneous sonic texture. An album of memories that Edmund channels on stage between moments of condensed intimacy that then explode outward. Violet Drive returned in a rawer, more aggressive form—less virtuosic, more tribal, based on a bond already established with the audience. The rhythm became almost ceremonial, evoking Berlin’s club community culture yet never abandoning their rock background, with shades of Velvet Underground seeping through.
The audience itself reflected the band’s hybridity: mostly millennials, a generation in between, characterised by different influences and whose musical tastes are heterogeneous, although here in Zurich, they surprisingly also have a remarkable fan base over 50, perhaps drawn to the band’s psych-rock elements.
The peak of the evening came with the most-awaited songs from the new album: The Bell felt somehow raw and unpolished: Pascal’s drumming sometimes ran ahead, the instrumental parts struggled to stand out, and the electronic beats took over. The volume rose, yet the balance was still shaky. Quite the opposite in the more intimate tracks, like Eden to Eden, which sounded even better live than on the record: the three core members displayed perfect synchronicity. Even more intense was Beyond the Pale—performed almost a cappella, stripped down yet powerful in its scenic intimacy. Its simplicity only amplified its emotional strength. A successful result, followed by an incredible transition with Maria and then Closer, which again integrates perfectly with the sound of An Echoes of Love and gives the audience two beautiful pages, albeit minimalist and characterised by the visceral realism of the memory album.
Love in the Underground was without doubt the highlight among the new material—gritty, perfectly balanced between a late-70s rock gig and a Berlin techno club night, yet still deeply intimate. The room glowed in yellow light during Remember You a Dancer, the crowd wild and warm, the song satisfying both youthful nostalgia and seasoned reminiscence: first loves, first nights under the haze of music. Kerala Dust managed to drape techno vibes with a veil of romance—and succeeded.
The melodic, nostalgic thread of the album, as on record, closes in concert with the beautiful, Morricone-inflected The Bay, which also marks a strong continuity and parallelism with Violet Drive. A gentle breeze spreads from the subwoofers, carrying fragments that ran across the album’s entire narrative arc: the wind as a symbol of sound, the sound as the first word, the word as creation, which then is nothing but music as tangible matter. In a lyric that is poetry, sound and light, finally meet within The Bay to then dissolve among the crowd, leaving a little death that keeps us moving, washing lullabies away—those of the first love, the first shaking long nights in the club– serving as a bittersweet closure, yet always in motion, never standing still.
Romantics at heart, Kerala Dust could not resist an encore. Perhaps it would have worked better with a longer wait, but its cinematic effect still mirrored the set’s flow: Nevada sparked wild enthusiasm, Phoebe brought tenderness, and finally White Noise expanded into a psychedelic closure, sending the crowd dancing once more. It was a reminder of why they are loved—not only for their records, but for the energy they channel at the heart of the stage, and give back tenfold to the audience.
Very fitting, too, was the choice of the opener: Dino Brandão, whose nostalgic trumpet and eclectic blend of flamenco notes, loops, and theatrical performance set a vivid, almost cinematic tone. At times perhaps too virtuosic for an opener, his versatile set nonetheless captivated the audience, closing on a more electronic track that smoothly bridged into Kerala Dust’s sound.
We left the X-TRA—a venue that proved an excellent host, thanks to its well-calibrated sound system and the punctual support when Edmund at first seemed to have minor issues with the electric setup—with tired feet but lifted spirits. Kerala Dust had taken us from intimate whispers to tribal release, leaving Zurich resonating in their wake.
