The band managed to look both forwards and backwards with a moving set.
Photo: Shervin Lainez
Death Cab for Cutie holds a special place in people’s hearts. They are the kind of band people come across when they first discover music and feel the pure joy of realising how much music can mean to them. Manchester’s O2 Victoria Warehouse was full of people of all ages who each had their own unique and deep relationship with this band.
I, on the other hand, discovered Death Cab later in life — though I still pored over all their records, spun Plans on repeat and absolutely devoured this year’s incredible I Built You A Tower. It’s different discovering a band when you’re younger, but the beauty of this band is that they can mean just as much to people when they’re thirty as when they’re fifteen.
It takes a special band to follow people through their lives and to meet them where they are. Death Cab for Cutie are one of those bands. It would be dismissive to label them an emo band at this point. They transcend genre. They sound like nobody else, and nobody else really sounds like them.
In Manchester, the band played a rousing set that equally picked from all their albums in their back catalogue. This wasn’t a nostalgia show that focused purely on the band’s earlier days, nor their most popular period. At the same time, it wasn’t a show by a band afraid of their past. In 2026, Death Cab have reconciled with everything that makes them great and all of the different pieces and phases of the band that have gained them so many followers along the way.
The show opened with a pair of recent songs: the thumping Riptides from this year’s I Built You A Tower and Roman Candles from 2022’s Asphalt Meadows. Following these came one of Death Cab’s showstoppers with Transatlanticism’s opener, The New Year.
There were over 3,000 people at the O2 Victoria Warehouse (the band’s biggest Manchester show to date) and yet, inexplicably, seeing Death Cab frontman Ben Gibbard belt out the cathartic, affirming bridge to The New Year made me feel like I was the only person in the entire venue. It sounds cliché, but it’s an incredible skill to write and perform music that is simultaneously so personal yet also so universal that you are able to not only dive deeply into people’s hearts but also be able to offer everyone space to find themselves within your songs too. It really felt like everyone in the crowd was having their own personal moments with each of these songs, and it was incredibly moving to look around and see how powerfully music can connect with us all.
Although, as I said, it was hard to pay attention to the reaction of others because it was impossible not to get drawn so deeply into these songs yourself. All of that changed, however, when Gibbard brought out his acoustic guitar for a solo rendition of what is probably his most famous song, I Will Follow You into the Dark.
Dedicated to Manchester’s finest, The Stone Roses, Gibbard let the audience sing one of the final choruses entirely by themselves. Being caught up in a mountain of voices, all having their own moment but becoming joined together as one, offered the kind of life-affirming solace I’m convinced only the most special kind of live music can really offer. It’s a magic that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else.
Make no mistake, Death Cab have a new record out this year, and it is absolutely fantastic. This is a band at their peak and its testament to the power of the band’s recent material that the more recent songs fit so snugly and seamlessly alongside songs loaded with romantic nostalgia like The New Year and I Will Follow You into the Dark. This theme continued for the rest of the show with incredible new songs brushing up alongside old favourites as if they had always existed on the setlist together. To tell you the truth, such is the strength of I Built You A Tower that I can’t imagine a Death Cab setlist without some of those songs.
Alongside the old classics and newer material, there was room for plenty of surprises on the setlist. The band put together a show that manages to feel incredibly considered whilst also maintaining the raw energy that makes live music so exciting in the first place. It feels like a show designed to show off all the different facets of the band’s career and shine a light on them equally. This included their early material like Company Calls and the incredible encore opener Champagne From a Paper Cup from 2000’s We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes, and 1998’s Something About Aeroplanes.
The show ended with an epic rendition of the slow-building masterpiece title track on Transatlanticism. The entire crowd sang along desperately as the song reached its climactic refrain: “I need you so much closer”. When closing out a show with such emotional depth, it’s hard not to read it as a love letter from Death Cab to their fans, and also as an opportunity for us fans to throw it right back at them. To describe it as cathartic doesn’t do it justice. It was simply transcendental.
I may not have been fifteen years old when I first discovered Death Cab for Cutie, but these songs are so special that it feels like they’ve been part of me my whole life. It’s magic. It really is the only explanation.
