It’s true, few people would come to a Drones show for the silence. And for much of the band’s first Adelaide show since 2016, there was more than enough noise to drown out the decade they’ve been gone.

Returning to the Governor Hindmarsh, the reconvened five piece – frontman Gareth Liddiard joined by bassist Fiona Kitschin, guitarist Dan Luscombe, drummer Christian Strybosch and keyboardist Steve Hesketh – opened with the squall and desolation of the seven-minute-long ‘Private Execution’. The opening salvo from their last studio album, Feelin’ Kinda Free, its shrapnel-sharp sound – evoking Neil Young’s Crazy Horse if they spent less time hanging in barns, more time on the darker corners of Reddit – has lost none of its edge.

Next came the bluesy shuffle of ‘Sitting on the Edge of the Bed Crying’, one of several cuts from their 2005 breakthrough Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By. Liddiard and co. were in loose and limber form, halfway through a comeback tour initially envisaged as half a dozen shows that quickly blew up into seventeen mostly sold out dates. Adelaide was one of the slower cities to sell out, but in some respects the band had never fully gone away – their core DNA just reconfigured into Liddiard and Kitschin’s perma-touring latter project Tropical Fuck Storm, who played the Adelaide Beer & BBQ Festival a few months ago. 

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While other stops of this tour front-loaded the set with the energetic one-two punch of ‘The Minotaur’ and ‘Taman Shud’, tonight it’s a slower start with tracks like ‘Locust’ and ‘Luck in Odd Numbers’ played early. It’s half an hour before the band really pick up the heart rate with a stomping rendition of ‘Baby²’. Perhaps they were saving ‘Taman Shud’ for later in the set given its connections to Adelaide – but we never get to find out.

I notice that the crowd is full of ageing millennials, many of whom I recognise from gigs a decade ago, now a little older and greyer. It’s little wonder that so many have turned out for this comeback show; by bowing out of the last decade of culture wars, pandemics and slop merchants, The Drones’ sound and unvarnished portrayal of Australia’s past and future feel like an antidote to the age of the algorithm. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this was one of the first shows I’ve been to in a long time where barely anyone had their phones out.

Closer to the bar and in the beer garden, however, it seems some in the crowd are too taken by the mates around them, and when the band take it back down a notch to perform their singular cover of Kev Carmody’s ‘River of Tears’, straight after their signature hit ‘Shark Fin Blues’, that things get uncomfortable. After a few verses, the background chatter persists until Liddiard sings a long ‘Shhhhhhh’, then stops playing entirely. 

The band let us sit in silence – or lack thereof – for a full minute as the back of the crowd chats on obliviously, before he delivers the next few devastating lyrics.

‘There’s a fatherless child / A grieving wife / A black fugitive on the run / Running from two centuries / Of oppression’s loaded gun.’

They finish the song in a wall of noise, and Liddiard walks off stage. It feels early in the night for an encore break – just seven songs, less than an hour – but when the house music and lights come up a horse has clearly bolted. While some reunion tours are steeped in fan service, Liddiard seems happy to remind us that The Drones don’t have to be here – and neither does the audience if they have other places to be.

Eventually, after seven or so minutes, Luscombe appears back onstage to announce they will play a few more. They play two more songs, finishing with ‘I Don’t Ever Want to Change’ from Gala Mill. It’s one of their loudest and fastest, but there are moments when Liddiard still reduces his singing to a whisper – a defiant closing note for a band that has always been uncompromising. Why should a reunion tour be any different?

The Drones played The Governor Hindmarsh on Friday September 4