Parcels Live: A Night of Groove, Glow and God-Tier Musicianship
- Ben Preece
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
LIVE REVIEW: PARCELS + MILDLIFE
Riverstage, Brisbane| Friday, 28 November 2025
PHOTOS BY MARTY KOOISTRA
WORDS BY ERIKA KOOISTRA & BEN PREECE
Riverstage feels somehow different tonight — brighter, bigger, warmer — as Mildlife drift onstage and take a quiet moment to steady themselves, almost like a meditative breath before ignition. It works. The crowd settles with them. Then the set slowly begins to unfurl in long, glowing strands: unhurried, liquid, cosmic. Spacey synthwave lines start floating off into the night air, and every so often those slicing, trebly guitar chords cut through the haze — recalling The Wall-era Pink Floyd but stripped of any grandiose bloat. Sharp, lean, hypnotic. Mildlife don’t oversell a thing; they never do. Their basslines, spiralling synths and slow, patient builds speak more loudly than words. By the time they walk off, the crowd feels stretched open and ready.
Parcels take that readiness and elevate it tenfold. The moment they hit the stage is genuinely dazzling — helped, admittedly, by the ginormous widescreen stretching across the entire top of the stage like some retro-futurist billboard beamed in from a better universe.
PARCELS LIVE
They begin with the soft glow of ‘Tobeloved’ folding seamlessly into ‘Ifyoucall’, two tracks that feel like a warm invitation rather than an explosive opener. Then the screen truly wakes up: that enormous horizontal band slicing across the stage shifts from backdrop to living artwork — a wash of shifting collage, saturated colour, and precise geometry. At times it even peels back the curtain, revealing flashes of the machinery and preparation behind a show like this, hinting at just how much work sits beneath the polish. And suddenly Riverstage feels transformed — more Primavera Sound in Barcelona than Brisbane on a muggy night. Elevated. Cinematic. International. Parcels aren’t just playing a show; they’re curating an environment.
From the moment they lock into ‘Overnight’ — their Daft Punk collaboration that shifted them from the
Byron Bay band-that-could to international recognition almost, umm, overnight — their ridiculous musicianship is on full display. Four singers line the front of the stage, each taking turns at lead, each folding back into harmonies that land like angels when they’re not. And behind that, every dreamy member plays with the same level of brilliance: no weak links, no passengers, just a band operating at frighteningly equal heights.
PARCELS LIVE
Maybe it’s the balmy night air, but the euphoric energy is almost wholesome — like brothers, like some God-fearing family band who traded hymnals for future-disco. You start to believe they sleep in matching bunk beds on tour. The keys shimmer, slick and sparkly and perfectly weighted. The five of them glide into a groove pocket that feels completely effortless, pivoting between songs with something close to telepathic precision. Every transition lands feather-light but exact.
‘Somethinggreater’ is where the first real collective shiver hits. Those middle-eight harmonies are startlingly tight, rising and folding like a single body breathing. Seemingly stepping through a relationship, 'Sorry' addresses the disorganised avoidant of the lovers—“I’m sorry it hurts to be loved” floats out across the hill and catches people mid-sway.
Then comes ‘Safeandsound’, where the three singers blend so perfectly it’s almost unnerving. It’s like hearing one voice multiplied. A guitar solo drops the guitarist straight to his knees — dramatic and joyful — before snapping into that familiar Nile Rodgers-style disco chop. If that staccato shimmer isn’t your thing, this show could be hazardous. Lucky for Parcels, the Riverstage crowd would happily take a double dose.
“I can’t just believe it!” one of them shouts before bursts of strobe flashes and a delicious pivot into a Prince-like snap-strum. They play with genre like it's soft clay — disco into funk, funk into pop, pop into something that feels like a crisp Berlin basement at 3am.
There’s a moment midway through the show where the band stop and stare, genuinely startled by the sight in front of them — Riverstage glowing, bodies heaving and moving as one. It clicks: this is the closest thing they’ve had to a hometown show in years. You can see the gratitude hit them. You can feel the crowd give it back.
Later, they sit in a neat row for ‘Leaveyourlove,’ a sweet, wholesome tableau: soft lighting, a keyboard wedged between someone’s knees, a wife-beater stretched across strapping shoulders — the whole stage suddenly intimate and small. It’s a tender little pause in the middle of all the disco sheen.
Contrast that with the kiss-cam during ‘Summerinlove,’ a cheeky burst of rom-com energy that somehow works perfectly in the open air. The camera sweeps across the crowd catching couples in various stages of passion — some faked, some very much not — and the lawn roars with delight.
‘LordHenry’ is the surprise left turn of the night — a house-leaning instrumental jam that briefly turns the hill into an open-air club and gives the group room to fully indulge. It stretches out unhurried and delicious, hinting at Spiller and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Groovejet’ without ever fully surrendering to it. It’s a vibe, a detour, a little dance-floor fantasy carved out under the Brisbane sky.
‘Thinkaboutit’ keeps that pulse riding high, rolling pause-free into the slower ‘Tieduprightnow’. It arrives with a glam-tinted flourish that echoes Elton John’s 'Bennie and the Jets', and the drummer — their unofficial spokesman — beams like a man who can’t believe his luck. He’s stoked. He says so. Often.
But the real curveball is ‘Once,’ slowed into something haunting and exposed. It carries shades of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ and the intro of ‘I Will Survive’ — a strange combination on paper, but here it lands with quiet power, stripping everything back to vulnerability.
By the end, Riverstage feels like it’s been reshaped — visually, sonically, emotionally. There’s truly no accounting for the talent within these five. The harmonies alone would be enough of a selling point, but the musicianship is something else entirely, and their unique approach follows no one: superior, intuitive, top tier. They turn the venue into a fever dream — warm, dazzling, deeply human. And while the set is clearly rehearsed within an inch of its life, it never once feels sterile. It feels generous. Joyous. Earnest. Euphoric. An uncompromising outfit at the height of their powers playing for a crowd that froths for every second of it.
They close the main set with a trance-laced version of ‘Tobeloved’, a surprising, pulsing rework that almost hints at where album four might be heading. Then ‘Finallyover’ arrives as a final, intimate moment — the lads gathered kumbaya-style, a gentle exhale after all the glitter and precision — before a wave, a grin, and they’re gone.
And as people start walking up the hill to leave, they walk differently — lighter, warmer, carrying just a little more glow than they arrived with.
