Live Review: The Church in Phoenixville, PA, June 27, 2026
Aussie masters of neo-psychedelic indie rock bring their spellbinding, sprawling Singles tour to a small theater in eastern Pennsylvania
Since early 2020, bass player/vocalist Steve Kilbey has been the sole founding member of Australian neo-psych rockers the Church that is still in the band. In some parts of the band’s fan base, that fact really annoys some people. They declare that things have “never been as great” since either or both of guitarists Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes left the band and were replaced by, respectively, Ian Haug (of Powderfinger) (2013) and Ashley Naylor (2020).
I’m not one of those people.
Don’t get me wrong…. I love the band’s albums with Willson-Piper and/or Koppes, but I’ve seen the Church do some killer shows after they both were gone — all thanks to a chance viewing of the band’s seven-song performance at the 2022 Cruel World festival in Los Angeles. It just happened that the overall festival schedule that day — full of overlapping sets on multiple stages (a fucking nightmare, I tell you) — was really conducive to my viewing the Church’s set between some other bands that I wanted to see even more, and the Church were so great that day that I declared, “I’ve always liked this band, but that was so good that now I really need to see them do a full-length headlining set with this lineup.”
The band was tight and powerful that day, but it was the guitar interplay that really impressed me. In a similar manner to the way that Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd spun musical webs around each other in Television, Naylor and Haug are absolutely dialed into one another’s playing. They’re both “lead guitar” in this band, but they’re trading solos and flavoring one another’s playing with harmonics and chiming, sometimes-E-bow-driven, melodic lines. Imagine the Bunnymen with two Will Sergeants playing off one another! It’s a bit like that.
I then saw the band do headlining shows a number of times in 2023 and 2024 but every one of those gigs focused on the band’s most recent album at the time, The Hypnogogue. They’d play two long, glorious sets, and while the song selection certainly spanned their entire career, it was heavy on Hypnogogue tracks and so, after three or four of those fairly similar shows, I was beginning to hope for something different the next time around.
In 2025, the band appeared to be granting my wish. They announced a USA tour that focused on their singles, but then a health issue in the band postponed the tour for a full year. Finally, last night at the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, PA the Church “Singles” tour came to town something like 18 months after I originally bought the ticket. It was so worth the wait.
The Church have released many singles over the years and this tour — featuring 23 of them, spread over two sets and encore — isn’t attempting to play them all, just some extremely choice selections, spread out over their full career.
The two sets varied a bit. The first featured ten songs and an extremely loquacious Steve Kilbey. He really talked a lot after almost every song. While Kilbey is hilarious and a good storyteller, the sheer volume of words coming out of his mouth was honestly a little disruptive to the flow of the first set. It took them 75 minutes to play the ten-song set because he was talking so much. The second set was much more focused on just the music.
That’s not to say the first set was a dud, far from it. It just didn’t have the pacing of the second one. The absolute highlight from the first set, for me, was the six-plus minute “Block,” which I hadn’t seen them play before. It’s one of those subtle, hidden gems in the Church catalog that really comes to life at a show, rising and falling in intensity over the course of the song. As usual, with all my favorite Church songs, “Block” is mostly about the interwoven guitars and those moments where the entire band is riding waves of loud/soft dynamics.
In general, whether in the first set or the second, while I loved the more predictable/popular singles like “Columbus,” “Unguarded Moment,” “Metropolis,” “Reptile,” “Under the Milky Way,” and “Tantalized,” it was some of the deeper cuts that I either hadn’t ever seen them perform live — or hadn’t seen for a very long time — that really made the Singles show special. In that regard, “When You Were Mine,” “Constant in Opal,” and “Numbers” all were riveting. And even songs that I’d heard quite often in the past, like “Ripple,” “Destination,” and “The Hypnogogue,” had a (Pink) Floyd-ian sense of psychedelic power. This band is really well-rehearsed.
It was a long, fantastic night of sometimes-ethereal, always captivating music at a cool venue. The Colonial has reserved seats that actually are comfortable and have some legroom, and when I’m looking at a performance with no opener that goes from 8:15 to 11:25 or so, including the encore break, I have to say that it’s kind of nice to have a good seat.
One last thing: there were two new, fairly chill, songs in the second set: the mid-tempo “Western” and a slower one called “Sacred Echoes (Part Two)” — both of which are from an upcoming, still unreleased Church album called Lacuna. They fit well into the vibe and flow of the second set, positioned as sorts of palette cleansers after the more intense “Destination” and the loud, nearly-chaotic roar of “Tantalized.” I’ll be curious to see if Lacuna, whenever it’s released, is an entire record of that mellower mood, or whether it’s more diverse. I’m hoping for the latter, but this band is so on fire when they play live these days that I’ll be at the subsequent tour no matter what.
