By the time the lights drop and Loaded begins to throb through the Art School PA — Primal Scream’s frayed-edge hymn to bliss and abandon — it already feels less like a gig and more like a ritual. VLURE have been away, out in Europe playing to rooms that don’t yet know to fear and adore them, but Glasgow has been waiting. And tonight, in a completely rammed Art School, the waiting breaks like a wave.

But first, the Ewart Brothers, Glasgow’s resident TikTok jesters, stride out in cowboy hats to deliver a eurodance parody called Kingston Bounce. It’s idiotic, hilarious, disarming — the kind of communal in-joke only a hometown crowd can metabolise — and the perfect misdirection before VLURE tear the whole room inside out.

When the band finally appear, the air pressure seems to shift. Euphoric is the opener, and the refrain — “Take it or leave it, I want it euphoric” — lands like a manifesto. This is the VLURE promise: all or nothing, but mostly everything.

Something Real follows in a storm of strobes and sweat, and when P Sweatpants barrels onstage — the human equivalent of a mosh-pit starter pistol — the room erupts. It helps that the track has just landed on the latest FIFA soundtrack, which half the crowd apparently still plays; the place moves like a loading screen exploding into life.

VLURE have always been a live band first, and tonight that truth feels almost absurd. Heartbeat pulses with the kind of synth melodrama that would make mid-period Depeche Mode blush. Feels Like Heaven and Show Me How to Live crash like rave-punk tidal waves. Escalate — the title track of their debut — is the night’s ignition point, prompting the kind of full-body delirium usually reserved for the last 45 minutes of a 4am club set. When the chorus hits, the Art School doesn’t react so much as convulse.

But the night’s emotional crest rises elsewhere. Tha Gaol bleeds into the raw, trembling How to Say Goodbye, Hamish Hutcheson’s elegy for his father. Amid a set built for maximal intensity, the sudden openness is devastating. You can feel half the room holding its breath.

Then Conor Goldie takes over for Better Days, an ode to the afters, to friendships built at 3am when the world blurs into something honest. He grins like someone who knows the whole room personally — and judging by the cheers, he might.

The final stretch is pure velocity. Shattered Faith appears with mischievous fragments of Faithless’ Salva Mea threaded through it — a nod to the band’s club-floor DNA. Between Dreams feels like VLURE at their widescreen best, all smoke, strobe, and spirit. And then comes Cut It, the band’s early-era weapon, still devastating, still euphoric, still capable of turning bodies into weather systems. The pit opens one last time. Bedlam, blessedly, ensues.

Afterward, there’s the obligatory Sleazy’s afterparty — Glasgow canon law — but the truth is the night has already peaked where it needed to. What VLURE delivered was more than a triumphant hometown return; it was a victory lap disguised as a purge, a celebration that felt both earned and necessary.

If Escalate marked their arrival, tonight marked something even louder: VLURE aren’t just back in Glasgow — they’re becoming the band Glasgow always believed they could be.

Images: Reanne McArthur

Words: Fran Tamburini