Circa Survive Reniun Show
W/ Boo Boo Spoiler, Geoff Rickly, Circa Survive
You didn't need a history with this band to feel what Tuesday night was. The Fillmore was packed well before the lights went down, the kind of packed that tells you this isn't just another Tuesday show—this is the room getting something back that it thought was gone for good. Circa Survive hadn't stood on a Philadelphia stage in going on five years, and for a while there, it wasn't clear they ever would again.
Boo Boo Spoiler opened the show, and did what an opener in this position needs to do—set the tone without trying to steal it. Geoff Rickly followed, and the room tightened up a notch, the anticipation building the way it does when everyone can feel the main event getting closer. Everyone was there for one thing, and everyone knew it.
Then Circa Survive came out and opened with "Holding Someone's Hair Back," and the room exhaled and inhaled at the same time. Anthony Green looked, by every account, like a man who wasn't sure five years ago this night would ever come. In 2022 the band called it an indefinite hiatus. It wasn't indefinite. It was over, and Green would later say so himself. That's the weight this show was carrying before a single chord got played—not just a band coming back, but a band coming back from something real.
What they did with that weight was play like they had something to prove, not to the crowd, but maybe to themselves. The set didn't play it safe. "House of Leaves" hadn't been touched since 2015. "Semi-Constructive Criticism" hadn't been played since 2017. "Wish Resign" since 2018. "In the Morning and Amazing..." since 2019. This wasn't a greatest-hits victory lap. This was a band reaching back into corners of its own catalog that even longtime fans had stopped expecting to hear live, and pulling them out like nothing had changed.
Through "In Fear and Faith," "Child of the Desert," "Imposter Syndrome," "Strange Terrain"—the room sang the way rooms only sing when the songs mean something beyond nostalgia. By "Suitcase" and "The Difference Between Medicine and Poison Is in the Dose," it wasn't a comeback show anymore. It was just Circa Survive, playing like they'd never left.
They closed with "House of Leaves" and "Get Out," and the room didn't want it to be over, which is the only way a night like this should end.
Two more Philadelphia nights and a run through Louder Than Life, Aftershock, Neverender, and Furnace Fest still lie ahead. But Tuesday was the one that mattered most—the first step back, taken at home, in front of the people who never stopped waiting.
Photography by Wes Shepherd
