Live Report: Bright Eyes deliver bittersweet indie-rock performance to Dublin’s National Stadium

Seeing Nebraskan indie rockers Bright Eyes live is like being hit right in the face with nostalgia – like having a sip of a soda you haven’t tasted since you were fourteen and feeling a full range of emotions you had forgotten about. It’s joyful, comforting, but also a little sad, melancholy lodged in your chest.

The band’s first tracks, though, namely ‘Bells and Whistles’ and ‘El Capitan’, hail from their 2024 album Five Dice, All Threes, and are fun, bouncy numbers that match the warm National Stadium’s energy on this sunny Friday evening. But even as the frontman Conor Oberst joyfully jumps around the stage, visibly stoked to be playing tonight, and a heart-warming duo of trumpets takes over the bridges of both tunes, their melodies and lyrics are still lined with a certain desperation that seems to follow Bright Eyes wherever they go.

Bright Eyes at National Stadium 20/6/25. Copyright @ Hana May / Hot Press

As if to prove me right, Oberst announces the next track ‘Four Winds’, saying “this is one of our many songs about the end of the world,” before jumping into the shimmering, bright melody that usually accompanies the band’s darker lyrical works. With Bright Eyes, no matter if the tracks were written in 1998, 2007 or 2024, they retain the gut-wrenching yet incredibly hopeful quality of early 2000s indie: the world might be ending, but we sure are going to enjoy ourselves through it.

Bright Eyes at National Stadium 20/6/25. Copyright @ Hana May / Hot Press

However, with the tracks ‘Method Acting’ or the later ‘Persona Non Grata’, the band also prove that they can do proper, passionate somber numbers, the kind whose heaviness resonates through the chest. For the melancholy-filled tracks, instrumentals either accelerate with powerful rhythmic sections and gritty guitar lines, or slow down to allow Olbert to sit at a grand piano, thoughtful, pensive, and incredibly moving. It is perhaps thanks to these more direct tracks that the rest of the setlist, which plays with the line between joy and sadness, feels so beautifully bittersweet.

Bright Eyes at National Stadium 20/6/25. Copyright @ Hana May / Hot Press

Bright Eyes, however, are also incredibly well known for their soft, emotional and incredibly romantic ballads, such as the deliciously gentle and iconic ‘First Day Of My Life’. A standout in their discography, the tune has visibly been adapted over the years, now accompanied by bright banjo instrumentals and a healthy amount of delicate wind sections, and presented as being “for the hopeless romantic – God help you all.” Indeed, since coming out in 2005, the track doesn’t seem to have aged a day, with its universal theme of all-encompassing love and the romanticism of its arrangements.

No matter the mood or age of the tracks, though, one thing is clear: the American musicians are having the time of their lives up on the stage, only four dates into the European and UK leg of their Five Dice, All Threes tour. Whether it is with playful crowd banter or relentless jumping and dancing around, Bright Eyes make sure that we know they have not lost a drop of their passion since their inception in the late 90s.

Bright Eyes at National Stadium 20/6/25. Copyright @ Hana May / Hot Press

Reaching the end of the set-list, Oberst takes the time to offer a word for the people of Palestine: “Everyone deserves dignity,” he announces, “no matter if they’re in Gaza, or in Dublin,” before jumping into the closing track ‘One for You, One for Me’.

In a riotous encore, however, Bright Eyes offer their glistening tracks ‘Hit the Switch’ and ‘Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (to Love and to Be Loved)’, as well as a brilliant rendition of ‘Running Back’ by Thin Lizzy, kept especially for their Dublin date and dedicated to Phil Lynott, giving their Irish crowd an incredibly special and emotional ending to an equally special show.