Savages, The Roundhouse, London

“It’s so fucking good to be back here,” announces Jehnny Beth with a beady-eyed roar, stalking her stage, and rattling the cage of pitch-black columns lining the Roundhouse. “This is home”.

The final night of their European tour, and ‘Adore Life’ has transformed Savages into a band operating on a new plain. As the band first started to tease out strands of their second album during last summer’s festival season, a new warmth started to sear and charr the edges of their notoriously brutal live show. Now, that warmth has become a glowing, strobing furnace; reaching every last inch of the Roundhouse.

Ayşe Hassan’s monstrously diving bass lines still plunk and shatter the air like a concrete-block-solid assault, push-pulling with Gemma Thompson’s squalling noise-guitars, and drummer Fay Milton’s underworld-borne pulse. Jehnny Beth remains a fearsome frontwoman, but she’s also opened out to her audience like an unfurling piece of black-jacketed origami, smirking and joshing with the entire, cavernous room. ‘I Am Here’ kicks off the show in swooping, clattering fashion, and true to title, Savages have never been more present. Savages were already blisteringly good with their iron guards up and the fourth wall unlooked through. Tonight, making full unbroken eye contact, they’re sensational.

Savages have already called London their home once tonight; later, they demonstrate just how true that statement is. Squatting in front of a smoky, razor-edged beam of light to address the front row during ‘Hit Me’, Jehnny Beth slowly tosses shoes and socks to one side, and proceeds to carefully trample and stumble into the middle of the 1,700-strong crowd like she’s traversing a downy living room carpet rather than an ocean of heads. “Steady, steady… are you ready?” she quivers theatrically keeping things on a knife-edge before, eventually, throwing herself back towards the stage, in order to survey the mayhem. “More of this action!” she bellows, throwing her head back and laughing as a hapless crowd surfer tumbles over the front barrier. “I think that’s allowed,” she asides to security with a snigger, who kindly let the would-be stage invader flee without pursuit.

As ‘Slowing Down The World’ - a song for all the lusty couples in the building tonight, according to Jehnny - waltzes down its unwieldy train-tracks, and ‘Surrender’ casts beams of imposing empty-white strobe, Savages don’t just put on a stage show, they envelope the whole place in their blinding, retina-hitting spectacle, as the swooning, soaring anthem for zest, ‘Adore’ takes over in a sea of cover-art mimicking raised fists. Embracing connection more than ever before, Savages keep grabbing at their own bar, yanking it loose, and setting it higher, higher, and higher. It seems impossible to imagine a show more flawless than this, and yet there’s a sense Savages have still got springs and springs of coiled kinetic potential left in them yet to rip-roar loose. There are next to no live bands more exciting than this lot.