When “Ghosts” Took Over Perth: YUNGBLUD’s Emotional Encore That United Northbridge
Perth didn’t feel like it was hosting a concert on January 20, 2026 — it felt like it had been drafted into a full-body experience. The Ice Cream Factory in Northbridge is the kind of venue that blurs the line between a nightlife district and a live-music pressure cooker, and that night it behaved like both at once: streets busy, air warm, and fans arriving with the specific, buzzy impatience you only get when people already believe they’re about to witness something special. This was the closing stretch of Yungblud’s Australian run, and you could sense a “last night, leave nothing behind” mood from the moment the crowd started thickening. By the time the lights dipped, the place didn’t feel like separate strangers anymore. It felt like one big, keyed-up organism waiting for a spark.
Yungblud’s shows work because they’re paced like stories, not playlists. He comes out swinging, sure, but he also keeps pulling the room closer to him — tightening the connection between songs until the crowd stops reacting like spectators and starts behaving like collaborators. Early in the night, that energy was all movement: jumping, shouting, arms up, sweat starting to do its inevitable thing in an outdoor Perth summer. Between the louder moments, he’d reset the room with short, direct speeches about being yourself, looking out for each other, and making sure nobody in the crowd feels alone. It’s never delivered like a “motivational break.” It lands more like a friend grabbing your shoulders and reminding you why you came. That emotional architecture matters, because when he later reaches for something as huge as “Ghosts,” the crowd is already primed to mean it.
“Ghosts” wasn’t just another track that night — it arrived like a payoff. By the time the main set was winding down, the audience had already been put through the full Yungblud spectrum: chaos, humor, tenderness, and the sort of communal “we’re all in this together” vibe he builds better than almost any modern rock frontman. You could feel people anticipating the encore with the same intensity they usually reserve for a band’s biggest radio hit. That’s a telling sign. It means the show has convinced the crowd that the emotional songs are just as essential as the loud ones — and it also means the room is about to change texture.
When the encore finally arrived, “Ghosts” hit like a collective exhale that somehow turned into a roar. In Perth, the chorus has that rare quality where it sounds like it belongs to the audience as much as it belongs to the singer. The moment it started, the front sections leaned in, the back sections lifted up, and suddenly the whole venue was singing in that specific unison that feels less like karaoke and more like a vow. It was the kind of singalong where you can hear individual voices crack, not because people can’t sing, but because they’re genuinely emotional. According to Kerrang’s reporting on the tour setlist, “Ghosts” was placed in the encore alongside “Zombie,” and that structure is exactly why it works: “Ghosts” opens the heart, and “Zombie” lands the final punch.
What makes “Ghosts” so potent live is how it turns noise into meaning. The verses play like a confession, and the chorus plays like a group decision to survive whatever the confession reveals. Perth responded to that dynamic instantly. There’s always a split second in a live show where the crowd chooses whether to stay loud or to actually listen, and during “Ghosts,” they did both. They listened hard during the quieter lines, then exploded into the hook with an intensity that made the whole place feel taller. You could see phones come up, but it didn’t feel like people filming for clout. It felt like people trying to capture proof of a moment they didn’t trust their memory to hold on to. That’s when you know the song has crossed from “performance” into “shared experience.”
The venue helped, too. The Ice Cream Factory’s outdoor layout keeps the air moving, but it also traps sound in a way that makes a crowd chant bounce back toward the stage. “Ghosts” thrives in that environment because it needs space to swell, then collapse back into intimacy. The chorus washed over the crowd like a wave, and you could sense people squeezing closer together — couples leaning into each other, friends throwing arms over shoulders, strangers swapping smiles like they’d known each other for years. That’s one of Yungblud’s real tricks: he doesn’t just ask for unity; he creates the conditions where unity is the easiest thing to do. In a city night that already had Northbridge energy pulsing outside the gates, the song turned the venue into its own little universe.
On this Australian run, “Ghosts” has become one of the emotional signature moments — the song that makes people stop bracing for the next mosh and start feeling everything they’ve been holding in. Frontier Touring billed these shows as Yungblud’s biggest Australian dates, and you could feel that “big moment” expectation hanging in the air throughout the night. But the beauty of “Ghosts” in Perth was that it didn’t feel like a “big production moment.” It felt simple and human: a vocalist fully committed, a band supporting without cluttering, and a crowd singing like the lyrics are a personal message. That simplicity is precisely what made it so massive.
There’s also the context of how “Ghosts” is positioned near the end. A lot of artists treat their final songs like fireworks: bigger, louder, faster. Yungblud does something smarter. He uses the final stretch to make people feel seen, then sends them out into the night carrying that feeling like a shield. “Ghosts” is central to that mission. In Perth, you could watch the crowd go from wild to emotionally present in real time, like someone turned the dial from adrenaline to sincerity without losing intensity. That’s a difficult transition to pull off. Most shows either stay heavy or go soft. This one stayed heavy emotionally, even as the tempo and the energy shifted.
At a practical level, the night also carried the reality of Perth summer heat — and that matters when you’re talking about a song that depends on the crowd still having something left in the tank. The audience had been going hard, and yet when “Ghosts” arrived, they somehow found another gear. The singalong didn’t sound tired. It sounded hungry. You could hear it in the way the final words of each line were punched out by the crowd, like people were trying to throw the lyrics back at the stage as a gift. It’s the kind of moment where security guards even start glancing around with a half-smile because they can feel the atmosphere shift from “rowdy” into “beautiful.”
One of the reasons Perth’s “Ghosts” moment stood out is that it was part of a night people immediately started calling one of the best shows they’d ever attended. That isn’t just fan exaggeration — local coverage highlighted how the city basically spilled into the streets afterward, with crowds filling Northbridge in the post-show chaos, and at least one attendee specifically named “Ghosts” as a favorite moment of the night. When a song is being singled out like that in the first wave of “what just happened?” reactions, it tells you it wasn’t merely performed well. It connected.
And connection is the real headline. “Ghosts” is a song that asks a room full of people to admit they’re scared sometimes — scared of losing people, scared of being forgotten, scared of not being enough — and then it dares them to sing about it together. That’s vulnerable. It’s also incredibly punk in the purest sense: honest, unguarded, refusing to pretend you’re invincible. In Perth, you could see that vulnerability spreading through the crowd like permission. People who looked tough a few minutes earlier suddenly looked soft in the eyes. People who were yelling jokes between songs went quiet and focused. The song didn’t just sound good. It changed faces.
The staging around “Ghosts” also did what great staging should do: it supported the emotion without distracting from it. Instead of relying on gimmicks, the show leaned into atmosphere — lighting that made the venue feel cinematic, a sense of space around the vocal, and a band performance that stayed locked to the emotional pulse of the song. When the chorus hit, it felt like the lights lifted with it, like the whole environment was breathing. That’s why the chorus landed so hard: it wasn’t just a catchy hook; it was a moment that looked and felt like a release. People weren’t only hearing it — they were watching it happen to themselves.
Reviews from the night captured that late-set surge perfectly, describing the closing run — including “Ghosts” — as the point where the venue boiled back over into full, roaring singalongs. That detail matters, because it frames “Ghosts” correctly: not as the “quiet emotional one,” but as the emotional one that still hits like a weapon. In Perth, it wasn’t gentle. It was uplifting in a way that felt physically loud. You could feel the chorus in your chest the same way you feel a bass drop, except the force was coming from people, not speakers.
Then, of course, the show didn’t end neatly at the barricade. The post-concert Northbridge scenes became their own story — crowds outside, people buzzing, the feeling of a neighborhood temporarily taken over by a single night’s energy. That kind of afterglow is exactly what “Ghosts” creates. It sends people out into the streets feeling like they’ve just survived something together. Even if you walked in with your own private problems, you walked out feeling lighter, because the room made them feel shareable for a few minutes. That’s why the song sticks. Not because it’s technically impressive — though it is — but because it makes a crowd behave like a community.
If you zoom out, “Ghosts” in Perth worked as the emotional bridge between the show’s chaos and its catharsis. The earlier set gave people the adrenaline they came for; the encore gave them the memory they didn’t know they needed. That’s the difference between a fun gig and a defining one. Anyone can deliver volume. Not everyone can deliver a moment where thousands of people sing like they’re trying to save each other. Perth got that moment. And judging by how quickly fan clips and reactions started circulating afterward, “Ghosts” wasn’t just an encore track — it was the emotional receipt, stamped and signed, proving that this night meant something real.
By the time the last chorus faded, the crowd didn’t look “entertained.” They looked transformed — sweaty, hoarse, smiling, and a little stunned. That’s the most honest look a concert can leave on people. And if you’re trying to understand why fans keep describing this Perth show in superlatives, start with “Ghosts.” It turned an already high-energy night into something with emotional gravity. It took a venue in Northbridge and made it feel like the center of the world for a few minutes. That’s what special live music does: it makes your city feel like a capital, and it makes a song feel like it belongs to everyone in the room.
