HELMET
The Palladium Times Square – NYC – 11/21/25
©Alice Teeple
Helmet hit The Palladium Times Square like a municipal vehicle that lost its brakes somewhere around 1992 and never bothered to get them fixed. Page Hamilton walked out first: calm, stoic, professorial, the only man alive who can make a guitar’s harmonics sound like a dental drill slipping into a hymn. Before anyone could process the fact that the godfather of alternate tunings was standing ten feet away, the band dropped “Swallowing Everything” with the grace of a brick through a windshield. Heads snapped forward. Drinks sloshed. The room recalibrated itself to Helmet Time, which is to say: no frills, no filler, no hand-holding. Just angles, impact, and repetition until your skull learns the rhythm on its own.
Dan Beeman stood at Hamilton’s flank like a silent assassin, peeling out those jagged counter-riffs that make the whole machine feel like it’s chewing its own teeth. Kyle Stevenson kept the drums rigid and unyielding: military precision without the ceremony, just the strike. Dave Case, swung a bass tone so heavy it could collapse a parking structure, all while wearing a T-shirt plastered with tiny kittens, as if to remind everyone that absurdity and volume aren’t enemies, they’re neighbors living in the same cracked apartment, sharing a wall.
The early run was a heat lamp pointed directly at the crowd: “Ironhead,” “In Person,” “Give It”…each one a blunt reminder of how Helmet made their bones by stripping rock of its preening nonsense and replacing it with tension so tight it could slice fruit. When “Milquetoast” landed, the floorboards seemed to loosen. Those dissonant harmonics hung in the air like fluorescent buzzing, a queasy lullaby for people who never learned to sleep properly.
Then they dove into the deep basin of the catalogue: “Red Scare,” “Blacktop,” “Birth Defect.” No banter, no moral-of-the-story, no mystique-building. Just riffs delivered with the blank stare of a surgeon who’s late for lunch. Each song hit like it was engineered in a testing facility where the only metric was impact velocity. By the time “Drunk in the Afternoon” ambled in, looser, wobblier, warm like a spilled drink, it felt like the band was letting the crowd lean in closer just to smack them back with “Unsung.” That one raised the ceiling another two inches. People screamed the chorus like it owed them money.
The finale stretch: “Dislocated,” then “Wilma’s Rainbow,” felt like a final chiropractic adjustment to the collective spine of the room. No nostalgia, no victory lap. Helmet doesn’t do sentimentality. They do compression. They do torque. They do the kind of relentless, single-minded force that turns a concert into a controlled demolition of your attention span.
The lights came up on a room buzzing in the aftermath: people blinking, shirts damp, ears ringing like distant alarm bells. Helmet walked off without drama, leaving behind only the echo of their precision, the ghost imprint of their volume.
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