The Hives @ Saint Luke's, Glasgow, 25 Nov

“Stop filming and enjoy the show,” barks The Hives frontman Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist. “You’ll need that battery to get home!” Is it any surprise someone’s boldly trying to capture the intimate Glasgow warm-up show when these Swedish rockers have been a consistent spectacle in the indie live circuit since the early aughts? While fellow garage rock revivalists like The Strokes and The White Stripes dabbled in scruffy side partings and scuffed sneakers, The Hives stayed sharp in a signature monochrome palette, confidently declaring themselves our “new favourite band”.

Not content to wade in nostalgia, though – they’re here touting The Hives Forever Forever The Hives, their second new album in the past three years – tonight’s attire has levelled up from glow in the dark lightning bolts and old school spats. Instead, the seams of their suit jackets are lit up with LED piping, a look Almqvist himself dubs “electric funeral cowboy”. It’s a fitting reference, given that new number Born a Rebel boasts the string-bending feats of Kenny Loggins’ Footloose, and the modern midwestern showdown continues in the swaggering Stick Up.

The latter appears on 2023’s The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, a record released a decade after a few of the key threads from their tailoring began to unravel. Original bassist Dr. Matt Destruction left the band for health reasons, and was replaced by bassist Johan Gustafsson, aka The Johan and Only. In 2019, around the time the group was touring with AC/DC(!), drummer Chris Dangerous had to take time off due to surgery. Then, to top it all off, the world went into lockdown a year later, forcing the fivesome to shut up shop, head out of their US studios and back to the pine forests of Sweden.

But in 2023, an obituary for the band’s infamous songwriting svengali Randy Fitzsimmons appeared in a small Swedish newspaper, leading them to a tombstone with his name on it. When they dug up the supposed grave, conveniently lodged in the casket were the lyrics and music for a new record. The release rocketed the fivesome back to number two in the UK charts, clearly backed by a new flavour of fans who are in full force tonight alongside older boomers in bandanas. Recent single Enough Is Enough sidles up against stone-cold classic Walk, Idiot Walk. Almqvist urges a Seven Nation Army-style guitar singalong, pulsing his arms like an overly enthusiastic aircraft marshaller.

“Are you listening to what I’m saying?” he continues before adding, without a shred of self-doubt. “I prefer it if you scream over the top of what I’m saying, because usually we’ve just finished a fantastic song.” Rigor Mortis Radio is a toe-tapping, analog daydream with a lesson for us all as we head into silly season: 'I got your emails saying that you wanna meet / I got your emails, yeah, delete, delete'. Our punk-rock preacher is now installed in the pulpit, mic aloft, capturing those screams he demanded.

O.C.D.O.D. feels like the new full throttle A.K.A. I-D-I-O-T and, in fact, the only nod we get to debut record Barely Legal is Here We Go Again. And that’s precisely what the crowd demands as we rattle into an enigmatic encore that has Almqvist reflecting: “Now, that’s a lot of rock and roll, Glasgow. It’s almost too much for my delicate constitution.” As the band charges back out – their LED-piped jackets still glowing like runway lights – it’s a final reminder that The Hives don’t just perform: they dazzle. Decades on, they’re still your new/old/current favourite band.