Poison The Well celebrates 25 years of ‘The Opposite Of December…A Season of Separation’ in New York City
April 27th, 2025 - Brooklyn, New York
Last Sunday night metalcore pioneers Poison The Well celebrated 25 years of their groundbreaking album The Opposite Of December…A Season of Separation to a sold out New York City crowd at none other than the newly renovated and historic Brooklyn Paramount theater, which has been the hub for all the happening acts in New York City as of recent.
Poison The Well, although a very well established metalcore outfit hailing from South Florida’s hardcore scene, has come back after a 6 year hiatus that ended in 2016, with only a handful of live appearances since then, and have been working on their first studio album in 16 years, and have just released the lead single “Trembling Level” at the start of the year. They most recently celebrated 20 years of their 3rd studio album You Come Before You in 2023, with a small set of intimate shows around North America in the winter. I was fortunate enough to catch them play a low-key show in Chicago’s Cobra Lounge to a sold-out 300 capacity audience on that tour, so I was ecstatic to see them once again in another album-play setting, this time to a much larger crowd.
The Opposite Of December…A Season of Separation is probably the band’s most celebrated studio album to-date, and highly influential to many modern-day metalcore acts. Many dates of this tour sold out quickly, with New York being one of them. This date also served as the last date on the US part of the tour. They brought along post-hardcore legends Glassjaw, metalcore supergroup Better Lovers, and grunge-gaze newcomers Teenage Wrist along with them for a proper warmup to an immensely exciting night.
I was surprised to find out that the set-list for the night did not include the band playing the album in sequential order like your typical album-play performance, instead opting to place other fan-favorites from their discography such as “For A Bandaged Iris” and “Botchla” between them. Rest assured though, the band did indeed play all 9 tracks from “The Opposite Of December…”, such as “Slice Paper Wrists”, “An Artist’s Rendering Of Me”, and of course the band’s cult classic “Nerdy” Each performance was electric.
Hardcore in larger venues has always been a subject up for debate, as barriers and security can often remove the interaction factor, the very thing that makes hardcore music so special. The concept of getting on the stage with the artist to stage-dive, or to sing along with them. The idea that the artist is not above the audience they are playing to, but one with them, to create a orchestra of no-rules madness is imperative to its values. However, Poison The Well and their fans managed just fine with both a barrier and many security at play, with a nonstop downpour of crowd surfers that began the second they took the stage. Things got so intense that the security momentarily pushed out all of the photographers out of the photo pit before our first three songs were even finished.
Vocalist Jeffery Moriera made a very clear expression of gratitude by taking a moment to recognize how far him and his bandmates have came, taking a moment to speak about how they used to play these songs in small rooms to a handful of people, to celebrating the record to rooms double the size. It’s an extraordinary feat for a band to still be going strong 25 years after putting out a record, and it was evident the entire night. The band had a unique lighting setup that casted their shadows amongst the Brooklyn Paramount’s historic architecture, that generated a tumultuous contrast between the band and the 3,000 fans in attendance that night.
It was an honor to be able to witness such a special night for the band and their audience as the band brought their A-game on the home stretch of what will go in the history books as an iconic tour. While the fans wait for what Poison The Well will bring with their next studio album, it’s for certain that “The Opposite Of December…” tour will be enough to hold us over until the time inevitably comes for them to usher in the next era of their already distinguished discography.
