For many in the crowd at Brooklyn Steel on Saturday, this may have been the most instrument-switching and most false-ending-filled show they’d ever seen. The Beta Band were gloriously weird in their heyday, defying conventional song structures and band setups — and nothing’s changed on their reunion tour. In fact, they may have doubled down. “I think we owed it to ourselves as a band to fire up the engines and have a trip that was really for us,” frontman Steve Mason told us this summer.
What The Beta Band do, though, is magic — and Saturday’s Brooklyn Steel show, their first in NYC in 23 years, was a fantastic night of millennium-era classics, head-bobbing grooves, and percussive, artful brilliance.
This tour, billed as A Celebration of The Three E.P.’s and wrapping up Sunday with a second Brooklyn Steel show, was “An Evening With The Beta Band.” The night opened with member John Maclean spinning a wonderfully eclectic DJ set that foreshadowed what was to come. Then, after a short film montage of old videos and clips — including a parody of the “I will now sell five copies of The Three E.P.’s” scene from High Fidelity — the band took the stage to David Bowie’s “Memory of a Free Festival.”
The Beta Band’s set opened with two songs from The Three E.P.’s: “Inner Meet Me,” one of the grooviest songs ever recorded, driven by acoustic guitars and shuffle-beat drumming, followed by “She’s the One for Me.” The latter began in similar fashion but soon saw the band members swap instruments across a stage covered in gear. Maclean started on mouth harp, Richard Greentree on bongos, but soon they’d switched to bongos and acoustic guitar, respectively, while Mason sang and played congas. After the song’s odd middle section, they morphed again into a traditional rock setup — Robin Jones stayed put behind the drums — as the song broke into Pink Floyd territory.
The Brooklyn Steel show continued like this for nearly two hours, with no member staying in one place for long. The setlist featured most of The Three E.P.’s, plus three songs from Hot Shots II (their best album) and one each from their self-titled debut (“It’s All Too Beautiful,” still wonderfully strange) and Heroes to Zeroes (“Assessment,” the closest they ever got to trad indie rock).
Highlights included a hat-trick run of the downtempo groover “Push It Out,” the widescreen psychedelia of “Needles in My Eyes,” and “Dog’s Got a Bone”; an 11-minute “B + A” that ended with all four members on various percussion instruments (not the only time that happened); and Hot Shots II standout “Broke,” which closed the main set with Mason joining the second drum kit to take things into Can territory.
Of course, there was “Dry the Rain,” by far the night’s most beloved song, which had the entire venue nodding along. The band returned for a three-song encore: the chilled-out “I Know,” the trip-hoppy “Squares,” and a tour-de-force version of “The House Song,” featuring near-constant instrument swaps, turntablism, rapping, and a four-man drum solo in multiple configurations. What a great show.
Check out photos from Saturday’s show by Ryan Muir, the setlist, and a few videos from Sunday’s show below.
SETLIST: The Beta Band @ Brooklyn Steel 11/1/2025
Inner Meet Me
She’s the One
It’s Not Too Beautiful
Assessment
Alleged
Push It Out
Needles in My Eyes
Dog’s Got a Bone
Dr. Baker
B + A
Dry the Rain
Broke
Encore:
I Know
Squares
The House Song