Bloom’s Jono Hawkey Reveals His Favourite Songs To Play Live

Bloom have been levelling up over the last few years with more weight in the songwriting, bigger rooms, louder crowds, and a live show that’s getting sharper with every run.

Ahead of next month’s Australian tour dates, Jono Hawkey of Bloom gave us an exclusive look inside the set, specifically: the tracks that hit hardest on stage.

From new album cuts built for movement, to older songs that still flip a room on its head, here are Jono’s favourite Bloom songs to play live, in his own words.

Forget Me Not

The first song that comes to mind is track two on The Light We Chase, it’s called Forget Me Not. It’s a song that we wrote with the intention of playing it live, live was definitely at the forefront of this song. I remember being in the studio and we jumped tested it, we played it at different BPMs to work out what felt the best natural tempo to jump along with. It has this really fun, uptempo, bouncy feel to it. And I think that has just come from years of live shows and seeing what people connect with and what gets people moving. When we first heard the demo and the skeleton of the song, there was this really cool pulse throughout it. And I am really excited to play it in Australia. We’ve only played it in Europe, UK and America so far, so it’ll be the first time we play it live in Australia in a couple of weeks. And then I’ll really get to test my theory of whether we have written a good jump song!

Withered

My next pick is going to be another song from the new album, and it’s Withered because the ending of that song is absolutely ridiculous live. It is very, very heavy and I get to have a really big moment where all the instruments drop out and it’s just me. I’ve started doing portions of it live off the mic, just kind of yelling at the crowd, and it feels massive. That song is just a very heavy song, it has a lot of crowd surf, intense energy . We got to do those Withered shows just before we went overseas, it was Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne. And those shows had so much intensity, you really felt the energy there. Withered absolutely delivered live, it achieved what we hoped it would when we were writing it.

Siren Song

My next pick is going to be Siren Song off our album Maybe In Another Life. The reason this song makes the cut is because of the way that it’s evolved over time. I remember we did a tour with Make Them Suffer Back in 2024, and it was Make Them Suffer, Bury Tomorrow, Spite and Bloom. And when you look at that lineup, you go, “wow, that’s a lot of heavy bands…and I guess Bloom’s playing too”. I remember we were at prac and we were like, “well, we’ve got to do something. We’ve got to have one of these heavy moments. The second we leave the stage, Spite are getting up on stage and they’re going to be so much heavier than us. Maybe we should throw a punch”. And I remember we were messing around at prac and I floated the idea of: what if we just did the Siren Song ending at half tempo? We just slowed it down, I chucked a mean guttural in, and we really made it into a “moment”. It kind of started as a joke, but we did it a couple of times and it felt really fucking awesome. Then we went to Europe and we played on a Silverstein show, and it was a show where maybe the crowd’s not expecting breakdowns. And we just lent into it! We played maybe eight shows in Germany, and by the end of it when we’d get to the section, I’d be getting everyone in the room, horns up, something that’s very easy to engage with. And it just became this part of the set. So, our live version of Siren Song is really fun and it’s something that we only do live. And I get to rip a mean guttural in it, that part’s awesome.

Daylight

My fourth song is off In Passing, and it’s called Daylight. Daylight was the first song we put out through Greyscale Records when we signed with them, and I think a lot of people discovered Bloom through that song. If they hadn’t found us from Cold, Daylight was the song they’d found us from. That song was probably the first time Bloom had ever written any semblance of a breakdown in any song. It had pit moments, two-step rhythms and breakdowns and all of that. It’s a song that we don’t bring out too often, it’s really kind of reserved for headliners. But every time we played it at headliners, it’s been a song to get the room moving. Even outside of Australia, we did some Japan headline shows last year and I think our Japanese audience really likes In Passing. We were playing the show and it was going well, then we played Daylight and the energy in the room just completely flipped on its head, it really picked up. That song is always fun to slip in. And because we don’t play it too often, it feels exciting for us to play as well.

Keep You feat. Pat Miranda

My fifth pick will send it back to the new album, and I’m going to go with Keep You because it’s just really different, it has a different energy and a different feel. I remember the first time we played that live was at the Sydney Withered show, and we had never played it as a band. We’d shot the music video for it, so we knew how to play the song, but the five of us had never played it all together. It was the last show of this run that we did before we went off overseas, and we knew that that song was going to be one of the next singles coming out. And we were just so hyped on how well all the other shows had been going, but Sydney’s the hometown so you kind of gotta do something special. I remember we ended up playing Keep You in the set for Sydney, we slipped that song in and it kind of caught all five of us off guard. It’s a different one for us because it has less intensity, and it ruminates, it builds and it has this sort of swaying feeling to it. We’re really used to really fast, high-paced sections, so it was cool to do a song that didn’t have that same sort of feel and intensity. I think You & I on the last album sort of scratched that itch a little bit, but with Keep You on The Light We Chase, it’s really stripped back, by Bloom standards at least. And it has a really fun feeling to play live, it just has a groove that we haven’t really done in a live setting before.

Bloom ‘The Light We Chase’ Australian tour – February 2026