Wild Beasts @ O2 Apollo, Manchester, 16 Feb

When Wild Beasts announced their split last September, it felt as if we were losing the one all-white, all-male indie rock four-piece that we couldn’t afford to. Their uncommonly deep explorations of sexual politics and toxic masculinity were carried off with wit and flamboyance and it is achingly ironic that the global reckoning on sexual harassment and assault has taken place only after this group, which has been picking apart those behavioural patterns and excoriating those who facilitate them for years, made public their decision to call time. Not everything about Wild Beasts should be viewed through this particularly political lens, of course, but it does underline the fact that they can’t be departing because they feel they’re no longer relevant.

An extensive interview that the Kendal four-piece participated in with Q Magazine towards the end of last year demonstrated that there is no neat answer to the question of why tonight’s show at Manchester’s Apollo is their penultimate, before they head to Hammersmith’s equivalent the following night. The law of diminishing returns on a sparsely-attended U.S. tour contributed, as did a sense that there was a life to be lived outside of one another’s pockets. The decision was not unanimous; Tom Fleming, whose rich baritone was one half of the fascinating vocal push-and-pull with Hayden Thorpe’s falsetto at the heart of the band’s sonic identity, appears to have reluctantly gone down with the ship, if his comments in that piece were anything to go by.

Kendal was never a town big enough to suit the group’s creative ambition and accordingly, they called Leeds and, later, London home for the vast majority of their time together. Manchester, though, appears to hold a similarly important place in their story; when this show was bumped up from the smaller Albert Hall, they said on Facebook that “the very notion of our band began with nights at the Apollo. That we should be finishing there is beautifully symmetrical.” Day trips to the city for concerts was something that continued long after they were an established band themselves; when they played Smother in its entirety at Sound Control in 2012 (a venue that, speaking of poetic symmetry, was demolished last week), Thorpe recalled that the night before they’d started writing the album, the four had been at the Palace Theatre across the road, to see Joanna Newsom.

Tonight’s show bears all the hallmarks of an indie rock curtain call; an emotionally charged atmosphere, a career-spanning setlist, and a packed room that realistically they couldn’t have hoped to have sold out in less poignant circumstances. They open with the first track off of Two Dancers, the Mercury Prize-nominated record that consolidated their rise to alternative royalty in the UK and that continues to vie with Smother for the title of the fans’ favourite. The Fun Powder Plot unfurls slowly and deliberately and might normally test a Friday night audience’s patience. Tonight, nobody here wants it to end.

There’s a brief interval at the midpoint of tonight’s show, which runs longer than two hours, and the first half deftly balances the immediacy of their singles – A Simple Beautiful Truth and The Devil’s Crayon are cases in point – with deep cuts like His Grinning Skull and the rolling drama of Smother pair Loop the Loop and Lion’s Share. It's a stirring reminder of how consistently brave this band have been, all the way back to their debut, 2008’s Limbo, Panto.

The night’s real triumph, though, comes in its closing half, and therefore so does the evening’s real story. The second set is dominated by Boy King, the utterly audacious fifth Wild Beasts album that will now stand as their last and, by some estimations, as the straw that broke the camel’s back. It saw the band violently snap back against the persona they’d created for themselves and instead attempt to subvert by assuming, with tongue firmly in cheek, many of the characteristics of the macho profile they were so often seen as the antithesis of. It’s a sleazy, grimy affair, but knowingly so, and it was the boldest possible album that a band in their position at that specific moment could have made.

It is also, tonight, crashingly loud, as if they’ve deliberately turned the volume up on those tracks just to hammer home how far apart it stood from the rest of their catalogue. The streamers that herald the opening of Get My Bang feel like an unnecessary affectation when the pulsating bass is already pummeling the crowd into submission; Alpha Female, Big Cat and Celestial Creatures are similarly thrilling in their deafening energy. The older tracks sharing the second half with them, even big hitters like Hooting & Howling and This is Our Lot, are left in the shade; only Wanderlust stands tall in the face of Boy King’s sonic assault.

The encore comprises the two tracks that probably best capture the essence of Thorpe and Fleming’s conflicting vocal styles, both of which inspire manic singalongs (Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants and All the King’s Men respectively) before a suitably epic version of End Come Too Soon that the band, understandably, milk for all it’s worth. They tick every box that you’d expect at a farewell gig tonight, but you wonder whether a large chunk of the audience might have left with a dramatically changed view of the divisive Boy King that was down to more than just eulogistic generosity. Ultimately, there’s no real sense of closure.

That’s partly because, in a post-LCD Soundsystem world, cynicism about the permanence of a split will reign regardless of how big a song and dance a band makes about it. More than that, though, there is an uncomfortable feeling that we’ve just seen a band cut themselves down in their prime. James Murphy, at some point, must have decided that the reasons for retiring his group were no longer valid – that he wasn’t too old to be in a band, and that he didn’t feel too guilty about asking his bandmates to leave their families and their other projects on the back burner. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to hope that Wild Beasts are visited by similar changes of heart sooner rather than later.