Four Bands, One Very Long Night: Breaking Benjamin Take Over RBC Amphitheatre

Toronto got a pretty strong lineup on September 9, when Breaking Benjamin brought their 2026 tour to RBC Amphitheatre with STARSET, Chevelle and Kami Kehoe. Kami opened the night with a short, energetic set, STARSET followed with a full visual production packed into about forty minutes, and Chevelle came out with three people and a whole lot of sound. By the time Breaking Benjamin finally took the stage, the crowd had already seen three very different shows.

Kami Kehoe came out with a lot of energy and pretty much stayed there for the whole set. It also happened to be her first-ever show in Canada. She started the set behind the drums, then moved to the microphone and spent most of the set there, showing the range of her voice while moving around the stage.

Her set included “PSYCHO”, “SOMETHING IN THE WATER”, “UR GONE”, “Fade Out”, “THE END”, “Love Is a Weapon”, “SLEEP WHEN IM DEAD” and “DOPAMINE”. The last two worked especially well together, with “SLEEP WHEN IM DEAD” leading into “DOPAMINE” and keeping the energy up right through the end. Kami did not have a huge production surrounding her, and she did not really need one. Between the vocals, the drums and the songs themselves, there was already plenty happening onstage.

Then STARSET came out, and the atmosphere changed almost immediately. Their set opened with “p a r a d 0 x 1 c”, followed by “Carnivore” and “Brave New World”. “Monster” came next, before the band moved through “SILOS” and “a n n 1 h 1 l a t 1 0 n”. They finished with “TokSik” and “My Demons”.

The visuals were right there with the music. Dustin Bates stayed in the centre of it all, with the rest of the band moving around him. There were times when so much was happening onstage that you could look in one direction and miss something happening somewhere else.

What surprised me most was how little the set felt like a support slot. Forty minutes is not much, especially for a band putting this much into the presentation, but STARSET still managed to make it feel like a standalone show. “Carnivore” hit hard, “Monster” got one of the biggest reactions to a familiar song, and “My Demons” made complete sense as the finale. The newer material did not feel awkwardly wedged into the set either. “a n n 1 h 1 l a t 1 0 n” in particular gave Toronto a preview of what is coming next from the band without stopping the momentum of the older songs around it.

And yeah, I would have happily watched STARSET for much longer. The mix of music, visuals and production worked well enough that forty minutes felt too short. A headline show would obviously give them more room for songs and more time to stretch the whole presentation out, because there was clearly more they could have done with it.

Chevelle came next, and the stage suddenly looked a lot less crowded. There was no huge visual world surrounding the band and no need for a large group of musicians filling every part of the stage. The setup was much more direct. They opened with “Family System” and “Self Destructor”, followed by “Vitamin R (Leading Us Along)” and “Pale Horse”. “An Island” and “Face to the Floor” carried that first half of the set forward.

Their performance was tight, heavy and focused, with the guitars carrying a lot of the weight. After everything STARSET had just put on the screens, seeing three musicians simply come out and play worked surprisingly well. Chevelle did not need constant movement or some new visual idea every few seconds to keep the set going. “The Clincher” and “Forfeit” came next, followed by “Send the Pain Below” and “Comfortable Liar”, before “The Red” and “Mars Simula” closed out the set. They were loud where they needed to be, controlled without feeling stiff, and gave the night another completely different kind of performance before.

Before Breaking Benjamin played a single note, they dropped a nostalgia bomb on the crowd. Windows XP booted up on the screen, LimeWire started downloading Breaking Benjamin songs, and the amphitheatre erupted in cheers. For longtime fans, it was a pretty perfect throwback to how a lot of us first found the band. Then the screen filled with error pop-ups, and the real Breaking Benjamin show began.

Breaking Benjamin opened with “I Will Not Bow”, immediately followed by “Until the End” and “Evil Angel”, which is a really effective way to start a headline set without a long intro. “Crawl” and “Red Cold River” came next, followed by “Blow Me Away”, so the opening stretch barely gave the crowd time to settle down. “I Will Not Bow” established the mood right away, while “Until the End” and “Evil Angel” kept pushing forward. “Crawl” still sounded made for a venue this size, and “Red Cold River” gave that first part of the set an even heavier edge before “Blow Me Away” brought in another familiar favourite.

One of the best parts of the set was how much ground Breaking Benjamin covered. They did not just stick to a handful of obvious songs. Material from We Are Not Alone, Phobia, Dear Agony, Dark Before Dawn and Ember all appeared during the night. “Follow”, “Angels Fall”, “You” and “So Cold” brought in more of the older material, while “Red Cold River” represented the more recent side of the band. “Polyamorous” went even further back. There was plenty of nostalgia here, obviously, but the show never turned into nothing but nostalgia.

The middle of the set moved around quite a bit. “Follow” and “So Cold” pulled things toward the earlier years, while “You” gave the show a quieter moment without losing the weight of the music. “Polyamorous” was another trip back, before “Dear Agony” shifted the mood again. That was something Breaking Benjamin handled really well throughout the night. The set could move from a huge familiar song into something darker and quieter, then turn around and hit hard again without making those changes feel forced.

“Something Wicked” and “Breath” pushed things toward the final part of the show. “Breath” obviously did not need much introduction, but in a set packed with this many familiar songs, it felt less like the one big moment everyone had been waiting for and more like another piece of a much larger body of work. “Awaken” and “Failure” kept the newer side of the band in the picture before “Dance With the Devil” brought the darker mood back again. Placing it this late gave the song some room to breathe, especially after so many shifts between different eras of the band’s music.

“The Diary of Jane” closed the night. Breaking Benjamin played for about 80 minutes and got through 18 songs, which is a lot for the final set of a four-band night. It never really felt rushed, though. The big songs were there, some less obvious choices made it in too, and the newer material had its place without pushing the older albums aside. That was probably the strongest thing about the set as a whole. Someone who has followed Breaking Benjamin for years got songs from several different parts of the band’s history, while newer fans were not just getting a set built around old favourites.

It was a long evening, but it never felt like four versions of the same show. By the time “The Diary of Jane” finished the night, Toronto had seen four very different approaches to heavy music on the same bill.