“Fuck the American government, fuck Donald Trump, and fuck you”. San Francisco melodic punks Spiritual Cramps, tonight’s openers, pull no punches in an Olympia Theatre they quickly win round, with shuddering, abrasive performance that’s lyrically hard to pick out, but carries all the hallmarks of a gnashing punk act on the up. The highlight is ‘Better Off This Way’, a guitar-swirling but immediate number with echoes of The Ramones having an experiment. A good band, but we had to laugh at their tiny banner dwarfed by the Olympia stage.

L.S. Dunes are an unlikely support act, not least because the supergroup is riddled with stars, including Frank Lero of My Chemical Romance, and members of Coheed and Cambria and Thursday. Billed very much as a “mates project” away from their day jobs, their slightly scruffy sounding set does in fact look like they’re having a lot of fun. For all their well-touted ‘names’ – and the songs do seem constructed to somewhat highlight different members at different times – there is a clear stand out member, in vocalist Anthony Green.

Green’s vocal has been described as an acquired taste, but we’d instead point to it as by far the outstanding thing about the act. Capable of sharp anger, something approaching spoken word in some corners, and a vast vocal range, he delivers his emotive punk-inspired scripts like they’re straight from the heart. The rest of the band are simply a lot of fun, if far more loose and scatty in their set up than the headliners. New album ‘Violet’ is just about out now and is unusual and clever in its emotive yet punchy content. It’s likely to lift them to a status where they’re easily headlining venues like this themselves.

Rise Against, remarkably, are now more than a quarter of a century into a career that’s seen them take hardcore to unusual longevity, and in some senses they’ve lost none of the principled bite they’ve become known for. In others, they’re a band in transition, a remarkable feat at this stage, and one that shows plenty of promise.

The symbol of that transition is new single ‘Nod’. Like their new album, due in June, it’s produced by Catherine Marks, an unlikely collaborator given her more regular style (she’s worked on the likes of Boygenius, Foals, and Alanis Morisette). The track feels less like their standing style of abrupt pace changers, roaring vocals and principled staunchness, and more like a tug at the heartstrings. It’s atypical, to say the least, but it absolutely shines live, and immediately offers Rise Against a range that we haven’t seen from them before.

That said, it’s always going to be the pulsating classics that established McIlrath and co’s reputation that bring out the band’s not insignificant verve. The opening night of the tour starts with their usual opener ‘Satellite’ (rowdy, already), and continues with McIlrath wasting no time heading for the front barrier as raspy, shouty classics like ‘Give It All’ and darkly memorable ‘Help Is On The Way’ showcase their melody-heavy hardcore.

Screams of “can nobody save us, will anyone try” feel particularly apt as Rise Against’s railing against their homeland (Chicago, yes, but more the US in general), with the four-piece – who told us before the show they hadn’t practised together since their last show in November – delivering a remarkably tight performance on the tour’s opening night.

McIlrath is the unquestioning focal point, and he’s left alone to run through ‘Swing Life Away’ and ‘Hero Of War’ in acoustic form, before closure ‘Saviour’ prompts a bout of crowd surfing and a somewhat manic send off.

The highlight, though, is unquestionably the profoundly cutting ‘Prayer of the Refugee’, it’s up and down refrain both hooky and in-touch with the feel of a band that put such an emphasis on who they are and what they believe in: it’s an earworm, but one with depth and punch.

All in, Rise Against are oddly slick for a hardcore band (the genre, more often, sees talented guitarists almost jarring against each other). They’re also layered and occasionally even quite quiet and subtle. Their anger on which they built their reputation, though, has not abated, and it feels memorably personal.

At 80 minutes or so, their set is not enough to cover ten albums, but it was never going to be. It doesn’t even touch on some of the band’s core principles: there’s no mention of their well-touted veganism, for example. It is, though, enough to remind you of why this band matter, perhaps now as much as they ever have. That reason lies primarily in McIlrath’s driving, principled anger.