Royal Blood at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin on Monday, 9 March, 2015

In the wake of a hit record and an instant rise to mass popularity, all conventional music industry wisdom says you’ve got to tour like hell before the buzz dies.

The flip side of this tactic is that the fatigue that results has torn plenty of fledgling hit bands to pieces. Constantly being on the road can tear a young band apart, and constant gigging on the back on of one album’s worth of material can leave audiences jaded before very long.

Thankfully that doesn’t appear to be the case for Royal Blood just yet.

The proof comes in the form of the first of two sold out nights in the Olympia theatre, less than a year since Royal Blood played these shores in the far more intimate Workman’s club.

Looking every bit the seasoned rock stars, drummer Ben Thatcher and bassist/vocalist Mike Kerr emerged onto the stage with a calm, commanding swagger. Their performance followed in a similar vein – confident, commanding, overwhelming in its intensity, but never anything less than total controlled.

Rather than embracing the limitations of a two-piece set up, Royal Blood continually pushed themselves to wring the absolute maximum out of instruments normally consigned to background rhythm section status. You Can Be So Cruel saw Kerr furiously manoeuvred his fingers across the fret board of his bass, weaving a rise and fall surge of sounds that the likes of Queens of the Stone Age take two (or sometimes three) live guitarists to accomplish.

Meanwhile when the drums kicked in on Figure it Out, Thatcher showcased his dynamic ability to pile on a sonic barrage of  beats while simultaneously maintaining a satisfying rhythm.

There was seldom a moment that wasn’t filled with sizzlingly fast riffs and pummelling drum fills. Despite Royal Blood being such a forceful live engine, the thing that really stood out was how tight everything was.

The show hummed along with an elegant machinelike precision, with Kerr and Thatcher performing in a tight unison that at times sounded like it hardly could be coming from separate entities. It’s hard to manage they’ll do anything on their second night in Dublin (and the rest of their current tour dates) other than crank out the exact same show with assembly line accuracy.

But when the performance is this intense, that’s hardly a fault. The likes of Little Monster and Ten Tonne Skeleton get rolled out just as they sound on the album (with the minor addition of some brief sonic interludes between songs). Even this is satisfying in its own way. It’s proof for those who doubted that all of that noise on ‘Royal Blood’ the album really was made by just two guys.

The only crack in this minutely choreographed performance appeared right at the end. As Kerr launched into the thunderous hook of Out of the Black there appeared a sudden spark of genuine chaos. Where once there was perfectly balanced distortion, now there was a certain bleeding of sound. Everything became mashed together, and for once Kerr’s huge vocals got a bit buried beneath the instrumentals.

Not that this mattered. For one thing the Olympia audience was roaring along to every word anyway. But more than that, this chaos was in a way relieving. It was willing departure form imposed perfection into the messy reality of live rock music. It proved that maybe Royal Blood are human after all. Because for a minute there, we’d started to doubt.