Metal Edge Presents
Highlights
METALLICA ANNOUNCES 2027 NORTH AMERICAN M72 TOUR DATES
Metallica's M72 World Tour keeps rolling. The band has announced 12 additional North American stadium shows for 2027, launching May 8 at BC Place in Vancouver and closing out June 19 at Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City. Limp Bizkit and Avatar, both veterans of previous M72 legs, return as support for the entire run. SHOP LIMP BIZKIT The 2027 leg breaks from the tour's signature two-night, no-repeat format — this time, Metallica will play single shows in each city. The venues are a deliberately eclectic mix: NFL and CFL stadiums, college football cathedrals like Camp Randall and Razorback Stadium, and the homes of men's and women's soccer clubs, including San Diego's Snapdragon Stadium. What stays the same is the production that has defined M72 since its 2023 launch. The stage sits at mid-field, in the round, with the Snake Pit at its center putting fans inside a full 360-degree view of the show. SHOP METALLICA The routing covers serious ground, threading from the Pacific Northwest through Texas, the Midwest, and the East Coast before circling back west. Highlights include Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, and Buffalo's Highmark Stadium. Presales begin Monday, September 21. Tickets go on sale to the general public Friday, September 25 at 10 AM local time. Metallica 2027 M72 North American Tour Dates: May 8 — Vancouver, BC — BC PlaceMay 13 — San Diego, CA — Snapdragon StadiumMay 18 — El Paso, TX — Sun Bowl StadiumMay 22 — San Antonio, TX — AlamodomeMay 26 — Fayetteville, AR — Razorback StadiumMay 29 — Kansas City, MO — Arrowhead StadiumJune 2 — Raleigh, NC — Carter-Finley StadiumJune 5 — Indianapolis, IN — Lucas Oil StadiumJune 8 — Buffalo, NY — Highmark StadiumJune 12 — Madison, WI — Camp Randall StadiumJune 15 — Cleveland, OH — Huntington Bank FieldJune 19 — Salt Lake City, UT — Rice-Eccles Stadium
5 BANDS YOU CAN'T MISS AT LOUDER THAN LIFE 2026
5 BANDS YOU CAN'T MISS AT LOUDER THAN LIFE 2026 Louder Than Life returns to Louisville's Highland Festival Grounds September 17–20 with the biggest bill in the festival's history — more than 200 bands across seven stages, headlined by Iron Maiden, My Chemical Romance, Limp Bizkit, and Tool. With that much noise packed into four days, the schedule conflicts are brutal. These are the five sets we're building our weekend around. (All Photos by Dimitry Mak) IRON MAIDEN Thursday, September 17 — Louder Stage, 8:45 PM Maiden close out Thursday night as part of the Run For Your Lives World Tour, the 50th anniversary trek built entirely from the band's first nine albums — everything from the 1980 self-titled debut through 1992's 'Fear of the Dark.' That means "The Trooper," "Hallowed Be Thy Name," "Powerslave," and two hours of the catalog that built heavy metal's blueprint, delivered with the full theatrical production only Maiden can pull off. Bruce Dickinson still hits the notes. Steve Harris still gallops. Eddie still towers over everything. But a golden-era anniversary tour five decades in carries a certain gravity, and nobody in the Maiden camp is making promises about what comes after this cycle. Stateside festival appearances from the band are rare to begin with — this is one of the only chances American fans will get to see them this run, and there's no telling when, or whether, another one comes around. Bands like this don't exist anymore, and the window to see the originals do it live keeps narrowing. If you've never witnessed "Fear of the Dark" sung back by a festival crowd of thousands, Thursday night is the assignment. Up the Irons while you still can. LOATHE Friday, September 18 — Life Stage, 3:05 PM We have a standing rule at Metal Edge: if Loathe are anywhere near New York, we're in the room. Every time. The Liverpool outfit remain one of the most singular live acts in heavy music, and this year they finally delivered the record fans waited six years for. 'A Stranger to You,' released July 17 via SharpTone, follows 2020's genre-shifting 'I Let It In and It Took Everything' with fourteen tracks that fold psychedelia, synth atmospherics, and soul-jazz collaborators into the band's signature collision of crushing metalcore and shoegaze haze. Lead single "Revenant" — featuring NOWHERE2RUN, the new project from Code Orange's Jami Morgan and Shade Balderose — might be the heaviest thing they've ever recorded, while deep cuts like "Fangs" showcase Erik Bickerstaffe and Kadeem France operating at the peak of their powers. The album is a lock for year-end AOTY conversations, ours included. Their Louder Than Life set lands one day before the A Stranger to You headline tour kicks off with Fleshwater and Prostitute in support, so consider Friday afternoon your preview of a band about to level up. The 3:05 slot is early. Be there anyway. THE WARNING Friday, September 18 — Decibel Stage, 8:15 PM Stateside chances to catch The Warning have been scarce all year. The Monterrey sisters spent 2026 largely overseas and on festival stages abroad, and the just-announced Everything's Falling World Tour keeps American fans waiting even longer — the run opens with a 65,000-cap stadium show at Mexico City's Estadio GNP Seguros in February before hitting Europe, with the U.S. leg holding off until April 2027. That makes this Friday night set one of a precious few opportunities to see the band on American soil before next spring. And the timing could hardly be better. Fifth album 'Everything's Falling,' released in August via Lava/Republic, arrived as single "Kerosene" topped Billboard's Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, making The Warning the first Mexican band and the first all-female band ever to do it. Dany, Pau, and Ale Villarreal have grown from viral prodigies into one of rock's most explosive live units, and the new material was built for stages exactly this size. They play directly before The Pretty Reckless closes the Decibel Stage, so plant yourself early and stay put. History suggests they'll leave a crater. KILLSWITCH ENGAGE Sunday, September 20 — Decibel Stage, 6:55 PM Twenty-six years in, Killswitch Engage remain the standard against which American metalcore measures itself, and they're arriving in Louisville mid-victory-lap. 'This Consequence,' released in early 2025 via Metal Blade, ended a five-plus-year gap after 'Atonement' and promptly delivered one of the biggest songs of the band's career — "I Believe" became their first single to crack the top five of Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. The record finds Jesse Leach at his most lyrically pointed and Adam Dutkiewicz's production as razor-sharp as ever, balancing the soaring choruses that made "My Curse" and "The End of Heartache" generational anthems with some of the nastiest riffing they've committed to tape in years. The band has spent 2026 grinding through headline runs and a Canadian trek with Machine Head, and the live show is airtight right now. Their Sunday evening slot on the Decibel Stage sits inside a murderers' row of a closing day — Underoath, Thrice, Alexisonfire, and Atreyu all share the bill before Tool brings the weekend home. Sunday legs will be tired. KsE's opening breakdown will fix that immediately. CIRCA SURVIVE Saturday, September 19 When Circa Survive's dormant Instagram flickered back to life in February to announce this reunion, the post-hardcore world collectively lost it. The Philadelphia band went on indefinite hiatus in 2022 — a split Anthony Green later admitted felt closer to a breakup — and these September dates mark their first shows in nearly five years. Demand tells the story: the hometown warm-up at Philly's Fillmore sold out within hours, forcing two additional nights just to meet it. Louder Than Life gets the festival exclusive, and the booking around it is a scene reunion in itself — Saturday's undercard stacks Dance Gavin Dance, Chiodos, Thursday, Hail the Sun, Scary Kids Scaring Kids, and Emarosa alongside them, essentially a Warped-era fever dream dropped into the middle of a metal festival. Green remains one of the most magnetic frontmen of his generation, equal parts falsetto and chaos, and the 'On Letting Go' and 'Blue Sky Noise' material has lost none of its urgency in the years away. Reunions like this tend to be fragile, beautiful things with no guaranteed second act. Whatever else Saturday holds, this is the set people will be talking about on the drive home.
READER POLL: THE TOP 5 MÖTLEY CRÜE SONGS OF ALL TIME
Photo by Chris Walter/Getty Images You voted. We counted. And for a band whose catalog spans grimy Sunset Strip proto-punk, arena-crushing ballads and one of the most notorious comeback singles in metal history, the results say a lot about what Crüe fans actually treasure — starting with a winner that predates the band's first major-label deal. Here are your top five, counting down to No. 1. 5. "Home Sweet Home" Power ballads were a cottage industry by the mid-Eighties, but almost none were built like this. "Home Sweet Home" opens with Tommy Lee — the most kinetic drummer of his generation — alone at a piano, playing a melody so patient and mournful it barely sounds like the band that made 'Shout at the Devil.' Mick Mars' guitar, when it finally arrives, is all sustain and ache, and Vince Neil delivers one of the least sneering vocals of his career. Released on 1985's 'Theatre of Pain,' the song became a phenomenon on MTV, where fans requested the video so relentlessly on Dial MTV that the network instituted a policy retiring clips after a set run — the so-called Crüe rule. What's remarkable in hindsight is how unguarded it is: a band whose entire brand was excess admitting to exhaustion and homesickness in the middle of the ride. Four decades later, your votes suggest it still hits the same nerve. Even the dirtiest band on the Strip wanted to go home. 4. "Wild Side" If "Home Sweet Home" is the Crüe at their most vulnerable, "Wild Side" is the band at their most dangerous. The standout from 1987's 'Girls, Girls, Girls' opens with Nikki Sixx committing outright blasphemy — twisting the Lord's Prayer into a street sermon for runaways, dealers and everyone else surviving on the wrong side of Hollywood Boulevard. It was the darkest lyric he'd written to that point, and it came from an honest place: Sixx was deep in the heroin addiction that would nearly kill him within the year. Musically, it's arguably the heaviest thing the band ever cut. Tommy Lee's stuttering, syncopated drum pattern hits more like Judas Priest than the glam pack the Crüe were lumped in with, and Mars answers with one of the grimiest riffs of his career. That contradiction — a band at its commercial peak writing its most menacing material — is exactly why the song endures, and why it's the cut fans cite when arguing the Crüe deserved credit as a genuinely heavy band. Your votes make the same argument. 3. "Primal Scream" The dark horse of this poll — and maybe its most telling result. "Primal Scream" arrived as a new track on 1991's 'Decade of Decadence' compilation, the kind of contractual bonus song most bands phone in. The Crüe wrote one of their fiercest. Credited to all four members, it's a groove-heavy, weirdly funky slab of hard rock that absorbed the changing early-Nineties landscape while sounding unmistakably like themselves. Lyrically, it turns the anger inward and outward at once — Sixx processing childhood wreckage and hard-won sobriety, Neil spitting the verses with a rasp that sounds genuinely wounded. There's a case it's the best vocal of Neil's tenure, which carries extra weight given that within months he and the band would split. That makes "Primal Scream" one of the final statements of the classic lineup, a glimpse of the road the Nineties Crüe might have traveled. Nearly three and a half decades on, you put a compilation track above "Home Sweet Home" and "Wild Side." Consider it a verdict. SHOP MOTLEY CRUE 2. "Kickstart My Heart" The backstory borders on myth, except every word is true. December 1987: Nikki Sixx overdoses on heroin, is declared clinically dead, and is revived with adrenaline shots to the chest. Two years later he mined the worst night of his life for "Kickstart My Heart," the second single from 1989's 'Dr. Feelgood' and three minutes of pure velocity — a song about being slammed back into existence, written by the only guy with firsthand experience. Fittingly, it's the leanest machine in the catalog. Mars' revving talk-box intro remains one of the great opening statements in hard rock, and the newly sober band — recording with producer Bob Rock — discovered that clarity could hit harder than chaos ever did. A Grammy nomination followed, then decades of trailers, arenas and video games. The ubiquity never dulled it: the song still closes Crüe shows because nothing can follow it. There's a poetic justice your ballots recognize. The band's nearest brush with the end produced the song most likely to outlive them. MOTLEY CRUE ‘TOO FAST FOR LOVE’ 45TH ANNIVERSARY LP 1. "Live Wire" And at No. 1, the first shot fired. "Live Wire" opened 1981's 'Too Fast for Love,' the debut the band originally released on their own Leathür Records, and it remains the purest distillation of what Mötley Crüe was: punk desperation, metal muscle and glam theatricality crammed into one twitching, sweat-soaked anthem. Everything that made the band famous is already here at full strength. Sixx's gift for making menace catchy drives the whole thing, Mars' riff is nasty and economical, and Lee plays like a man being electrocuted — right down to the breakdown that collapses into coiled, whispering tension before detonating again. Neil's shriek sounds hungry in a way that can't be faked: four broke maniacs deciding they'd become the biggest band in the world through sheer voltage. The song helped turn a self-released record into an Elektra deal and never left the setlist. That your ballots put it above every platinum-plated hit that followed says something genuinely cool about this readership: you value the spark over the fireworks. According to you, the Crüe never topped their opening statement — hard to argue with the wire that started the fire.
