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Metallica have shared live footage of two songs they played as they kicked off their ongoing European tour last month.
San Francisco’s Grammy-gobbling and multi-Diamond-selling metal giants’ trek across the continent started on May 9 at the Olympic Stadium in Athens, Greece, and videos of them playing 1984’s Creeping Death and 1996’s King Nothing that night are now on YouTube.
The uploads took place over the last week, as Metallica’s tour continued and took the four-piece to Romania, Poland, Germany and Switzerland. Their next performance will be at at Stadio Renato Dall’Ara in Bologna, Italy on Wednesday (June 3) and they’ll hit the UK towards the end of the month, when they play Hampden Park in Glasgow on June 25.
Further dates, the last of the run, will take place in Cardiff and London from June 28 to July 5.
Metallica’s European tour sees them continue to promote 2023 album 72 Seasons, which was released to positive reviews from critics, including a three-and-a-half-star writeup from Metal Hammer’s Stephen Hill. Support across the dates comes from Gojira, Pantera, Knocked Loose and Avatar.
The band are continuing their ‘No Repeat Weekends’ format for select shows. The setup, which was brought in as 72 Seasons touring kicked off in April 2023, has them play two sets at the same venue on different nights, with different support acts and a totally different setlist each gig.
After the end of this tour, Metallica will return to the stage in October for a residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere, set to span from October 1 to November 7 and pick up again from January 28 to March 13. The shows will make Metallica the first metal band to play the famous multimedia venue, which has previously hosted U2, Phish, the Eagles, Chase & Status and more.
Another metal band who want to perform there are Los Angeles progressive metal leaders Tool. Drummer Danny Carey said earlier this year that the foursome want to both play the venue and release their long-awaited new album, the follow-up to 2019’s Fear Inoculum, in 2027.
“I think we’re the perfect band for [the Sphere],” he told Spiral Out Network. “We’ve been talking to those guys.”
Although no metal band has played the Sphere as of yet, it’s still hosted a legend of the genre. Last July, Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler posted a photo of himself with the Backstreet Boys to social media after watching the best-selling boy band of all time at the venue.
“Thanks for letting me audition, but after much consideration, I decided to stick with bass guitar (kidding),” he wrote.
Creeping Death was originally released as the single for Metallica’s second album, Ride The Lightning. It’s only chart placement came in Greece, where it landed at 63 on the International chart, but it’s gone on to become one of the band’s most-performed live songs. According to setlist wiki setlist.fm, it’s made it into 1,675 gigs, second only to 1986’s Master Of Puppets at 1,796.
Meanwhile, King Nothing first came out on 1996’s divisive Load and was later issued as the album’s fourth single in January 1997. The band reissued Load as part of an enormous multimedia bundle last summer, and they’re giving its 1997 sequel Reload a similar treatment on June 26. Head to the Metallica store to see what packages are available.
