Metallica
Pull a thread
The Chicago radio DJ who got Limp Bizkit run off a Metallica stage, and the 2027 stadium run that makes the comeback official
In 2003 a local morning host spent a week telling his listeners to bring things to throw at Fred Durst. They did. Metallica brought the band back as an M72 opener in 2025, and has now booked them for twelve stadiums in 2027.
On 16 September 2026, Metallica announced twelve North American stadium dates for spring 2027, with Limp Bizkit and Avatar opening. The run goes from Vancouver’s BC Place on 8 May to Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City on 19 June, with the band playing in the round at the 50 yard line. Limp Bizkit already opened a handful of M72 stadium dates in 2025. The last full tour they shared, in 2003, ended with Durst pelted off a stage outside Chicago by a crowd a radio host had spent a week building.
Forty years without Cliff Burton: the card draw in Sweden, and the two bass players who came after
On 27 September 1986 a bus went off the road near Dörarp, Sweden, and Metallica lost its bass player at 24. Four decades later the fan argument is still Jason Newsted versus Robert Trujillo, which has never been the actual question.
The night before
The band was on the European leg of the Damage, Inc. tour, out behind Master of Puppets, riding a bus between Stockholm and Copenhagen. On the night of 26 September, Cliff Burton and Kirk Hammett drew cards to decide who picked a bunk first. Burton pulled the ace of spades and took the one Hammett had been sleeping in.
Cliff Burton's bus crash at 40: the Metallica guitar tech in the bunk above him tells his side
Every retrospective of 27 September 1986 tells the story from the swapped bunk. Aidan Mullen was sleeping directly above Cliff Burton, went through the same window, and told it on a podcast in August 2026.
The scene everyone knows, minus one person
The bunk story is the one part of that night every Metallica fan can recite. The band picked sleeping spots on the tour bus in Stockholm, Cliff Burton won the choice, took Kirk Hammett’s bunk, and Kirk went to sleep at the front. A few hours later the bus went over and Cliff was dead at 24.
Orbit Culture and In Flames on the Crown In The Grave tour: how the Gothenburg sound reached a band from Eksjö
Orbit Culture spend November and December 2026 opening arenas for In Flames, the band whose sound people keep hearing in theirs. Niklas Karlsson says the influence came from America. The records say otherwise, and the gap between the two is the subject of this piece.
Ten months, three tours
Orbit Culture released Death Above Life on October 3, 2025, their fifth album and their first on Century Media (Wikipedia). That record carried them into their first North American headline tour, February 18 to April 10, 2026, with Ov Sulfur and Atlas in support (Blabbermouth). Then in July, Trivium announced the Crown In The Grave tour: 32 North American dates from November 5 in St. Petersburg, Florida, to December 19 in Charlotte, North Carolina, with In Flames as special guest on every night (Blabbermouth).
Andy Wallace mixed Nevermind because he had made Slayer records: the producer chain behind six weeks of 1991
Between 12 August and 24 September 1991, five albums arrived that rearranged what rock radio sounded like. The thread nobody pulls runs through the people at the mixing desk, and it starts on a thrash record from 1986.
The six weeks, in order
Start with the calendar, because the calendar is the part people misremember.
Metallica released the self-titled album everyone calls the Black Album on 12 August 1991. Pearl Jam released Ten on 27 August. Guns N’ Roses put out Use Your Illusion I and II on the same day, 17 September. And on 24 September, a Tuesday, Nirvana’s Nevermind and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik both landed (1991 in music).
Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? at 40: Megadeth's Farewell, Mustaine's Memoir, and the Family Tree Behind His "New Big Four"
Four clocks struck in the same ten days of September 2026. Put them side by side and the story of Bay Area thrash turns out to be one family, still arguing at the same table.
The week the calendar lined up
Start with the dates, because nobody planned them and they still fit.
On September 8, Dave Mustaine published In My Darkest Hour: A Memoir, written with Joe Layden and centred on his 2019 throat cancer diagnosis and the making of The Sick, The Dying… and the Dead! (megadeth.com, Rolling Stone).
Back to the Beginning: the map Ozzy Osbourne left behind, and the charity number everyone got wrong
Every branch of heavy music sent a band to Villa Park on 5 July 2025 to play in front of the man who sang the first record. The map holds up when you check it. The money story did not.
Friday the 13th, 1970
Black Sabbath put out their first album in the UK on 13 February 1970, a Friday, on Vertigo. Tony Iommi has said the whole thing was recorded in a single twelve-hour session on 16 October 1969 (Rolling Stone). The first thing you hear on it is rain. Then a church bell, then thunder. Then Iommi’s riff, slow and loud, with so much air between the hits that you can hear the room. Ozzy Osbourne comes in over it sounding like a man who has just seen something he was not supposed to see.
Rush's Fifty Something tour has no drum solo
Geddy Lee gets asked the same question every night: is Neil “with” them? His answer involves a bird. The band’s actual answer is an empty spot in the setlist. It’s the rarest solution rock has ever found to an impossible problem.
The bird in the doorway
A Toronto radio DJ, Joanne Wilder of Q107, asked Geddy Lee the question everyone wants to ask and nobody quite knows how to phrase: do you feel like Neil is with you? Have you seen any signs?
'Chop Suey!' Goes Diamond: The Heavy Songs That Sold 10 Million in the US, and What They Share
On August 28 the RIAA certified System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” Diamond, a week before Toxicity turned 25. The heavy songs at that level fit on one hand, and what they have in common has very little to do with 2001.
A Friday in August, one week before the birthday
On Friday, August 28, 2026, the RIAA certified “Chop Suey!” as a Diamond single: 10 million units in the United States, counting sales, downloads and streams together. It is the first Diamond single in System of a Down’s catalog. The same batch of certifications moved Toxicity up to 7× Platinum, and everything landed a few days before the album turned 25 on September 4. WMMR and Metal Injection carried the news on September 1.
2112 at 50: How Rush Answered Mercury's Demand for a Hit Single With a 20-Minute Suite
In 1976, one album away from being dropped, Rush handed their label the least commercial thing they’d ever made, and side one of 2112 bought them the next four decades of doing whatever they wanted.
It’s late 1975, and Rush are playing smaller rooms than they were a year earlier. Their third album, Caress of Steel, has stiffed: two side-long suites, hostile reviews, shrinking crowds. The band’s own name for the supporting run tells you everything: the “Down the Tubes Tour.” Geddy Lee later told MOJO they joked about Neil Peart going back to selling farm equipment, and him and Alex Lifeson going back to painting movie theatres.
Ghost in the Shell's Real Rock Connection Isn't Metallica — It's The Police (and U2)
A stubborn fan myth says “Master of Puppets” was inspired by Ghost in the Shell. The timeline kills that in one move, and the real rock connections buried in this franchise are better than the myth ever was.
The claim, as it circulates, is that Metallica wrote “Master of Puppets” about the Puppet Master, the body-hopping villain of Ghost in the Shell. Puppets, puppet master, control, loss of self: the vocabulary lines up so neatly you can see why people want it to be true.
System of a Down, by Candlelight: How Brazil's Museums Became Metal Venues
Fever’s Candlelight series is running an unprecedented rock and metal program across São Paulo, Rio, and Belo Horizonte in late 2026: System of a Down by string quartet, under the concrete span of MASP. The interesting question is why it works so well.
Picture the room for a second
A string ensemble, hundreds of flickering (LED, but still) candles, an audience sitting in respectful concert silence inside one of Brazil’s great cultural landmarks. Then the cellist digs into the opening riff of “Chop Suey!”