Heavy metal is having one of its more surreal weeks in recent memory, and not because of a new album or a canceled tour. This time the headlines are coming from a Las Vegas residency inspired by U2, a nine figure rights deal built on the same playbook that gave the world ABBA Voyage, and a 95 year old television icon who is finally getting around to fronting a metal band. Layered underneath all of that is a quieter but no less significant stretch of news involving Slipknot’s next chapter, Anthrax’s decision to turn four decades of chaos into a graphic novel, and a fresh wave of fall tour announcements that includes a genuinely stacked lineup of shows landing in New Jersey and Philadelphia over the coming months.
Lars Ulrich has never been shy about admitting when something has left him rattled, and in a recent conversation with U2 guitarist the Edge on the guitarist’s SiriusXM show, the Metallica drummer described exactly that kind of reaction to attending U2’s opening night at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Ulrich called the experience awestruck and inspired, and said watching U2 pull off that show planted the seed for what has now become Metallica’s own residency at the venue, titled Life Burns Faster after a lyric from Master of Puppets. The band’s run begins October 1 and stretches, with breaks, into March of next year, built around a No Repeat Weekend format in which each Thursday and Saturday performance features a completely different setlist. Ulrich did not pretend the challenge was small, calling the prospect of stepping into a venue built around 16K wraparound screens and a completely reimagined sound system both overwhelming and intimidating, while also acknowledging that Metallica has spent much of its career deliberately avoiding environments it cannot fully control. Throwing themselves into unfamiliar territory, he said, is exactly the point. Read The Full Breakdown on the MetalMania Live Substack!
While Metallica is looking ahead to its own high tech reinvention, Iron Maiden has just closed a deal that reframes how one of metal’s most enduring bands plans to manage the next several decades of its legacy. Pophouse Entertainment, the Swedish investment firm co-founded by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, announced that it has acquired a fifty percent stake in Iron Maiden’s publishing and master recording rights, along with the band’s name, image, and likeness rights. The deal was struck directly following Iron Maiden’s EddFest festival at Knebworth, and it brings with it the same creative infrastructure Pophouse has used to build the ABBA Voyage virtual concert experience and the forthcoming KISS avatar production. Early fruits of the partnership are already visible. During EddFest itself, fans got their first look at the Infinite Dreams Museum Experience, a walkthrough exhibit built around the band’s fifty year history and inspired by their recent anniversary book of the same name. Pophouse and Iron Maiden are also reportedly working on a live cinematic film chronicling the band’s ongoing Run For Your Lives World Tour, giving fans a tangible sense of what this new chapter of the band’s business life will actually look like on screen. Pophouse CEO Jessica Koravos framed the arrangement as a way of giving Iron Maiden the creative and financial firepower to keep evolving for decades, language that echoes almost exactly what the firm said when it closed its similarly structured deal with KISS.
If those two stories represent heavy metal at its most calculated and corporate, the next one leans hard in the opposite direction. William Shatner, at 95 years old, is set to make his heavy metal debut this September at Riot Fest in Chicago, fronting a newly assembled band billed as The Uckers. Backing him will be a genuinely credentialed lineup, including guitarists with ties to Ozzy Osbourne’s touring band and Vixen, alongside a bassist who has played with Ozzy Osbourne and Billy Idol. The performance will double as a preview of Shatner’s upcoming heavy metal album for Cleopatra Records, reworking material from across his decades spanning musical career while also debuting new songs from the record itself. Shatner has leaned fully into the absurdity of the moment, telling fans in his own statement that Riot Fest is exactly the kind of place where anything can happen and promising volume, intensity, and a few surprises. Riot Fest organizers, for what it is worth, say they spent more than a decade trying to get him on the bill. Read The Full Breakdown on the MetalMania Live Substack!
Away from the spectacle, Slipknot appears to be quietly building toward its next studio album with an unusually large amount of raw material already in hand. Guitarist Jim Root recently confirmed in an extended podcast interview that the band has brought in producer Matt Wallace, known for his longtime work with Faith No More, and that the group has already developed at least fifty distinct song arrangements during jam sessions built around drummer Eloy Casagrande. Root described the process as unusually organic, with the band gathering to play for hours at a time before Wallace and percussionist Shawn Crahan pull out the strongest moments and begin shaping them into finished songs. He was careful to note that despite a wider resurgence of interest in nu metal among younger listeners, Slipknot has no intention of chasing that sound directly, arguing that the band has always existed somewhat outside easy genre classification.
Anthrax, meanwhile, is taking a different approach to preserving its own history. The thrash veterans have teamed up once again with Z2 Comics, following their earlier illustrated adaptation of 1987’s Among the Living, to produce NOT: The Illustrated Oral History of Anthrax, a fully illustrated graphic album chronicling more than four decades of the band’s career. Drummer Charlie Benante has described the project as a way of finally visualizing stories that have circulated among fans for years, insisting that despite how outlandish some of them sound, nothing in the book has been fabricated. The 108 page release will cover the band’s earliest days, its friendships with Metallica and Pantera, its landmark collaboration with Public Enemy, and its memorably strange appearance on Married… With Children, all illustrated by a roster of comics veterans and set for release in March of next year. Read The Full Breakdown on the MetalMania Live Substack!
Beyond the headline grabbing announcements, a fresh batch of fall tours has also landed in the past several days. Cradle of Filth confirmed the second leg of their Majestic In Death tour, bringing along Moonspell, Worm, and Black Satellite for a North American run built around the thirtieth anniversary of Dusk… And Her Embrace, with the band promising select tracks from that landmark 1996 album woven into an otherwise career spanning setlist. Slaughter To Prevail announced what may be its final North American dates of the year, closing out the touring cycle behind their 2025 album Grizzly with support from rising deathcore act Rev3rent and, on select dates, Three 6 Mafia’s DJ Paul. And Soulfly rounded out the wave with a genuinely rare family reunion of sorts, announcing a fall run featuring Max Cavalera’s reactivated industrial project Nailbomb alongside Incite, the band fronted by his son Richie Cavalera, giving fans an unusually direct look at multiple generations of the Cavalera family’s influence on heavy music sharing a single bill.
For fans closer to home, the next few months bring an especially strong run of shows to New Jersey and Philadelphia. Staind will headline the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden on September 16 as part of their Break The Cycle 25th Anniversary Tour, joined by Seether, Hoobastank, and Hinder for a night built around the album that first pushed the band into the mainstream. The following night, September 15, death metal veterans Vader bring their Reign Forever In Kingdom Of Blood tour to Broken Goblet Brewing in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, with Jungle Rot and Fleshcrawl in support. On October 26, Arch Enemy and The Black Dahlia Murder co-headline a stop on their Wrath Across North America tour at the Theatre of Living Arts in Philadelphia, backed by Septicflesh, Crypta, and Thrown Into Exile. And closing out the year, GWAR brings their characteristically theatrical Gor Gor Must Die tour to the Fillmore Philadelphia on December 11, with support from Midnight, Mac Sabbath, and X-Cops promising one of the messiest and most purely entertaining nights of the entire fall calendar. Read The Full Breakdown on the MetalMania Live Substack!
Taken together, this stretch of news captures something genuinely unusual about where heavy metal sits right now. On one end, legacy acts like Metallica and Iron Maiden are leaning into technology and investment partnerships that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago, reshaping how their music and likeness get experienced by future generations. On the other end, the genre’s underlying culture remains as strange, communal, and unpredictable as ever, whether that means a 95 year old Star Trek icon debuting a metal band at a punk festival or three generations of one Brazilian metal family sharing a stage on the same tour. Few genres manage to hold both of those instincts at once, and few weeks have illustrated that balance quite as clearly as this one. Read The Full Breakdown on the MetalMania Live Substack!