Metallica announces 12 new stadium shows in North America for 2027

Metallica has announced twelve new North American stadium dates as an extension of the already massive M72 World Tour, which kicked off in April 2023 in support of the album 72 Seasons. The new run, promoted by Live Nation, starts on May 8, 2027 in Vancouver at BC Place and wraps up on June 19, 2027 in Salt Lake City at Rice Eccles Stadium. In between, the band will stop in cities like San Diego, El Paso, San Antonio, Fayetteville, Kansas City, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Buffalo, Madison and Cleveland, all places they hadn't visited during previous legs of the tour.

Support for these new dates will come from Limp Bizkit and Avatar. Tickets go on sale through fan club presales starting Monday, September 21 at 10 AM local time, with additional presales running throughout the rest of that week, followed by the general on sale on September 25 at 10 AM local time.

Before this new stadium run gets underway, the band will first make an extended stop in Las Vegas. Metallica will hold a residency of twenty four shows there, titled Life Burns Faster, at the Sphere, running from October 1, 2024 through March 13, 2027. After that, the M72 tour simply picks up where it left off. To date, the band has already played 99 shows across 26 countries on this tour, reaching nearly five million fans in the process, making it one of the largest tours in the band's history.

The title 72 Seasons refers to the first eighteen years of a person's life, divided into seventy two seasons. In October 2023, drummer Lars Ulrich told Rolling Stone how the new material was evolving on stage. "Playing these songs live is super fun," he said about tracks like Lux Aeterna and Too Far Gone?, "We're steering them, they're not steering us." At that point the band had played and fully explored eight of the twelve album tracks live, and that number has since grown to nine.

For Dutch fans, no European continuation of the M72 tour has been announced so far, but the scale of this new North American campaign makes it clear that Metallica has no intention of closing the book on this chapter anytime soon.