Just like 2025 and 2024 before it, we are eschewing a "classic", big ol' list of albums we liked from 2026 so far. Lists are fun but they make no sense ("this album is number 12 and this album is number 9" are words uttered by the insane). Instead, we will be using the next few weeks to highlight our favorite trends, releases, shows, cover art, experiences, and more from the first half of this (musically) excellent year.
Time continues to pass by at the rate of one wretched year per year, and as a consequence, it seems that every other day now there’s another album approaching some anniversary mark, be it 10 years, or 20, or whatever your favourite number is. There is often, naturally, a tour to match. Maybe a double anniversary tour, with a second band doing the same with the album they released around the same time. You should probably go. You loved that album back in the day. Plus, when else would you hear that one deep cut from the tracklist again? They never play that one live.
I really can’t point to when exactly the ‘anniversary tour’ — and its subsidiary, the ‘full album tour’, devoid of the temporal context but just as much a thing — really started becoming more commonplace in metal. Still, it seems band after band has been getting in on the trend in recent years. A short list off the top of my head: I was stoked to see Cynic perform the legendary Focus front to back in 2023 (a rare 30-year anniversary tour); Mastodon and Lamb of God’s Ashes of Leviathan double-anniversary tour was all high school me had ever wanted (though that tour apparently dodged every major city, and I missed it); my bedroom wall is adorned with a tour poster from when Revocation played The Outer Ones front to back in 2018; Baroness toured Red Album and Blue Album simultaneously just last year; Deafheaven did Sunbather in full some years back; and I even trekked out to Montreal in 2024 to watch the previous iteration of The Ocean Collective rip through 2013’s Pelagial in a show that was explicitly marketed as being part of a one-time-only run.
Is it fair to say these have been happening at an increased frequency over the past decade or so? I’m not sure where I’d even begin crunching the numbers, but it certainly feels that way, anecdotally speaking. Maybe they’ve always been a thing and I’ve only just started noticing it more. Hey look, Parkway Drive just announced one!
If we operate under my not-quantitatively backed premise here, I can kind of get why. Nostalgia is a powerful thing and it sells. And even beyond the nostalgia angle here, there’s something about being present for an event, this sort of somewhat-manufactured-scarcity to it all, a sense that this is a special occasion beyond any other regular show. Plus, if you’re a full-album-listener who treats the shuffle button with scorn, there’s also something special about watching songs match the same order the way you’re used to hearing them, and doubly so for very well sequenced albums that are best experienced in exactly that way. Consider Pelagial again — one of the best metal concept albums ever, a record that was always intended to be experienced in order, and one which was immaculate to witness in full live as a consequence. I’ve also found that seeing a full album that I love played through in order means that listening to that same sequence of songs off of the record after the fact feels extra good — as if there’s a whole new layer of dopamine attached to the dynamics of the album that my brain is already used to.
That said, I had the good fortune of interviewing Rody Walker of Protest the Hero recently, and he has gone on record saying that after doing three anniversary tours (for Kezia, Fortress, and Volition respectively) he is absolutely done with the concept (which does mean, tragically, that Scurrilous will never get one). When I asked, his take was that while anniversary tours might seem to be an easy way to drum up interest in a tour, it didn’t feel great to potentially limit one’s audience to a specific album. Doing so could counterintuitively work against making people want to come out to a show; he felt that their encore during the Volition X tour (”Bloodmeat” and “Sequoia Throne”) got the crowd far more pumped than the Volition set prior. I was reminded of Josh Homme talking about this once, explaining that when fans pay to see Queens of the Stone Age, they are likely expecting to hear “No One Knows”, and he feels that the band ‘owes’ it to the fans to play it through — no matter how many times they’ve done it before. (Last year, in Boston, he introduced the song by first convincing the audience they were about to play a song they’d never done live before. I got got. I’ll admit it.)
To an extent, I get this angle about limiting one’s audience too. I was pretty bummed when I heard that the Mars Volta tour I was seeing last November was going to be them just playing their latest album Lucro Sucio, which is… a perfectly fine record, but not really why I wanted to see them. I enjoyed the show plenty and I don’t regret going, but I originally fell in love with The Mars Volta because Deloused and Frances the Mute changed my life like it did everyone else’s, and I left wishing they’d at least played “Inertiatic ESP” or something as an encore. I can respect the artistic statement being made there, and I’m sure they’ll play songs from those earlier albums again in the future — but I remember what I felt like when I found out that was the set for the tour, when Rody’s point was laid bare to me months before I heard him put it into words.
So maybe these tours aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. But would I have minded nearly as much if The Mars Volta had been doing Deloused front to back? Is it just album-dependent? Bullet for my Valentine were knowingly tapping into a lot of millennial nostalgia when they anniversary-toured 2004’s debut The Poison last year, but — and I don’t say this to besmirch the band, I also liked Scream Aim Fire when I was younger — it certainly felt like the band’s peak popularity was indeed The Poison. I get the feeling that people who would normally not attend a Bullet for my Valentine show in the 2020s were much more inclined to do so upon hearing that they could watch “4 Words to Choke Upon” into “Tears Don’t Fall” live and feel like they were fourteen again, however momentarily. Once again, nostalgia is a powerful thing, and it sells — from entire festivals marketed around that (When We Were Young fest, the revamped Warped Tour) to endless Hollywood remakes and sequels of older, otherwise beloved films. It’s probably not that shocking to see individual bands tapping into that more and more as well.
Do I personally want to see anniversary or full album tours go away? Not really. I enjoy the spectacle of witnessing them, and I feel like generally speaking bands have been pretty ‘on the pulse’ of which albums of theirs are deserving of the full-tour treatment. I am also someone who pays a lot of attention to how a record is sequenced, and I feel like an album tracklist that’s well thought through also translates well to making a good live setlist. In either case, I’ve not seen that much backlash to the idea in general, and I don’t see why it would make sense for most bands to suddenly start avoiding these. But I do look forward to the day some big band announces a bizarre tour for an immensely unpopular album in their discography to see how that shakes out. Maybe Metallica could do a Lulu tour with a Lou Reed hologram for maximum psychic pain.