Music | Metallica will perform twice at the Olympic Stadium, but the contents of the concerts are different

World the most successful metal band Metallica will perform on Friday and Sunday at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium. Finland is a familiar place for the band, as it has been here since 1984 and played 20 concerts in Finland before this weekend.

Unlike many other bands and artists who play stadium gigs, Metallica plays a different repertoire for two consecutive gigs. The world tour started in the spring of 2023, and the tour program has been prepared so that Metallica will appear in each city on Friday and Sunday and play different songs at the concerts.

This summer, the program of the European tour includes a few individual large open-air concerts between the weekends, but they have also had different programs.

To vary using the software has been a habit for Metallica for a long time. The drummer who prepares the song lists for the band’s concerts Lars Ullrich told last summer of the New York Times in an interview that even in the early 1990s, the band played the same song list “almost robotically” on tour.

Since the 2004 tour, the program has been changed from night to night, and now we have reached a situation where completely different songs can be heard at two shows in the same city, as happened less than two weeks ago during the opening weekend of the summer European tour at the Olympic Stadium in Munich.

“Mixing the songs protects us from being on autopilot,” Ullrich explained the solution in an interview.

Of variation nevertheless, Metallica has classic hits that are played more often than others.

On last year’s tour, the band played 29 concerts. Setlist FM – website, they circulated a total of 44 songs, and the first single from the most recent album was most often heard Lux Æterna as well as some of the band’s best-known old songs Master of Puppets and Nothing Else Matters.

Usually 16 songs have been heard during one gig.

During their career, Metallica has made a lot of surprising decisions that have annoyed some fans, but also kept the audience interested. It’s also a surprise of its own that on last year’s tour The Unforgiven heard only five times. The song is the sixth most played of all Metallica’s songs on Spotify.

From the evening in addition to the songs changing to another, Metallica is kept alert by the donut-shaped stage structure, where the audience is also inside the ring.

During the gig, the band changes places on the ring so that it plays in four different directions. For this, Ullrich has four drum kits on stage.

Even the warm-up bands are not the same at the weekend gigs. Mammoth WVH and Architects will perform before Metallica on Friday, and Ice Nine Kills and Five Finger Death Punch on Sunday.

Concerts in Helsinki on Sunday are sold out. Some standing-room tickets were available for Friday’s concert on Wednesday night.