Swedish progressive metal godfathers Meshuggah had already revealed their 40th-anniversary Forty Year Anomaly tour of North America for next spring. Now they’ve added to it by announcing another leg which will visit the UK, Ireland and Europe next autumn. Support for the tour will be two modern metal bands Meshuggah have inspired heavily – US ‘djent’ innovators Periphery and fellow Swedes Vildhjarta.
Meshuggah formed in Umeå, Sweden in 1987, and over the past 40 years they have revolutionised the typically rough, raw death metal template. Their application of odd time signatures, frantic syncopated riffs, and the introduction of previously-uncommon 8-string guitars combined to create a new strain of chaotic, but meticulously constructed progressive metal.
While their influence crept into the metal consciousness off the back of genre-redefining albums like 1995’s ‘Destroy, Erase, Improve’ and 1998’s ‘Chaosphere’, the explosion of the ‘djent’ subgenre through the mid-2000s had Meshuggah’s fingerprints all over it. Named by their guitarist Fredrik Thordenal after an onomatopoeia of their signature down-tuned guitar bursts, djent became an umbrella term for acts like US progressive metal collective Periphery, whose founder Misha Mansoor has openly cited Meshuggah as one of his biggest inspirations. Shortly after, Swedish contemporaries Vildhjarta took the sound a different way, coining their own Meshuggah-adjacent subgenre they dubbed ‘thall’.
Celebrating 40 years since the band’s formation, Meshuggah announced the Forty Year Anomaly tour of North America at the end of October, scheduled for Spring 2027. Their partners for the US and Canada leg will be old-school US thrashers Testament, plus modern American death metal revivalists Blood Incantation.
In an announcement this week, Meshuggah revealed they will be taking both Periphery and Vildhjarta along for all 20 dates of the new European stage of the tour next autumn, kicking off in Copenhagen on September 29. After Paris on October 24, it comes to Dublin’s 3 Arena on October 27. The run ends with its two England shows, visiting Aviva Studios in Manchester on October 29 and ending at London’s OVO Arena Wembley on October 30.
Tickets for the European Forty Year Anomaly tour are available now on O2 pre-sale, ahead of general sale going live at 11am this Friday, November 6. Check the full dates on the poster below:
