Metallica Launches 24-Show ‘Life Burns Faster’ Residency at Las Vegas Sphere

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2026 — Metallica are officially Las Vegas residents. The thrash metal giants opened their Life Burns Faster residency at Sphere on Thursday night with a 16-song set that reached across four decades of their catalog — and they did it by dusting off songs the band had not touched in years. The show opened with “Battery,” the first time the Master of Puppets classic had kicked off a Metallica concert since 2014, setting the tone for a night built around the deep cuts the diehards came to hear.

A setlist built for the diehards

The opening night setlist, reported by JamBase and NextMosh, moved from the expected heavy artillery — “Creeping Death,” “Sad but True,” “Seek & Destroy,” “Master of Puppets” — into territory the band has avoided for years. “Now That We’re Dead,” from 2016’s Hardwired... to Self-Destruct, returned to a Metallica setlist for the first time since 2021. And then came the night’s biggest shock: “...And Justice for All,” the title track of the band’s 1988 breakthrough, played live for the first time in 12 years.

Guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo kept their nightly “Kirk and Rob Doodle” improv slot, this time building it around a reimagined “Sleepwalk My Life Away” from 2023’s 72 Seasons. The instrumental “The Call of Ktulu” was dedicated to late bassist Cliff Burton, a moment of reverence inside the spectacle. Among those in the audience for the historic night: Jack White and his bandmates, who watched the rarities unfold from the floor.

The full opening-night setlist: “Battery,” “Creeping Death,” “Now That We’re Dead,” “Sad but True,” “The Shortest Straw,” “Wherever I May Roam,” “The Day That Never Comes,” “...And Justice for All,” the Kirk and Rob doodle, “Nothing Else Matters,” “The Call of Ktulu,” “Lux Æterna,” “Ride the Lightning,” “The Memory Remains,” “Seek & Destroy” — and “Master of Puppets” to close.

No Repeat Weekends, Sphere-sized

The residency runs on Metallica’s No Repeat Weekend format, the same structure that powered their massive M72 world tour: each weekend pairs a Thursday show with a Saturday show, and no song is played twice across the two nights. Fans attending both nights of a weekend get two completely different programs instead of a repeat performance.

That format, born for stadiums, takes on a new dimension inside Sphere. The venue’s wraparound LED displays, immersive audio system, and 4D effects turn each setlist into a distinct audiovisual production — the band’s live intensity paired with large-scale custom visuals built for the room. Reviewers of the opening weekend described the pairing as a natural fit: a band whose whole identity is scale and volume, inside a venue designed for exactly that.

Metallica is the first metal act to headline Sphere, a milestone for both the band and a venue that has hosted pop, rock, and EDM residencies since opening. The booking signals how far the residency model has come from its old “legends playing the hits” template — this is a working band, still touring heavily, planting a flag in the most technologically ambitious room in live music. (The Power to the People festival proved the same weekend that guitar music still moves crowds; Metallica just proved it can fill the future, too.)

The full run: 24 shows into next spring

Metallica announced the engagement in February and later expanded it to 24 shows. The 2026 portion runs in Thursday-Saturday pairs: October 1 and 3, 8 and 10, 15 and 17, 22 and 24, and 29 and 31 — yes, there is a Halloween night show — followed by a November 5 and 7 weekend. The run then pauses and resumes January 28 and 30, with further paired weekends in February before the final March dates, closing out March 13, 2027.

The October 1 Ticketmaster listing gave an 8:30 p.m. start time. One practical note from MusicTimes’ ticketing breakdown: a Thursday ticket and a Saturday ticket are separate performances even within the same No Repeat Weekend, so single-night buyers should plan around the date on their own ticket. As of late September, USA Today reported the cheapest available tickets for the 2026 dates started at $684 for the October 29 show — Sphere residencies do not come cheap, and Metallica’s is priced like the event it is.

The structure gives the residency a longer calendar span than a straight month of nightly shows, with breaks between blocks — a schedule that lets a touring band keep its road legs while holding down the Strip. It also means the setlists will keep evolving: with no repeats within a weekend and months of shows ahead, the deep catalog has room to surface songs that haven’t been played in decades.

What’s next

The next performances are this coming week — Thursday, October 8 and Saturday, October 10 — and if the opening weekend is the template, each night will dig somewhere different in the catalog. The “...And Justice for All” revival alone gives the faithful a reason to watch every setlist that posts: a song untouched for 12 years is back in rotation, which means nothing in the vault is safe.

For Las Vegas, the residency is another anchor in a packed fall — the same weekend Metallica opened, the Strip hosted everything from Diana Ross to Wu-Tang Forever. But a 24-show metal residency at Sphere is a statement about where the city’s live-music economy is headed: the biggest room in town now belongs, for the next six months, to the biggest metal band in the world.

The Previously news desk will keep tracking the residency as the setlists roll in — because with No Repeat Weekends, every Thursday and Saturday is a new show.