ANVIL Announces June/July 2026 North American Tour

Canadian metal legends ANVIL will embark on a North American tour in June 2026. The trek, which will feature East Coast metal wolves MIDNITE HELLION as support, will kick off on June 3 in Rochester, New York and wrap up on July 11 in Toledo, Ohio.

The "Pounding The Past 2026" tour will see ANVIL perform fan-favorite songs from the band's early releases "Hard 'N' Heavy" (1981),"Metal On Metal" (1982) and "Forged In Fire" (1983),along with other classics.

"Pounding The Past 2026" tour dates:

June 03 - Rochester, NY - Pineapple Jack's
June 04 - Lakewood, OH - The Foundry
June 05 - Chicago, IL - WC Social Club
June 06 - St Louis, MO - Off Broadway
June 07 - Lawrence, KS - Bottleneck
June 10 - Austin, TX - Come And Take It Live
June 12 - El Paso, TX - Rockhouse
June 13 - Tucson, AZ - Club Congress
June 14 - Las Vegas, NV - The Tuscanny
June 17 - San Diego, CA - Brick By Brick
June 18 - Los Angeles, CA - The Moroccan Lounge
June 19 - Palmdale, CA - Transplants Brewing
June 20 - Santa Rosa, CA - Arlene Francis Center
June 21 - Sacramento, CA - Cafe Colonial
June 24 - Portland, OR - Dante's
June 25 - Seattle, WA - El Corazon
June 26 - Chilliwack, BC - The Chill House
June 27 - Vancouver, BC - Astoria
June 28 - Victoria, BC - The Phoenix
July 01 - Calgary, AB - Palomino
July 02 - Edmonton, AB - The Dive Bar
July 03 - Saskatoon, SK - Black Cat Tavern
July 05 - Winnipeg, MB - The Park Theatre
July 08 - Minneapolis, MN - 7th St Entry
July 09 - Madison, WI - Crucible
July 10 - Indianapolis, IN - Black Circle
July 11 - Toledo, OH - Frankies Inner-City

ANVIL's 20th studio album "One And Only", came out in June 2024 via AFM Records. The effort was recorded in the summer of 2023 with longtime producer Martin "Mattes" Pfeiffer and Jörg Uken at Uken's Soundlodge studios in Germany. The same production team was responsible for ANVIL's previous four albums, "Anvil Is Anvil" (2016),"Pounding The Pavement" (2018),"Legal At Last" (2019) and "Impact Is Imminent" (2022).

In an interview with Victor Ruiz of Signals From Mars, ANVIL guitarist/vocalist Steve "Lips" Kudlow addressed the fact that his band never quite hit it big despite being musically ahead of their time, due to a combination of poor management, shady record labels and bad luck. He said in part: "How do you think it looked to [ANVIL drummer] Robb [Reiner] and I to watch, in 1983, the whole world pick up on what we did and leave us behind? We were doing it before… Metal didn't exist in North America. They didn't call it metal. We were doing something that they were doing in England, and we were one of the very first metal bands to play in America. Yeah, you've got hard rock, but there was a difference. There was a difference between hard rock and metal because hard rock was still attached to rock and roll. It still used rock and roll progressions. Metal used more of a prog attitude. You had songs that were much more complicated than just rock and roll. Certainly, IRON MAIDEN's 'Phantom Of The Opera' and songs like that, or ANVIL's 'Mothra'. It's not rock and roll. It's a form of it, but it's metal, that turned it into metal, what we call metal. And riff rock. That's what it is. And you can put titles on it, but you can also talk about it in musicality, what things we're actually doing. So that's how I kind of see it. So there was a difference. And some of the problems that I've been faced with is that I'm kind of the bridge between hard rock and heavy metal, because I was one of the pioneering bands that created that bridge. So I had songs — I still have songs that venture back into the rock and roll world, but at the same time, there are songs that are not rock and roll."

Lips continued: "We can sit and discuss how hard rock became metal and certainly BLACK SABBATH and DEEP PURPLE and LED ZEPPELIN were the forerunners of all of it, really. Because that's the biggest influence after [Jimi] Hendrix, the use of distorted guitars and stuff, and all of a sudden, everybody's doing it. Nothing stays sacred. Everything is stolen by the next generation and regurgitated in a new fashion. And that's what's been going on in the music industry for decades now. But I think we might've gone the full circle. You certainly can't go much further with guitar. The guitar's done its thing, man. It's done. And that's part of where the downslide for the interest in it went. Once you got to the point where the guitar playing is so phenomenal that everybody starts sounding the same — you can't tell one guitar player from the next — it's done. It's over. The race is finished. You know what I mean? For many, many years in hard rock and metal, it was who had the best guitar player in their band. Everything was revolved around the lead guitar. I mean, otherwise what would VAN HALEN mean without Eddie Van Halen? It's centered around the guitar, which we all know, obviously. We all know that. But we're at a point in history that they've done everything. Every possible way of playing lead guitar has been done. So what do you do? What is there left to do? Write good songs. That's all that's left. It's not about the guitar solo anymore. It's about the fricking song. The riffs last forever. The solos are here temporarily. It's the way it is, man."

Released in 2008, the ANVIL rockumentary "Anvil! The Story of Anvil" was the directorial debut of screenwriter Sacha Gervasi ("The Terminal") and was produced by Rebecca Yeldham ("The Kite Runner" and "The Motorcycle Diaries"). The film follows Kudlow and Reiner and their band, ANVIL, which released one of the heaviest albums in metal history, 1982's "Metal on Metal". The album influenced an entire musical generation of rock bands, including METALLICA, SLAYER and ANTHRAX, who all went on to sell millions of records. ANVIL, on the other hand, took a different path — straight to obscurity. The film was both entertaining and touching as it followed their last-ditch quest for the fame and fortune that has been so elusive to them.

Image credit: Metal Sphere