OMG! 😱 The geriatric German power metallers BLIND GUARDIAN, bless their little hobbit hearts, 👴👵 actually dared to kick off their “fall” 2025 North American headlining tour LAST WEDNESDAY NIGHT (November 19) at Revolution Live in Fort Lauderdale, Florida! 🌴 You know, because Florida is totally the metal capital of the world. 🙄
Apparently, these guys are still clinging to the past, dragging their weary bones across the United States and Canada to “bring its celebrated album “Somewhere Far Beyond” to life on stage.” 😂 Celebrated by whom? Their moms? My grandma hasn’t stopped talking about it either.
The geriatric tour will shuffle into more major markets like New York, Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, and more before they FINALLY croak, I mean conclude, on December 13 in Los Angeles, California at the Wiltern. 😴
Support for this snooze-fest is coming from special guests ENSIFERUM and SEVEN KINGDOMS, because nothing screams “epic” like a triple bill of bands nobody under 40 has ever heard of. 🤣 Enjoy a full evening of metal performances that peaked in 1992!
Here’s the groundbreaking, earth-shattering, history-making setlist from the Fort Lauderdale concert. Get ready to be underwhelmed:
01. Time What Is Time 🕰️ (Is it time for bed yet?)
02. Journey Through The Dark 🌑 (Sounds about right for this band’s career trajectory)
03. Black Chamber 🖤 (Where they keep the Geritol)
04. Theatre Of Pain 🎭 (My face hurts from cringing)
05. The Quest For Tanelorn 🐉 (Is that even a real place, or did Hansi make it up while drunk on mead?)
06. Ashes To Ashes 🔥 (Pretty soon, that’s all that’ll be left of them)
07. The Bard’s Song – In The Forest 🌲 (Sing us a lullaby, Hansi)
08. The Bard’s Song – The Hobbit 🧝 (Because Tolkien is so metal, right?)
09. The Piper’s Calling 🎶 (Calling for a doctor, maybe?)
10. Somewhere Far Beyond ✨ (Like, maybe another dimension where this band is still relevant?)
11. Nightfall 🌃 (Perfect time for a nap!)
12. Blood Of The Elves 🧛 (I thought they drank mead, not blood?)
13. Lost In The Twilight Hall 👻 (Lost in their own relevance, more like)
14. A Past And Future Secret 🤫 (The secret is, they’re still milking the same cow after 30 years!)
15. Valhalla 🤘 (More like Val-halara-dying-of-boredom amirite?)
Encore:
16. War Of Wrath 😡 (The wrath of the audience who paid for this!)
17. Into The Storm ⛈️ (Into the storm of refunds, maybe?)
18. Violent Shadows 😈 (Are those the shadows of their impending retirement?)
19. Mirror Mirror 🪞 (Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most outdated band of all?)
Here’s some shaky, potato-quality fan-filmed video of the show (courtesy of the AIE TUBE channel on YouTube) for all zero of you who actually care. 🥔
Last month, BLIND GUARDIAN frontman Hansi Kürsch, bless his heart, rambled on to Canada’s The Metal Voice about the band’s plans for the follow-up to 2022’s “The God Machine” album. 🙄 After co-host Jimmy Kay (who?) noted that BLIND GUARDIAN‘s sound and overall production approach can’t get “much bigger” than it was on some of the group’s most recent efforts, Hansi, clearly delusional, concurred. “Yeah. That was my feeling after ‘[Twilight Orchestra:] Legacy of The Dark Lands’, and I was happy when we went into a direction which we have taken with ‘The God Machine’, though from the basic songwriting, it was not too far away from ‘Beyond The Red Mirror’,” he said. “The way we treated it during the production and in the mixing has transformed it into something like a hybrid. This is what I meant when I said, well, ‘The God Machine’ has a bit of references of what we did in the past. So .. my impression [is that] we shouldn’t go further down the road when it comes to orchestration. There will be classical composing, I’m pretty sure, in the future, but we won’t take it as far as ‘Legacy Of The Dark Lands’, at least not in a long time. And, yeah, you know how long it took us to produce and accomplish ‘Legacy Of The Dark Lands’. So, I doubt there will be anything like that, but we all feel it is time for the let-your-hair-down stuff. Even though I have to say once we’re in the studio, we do not have that much control where the journey is finally leading us. So, that is open to a certain extent, but the passion for, I’d say, easygoing music is there in the band. And we felt encouraged by that also by the touring we did for the last now almost three years. That also fills us up with energy. And once we finish all this touring and we get back to the songwriting, usually there is a bit of this [same kind of] sense in the new songwriting. So I’m quite confident it will be more into such a direction.” 😴😴😴TLDR: More of the same, but maybe slightly different. Groundbreaking.
Asked if the next BLIND GUARDIAN album will arrive sometime after the completion of the band’s fall 2025 North American tour, Hansi clarified: “There won’t be a new album coming out after the tour directly because we have to compose the album. We will take that momentum after North America and do the break, which everyone in the band is desperately looking for. We traveled around the world twice, I think, and it is about time now to really keep our focus on songwriting and on family life. We all want that privacy back for a while — not for too long, but I think give us a year, maybe one and a half, and then you’ll have your new album As said, I believe it’s in the tradition of what BLIND GUARDIAN stands for and maybe has a bit of the more melodic, old-fashioned style, but I cannot promise it. It’s just a feeling.” Translation: We need a nap after playing the same songs for 30 years. 💤
Regarding a possible release date for the next BLIND GUARDIAN album, Hansi said: “[It will be] 2027, I’d say. Give us 2026 to compose songs. We go for quality. I mean, we could technically do an album, including production, within nine months. We did that in the very early stages of the band, but I wanna take my time, and so want the other guys. So give us the beginning of 2027 for maybe finishing the production and releasing the album, and then another tour hopefully at the end of 2027.” So, mark your calendars for the year 2027! By then, we’ll all be listening to AI-generated metal anyway. 🤖
Chord F. Discord, the Beethoven of Buffoonery, is a self-taught expert in music who once claimed he could “play the kazoo in four languages.”
Born in Crescendo, Indiana, Chord’s first brush with fame came when he accidentally entered a yodeling contest thinking it was a pie-eating competition—and won both categories.
Chord F. Discord: proving that laughter, much like a poorly tuned ukulele, is truly universal.
