American heavy metal band Machine Head has finally announced the dates for their April/May 2023 U.S. tour that will be conducted to support the band’s latest album, Of Kingdom and Crown, which was released earlier this year on August 26. What is unique about this upcoming run, however, is that the band currently has no plans to utilize or incorporate any sort of setlist; instead, the band aims to rely on audience requests in order to perpetuate a more comforting and casual tone around their performances (Blabbermouth).  

When Brian Aberback of The Aquarian Weekly asked Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn why the band decided against using what seems like such a necessary structural component, Flynn said that “Over the pandemic, Jared [MacEachern, Machine Head bassist] and I started doing this thing called ‘Electric Happy Hour.’ Every Friday afternoon, we would jump on Facebook Live and Twitch, and YouTube Live and stream, drink beer and play metal songs. We were all on lockdown; we were all cooped up and couldn’t do anything, so it was this very loose, fun, jammy thing. We’d take requests on Facebook Live, and we got a lot of people. We’d average about 2,000 people a show. It was pretty fun, and then we started doing full-album playthroughs on the anniversaries. We ended up doing about 130 shows. In general, there was no setlist. We’d kind of just make it up. I’d pick the first song about five minutes before we went live, and from there, we didn’t know what we were going to do, we just made it this fun thing and ended up learning like 365 songs between all the Machine Head songs and then the cover songs. We just wanted to take that and bring that crazy energy to touring once we started again, but it was really fun having this loose structure.” The frontman later elaborated, saying, “We’re out here doing a lot of dates, and we’re not playing a single major market. We’re not playing in New York City, we’re not playing San Francisco or Chicago. I’m in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, right now. We did Fargo, North Dakota, last night. We did Missoula, Montana, Boise, Idaho — all these nooks and crannies, all these killer markets, and people are starving for it, and we love it. That connection in the live environment? That’s the ultimate. That’s the way to win people over. We’ve got a major market tour of the U.S. for April through May.”

While no dates for the April/May performances have been released yet, the loose structure of the future shows is guaranteed to be exciting!

In other news, Machine Head is currently undergoing a Fall 2022 North American tour that will continue until December 23. Click this link for a full schedule of tour dates.

Machine Head also shared a video for their song “No Gods No Masters” earlier this year in August.

 Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat