It's time to talk about Metallica's first show at The Sphere in Las Vegas

So let’s talk about the past few days, but let’s also talk about how we got there first.

When Metallica announced their residency at The Sphere in Las Vegas, I absolutely knew I needed to be there. Natalie and I had the pleasure of attending BOTH their 40th anniversary shows in San Francisco back in 2021, kind of as our 15th anniversary trip. So this being our 20 year, I knew that the Sphere made sense! (side note: Natalie doesn’t actually care for Metallica, but she loves me, so she went along with it!)

So when tickets went on sale, I was ready, I had my fan club access and did my best to get to the front of the ticket queues. I failed though, at the time they initially went on sale the only tickets I was able to get into my cart were VIP Meet & Greet tickets, and at over $2k each, were not something that I could justify spending on. I tried for multiple weekends, over multiple days, but simply had no luck landing anything.

Fast forward to September 2026. I am in Lincoln Nebraska at the 2026 Tire Rack SCCA Solo National Championships, having finished racing, but taking photos for the final few days. I receive an email from Metallica/Seated.com about a “wait list” for Fan Club members. With that wait list, you can choose which show(s) you want to try to get tickets for and then if you make it through the wait list they will give you the opportunity to buy tickets. I fill out the form, pick 10/1 (first show) and 10/17, just to see what happens. Not expecting anything good to come out of this, except maybe more spam.

About 24 hours later, I’m driving towards Kansas City on my way home from Lincoln and get a text message saying I’ve made it to the top of the wait list and I can now purchase tickets for the 10/1 show. I pulled over and was able to get two seats to the first show, Section 109, Row 21 seats 5 and 6. I was blown away, the price was just at $400 each with fees, which after viewing the VIP M&G prices earlier in the year I was more than happy to pay!

So with that I needed to start planning the trip, where to stay, how to get there, etc. Ended up booking a room at The Palazzo, which is connected to the Venetian and also connect to The Sphere. For an additional $85/night I was able to upgrade to a “Sphere View” room, which was a no brainer and totally worth the money! If you’re looking for a hotel for a Sphere show, definitely look for a Sphere view.There isn’t much of a view (if any) of the Sphere from the strip, so you may not really get much of a look at it without a hike.

So let’s get to Vegas

We flew out of St. Louis early on Thursday morning, 10/1, and arrived in Las Vegas just after 8am. We grabbed an Uber over to the Palazzo and checked in to the hotel, they let us check in, but wouldn’t give us our room number. The room was apparently empty, and would be one of the first ones cleaned, so they wouldn’t give out the number until it was clean.

We packed light, just a single night in Vegas, so we kept our backpacks with us and headed over to the Metallica Life Burns Faster pop up store in the Venetian. We got there just at 10am when they were opening up, only to realize the line was quite a ways down the hallway, down and escalator and further down another hallway. We didn’t have anything else planned, so we stuck the line out and made it through in maybe an hour or more?

The merch store was overwhelming, so many items, most of them reasonably priced, but hose Justice sweatshirts at $300+? WTF

The “weekend” t-shirts were hard to find, ended up grabbing one in Small I believe, it was that or 3X that was left. The weekend posters were not available while we were looking around, sold out from what we heard. Ended up with 2 shirts each, at the checkout counter I grabbed some Sphere/Live Burns Faster magnets, and while checking out the guy that had checked out previously came back and told the cashier that they brought out a stack of posters, she ran off and grabbed 2, one for me, and one for the guy. This was the FOIL poster too, so beautiful.

Lunch at Yardbird’s

From the store we headed to grab ourselves some food, walking through the Venetian, we ended up at Yardbird’s, which was a great choice. I ended up ordering the Cheesy Grits and Potatoes (both appetizers) and found them to be excellent! Added that one to our “room” bill and as we finished up our lunch we got a message that the room was available, so we headed off to the room to unload and Natalie took a quick 30 minute nap.

We weren’t sure what we wanted to do Thursday afternoon, so we decided to head out on the strip and walk around a bit. We walked through the Venetian and headed across the street to Ceasar’s and the shops over there. Did a little shopping while wandering around Vegas eventually over to the Bellagio. At that point I thought we should head outside and check out the fountains, but as we made it to a window I noticed the fountain pool was full of metal… With the F1 race coming up they were building out Boxes that overlook the track, and completely block the fountains from Vegas Blvd.

We wandered a bit more and headed off strip to try to walk up to the sphere, which we managed to do. But being Vegas, it was getting awfully warm in the exposed shadeless afternoon so we turned back into the hotel around 4pm for a quick rest before the show. We grabbed a bite to eat at one of the burget places in the shops and then headed over to the Sphere for the show.

Security was pretty straight forward at the show, though Natalie had to go through the “back check” line for her small see-thru clutch she had. Once inside we found the merch line and headed to our seats real quick to check them out. After a few pictures from the seats we had plenty of time before the show, so we ended up heading back out to grab some water and get in the merch line. Merch was similar to the pop up store, by the time we got to the front things were getting limited. The posters were once again nowhere to be found, we did manage to pick up two sweatshirts and a t-shirt with the October 1st poster design on it.

The Show - Metallica

The show, well, it was simply an amazing experience. We were sitting in Section 109, Row 21, Seats 5 and 6. We had a great view of the stage and the sphere. There was a small section of the very top/back of the sphere we couldn’t see due to an overhang behind us, but I don’t think it impacted our experience in any way. I’ve got plenty of photos in the gallery at the bottom of this post, and you can find videos from the show on my Instagram, @thechristoc, so you can see some of the views and what the show was like.

I wore my custom “ADIDAS” Sphere shirt that I quickly made with the help of friends the day before we travelled. Earlier in the week Metallica had announced an ADIDAS collab, and someone posted in the forums that Adidas stood for “All Day I Dream About Sphere”, so I ran with that idea.

The ticketed time for the show was to start at 830pm, I had come across someone posting a published schedule that said 840pm, but it was 845pm before the intro music started.

The show itself was amazing, sure a few of the songs had weird animations that could have used a lot more effort (Sad But True) but overall I thoroughly enjoyed it. I didn’t wear any earplugs and found the sound levels to be great, and the quality, better than any concert I’ve been to.

Did people stand? Did people sit?

Yes to both. In the section we were in, everyone pretty much started off standing. I would say for 80% of the show they were standing, there were a couple of times where people say down, which to be honest as a 49 year old dude who walked around Vegas earlier in the day, was nice. I am not sure if the upper sections stood much, I honestly didn’t look up to see how they were doing, I was too immersed into the show.

Visuals during the Show

The visuals on the sphere were pretty amazing for most of the show, though Sad But True with a bunch of animated hammers felt like a cop out.

Call of Ktulu was simply amazing to hear and see in person, my Instagram Reel for that has 1/4 million views alone.

A post shared by Chris Hammond (@thechristoc)

I definitely enjoyed the visuals and getting to see the band on the stage. It was most enjoyable to watch James just staring up at the visuals while playing as well. Lots of still shots from the show included in the gallery at the bottom of the page.

Post Show Poster

When the show came to an end, the band spent some time tossing out picks and drumsticks, though only to the GA ticketed folks (and snake pit passes), who were on the floor. The house lights were up and it was pretty apparent that the show was over, so we headed to make the trek back to the hotel. As we came out of the seating area I started seeing more people with poster tubes walking around, so I made a quick pass by the merch table and saw that they had posters! We got in line, took about 15 minutes to get through, as we got closer the poster stack was shrinking, I was worried I would get to the front of the line and they would have sold out. Fortunately I was able to snag the 10/1 concert poster, along with a tube, so I managed to get both the weekend and Thursday 10/1 poster on the trip!

The walk back to the hotel was a little chaotic, we started down the tunnel/hallway that connects between the Sphere and the Venetian, but it was absolutely packed with people. We figured we would try the outside route down Sands Blvd. That might have been a mistake. There seemed to be nearly as many people, but mainly people from the GA floor (I think). Half these guys looked so drunk or stoned that they couldn’t walk! That made for a very slow trip back to the hotel, but the biggest pain was we couldn’t enter through the convention center, so we ended up having to walk entirely around the Palazzo and go in the front doors, which increased the travel distance by probably 2x.

The Outside of the Sphere

One of my goals for this trip was to take a time lapse of the outside of the sphere during the show. I brought my trusty GoPro Hero 12 with me and attached it to the inside of the hotel room window. I started recording around 6pm and stopped the recording just before midnight. I went back through the video quickly before bed and realized that during the show there wasn’t actually much related to the show on the outside of the sphere. Just the standard Metallica Life Burns Faster red graphic that they cycled through throughout the day. They did however at one point LOOP that graphic multiple times. I put that section together in another video:

A post shared by Chris Hammond (@thechristoc)

The Return

Friday morning we slept until around 8am and then slowly got ourselves up to grab some breakfast. The problem with the shoppes at the canal, most of them don’t open until 10 or 11am, so getting breakfast wasn’t as easy as we had hoped. We found a cafe/bakery and grabbed some breakfast and coffee. After that we went back to the room and packed up our stuff, most of the merch we were able to fill into our backpackages. We did end up with one extra bag for the sweatshirts and posters, which I figured I would be able to transport onto the plane.

Our flight wasn’t until nearly 2pm, so we had a few hours between check out time and needing to be at the airport. After Ubering to the hotel from the airport, I wanted to try a driverless taxi but Waymo wasn’t an option, they had a limited rollout to only invited riders, so I needed to find something else. Ended up seeing ZOOX driving around Vegas with their little shoebox looking cars (no front/rear), so I downloaded the Zoox app and figured out we could take a Zoox from the Fashion Show mall to the airport. So we wandered around the mall a bit and then waited for our chariot to arrive.

What’s next?

I am going to see what happens at the shows this weekend, see if the setlists are generally the same, or if they are different. I would like to try to see another Metallica show at the sphere but I want to NOT see the same setlist we saw on 10/1. So I’ll see what happens and what tickets, if any, I’m able to find in the future to see another show.

If you get the chance to go to Vegas for Metallica at The Sphere, you definitely need to jump at the opportunity!

Metallica At The Sphere Night 1 Gallery