Watch: VOLBEAT Kicks Off ‘Greatest Of All Tours Worldwide’ In Vancouver

Danish rock and rollers VOLBEAT kicked off their “Greatest Of All Tours Worldwide” last night (Saturday, June 7) at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

According to Setlist.fm, the setlist for the show was as follows:

01. Seal The Deal
02. Lola Montez
03. Devils Are Awake (live debut)
04. The Devil’s Bleeding Crown
05. Sad Man’s Tongue
06. Demonic Depression (live debut)
07. Fallen
08. Shotgun Blues
09. In The Barn Of The Goat Giving Birth To Satan’s Spawn In A Dying World Of Doom (live debut)
10. By A Monster’s Hand (live debut)
11. Black Rose
12. Wait A Minute My Girl
13. Better Be Fueled Than Tamed (live debut)
14. The Devil Rages On
15. For Evigt
16. Still Counting

Fan-filmed video of the performance can be seen below.

VOLBEAT‘s “Greatest Of All Tours Worldwide” is launching with a co-headline Canadian run with THREE DAYS GRACE and special guests WAGE WAR, which will be followed by headline treks in the U.S. with special guests HALESTORM and THE GHOST INSIDE, and Europe with special guests BUSH and WITCH FEVER, including a second show at Copenhagen’s Royal Arena on September 20.

VOLBEAT is touring in support of its ninth album, “God Of Angels Trust”, which was released on June 6 via the band’s longtime label Vertigo/Universal.

With “God Of Angels Trust”, the Danish band — which has scored ten No. 1 songs on the Billboard Mainstream Rock airplay chart, the most ever for a band based outside North America — has thrown caution to the wind, ignored comfort zones, and paid little heed to traditional songwriting in the search for something more immediate and surprising. The end result will thrill VOLBEAT‘s dedicated legion of fans.

“In the past, I’ve taken a long time to write and obsessed over so many elements of the songs before finishing them,” says VOLBEAT guitarist/vocalist and main songwriter Michael Poulsen. “This time, I wanted to make a VOLBEAT record without thinking too much about it. Instead of following any kind of structure I said, ‘Okay, there are no rules. I can do anything I want. I can start with a chorus or do songs that are just a bunch of verses stacked on top of each other. Anything goes.’ That was freeing for me and made it exciting to write this album.”

Poulsen‘s excitement to thwart convention is palpable throughout “God Of Angels Trust”, a punchy, crunchy album that’s undeniably VOLBEAT, yet marches to a fresh new metallic and melodic energy.

Poulsen started working on songs for the follow-up to 2021’s “Servant Of The Mind” in the summer of 2024. VOLBEAT was taking a year-long break from touring to give Michael a chance to recover from throat surgery and to tour with his death metal band ASINHELL. Driven equally by his excitement to record a new VOLBEAT album and by his determination not to follow convention, Poulsen worked on songs for a mere three weeks with bandmates drummer Jon Larsen and bassist Kaspar Boye Larsen. Amazingly, they worked on a new song at every rehearsal. Three weeks into the process, VOLBEAT had arranged half of “God Of Angels Trust”. That’s when Poulsen decided that having no rules meant he could follow his muse wherever it took him, and he veered off on a different path. He and the band still wrote and rehearsed two songs a week, but they started composing more familiar rock songs that drew from traditional elements.

The band entered the studio with their longtime producer Jacob Hansen in the fall of 2024. As with the songwriting, Poulsen wanted to work quickly and rely on instinct, so they just plugged in and started to play. To keep the music sounding urgent and immediate, VOLBEAT recorded live in the studio, playing as few takes as possible before moving from one song to the next.

When it came time to add lead guitar, there was no question that VOLBEAT would tap Flemming C. Lund, who currently tours with the band and worked with Michael in ASINHELL. A mere 13 days after they started working with Hansen, VOLBEAT were finished.

As impressive as it is that VOLBEAT wrote and recorded an entire album in about five weeks, what’s more incredible is that “God Of Angels Trust” sounds as fleshed out, eclectic, and fulfilling as albums that have taken 10 times longer (or more) to create. In the end, creating such a strong album so quickly was a tremendous challenge that demanded Zen-like calm, a joy for exploration, maximal creativity, and razor-sharp concentration to pull off.

“In some ways, it feels like we’ve come full circle,” Poulsen explains. “If you start drawing a circle over an extended period of time, eventually you’ve going to get back where you started, and that’s how I feel now. I’ve dealt with medical operations, lineup changes, and all these things, and now it feels like a rebirth. It doesn’t feel like we’re doing our ninth studio album, it feels like we’re on our first album again and there’s something really refreshing about that.”