Ice Nine Kills frontman Spencer Charnas has reflected on his band’s multi-year stadium tour opening for Metallica, calling the “incredible” experience a career-changing opportunity that fulfilled a childhood dream and provided a masterclass in how a legendary band should treat their support acts.
In a new interview with The Mistress Carrie Podcast, the horror-metal vocalist opened up about the profound impact of spending several years on the road with one of the biggest bands in the world.
“Incredible. It’s so hard to sum it up in only a few words, but I’m gonna try,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). Metallica‘s a band I’ve always loved since I was a little kid. I wanted to figure out how to play ‘Master Of Puppets‘ on the guitar. My father took me to see them live in probably, like, ’96, ’97. They’ve just always been that band that we’ve looked up to. And to be given an opportunity to even open one show with them or to play a festival on the same stage would’ve been like a bucket list thing. So the fact that they brought us all over the world for a few years is incredible. And their whole team and everyone in the band, everyone was just so nice and kind, and they really changed our career. We’ve seen so many people come up to us and message us and post on socials that that’s how they found out about us. So it’s like something that you dream of. I still can’t believe it happened.”
This full-circle journey began for Charnas as a young fan in the late 1990s. In a previous interview, he recalled that first Metallica concert vividly. “My dad took me to it,” he said. “They were, if memory serves, I think they were on the Load or the Reload album cycle, and it feels like that concert was a week ago.” He described Metallica as one of the “seminal bands for me. They made me, along with Nirvana, wanna learn how to play guitar riffs.”
Decades later, standing on stage with his heroes was a surreal experience. “I still have to kind of pinch myself every time we show up at one of those stadiums and realize, ‘I’m not just going to see them. We’re on the show,'” he admitted.
Beyond the personal thrill, Charnas explained that the tour was also an invaluable learning experience. He was deeply impressed by the kindness and respect shown to his band by Metallica and their entire organization.
“They come into the locker room and say ‘what’s up’ to us,” he said. “And they’re really sort of showing us the way of how, when you’re coming up, you take bands out, and take the bands out that you think are cool, and you treat them great. And we’ve learned a lot from them.”
