Immutable, Meshuggah's 2022 album, went to No. 1 on Billboard's Top Hard Rock Albums chart and topped the U.K. Rock & Metal Albums chart too, according to the band's own tour announcement. Odd place for them to end up. The whole method, complex rhythms and dissonance and long stretches of repetition, was never built for charts. Four years before that, "Clockworks" had drawn a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance.
They formed in Umeå, in northern Sweden, in 1987. Destroy Erase Improve, Chaosphere and Nothing are the albums people point to when they talk about what Meshuggah changed, and "Future Breed Machine," "Rational Gaze" and "Bleed" became songs younger guitarists and drummers learned the hard way. Revolver calls them djent's godfathers. The band has kept its distance from that label; Metal Hammer quoted them putting it flatly: "We aren't part of any movement. What we do is unique to us."
The festival bills this as their 40th anniversary, and the year is mostly touring. The Forty-Year Anomaly North American run starts February 12, 2027, in Toronto with Testament and Blood Incantation as support, and ends with three festival dates in a row: Welcome to Rockville, Sonic Temple on May 13, Milwaukee Metal Fest the day after. Revolver noted it's their first major North American tour since the 2025 headline run with Carcass and Cannibal Corpse. Europe follows in the fall with Periphery and Vildhjarta, Copenhagen on September 29 through Wembley at the end of October.