Riffs for Days: The Sword, Red Fang & Spoon Benders Hit the Sunshine Tuesday

Clear your Tuesday and hydrate your neck. On August 11, the Sunshine Theater hosts a stoner-metal triple bill built for the pure worship of the riff: The Sword headlining, Red Fang in direct support, and Spoon Benders opening the throttle. It's an all-ages show, doors at 6:30, music at 7:30, and it is going to be extremely, gloriously loud.

The pairing is close to ideal. The Sword built a devoted following on molten, Sabbath-descended fantasy metal — the kind of thick, deliberate riffing that rewards a room with good low end. Red Fang bring the Portland heaviness with a sludgy, beer-soaked sense of humor that has made them a live favorite. Spoon Benders open with the fuzz turned up. Three bands, one temperature setting: scorching.

The room is the co-star. The Sunshine — open since 1924, a live-music house since 1990, capacity around a thousand — is precisely the mid-size box this kind of bill wants. Big enough to feel like a proper metal night, tight enough that the riffs hit you in the chest instead of dissipating into a shed's rafters. This is a stage that's held Deftones; it knows what to do with volume.

A note on logistics: ticket listings for this one have been inconsistent, ranging from a roughly $28 advance figure up through higher day-of tiers. The all-ages policy, at least, is clear — bring the teenage metalhead in your life and let them learn how a real riff feels through a wooden 1924 floor.

Why does a touring metal package rate a weekend preview? Because these are exactly the shows that quietly define a mid-size market's health. Arena tours skip cities Albuquerque's size or route them as an afterthought; a genre bill this stacked landing at a thousand-cap independent room is the kind of booking that keeps the Sunshine's calendar — and the city's reputation as a real tour stop — intact. Miss enough of them and rooms like this stop getting offered the good routing.

So this is a civic duty disguised as a Tuesday night headbang. The Sword, Red Fang, and Spoon Benders don't need instructions. You do: earplugs in, phone away, neck loose. The Sunshine has survived a hundred and two years and countless mosh pits. It can take one more.

Sources: The Sword · Red Fang · Spoon Benders — Sunshine Theater; The Sword, Sunshine Theater, Aug 11, 2026 — JamBase; Sunshine Building — Wikipedia