Eagles of Death Metal roll into San Francisco's Fillmore at 8 PM tomorrow, to play their sophomore album, Death by Sexy, from start to finish as part of a nationwide tour marking the record's 20th anniversary. The California garage rock band will run through all 13 tracks, including staples like Chase the Devil, Cherry Cola and I Want You So Hard (Boy's Bad News), with tickets starting at $48.
As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, frontman Jesse Hughes will lead this run of shows without co-founder Josh Homme, who likely has commitments with Queens of the Stone Age, the band he formed in 1996. Homme co-founded Eagles of Death Metal with Hughes in 1998, and the two childhood friends from Palm Desert built the project as a tongue-in-cheek experiment imagining what might happen if the Eagles collided with death metal — despite the name, the band has always leaned into garage, blues and rockabilly rather than anything metal, according to Wikipedia.
A Breakout Record Born in 12 Days
Death by Sexy, released in 2006, marked a turning point for the band, per the Chronicle's reporting. The album was recorded in just 12 days in January 2005 at Studio B inside Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, the San Fernando Valley facility famous for decades of iconic analog rock recordings, according to Discogs. Homme was the driving force behind the sessions, which drew a roster of high-profile guests: actor Jack Black, credited under the alias Jack B. Nimble, along with late Screaming Trees singer Mark Lanegan, Brody Dalle and guitarist Dave Catching all made contributions, illustrating how Homme and Hughes frequently brought in famous friends as what Discogs describes as additional Eagles.
The record found an audience beyond rock radio. It debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's Heatseekers Albums chart and climbed to No. 11 on the Top Independent Albums chart, per Ultimate Guitar. Individual songs later reached an even wider mainstream audience through licensing deals: Don't Speak (I Came to Make a Bang!) turned up in Electronic Arts' Need for Speed: Carbon and a Guy Ritchie-directed Nike ad, while Chase the Devil landed in Tony Hawk's Project 8, according to Wikipedia's entry on the band's discography.
Back at The Fillmore, Two Years After a Free Park Show
This isn't the band's first San Francisco stop in recent memory. Eagles of Death Metal last performed in the Bay Area in 2024, playing a free outdoor concert at Potrero Del Sol Park in Potrero Hill as part of SF Live, a six-month series of free concerts presented by the city and live event producers, as detailed by DoTheBay. That show was co-presented by Mission District venue Kilowatt and Noise Pop Productions. The SF Live series itself launched in April 2024 through the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department and the SF Parks Alliance, backed by a $2.5 million state funding allocation that then-Assemblymember David Chiu secured before becoming City Attorney, according to KQED. The program was designed to help revive the city's post-pandemic nightlife and music scene, the outlet reported.
This time around, the band trades a city park for one of San Francisco's most storied stages. The Fillmore, located at 1805 Geary Boulevard, was built in 1912 as Majestic Hall and now holds a general admission capacity of 1,315 patrons under operator Live Nation, which has run the venue since 2007, per Wikipedia. Concert promoter Bill Graham staged his first show there on December 10, 1965, a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe featuring the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, under a lease from African American nightlife entrepreneur Charles Sullivan, who had operated the venue for Black artists before Graham took over its dates, according to KQED's reporting on Sullivan's legacy.
The Band's Darkest Chapter
Any account of Eagles of Death Metal carries the weight of November 13, 2015, when Islamic State terrorists attacked the band's concert at the Bataclan theatre in Paris. The attack killed 89 audience members and the band's merchandise manager, Nick Alexander, while band members escaped through a backstage door, according to Britannica. The Bataclan assault was part of a coordinated series of terror strikes across Paris that claimed 130 lives that night.
Two decades removed from the album's origins in a Van Nuys studio, the Death by Sexy anniversary tour brings Hughes back to a city that embraced the band's free outdoor show just two years ago, this time inside a venue with more than a century of San Francisco music history behind it.
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