A week after the Outside Lands Music Festival attracted tens of thousands of music fans to Golden Gate Park, promoter Another Planet Entertainment is presenting another major concert in San Francisco on Saturday featuring System of a Down, Sacramento’s Deftones and others.
The concert, the opening event of the event called Golden Gate Park Concerts by the organizer, was announced last April And sold out quickly when ticket sales began.
Formed in the early 1990s by four Armenian-American musicians in the Southern Californian city of Glendale, System of a Down has become one of the most popular alternative metal bands in the world, despite not releasing a new album in nearly 20 years and only sporadically headlining festivals and tours.
Co-headliners Deftones are a hugely successful Sacramento-based group (arguably the greatest band to ever emerge from the state capital) that has been pushing the boundaries of hard alternative music for more than three decades. While their debut album adrenaline Strongly influenced by hardcore punk (especially DC pioneers Bad Brains), the group began to introduce more melodic, melancholic elements All about furwhich led critics to compare their sound to that of The Cure and Radiohead.
When they published White Pony In 2000, Deftones ventured into far more atmospheric territory, an approach they have maintained over the past two decades. In 2020, Deftones released their latest original album ohmbut also reissued in the same year White Pony in a special 20th anniversary commemorative edition that included a remix of all the songs from the original recording.
Rounding out the program on Saturday is the reunited progressive punk band Mars Volta (who released their first new album in a decade in 2022 with their eponymous album, followed by a stripped-down acoustic re-recording of the same songs entitled Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Heart last year), the Swedish punk band Viagra Boys and the Australian “death pop” duo VOWWS as the opening act.
Doors for the sold-out concert at Polo Fields open at 1:30 p.m., with the first band starting at 3 p.m., according to the official Golden Gate Concerts website. The promoter is funding free Muni rides to and from Polo Field for concert ticket holders and also offers a paid shuttle service from downtown San Francisco (from the Civic Center), the Cow Palace in Daly City and Sacramento.
For more information on bag restrictions, entrances and more, visit the official website.
It was originally announced that Another Planet would hold several additional ticketed concerts at the park, using Lands End’s main stage and other festival infrastructure from Outside Lands. However, the co-headlining show by System of a Down and Deftones has been the only event to take place in the months since the announcement. was approved by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors last September.
Under the approved agreement, Another Planet will be able to host two or three ticketed concerts at the Polo Fields on the weekends following the Outside Lands Music Festival through 2026. The additional concerts at the Polo Fields will be about one-third the size of the Outside Lands Festival and will be smaller, headliner-focused events.
