Avenged Sevenfold and Good Charlotte Bring Pyro, New Songs, and a Kavinsky Tribute to Tinley Park
By Colette Custin Bevard
Some tours feel like they were inevitable. Avenged Sevenfold and Good Charlotte have been circling each other's orbits for over two decades- two bands who came up together, toured together, and somehow never shared a proper headline bill until now. Thursday night at Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre, that overdue pairing finally arrived, and it brought with it one of the most moving moments I've witnessed at a show all year.
Before Avenged Sevenfold took the stage, the amphitheatre went dark for something unplanned by the setlist but impossible to ignore: a memorial light show for Kavinsky, the French DJ and producer behind "Nightcall," who was found dead in his Paris home just two days earlier, on July 28. The crowd was asked to raise their phones, and thousands of small white lights swayed across the lawn and pavilion in unison- a synced, improvised send-off for an artist whose music soundtracked a generation of late-night drives and closing credits, even for a crowd that had come out for metal and pop-punk rather than synthwave. It was a strange and moving thing to witness in a room full of strangers who mostly knew Kavinsky secondhand, through movies and Spotify algorithms rather than devotion- and somehow that made it hit harder.
Good Charlotte opened the night leaning hard into their catalog, but the set carried a different energy than a straight nostalgia lap- the band is still touring behind Motel Du Cap, their 2025 album and first new full-length in seven years. New material sat comfortably next to the old-guard singalongs, and Joel and Benji Madden worked the stage with the ease of a band that's spent the better part of thirty years figuring out how to hold a crowd. The pop-punk-meets-goth contrast between Good Charlotte and Avenged Sevenfold shouldn't work on paper, but in practice it made for one of the more interesting openers-and-headliner pairings Tinley Park has seen this summer- a reminder that both bands were cut from a lot of the same emo-adjacent cloth, even if they took different roads from there. That shared history got its own moment onstage when M. Shadows walked out to join the Maddens for "The River," the 2007 Good Morning Revival cut he and Synyster Gates originally guested on.
M. Shadows, Zacky Vengeance, Synyster Gates, and Johnny Christ hit the stage with the kind of precision and force that's kept this band a headliner for two decades, and Avenged’s set list found room for a surprise: "Magic," the single the band dropped independently this year after it debuted inside Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. In terms of production, the band leaned into a stark, almost brutalist theme: lots of pyro and a towering light rig that loomed over the stage all night like an iron gate standing sentry behind the band. The drum riser played its own visual trick- Brooks Wackerman started the set boxed in behind bars, the kit looking almost caged, before it was hydraulically raised high above the stage by the end of the second song, turning the whole rig into a genuine centerpiece, made even more eerie from the phones that still glowed through the amphitheater from the aforementioned tribute.
