Periphery bring the A Pale White Dot tour to Boeing Center at Tech Port on Friday, November 13 — six months after releasing their eighth album and well into the argument it has started. This is not a small booking: 3,100 capacity, Live Nation production, doors at 6:30 PM. The support lineup alone makes getting there early a requirement.
About Periphery
Washington D.C.’s Periphery formed in 2005 around guitarist Misha Mansoor — known online as “Bulb” — whose self-produced demos of syncopated, high-gain riffing on SoundClick and guitar forums helped originate the djent sound before the genre had a name. The band that coalesced around those demos — Mansoor, guitarists Mark Holcomb and Jake Bowen, vocalist Spencer Sotelo, and drummer Matt Halpern — went on to build one of progressive metal’s most consistent catalogs: Periphery in 2010, Juggernaut: Alpha / Omega in 2015, a Grammy nomination with Periphery IV: Hail Stan in 2019, Djent Is Not a Genre in 2023. All of it self-produced on their own 3DOT Recordings imprint.
A Pale White Dot, out May 15, is the eighth record and a deliberate turn. Tracks that used to stretch past ten minutes now come in under five. The djent architecture is intact but tidied up into shapes that sit closer to contemporary metalcore than the progressive complexity the band built its reputation on. Critical reception has been mixed — some critics reading the streamlining as confident evolution, others as a step back. It’s also the first Periphery title that doesn’t reference the band name since Juggernaut, and it arrives without the band’s three-dot logo. Whether that signals a new chapter or just a cleaner aesthetic is a reasonable question. The tour will tell you something either way.
Support Acts
The bill earns a full night. Ne Obliviscaris — Melbourne’s progressive black/death hybrid — headline the support slot, and they are one of the most technically demanding live acts you’ll see at this venue size. They don’t tour North America often enough to treat this as a routine Tuesday-night opener situation. Greyhaven and Ando San round out the lineup.
The Venue
Boeing Center at Tech Port sits on Port San Antonio — the redeveloped former Kelly Air Force Base campus, less than ten minutes from downtown. Opened in May 2022 as part of a $70 million build, the room holds approximately 3,100 and is managed by ASM Global. San Antonio Current readers voted it the city’s best music venue in 2024. The venue is embedded in a larger tech campus that includes an aerospace STEM museum and gaming center, and all profits support the Kelly Heritage Foundation’s STEM and workforce development programs — which is an unusual sentence to write about a concert hall, but accurate. More San Antonio shows here.
Tickets
Tickets are on sale now. Doors at 6:30 PM. Full lineup: Periphery, Ne Obliviscaris, Greyhaven, and Ando San.