Metallica's 'Enter Sandman' at Virginia Tech Sparks Seismic Activity

Metallica played their first concert at Virginia Tech’s Lane Stadium Wednesday, where the crowd’s rapturous reaction to “Enter Sandman” — which has doubled as the Hokies football team’s intro music for the past half-century — triggered the Richter scale.

The Virginia Tech Seismological Observatory measured the sold-out crowd’s response to the Black Album classic, with singer James Hetfield prompting the performance with a chant of “Hokies! Let’s Go!” When the 60,000-person crowd started jumping up and down when Lars Ulrich’s drum beat kicked in, the movement was enough magnitude to create a noticeable spike on the seismograph equivalent to a “small” but prolonged earthquake:

The night the earth shook 🎸 pic.twitter.com/KHtwPg1Os8 — HokieSports (@hokiesports) May 8, 2025

For the past 25 years, “Enter Sandman” has served as the soundtrack for when the Hokies football team run out onto their home field on gameday, and according to Hokies Daily, even the fans’ reaction to the recorded version of the track has shaken the seismograph, like before big matchups versus Miami in 2011 and Ohio State in 2021.

Like the football team, Metallica themselves took the stage to a prerecorded version of “Enter Sandman” before closing out the concert with the actual performance of the track.

“Experiencing that live, the actual band playing it rather than the games because we already get hyped from the games themselves, but hearing Metallica playing in the stadium live, it’s awesome, man,” Virginia Tech junior Luke Dalton told ABC News 13. Trending Stories MAGA Melts Down Over New Pope's Anti-Trump, Pro-Immigrant Social Media Lil Durk Denied Bail, Accused of Using Phone Accounts of 13 Other Inmates Arcade Fire Keep Moving Forward Together People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

Prior to the band’s first-ever concert at Lane Stadium, Metallica met with Hokies football coach Brent Pry, who presented them with the team’s jerseys with the numbers 25 (for how long “Enter Sandman” has been the intro music) and 72, to mark their current M72 Tour.

“It all starts with ‘Enter Sandman,'” Pry told Hokies Daily. “There’s no better entrance in college football.” (“Enter Sandman,” notably, was previously the intro music for Hall of Fame New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera.)

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