Metal
Nuclear Blast · 2 October 2026
Two hours and nine minutes, twenty tracks and not a second of new recording: this is the AFAS Live show in Amsterdam from 20 September 2024, with orchestra and choir, which already came out on 11 April 2025 as a Blu-ray and a double CD inside the special editions of “Aspiral”. What arrives now is that same audio, digital and on its own, without the video it was first released with.
The setlist that night had two songs that had not been released yet. “Arcana” did not appear as a single until 13 November 2024, two months after the concert, and the title track of “Aspiral” waited until 11 April 2025: here it runs 7:18 against the studio version’s 5:39. The rest ranges across the whole catalogue, with “Sensorium” and “Cry for the Moon” (9:58) from the “Phantom Agony” years and “Consign to Oblivion” (10:03) as the closer.
The “Symphonic Synergy Medley” is eleven and a half minutes that play no song whole: it chains fragments rather than taking them one at a time. “Beyond the Matrix” runs 10:36 and “Code of Life” 7:01. Nuclear Blast calls it a milestone in a career now more than twenty years long, and says the show was sold out: five thousand people, part of a 2024 run taking in Amsterdam and Mexico City that the label puts at thirty thousand people across four nights.
Neither the orchestra nor the choir is named in the release details. The album is sold on the strength of its symphonic collaboration and never says who played it. The band’s precedent is “The Classical Conspiracy”, recorded in Miskolc and released in May 2009 with twenty-eight tracks.
The most recent studio album is still “Aspiral”. In 2027 the band takes the show on the road for its twenty-fifth anniversary, from 24 September to 11 October, with London’s Royal Albert Hall already sold out; the two Iberian stops are Madrid, at the Palacio Vistalegre on 10 October, and Lisbon the day after.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Roger Estivill