Godsmack built their entire career on the kind of sound an amphitheater lawn was made to hold — blunt, percussive hard rock that lands in the chest before it reaches the ears. On Tuesday, June 30, the Massachusetts four-piece brings The Rise of Rock World Tour to Empower FCU Amphitheater at Lakeview, and they’re not traveling light: Stone Temple Pilots and Dorothy fill out one of the heavier touring packages Central New York will see all summer. KROCK presents, doors and music build toward a 7:00 PM start.
About Godsmack
Few rock acts of the late-’90s wave have stayed as durable as Godsmack. Eleven number-one singles at rock radio — a tally most of their peers never came close to — track a band that always understood the assignment: loud, immediate, built for the back rows. Sully Erna’s growl and the band’s tom-heavy attack have aged into something dependable rather than nostalgic.
What gives this tour its weight is the framing. Their 2023 record Lighting Up the Sky arrived five years after When Legends Rise — the longest gap of their career — and Erna announced it would be the band’s final studio album. That makes The Rise of Rock less a victory lap than a closing argument, and the catalog is deep enough to carry a full outdoor set without leaning on the new material. The trek runs from a May 10 opener in Bristow, Virginia, through a late-September finish, with the Syracuse date landing right in the thick of summer.
The Venue
Empower FCU Amphitheater at Lakeview sits on the shore of Onondaga Lake in Geddes, just west of downtown Syracuse — a 17,500-capacity shed with 5,000 covered seats under the pavilion and another 12,500 on the lawn. It’s an ASM Global-managed, Live Nation-promoted room, which means the standard lawn-chair rules apply: no outside chairs, though a limited number of rentals are available on-site while they last. Sight lines from the lawn are forgiving, and for a band this physical, the open-air setup does it favors.
Tickets & Pricing
Tickets start at $43 and are on sale now. If you’ve seen Godsmack work a summer crowd before, you already know the lawn fills early — this is not a show to time at the last minute.