AFI rolled into The Pageant on October 22 for a stop on their Holy Visions 2026 Tour, supporting the 2025 album Silver Bleeds the Black Sun…. With Choir Boy opening and an all-ages crowd filling the room, the night delivered the band’s signature blend of early hardcore intensity, mid-2000s anthems, and their current gothic/post-punk atmosphere.
Doors opened at 7 p.m., Choir Boy took the stage around 8 p.m., and AFI hit around 9:20 p.m. for a tight, roughly 65-minute set that wrapped near 10:25 p.m. The Pageant suited the band well—intimate enough for the theatrical moments, yet big enough for the full-throated sing-alongs.
The set opened with “Strength Through Wounding,” the band launching into the track from Black Sails in the Sunset as Davey Havok worked the stage with his usual charged presence. From there they hit the Sing the Sorrow and Decemberunderground era hard: “Girl’s Not Grey” and “Love Like Winter” both landed as immediate crowd favorites, with the room singing back the choruses. Newer material from Silver Bleeds the Black Sun… sat comfortably in the middle of the set—“Holy Visions,” “Behind the Clock,” “Marguerite,” “End Transmission,” and others—showing how the band’s current darker, more atmospheric sound fits live alongside the older catalog.
The Pageant crowd responded with the usual AFI mix of old-school punk energy and dedicated sing-alongs. Reports from earlier stops on the tour (Sayreville, Toronto, Grand Rapids) described similar nights of high energy and career-spanning sets; St. Louis followed that pattern with a focused, no-filler performance that balanced nostalgia and the band’s current direction.
For a band more than three decades in, the Holy Visions stop at The Pageant felt like a confident reminder of why AFI still commands rooms like this. The songs still hit, the live intensity hasn’t dimmed, and the set smartly threads the old and the new.
