Iron Maiden Touring Canada This Summer

Heavy metal icons Iron Maiden have announced a North American tour in support of their upcoming new album, The Final Frontier, which is expected out later this summer.

The tour kicks off June 9 in Dallas. Dream Theater will be the support act for the entire tour, except a lone Canadian date June 30 in Winnipeg. There's no word on who will open that show.

"It's a bit of a dream come true for us," Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy said. "After 25 years together, at this stage in our career, there's honestly only three bands Dream Theater would consider opening for and Maiden is one of them."

The 22-city tour of arenas and amphitheatres features six Canadian stops in Vancouver, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal before concluding July 20 in Washington, D.C.

Tickets to the Canadian dates go on sale March 13 at 10 a.m. local time (noon for the Montreal show). Members of the band's fan club have first crack at tickets through a pre-sale on March 10, but Montreal fans will have no access to the pre-sale offer "regretfully due to technical reasons."

The band are also proposing a paperless ticketing system for most of the North American dates to curtail possible scalpers and resellers.

Following the North American tour, Iron Maiden will head to Britain to play the Sonisphere Festival July 30 to August 1 before a handful of European festival dates in August.

Iron Maiden last toured North America in 2008 as part of their Somewhere Back In Time Tour, hitting Toronto and western Canada in May and June of that year.

Here are Iron Maiden’s tour dates:

June 9 Dallas, TX @ Superpages.com Center
June 11 Houston, TX @ Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
June 12 San Antonio, TX @ AT&T Center
June 14 Denver, CO @ Comfort Dental Amphitheatre
June 16 Albuquerque, NM @ The Pavilion
June 17 Phoenix, AZ @ Cricket Wireless Pavilion
June 19 San Bernardino, CA @ San Manuel Amphitheatre
June 20 Concord, CA @ Sleep Train Pavilion
June 22 Auburn, WA @ White River Amphitheatre
June 24 Vancouver, BC @ General Motors Place
June 26 Edmonton, AB @ Rexall Place
June 29 Saskatoon, SK @ Credit Union Centre
June 30 Winnipeg, MB @ MTS Centre
July 3 Toronto, ON @ Molson Amphitheatre
July 7 Montreal, QC @ Bell Centre
July 11 Holmdel, NJ @ PNC BankArts Center?July 12 New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
July 14 Pittsburgh, PA @ First Niagara Pavilion
July 15 Cleveland, OH @ Blossom Music Center
July 17 Clarkston, MI @ DTE Energy Music Theatre
July 18 Chicago, IL @ First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre
July 20 Washington, D.C. @ Jiffy Lube Live
July 30-Aug. 1 Knebworth, England @ Knebworth Park (Sonisphere)
Aug. 5 Wacken, Germany @ Wacken Festival
Aug. 7 Stockholm Sweden @ Stora Skuggan (Sonisphere)
Aug. 8 Pori, Finland @ Kirjurinluoto (Sonisphere)
Aug. 11 Bergen, Norway @ Bergenhus Festning (Koengen)