Machine Head Set to Release New Song and Announce Burn My Eyes U.S. Anniversary Tour

HUZZAH! It looks like these past five months of nightly live goat sacrifices to the Dark Lord are gonna pay off after all: The PRP says Machine Head are bringing their much-anticipated Burn My Eyes 25th anniversary tour to the U.S. (and, we can probably assume, parts of Canada). The European iteration of that tour will both reunite 75% of the band’s Burn My Eyes line-up (guitarist/vocalist Robb Flynn, guitarist Logan Mader, and drummer Chris Kontos, now joined by current MH bassist Jared MacEachern) to play that seminal album in its entirety, and will introduce a new guitarist and drummer (replacing Phil Demmel and Dave McClain) to join Flynn and MacEachern for a separate set. Presumably, the North American edition of the trek will do the same.

But wait! That’s not all! The band is also getting ready to release a new song, “Do or Die,” in September, likely in tandem with the official North American Burn My Eyes tour announcement. In addition to Flynn and MacEachern, the track reportedly features drums by Warbringer’s Carlos Cruz, although it’s not clear if Cruz is, in fact, the band’s new full-time drummer or not.

Flynn himself broke the news during a recent Facebook Live chat, revealing that the new song “has been done forever. I’ve been waiting to fucking drop it with these fucking dates, It’s taking for-goddamn-ever. So, now that we finally got the dates, we’re gonna be dropping some new shit for you.” He also said we can expect some more new songs in the not-too-distant future, even if we can’t expect the impending release of a new album:

“There’s not gonna be an album; there’s just gonna be a steady stream of standalone tracks that are consistently released. And then eventually they may or may not end up on an album. But we’re mixing it up. We wanna do this new model where we can put stuff out faster and get new music out quicker to the die-hards.

“We wanna have this ability to not just have an album come out every three years, which is what we’ve been doing — every four years sometimes — and just make it quicker and more consistent and more like a regular thing. I don’t know what it’s gonna be, but I’m definitely excited about it. I’m excited for you guys to hear this new shit.”

Which is exciting! Not only because it means we’re getting new Machine Head tunes, but also as something of a music business experiment. Bands have been talking about prioritizing singles over full albums pretty much since it became clear that the music business has been irrevocably altered in the digital era, but no one has really followed through until now. Tempting though it may be to decry the potential death of the complete album as an art form, times change, and we all gotta change with ’em or face extinction. I have no idea if releasing singles only instead of a full album will “work” or not (in a financial sense), but I’m beyond curious to find out.

Dates for the European leg of the Burn My Eyes tour are here. There’s also a Los Angeles show on December 20.