Cabal Blames Unmet Expectations and Social Media Rants for Why Summer Slaughter Disappointed

I’m just going to say this right off the rip so everyone in the back can hear it: the following is not an indictment of the bands that signed up to play this year’s Summer Slaughter tour. They’re all artists trying to make a living and there’s zero fault for signing up for a festival that once held the kind of prestige that Summer Slaughter once had. That being said, things apparently didn’t go well and one of the bands on that bill thinks they know why.

During a recent episode of the Garza Podcast, hosted by Suicide Silence guitarist Christ Garza, Cabal vocalist Andreas Bjulver and bassist Dennis Jovcevski Hursid were on as guests and the conversation turned to the concept of summer touring. To Summer Slaughter’s credit, Hursid said some of the shows were good… but some weren’t even close to expectations.

“We played a lot of fun shows, but we played some boring shows as well. I’m not gonna lie. Ticket sales, sometimes. We just played big rooms, like 1200 caps for 150 people.”

Ouch.

Bjulver suggested that some of the issue with ticket sales came from the lineup itself and how fans may have expected to see the Summer Slaughter of old that used to have death metal heavy hitters like like Morbid Angel, Dying Fetus, Goatwhore, and Cattle Decapitation. Instead, this year had Veil of Maya and Brand of Sacrifice co-headlining most (but not all) of the dates, with Gideon, Left To Suffer, Ten56, Tallah, Cabal, and Brat filling out the rest of the bill.

When we highlighted that issue, it sparked a major meltdown with festival owner Ash Avildsen (more on that in a bit). But according to Bjulver, that may have played a big part in why things didn’t meet expectations.

“I remember back in the days, looking at the lineups when I was a teen and there would always be a mix of death metal and then metalcore and deathcore. This year they kind of switched and just did death metal. We had Brand [of Sacrifice] who are death grind, kind of, but besides that it is really centered on more modern core. I like all the bands on it, but I think that some of the OG bands were really pissed about it.”

Then comes the elephant in the room. The aforementioned meltdown. After our initial article commenting on the lineup in comparison to previous years, Avildsen used the tour’s official Instagram page to blast us directly. In his post, he said:

regardless if we booked cannibal and fetus or resurrected necrophagist and cynic, you’re still a bunch of pro vaccine mandate brainwashed pharma cuck sheep bootlickers. have a good day and bow to your publicly traded owner, posers.

If you’re asking why he brought up big pharma and vaccine mandates, it’s cause we called him out on his anti-vaxx stance and it hurt his feelings. We capitulated though and gave him a platform to share his views in an unedited fashion, but apparently that wasn’t enough. Rather than go into the specifics, you can read this Lambgoat article that details all the insanity that went down.

Turns out, those comments could have also hurt the festival. Bjulver said as much in the podcast.

“Then there was also the rant. I don’t know if you caught that. So the page on Summer Slaughter, the person who controlled the page went on a rant.”

Hursid chimed in shortly afterward, saying it was in response to a Lambgoat article. Which, once again, was really in response to something I wrote, so…

“On an Instagram photo, they wrote about all the backlash. And then he dropped the comments basically calling all the people pussies, like Fauci pussies and basically went on an anti-vax rant.”

Unfortunately for the band, by the time all that shit went down, they’d already signed on for the festival. Even then, Bjulver said they knew the unprofessional outburst from Avildsen was bad for business.

“We had already accepted the tour and we saw that and were like, ‘Oh no,’. You can do that as a private person. No problem. But when you’re doing that and you’re speaking on behalf of the entire tour … And also, when you’re trying to sell a product, you shouldn’t antagonize your potential buyers. And that’s kind of like what happened. We were like, ‘Oh no.’”

Sounds like the unexpected changes to what Summer Slaughter was, along with the insane social media actions of its owner, really hurt the brand. Here’s hoping next year can be a bounce back for Summer Slaughter, because what happened this year ain’t it.