Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta Has Taken Over Summer Slaughter
Remember how around this time last year Summer Slaughter was announced and its lineup fell far below people’s expectations? Remember the fallout that came afterward and how some bands felt that fallout hurt ticket sales?
You may recall that even though the lineup featured powerful modern acts like Veil of Maya, Brand of Sacrifice, Gideon, Left To Suffer, Tallah, Cabal, Brat, and others, people were expecting something like years past where Goatwhore, Dying Fetus, The Black Dahlia Murder, and the like were on the bill. Fans blasted the unexpected change in the type of bands getting booked to the tour and it got so bad that they dropped the old tagline of “most extreme tour of the year.”
Well hopefully that whole shit show won’t happen again because it’s now apparently under new management. During his most recent appearance on the Garza Podcast, Hatebreed vocalist Jamey Jasta revealed that Summer Slaughter has been transferred over to his control.
“I’m going to be helping take over Summer Slaughter. I don’t think I can talk about the lineup, but this is something that I really wanted to do. Especially after the reaction to last year’s lineup… Ash is a Maverick and a visionary. And if you look at the early days of Summer Slaughter… There was shows where, like, Whitechapel opened, playing first, okay?
“And [Avildsen] would always offer us this tour, and we never did it, because we were always building in Europe. But now that we kind of made it where we need to be in Europe, where either we’re headlining or we’re second or third from the top — we focused on Europe for a long time — I said we want to bring back… We want Hatebreed to headline a summer tour. And so after the the reaction [to The Summer Slaughter Tour] from last year, I thought we could do this.
“We can bring it back, and we can diversify the lineup a little bit, with some hardcore and some metalcore, but still have the deathcore and the death metal and the crossover, or whatever you want to call it.”
Having seen how Jasta’s handled Milwaukee Metalfest, this could be great. According to Jasta, the show will also span more than just the North American market, taking the “summer” thing worldwide and effectively making it a year-long thing.
“So they created headliners out a lot of these bands, and Hatebreed hasn’t done a summer tour in years in the US. But we’re going to start small. It’s going to be very short, like 14-15 shows and we’re going to take small bands; we’re going to take the future bands, for better or for worse.
“So we’re not expecting it to be blowout bonkers, but we’re just, we’re also taking it global… Because, it’s summer in other parts of the world, at different places, like Australia, like South America.
“And we [Hatebreed] also need to be… We’re long overdue to start working Australia regularly. Again, we just did Knotfest and just crushed it, and in South America too. So yeah, so we got work to do, but it’s good problems to have and it’s good opportunities to have.
“And yeah, I really, I appreciate Ash giving Tim [Borror of Sound Talent Group] and myself the support of not only Milwaukee Metal Fest, but also the belief in us taking this over and trying to make something great again.”
Given the fact that it sounds like this might be a mixing of old school and new school Summer Slaughter, this could ultimately be a great thing! I know I’m looking forward to finding out who’s going to be the bill.
