Metal Anarchy

Last year, Ash Avildsen (Sumerian Records) brought back The Summer Slaughter Tour. However, the lineup ended up being met with backlash from fans who took issue with its new direction. As such, Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta has since been brought in to assume control of the event.

Jasta told the “Garza Podcast” the following:

“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.”

He later added:

“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.”

[via The PRP]