Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed is now in control of Summer Slaughter

When Summer Slaughter was revealed around this time last year, its roster was significantly less than what people had anticipated; this caused a backlash, which several bands thought harmed ticket sales. As you may remember, people were expecting something similar to previous years when Goatwhore, Dying Fetus, The Black Dahlia Murder, and similar acts were on the bill, even though the lineup included strong contemporary acts like Veil of Maya, Brand of Sacrifice, Gideon, Left To Suffer, Tallah, Cabal, Brat, and others. The sudden shift in the bands booked for the tour was criticized by fans, to the point where the previous motto, “most extreme tour of the year,” was abandoned. Since it appears to be under different control now, perhaps it won’t happen again. The singer of Hatebreed, Jamey Jasta, disclosed that Summer Slaughter has been turned over to his authority during his most recent visit on the Garza Podcast.

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.

Additionally, the program will be available outside of North America, thereby turning the “summer” season into a year-round event.

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.