The Mayhem Festival is set to return as a single-destination event in Southern California on October 12, 2024, featuring performances by 23 bands. Complete details will be revealed on Tuesday, June 4. Following this event, a full Mayhem tour will take place in the summer of 2025.
Originally, Mayhem hinted at a 2020 comeback in December 2019 after a five-year hiatus, but these plans were postponed due to the global pandemic.
Mayhem was established in 2008 by Kevin Lyman of Vans Warped Tour and his partner John Reese.
After the 2015 edition of Mayhem, which was headlined by SLAYER, Reese announced the festival’s end due to low attendance and critical remarks from SLAYER guitarist Kerry King.
Reese wrote at the time: “Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival 2015 comes to an end. All I know is we have all tried our damned hardest to make Mayhem a home for artists, a platform for bands to increase their fan base and a place where people feel welcomed.”
Alongside SLAYER, the lineup included KING DIAMOND as co-headliners, with support acts such as HELLYEAH, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, and WHITECHAPEL.
“The bands at the top all demand a certain level of fee to be on a tour,” Lyman told the Detroit Free Press back in July 2015. “Unlike punk rock, metal never knows how to take a step back to move the whole scene forward…What happened was metal chased girls away because what happened was metal aged. Metal got gray, bald and fat.”
Kerry later told Houston Press that the issue with that summer’s event was not so much the metal bands themselves but rather the way the festival was organized.
“I didn’t take what [Lyman] said personally,” King said. “He just definitely had a mike put in front of him and said some s**t that’s detrimental to this tour and any tours he has in the future — not just Mayhem, but whatever else he promotes. Because, to me, he committed business suicide.
“At the end of the day, what I think happened to Mayhem was that they waited too late in the game to get the talent they needed to pull it off correctly,” Kerry continued. “Because what happens is, people get booked up so early these days that it seems like all the bands that could have made this more of a success are playing in Europe now instead of being on a U.S. festival. It just made the talent pool less than it could be.”
Reeder, the visionary behind Metal Addicts, has transformed his lifelong passion for metal into a thriving online community for metal aficionados. As a fervent devotee of black metal, Reeder is captivated by its dark, atmospheric, and often unorthodox soundscapes.