More and more, festivals are becoming the driving force for touring rock and metal bands. While obviously there were none in 2020, festivals are returning in force in 2021, mostly in late summer and early fall. Headliners and co-headliners include such heavy hitters as Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Slipknot, Rob Zombie, the original Misfits, Korn, Judas Priest, Five Finger Death Punch and Shinedown. Live Metal’s “2021 Festival Spotlight” series aims to bring attention to some of the names in smaller print on the festival admats—the bands you can get up close and personal with at the smaller stages—along with a few higher profile acts we find worth calling out here. See you at the shows.
Playing: Inkcarceration, Louder Than Life, Aftershock, Welcome to Rockville
Website: www.mudvayneofficial.com
Latest release: Mudvayne’s last release was a self-titled album in 2009.
What You Need to Know: Mudvayne—vocalist Chad Gray, guitarist Greg Tribbett, drummer Matthew McDonough and bassist Ryan Martinie—is set to reunite after a hiatus of more than a decade. All the band members stayed active in music while Mudvayne was on ice, most notably Gray and Tribbett in Hellyeah, but clamor for a reunion never went away.
The band’s only comment so far has been this typically cryptic statement released to social media: “These symptoms suggested that our evolution, I suppose, from the animal kingdom into human kingdom itself was catalyzed or triggered by our encounter with these hallucinogenics, and… Yes, we are an ape with a symbiotic relationship to a mushroom, and that has given us self reflection, language, religion, and all the spectrum of effects that flow from these things And one can only wonder how these hallucinogens might effect our future evolution as well. They have brought us to this point and as we make our relationship to them conscious, we may be able to take control of our future evolutionary path.”
Known for musically complex, polyrhythmic songs and horror movie-style makeup, Mudvayne has released five full-length albums, the first three of which—”L.D. 50″ (2000), “The End of All Things to Come” (2002) and “Lost and Found” (2005)—have been certified gold, along with the single “Dig” from the first album. The single “Happy?” reached number one on the U.S. Mainstream Rock chart in 2005, one of the band’s six top 10 singles.
What You Need to Hear:
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