MAYHEM Festival To Return As Single-Destination Event In October; Full Tour To Take Place In 2025

Mayhem festival will return as a single-destination event in Southern California on October 12, 2024. 23 bands will perform at the festival, with complete details to be announced on Tuesday, June 4. A full Mayhem tour will follow in the summer of 2025.

Mayhem originally teased a 2020 comeback in December 2019 following a five-year absence, but those plans were subsequently put on hold due to the global pandemic.

Mayhem was founded in 2008 by Vans Warped Tour's Kevin Lyman and his partner John Reese. Over the years, such groups as SLIPKNOT, SLAYER, MOTIONLESS IN WHITE, ASKING ALEXANDRIA and UNDEROATH have taken part in the event.

Following the SLAYER-headlined 2015 edition of Mayhem, Reese declared that the festival was coming to a close, in light of poor attendance and less-than-kind words from SLAYER guitarist Kerry King.

"Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival 2015 comes to an end," Reese wrote in a social media post back in August 2015. "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."

A few weeks earlier, Lyman criticized the metal scene for the lower-than-usual attendance at the 2015 edition of the traveling event. The tour was smaller that year, with fewer bands overall and fewer "headline-worthy" acts at the top.

In addition to SLAYER, the lineup featured KING DIAMOND as headliners, with HELLYEAH, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA and WHITECHAPEL among the support acts.

"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."

King later told the Houston Press that the problem with that summer's event lay not so much with the metal bands themselves but with the way the festival was booked.

"I didn't take what [Lyman] said personally," Kerry said. "He just definitely had a mike put in front of him and said some shit 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."