The Charleston Music Hall will become a sweaty metal club for one night only on July 22 when the Summer Slaughter tour rips into town. Six bands will brutalize the stage that Tuesday night in what are sure to be unforgettable performances.
Topping the bill is Hatebreed, a Connecticut metalcore band that has been surprisingly commercially successful, given its ultraheavy sound. Since forming in 1994, Hatebreed has become one of the most reliable bands on the metalcore scene, routinely selling hundreds of thousands of albums with each new release.
Hatebreed’s streaming numbers are even more impressive. The band’s most popular track, “Looking Down the Barrel of Today,” has been streamed more than 115 million times.
Hatebreed brings its loud sounds to Summer Slaughter at the Charleston Music HallThe Summer Slaughter tour started back in 2007, but Hatebreed has never been on the bill. Past performers include popular bands like the Black Dahlia Murder, Whitechapel, Cannibal Corpse, the Dillinger Escape Plan and Morbid Angel.
After taking a couple of years off for Covid-related reasons, the tour is back.
“It’s a well-known festival,” said Hatebreed drummer Matt Byrne in a recent conversation with the Charleston City Paper. “It’s been around a lot of years. So to be part of it, and to be headlining something like this, is an honor.”
Byrne also pointed out that this year’s lineup covers a wide variety of styles under the umbrella of the metal genre, and he isn’t wrong.
Kicking off the day is Incite, an Arizona quartet that mixes funk grooves and thrash tempos. Up next is South Carolina’s own Slackjaw, which is probably the most straightforward metal band of the day. Snuffed On Sight plays relentless deathcore. Fort Worth’s Fugitive is based in loud-and-fast punk music, and the popular hardcore group Gridiron plays just before Hatebreed.
“It’s not a death metal tour,” Byrne said. “It’s a mix of thrash and hardcore and punk, and it’s almost all newer acts. I feel like the tour is a perfect opportunity to shine some light on some new bands that are out there in the trenches.”
While Hatebreed’s music shows zero punk influence, it has a surprisingly punk-rock approach to playing live. Hatebreed, despite releasing eight albums of relentless but precise metal epics, doesn’t use a set list.
“It’s very on the fly,” Byrne said of the band’s stage show. “The only times we’ve really used a set list is if we’re on some kind of time constraint. But otherwise, on our headlining shows, we know what we’re going to begin with and maybe what we’re going to end with but in-between could be anything.”
Having said that, there are some fan favorites that Hatebreed fans expect to hear, not just “Looking Down the Barrel of Today.” Hits like “I Will Be Heard,” “Destroy Everything” and “Serve Your Masters” still figure prominently in the set.
“We try to cover a lot of territory,” Byrne said. “We can’t always do it, but we try to do one or two songs off of every album so that it’s an even mix of material from all through the years of Hatebreed. You’ll hear tracks from (the 1997 debut album) Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire all the way up to Weight Of The False Self (from 2020).”
Byrne said that regardless of the venue for the Summer Slaughter, the tour’s intention is to make a more intimate connection with fans of more extreme styles of metal music.
“It’s good to see a festival that can still highlight extreme bands or extreme metal,” he said. “But it’s a smaller festival that creates a different atmosphere. I think any artist will tell you that a more intimate setting creates a different feel than a wide open stage setting.”
Don’t mistake “intimate” for “quiet,” though. Byrne said there’s one thing he looks for to let him know that a show is going well.
“Typically, what I look for is a lot of moshing,” he said. “You can tell everyone’s having a good time.”
IF YOU WANT TO GO: Doors open at 5:30 p.m., July 22, Charleston Music Hall, 37 John St., Charleston. Tickets are $52-$130 at charlestonmusichall.com
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