Onlangs zijn de heren van Slaves van Vans Warped Tour weggestuurd wegens een incident rondom frontman Jonny Craig. Alle bands en medewerkers van de festivaltour kwamen onlangs bij elkaar om te beslissen of de band wel of niet mocht blijven, maar de meerderheid was ze liever kwijt dan rijk.

Na deze gebeurtenis plaatste de band een statement online waarin zij beweren dat er geen drugs of seksuele intimidatie in het spel is geweest en dat het onterecht is dat men de band veroordeelt om dingen die zich in het verleden hebben afgespeeld.

Toch rouwt de band niet om hun vertrek, zo laten ze in een nieuwe statement weten dat dit juist het beste is dat hen heeft kunnen overkomen. “Getting voted off Vans Warped Tour is the best thing to ever happen to our band, it was more of a reminder than a punishment. We don’t give a fuck about our first week sales, we don’t give a fuck about what bands in our scene think of us, and we don’t give a fuck about how many followers we have on the internet, unless these followers love music as much as we love music.”

Ook heeft de band de releasedatum van hun aankomende album Routine Breathing vervroegd van oktober naar 21 augustus. Daarbij hebben ze ook een  video voor de single “Burning Our Morales Away” online gezet, deze kun je hier bekijken.

Lees de volledige statement hieronder.

Following our debut release “Through Art We Are All Equals” last June. We’ve spent the last year putting this band together musically, as a family, and as a business. You can’t throw 5 people whom most don’t have an extensive history in the same room, airplane, vehicle together for over a year and tell them it’s going to be easy, Which it was not.

This band has had to fight through each others personal problems as a whole, Each others history as a whole, and then the opinions the rest of the world forms of these things as a whole. We have all taken each other’s addictions, family problems, relationship problems on as a group and have each individually became the strongest we’ve been in our lives because of this.

On July 14th this year Slaves was scheduled to play Vans Warped Tour, it was our most anticipated tour as a band and we were ECSTATIC. 4 days before our band made our trek from Sacramento all the way to Boston , Alex and Weston were involved in a brutal altercation that left Alex with a 4 inch long and 2 inch deep stab wound in his side, and Weston with a broken hand. As you can imagine the doctors told us there was NO WAY we could play shows and needed to rest for 6 weeks. As you can probably also imagine Weston cut his cast off 2 days later and him, Alex and the rest of Slaves recorded two music videos that day and left for warped tour. 

We showed up ready to prove ourselves to the world in Mansfield, MA which was our first Warped Tour show of our bands short career. It was incredible, Day two in Buffalo, NY was just as incredible, Day 3 in Cincinnati was not so incredible, and is the day that our journey with Vans Warped Tour ended. 

On our drive home from Warped Tour none of us believed we would be continuing this band at all, Our guitarist almost died a month earlier, Our other guitarist had to play with us with a shattered hand, and now we were on the same 35 hour drive we just made to get to Warped Tour, but back home to face the debt that was now pushing 30k of money invested into this tour. SOMETHING was telling us that our time is UP. 

We were so sure that this band was over we leaked a song on the cd that meant alot to us. We put all our merch up to cover what we could of our debt and bow out. Little did we know that less than 48 hours later we, or better yet our fans, would generate enough money to pull us COMPLETELY out of debt. Yes twenty nine thousand dollars of debt, GONE.

Getting voted off Vans Warped Tour is the best thing to ever happen to our band, it was more of a reminder than a punishment.We don’t give a fuck about our first week sales, we don’t give a fuck about what bands in our scene think of us, and we don’t give a fuck about how many followers we have on the internet, unless these followers love music as much as we love music.

Our new CD “Routine Breathing” was scheduled to be released mid October, This was to give us proper promotion time and to make sure we would release our cd on tour for road scans, and to push as many of these into stores all so we can sell more copies first week. 

But we as a band genuinely don’t fucking care how many CD’s we sell first week, so we are releasing “Routine Breathing” early on August, 21st 2015. The CD will mostly be available digitally, but we will be selling 1000 limited edition digipacks exclusively on MERCHNOW. They will go fast and be the ONLY time we will print digipacks for the release! 

No one is going to remember this scene, they’re going to remember the music in it. It’s time to remember what it’s about.