MESHUGGAH Announces 2022 U.S. Tour With CONVERGE And TORCHE

Swedish extreme tech-metal pioneers MESHUGGAH will embark on a U.S. tour in early 2022. The 19-date trek will kick off on February 23 in Silver Spring, Maryland and travel cross-country, making stops in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles before concluding in Atlanta, Georgia on March 20. Joining the band as direct support will be none other than metalcore architects CONVERGE, while Florida quartet TORCHE will be opening the shows.

Tickets for the tour will go on sale on Friday, July 2 at 10:00 a.m. local time at www.meshuggah.net/tour.

Confirmed dates for the MESHUGGAH 2022 U.S. tour with CONVERGE and TORCHE are:

Feb. 23 - The Fillmore - Silver Spring MD
Feb. 24 - Franklin Music Hall - Philadelphia PA
Feb. 25 - Hammerstein Ballroom - New York, NY
Feb. 26 - The Palladium - Worcester, MA
Feb. 28 - Stage AE - Pittsburgh, PA
Mar. 01 - Express Live - Columbus, OH
Mar. 02 - Agora Theatre - Cleveland, OH
Mar. 03 - Royal Oak Music Theatre - Royal Oak, MI
Mar. 05 - Myth - Minneapolis, MN
Mar. 06 - Radius - Chicago, IL
Mar. 08 - Fillmore Auditorium - Denver, CO
Mar. 10 - The Warfield Theatre - San Francisco, CA
Mar. 11 - Riverside Municipal Auditorium - Riverside, CA
Mar. 12 - The Marquee - Tempe, AZ
Mar. 13 - Hollywood Palladium - Los Angeles, CA
Mar. 16 - [to be announced] - Dallas, TX *
Mar. 17 - Warehouse Live Ballroom - Houston, TX
Mar. 19 - Hard Rock Live - Orlando, FL
Mar. 20 - Buckhead Theatre - Atlanta, GA

* Venue will be announced on July 12

Earlier this year, MESHUGGAH entered Sweetspot Studios in Sweden to record its ninth studio album.

MESHUGGAH's latest album, "The Violent Sleep Of Reason", came out in 2016 and resulted in a "Best Metal Performance" Grammy nomination for the song "Clockworks". The disc was produced by the band and was engineered by Tue Madsen of Puk Studios in Kaerby, Denmark.

Last October, MESHUGGAH drummer Tomas Haake confirmed to Knotfest.com's "Mosh Talks With Beez" that the band had spent much of the downtime during the COVID-19 pandemic working on fresh material.

Regarding the musical direction of the new MESHUGGAH songs, Tomas said: "Of course, we have a certain framework that we still wanna sound like MESHUGGAH, we wanna have that signature sound, we want people to be able to — even if they haven't heard the song [before] — in the best-case scenario, it's, like, 'Oh, that's gotta be MESHUGGAH,' even if it's a brand new thing. So hopefully that's something we're aiming at. But with that said, as far as the music goes, we try to [do] kind of the opposite of what AC/DC has been doing for 40 years. So we're not trying to write the same album over and over. And whether we succeed with that or not, that's more up to our fans and other people, but that's definitely the aim. We try our best to kind of find new grips within the framework of what we're supposed to be, I guess. 'Cause we don't wanna really step out of that either. We're not looking to be another band all of a sudden or something that we haven't been or that is not true to kind of what we're doing."

Haake said that MESHUGGAH has fared better during the coronavirus-related music shutdown than most other artists.

"We know a lot of bands that just had their album out or just finished something and were just about to go on tour, and this [pandemic] happened," he said. "So, of course, we feel with 'em — that's no fun. We were fortunate enough [in that] we just kind of finished the tour run for [MESHUGGAH's last album] 'The Violent Sleep Of Reason', so we're just writing. We played a lot the last few years, so we had a good amount of cash in the bank to keep us afloat for a while, so we've been really fortunate in all this compared to a lot of bands that are just — they're done. What are they supposed to do?"