Daylight is not something underground metal and hardcore bands, or their fans, see very often – but this summer, they will.

Attempting to reinvigorate the summer touring season by filling the void left by multi-stage mainstays Ozzfest and the Vans Warped Tour, the inaugural installment of the Sounds of the Underground tour will bring together over two decades worth of metal and hardcore, beginning in late June and running through the end of July.

Unlike some of the larger bands on Ozzfest or Warped Tour which have achieved success over the airwaves of rock radio, the bands on the Sounds of the Underground tour will bring out their blend of music from inside the confines of clubs and bars for the first time on their own.

“Some of those bands have just become so strong and so powerful on the club level in the last year or two, it almost seemed like something had to be done this year so that this stuff didn’t peak out and kind of fizzle away,” said Sounds of the Underground tour co-founder and Face The Music booking agent Tim Borror. “There’s a real lifestyle aspect of it and we needed to figure out a way to help these bands continue to have a larger profile, bigger summer touring opportunities, than just these other two tours, where there wasn’t a ton of room for these types of bands.”

Besides radio play and exposure, there’s a larger uniting artistic element separating Sounds of the Underground from what people might expect from past experiences with Warped Tour or Ozzfest.

“This tour doesn’t cater to the Yellowcard audience,” Borror said. “There’s nothing wrong with that audience, that’s great, we have a lot of bands that play Warped Tour, that love Warped Tour, but we’re trying to do something that’s probably a little more aggro. Punk has just been so big and that’s awesome, but metal and hardcore have flown under the radar, real underground metal, has flown under the radar for the last few years, and we’re just trying to develop something where that’s not necessarily the case. It has its moment as well – its place in the sun if you will.”

By November of last year, tour organizers had a fairly clear idea of who would head out with this year’s Warped Tour and Ozzfest and solidified their lineup with artists not fitting in on those bills. Headlining the nearly 12-hour, single-stage lineup will be thrash metal masters Lamb of God. Also featured among the over 20 other bands on the roster are Clutch, Poison The Well, Opeth, From Autumn To Ashes, Unearth, Chimaira, Everytime I Die, Throwdown, Norma Jean and GWAR.

“We just wanted something that was spread out between hardcore and metal and rock,” Borror said about how the lineup was selected. “We don’t really have a punk rock presence on this thing so much, but I think that we could probably have the more aggro punk stuff on this thing in the future. So it was really just about aesthetics. Just trying to find a lifestyle-oriented community of bands, or a few different communities of bands, something that was kind of random but just all worked together and we just lifted everything out there that was available until we thought we had what we felt was the right fit.”

Leading up to the Sounds of the Underground tour were talks at one point of trying an outdoor summer tour based on the annual Derek Hess Strhess Fest. That tour decided against becoming a traveling festival and has had success as a club tour with Shadows Fall last year and Bleeding Through heading out with it this year. The tour’s founders also looked at the success the recent Taste of Chaos tour had as a heavier, arena-based offshoot of the Vans Warped Tour as a sign that now was the time to launch something of their own.

Most of the dates on the tour, including the June 28 stop at the Jerome Duncan Ford Theatre at Freedom Hill in Detroit and the July 8 stop at Chicago’s Tweeter Center, will take the Sounds of the Underground outdoors; however some shows will take place inside arenas. Borror explained that while the tour was ready for larger venues, in some areas the only available outdoor locations still remained too large. He also suggested that the tour organizers were not yet sure which atmosphere would better fit the tour and wanted to try out the lineup both inside and outside.

A companion CD/DVD release has already been planned to accompany the tour and Borror did not hesitate to discuss the future of the Sounds of the Underground tour while detailing this year’s installment, mentioning how there exists a big enough audience of people not completely satisfied by the lineups on Warped Tour or Ozzfest that the tour could happen again with more artists becoming involved.

“Hopefully this tour will become big enough that a band like Slipknot will want to continue to wave a flag for the bands that are in the underground and maybe they could be a headliner in the future, who really knows,” Borror said.

For more information on the Sounds of the Underground tour, sponsored by House of Blues, including where to pick up tickets without a service charge for either the June 28 show in Detroit or the July 8 show in Chicago, check out soundsoftheundergroundtour.com.

June 2005