Despite the rumors floating around online, the Jonny Craig-fronted act Slaves will NOT be breaking up.
Thankfully, after their disappointing run on Warped Tour, the band’s fans came though and helped the Sacramento-based outfit climb out of their staggering $29,000 debt in less than 48 hours.
Along with the announcement that they’re sticking together, Slaves also released a new music video for their single “Burning Our Morals Away” and revealed plans to release their new album Routine Breathing earlier than expected.
To read the full statement from the band and see their new music video, be sure to look below. Afterwards pre-orders for Routine Breathing can be found here.
“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.“
