Chaos & Carnage & Mexico Too (TC Blog May 15, 2025) (Patreon)

Hey Everyone!

Tim here for another tour blog. 22 shows in the USA and 2 shows in Canada are now completed!

Chaos & Carnage around North America was definitely a successful tour for NeO and as if often the case, we had a lot of fun in the process. A tour like this is quite different to a headline tour in many ways. We sometimes have a dressing room, sometimes not. Sometimes have plentiful space on stage.. sometimes not. Sometimes we have catering/food/drinks provided for us at the venue, but often not. With 7 bands and us being somewhere in the middle of the bill each day required to work out what we needed to just sort ourselves and be flexible with arrangements. The contrast with this is that on a headline tour often the conditions for each show are very similar and there is more a sense of consistency in that regards. This tour was a bit more mix and match, which still worked fine enough. In the end, we’ve always found that if the shows are really good, everything else is workable.

One thing we had consistently on all these shows was a nice big crowd to play to, filled with a mixture of NeO fans, people eager to check us out for the first time and some who didn’t really know us much at all. Every single day on this tour we had people telling us they had become new fans of the band and this was great to hear as it was literally the reason we decided to do this tour. We wanted to take the chance to expose NeO’s music to new audiences and we definitely did that.

After our last show in Denver I actually met a family of 5 (Mum & Dad and 3 kids) who until they had seen us for the first time on this tour hadn’t really known who we are at all. Now they’re big fans and vowed to come see us next time we come back as well. I also ran into a girl at the merch table in Denver who had only just discovered us in the last couple months. She was initially drawn to this tour as a fan of Cradle of Filth, but now had listened to all our albums in recent weeks and had become a big fan of NeO and was super excited to see us live for the first time.

But as much as I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on what has been so far, though Chaos and Carnage is over, the tour is not!

I write this sitting on the plane to Monterey, Mexico where we will be performing 3 shows in the coming days. Headline Citadel/Exul sets in Monterrey and Mexico City, plus a festival in Guadalajara alongside Sabaton, Kataklysm, Ensiferum & more. The fans in Mexico are some of the loudest and best in the world and so we are expecting some really fun shows! And though we were just in Mexico City for MxFest in November, we haven’t played in other parts of Mexico since 2018 and so it’s been a long time coming!

Beyond that, we then look quite quickly to our tour of Australia as well which starts on June 10. We have some really special things lined up for those shows as well including some special guests jumping up on stage on some of the shows which will be revealed in time.

For those of you here on Patreon, we’d love to hear from anyone that saw one of the shows on this tour so far! What show did you attend, did you enjoy the show? Should we come back again? (silly question? haha)

Thanks for all your support as always.

Tim