We are on our way to the USA! But why so early? (TC Blog) (Patreon)

Greetings all,

Well I must admit it's been a challenging lead final few days leading up this tour. All ideas of trying to take it easy and get some rest before hitting the road promptly went out the door when our FOH/TM (sound engineer & tour manager) cancelled on us to "help out" another band he was friends with who had someone cancel on them.... just passing the issue on to us instead. Well, we'll never work with that guy again that's for sure.

The crazy thing is that our sound guy for the last few years has been the incredible Melo from Portugal, but he had a clash with another band he works with when we got booked for this tour and so we had to find someone else. So we found someone else great, and then in July they had to pull out due to a family emergency. But it was totally fair enough, and with no hard feelings we tried to find someone else, which was difficult as most of the best metal engineers book out 6-12 months in advance if not more. But eventually in August we found an experienced touring engineer who came highly recommended and then.... fast forward and here we are. The good news is that we have at least 4 people very much qualified and available and another 5-10 people who are partially available and/or maybe not quite what we're looking for. And so it looks like one way or another we're going to end up with a great engineer working with us on this tour, just at the expense of all my sleep. I sent a long email with all the choices and info about them during this flight to the rest of the NeO lads and we'll discuss asap after we land in Nashville.

Honestly, right now I am so exhausted... but I'm really happy that we are getting to USA early as it'll give us a chance to settle in and within 24-48 hours we'll choose our new crew member and then hopefully I can get a good sleep each night for the next week before the tour starts.

But why are we going to Nashville? The tour doesn't even go there? And why are we going a week early? Well, these are two very valid questions.

We are going to Nashville as that is where our tour bus is leaving from, and we can then get our drum backline and other things there in Nashville to avoid any shipping costs (drum kits are not cheap to ship to different cities to say the least).

And we're going early.... to spend a week writing music together! We have so many ideas for this new album, but honestly things have been slower than we wanted and so we all agreed that a week just dedicated to writing music all together would be really helpful. I've also brought with me my Apollo Twin X interface, which is what I recorded my Exul vocals with at my home studio during the pandemic. This means that any ideas we have we can record high quality on the spot. We even bought Benji a cheap left handed acoustic guitar which we are picking up tomorrow in Nashville so we can do some writing with that as well.

Soo.....this week we are going to be all living together in a house in Nashville and spending our days at a rehearsal studio down the road writing here and there and seeing what we come up with.

Of course, an ESSENTIAL part of this is to include you all here on Patreon! And so we are going to be posting EVERY DAY this week with updates and livestreams. What do you want to see from these sessions? Any questions for us that we can answer through the week? (post them below!)

And so now before I go I'll leave with you with my playlist of what I have listened to on this 14 hour flight which is almost over. A mixture of lots of new stuff along with some classic favourites of mine. At the time of posting the flight has been going over 12 hours, so less than 2 hours to go. After that we have another another flight from San Francisco to Nashville where we land about 6pm local time this evening.

If you've got any suggestions on what you think I should listen to on the final (shorter) flight post them in the comments below!

Tired, but excited,

Tim & NeO

FLIGHT 1  (14 hour flight)

Showing Teeth- A Fate Worse Than Loneliness (2026)

Soilwork- Natural Born Chaos

In Flames - Reroute to Remain

Ironstone- Commence the Culling (new single 2026)

Ironstone- (unreleased single 2026)

Imminence - Axis Mundi (2026)

Chvrches - Roses (new single 2026)

Chvrches - Screen Violence

Northlane- Crucified (new single 2026)

Architects - Machine (new single 2026)

Spiritbox - Mourning (new single 2026)

Invent Animate - Heavener

Periphery - This Time It’s Personal

Periphery- A Pale White Dot (2026)

I Built The Sky - Promise Me You’ll Thrive (2026)

Opeth- Damnation