With a staggering 400+ million streams and over a decade of pent-up anticipation, high-octane Missouri rock band Shaman’s Harvest will be stepping foot in the UK and Ireland for the first time on their March 2025 About Time’ tour with Texan rocker’s Blacktop Mojo.
They will be starting on 5th March at the Fleece, Bristol. They will then call through Southampton (The 1865), London (O2 Islington Academy),Birmingham (O2 Institute 2), Manchester (Rebellion), Glasgow (Cathouse), Newcastle (Anarchy Brew), Belfast (Limelight 2), Dublin (The Academy) and finish on 21 March at Cyprus Avenue, Cork.
For the past 25 years, the band has had seven albums out and been crushing stages in the US with their blend of alternative metal and smouldering dark hard rock. They’ve prowled stages on their relentless touring with the likes of Nickelback, Cheap Trick, Seether, Black Stone Cherry, Theory Of A Deadman, and In This Moment. They shared the biggest stages with AC/DC, Alice In Chains, Killswitch Engage, Stone Sour, Godsmack, Shinedown, Rob Zombie, Ghost and more. For over two decades, they’ve blown away audiences on speedways, casinos, amphitheatres, theatres, arenas, dive bars, and festival stages.
If you zoom in for a real snapshot of why fans continue to go back and listen to the band time and time again, you find the band’s incredible back story – they have survived tornados levelling their town, throat cancer, crushed ankles and a run through of everything you can within the industry and beyond.
Guitarist Josh Hamler said of the tour, “Being a rock band for 25+ years is almost unthinkable. But here we are. A lot of what keeps the fire burning are those bucket list moments that happen along the way. This opportunity to tour the UK and Ireland alongside our talented friends in Blacktop Mojo is one of those moments. It’s about time we teamed up to make this dream a reality.”
Singer Nathan Hunt added,” For more than a decade now, a bucket list item for the band has been to get to the UK and Ireland for a run of shows. Typically, you wait to go over with a band that’s already drawing crowds, and we’ve come close a few times, but they always seemed to fall through in the final hour. It got us wondering if we could potentially do this thing ourselves and who would be a great partner to run with. Over a 3 hour conversation with some of the guys in Blacktop Mojo and a few glasses of liquid courage, we realized both bands were bobbing in the same dingy, so why not try to bring this package over. With great risk and all that. I’ve not been this excited to play our brand of rock n roll in a long time.”
The bands’ last three albums via Mascot Records have seen them hit a creative streak with Smokin’ Hearts & Broken Guns (2014), the Billboard Top 20 Rock album Red Hands, Black Deeds (2017) and the Billboard #11 Hard Rock Album charting Rebelator (2022). Hit songs have led the way; ‘In Chains’ has clocked up 8.3 million views and, at the time of release, spent over four months in the iTunes Top 10 Metal Songs Chart, ‘Dragonfly’ has over 8m views and 5m for ‘Dangerous’.
They’ve been playlisted by Planet Rock, Total Rock, picked up numerous BBC Radio plays and support from Kerrang, who raved, “Rambunctious Missouri rawkers fry up a fracas” on Red Hand, Back Deeds. Classic Rock lauded their “Muscular riffs, Stonesy blues licks and Southern swagger”, and they’ve picked up fans at Loudwire, SiriusXM Octane, Heavy Mag, Metal Talk, Ghost Cult and more.
The band has also become entwined within the world of professional wrestling; ‘Broken Dreams’ was the theme song for WWE wrestler Drew McIntyre, ’End Of Days’ was the entrance song for Wade Barrett and The Corre, and ‘Then There Was Darkness’ was the promo music for Bray Wyatt vs. The Undertaker at Wrestlemania 31.
But the path to the UK has not been an easy one. In 2012, Nate Hunt had an accident, crushing his ankle, needing a hospital bed in his own home for months on end, having to remap his entire future. As he began to walk again, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, and that fed into 2014’s Smokin’ Hearts & Broken Guns. “Some dark stuff came from that period. I feel, as a man, you can’t really express that loneliness, so I’d put it in melody,“ he said.
He recovered from his cancer diagnosis, but before they began to write Rebelator, Hunt had to make a life-changing decision whether to amputate his leg or not, following his accident a decade earlier. With this hovering over him, they dug deep into the recording session of the new album as a tornado ripped through their town. Levelling everything in its path and devastating the community.
With Rebelator finished, Hunt’s pieced-together leg continued to deteriorate. He started the search for a doctor who would amputate so he at least would be able to walk with a prosthetic. They continued to tour and smashed through their set every night, Hunt pushing through the pain barrier, watching fans sing back – no one knew what he was going through. “The fellas in the band cover the stage movement, the jumping and all the high energy while I’m able to really internalize and project from a place of emotion,” he explains.
So much is their connection to their fans and roots that their hometown, the City of Jefferson, Missouri, proclaimed 2nd August as the Official Shaman’s Harvest Day of 2018!
In May 2021, as they released their first new song in three years, ‘Bird Dog’, he found hope and a doctor who works with young athletes who replaced the joint and rebuilt the Achilles. Now they are tightly coiled and ready to fly headlong into their future.
Blacktop Mojo’s fiery blend of sludgy grooves, classic rock guitar riffs, and southern metal shredding falls somewhere between Soundgarden, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and ZZ Top to form a sound deemed by some as “Texas grunge”. The music draws on a multitude of genres and styles to form a hodgepodge of dirty, heavy rock and roll mixed with sensual and at times even, carnal blues. After their debut album I Am in 2014, The band spent a few years cutting their teeth in dive bars, dancehalls, and honky tonks around Texas. Since then, the band has kept a relentless touring and recording schedule, with multiple songs reaching the top 40 on both the Mediabase and Billboard Rock Charts, no small feat for an independent artist. The band continues to grow the old-fashioned way by hitting the road, sweating it out on stage, and growing slowly, but surely, by word of mouth. “When you come see us,” said lead singer Matt James, “You’re seeing rock and roll the way it used to be. A group of people on stage playing their instruments right in front of your face. No laptops, no backing tracks. What you see is what you get.”
UK fans may have been waiting a long time for Shaman’s Harvest to come over, but you might like to consider the decade of struggles, heartbreak, pent-up hope and anticipation that the quartet of singer Nathan Hunt, guitarists Josh Hamler and Derrick Shipp and drummer Adam Zemanek are going to unleash on those first few days of the tour… For fans it’s likely to be monumental.
You can check out Rebelator by Shaman’s Harvest here and 2025 UK and Irish tickets are available here.
