Hail to all ye brethren of the Hammer,

We have returned triumphantly from our first little mini-tour for 2012. We are calling all of the touring that we do this year the Roadkill 2012 Tour. We had a great time playing in Finland, Sweden and England. The audiences were fantastic and I was so surprised at the young age of some of our newer fans. It is great to see that we are still able to bring new blood into the Manilla camp. The love and respect was abundant and we are all so very honored to have had the chance to play in several places we have never been before. There are some videos taken by fans on youtube already and my fb page has been blowing up so thank you all for the great amount of support that you all are putting out there for us. It is not even close to over for this year. We will be headlining the Warriors of Metal festival in Ohio in about a week and then returning to Midgard Sound Labs to record the drum tracks for the next album with Neudi. Then we will do a long overdue show in Wichita Kansas at The Port Of Wichita on July 6th. We will take a bit of a break from touring then to work on finishing up the new album. It appears we will be adding another tour stop this year though. I believe we shall be playing at the Noctis Festival in Calgary, Alberta, Canada on the weekend of September 28th & 29th. More information on this date very soon. We will also be headlining the Up The Hammers festival in Athens, Greece in October. The shows we just finished went extremely well and I am so impressed with my band mates for enduring the many plane rides and loss of sleep for that leg of the tour. It was brutal. I swear we were not at the Muskelrock festival for more than 20 minutes and then we were on the stage. It’s funny though…I can’t wait to do it again. Even though it is way too much traveling and not enough sleep it is still worth it every time we get up on stage and crank up the sound. Once again we have been honored by our fans who have allowed us to do what we love the most and that is playing epic metal the Manilla Road way. There will also be some new merchandise showing up on this site very soon. We will have new tour shirts and more new re-issues from High Roller and Shadow Kingdom. So keep an eye out for that stuff right here at manillaroad.net. The first Hellwell release “Beyond the Boundaries of Sin” will be out on High Roller August 17th 2012 and the Shadow Kingdom CD version that will be available in the US will be out right around the same time. I don’t know if any of you are into the internet radio sites but just for information sake I would like to let you know that Pandora and RDIO are both carrying Manilla Road music now. I know that Playground of the Damned and The Deluge are getting airplay already. As all of the reissues come out there will be more MR music available on these type of sites. Of course they are on I-tunes also. So all is going well for the Road and for Hellwell right now and we are looking forward to finishing out the rest of this year with a bang (your head). New Manilla album in the works…New Hellwell album out soon…More touring and live shows…New friends and new places…Life is good in the Manillan Empire. Thanks to all of you for your undying support and of course May The Lords Of Light Be With You.

Up The Hammers & Down The Nails

Shark