Fourteen albums into a career, most bands quietly stop pushing new material live. KAMELOT founding guitarist Thomas Youngblood says his band deliberately does the opposite — and that the resulting setlist arithmetic is the hardest job of every tour cycle.
Speaking to MikeP on TotalRock's "The Autopsy" radio show, Youngblood laid out the process. "We always start with the new album. We save four to five new songs always with each tour, so that's five songs that we have to eliminate from the setlist." The new material earns its place first; everything from the back catalogue then competes for what is left. "With 14 albums, it's always the biggest challenge, is just putting together a setlist."
Picking the five is its own exercise. "Obviously, usually you kind of start with the singles and then you kind of figure out which ones are gonna work live, which ones are gonna translate the best live." For the upcoming run he also promised some returns — "we're gonna be bringing back some songs that we haven't played in a while."
The reasoning behind the policy is where Youngblood gets pointed. "We are a band that, even though we've been around a long time, we really focus on the new songs, the new material. And I think that's one of the important aspects of how the band has maintained relevancy, is not kind of falling back on songs from 20 years ago."
He is unsparing about the alternative. "A lot of times, any artist that's been around a long time, they don't really believe in what they're doing now. They make an album just so they have a reason to tour, but they only play old songs, which is not something that we want to do, not only for the fans, but for ourself personally."
On the staging for the North American leg of the "Dark Asylum" world tour, which opens August 28 in Orlando, he offered atmosphere rather than detail. "No spoilers, but obviously we wanna try to recreate some of that asylum on stage. And there'll be some surprises." He added that the band deliberately vary things night to night: "if we were doing a residency in Vegas, we could do the same show every night."
"Dark Asylum", KAMELOT's fourteenth album, arrives August 28 via Napalm Records, preceded by the singles "Ashen World" and "Godlike Alchemy". Longtime producer Sascha Paeth returned, with Jacob Hansen mixing and mastering. Ignacia Fernández, crowned Miss World Chile 2025, guests on "Ashen World" and "Sanctuary". Its fifteen linked tracks extend the RavenHill storyline the band have been building across recent records.
Source: blabbermouth.net