Forbidden will play their autumn American tour without bassist Matt Camacho and drummer Chris Kontos. Both gave personal reasons and both are expected back in 2027. Avery Thurman takes the bass and Eli Lucas the drums.
Camacho put a number on what he is missing. “This is the first tour I will miss since 1987,” he wrote, which covers nearly the whole of the band's existence and a good part of the Bay Area's. Kontos cited family and personal commitments and timing that does not line up, and asked people to give Lucas the same room they would give him.
Neither replacement is a stranger. Lucas came second in the band's international drummer search in 2011, losing it to Sasha Horn on age and mileage rather than on playing, and has spent the fifteen years since becoming one of the drummers the Bay Area calls first. Thurman is twenty-one and on loan from Blind Illusion, which is as Bay Area a credential as the instrument allows. The band say they have been rehearsing with both for weeks and are working from a pool of eighteen songs that they can move in and out each night.
The Chaos By Design tour starts on 23 October at The Usual Place in Las Vegas, runs with Heathen and Void, and finishes on 22 November in Los Angeles. The self-titled album it exists to support comes out the same day the tour opens, on BLKIIBLK, and it is the first Forbidden album in sixteen years. Camacho and Kontos both played on it.