During the first week of September, NONPOINT was on tour for the first time in two years. While traveling from one show to another, the band’s trailer unhitched and crashed into a wooded area, damaging equipment and merchandise. While all of this was going on, two of the bandmembers also contracted COVID-19 and had to leave the tour altogether.
NONPOINT singer Elias Soriano told Tucson’s rock station Rock 102.1 KFMA about the band’s recent mishaps (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “It started out as health concerns. Robb [Rivera, drums] wasn’t feeling well, and I wasn’t feeling well. A couple of tests came back positive, so we decided to pull off for a couple of days, hopefully, and see if we can get back on. We started kind of routing towards Blue Ridge [festival in Danville, Virginia] to hopefully continue and have some guest drummers to do our set for us on Blue Ridge, we hit Tennessee and we lost the trailer on the highway. We hit a bump that apparently was a common place where there’s constantly accidents. The bus hit a bump, the trailer hitch hit the road really hard and completely broke off. The gear went off into the forest in Tennessee.”
Soriano went on to credit NONPOINT‘s fans for making it possible for the band to “recover” and get back on tour.
“We put up a fundraiser to kind of fill the hole that we made, trying to get everybody back home, trying to get back out on the road, trying to replace the gear,” he said. “So we put up a special shirt and priced it a little higher and let people know, ‘Hey, this is priced higher because we’re gonna try to take some of this and turn it into repaired gear,’ I guess. And people came to bat for us, man. It was great… We wouldn’t be here without ’em, for sure.”
In early September, NONPOINT rescheduled just under a dozen shows on its current tour after “multiple members of the band” tested positive for COVID-19.
Prior to the launch of the trek, Soriano told Bernard Cana of The Photo Pit about his band’s plans to offer “VIP experiences” to its fans on the tour: “I’m nervous because of what’s going on with COVID, to be able to be that up close and personal on this next run. We’re having a VIP experience where we’re trying to give them some kind of experience where they get to see us up close and ask questions and take pictures with us without possibly catching it from one us, God forbid — if we happen to catch it. So, what we’re trying to do and what we’ve done and decided in our camp… We’re all vaccinated. We’re gonna stay inside the bubble. We’re gonna make sure that the backstage area is pretty much situated and taken care of, keep our crew — especially our tour manager and our merch person, who’s really gonna be in and out the crowd a lot, try to keep them safe and keep people around them masked up, hopefully, if there’s that ability to do so.
“Our fans are very understanding; they always have been for years,” he continued. “So I think they’ll understand what we’re having to deal with. I’m hoping to God that [the pandemic situation] starts to turn around very, very fast, but if it doesn’t, we already have a very, very strong Plan B that’s gonna keep our fans very excited and happy that isn’t gonna cost ’em an arm and a leg.”
NONPOINT has toured with major acts like DISTURBED, PAPA ROACH, MUDVAYNE and SEVENDUST, to name a few. They have also been featured on the main stages and support stages of iconic festivals like Soundwave, Rock Am Park, Rock Am Ring, Ozzfest, Rock On The Range, Welcome To Rockville and many more.
In June, NONPOINT released the music video for “Ruthless”, the title track off the band’s upcoming EP. The single was made available through the group own label 361 Degrees Records LLC and was this year’s featured track on AEW‘s “Blood And Guts” on TNT.
NONPOINT launched its independent record label 361 Degrees Records LLC in January of this year. They filmed the process of starting the label and making new music in a docu-series titled “A Path To Independence” that can be seen on the band’s YouTube and official web site.
