Northlane have been forced to cancel this summer North American tour, which was scheduled to kick off next month. The group issued the following statement regarding the matter:
“CANCELLED: NORTH AMERICAN TOUR 2022
Refunds available at point of purchase.
For Australian bands, touring internationally has always been difficult. It’s a costly and risky undertaking, but for over a decade we’ve managed to make it work because we love playing for our legion of fans around the globe.
The USA has always been particularly tough due to the arduous and incredibly expensive working visa process. Despite a sharp rise in application costs, we applied for our visas and followed the standard processes, but in the post-COVID era times have changed and our petition has faced unprecedented processing delays. As it stands, the wait time for a visa appointment at the US consulate in Melbourne is 220 days. Yes, you read that correctly. Our immigration lawyer has literally scoured the globe looking for consulates with openings. We’ve explored undertaking appointments in both Indonesia and the UK among other countries. While we were prepared to eat the extreme costs to make the tour happen, in the end we just couldn’t get the appointments we required.
With options running out fast, we were put in touch with a Federal government official yesterday and they are being inundated with similar situations to ours from dozens of other Australian artists. Even though the department is doing their absolute best to expedite select cases with the US consulate here, our case did not make any progress. Knowing full well that the longer we left this decision, the greater impact it would have on everyone involved in the tour, we unfortunately had to make the difficult decision today to cancel the entire Obsidian North American Tour. This cancellation also unfortunately extends to the Canadian shows as just doing these isn’t viable.
We’ve taken our time to explain this in the most detail possible, so you can understand the impossible lengths we went to in order to try and solve it. Unfortunately for us this situation was unwinnable. We’d like to thank our incredible fans from North America, you’ve been patient since 2019, we trust you’ll be patient until we can make it back to play for you again. We’ve gone to the most insane lengths and done beyond our best. Our hearts are broken too.
In order to soften the blow best we can for the support bands, we’d ask if you could kindly check out their online merch stores and grab whatever you can:
https://SilentPlanetMerch.com/
https://www.LoatheAsOne.co.uk/merch/
https://AvoidKicksAss.org/
CANCELLED: NORTH AMERICAN TOUR 2022
— Northlane (@Northlane) June 29, 2022
Refunds available at point of purchase.
Read our statement here: https://t.co/oNEjgeDQ5f pic.twitter.com/eEIFawB1gb