New billboards have been spotted featuring the dates
Sick New World appears to be making a comeback after taking a year off. The 2025 installment, which was set to feature Metallica and Linkin Park as headliners back in April, was officially canceled in November of 2024. Fans wondered if the massive one-day fest, which featured a ton of early 2000s rock and nu metal, was dead and buried.
“It is with great disappointment that Sick New World will no longer take place in Las Vegas on April 12, 2025.
Despite our best efforts, we’ve encountered unforeseen circumstances that we are unable to overcome for next year’s show. We extend our heartfelt thanks to all the dedicated SNW fans who made plans to join us for another cultural celebration of hard rock, goth, alternative, and heavy music. Please stay tuned for further and future information regarding Sick New World.”
Now, Sick New World is coming back bigger than ever.
Recently, billboards have been spotted in Las Vegas featuring the Sick New World logo and two new dates in the fest’s native Las Vegas, plus Fort Worth, Texas. The one-day jaunts are slated for next April and next October. The festival has updated its website with links for both Las Vegas and Fort Worth, where fans can click to sign up for updates regarding either or both dates.
Check out the 2026 dates and locations below, plus a link to sign up for lineup and ticket updates.
Sick New World arrived in the desert as Las Vegas’ answer to the nu metal and heavy-alt nostalgia boom, a sibling to Live Nation/C3’s pop-punk-leaning When We Were Young festival and staged on the same Las Vegas Festival Grounds footprint. Announced in late 2022, the concept was simple and maximalist: stack legacy anchors beside modern heavies for a one-day, multi-stage blowout built for black-clad crowds and Instagram-long bills. The debut on May 13, 2023 sold out and drew tens of thousands—coverage at the time pegged the audience at roughly 85,000—while System of a Down, Korn, Deftones, Incubus and scores more rotated across four stages under 90-plus-degree sun, establishing a new tent-pole for heavy music tourism in Vegas. Industry reporting traced the festival’s DNA to C3/Live Nation’s expanding rock-fest portfolio, with Sick New World positioned as the louder, darker counterpart in that ecosystem.
The second edition on April 27, 2024 doubled down and scaled up. System of a Down returned to co-headline with Slipknot as the site expanded to five loosely thematic stages—two alternating mains and three rotating side platforms—with the tented Diablo Stage leaning hardcore and the Siren Stage tilting industrial/goth. Reviews noted the improved site flow and relentless pace as more than 70 bands—from A Perfect Circle and Alice in Chains to Knocked Loose and Code Orange—sprinted through tight changeovers from afternoon heat into neon night. By its second year SNW wasn’t just a nostalgia play; it had become a broad survey of heavy’s past and present, a rare place where Danny Elfman could share poster space with Slowdive and Primus, and where hardcore circle pits met festival-scale production.
Momentum made the 2025 reveal feel audacious even by Vegas standards: a co-headline pairing of Metallica and the newly rebooted Linkin Park atop a bill that also touted Queens of the Stone Age, Evanescence, Gojira, AFI, Meshuggah, Tomahawk, and a rare reunion from sludge cult heroes Acid Bath. The date—April 12, 2025—was announced in mid-October 2024 and lit up social feeds and rock press alike. For fans of heavy music, the prospect of Metallica and a new-chapter Linkin Park sharing a single-day stage felt like a once-in-a-generation booking triumph.
Then, on November 29, 2024, the organizers pulled the plug. In a brief statement posted to SNW’s channels and relayed by music outlets, the festival cited “unforeseen circumstances” that it was “unable to overcome” as the reason the 2025 edition would not take place, with automatic refunds promised to fans who bought through the primary ticketer. The announcement landed after a day of rumors sparked when Tomahawk/Mr. Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn said on a podcast that the festival was “not happening,” adding that his band had built a two-week tour around the appearance and could no longer make the finances work without the anchor date. His comments were widely aggregated and, according to multiple outlets, later edited out of the episode; within hours the official cancellation made them a grim prelude rather than speculation.
The official line never went beyond that phrase—“unforeseen circumstances”—but reporting and scene scuttlebutt quickly coalesced around a few plausible, if unconfirmed, contributors. Metal Injection later characterized 2025 as a “difficult” year behind the scenes, claiming both headliners commanded fees around $5 million each and pointing to slow ticket sales as part of the collapse—an expensive risk profile for a one-day fest that already runs heavy on production and breadth. Other coverage echoed the idea that a stacked, pricy top line, high operating costs, and softer-than-hoped demand created a squeeze that the promoters chose not to ride out into spring. It’s important to note that the organizers themselves did not enumerate those factors; they offered no detail beyond the boilerplate statement. Still, industry-watching write-ups and local pieces made that money-math narrative the leading postmortem for 2025.
However you weight those factors, the cancellation was a jolt. The 2025 bill had carried added symbolic value: Metallica’s rare U.S. festival top-line within a cycle otherwise dominated by stadium touring, Linkin Park’s first full year presenting a new lineup to the world, and the promise of special moments from cult and legacy names seeded throughout the undercard. With refunds activated and no further explanation forthcoming, Sick New World entered a holding pattern—until organizers began teasing a reboot. By late 2025 the festival’s website had reappeared with waitlists for Las Vegas and Texas, and outlets reported that a 2026 return was in motion, with System of a Down all but confirming they’d be back. SNW, it seemed, would try again with lessons learned.
Taken together, Sick New World’s brief history tracks the volatility of the modern mega-festival: a rocket-ship start powered by millennial/Gen-Z cross-appeal and social nostalgia; an iterative year-two that broadened the palette while keeping the pits churning; and a spectacularly ambitious year-three vision that, for reasons the organizers never fully shared, proved untenable. The cancellation that shelved a Metallica/Linkin Park summit stands as a cautionary tale about the razor-thin margins of scale in the post-pandemic live market—especially for single-day spectacles where colossal headliner fees, desert-city production costs, and the risk of a slower on-sale all converge on one date. Yet the festival’s stated intent to return underscores how strong the fan appetite remains for a Vegas-style, all-eras heavy-music summit. If 2026 does land as teased, Sick New World will have the chance to turn a high-profile stumble into a hard-earned second act.
Reportedly, high headliner fees and slow sales contributed played strong roles in the 2025 installment getting canceled.
Since its inception in 2023, Sick New World has featured some of the biggest names in rock, including System of a Down, Korn, Slipknot, Deftones, Bring Me The Horizon, A Perfect Circle, Incubus, and many more.
April 25, 2026 – Las Vegas, Nevada
October 24, 2026 – Fort Worth, Texas
Sign up for lineup and ticket updates HERE