Good news for all the Knotfest ticket holders among us! We recently reported that both Lamb Of God and Dethklok had to cancel their shows at the inaugural Knotfest, Slipknot’s very own summer festival taking place in Iowa on August 17 and in Minnesota on August 18.  Lamb Of God’s cancellation, as you all know by now, is due to Randy Blythe still being held in the Czech Republic for the time being (we gave you the Top 5 Responses by fellow musicians to that yesterday).

It was unclear who would be replacing the two bands at Slipknot’s dark carnivalesque metal festival, but one of the two replacements has now been announced, and it is none other than Machine Head. The festival organizers commented on the replacement as follows:

The mighty Machine Head has been tapped as one of the artists to replace the cancelation of Lamb Of God and Dethklok. We are very excited that Machine Head is rushing back from Europe to play Knotfest. They will perform at both the Iowa and Somerset/Minneapolis Knotfest shows. We expect to announce another artist in the next day or two.

They sure landed a great replacement with Machine Head, and soon we will know who the second contender will be, so things are looking good for the first official Knotfest. The festival is an idea long in the making and was initially set to take place on September 9, 2009, alas it did not happen back then. Slipknot mastermind Clown is really excited about the idea finally being realized:

We wanted to do it from the very, very beginning, but we accepted that there was a lot of things we wanted to accomplish for ourselves. And we figure, right before we take a little hiatus and get ourselves together for this next record, which is gonna be phenomenal, that we would end it with two shows called Knotfest. So we’re very excited, and we’re gonna bring rock ‘n’ roll back to some kind of level of conceptual thinking, and we know everybody’s gonna have a blast.

Machine Head will be playing both shows and are joining the ranks of Serj Tankian, Deftones, Prong, The Urge, Dirtfedd, Cannibal Corpse, Gojira, and Dillinger Escape Plan.

[via Blabbermouth]