A boogie-rock trio formed in Wakefield in 1973 and originally called Quo Vardis, Vardis predated the New Wave of British Heavy Metal but happily accepted a leg up from the movement. They released three albums between 1981 and ’86 before band leader, guitarist and singer Steve Zodiac walked away from music.

The band reunited in 2014, and now a new retrospective album, titled 100 M.P.H. ’79 Revisited, pulls together their earliest demo material. We caught up with Zodiac.

Classic Rock described 100 M.P.H. ’79 Revisited as a “much-needed document”. Why did you consider it worth releasing?

There was so much archive stuff in lockups and flight cases, so I thought, let’s see if we can get them to sound like they did when we were in the studio. I’m so impressed with how it came out.

The CD version adds three bonus recordings from July 1978, which you were “hesitant” to include.

That was a little garage recording done up in Wakefield. But on reflection, they have a certain charm. That’s why the vinyl edition is nine songs, but if people want a little bit more those extra three are added to the CD.

The album is on High Roller Records, a German independent label that specialises in NWOBHM-era music. Why did you go with them?

High Roller have a good reputation with restoring [material] and promoting older releases from a range of bands from across the continent. The album is a document of its time. It represents an era in music – not just Vardis, but the whole club scene of the 1980s. Hence the rusty old Transit van on the cover.

Is there going to be a follow-up to 2016’s Red Eye?

I’ve written a batch of songs. Hopefully it’ll be next year.

Vardis were among the last bands to perform before lockdown, at the 100 Club in London in March 2020 that produced a double live album.

I didn’t know if anybody would show up, especially in a club like that with everybody a bit rammed in. It was like there was sort of an unspoken panic, one of those moments where you think: “What’s going on? Is this gonna change everything forever?”

Vardis have a couple of European shows coming up, but why aren’t there any UK gigs lined up?

That would be lovely, and of course I’d like to, but a lot of it is logistics. Will we get approaches from festivals, and will the numbers add up? Touch wood it’s possible, but right now I really don’t know.

Vardis supported Slade and Hawkwind and appeared at some now iconic festivals including the Heavy Metal Barn Dance and the Heavy Metal Holocaust. Why did the band never break through?

That’s a good question, but a delicate one. It was disillusionment that caused me to walk away. I felt we were being manipulated and exploited. To a degree, I expect to be exploited, but I wanted people to be honest about it. So I just moved on. And it was very painful. I shed a tear when I cut my hair, even though it was dropping out a fair bit. Even today when I play live, I do the big old intro and the head goes down, and I can still feel it [the hair]. It’s a phantom feeling. It’s wonderful.

100 M.P.H. ’79 Revisited is available via High Roller Records.

Symphonic metal star Amanda Somerville has been diagnosed with a "malignant and aggressive brain tumour" her family have revealed.

Somerville is an American singer and vocal coach who made her name working with a string of metal bands including Epica, Avantasia, Kamelot, Trillium, After Forever and others.

Her husband, After Forever guitarist Sander Gommans, says in a statement posted to social media: "I have some very sad news to share.

"The love of my life, mother of my three daughters and my beautiful wife Amanda Somerville, has a malignant and aggressive brain tumour.

"We’re shocked, devastated and I can’t describe the challenges we’re facing as a family right now. We’re very grateful with the help we’re getting from family and friends.

"Positive thoughts help, prayers help, keeping us in your minds help. Please be there for Amanda and our kids and have us in your minds.

"Amanda gives so much to all of us…love, music, friendship, strength….it’s time to send out hope and power to her."

Somerville has carved out a name for herself with her powerful vocal abilities both as a guest singer and through fronting acts like Trillium and the Kiske/Somerville project which she formed alongside Helloween's Michael Kiske.

She has also toured with the likes of Ian Gillan and Alice Cooper, while she has also stood in on lead vocals for Epica when Simone Simons took unwell.

Somerville sang on Tobias Sammet's metal opera Avantasia world tours from 2008 to 2016 and was the brains behind progressive metal project Aina which released the album Days of Rising Doom in 2003.

From helping create jazz rock fusion to tackling everything from funk to Indian music to flamenco, John McLaughlin’s career has been defined by his willingness to take his guitar and his music into undiscovered territory. He looked back with Prog in 2017.

In the late 1960s, change was in the air. Jimi Hendrix had hinted at the possibilities of throwing jazz improvisation into rock music, James Brown amplified the R&B groove to create funk, and Miles Davis and Tony Williams were chomping at the bit to shake off the limits of acoustic jazz.

Originally from Yorkshire, John McLaughlin was a prodigiously gifted guitarist working on the London circuit when Williams brought him to New York to join his new band, Lifetime, for their genre-defying album Emergency!.

Davis, impressed by the young Brit’s speed, fluency and invention, recruited McLaughlin to play on In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. These three albums tore up the jazz rule book and made something new – jazz rock. It was loud and the critics loathed it; but it was unstoppable.

“It was a great period, the end of the 60s going into the 70s,” says McLaughlin. “I just happened to be in the middle of it all. It was just luck really.”

In 1971 he founded Mahavishnu Orchestra to play their own fearless, ferocious brand of this new form. In the mid-70s, he switched direction to pursue Indian music with Shakti.

Currently leading John McLaughlin And The 4th Dimension, the guitar wizard remains a restless musical explorer, his lightning velocity on the guitar matched only by his boundless drive to expand and improve his craft. “I think music reminds us of our home where we all belong together,” he says. “It’s wonderful.”

What prompted you to record your recent gigs at Ronnie Scott’s in London?

We had two nights there and Ronnie’s has got the facility to record built right into the club, which is really very handy. I asked specifically to play Ronnie’s. It’s very nice to play in the Barbican or the Royal Festival Hall, beautiful halls. Maybe it’s age and nostalgia, but I thought how wonderful it would be to be back in Ronnie’s after how many years. I was in one of the house bands at Ronnie’s in 1966/’67, about 50 years ago, called the Mike Carr Trio: a very fine British Hammond organ player.

That was the whole theme in the 60s, the Hammond organ, and of course I have such a huge debt to Ronnie personally. Actually, a lot of musicians have a very big debt to him. You’re probably too young to remember the Wardour Street club before he moved to Frith Street in the early 60s. The first one was a very small club, but when he moved he kept the small one open for the young musicians so we had a place to play. It was very sweet.

Also, he was instrumental in getting me to America in ’68. He was just a super guy and a great player too, so it was personal for me. I asked to record, so maybe we’ll have a Live @ Ronnie Scott’s. How nice!

How is it different playing in a club versus a big hall?

I like the clubs; I grew up in the clubs. Even when I went to the US playing with Tony Williams and Larry Young, it was all clubs. No concerts at all really until a year later when Jack Bruce joined the band. Jack was already kind of a star in the four-piece Lifetime, but even Miles was playing mainly clubs in America in the 60s and 70s.

There’s an intimate atmosphere in clubs that’s really hard to reproduce in a concert hall. The sound of a hall can be really great, but that intimate communication between the audience and the band, I like that, I really do. They can see the dirt under your fingernails.

You mentioned organ trios were in fashion in the 60s – the original incarnation of Lifetime was an organ trio.

Absolutely. I didn’t even know Larry would be in the band until I got to New York, but I was thrilled. He was one of the new breed of Hammond players that stepped out of the genre of Jimmy Smith, this kind of funky R&B which I loved. But Larry brought this different chordal harmony that McCoy Tyner was doing with John Coltrane in the early 60s. He brought that to the Hammond organ and I thought that was marvellous. On the road, we were making $20 a night in those days. Not a lot, but it was a marvellous experience to play with Tony.

When you formed Mahavishnu Orchestra, did you consider the organ trio format?

I wanted a different sound. Don’t forget, I’d been playing for many years. We’re talking the early 60s, with people like Georgie Fame And The Blue Flames. I loved it but by the time I’d done two years with Tony and Lifetime with Larry Young, I was breaking out. Plus, I wanted a violin in my band and I always loved the Fender Rhodes.

It must have been the end of 1970 – it’s all Miles’ fault really. One night in a club we were talking and he said, “It’s time to form your own band.” That was a real shock for me because he was a very honest man, the most honest man I ever met. In any event, within a month I was putting it together. I got Billy Cobham; Billy and I were on A Tribute To Jack Johnson together and I loved the way Billy played.

Then Miroslav Vitouš called and he said, “John, we’re forming a band with Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul called Weather Report and we want you in on guitar.” Oh man! “Sorry Miroslav, but I’m under orders. I’ve got to put my own band together.” He said, “Listen, have you heard Jan Hammer? He’s a great piano player.”

He was playing with Sarah Vaughan at the time, and that’s as good a credential as you can get. So I called him and he was up for it – he wanted to break out. It was in the air. People wanted to break out of the mould, to create new forms and, in a sense, you’ve got to break some of the old ones and he was up for that. Of course, he was playing Fender Rhodes, so it was perfect for me.

How did the jazz rock sound develop?

In a way, you could say my discipline is a jazz discipline, but I like that distortion thing. It reminds me of Coltrane. You listen to some of the recordings of Coltrane, even on A Love Supreme, ’64/’65, sometimes he hits two or three notes on one note. You hear these harmonics coming out.

That’s what I loved about Jimi [Hendrix], he was finding a way to get a new sound and already by this time, we’re talking mid-60s, I was a little bored with the kind of jazz tone of the guitar – this pure, almost nylon string sound on an electric guitar.

I was cutting my teeth on Coltrane, whether A Love Supreme or Interstellar Space or Om – that music is just total passion and Miles of course always played with such a passion. Jimi really opened the door to electric guitar players in how to achieve this kind of getting more than one note out of one note.

It’s difficult to say, but Jimi had a very strong impact on me in terms of the tone of the guitar, and I think he affected an entire generation. In fact, more than one generation.

How much was your approach influenced by Lifetime?

When Lifetime started, Tony was already radical. I loved Tony because he was free, he was a real free spirit and he had new concepts of how to play drums. I loved that.

Within a couple of months I had to get a big amp and trade in my hollow body for a solid body – the hollow body guitar freaks out with high volume. Tony was always loud and strong because he loved rock’n’roll. There’s good rock’n’roll and bad rock’n’roll, like there’s good jazz and there’s bad jazz. There’s good and bad everywhere.

Is it true that Mahavishnu Orchestra were hated by critics?

We got really slagged off big time by a lot of the jazz players. The purists, they’ve always been around and they’ve always believed that they know what the real jazz is, but it happens every time. It happened with Shakti.

When I started playing with Zakir Hussain, the tabla player in Shakti, he got berated violently in the press for playing with people like me – it was making the music impure. I mean, it’s so silly. Paco De Lucia, when we started to play the flamenco, purists said, “It’s over now! The pure flamenco is dead.”

What can you say? These purists, they’re the bane of music. They think they know what music is and all they do is have certain fixations about what they like, and they want everybody to like what they like. They have problems accepting new concepts and innovation.

It happened with Coltrane, even from A Love Supreme. Within a year he started to make albums like Interstellar Space, bringing Pharaoh Sanders in there, just screaming saxophones like screaming guitars, but wonderful. Well, I like it, but the critics were saying, “What is he doing? He’s got such an ugly sound!” They don’t know how to deal with it.

When you start to break the mould of whatever they have a particular affection for, they get very nervous and anxious: “This is not the real thing, it’s wrong!” But it’s everywhere. Who worries about that? There’s no point. As Oscar Wilde said, “They love you, they hate you, as long as they don’t ignore you.”

When you played with Zakir Hussain in Shakti, was it like learning a new musical language?

It’s another culture, isn’t it? Musically, there is common ground between jazz and Indian music. I think they’re the only two cultural expressions that have common ground and that is rhythm and improvisation. Coming out of the whole psychedelic period in the mid to late 60s, many of us were looking to the East for answers to the great existential questions, and once you start looking East – India in particular has been addressing these questions for thousands of years – at some point you come across the music.

Zakir and I go back to ’69 when we both arrived in the US. We had a mutual friend who had a music store and I asked this guy, “Listen, if you get an Indian musician walk in and he wants to give a lesson, call me.” It happened to be Zakir, and the store owner called me. I said, “What does he play?” He said, “He plays tabla.” I said, “Well, I don’t study tabla, can he give me a vocal lesson?”

I went down right away – and I don’t sing well at all! Zakir really doesn’t sing much better than me, but he gave me a vocal lesson. We had a good laugh afterwards and we became friends.

By 1972 I’d studied North Indian. In ’72 I was studying South Indian, so I was getting the best of both worlds. By 1973 I’d met L Shankar, the first violin player in the Shakti band, and I took the percussion player of my teacher, my guru Ramanathan, and that was the first Shakti group.

I’d been studying theory for several years so I knew about the rhythmical structures, to some extent about the raga system of India, and I was relating it to my own Western harmonic knowledge. Western music is based all on different scales, because harmony is just a bunch of notes from a particular scale playing together. It’s a vertical view of harmony – of a scale rather, a chord.

I was playing acoustic guitar, and by the end of ’75 that was it for the Mahavishnu Orchestra. I told the guys, “Sorry, I’m going to have to let you all go because I just want to concentrate on the Shakti group.”

By the end of ’75 I’d gone to India and I found Vikku Vinayakram, the ghatam player. I continued learning, playing with the great masters like Zakir. He’s probably the greatest tabla player alive. I think the only guy who was better than him at that time was his dad, Alla Rakha.

How have those influences from India shaped your playing?

I’ve been going to India now for more years than I can remember. We’re not alone in the West in seeking inspiration elsewhere, in India or wherever for that matter. Because musicians – of which there are millions in India and they’re great players – they’re all seeking inspiration. They’ve been listening to and are influenced by Western music.

Floating Point, the album I made in India about 10 years ago, is an example of that. There’s a piece with two guitar players, one guitar, one is a zitar – it’s an electric sitar – with Niladri Kumar. The way he plays that electric sitar, you can hear the Western influence with the Indian influence. It’s not contrived.

I have no desire to be an Indian musician. I’ve done that. I’ve realised after years of working on Indian instruments that I’m a guitar player. I’m not gifted enough to play more than one instrument, but the influences and the knowledge that I’ve searched for and studied in Indian music are really because I love that music and I want to understand it more. In fact, the more I understand it, the more I understand the musicians themselves.

It’s like speaking a language. I live in a French-speaking population and there’s no way you can enter into the French mind without the language – it’s impossible. To understand the mind and the culture, you need the language, so I needed the language of Indian music in order to communicate in a coherent way with my Indian brother musicians.

Even though we’re thousands of kilometres apart, we’re growing up and discovering each other through music and through love, really, because if you don’t love it then it’s not going to work.

There was a period in the 80s when it became New World Music and people were sampling the shakuhachi flute from Japan with a 12-string guitar with a Peruvian flute – it was all sampling. They made records and actually became very successful, but it wasn’t playing. Nobody’s playing where you sweat and you can fall down and hit your nose on the ground, which is of course the only music that I want to play – real improvised music.

You’re revered by other guitarists. Are you ever tempted to start believing your own reputation?

Yes – but I don’t. That’s the problem: I’m acutely aware of my incapacities and my ignorance. In fact, I was just thinking this morning, I should make a CD called Deaf, Dumb And Blind because that’s how I feel sometimes. It’s very sweet what people say, and these accolades; but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s pleasing to the ego, but I’m also acutely aware that my ego is really a stupid fellow – so I don’t want to pay any attention to it.

I’m not trying to be humble here, because humility can be turned into inverted vanity; but what I say is what I truly feel. I know retrospectively I’ve had a great deal of success, but in a way that has stimulated me even more. My whole life has been dedicated to my instrument and to music. It hasn’t stopped.

I’m 75, I’m still learning every day, I still work every day because I know so little about everything. In my ignorance, since I’m aware of it, I have this insatiable desire to learn more.

Has Mahavishnu Orchestra cast a long shadow over your career?

I see it more as a bit of a shining light. For me, it’s a very positive thing that happened in my life. Even by that time, I was a very avid student of meditation and becoming increasingly aware of my own stupidity. The amazing outward success which happened more or less instantly with Mahavishnu, I couldn’t believe it. It was just kind of a phenomenon – and they come and go just like the tides, like the night and the day.

I had no illusions about losing popularity. In fact, I almost did it intentionally, because when I came out of Mahavishnu and said to my agent and my record company, “I’m going to do Shakti,” they said, “You’re out of your mind!” Literally, there was one guy from the record company – which was CBS at that time – who said, “Whatcha gonna do, sit down and play acoustic guitar with these Indians? What are you, crazy?” And I said, “Yes, but I assume the consequences.”

That’s really all it is. There were financial consequences – we didn’t sell many records – and that’s why they were pissed at me. Mahavishnu was a real money-spinner for the record companies.

In India, Shakti is something like a cult band, truly getting a wonderful reception. Mahavishnu, it is a light to me because it’s part of my musical history. I wouldn’t be playing how I am, I wouldn’t be who I am, without the Mahavishnu. So I’m very grateful for whatever that brought to me, musically, personally, spiritually –whatever you want to call it.

A decade is a long time between albums, but Alyssa Bonagura has chosen the optimum moment to release America’s Backroads.

“It tells the story of the last ten years of my life,” explains the Nashville songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. “These are songs that I’ve played live or just never cut. When you write songs, sometimes they’re perfect for that moment. At other times they meet you years later and you’re like: ‘Oh my god, now that’s for me!’ That’s the magic of it.”

The richly autobiographical America’s Backroads, Bonagura’s fourth studio album, details a life spent criss-crossing the States, gathering experiences – good and bad – along the way. Predisposed to a sweeping chorus, she’s a classic Southern storyteller at heart, driven as much by rock’n’roll as by rootsy country.

“I listened to a lot of rock music growing up, a lot of electric guitar music,” she says. “I’ve always loved people like Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow and Alanis Morissette. And all the women that kind of spearheaded that movement.”

Bonagura was destined for this kind of life. The daughter of Kathie Baillie and Michael Bonagura, founders of hit country trio Baillie & The Boys, she spent her childhood on the tour bus: “I think it’s because I was surrounded by music all the time. I wanted to be like my parents.” By 1998, aged 10, she was duetting with Kenny Rogers, and at 16 she was opening for Marty Stuart.

In 2006 she was granted an overseas scholarship to study sound technology at Liverpool Institute For Performing Arts.

“I was playing at the Zanzibar Club while I was there,” she recalls. “Pete Wylie turned up one night, saw me playing guitar and singing, and asked me to join his band. To be honest, I didn’t know who he was. But I joined The Mighty Wah! for the next two or three years. That whole experience changed everything. I came into my own as a songwriter.”

Bonagura channelled it all into her 2010 debut The English Diaries. She’s since had her songs covered by Steven Tyler, The Shires and a slew of contemporary country artists. But America’s Backroads is easily her finest statement yet.

“The title track led the way,” she says. “It’s about me, my mom and my dad playing in New Mexico, and growing up on the road. I also wrote it because I don’t want any of those memories to go away. They put miles on your soul.

“My parents really got burned by the industry,” she continues. “They were dropped when they had a number two record, which sounds crazy to me. It made me realise that the ebb and flow of the business will always be there, but that music still has to be the one priority in life. You have to love it enough to just keep going.”

When Nirvana hit the big time with Nevermind in late 1991, they kicked off a feeding frenzy that saw major record deals thrust in front of every oddball, backwoods yokel and scruffy coffee shop intellectual A&R reps could find playing dive bars and ‘toilet’ venues.

From bands who had a formative influence on Nirvana themselves (Melvins, Butthole Surfers) to those who took up the alt-rock charge in their wake (Bush, Candlebox, Stone Temple Pilots), everybody was suddenly a potential star in the making, a commercial goldmine just waiting to be tapped.

That also meant the 90s were a time where seemingly any band could break big and climb the charts, whether it was the quasi-prog-funk noodling of Primus or the baffling success of comedy metal thumpers Green Jellÿ (who achieved a UK Top 10 single with Three Little Pigs).

But even in a decade littered with oddities and surprise sensations, some bands remained frustratingly obscure. Whether by their own design or simply cursed with a lack of good fortune, these 10 obscure but brilliant bands had all the requirements needed for stardom but never quite crossed the finish line.

1. Screaming Trees

Screaming Trees were already on their fifth album when grunge broke big in 1991, their moody, reflective sound a pitch-perfect predecessor for the likes of Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains. Despite striking while the iron was hot with 1992's Sweet Oblivion (and featuring on the platinum-selling soundtrack to Cameron Crowe's grunge-era movie Singles), Screaming Trees found that mainstream success almost completely eluded them. Single Nearly Lost You stalled at No. 50 in the UK singles charts, failing to make the Top 100 in the US entirely (though it did reach No. 5 on the US Alternative Airplay and No. 12 on Mainstream Rock charts), proving to be as close to the big time as the band would ever come.

Despite being grunge forerunners and having endorsements from both Chris Cornell and Kurt Cobain (the former having helped produce the band's major-label debut Uncle Anesthesia, while the latter selected the band for inclusion on the 1993 Reading Festival bill), Screaming Trees remained a cult act for the duration of their existence. Despite climbing to No. 32 on the UK albums charts in 1996 with the superb Dust, the band were met with utter indifference when trying to court label interest in releasing a follow-up, ultimately disbanding in 2000. Considering the success singer Mark Lanegan went on to achieve as a solo artist (and just how ubiquitous the band's moody, radio-friendly sound would become), it beggars belief that Screaming Trees weren't more beloved in their day.

2. Alice Donut

New York's Alice Donut were exactly the kind of band the tag 'alt rock' was created for. Not entirely punk (though they certainly had their moments) and pretty far from straight-up rock, the band exhibited almost Frank Zappa levels of eccentricity (including releasing a trombone-led instrumental cover of Black Sabbath's War Pigs, a trick they later repeated in 2009 with Pixies' Where Is My Mind?) that in a just world would have enabled them to succeed in the alt-rock gold rush of the early 90s.

Frequent fliers at CBGB's and signed to Alternative Tentacles (the label owned by ex-Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra) throughout their initial run, Alice Donut were described by Biafra as being "the missing link between R.E.M. and the Butthole Surfers".

The band's genre-blurring sound meant they didn't fully fit in with New York's hardcore or noise rock scenes, closer resembling ’80s alternative underground acts like Husker Du and Minutemen, albeit a few years too late to fall in with either group. Nonetheless, their gloriously oddball sound helped them establish a devout cult following, with fans drawn in by their warped sense of humour and canny ear for wrapping brilliant radio hooks in squalling walls of sound that seemed to draw as much on twisted psychedelia as it did ’80s punk rock.

Alice Donut ultimately decided to call it quits in 1996 after playing their 1000th show, in spite of the fact they had earned more acclaim than ever with the previous year's Pure Acid Park. The band ultimately reformed in 2001 and have operated intermittently ever since, their last album being 2009's Ten Glorious Animals (though they did put out the documentary Freaks In Love in 2011 - which you can currently watch on Amazon Prime).

3. Bikini Kill

The 90s riot grrrl movement may have been iconic, but it seldom enjoyed the commercial success it so richly deserved. Yes, the likes of L7, Babes In Toyland and Hole (to whatever extent you include Hole as a riot grrrl band) would make their chart appearances, but with the exception of Courtney Love’s band they failed to break past the top 100 (in the US at least) and reach the same commercial peaks as other ’90s alt movements. Few were snubbed harder than Bikini Kill however.

One of the most vocal and politicised forces in the scene, the Olympia, WA/Washington DC-based band had a direct hand in shaping both the style and ideals of the riot grrl movement but ultimately found themselves sidelined, vocalist Kathleen Hanna saying people would bombard the band with hatemail while drummer Tobi Vail described their shows as "all-out war".

Though Bikini Kill were extremely active in the scene, and received endorsements from Nirvana and Fugazi, with Ian MacKaye producing their self-titled debut EP, they were slow off the mark to release an album - 1993's split-album Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah was their first to see widespread release, followed shortly by their full-length debut Pussy Whipped. The song Rebel Girl became the band's biggest 'hit' (as well as an anthem for riot grrl overall) but failed to make any major commercial dent.

The band released only one other album before splitting in 1997, never truly reaping the popularity associated with the scene they helped create, though the huge excitement generated by their on-going reunion tour is a testament to their ever-swelling cult status.

4. A

The US didn't hold a complete monopoly on guitars in the ’90s. On the other side of the Atlantic, the rise (and chart success) of bands like The Wildhearts, Therapy? and Terrorvision helped cement the rise of Britrock, Britpop's noisier, more distortion-friendly sibling. A had actually formed the other side of the ’80s, albeit under the name Grand Designs (a nod to the Rush song, rather than the band being fans of daytime TV) with a decidedly more prog sound.

By 1993 the Perry brothers had seen the light and rebranded into a punkish ball of energy that perfectly fit in with the Britrock scene. Neither of A's ’90s releases (their debut How Ace Are Buildings and the utterly superb A Vs Monkey Kong) managed to fully crack the charts however, Monkey Kong stalling at No. 62 in the UK. They did manage to enjoy some chart success the other side of the millennium however; the more nu metal adjacent Nothing broke the Top 10 of the UK singles charts, while its parent album Hi-Fi Serious reached #18.

With a sunny sound that evoked the very best of ’90s pop-punk without ever sounding derivative, A should have been primed to take advantage of the popularity of bands like NoFx and The Offspring whilst also slotting in nicely with Britrock's biggest bands.

But chalk it down to a case of bad timing (they came just a few years too late for Britrock's peak and slightly too early for the early 2000s pop-punk explosion), being on the wrong label (the band would have fit perfectly on an Epitaph Punk O-Rama compilation) or just being from the wrong country, A never managed to get the success they deserved. The band's prevalence at UK music festivals in recent years is heartening at least, the sizeable turnout of crowds a reminder that 25 years on from their debut the band are still loved in the right circles.

5. Cop Shoot Cop

Formed in New York in the late 80s, Cop Shoot Cop can neither be said to have come at the wrong time or wrong place. After all, New York's late-80s/early 90s hardcore and noise rock scenes are the thing of legend, the likes of Unsane, White Zombie, Type O Negative, Helmet, Biohazard and Prong all emerging (and catapulting towards success) in just a few short years. Unfortunately Cop Shoot Cop seldom even get mentioned when discussing the scene, perhaps deemed just a little too weird to fit in with an empire of freaks who would help reshape the metal world.

Though starting out firmly rooted in noise rock, by 1994's Release Cop Shoot Cop had largely reigned in their most abrasive tendencies. It didn't make them any less unique; heavily bass-driven (Release was the only CSC album to feature a guitarist), Cop Shoot Cop's sound mixed elements of industrial, noise, alt-metal and even freeform jazz, Release just throwing some radio-friendly tunes onto the pile.

The likes of It Only Hurts When I Breathe, Two At A Time and Ambulance Song are just the kind of weird that 90s alt-metal fans loved - think the Rollins Band's Liar, Filter's Hey Man Nice Shot or even the more out-there material by Tool or Therapy? and you're in the right sonic headspace.

For all that Release was more straight-laced, it didn't help the band's fortunes; the album failed to make any decent in-roads commercially and ultimately contributed to the souring of their relationship with Interscope (singer Tod Ashley later saying they were treated 'poorly' by the label) and ultimate split in 1997 - the same year Devin Townsend covered their song Room 429.

6. Majesty Crush

When it comes to talking about a band who were born in the wrong time and place, Majesty Crush might take the crown. Formed in Detroit in 1990, Majesty Crush were on the wrong side of the Atlantic to take advantage of shoegaze's 'peak', the genre never really taking hold in the US in the same way it had Britain.

Even so, by the time Majesty Crush put out their debut (and only) album Love 15 in 1993 the genre was already in decline; its best elements subsumed into the burgeoning Britpop movement and years out from the 'nu gaze' revival of the early 2000s.

Majesty Crush's own take on shoegaze introduced radio sensibilities that, on reflection, are in-keeping with the tones and styles of many mainstream artists in the US during the 90s. Moments of Love 15 evoke the more ambient, reflective songs of Pearl Jam's Ten (think Release, or Garden), the discordant wall of noise that opens Boyfriend wouldn't be out of place on a Siamese Dream or Gish-era Smashing Pumpkins song (think Cherub Rock or I Am One) and Grow is akin to Jeff Buckley's Last Goodbye.

Unfortunately for Majesty Crush such elements were seemingly only palatable in the mainstream when absorbed into a wider musical genre (alt rock, grunge, pop) and when the band's label collapsed shortly after Love 15's release they never managed to recover. A subsequent 'best of' collection was released in 2009, but any chances of the band making a comeback to more receptive audiences were dashed when singer David Stroughter was shot and killed by Californian police in an apparent road-rage incident in 2017.

7. Far

Formed in Sacramento, and fronted by the charismatic Jonah Matranga, Far cut their teeth in the same scene that gave rise to Deftones and while achieving a similar level of influence (particularly on the 00s post-hardcore and emo scenes), they never managed to commercially break through.

It's something of a mystery of exactly why they never broke through however; the band's sound bore heavily resemblance to Deftones own, albeit replacing the nu metal elements with a post-hardcore crunch and alt-rock radio choruses.

1998's Water & Solutions presented a meatier, more direct sound that was decidedly more radio-friendly and Far were even able to tour with Deftones and Incubus in that same period, exposing them to wider audiences. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to break them on a mainstream level and the band split in 1999, meaning they missed out on any increased profile they would have enjoyed when emo broke big post-2001.

Water & Solutions remains a classic however, albeit in retrospect as it set out the stall for everyone from Finch, Hell is For Heroes and Hundred Reasons to Funeral For A Friend, Thursday and Biffy Clyro. The band reformed in 2008 and released At Night We Live in 2010, but have only operated intermittently since.

8. Tad

The band that took Nirvana on their first European/UK tour (as support, no less), Tad somehow never managed to fully capitalise on the industry gold rush in the post-Nevermind era. In truth, Tad's sound bore more resemblance to the likes of Helmet or Prong than to Alice In Chains or Nirvana (though Soundgarden have their moments - just hear the metallic crunch of Room A Thousand Years Wide), but the band, fronted by the likeable Tad Doyle, were key early figures in grunge's development.

From signing to Sub Pop to working with Steve Albini, Tad got in ahead of just about everyone else - and maybe that's exactly what held them back. Coming just a little too early for the wider music world to pay attention, the band's 1991 release 8-Way Santa would perhaps have also been their breakthrough had it not arrived in February that year - a full seven months before Nevermind.

As it was, the single Jack Pepsi earned some traction before hitting legal snags from the Pepsi company, while the song Jinx (and the band themselves) would feature on the movie Singles. The band did move over to a major label amidst the changes in the industry and 1993's Inhaler was released through Giant Records (a company associated with Warner Bros.).

Neither Inhaler nor 1995 Infrared Riding Hood managed to break the band and they were released from the label shortly after Infrared Riding Hood's release. A final single, Oppenheimer's Pretty Nightmare was released in 1998 but the band had reached breaking point and split in 1999, never having enjoyed the success they deserved as forerunners for many of the decade's biggest grunge acts.

9. Girls Against Boys

By the end of the ’80s Washington D.C. had become a hotbed for post-hardcore acts, the likes of Jawbox, The Nation of Ulysses and Shudder establishing a strong presence in a scene popularised by local legends Minor Threat and Fugazi.

With Fugazi’s Brendan Canty a founding member alongside Soulside’s Scott McCloud, Girls Against Boys already had a sense of indie cred before they'd struck a note. But despite being much love from the UK music press, appearances in movies and extensive tours overseas, Girls Against Boys never managed to outgrow their cult status.

By 1993 the band had relocated to New York and released their second album, Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby, their first album for label Touch And Go but also the first that truly established the heart of their sound. Now sporting two bassists, the band were affixing the bounce of D.C. post-hardcore to New York noise abrasion, but executing it in a way that wasn't an overload on the senses.

Two more well-received albums (1994's Cruise Yourself and 1996's House Of GSVB) under Touch And Go ultimately led to the band signing with Geffen, 1998's Freak*on*ica becoming their highest-selling album but still not yielding major chart success (though the album did feature on the Billboard Heatseekers chart) and the band ultimately became inactive in 2003 after the release of You Can't Fight What You Can't See. In 2021 Girls Against Boys announced plans to play shows ahead of a reissue of House Of GVSB, leaving hope for a seventh album in future.

10. Cows

Minneapolis punks Cows only existed for a fraction over a decade, but made the most of their time by putting out nine albums of chaotic, howling brilliance. Ostensibly sat somewhere between post-hardcore and noise rock, the band's sound felt more like a throwback to '77 and late ’60s garage rock than many of their contemporaries, always sounding one note away from collapsing completely but somehow keeping the calamitous racket together.

Signed to Amphetamine Reptile for much of their existence (with only their 1987 debut Taint Pluribus, Taint Unum being issued elsewhere), Cows' output represents the best of ’80s punk, chaotic bursts of energy punctuated by obnoxious blasts of brass courtesy of vocalist Shannon Selberg.

Though Cows never particularly dialled back their anarchic tendencies on record, there was a sense that by 1992's Cunning Stunts they had at least twisted their sound into something with (warped) pop sensibilities, albeit with the same breed of off-brand humour as Faith No More. Unfortunately, it never translated into any mainstream appeal and even drafting in Buzz Osbourne of the Melvins to produce their swansong, 1998's Sorry In Pig Minor, wasn't enough to push the band over.

Shannon Selberg's relocation to New York in 1998 spelled the end and Cows split later that year. Three quarters of the band reconvened in 2015 to play annual punk event Grumps (albeit under the name 'Cowz' to differentiate the show from being a full-band reunion) but subsequent plans for a comeback have never surfaced.

Coheed And Cambria are reaching the end of their epic, 12-album Amory Wars concept with The Father Of Make Believe. With mainman Claudio Sanchez in a precarious position as he contemplates his future, it’s the band’s most out-there album yet – equal parts a sci-fi prog epic and personal tome of uncertainty.

While some bands’ vision for a concept record would stretches across a double album, that would barely scratch the surface for Coheed And Cambria. Founder, lead songwriter and tireless creative Claudio Sanchez mapped out an intergalactic odyssey with the intention of spreading it across 12 full-length releases. Save for the much-needed respite of 2015’s The Color Before The Sun – which temporarily unshackled the group from the chains of such a lofty concept – it’s driven the band’s existence for nearly a quarter of a century.

The 10th album in the band’s Amory Wars series, Vaxis – Act III: The Father Of Make Believe, finds the final straight in sight. Naturally, that’s led to some pensive self-reflection for Sanchez. “We’re now at the third part of this five-part thing, and I can almost see the end,” he says. “But what will my life be like without it?”

Set in another galaxy, he describes The Amory Wars as the tale of “a fucked-up dysfunctional family in space.” But really, such high fantasy provides him with a mask to be vulnerable without baring all. “I had a really hard time putting myself at the forefront of the songs,” he admits. “That’s why I created The Amory Wars. I grew up on Emory Drive in a small town outside of New York City; the characters Coheed and Cambria very much resemble my parents. I play a character in the story.

“Every life is nuanced, right? I grew up in a chemically dependent household. My dad was a functioning addict, so that’s where the dragonfly [a key creature within the story] came from – it resembles a syringe. The father turns into a monster, and the mother is a shield to protect the children.

“I never wanted to villainize the people I was singing about; but I needed to write music to feel good. This is a therapeutic thing for me. When I got older and became a father, I started making peace with things. It’s my life – I should be able to speak about it. I had a great upbringing despite the dysfunction. I thought it was fantastic to take moments in my life and make them these grandiose paintings of moments in time that I had experienced one way, but maybe the audience can experience in another.”

The band’s lyrics, as well as a series of novels and comic books, are the vehicles for his confessional storytelling, which has always been tailored to welcome new listeners with each album. Fans rooted deep into the lore will hear character themes and sonic nuggets oscillate through their discography; but for those who just want music to digest and enjoy, the band’s mix of emotional post-hardcore and very nerdy prog has proven a winner.

“Early on, I attempted to try to inject concept jargon into songs, and I didn’t really love that,” Sanchez says. “It felt a little forced. I wanted it to be a surprise that there was a bigger concept. It’s more suggestive than necessary.”

As he dove deeper into the chaotic narrative arc, the music became more ambitious. “I feel like we’ve constructed the freedom to do whatever it is we choose to do,” he says. “That’s always something that I’ve strived for. I never wanted there to be restrictions. But then there’s the question of, ‘Did I imprison myself in the concept?’”

Unsurprisingly, he answers this question in musical form with So It Goes, the final song on the new record. “It’s a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which only gets mentioned in conjunction with something dying. I was very much influenced by that. Some of those stories have really inspired some of the motives in The Amory Wars – one being the character of Billy Pilgrim being unstuck in time and being able to see everything at once.

“And so for me, as much as this isn’t the end, I see the end. I don’t know if that end is finite, or if it’s a metamorphosis into something that isn’t a prison, but there is a way to move on to something else.”

To get to that answer, first he had to make sense of the lyrics that passed through his lips. “A big theme in Coheed records is identity and mortality. And the older I get, those themes become louder. I understood what conceptually was supposed to happen with the story, but initially I was writing without the rules of the story.

“I found a very personal theme of questioning who I am and where I would be if I’d made different decisions along the way. When I was listening to the material, it was like going through some sort of midlife crisis. I was asking, ‘Do I want to be in Coheed And Cambria any more? Do I want to try a different avenue of creativity?’ That theme made a lot of sense for me, being at the centre point of this pentalogy.”

As ever, Coheed’s latest batch of songs are highly fantastical, but it doesn’t take much to understand the meanings. “Goodbye, Sunshine is about saying goodbye to a thing that is really important to you. But it’s followed by Searching For Tomorrow, which is about looking for a better existence past that,” he explains. “There’s a real duality to the record.”

Having found meaning in his subconscious writing, Sanchez returned to Paris, where the initial concept for The Amory Wars was created. He recalls that, in 1998, the city was “another world” to the young, impressionable musician, having previously only travelled as far as New Jersey, his neighbouring state. He spent 10 days in the French capital, exploring, writing, reconnecting with Coheed And Cambria’s roots.

“Paris will always be important to me,” he reflects. “Every once in a while, I’ll return there and see if I’m inspired by anything. Some of The Afterman story [2012/13] was written there. This time I went on a writing retreat, and I wrote Meri Of Mercy and Blind Side Sonny there. They almost act as the binding of the album.

“They’re right in the middle and they’re extremely different. One is very pretty and airy – something about the textures in Meri Of Mercy reminded me of my grandfather passing, and maybe somewhere in the afterlife being reunited with the wife he’d lost for 40 years. Blind Side Sonny is aggressive and gritty.

“When I write music I like to cover a lot of ground, and I think that sometimes might make Coheed a hard pill to swallow. It really doesn’t fall into one category, but it resembles my personality. There are moments when I can be open and soft, and moments when I can be aggressive. It’s important to showcase both sides. Again, this is therapy.”

Amid his self-wrangling, Sanchez has greatly expanded Coheed’s musical spectrum on The Father Of Make Believe. He points to album opener Yesterday’s Lost. “It’s a very conscious effort to reintroduce The Afterman’s theme, and it’s very [folk singer] Iron & Wine-y. There was an instrument in the background, called the Therevox, which emulates an old French analogue synthesiser; I used a little bit of that to create some otherworldliness.”

It’s not the only oddball instrument that makes its way onto the record. “I’ve got stuff everywhere! When I was doing The Flood, I needed something that sounded like water, so I used a waterphone [a strange, spiralling instrument that looks like it should be in a modern art gallery]. You fill it with water and bow it. It sounds alien. I like trying to find instruments and textures that aren’t obvious; they sit in the background and really paint a picture.

“I also used a box instrument called an apprehension engine. It’s something that Mark Korven [composer for the Robert Eggers horror films The Lighthouse and The Witch] made. It’s a scary instrument!”

They’re vehicles to push Coheed’s sound as far as possible. “For me, there isn’t any other contemporary music that moves quite like Coheed does,” he says. “There’s a lot of peaks and valleys, and I feel that’s something a lot of music lacks – the complexity of movement and vibes. I feel we cover a lot of ground in a very creative and interesting way.”

The Flood helps support that claim: it’s part of the thrilling, near-20-minute, four-part masterwork The Continuum, which closes out the record. “Going over those questions of growth and identity, I felt the song really amplified that,” Sanchez explains. “Mr Nobody is a very self-deprecating acceptance of ‘You’ll forever be known as nothing.’ That’s the hyper side of the spectrum.

“Part two, The Flood, was almost like a rebirth. It reminded me of a horrible acid trip when I was a teenager – I saw my life flash by in these still pictures, to the point where I found myself as an orb of energy, like it was the nucleus of my id or my ego. And then I was abruptly awakened from it. I think I was out of my mind on a couch somewhere and somebody was afraid I was dying.

“Then we get to Tethered Together, which, as much as I’m questioning my identity and myself inside Coheed And Cambria, we are stronger together – and that feels like the climax of the story. Whereas So It Goes becomes the resolve; regardless of everything, we still move on. That’s why I thought conceptually the four movements really worked together – they give closure to this record.

“I feel a personal connection to all Coheed records,” he adds. “But this one resonates differently.”

Dave Mustaine endured many tough times in the long months between being diagnosed with throat cancer in February 2019 and being declared cancer-free the following October. There was the emotional pain of breaking the news to his family and friends. There was the physical toll the radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatment he endured took on him. But one of the worst things of all was the mask.

Cancer patients who have to undergo radiation treatment on their head and neck, as the Megadeth frontman did, have to wear a thermoplastic radiation mask – a mesh-like construct that holds the patient’s head rigidly in place while it’s bombarded with pinpoint radiation that destroys the cancerous cells. Dave had been warned by his radiologist that fitting the mask would be uncomfortable, but he didn’t realise just how bad it would be.

“They said they were going to have to put this plastic mesh over my head because I could not move, not even one millimetre,” he recalls today. “I said, ‘OK’ and didn’t think anything of it. But what they do is take this plastic, heat it to a volcanic fucking magma temperature and slap it on my face. I thought I was going to have a baby! I went nuts!”

It took three different attempts in all to fit the mask, and only then with the aid of a little Valium to calm Dave’s nerves.

The mask appears on the cover of his new book, In My Darkest Hour, which charts his diagnosis, recovery and slow return to health. Where Dave’s 2010 autobiography, Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir, was a wild, all-guns-blazing ride through his mercurial life, In My Darkest Hour is more focused, reflective and ultimately moving. It captures the dread and doubt that he went through, and the emotional and physical toll it took on both him and his family. But it also shines a light on his resilience and, ultimately, the sense of relief and hope that came with his all-clear.

“I met a lot of people that had cancer, and a lot of them seemed really hopeless,” he says. “That was pretty much what prompted me to do it, because I wanted to share the hope that was there for me at the end.”

He found out he had cancer during a visit to an oral surgeon in early 2019. He had been suffering from an indefinable ache in his jaw – not quite toothache, but similar. In the book, he relates how the surgeon broke the news to him: “He stands over me, hands folded across his chest and takes a deep breath. ‘Well, looks like you’ve got the Big C.’”

Recalling that moment and the subsequent journey while he was writing the book wasn’t as painful as it could have been.

“Mostly, it was cathartic,” he says. “There were times, of course, after the chemo and the radiation, where I’d be so exhausted that I fell asleep. And they’d have students poking me in the neck with needles over and over trying to find my lymph glands, which made my wife lose her mind. But I knew every inch of the journey, so I knew how dark it got.”

In My Darkest Hour isn’t just Dave’s own recollections of the time. It also features input from people who were in his orbit during this period, from his wife, Pam, and children Justis and Electra, to the singer’s radiologist, Dr Anthony Cmelak (who contributed lyrics for the Megadeth song Dogs Of Chernobyl, from 2022’s The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!) and even his jiu jitsu teacher. These were the people that helped get him through the ordeal.

“I’ve always needed a lot of help in this world, and I’m not afraid to ask for it,” says Dave. “Family, faith, even my martial arts training – they all helped a lot.”

Dave made his diagnosis public in June 2019. There was never any intention to keep quiet about it.

“I’ve always been pretty open with people,” he says. “There are a lot of people who have prayed for me over the years. The reason I didn’t keep it quiet was to let the people who are my support system know, because I’m the dude who has needed prayer his whole life.”

After the news broke, he received messages of support from several famous friends and fellow musicians. Among them were Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne and, more surprisingly, James Hetfield, the man who had fired him from Metallica back in 1983.

“It wasn’t any more significant than the other people who gave their support to me,” he says of the notable names who reached out. “I’ve always looked at that stuff like one beggar giving another beggar a crust of bread. But I appreciate it, because I know how our time is measured out, and to take the time to stop and do something like that means a lot.”

One person who did offer some useful advice was Bruce Dickinson. The Iron Maiden frontman had gone through treatment for throat cancer a few years earlier. Bruce passed on his own experiences of what to expect, and also gave
Dave one simple but invaluable piece of advice: “Surround yourself with good people… make sure you’re spending time with people who are upbeat and positive.” Or, as the Megadeth man writes in the book: “Stay away from assholes.”

“Bruce had some fantastic stuff to say as a cancer survivor,” says Dave today. “There’s a big difference between someone saying ‘You’re in my thoughts and prayers’, versus somebody who goes into detail about his treatment and tells you about the outcome. I needed hope, and he gave me it.”

Unsurprisingly, the treatment itself was tough: first the radiation, then the chemotherapy.

“I absolutely hated getting up in the morning to go for treatment, but I knew I wouldn’t do it by myself,” he says. “So I hired a person to come into my room, whether I was asleep or not, get me up, make me get dressed, put me in the car, take me to my appointment, bring me home, and pour me back into bed.”

Dave had planned to start work on the follow-up to 2016’s Dystopia just before he received the news about his cancer. It’s a measure of his endurance – or maybe his stubbornness – that he elected to carry on working on new music throughout his treatment.

“There were all the stigmas that come along with it [the cancer diagnosis],” he says. “When I wanted to keep doing the record while I was going through treatment, I know there was doubt about how good it would have been:
‘How can a guy make a record when he’s going through cancer treatment?’

“I only had two days where I was too sick to work and couldn’t go to the studio,” he continues, his voice edged with defiance even now. “The studio was built in a house right next to where I live, so I’d go out my garage door, get into our little four-wheeler, drive through the field, pull up next door, walk through the door, and there was our studio.”

Finishing the new album would ultimately be held up even further by an altogether different illness in the form of the pandemic. The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead! – a title he insists had nothing to do with his own sickness – was eventually released on September 2, 2022, giving Megadeth their eighth US Top 10 album.

If he’d wanted to end the band there, it would have been the perfect valediction. Instead, they returned to the studio to make a follow-up, 2026’s self-titled Megadeth. And that’s when Dave announced that it would be his band’s last album, and that they were embarking on a farewell tour.

Today, he says his decision was down to a hand condition named Dupuytren’s contracture – aka ‘Viking Hand’ – that prevents him from playing guitar to the level he wants.

“It’s a tendon in the centre of my left hand that has nodules on it,” he explains. “That whole area itches, burns and hurts. Whenever I play, that extra activity just makes it worse. My goal is to play until I can’t.”

He’s considering surgery. “But even then, it’s a 50-50 chance whether it turns out good or bad. I don’t want to have someone cut my hand open and have it turn out worse forever. I know what I’ve got right now, so I’m going to put it to work and use it as much as I can. We have a beautiful tour lined up for the next couple of years, and there’s a lot of other Megadeth-oriented stuff we’re still going to do once playing is out of the picture.”

There are at least a couple of songs left over from sessions from the most recent album. One is called Bloodlust, the other Farewell My Love.

“I thought there was a third one called ‘When Robots Rule’,” he says, “But I might be mixing things up. That’s another byproduct of chemo and radiation called ‘chemo brain’, where you have a really hard time remembering things.”

There are definitely a bunch of older unfinished songs kicking around. Will he revisit them? Maybe, though they wouldn’t be his priority if he does get his playing hand fixed.

“If I could play old songs,” he says, “why wouldn’t I want to focus on new songs instead?”

There’s a funny moment in the new book where Dave relates that James Hetfield once jokingly said his former bandmate must have “a horseshoe stuffed up my ass”. How else could he have cheated death so many times other than pure luck?

“Well, maybe the horseshoe had fallen out, or maybe it had rusted over and poisoned my system,” writes Dave, thinking back to the moments after his initial diagnosis.

It’s incorrect to say the frontman cheated death once more – that does a disservice to the medical team that treated him and the people who supported him throughout that period. Still, surely it made him view mortality differently?Apparently not.

“I died once back in ’92 when we were going through some really terrible times [with drugs] and everybody was doing all kinds of hardcore stuff,” he says. “I still know death is final. I still have pain and grief for the friends I’ve lost. The only way that this could change me is just giving me experience in something that other people may not have faced and are terrified by.”

He empathises with anyone who is going through what he went through, though any advice he can offer comes with a quiet caveat.

“The thing I need to be careful with is that there’s not always a happy ending,” he says. “Some people wait too long, or some people don’t follow medical direction. The smartest thing I could say to anybody is: be honest with yourself. You have to know that you need help, and help comes in many forms. And then I would say: be nice to your family, because you’re going to notice when you need them.”

He laughs, and there’s a flash of the Mustaine of legend. “’Cos they’re going to have a hard time helping you if you’re a dick.”

In My Darkest Hour is published on September 24 via Constable

Iron Maiden was one of the earliest Iron Maiden songs written by bassist and founding member Steve Harris, who took the band's name and title from a medieval torture device from a film based on Alexandre Dumas's book The Man in the Iron Mask. And 50 years after its creation, it remains one of the most aggro songs committed to tape by the British metal legends.

"It was kind of the attitude we had at the time," remembers Harris. "We were just going to go out there and go for it and basically take no prisoners. We obviously were young and hungry and we had the adrenaline.

"We were just trying to get out there and play fast, heavy music with lots of melody," he adds. "There wasn't really anybody playing the stuff we were playing; we were heavily influenced by people like Wishbone Ash with the very melodic guitars. But we had a fire in it."

By 1977, the band were a quartet, which meant Harris had to embellish the song's twin guitar harmonies with his bass.

"We stayed that way for quite some time," he explained on the band's excellent 2004 documentary The Early Days. "We were always on the lookout for another guitar player, so some of the songs – like, for instance, Iron Maiden, where you've got the answering guitar riff from the other guitar, I'd have to do that on the bass. It worked really well for a while."

The song is responsible for birthing the band's mascot, Eddie, too.

One of their earliest vocalists, Dennis Wilcock, was inspired by the theatrics of Kiss. During the song's climax, he would pop some blood capsules into his mouth and drag a prop sword across his lips to create a gory stage effect. It certainly had an impact when one fan found his gory theatrics a little too much and fainted.

"When [Dennis] left we thought, ‘It’s good for people to come and see that sort of thing’, but we didn’t want it to be within the band itself," said the bassist, and plans were put in place to create a head, or a face, or something, that would spit blood onto drummer Doug Sampson's head for dramatic effect while vocalist Paul Di'Anno sang: "See the blood flow watching it shed up above my head, Iron Maiden wants you for dead!"

Eddie began as a kabuki-style mask, made from a face mould of their lighting tech Dave Beazley. A fish tank pump was attached to the mask and, hey presto, thick, fake blood would ooze from its mouth and directly onto Sampson's long blond hair.

The song itself opened their punchy, raw debut EP The Soundhouse Tapes, which also featured Invasion and Prowler.

Recorded at Cambridge's Spaceward studios during New Year's Eve in 1978 (a cost-effective move by the fledgling band) they released the EP on their own Rock Hard label in late 1979; limited to 5000 copies, the record became something of a Holy Grail for Maiden collectors.

Iron Maiden and Prowler would be re-recorded for their debut. While the quality of the second recording remains a bone of contention for Harris, the 1980 album captures the band's spirit and the raw energy of their legendary club gigs. With an EMI deal in place, the eight-song collection was recorded in London's Kingsway Studios, produced by Wil Malone and engineered by Martin Levan. It reached number four in the UK Albums Chart a week after its release.

The eponymous song, which closes their debut album, remains a live staple to this day. The band's production budget has expanded somewhat over the decades, and now the six-piece are joined by a huge, live-action Eddie.

Setlist.fm has calculated that the band have performed the song at least 2,467 times, followed by The Number of the Beast.

"As long as I can remember, we've closed our set with this song," says Harris. "It's quite simple. The bass line is fairly straightforward as is the drumming. But the guitar is over the top with harmony, and the bass is descending behind it. I think this makes it pretty special."

A fair point, well-made. And remember, wherever you are... Iron Maiden's gonna get you, no matter how far.

Time marches inexorably on, and so must we. We're over halfway through September now and the massive tours are rolling through with regularity (hello Evanescence and Spiritbox!), bringing with them the knowledge there's a tonne of new records to explore in the coming weeks. So, we're cutting through the clutter and picking out some of the finest metal songs around right now.

Speaking of, the results of last week's vote! The big news was, of course, that Slipknot were back with new music but we'll admit even as big as they are, we were surprised to see them slip into the top three given the discourse around Arsenal. Goes to show, the haters are always louder than anyone else. Elsewhere, Miss May I took second place with Highbrow Thieves, but our overall winners for the week was Ando San and Hype Man / Triggas.

This week we've looked far and wide for exciting new sounds to bring to you, whether that's the new offerings from Trivium and Godflesh, or emergent talent like Hulder and Sable Hills. As ever, we need you to let us know which songs excite you most, so don't forget to cast your vote in the poll below - and have a great weekend.

Sable Hills - Homura (ft. Fuki)

Epic metalcore coming out of Japan, Sable Hills' Homura kicks off with the kind of gorgeous, soaring solo you'd expect to hear in a power metal record. They're not imbibing the cheese though; there's something Trivium like in their adoption of classic metal tropes - including a healthy love for In Flames style melodeath - in a slick, modern package with some Japanese folk flourishes. Keep your eyes out for new album Homura, out November 13.

Trivium - Dead Inside Of Me

Speaking of Trivs, they're back! Fresh off the back of announcing dates in 2027 with In Flames, the boys from Orlando have offered up Dead Inside Of Me. After the more trad-metal inclined energies of In The Court Of The Dragon and What The Dead Men Say, this feels like a conscious choice to change up their sound, going for something almost Machine Head like with lumbering, bassy verses and big breakout choruses.

Hulder - …And We Will Sing

Summer is well and truly dead and we're ready for frosty Scandinavian forests to take us into Autumn. Granted, Hulder actually hail from Washington, but there's an undeniable Scandi-influence on their brand of black metal, with ...And We Will Sing going hard on pure frosty ferocity.

Evil Invaders - Dreamstate

We had a long summer, so why not get a jump start on Halloween too? Evil Invaders sound so steeped in 80s Satanic Panic we wouldn't be surprised if they didn't so much form as get summoned from the Necronomicon. Slayer meets Mercyful Fate, it's gloriously over-the-top and theatrically evil, all high pitched wails and galloping guitars.

Ignea - Prefab (ft. Combichrist)

Teaming up with 00s metal veterans Combichrist, Ignea are exploring the heavier ends of their sound on Prefab. The booming, apocalyptic tones are a stark contrast to some of the more melodic fare the Ukrainians have indulged in the past, though there's still rays of light breaking through in the keytar work that adds a little bit of levity to the whole song. The group's new album Monumental is due October 23.

Mental Cruelty - Frost

"I'm lost in the dark!" So goes the hopeless declaration right up top in Mental Cruelty's Frost, a desolate and suitably frosty track that sounds like staggering on a death march through the tundra. Taken from new album Echoes of a Forlorn Land, the track does a great job of balancing the relentless heft with some soft, folky melodic sections that feel are like stumbling onto a roaring hearth after an eternity out in the cold.

Cabal - Hurt Me (ft. Justine Jones)

You can practically taste the sweat flying on Cabal's Hurt Me. From riffs that switch up between bounding beats, sudden thrashy two-steps and a spine-worrying breakdown, to the snarling exchange of vocals between Andreas Bjulver and Employed To Serve's Justine Jones, who guests on the track, it takes metalcore back into the dingy clubs it inhabited for decades before arena stardom plucked out the likes of BMTH or Architects. Both bands are touring the UK together in November, so we'd say its good odds this one will be roadtested before long.

Zilqy - Run

With a killer main beat and big, breakout pop metal choruses, Zilqy's Run is at once something you could see fitting in with the likes of As Everything Unfolds or Luna Kills, while being undeniably Japanese in its melodic structure without ever sounding like anyone else. It's a dramatic and powerful track, and comes from the band's upcoming debut Birth Of Riot, due October 7.

Ministry - Singularity

"Your time on this planet has passed." Ministry are getting a little ahead of themselves on Singularity, but not by much. The band's final record Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery) is set for an October 30 release and this new single leans on the mechanised, end of the world bacchanalia that's been their bread and butter for the past four decades. Just a shame the band seem to have opted for a cheap AI video to back it up.

Godflesh - Master And Slave

It's not a great time to be an industrial metal superfan. Or at least, not one who is hoping for a bright future. Justin Broadrick's Godflesh are also gearing up for a big finale, though next week's Decay album will actually be their penultimate. Master And Slave finds the group in typically apocalyptic, claustrophobic form, sounding much as you'd expect it would if you'd been sucked into a great machine and ground to dust and mulch by unyielding gears.

Vesseles - Eternally Within Us (Reclaimed)

Mining the vein of gothic, symphonically underpinned black metal, Vesseles might be a masked and mysterious band but there's very little Sleep Token-ish about them. Instead what we get is something feral and crawling, grandiose in its use of strings and piano without ever feeling overblown or fully orchestral. The band's debut Home (Reclaimed) isn't due until March 26, 2027, but this will tide us over nicely in the meantime.

Waterlines - Sinister

Knowing that Waterlines mix metalcore and EDM, you might be expecting some Electric Callboy like fun 90s dance shenanigans. Sinister is nothing of the sort. A dark, careening track, the electronica is used to underpin their sound and add a buzzing tonal foundation to their riffs, the big, breakout chorus the only real concession to release from an otherwise tight and intense song.

In just four years, Spiritbox have gone from playing the 800-capacity O2 Academy in Islington to headlining the UK's biggest arena. Granted, Manchester's Co-Op Live isn't being used to its full capacity - curtains cover the upper decks and the room is maybe half-open, but the Canadians have managed to speedrun a progression that took Sleep Token six years - seven if we're talking full arena tours - Ghost nine years and Bring Me The Horizon a decade.

It's also their first real test as potential torchbearers for metal's future. With a supporting line-up of hot, rising acts, Spiritbox have at least avoided the pipeline of dragging out legacy bands to bolster bigger tours. You'd need to get in early if you hoped to see openers Dying Wish, but as the clock ticks towards 8pm Jinjer are greeted by a full floor.

Back in 2019, the Ukrainians seemingly couldn't play anywhere without being greeted by big SOLD OUT signs across the board, so their jump up to arena-sized stages has been a long time coming. But their biggest obstacle comes in translating their technical, acrobatic prog metal to bigger rooms. Perennial arrives with all the ferocity and violence of a Great White ram-raiding a seal, while Call Me A Symbol offers an apocalyptic death metal bluster. But there's also a distinct lack of big hooks, and impressive as Tatiana Shmayluk's range is - her voice rapidly switching between off-kilter melodies and throaty snarls - there's few moments for the crowd to roar along in rapturous release.

With limited production, Jinjer are still adjusting to the space they're playing. The rest of the band's all-black ensemble means they often seem to disappear into the background and while it sets a stark contrast against Tatiana's all-silver get-up that lends her the air of a rampaging crusader, it means they also feel lacking in presence. Still, the set picks up nicely in its second half, I Speak Astronomy earning an excitable pit, while Judgement & Punishment chucks up some careening force. But it's still breakthrough single Pisces that feels like the centrepiece of the set, its swinging dynamics bringing to mind the impressive sonic dexterity of Opeth.

From their incendiary Download Festival debut to the massive Alexandra Palace gig that tied a bow on their Eternal Blue era, it's been obvious Spiritbox are eyeing up the upper echelons of the metal world. The Tsunami Sea tour could well be the crucial stepping stone to getting them to the top. It's not a flawless transition, mind.

Silhouetted behind a giant curtain, there's a nice sense of drama to how Spiritbox arrive to the stage, Courtney's shimmying form projected as a colossal figure before the curtain drops and they kick out an impressively furious one-two of Fata Morgana and Black Rainbow. Intense as those tracks are, it feels like the band only fully arrive with Perfect Soul, the pay-off of having a big anthem helping to boost the energy in the room, Keep Sweet keeping that joyous spirit going and Soft Spine is introduced with an almighty roar of "You all deserve each other!", streamers blasted out over the crowd as the riff drops.

It's not quite Parkway Drive or Sabaton, but things like that, the shimmering light show and a bubble machine that sprays for Tsunami Sea add nice little touches to the set that show Spiritbox are thinking about how they want to enhance their live shows.

By their own admission, the biggest obstacle is working out their sequencing. These shows feel almost like a send-off for Tsunami Sea to clear the path for what comes next. While it's definitely great to hear so much of the album - eight of the record's eleven tracks - it feels like some obvious massive tunes from their debut - Hurt You, Secret Garden - could've served the big room well.

It becomes most obvious towards the end of the set. Introducing the next track, Courtney acknowledges that Holy Roller was the song that changed everything for Spiritbox. But rather than being the big finish, it and Circle With Me arrive as something of a premature climax - a powerful one-two, but also an all-too early peak with four more songs to go. We spot a few bodies making a tactical early exit - it is a school night, after all - and while there's seldom a good spot for a drum solo in the set, the fact it comes so late in the game just adds to the weird, post-orgasmic lull.

There's still a couple of highlights. Crystal Roses goes full trance to the point we're half-expecting Maxi Jazz (RIP) to drop a bar, and new single Mourning yields some Deftones-like crashing waves. But its obvious that Spiritbox need something bigger to really bring everything back home again.

In many ways though, that's a great problem to have: anecdotally, Metallica wrote The Black Album after realising the more complex arrangements of Justice For All didn't work in the massive rooms they were playing, and Ghost came up with Square Hammer to give them a big, orgiastic conclusion. If this is what Spiritbox can do without that big, all-conquering anthem, just imagine what they'll do next.

In the late 70s, pomp rock bestrode the US like a keyboard-laden colossus. Unstoppable and immovable, Styx, Kansas and their like dominated the charts with a succession of epic, inflated albums that captured the imagination of a generation that had progressive inclinations but wanted more obvious, radiorock charm.

But just beneath these chart-friendly monoliths lurked a band so pure in its love of Yes and so determined to carry on in that band’s grand tradition that they could almost claim to have inspired an underground movement. They were Starcastle, and they had a sound closer to Yes than anyone else in America – including Yes.

Citadel was their third album. Released in 1978, it was never meant to set the charts on fire, or to shift copies by the juggernaut-load. It was a slow burner, aimed at the connoisseur and the underground. Starcastle, from Champaign, Illinois (also home to REO Speedwagon), had released their self-titled debut in 1975 and Fountains Of Light two years later; two albums that allowed them to build a cult following, but little more. Citadel, though, brought them to a whole new audience overseas.

The record captured the imagination of melodic rock and prog rock fans in the UK. It was no commercial triumph – far from it – but the patronage of Sounds magazine exposed them to a waiting underground.

So what was it about Citadel that still makes it Starcastle’s outstanding contribution to the pomp rock genre? Simple: it distilled the essence of their Yes worship (mostly down to the keyboards of Herb Schildt) with a more accessible, tuneful approach; the eight songs had a real sense of cohesion, even though there were no superficial similarities between more progressive material like Shadow Of Song and Change In Time, and the airwave-friendly Can’t Think Twice or Could This Be Love.

Maybe the influence of producer Roy Thomas Baker should be underscored here. He had first worked with Starcastle on Fountains Of Light, recorded in Quebec. For Citadel, the label sent them to England to work on Baker’s home turf, which gave him a greater degree of control and confidence. And it showed, because there’s little doubt that the band had learned how to discipline themselves and focus on their strengths.

Despite the airplay for Can’t Think Twice and Could This Be Love, the album never took off in a music scene increasingly dominated by punk and new wave. One further studio album, Real To Reel, followed for Starcastle in 1979, but the appeal of Citadel has grown disproportionately, and it is now properly regarded as a minor masterpiece.

This feature first appeared in Classic Rock 49, published in January 2003.

"Good evening everybody. Welcome to our picnic by the Serpentine. You all look very beautiful, I must say."

Resplendent in a chest-baring white leotard, Queen frontman Freddie Mercury surveyed the crowd gathered before him in central London's largest Royal Park. Five years earlier, in the summer of 1971, Mercury had personally hand-designed 120 invitations, dispersed among family and friends, for a 'private showing' (aka a free gig) from his band at Lecture Theatre A on level five of the 'New Block' at London's Imperial College, and around 80 people had showed up. Five years on, as the final notes of Ogre Battle melted into the darkening sky above Hyde Park, the delightful singer could see that a considerably larger audience, conservatively estimated at between 200,000 and 350,000 Queen fans, had turned up for Queen's latest homecoming.

"It was odd," guitarist Brian May later recalled to Classic Rock, "because we’d been around the world and we weren’t sure whether people had forgotten us back home. We were quite shocked... It seemed like there were a million people there."

Here, if proof was needed, was confirmation of Queen's elevation to the gilded ranks of British rock royalty.

Ten days earlier, Mercury, May and bandmates John Deacon and Roger Taylor had gathered at a reception at the Les Ambassadeurs Club in London thrown by their record label, EMI. The event was organised in order to present the quartet with silver, gold, and platinum discs commemorating sales of their fourth album, A Night At the Opera, their first UK number one album, and Bohemian Rhapsody, their first UK number one single. But if the band were in a celebratory mood, knocking back glasses of champagne for invited media, they also appeared at pains not to come across as triumphalist or smug.

"I don't really think of it as a very commercial album," Brian May admitted to Melody Maker. "But it was the one which broke all the records. It's not nearly as easy-listening an album as Sheer Heart Attack. There's a lot of very uncomfortable things about it. We were deciding to branch out again. It was a conscious decision. Thinking that Sheer Heart Attack had been successful but safe, if you know what I mean, with A Night At The Opera we wanted to be adventurous again."

Days ahead of their Hyde Park show, May seemed concerned that the free concert would be interpreted as a "we're a big band now" flex.

"I really hope it's not taken in that way," May told Melody Maker's Harry Doherty. "I really hope that it's taken in the spirit that we're thinking of – just a nice thing to do. It's a dream to be able to do a free gig in Hyde Park, like the old days. It's as romantic as that.

"I don't think there's ever been a show like we're going to do in the Park. We're not going to hold back at all just because it's a free concert. It'll be the whole works. I hope it all fits together as a very nice and peaceful and enjoyable afternoon. It's a way of saying thank you."

Somewhat inevitably, as with so many other musical events on this scale during the era, Queen's free show was not entirely problem-free. As recorded on the band's own website, it was estimated that up to 90% of the crowd couldn’t see the stage, which naturally caused some frustration, expressed via the medium of cans and bottles being hurled towards those enjoying more advantageous sight lines.

"I have been requested by the constabulary for you not to throw little things around, tin cans or whatever," Freddie Mercury told the crowd at one point. "So, make this a peaceful event, OK? Sit on your arses and listen."

Later, with the show over-running, Queen were forced to drop a number of songs from their proposed set-list. And when they were still playing In the Lap of the Gods... Revisited 20 minutes after curfew, they were told by the police to vacate the stage immediately or face being arrested.

"The police got very iffy because they thought there would be some kind of riot," May recalled, "and they wouldn’t let us back on stage for an encore.

"We were very upset, having worked up for months and prepared for all that."

Such irritations aside, the concert was judged to be a landmark evening for Queen.

"At last," raved Melody Maker‘s Harry Doherty in his review, "the Seventies have arrived."

"I think that Hyde Park was one of the most significant gigs in our career," Brian May later reflected. "It was a wonderful feeling to come back and see that crowd and get that response."

Queen would never look back.

“I wanted to give it a proper burial at sea, as it were,” says John Mitchell, aka Lonely Robot. An Ending is the sixth and final album from his conceptual outlet.

When the release was announced he noted: “I wanted to close the circle of the Lonely Robot universe and bring back some of the elements that inspired the initial writing process. I hope fans find this to be a fitting epilogue to the most creative decade of my life.”

Launched in 2015, the project tells the story of an explorer traversing the vastness of space, reflecting on the meaning of life. It was planned as a trilogy when InsideOutMusic offered Mitchell a record deal.

“We got to the end of that cycle, I was on a bit of a roll, and I wanted to keep writing,” Mitchell tells Prog. “I did another two – but in my mind, it was always a sequence of three for some bizarre reason. Don’t ask me why! This brings closure to the whole thing. I’m pleased that I’ve got it to a place where I’ve put it to bed on my own terms.”

Mitchell has no regrets about drawing the curtain on Lonely Robot, observing that “the only guarantee in life is the impermanence of things.”

Unlike its predecessors, An Ending will be released by White Knight Records. “I’ve been with InsideOutMusic since 2003, but they’ve had a bit of a reshuffle in recent years,” says Mitchell.

“Quite a few of my former label pals – including myself and Frost* – have fallen by the wayside. But I’m not sad about the ending of this chapter in my musical life. Turning 50 was a big thing for me. You think, ‘Well, I’m on the wrong side of 50 now; it’s all downhill!’

“But since that happened, I’ve joined Asia and seen more of the world in the last couple of years than I had before. There are things to look forward to. This is the first record with a different team around me, and that’s exciting. So I’m not sad about that in the slightest.”

Making sure that Mitchell is kept nice and busy, Asia are set to return with their own new album, Indigo, which is released via Frontiers Music on November 6.

It’s their first studio release for 12 years, following on from 2014’s Gravitas, and it’s the first word from the band’s latest incarnation of Mitchell, longtime keyboard player Geoff Downes, Planet X drummer Virgil Donati and bassist-singer Harry Whitley.

“The album was really a joy to make,” Downes recently told Prog. “I forged a close writing relationship with Harry, and I felt how great was to be working with someone who had very similar musical influences and taste once again.

“I feel that this is one of our best albums to date. The songs are deep in musicality, with a powerful and original performance, dynamic and strong lyrical undertones – it’s an album that hopefully our fans will widely appreciate and support our cause to put Asia back on the map.”

Downes said of lead track The Traveller (Into The Light): “It’s a high-power energy piece, with a few elements of prog trickery, but retaining the accessible chorus block, which was always a signature of Asia’s music.

“Virgil’s dynamic and innovative drum parts drive the piece along, while John’s soaring guitars keep the momentum. It’s a song of great optimism, mainly about looking forward to the future.”

Indigo was produced by Downes and the band, with mixing and mastering handled by Mitchell himself – which goes to show you really can’t keep a good man down.

An Ending is on sale now. Indigo is available for pre-order.

Six solo albums into a career that also includes numerous collaborations, her work as a member of Red Sparowes, Marriages and more, Emma Ruth Rundle has amassed one of the most impressive back catalogues of any current musician.

These Killing Times is another beguiling set of songs that run the gamut from dark to delicate, crushing to sombre, and feel far more dynamic than the raw minimalism of 2021’s Engine Of Hell. This may partially be due to the subject matter, with Emma looking more broadly at the current state of the world, rather than reflecting on her own personal journey.

Opener Powerless muses on her fears and disdain of those who govern us and is gorgeously melodic, but the deep, distorted guitars that underpin Emma’s voice are pure post-metal nirvana. It’s a strong start, but the bar is quickly raised with the sublime God’s Picture. Her woozy, breathy vocals crack with emotion and, perfectly paired in tandem with Patrick Shiroishi’s deep, sighing sax, are reminiscent of Little Earthquakes-era Tori Amos. It’s quite brilliant.

It’s then followed by the gothic leanings of Anvil, which very much sounds like Chelsea Wolfe during her more acoustic Birth Of Violence period, and the 90s grunge stylings of the wonderful Catherine Wheel. The album really reaches its apex, though, with the eight-minute-plus Human Kindness. A song that pulls you into a swirling pit of gruelling, psychedelic riffs and soaring, sun-kissed melodies, its transitions are a form of musical magic that only the likes of Alice in Chains at their best can usually pull off, but this is worthy of the comparison.

These Killing Times is a brilliantly paced album, full of dynamically interesting turns of tempo and changes in feel, with Emma’s voice the greatest weapon, always lilting and soaring in the most unexpected ways. Another masterpiece from one of modern music’s most essential voices.

These Killing Times is out now via Errant Child. Emma Ruth Rundle tours the UK from April 5 2027.

Even at the height of their mainstream success, Soundgarden always felt like outsiders. Formed in 1984 by frontman Chris Cornell and guitarist Kim Thayil, they may have been grunge pioneers but they never had any interest in being its ringleaders.

The quartet, whose classic line-up was cemented by the recruitment of drummer Matt Cameron in 1986 and bassist Ben Shepherd in 1990, were classed as sell-outs by Seattleites when they became one of the first local bands to sign a major label record deal. But if A&M had envisaged Soundgarden as the next Guns N’ Roses, a possibility given they were sent out on the road as support to Axl Rose & co., the four-piece had other ideas.

Instead of turning their early punk rawness into straightforward heavy rock anthems, Soundgarden used success to streamline their strangeness. The bigger they got, the weirder their songs became. It was rock music alright – huge, slithery riffs, a howling vocal that could direct ships to shore and a rhythm section locked in with taut intensity – but rock music that sounded like it was being beamed in from the Twilight Zone. There's no stranger rock hit than Black Hole Sun, which sort of sounds like how people on heavy drugs might hear The Beatles but, on the face of it, is also just a really catchy ballad. A warped ballad, yes. A Soundgarden ballad.

They were one of the best bands of their generation but bold sonic adventurers too. That desire to keep exploring would eventually lead to a parting of the ways, with 1996’s wonderfully odd Down On The Upside leading to a split. It was not permanent, though, and a reunion birthed 2012’s King Animal. Cornell’s death in 2017 brought their return to a devastating halt, but with Thayil, Shepherd and Cameron currently putting the finishing touches to an album of unreleased songs featuring their dear departed friend, we have not heard the last from Soundgarden.

"It's important for the legacy of Soundgarden," Thayil said earlier this year. "It's important for the legacy of Chris Cornell. It is doing right by our collective work. It is doing right by our partner and friend."

Ultramega OK (SST, 1988)

Louder Than Love (A&M, 1989)

Badmotorfinger (A&M, 1991)

Superunknown (A&M, 1994)

Down On The Upside (A&M, 1996)

King Animal (Republic, 2012)

In 2015 David Gilmour released fourth solo album Rattle That Lock. A continuation of his creative partnership with wife Polly Samson, it used the “day in a life” concept to explore the present and the future. And although the past was naturally represented, Gilmour didn’t want to talk about Floyd or Roger Waters – which is where Prog started the conversation.

Before we begin, I’ve been told not to ask you any questions about Pink Floyd. Why is that so important?

Because I’m sick and tired of it. I’ve been asked every question about that band there possibly is – at least twice. And that makes me feel like a hamster on a wheel. It’s going on forever and it just becomes boring after a while. Plus, I don’t want to live in the past – I want to live in the very moment I’m in, and I want to enjoy that to the fullest. So I’m here to talk about a new album and a new tour, but not about my relationship with Roger or what we created in 1975 or anything like that. Pink Floyd was great, but it’s over, it’s done. Life goes on. And some people don’t realise or they are simply ignoring it. So, I need to ask them to be respectful to my views and wishes. And I do.

You’re also insisting on being called David instead of Dave. Why does that bother you?

It’s the same thing, basically. I’m a 69-year-old man who has had a long and fruitful career, and I want to be treated with some decency and respect. I mean, it’s okay if my closest friends call me Dave or if my wife does. In fact, she can call me anything she pleases! But not someone in the press who hardly knows me and vice versa. So it’s David, I’m afraid.

We’re talking on your houseboat studio, Astoria, but you recorded most of the new LP Rattle That Lock at your home studio in Brighton.

The one in Brighton is more of a recording space. It doesn’t have a mixing desk, but it’s hardwired in such a way that it makes it very easy for one person – that’s me – to work it all. So I work without an engineer. I work entirely on my own most of the time when I’m getting started on these things. I can record a guitar with a mic on an amp, and [engineer] Andy Jackson will make it sound great later.

This studio with the full flying faders desk is great for mixing. We did two Pink Floyd albums in this room; this is where A Momentary Lapse Of Reason and The Division Bell were made.

Rattle That Lock is about a day in the life, and it starts with a song called 5 A.M. – is that when you get up and go straight to work?

No, I don’t often get up and start recording then. But I did record the birds singing at the beginning at five in the morning, because I often wake up then, especially at this time of year when there’s a touch of light in the sky. It’s lovely to sit and look out of the window and feel that moment of the dawn.

The album’s mantra is “carpe diem” – seize the day. Is this you trying to make the most of life? Are you scared you’re running out of time?

I think you should try to make as much out of life as you can, and that’s the theme that’s found its way into this record. Polly has verbalised and lyricised it in a beautiful way.

She’s your official lyricist, isn’t she?

She is; she’s been writing lyrics for and with me for 20-something years now. She’s finding her feet much better now, and is less constrained in trying to imagine what I’m thinking and what I’m feeling. She’s more liberated to put her own thoughts into it, and if her thoughts are strong and cogent, great. When I sing them, they’ll sound like they’re my thoughts. We’re turning into a better team.

So you’re happy with every influence? Using whatever fits your songs?

Yeah. I don’t like narrowing my vision. I like all influences to be there.

If you look at the album as a “day in the life” thing, it’s quite a full day, isn’t it? There are lots of things going on in these 10 songs.

You can think about how shitty it must be for a soldier in Afghanistan to not know whether the people who surround him are friends or enemies, and the consequences of that. So that can be a five-minute moment in your day; and then you can spend another five minutes of your day thinking about Rick Wright and the fact that he’s died and you no longer have the musical partnership you used to have. You can spend a minute or two thinking about your parents or a minute or two thinking about your children and your hopes for them. There’s plenty of room in a day.

Even for some jingles you recorded at a French train station? The title track begins with a French train operator’s announcement jingle, recorded at Aix-En-Provence station.

That’s right, yes. To remind you of how nice a trip through France on the train can be.

I thought you’d be more of a plane enthusiast, flying over the country?

Polly doesn’t like aeroplanes very much, and I love the Eurostar and the French TGV trains. We take trains whenever we can. It’s not really slower. We took a train back from Spain once. It took, I think, eight hours from the Spanish border to our house in England. By plane, it’s an hour to the airport, two hours to check in, an hour-and-a-half flight, an hour to get your bags, an hour to get home. It would have taken six or seven hours. So much simpler and easier on the train.

Would you be interested in composing music for Heathrow or Paddington, then?

No, no, no. That jingle is a speciality of this guy who wrote that piece. It’s the only jingle I can think of, having been in airports in England, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and in train stations in all those countries too. Most of the jingles come on to say to you: “Listen. There’s going to be an announcement…” Most of them ain’t very good. And this one is good. It’s got a tune, it’s got syncopation. It’s quite clever to say as much as that with four notes.

There are some heavy emotional themes on Rattle That Lock, like war and the loss of a friend. What do you make of the 21st century, with us being quite close to another Cold War?

We had a moment, the build-up to 1989 where things were getting lighter, where the Berlin Wall came down and we thought the world was moving into a better place. Then there were massacres all over Eastern Europe, where people were no longer held down by a dictatorship and their liberation allowed all sorts of bad feelings to come out and create all sorts of shit. In the intervening years we’ve got things like ISIS and all sorts of other stuff going on. In England, it’s like more of a police state where the government is cracking down on protest. The world is tightening up again, and I don’t like it. Polly’s lyrics on Rattle That Lock are encouraging people to make their feelings known – don’t let the bastards beat you down.

Were the days of your youth, the 60s and 70s, more liberal then? Or is that just a myth?

Some things have got immeasurably better since those days. The homosexuality laws and attitudes towards homosexuality have changed radically. Also, women in the workplace and feminism has come on fantastically. It’s not finished with. None of these things are done, but some you can look and see real progress. But the world is a slow mover. Things go forward, things go back. We think progress is being made but it’s painfully slow, and at the moment it feels like more things are shutting down than are opening up.

Have we built our own cage, with the help of technology? Have we become prisoners in some way?

I think you’re right. Technology is moving at a speed the human mind can’t catch up with. I won’t be around, but I suspect in 30 years’ time, people will look back at this moment and say, “God, it was so confused.” And I think there will be solutions to many of the problems we have. I hope so. But they’re not going to happen as quickly as we wish they would.

You’ve described the upcoming Rattle That Lock tour as an “old man’s tour.”

The “old man’s tour” is a silly expression that popped out. Sometimes you say things and think, “Maybe I could have put that better.” The tour I’m doing is fairly gentle – it’s 10 dates this year. We may do some dates next year, but it’s not 100 per cent decided. We’ll see how it goes; see how I enjoy them. This career of mine is not really a career any more. It’s a bit part-time. I’ve had my career. I have other responsibilities, and I really don’t want to slog around the planet playing thousands of gigs. I’m not made that way.

Hence leaving that to the Stones? They need it; I don’t think Keith Richards could ever slow down.

What motivations drive other people is entirely up to them, and I’m thrilled the Stones keep getting out there and doing it. The equivalent for me would be to get out there with Roger and Nick and do it – and, ah, I’m sorry, I don’t have any desire to go in that direction.

Will you play some Pink Floyd songs on this tour, though?

Yeah, of course. I’ve had a long and fruitful career, some of it with Roger, a lot of it with Nick, and I’m very, very happy about that career. The unhappy moments are less than five per cent, and the 95 per cent is nothing but joy and satisfaction and pleasure in each other’s company. But shit happens, things break down. Fine. It’s all part of the tapestry of life.

Do you follow what’s going on in music these days?

No, not really.

Why is that? When did you lose interest?

I’m as interested as I’ve ever been in making music, writing, performing. But I’m not so interested in that searching process that I was happy to spend 23 hours a day doing for years. Now I let other people do that and they occasionally play me something that turns me on. But I’d buy the new Bob Dylan, the new Leonard Cohen and the new Neil Young record. Probably a new Joni Mitchell record if she made one.

What do you think about streaming and Apple Music and their plan not to pay artists royalties during their three-month trial period?

I’m with Taylor Swift [who opposed Apple’s policy, forcing them to back down]. I think she’s dead right. Why should they get three months free when what they’re doing is research and development? This is what I was talking about before – we’ll look back on this from the future and see how this conundrum pans out. I have no idea.

A lot of young people today seem to think it’s fine we should get music and films for nothing. I don’t agree. People put in years of hard work and expect to get paid something. And if it’s pinched, it doesn’t do any good, and it doesn’t encourage young people. It might prevent talented young people from being heard.

Yet there’s been an increase of vinyl sales lately, which is an interesting development.

I’m very happy that people like vinyl. But I was never like that. I always scratched my vinyl and cat hairs would get on the LPs. I loved it when CDs came along.

For a full vision, you need proper artwork, don’t you? On Rattle That Lock, you’ve gone for a picture of crows leaving a cage.

Corvids, yes. Various types of crows flying out of a gilded cage.

Which is a metaphor for liberation and freedom?

All that sort of stuff, yeah. It’s jolly, isn’t it?

In another, better, universe, Moonspell would be absolutely massive. Granted, they've not done badly for themselves - five number one records and a Gold Certification in their home country of Portugal for 2006's Memorial - but as a band who've been namechecked by HIM as an influence and were part of the 90s goth metal boom, they certainly deserve better than the smattering of support slots that's consistuted their UK tours this decade thus far.

So, we've sacked the UK off and come to Portugal to see them on home turf. Ish. Playing up the road from their homebase of Lisbon in the mountainous region of Sintra, Moonspell are playing the first gig of its kind in the grounds of a stately home. There's a couple thousand fans milling around, only its all gone tits up.

Partway through opener Cross Your Heart, everything cuts out and everything is plunged into darkness. It takes a good 35 minutes before Moonspell return to the stage - we're later told one of the production hires for the gig had inadvertently plugged a light into an amp, causing a blowout - but thankfully the crowd is an eager (if somewhat captive) audience and grumbling is kept to a bare minimum. When they do return, Moonspell show what they're made of.

Portugal's biggest metal band, they take to the occasion with a sense of pomp and theatricality that is begging for TikTok take off. Hey, if it can happen for Crowbar, it can happen for anyone. Not that there's any novelty production: the papier-mâché bats have been left in the belfry and Moonspell are letting their songs do the talking, reaching an appropriately vampiric, otherworldly peak on the likes of Mephisto and Vampiria. Playing new album Far From God in its entirety, they chuck in the vast majority of 1996's Irreligious (only intro Peverse... Almost Religious and dancey interlude Subversion skipped) as an added bonus.

Early on, new songs Cross Your Heart and Far From God prove fine additions to the Moonspell catalogue, easily as hooky and slick as fan-favourites like Opium or Alma Mater (which thankfully gets an inclusion in the set, even with the focus on other records). Elsewhere, there's the stomping heft of For A Taste Of Eternity that hints towards their extreme metal past, and even a headlong plunge into 80s synthpop territory on For The Love Of Mortals and Raven Claws, the latter seeing vocalist Mariangela Demurtas hop on for the most satisfying new romantics revival this side of Paradise Lost's Smalltown Boy cover.

Set against the dramatic backdrop of Quinta da Ribafria and with a light show that would do Jeff Wayne proud, the show has a genuine sense of occasion. Moonspell might still be goth metal's best kept secret, but for one night in Portugal, they feel like the kings of lusty, dark allure.

Moonspell setlist @ Quinta da Ribafria, Sintra September 12 2026

1. Cross Your Heart
2. Far From God
3. Biblical
4. Opium
5. Awake!
6. For A Taste Of Eternity
7. The Great Wolf In The Sky
8. Your Promise Of Light
9. For The Love Of Mortals
10. Ruin & Mortals
11. A Poisoned Gift
12. Raven Claws
13. Mephisto
14. Herr Spiegelmann
15. Our Freedom To Fall
16. Reconquista
17. Vampiria
18. Alma Mater
19. Full Moon Madness

Rolling Stones legend Keith Richards has contributed a a cover of Jimmy Reed’s Bright Lights, Big City to the forthcoming soundtrack album for Grand Theft Auto VI.

The guitarist's cover of the 1961 blues classic is one of 34 songs set to appear on the album, which is designed to "capture the electric energy of Grand Theft Auto VI’s world of Vice City and Leonida", according to a statement.

The game developers are promising that the soundtrack album, due for release on November 19, the same that the much-anticipated latest edition of GTA is set to drop, will feature a "genre-defying roster of the most exciting artists in the world".

In total, six songs set to feature on the album are now available on streaming platforms. The other five songs revealed are Sexy Magic by PinkPantheress, Fred again.., CA7RIEL and Paco Amoroso, and Etienne de Crécy, Travis Scott's RHYNO, Morgan Wallen's Last Thing You Need, Rauw Alejandro's Macacoa 2000 and That's It by Yung Lean.

Originally released on the 1961 album Jimmy Reed at Carnegie Hall, Bright Lights, Big City features in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of '500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll'.

There are no details yet as to exactly where or when Keith Richards' take on the song was recorded. But the guitarist has been singing Reed's praises for years.

"I love Jimmy Reed," Richards once told Planet Rock radio. "He was totally unique even amongst all of the other '50s and ’60s bluesmen out of Chicago. He had no pretensions. He has such a distinctive sound, such a simplicity of sound, so stark, so beautifully natural. There are thousands and thousands of Blues players out there and to find a unique sound and a way to play it is an extra touch of genius."

Rising Los Angeles rockers Dirty Honey, have announced details of their third album. Catch My Butterfly is the follow-up to 2023's Can’t Find the Brakes, and will be released via Dirt Records on January 15 next year.

The band have also released the first two songs from the album, the thumping anthem Lights Out and the poignant Butterfly.

"Lights Out was the first banger,” says guitarist John Notto. "It’s one of those rare times when I got the solo right on the demo! It’s only one flavour of the album though. There’s so much more."

Butterfly, meanwhile, finds the band in reflective form. "There are addiction issues in my family," says frontman Marc LaBelle. "I tried to write from a different perspective – either that of a father to an addicted child or the family member of an addict.

"In this scenario, you’re so overcome with worry about whether or not your loved one is alive or dead at any given moment. My thought was, ‘If you don’t get high, there’s no way that you’re going to catch this person who is so beautiful in your eyes, but so broken at the same time.'"

Catch My Butterfly was produced by John Feldman, frontman of LA punks Goldfinger, who has previously worked with Avril Lavigne, Yungblud, Blink-182, The Struts, Biffy Clyro and many more.

"I’m very proud of our perseverance," says Labelle. "Any band has to really survive to make a third record. We’ve made mistakes in the studio, gotten over past regrets, lived more, and become better songwriters. All of those things snowballed into Catch My Butterfly." "

"Catch My Butterfly shows the width of what we can do as musicians and songwriters," added Smolian. "We’re no one-trick pony."

Catch My Butterfly is available to pre-order now. Full tracklist below.

Dirty Honey formed in Los Angeles in 2017, and released their debut, self-titled album, in 2021. They've supported Guns N' Roses, the Black Crowes, The Who, Kiss, Rival Sons and Alter Bridge, and in 2022 co-headlined the Young Guns American tour with Mammoth WVH.

Dirty Honey - Catch My Butterfly tracklist

1. Lights Out
2. If It’s Over
3. Numb
4. Wanderlust
5. Good For You
6. Butterfly
7. Good Times Gone
8. American Lies
9. Poison
10. Sweeter
11. No Way Out
12. New Blood
13. Lullaby
14. I Should’ve Known

We're back with a brand new Tracks Of The Week! This week we've got another seven new and diverse slices of progressively inclined music for you to enjoy.

Hearty congratulations to French duo Ølyp, whose Molden won last week's Tracks Of The Week! Considering their debut album I(m)MORTAL isn't even out until November 2, that's pretty good going! They beat Lonely Robot into second place, and US prog rockers Quivira were third.

The premise is simple - we've listened to a batch of new releases by bands falling under the progressive umbrella, and collated them together in one post for you - it makes it so much easier than having to dip in and out of various individual posts, doesn't it?

The idea is to watch the videos (or listen if it's a stream), enjoy (or not) and also to vote for your favourite in the voting form at the bottom of this post. Couldn't be easier, could it? We'll be bringing you Tracks Of The Week, as the title implies, each week. Next week, we'll update you with this week's winner and present a host of new prog music for you to enjoy.

If you're a band and you want to be featured in Prog's Tracks Of The Week, send your video (as a YouTube link) or track embed, band photo (please, don't forget the photo!) and biog with quotes to us here.

STEVEN WILSON - REQUIEM FOR A VILLAGE

Steven Wilson surprised everyone last week when he announced a swift follow-up to last year's The Overview album. With that album, he gazed out into the vastness of space. With Requiem For A Village, he turns that on its head, centring on insular village life, with lashings of mystery, sinister vibes and eerie folk horror inspiration, and with narration by David Tennant. It's out on November 6.

“I wanted to get back to a kind of music where you can hear the metaphorical thumbprints," Wilson explains. "Doubling down on the human gestures and flaws in the music, stuff that can’t be created using software. For example, using only analogue synths with all their unpredictability, or not having instruments perfectly in tune. But it also led to me picking up the violin, the oboe, or trying my hand on the drums – playing things I don’t really know how to play but getting something out of them that inspired me in ways I didn’t expect. Approaching the music with a sense of innocence and seeing where it took me. And where it took me was to the village.”

THE PINEAPPLE THIEF - GOD KNOWS

Yeovil's The Pineapple Thief continue their campaign building up to the release of their next album, Far And Wide, with the dynamic new single, God Knows. The band recently announced a UK and European headline tour for 2027.

“The reckoning. Lying there, with my infinite stare. Through the shadows. I guess it's autobiographical. We all have regrets. I certainly do. I've made mistakes, did people wrong. The (metaphorical) god knows. And those ghosts are coming out...” Bruce Soord comments.

KALANDRA - LOST IN THE DARK

Moody Norwegian proggers Kalandra continue to make the most beautifully beguiling of music. The vibrant Lost In The Dark is the second single to be taken from upcoming album The Other Side, released through By Norse on November 13. There's a seductive melody on offer here, but always aligned with the hint of something a little bit deeper and mysterious, as befits an album inspired by vivid and recurring dreams.

“Timelines change, and life inevitably takes us down different paths, but the friendship—and the deep love for music that reaches the soul—has always remained," the band say. "We are therefore incredibly honoured to bring Lost In The Dark back to the surface and give this song a new life. The song is about self-discovery, and the sometimes relentless search for who we are and where we belong. Yet the journey can be paradoxical: in searching so deeply for ourselves, we can sometimes end up feeling more lost than found."

SOMETIME IN FEBRUARY - NIGHTFLIGHT

US instrumental prog metal trio Sometime In February have shared a video for a brand new single, Nightlight. The band have been on the road in the US recently and are now looking towards working on the follow-up to last year's Where Mountains Hide album.

“Nightlight was written in a headspace similar to our 2024 single Hiding Place," says guitarist Tristan Auman. "While in the trenches of writing our next record, we wanted to stretch our legs and write something free from the bounds of a bigger picture, and lean into styles that we may only dip our toes into. For this single, it was early-2010s era progressive metal/djent, something we appreciate but usually avoid when writing. In true SIF fashion, it also includes fun and upbeat highs, melodramatic lows, and singable hooks that might make you forget we’re an instrumental band.”

THE OCEAN - MILK OF MY DREAMS

German collective The Ocean's new-look line-up continues to make music that is increasingly prog-friendly, and for the pulsating electronic prog of Milk Of My Dreams they've enlisted none other than Tangerine Dream's current main man Thorsten Quaeschning, whithe band first metwhile tracking drums at Berlin’s legendary Hansa Studios, where David Bowie recorded “Heroes.” and later spent a week at Quaeschning’s studio in Berlin-Rudow, working not only on Milk of My Dreams but on the electronic dimension of the album as a whole.

“Working with Thorsten has been an incredibly inspiring experience, and with all of us being huge Tangerine Dream fans, a great honour of course," the band say. "His knowledge of electronic music, synthesisers and sound design is extraordinary, and at the same time he’s an immensely talented and curious musician. His studio feels like a synthesiser museum - everything is connected, switched on and ready to play. What’s particularly remarkable is his ability to take a sound you can only describe in words and translate it almost instantly into something you can actually hear.”

JOHN HOLDEN - MOHAWK RIVER

John Holden will release his seventh studio album, Thresholds, on October 2. The brand-new album features guest appearances from Sally Minnear, Peter Jones from Tiger Moth Tales, Sertari from Karnataka and, on the first single, Mohawk River, a stonkingly good showing from our good friend That Joe Payne!

'It is one of those pieces that arrived almost fully formed,” Holden says of Mohawk River. “It carries a sense of tension existing between two worlds; the pull of someone trying to live in the present but also bound to an unreachable past.”

JONATHAN CROSSLEY, DAVID KOLLAR AND LUKAS LIGETI - THEY ARE COMING

Ambient jazz trio Jonathan Crossley, David Kollar and Lukas Ligeti have just released their latest album, Solace, through former King Crimson Chapman Stick player Trey Gunn's 7D Media. Solace was recorded in 2024 at the University of Liverpool. Norwegian trumpet legend Arve Henriksen features in the title track, but it's the knotty rhythms of Ligeti and the digitally enabled guitar practices of Crossley and Kollar on They Are Coming that we hear here.

"It is wholly improvised and instrumental, moving between progressive rock, experimental rock and post-rock, with digitally expanded guitars/electronics and Ligeti’s polymetric drumming at the centre of the performance," Crossley explains

Born in 1978 in communist Hungary, Five Finger Death Punch architect and guitarist Zoltan Bathory was a furious kid who had no regard for the rules of his country and dreamed about escaping to the West. His discovery of metal only fanned the flames of rebellion, while his judo lessons gave him the mindset that any problem was something to be solved.

“You have to fight a guy twice your size, and at first that’s scary,” Zoltan explains. “But then you go, ‘Well, I think I can take him’, and suddenly the impossible starts to feel like, ‘I think I can do that.’ Every war can be won some way, I’m just going to figure out the way to win it.”

By the late 90s, he’d moved to New York and embarked on a career in design. In 2000, he relocated to LA, and although he played in bands in his spare time, he realised he wanted to be the leader of his own band, and Five Finger Death Punch were born. Their debut album, 2007’s The Way Of The First, catapulted them to the forefront of the scene, landing them tours with the likes of Korn and Disturbed.

Today, Five Finger Death Punch are a multi-platinum act celebrating their 20th anniversary, and are about to release their 10th album, Legacy. Whether driving monster trucks, playing gigs for veterans or creating the band’s visuals, Zoltan remains their fearless and irrepressible leader, his humble beginnings behind the Iron Curtain and struggle to the top never forgotten.

“When I look at my walls filled with platinum records, it’s not about the platinum records,” he says. “It’s about how much work it took to get them.”

You were born in Hungary in the 70s, under communist rule. What was it like growing up in that environment?

“I was a pretty angry kid. And the reason I was angry – even though I was seven or eight years old – is that at that age, it’s not like I could put on my backpack and head to America. You can’t do that. But the fact that I couldn’t, if I wanted to, just enraged me.

“We had access to Western society – we understood the culture, because things kind of seeped through. We had only one TV channel – it started at noon, finished at midnight, and there was no TV on Monday. As a kid I didn’t really feel oppressed, but we were oppressed – we couldn’t do certain things. I always thought, ‘Man, I can’t be a cog in this machine, I’ve got to break out of this.’”

How did you go about planning your escape route?

“I educated myself by going to extra schools. I was doing judo. I became a martial artist pretty quickly; I started at nine, and I competed. I attained that whole mindset that later became the foundation of my life. In extra school, anything I could study, I studied. I had this idea: I have to be faster, stronger, smarter than anyone around me if I want to break out of here.”

How did judo affect your mindset?

“Judo is the art of the samurai, tamed down, but with the same mentality. I know that if I get into a fight, I can do some damage – but that’s not what it’s about. The important part is the person you become. Obstacles are no longer obstacles; they’re challenges. That’s a massive distinction. The world is not happening to me – I am happening to the world. I was born into this world, and I’m going to impact it.”

How did you get introduced to metal?

“OK, so this is England’s fault. I was a little rebel at seven, eight, nine years old. I was already like, ‘When we grow up, we’re going to take down this system.’ My parents were scared shitless – ‘Kid, you’re going to get us arrested.’ And I was always like, ‘No, we’re not going to take this communist bullshit.’ So I started listening to British punk: Manufactured Romance, Cockney Rejects, The Exploited, GBH, UK Subs. That was my world. So imagine, I’m eight years old, a miniature punk in a country where you get your ass beat just for being a punk. I had a British-flag pin – I got my ass kicked by the cops, because that was Western society. It was crazy.

“Eventually, I heard of this band – Iron Maiden. Paul Di’Anno was the singer, and he’s kind of a punk guy. So the cassette was handed to me, like, ‘Check this out, bro, this is a punk band.’ At that age, I didn’t know what a guitar solo was – that was the first one. So I switched from punk to metal.”

What did you like about metal?

“In a way, it wasn’t just music – it was the voice of rebellion. All of us kids had long hair, and we got our asses beat for it. Any motherfucker who says, ‘Oh you guys are fake metal’ – fuck you. I got beat up by the cops for being a metalhead. I bled for this shit. We’d go to the park with these little gangs, cranking music – somebody had a mobile tape recorder, a boombox. When a cop showed up, we’d start running. All the metal shows were in burned-out, shitty places, usually broken up by the cops.”

We want to hear about some of those DIY shows, because they sound wild!

“Literally nobody had equipment. It was like, ‘Oh, this guy has a drum set, that’s pretty decent’, and then every band would play on that drum set. ‘Oh, this guy has an amplifier, that’s decent.’ Everybody would use that amplifier. If you don’t have resources, you have to be resourceful.

“I actually went to a special high school – the first in my country with a computer faculty. So, I wasn’t just getting a high school diploma, I was also getting a microelectronic engineering degree at the same time. So I could design and build amplifiers, distortion pedals, all that.”

What about instruments?

“I couldn’t afford a guitar – I was 12 or 13. A family makes a hundred dollars a month – that’s it. I saw a B.C. Rich in the hands of W.A.S.P. – Randy Piper’s guitar, with the skull on it. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, fucking hell, this is what I need!’ So I took a jigsaw to my parents’ coffee table and cut out a B.C. Rich Warlock shape from it. I got a second-hand guitar that had a decent neck, and I put together a guitar. It was an unplayable piece of shit, but it was metal. Fast-forward decades: I found Randy Piper’s actual guitar in the hands of a collector, and I bought it.”

Let’s talk about that first journey to the US – that’s a big leap. What was that like for you?

“I was 21 or 22 when I arrived in New York, but I didn’t speak English. Imagine: I show up in New York with a guitar, a bag of clothes, and a Hungarian-English dictionary. No safety net. I had to teach myself English. I stayed in a hotel that was $10 a night. There were cockroaches you could put a saddle on and ride. It was basically a crack house meets a hotel.

I had the only room with its own bathroom; everybody else shared. Questionable characters came in and out. But that’s what I could afford, and you know what? I was happy, because I was looking toward a life I could live in America without restriction, on my own terms. I was excited, regardless of the shitty circumstances.”

How did you learn English?

“Somebody had left a book there – The Shawshank Redemption. I started translating it with the Hungarian dictionary, without understanding grammar or anything. I kept reading it. I had a tiny black-and-white TV, about the size of my laptop, and it had closed captioning. I’d watch shows with the captions on, so I could hear how words were pronounced. Once I spoke English, I’d go to Barnes & Noble – I couldn’t afford books. I could afford a tea, so I’d come in and read, four or five hours a day, every day.”

Did you ever consider a career in something other than music?

“After high school, I ended up going to art school. I got a degree and built a design studio, at the same time as playing guitar. There was a moment when I was on tour – maybe 19, 20 – with a big Hungarian band that played arenas. We were the opening act. The reason we got the slot was that I was designing their stage, their album covers, all of it. We played a place that would be like spring break in America, called Lake Balaton [130km south west of Budapest].

We played there around August 30, the last day of summer before everyone goes back to school. We stayed, and I walked out of my hotel [the day after the shows], and the town that had hundreds of thousands of people partying yesterday was empty. Completely empty. And I thought, ‘I never want to see this again.’ I said: ‘If I’m a touring musician, I’ll never see the after-party again. I am the party. I’m the travelling circus. I’m bringing the fun. That’s the life I want to live.’”

How long were you a designer for?

“Until the band took off, design work supported everything. I was a consultant for the private space industry between 2004 and 2008 or ’09 – I was an interface designer, designing all kinds of crazy shit like space suits. Not the mechanical side, but the look and the vibe. I got to design a suit that went up to the space station. Once the band were big enough, I left the design world behind – but I still do album covers, plus the overall vibe, stage design, merchandise, all that.”

Five Finger Death Punch really took off fast. What’s the secret sauce that made you take off, when hundreds of other bands started in LA the same year and didn’t?

“It’s that whole judo mindset. Everything to me is tactical, everything is a chess game. I look at who’s doing what, and why, and how. And we knew we had a record that was something special. Ivan and I even had a moment when it was done – we were thrashing around in my house, kicking over couches, like, ‘Yeah, this is going to be something.’”

Through the years, there’s been some turbulence. Did you ever consider disbanding Five Finger Death Punch, or parting ways with Ivan? (He has stormed offstage on more than one occasion.)

“Never. Because I always respected that Ivan is the middle finger of this generation – a hand grenade with a loose spring. That’s who he is. I always looked at that as amazing: he’s uncorruptible. I could tell him, ‘Ivan, you’ll lose a million dollars if you don’t feel like doing these shows’, and he’d say, ‘Fuck off, I don’t care. I don’t give a shit.’ So he’s hard to manage, but I could, because I respected that he’s as punk rock as punk rock can get.

“Sometimes I want to kill him. Sometimes I’m making plans, thinking about what supplies I need, where I hide the body. But then I’m like, ‘Man, then I don’t have a singer who can do all these things.’ So you stay with the fantasy. And I’m pretty sure he’s plotting, too – ‘If I could just tie some dynamite to his backpack…’ We’re brothers, but we understand who we are and how to work together, and what’s worth fighting about and what isn’t.”

Your new album’s called Legacy. What do you want your legacy to be?

“A legacy is something you cultivate and build – something that actually affected the world in a way that’s permanent. So that means, 50 years from now, somebody writes a history of heavy metal, and they can’t leave us out of the book. Only a nuclear bomb can erase our legacy at this point.

“And the other part of the legacy is that we built this with the fans. It always was, and is, the people’s band. I can give you stories about how many times people come up and go, ‘Man, you guys saved my life.’ And for us – because we have so many military guys, so many people with PTSD in the fanbase – it’s more real than it is for others.”

Have you had any particularly memorable fan encounters?

“We had a meet-and-greet, and a kid comes in and brings a red ballpoint pen, and he goes, ‘Listen, I’m going to give you guys this pen, because I wrote my suicide note with it.’ This kid obviously had problems – he was, like, 15 – and a friend sent him the music video that had just come out, Coming Down, which was about that very topic, and said, ‘Hey, man, I’m just reaching out, hope you’re doing good.’ So he told us, ‘I’m giving you this pen, because I wrote my suicide note with it, and because of your music, because of your video, I didn’t do it.’ And he gave us the pen. That’s the moment where it’s like, ‘OK, our existence is justified.’

“Now, years later, a man comes into our meet-and-greet and goes, ‘Hey guys, you remember me? I was the kid who gave you a pen that I’d written my suicide note with – the red pen.’ Ivan goes, ‘Holy shit! Hold on a second!’ Ivan runs off, comes back – because to this day, even right now, that pen is in his road case, he carries it everywhere he goes – and he brought it back to the guy. The guy almost had a heart attack – ‘Are you kidding me?’ So that’s one form of the legacy: that we meant something.”

Do you have any regrets, in your life or career?

“Maybe the stress of it. I always worked 150%. People imagine a rock band is stripper poles and disco balls and mountains of whatever drug is your choice. I like the business aspect, because it’s all strategy. But at the same time, it takes time. If I hadn’t stressed, maybe it would’ve worked out anyway. But then again, it’s a butterfly effect. Would I change anything? Absolutely not. I wouldn’t be me; I wouldn’t be here.”

What do you think that 21-year-old who landed in New York would think of the man you are today?

“I purposely try to take myself back there. It’s really important to find a way to ground yourself and not let magical things become the status quo. So if I could go back and give myself a flashback, it would be more like confirmation of my beliefs. It would be exciting – because I was going to go get it anyway, but it would’ve given me extra fuel: here’s a moment of the future, you’re actually doing it.”

Legacy is out now via Better Noise. Five Finger Death Punch tour the UK from January 16, 2027.

Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have paid tribute to Neil Peart at the premiere of a new documentary about the late Rush drummer. The pair were joined onstage by Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith at the premiere of Neil Peart: No One's Disciple at the Toronto International Film Festival.

"Tonight you’re gonna see a very interesting look at this guy that you think you know," Lee told the audience at the Princess of Wales Theatre. "And you’re gonna see the depth of his musical legacy, and you’re gonna learn about friendship and how it runs both ways between the people he loved in the drum community and how they loved him back, which is really cool, and the wider circle of friends and what impact he had on their lives.

"So I’m very grateful that this moment has arrived where this stuff can be shared. So, thank you for coming."

"I’ll just echo what Ged said," added Lifeson. "He encapsulated everything about the film, what an amazing person was. There’s a whole side of him that a lot of you don’t really know. He was very, very funny. He was a sweet friend, and he was extremely loyal. And hopefully you’ll get to see a little more of that. And it’s certainly reflected in Chad and the other guys that played with us."

Directed by Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn, the team behind 2010's acclaimed Rush documentary Beyond The Lighted Stage, as well as Iron Maiden: Flight 666 and the Metal Evolution documentary series, the film will air on Canada's CBC network on September 23 as part of the series The Passionate Eye.

The film includes interviews with Lee and Lifeson, and features the pair performing Rush classics with Chad Smith, Stewart Copeland (The Police), Danny Carey (Tool) and Gavin Harrison (King Crimson, Porcupine Tree).

Rush are currently on the much-celebrated Fifty Something tour, with Anika Nilles taking Peart's place behind the kit. Full dates below.

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2026

Sep 19: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 23: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Sep 25: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Oct 01: Houston Toyota Center, TX
Oct 05: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 07: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 10: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 12: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 15: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 17: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 21: St. Louis Enterprise Center, MO
Oct 23: Cincinatti Heritage Bank Center, OH
Oct 25: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 27: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 30: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 01: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 05: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 07: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 09: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 11: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 15: Pittsburgh PPG Paints Arena, PA
Nov 20: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 22: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 25: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Nov 27: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Dec 01: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 03: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 10: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 12: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 15: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC
Dec 17: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2027

Jan 15: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
Jan 22: Curitiba Arena da Baixada, Brazil
Jan 24: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 26: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 30: Rio de Janeiro Estádio Olímpico Nilton Santos. Brazil
Feb 01: Belo Horizonte Estádio Mineirão, Brazil
Feb 04: Brasília Arena BRB Mané Garrincha, Brazil
Feb 19: Paris La Défense Arena, France
Feb 21: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Feb 23: Amstersam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Feb 25: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Feb 28: Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
Mar 02: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Mar 04: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
Mar 08: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 10: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 12: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 14: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 16: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 18: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 21: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 27: Kraków Arena Kraków, Poland
Mar 30: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Apr 01: Basel St. Jakobshalle Basel, Switzerland
Apr 04: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Apr 06: Oslo Unity Arena, Norway
Apr 08: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden
Apr 10: Helsinki Veikkaus Arena, Finland

Find Rush tickets.

Musically, the mainstream landscape of the early 2000s wasn’t exactly fertile ground for a classically trained female piano player and mezzo-soprano in a symphonic rock band. That’s what made Amy Lee such a trailblazer. Amid the garage rock revival and nu metal’s slow churn, Evanescence shattered glass ceilings and sold millions of records with their 2003 debut, Fallen.

Five albums later – including this year’s Sanctuary – the band have never been bigger. On their recent North American tour they more or less performed the weeks-old new album in full. Some endorsement.

The first music I remember hearing

I grew up in a really musical household – my dad was a musician, singing and playing lots of instruments. As a baby my parents used to sing to me at bedtime, and it was this one particular song, Goodnight My Love [by Jesse Belvin]. I don’t remember my life without it. My dad worked in radio, and in Miami where he grew up, that was always the last song of the night before they turned off the broadcast.

The first song I performed in front of an audience

I’m sure I did little piano recitals at school, but the first thing I remember performing in front of my peers was in seventh grade. We had an English project, and you could write either a poem or a short story, but the list also mentioned that you could write a song. It was the first piece of music I wrote and it was called A Single Tear. I recorded it on a little tape recorder with my friend from choir. We played it for the class on the tape player, so does that count?

The greatest album of all time

It’ll seem like the wildest answer, but it actually came from a comedy special during the pandemic. It’s Bo Burnham, and the soundtrack album is called Inside (The Songs). Obviously we were all trapped inside, but he made an incredible piece of art. I think he takes inspiration from different artists that he’s kind of mimicking, and he’s a great songwriter. It’ll make you laugh but it’ll also break your heart. I listen to it all the time.

The singer

I’ve always looked up to Björk as my favourite vocalist. She’s a force of nature. For singers, your instrument is your body, and the sound is like your heart pouring out of your face [laughs]. I think you can hear someone’s spirit in their voice, and Björk’s is fascinating. Army Of Me has always been big for me – I love all of [1995 album] Post. And the song Jóga is beautiful. I have my own harmony part that I sing in the car.

The piano player

I’m obviously a big fan of pianists and composers, and Tori Amos really influenced me. My first love in music was falling for classical music, and then the next moment was all about alternative music in the nineties. I remember being so blown away by how Tori Amos played the piano. She says it in [1998 song] Northern Lad: ‘I guess you go too far when pianos try to be guitars’. It’s really not how I started out, but she sounds like one of those people who can play and just jam without thinking about it, and it’s beautiful and intricate.

The best record I've made

Sanctuary! I feel like it’s taken all this time to be able to do this now. Fallen was so important for us and so many people, but at the same time we were just kids. Going through twenty-plus years, all the steps in different directions, searching and experimenting. The music is fresh but it’s a return to our roots as well.

The worst record I've made

I’m gonna say that our self-titled [2011] was the most challenging. A lot of the initial music was different and we were just having fun. Very synth-pop but dark and awesome. We went into the studio and the label didn’t get it. It wasn’t a fully baked idea and it was hard for me to admit that at the time. We scrapped those sessions, regrouped, and I had to rediscover how much I needed rock with the band.

My Saturday night party song

Back In Black by AC/DC, always. Every party playlist we have has that on it.

My guilty pleasure

The true answer is that I don’t feel guilty about listening to music. But if I had to pick from the pop stars it’s Olivia Rodrigo. She has several songs that I love – Vampire is incredible, Driver’s License is really cool.

The best cover version

It’s changed over the years and I have all-time favourites – like Tori Amos’ brilliant version of Smells Like Teen Spirit – but one that I’ve been coming back to lately is by an artist called Trevor Something. That’s his name, it’s not that I can’t remember! He does this beautiful synth-wave version of [Chris Isaak’s] Wicked Game.

The song that makes me cry

In My Life by The Beatles. A lot of memories with that one. It makes me think of my brother.

The song I want played at my funeral

I have a list and they’re not really sad songs. When I die I want people to feel like love lives for ever, more than being sad that I’m gone. But to pick one, All You Need Is Love.

Sanctuary is out now via BMG. Evanescence are currently on tour in Europe.

Pink Floyd have announced they will release a new San Tropez Orange Marble vinyl edition of their landmark 1971 album Meddle, for this year’s National Album Day, through Sony Music on October 17.

At the same time, a newly restored high-resolution version of the iconic Echoes sequence, the final chapter from cult-classic 1973 Australian surf film Crystal Voyager, will be available via Pink Floyd’s YouTube channel on 17th October.

Crystal Voyager was a 1973 documentary directed by David Elfick was written and narrated by surfer, photographer and filmmaker George Greenough. The sequence in question, the film's closing scene, was shot by Greenough with his innovative new technique for filming in the water, which involved a self-developed and built seventeen-pound camera rig, which allowed the audience to see footage from inside a wave for the first time ever.

In searching for an appropriate soundtrack for this groundbreaking footage, Greenough stumbled across a record his mother had bought for him. Upon hearing the closing track, Echoes, he noted its perfectly matched 23-minute running time.

Greenough sought the band's permission, despite not having enough money to pay them for use of the song. An agreement was proposed, whereby Elfick and Greenough could use the song if Floyd could use the footage as background visuals for their live shows. With both parties happy, the deal was made, and Echoes became an iconic accompaniment to a legendary film.

"I'd never heard Echoes before until my mother got it for me," Greenhough says. "When I heard it, I went, ‘my god, that's gotta be the soundtrack!’ We asked about using it, and we made a deal with Pink Floyd, and everybody had smiles on their faces. That was over 50 years ago, and the footage and the audio still looks and sounds groundbreaking today. I'm just so stoked that this whole thing is coming about; it’s amazing to work with Pink Floyd again. The big sound and the big picture; you can't beat it!"

Pre-order San Tropez Orange Marble Vinyl version of Meddle.

With its roots stretching right back to the earliest days of heavy metal, stoner metal is often seen as one of the metal subgenres closest in spirit to the source of the entire genre. Be it the legendary generator parties that sparked the desert rock boom of the early 90s, Britain's own prolific stoner/doom crossovers or Scandinavia's groove-laden contributions to the scene, one thing is clear: there's more to stoner than a shared love for the devil's lettuce.

These days you can find entire festivals dedicated to stoner - Desertfest and Heavy Psych Sounds fest, to name two - and bands around the world united in the love for 70s style heavy metal and hard rock. But these five records represent the game-changing moments in the development of the haziest of metal's sub-genres.

Black Sabbath - Master Of Reality (1972)

As with much else in heavy metal, stoner can trace its roots right back to Black Sabbath. Sabbath's love for the green was well established by the time the band recorded their third record Master Of Reality in 1972, and the Brummies pinned their colour(s) to the mast with the subtle-as-a-sledgehammer opening track Sweet Leaf.

The rest of Master Of Reality plays out like a blueprint for generations of stoner bands to come: thick, grooving riffs, tight, winding beats and instrumental jams mixing together to offer a groovier counterpoint to the doom and gloom of Sabbath's first two records, birthing an entirely new subgenre in the process.

Sleep - Sleep's Holy Mountain (1992)

Although stoner metal found its roots in 70s British acts like Sabbath, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, it wasn't until the 90s in the US that the genre truly started to take off in any serious way. Slightly removed from their fellow stoner pioneers in the Palm Desert (more on them below), San Jose's Sleep were tapping the bluesy Sabbath vein hard when it came to 1992's Holy Mountain.

Mixing the sludgy angst of early Melvins with the roiling grooves of Sabbath, Sleep's second record arrived just as the US stoner scene was starting to rear its head. The likes of Monster Magnet, Corrosion Of Conformity and Clutch proved a new school of haze-fuelled heavy metal was taking root in the US, with Sleep setting a high watermark for the bands that followed in their wake.

Kyuss - Welcome To Sky Valley (1994)

Springing up around generator parties hosted by desert punks who couldn't afford to travel to LA or San Francisco for shows, California's Palm Desert scene has since become a lengendary entity in stoner for later spawning the likes of Fu Manchu, Fatso Jetson and Queens Of The Stone Age. But chief among these was Kyuss, the legendary group featuring (at various points): Brant Bjork, John Garcia, Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri, helping to effectively take the style out of the wilderness and to fans around the world.

Kyuss had already stumbled onto a winning formula with 1992's Blues For A Red Sun, but found widespread acclaim still eluded them as grunge blew down from further up the coast in Seattle. It was their 1994 follow-up Welcome To Sky Valley that proved to be their breakthrough moment. Now signed to Elektra, Sky Valley's epic jam-driven compositions offered a more psychedelia-laden vision of what stoner could be beyond a shuffling of satisfying Sabbath riffs and grooves, sending the genre careening out into the cosmos with an exhilarating sense of adventurousness that has seldom been matched and certainly never bettered.

Cathedral - Caravan Beyond Redemption (1995)

The dividing line between doom and stoner is often as simple as a question of pace and tone, but few bands played as fast and loose with the interplay between the genres as Britian's Cathedral in the early 90s. Formed by former Napalm Death singer Lee Dorrian, Cathedral's debut Forest Of Equilibrium was as apocalyptically dour as doom comes, but by its 1993 follow-up the band had started chucking the odd Mountain riff into the mix to speed things up.

1998's Caravan Beyond Redemption marked the point Cathedral swung the pendulum firmly over to the stoner side, bursting forth with fuzzy, Deep Purple-via-Sabbath riffs that gave rise to a new school of underground artists, while Dorrian's own label Rise Above Records quickly signed future British stoner/doom stars Orange Goblin and Electric Wizard.

Spiritual Beggars - Ad Astra (2000)

Not content with revolutionising melodeath with the likes of Carcass and Arch Enemy in the 90s, guitarist Michael Amott also tried his hand at massive, 70s-style stoner rock grooves. By the time his group Spiritual Beggars went to record their third album Mantra III in 1998, they had been signed to Music For Nations, but it was 2000's Ad Astra that proved to be their major breakthrough, landing them on the radar - and tour bills - of everyone from Queens Of The Stone Age to Iron Maiden. Just one listen to the propulsive racket they create leaves no question as to why.

As has become characteristic in much of the European (and in particular, Scandinavian) stoner scene, the Black Sabbath DNA was dialled right back for Spiritual Beggars, the band instead choosing to indulge the larger than life finesse of bands like Mountain, Boston and Deep Purple, Amott's riffs soaring atop a psychedelia-laced din that only mildly hints to the fuzz so beloved in other stoner scenes.

Damn, this has been a long time coming. Five years elapsed between 2011’s Worship Music and 2016’s For All Kings, but Scott Ian and co. have managed to double the wait time and taken a full decade to deliver this, their twelfth studio album. However, the drought has ended with a glorious tsunami of prime Anthrax.

Of course, there was the small matter of the pandemic to get through, plus chief riff writer/drummer Charlie Benante and lyricist/guitarist Scott Ian suffering somewhat from writer’s block. Now that it’s here and suddenly bludgeoning you about the ears, though, you realise what’s been missing from heavy music for the past 10 years. It feels more epic and more compelling because of the wait; the cryptic Latin poetry of the title – translating as ‘my journey ends here’ – encompasses the finality of its arrival.

Despite the title, though, this is definitely not the end, or even the twilight, of Anthrax’s career – they couldn’t sound more alive and metal-thrashing mad than this if they tried. Teaming up with producer Jay Ruston for a third time, the result is satisfyingly weighty, dense with ideas and packed with great riffs – a furious, playful, slammingly serious return to form.

Kicking off with the short introductory passage Persistence Of Memory, the album proper begins with The Long Goodbye, about Ian’s dad’s battle with Alzheimer’s. That emotional, grand, melodic, mid-paced opener is followed by It’s For The Kids, a straight-up Anthrax thrasher in classic style, complete with pounding mosh part.

The strong opening one-two merely hints at the riches to come: an imaginative blend of flame-throwing speed and more mid-paced but no less aggressive, melodic metal. There are full-on, breakneck thrash monsters like NYC 93, the lightspeed blur that is Watch It Go, the crushing Target On My Back (TOMB) and the thunderous technical bruiser My Victory. Everybody’s Got A Plan and Infectious – including a callback to Captain Trips from 1987’s Among The Living – duke it out for the album’s earworm prize, and the immense title track and The Edge Of Perfection compete with The Long Goodbye for sheer scale and drama.

The variety is hugely impressive, the delivery a hundred per cent on-point. Hopefully this album marks not just the end of one journey but the beginning of a latter-career renaissance. And let’s have the next in under a decade, please.

Adrian Belew has added his distinctive guitar to a diverse and stellar cast including Frank Zappa, King Crimson, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Laurie Anderson, Herbie Hancock, Paul Simon, Porcupine Tree, Trent Reznor and even William Shatner. In 2011 – long before he hit the road with Crimson offshoot Beat – he told Prog that musicians’ survival lay in performing live.

In 1977 you joined Frank Zappa’s band. What, if push came to shove, are your favourite Zappa tracks?

Zoot Allures [from Zoot Allures, 1976]. The soaring feedback guitar lines over modal chord changes make this one of his most direct, even accessible musical pieces of Frank’s vast catalogue, and the effect is hauntingly beautiful.

With all the skills Frank had people sometimes overlook his voice. On Po-Jama People [One Size Fits All, 1975] I love the way he sings like a cartoon character might. I’ve sung it to each of my children growing up and they’ve all adored it.

One of the tracks Frank gave me to learn as an audition piece was Andy [One Size Fits All]. Another stunning piece of music which happens to be a song as well – and it certainly gave me pause to wonder what I was getting into!

Peaches en Regalia [Hot Rats, 1969] will always remain dear to me. It was often the first song of our performances together. Frank and I played the guitar parts in unison. What an honour that was.

You clearly love working in your power trio, featuring Julie Slick on bass, and Marco Minnemann on drums. What does it allow you to do that you can’t do in King Crimson?

First of all, it’s my vehicle more than Crimson. Obviously when when it’s you and Robert Fripp, you share ideas, and you can’t play all the time. Secondly, the trio gives me a different platform to work from. When you’re the only guitarist you have to fill in and really shine. I think it makes me a better player and gives me room to move around.

The trio have played all over the world. Any stand-out moments for you?

Chile was truly mind-blowing – all of South America was, but the first show in Chile was absolutely amazing. They turned away hundreds of people. The traffic was stopped and everything! I’d only played there once before with David Bowie in 1990; that’s a long time ago and I wasn’t expecting there to be much of an audience!

The coolest thing was that before we started playing they were pounding on the floor, a thousand people strong – incredible. We came out and we were like, “It can only go downhill now!”

You recently performed your 43-minute composition, e, on guitar with the Metropole Orchestra in the Netherlands. How did that come about?

I always dreamed of doing it, but I never thought I would because it’s a huge, very expensive undertaking, and I live in the US where they don’t fund these kinds of things! It took three years of writing on and off, and although it was definitely as a showcase for the power trio, in the back of my mind I kept thinking I’d like to have an orchestra play it.

I’d mentioned that in the press when the e album was released in 2009, and it just so happens that the guy who directs the Metropole Orchestra is a big fan. He called me out of the blue and said, ‘We’d love to do your orchestral piece!’

“They’re funded partly by the government and partly by the largest broadcasting company in the Netherlands. So, in February 2010, I played guitar by myself, in front of the orchestra; and that was like a dream come true.

Where did your interest in working with an orchestra come from?

I joined the school marching band playing the drums. They’d take us over to Cincinnati Music Hall four times a year to hear great symphony orchestras playing all this really great, heavy duty music.

Before I had a pop ear – and all the things that followed from that – I really liked orchestral music first; it was the thing that really awed me. If you’re 12 years old and you hear a 70-piece orchestra in a perfect acoustic hall, it’ll do that!

In a culture of increasing expectations that music should be free, are you optimistic about being able to survive?

The glass is definitely half-full for me. The story has not been fully written on what’s going to happen with intellectual property; I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. But the thing that I realised is that although they can steal pretty much everything else, they haven’t yet figured out a way of stealing the live experience. If they want to see you play live, they’ve got to come along and see you – and they still have to pay for that!

Your King Crimson ex-colleague Bill Bruford has retired from live work [he changed his mind and returned in 2023]. Do you think you’ll be following him soon?

No! No way. I don’t see myself stopping playing live right now because, as I said, it’s the one thing left, and I’d like to continue it. I don’t know what else I would do if I weren’t doing this.

A new documentary about the life and career of acclaimed singer/songwriter Linda Perry will be released later this week on Hulu.

Perry made her name with San Francisco outfit 4 Non Blondes, with their only album Bigger, Better, Faster, More! spawning the massive hit single What's Up? in 1993. Since then, Perry has gone on perform and write songs for some of the world's biggest artists.

Titled Linda Perry: Let It Die Here, the film premiered at the Tribeca Festival back in 2024 and is only now making its way to home streaming services, and is said to follow "Linda's past and present as they collide."

The Don Hardy-directed film includes interviews Perry herself, alongside a number of other artists, including the late Dolly Parton.

The synopsis for Linda Perry: Let It Die Here reads: "The hat, tattoos, and massive hit single What's Up? with her band 4 Non Blondes made Linda Perry an icon. But in the decades since that song topped the charts, Linda has reinvented herself as a songwriter and producer penning hit-after-hit for artists like Dolly Parton, Christina Aguilera, Celine Dion, Pink, and others.

"While the story of Linda's career and craft is extraordinary, this film is about much more. Let It Die Here follows Linda's past and present as they collide, as she struggles to answer the big questions she can no longer avoid: who am I, am I loved, what's my purpose, what will I leave behind?"

The documentary will be available to watch via Hulu in the US and you'll also be able to rent or purchase it around the world via platforms including Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video.

• How to watch Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear
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How to watch Linda Perry: Let It Die Here

If you want to watch the documentary as soon as it's available, US music fans will be able to stream it through a Hulu subscription from Friday, September 18.

If you're in the UK, Linda Perry: Let It Die Here will be available to either rent or purchase through a selection of streaming services including Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video.

If you'd like to subscribe to either network, here are the details:

Apple TV: $12.99/£9.99 per month
Free trial?: Yes - one week

Amazon Prime Video: $8.99/£7.99 per month (standalone), $14.99/£8.99 per month (with Amazon Prime), $7.49/£4.49 per month (Student)
Free trial: Yes - 30 days (how to watch Prime Video from anywhere)

How to watch from anywhere

If you're going to be out of the country on holiday and want to watch Linda Perry: Let It Die Here as soon as it's available, you'll need a VPN to help you.

Virtual Private Networks are used to change the location of your IP address, enabling you to watch the film no matter where you are. Nord VPN is Louder's service of choice and it's currently available with 75% off the usual price - and there's a 30-day money back guarantee.

How to use a VPN

1. Install a VPN. As we've mentioned above, Nord VPN is Louder's favourite.

2. Choose the location you wish to connect to in the VPN. If you're outside of the country and don't want to miss the film, just select your country from the list, then log on to your Apple TV or Prime Video account.

3. Kick back and relax: That's it - you're all set.

“I always wanted my songs to have a strong sense of place,” says Bruce Hornsby. “I was influenced by Southern fiction writers like William Styron and Lee Smith, who had that sense of place in their writing.”

The piano man is telling Classic Rock about how his home town of Williamsburg, Virginia - “my own little area” - inspired his 1986 breakout hit single The Way It Is.

“It’s a song about growing up in the sixties in a small town with narrow-minded, provincial attitudes,” he explains. He recalls that as a kid he was often led to believe that civil rights activist Martin Luther King was “a terrible, evil man” for working towards racial equality. “Not everyone in Williamsburg felt like that, of course – certainly my parents didn’t - but it was the prevailing attitude.”

Hornsby says that writing about the South always means dealing with issues of race and religion. “It’s clearly a moral thing,” he said in an interview with Dutch TV. “Allowing all citizens to vote, all citizens to be able to eat in the same restaurants, go to the same bathrooms, drink out of the same water fountains, ride in the front of the bus. From Rosa Parks on through the Greensboro Woolworth luncheon counter sit-ins, I was deeply interested in all that, and it related to that idea of creating a sense of place in my songs.”

Fast forward 20 years. Hornsby was living in Van Nuys, California, a working-class neighbourhood in LA, writing songs, playing gigs with his band The Range and trying – and failing - to get a record deal. One day in his garage studio, he started reflecting on his childhood in Williamsburg. Maybe it was that kind of Ernest Hemingway idea of how being far away from home, “three thousand miles allows you to see things more clearly.”

He wrote the lyric to The Way It Is first, then put music to it. “I work that way a lot,” he says. While the title and chorus lyric (‘Some things will never change’) might give the sense that it’s a sad song about resignation, Hornsby told Howard Stern that the “key line comes at the end of the chorus - ‘But don’t believe them’”. That mix of melancholia with a glimmer of hope is mirrored in the jazzy shifts of the piano chords and cascades that Hornsby laced through the song.

Forty years on, it’s easy to forget how startlingly different this all sounded from anything at the time. The prevailing style of 1986 was glossy synth-pop and power ballads, typified by hits such as Addicted To Love, West End Girls and Take My Breath Away; and here comes a five-minute piece with a 50-second intro, complex harmonies, two piano solos and an unsentimental lyric that referenced the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Hornsby himself was doubtful of its chances in the pop arena. He later told Rolling Stone that it was a “very even-running song that doesn’t reach the highs and lows that I think of as desirable”.

He first approached new age label Windham Hill, who offered him a deal after hearing the demos for both The Way It Is and Mandolin Rain. “I would’ve been happy to go with Windham Hill,” Hornsby says. “I thought: ‘Maybe this is what’s supposed to be for me.’” But his manager soon intervened, convincing Hornsby that these new songs deserved a much bigger audience.

Even though he had been passed on repeatedly by all the major labels, he took another shot, with The Way It Is as a new calling card. It worked. Two labels - Epic and RCA – wanted to sign him immediately. Hornsby told producer/ YouTuber Rick Beato in 2026: “We picked RCA, and everyone said: ‘Why are you picking them? They don’t have anything going on. Epic has Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson.’ And we said: ‘That’s exactly why we’re picking RCA! Our sorry little asses, we need some attention [laughs].’”

Hornsby’s debut album for RCA, The Way It Is, was a slow starter. Released in April 1986, its lead single Every Little Kiss stalled at No.72 on the Billboard chart. The title track was the follow-up that summer. Hornsby told Portfolio Weekly in 2006: “You’d have to give credit to the BBC Radio One disc jockey Mik Wilkojc. He picked this one song, put it on the air - boom! It exploded. We got these faxes: The Way It Is is exploding in England, then in Holland. By the time they put it out over here it was number one in Holland and Top Ten all around the world. The United States was late to the party.”

Six years after the song had launched Hornsby’s career, it had an unlikely resurgence when rapper Tupac Shakur sampled it for his hit Changes. “The song has always struck a chord in the hip-hop community,” Hornsby said. “There were so many others [who sampled it]. Tupac’s is only the best-known version. Almost all of the remakes have the word ‘change’ or ‘changes’ in the title.

"The Way It Is had been a complete fluke. Nobody thought it was gonna be anything. So to have become a big hit record was a beautiful thing, frankly, because it was totally unexpected. A song about racism, with not one but two improvised piano solos, is not the standard formula for pop success.”

Obviously it’s still a part of the setlist for every Hornsby concert, although he’ll often introduce it with disclaimers such as, “This next song is not my favourite song. I’m mostly proud of it because of its post-hit life.” But in the current US political climate, he is acutely aware of its continued relevance. As he told American Songwriter: “Just when one thinks we are making progress in race relations and tolerance, appalling incidents will occur that shock and sadden anyone who is interested in equality in American life. So sadly, the song still retains a bittersweet topical quality.”

As Nightwish celebrate three decades of symphonic metal, we travel to the small Finnish town of Kitee, where it all began. Known for moonshine and, now, riffs, Tuomas Holopainen and Floor Jansen reflect on a journey that’s involved everything from controversial singer swaps to opulent royal banquets.

The spotlight didn’t come easy to Tuomas. He remembers feeling nervous before Nightwish’s first-ever show, at a local recording studio on New Year’s Eve 1997. The band’s debut album, Angels Fall First, had been released a couple of months earlier and reached No. 5 in the Finnish charts.

“I was so scared I thought I was going to die,” Tuomas admits. “I think I vomited before the show. I’d played shows before, but I was just the keyboardist in those bands, I wasn’t responsible for those songs. Nightwish was my baby, I was like, ‘I can’t fucking do this!’”

Items from the band’s career are showcased in the world’s only dedicated Nightwish museum, in Kitee – Tuomas gives us a personal tour.

Also in this issue, we recall the demons, gremlins and erections involved in making and releasing Slayer’s infamous Reign In Blood.

In This Moment frontwoman Maria Brink gets the Hammer Interview treatment, explaining what it was like to be a teen mum, how she moved to Los Angeles at 25 to pursue her musical dreams – and why she’s always felt like a witch.

Atreyu are our guides at Amsterdam’s massive MagiCon, the Magic: The Gathering convention bringing together fans of wizards, spells, and… metalcore?

Satyricon reveal how they ended up playing a fashion show, Orbit Culture frontman Niklas Karlsson explains how he went from working in a slaughterhouse to playing on a stage, and Swedish metalcore innovators Imminence tell us how they invented a new genre: violincore.

Elsewhere, Beartooth’s Caleb Shomo opens up about living as his authentic self after coming out to his fans via social media, and Tony Iommi takes us inside his first solo album in 20 years.

Legendary director/composer John Carpenter confesses that he’d love to direct a video for Metallica, and Bimbocore inventor Scene Queen talks boobs, Botox and Britney.

All this, along with Cancer Bats, Saint Agnes, Amon Amarth, Anthrax, Tom Morello, Chelsea Wolfe, Powerwolf, our big Bloodstock review and much, much more.

Only in the new issue of Metal Hammer, on sale now. Order it online and have it delivered straight to your door.

“I don’t wear dresses normally, they make me feel uncomfortable,” Røry frowns, flicking through her phone gallery to showus what she wore for her wedding. When it’s time for the grand reveal, we’re met with a pearl-encrusted Frankenstein’s creationof an outfit, constructed from the scraps of a beautiful vintage frock and a bargain corset. In the photo, Røry is glowing with joy – and has an extra few inches of height, thanks to her beat-up New Rocks.

Prior to her wedding, the 41-year-old never thought she’d be the type to marry. Take her 2023 pop-punk track, Black Hearse, which sees Røry vowing, ‘I’m only getting married if I’m leaving in a black hearse!’ But she’s since learned to let love in, which involved walking down the aisle to Blink-182’s First Date and treating guests to a classy marital feast of pie and chips.

As Røry’s 2025 euphoric alt rock cut Sorry I’m Late proclaims, it’s taken a while for her to get her life on track, both personally and professionally. While there were early signs of musical interest, with a young Røry loving the piano, guitar, clarinet, and even writing a few songs, she initially tried to pursue a “proper” job.

“My parents both grew up on council estates, and worked hard to become teachers,” she explains. “So I went to uni, got a degree in Politics and Philosophy, then got a graduate job as an accountant.”

But life had other plans. When Røry was 22, her mum died from cancer.

“I couldn’t cope,” the singer. “I left my accountancy job, moved home… then I reconnected with writing to work through the grief.”

That’s when a friend suggested she should hit up a local open
mic night with her new music – a decision that would change everything.

“I got signed pretty quickly, and my very first album was in
my 20s,” Røry explains.

“It was very folky and acoustic,” she continues. “It was nothing like what I do now… then the label went bust.”

Rather than give up, Røry opted to self-fund her release, something she says was “very traumatic” at the time but, upon reflection, “very chaotically on brand” for her.

“I was left in so much debt, but my focus was on the music,” she recalls. “I’d given up everything just to make it work.”

However, the folk career didn’t take off. More success was found “networking” her way through the London rave scene on three-day benders – before taking on a proper songwriting job, five days a week. That’s when Røry’s chaotic mess of a life started levelling out.

“Suddenly I was writing dance songs for people like Charli XCX. Who knew when you take the cocaine away and actually start working hard, things start looking up?” she jokes.

In her 30s, Røry had essentially given up on being an artist in her own right.

“I kept thinking I’m too old to be an artist, and I’m not talented enough,” Røry says. “I tried before, I’d never do it again… but then I met my partner in 2020, and I finally had someone that believed in me.”

When the singer released her first single in 2021, the notion of starting her music career from scratch again was “fucking scary” – but it’s certainly paid off. With a mouth like a sailor and a vivid mane of blue hair, Røry is stomping through the rock scene, proudly performing on Download’s stages in 2024 and 2026 as the resident “delusional, old, ADHD bitch” – a label she proudly cackles about with glee – and has just dropped her second album, Bloodletting.

Many of Røry’s songs detail the darker episodes of her life, and depressive, self-hating spirals – though she often delivers her lyrics with a tongue-in-cheek flair. The video for 2025 single Dead Girl Walking sees her sprawled on a Tracey Emin-style ‘depression pit’ bed, wearing a Jesus-like crown of cigarettes, singing that she’s ‘back from the dead’.

“I love heavy music, and I take my art very seriously, but I’m also a clown,” Røry explains.

An equal serving of sarcastic clownery can be found on more recent single Kids These Days, which sees Røry mocking the meat-headed bigotry of “old boomers that don’t believe in ADHD” or how debilitating it can be. Røry has jokingly pushed the track as some kind of hilarious Reform national anthem, using real comments on her posts for the lyrics – the result includes rebranding the diagnosis as ‘entitled coddled brat syndrome’.

While Røry has spent most of her life thinking she’s a “fuck-up”, her debut record, 2025’s Restoration, hit the UK Top 10. However, she struggles to allow herself to feel truly proud.

“It hit me so hard. I’ve been chasing this dream for 20 years; the chasing kept me alive… It kind of made me crash out. I mean, what the fuck am I supposed to do now?”

The answer? Write. Music saved her back in her 20s, and it’s still there for her now.

“The music I’m writing now is much darker, much heavier… because the crash was just so horrendous,” she admits, with a self-deprecating ‘Who would’ve guessed?’ sigh. As a result, Bloodletting’s singles, such as Degradation, serve up Røry’s heaviest, screechiest, most cut-throat metal sound
to date – and there’s plenty more to come.

“No matter how bad it gets, you can really drag yourself out of the gutter and create something out of the absolute dregs of your own life… I’m a late fucking bloomer, baby, but I’m here!” Røry triumphantly proclaims, face splitting into a mischievous grin. “I’ve been late my entire life, but now it really feels like I’m right on fucking time.”

Bloodletting is out now via SadcØre

When Tool released 10,000 Days in 2006, many fans felt they’d taken too long to return, and they’d lost momentum as a result. But as Maynard James Keenan and his cohorts have frequently proved, it’s best not to write them off. In 2010 – two decades after they formed – Prog took a look at the art collective who ave always refused to be easily defined.

Some music isn’t meant to be understood: it’s just too difficult. Strip it down, analyse it, work out how to play it and you still won’t get it. Look at Tool, the Los Angeles prog-metal quartet, for example: the music they play is impossible to quantify, with riffs switching between brain-addling time signatures and a barrage of atmospheric effects masking and transforming everything.

Then there’s the lyrics, about which an entire online community orbits, attempting to decipher their meanings: do they mean what we think they mean, or what we’re supposed to think they mean? There’s enough complexity in the music, lyrics and images on Tool’s four albums to date to fill several lifetimes’ worth of study. Good luck with that.

Tool trod their own path from the very beginning. You may recall the rise of the US alt-metal movement in 1990 or thereabouts: the grunge scene was on the brink of a commercial explosion, and the funk-metal movement was in full swing. Somewhere between Nirvana and Faith No More were Tool and Rage Against The Machine, LA bands whose members had known each other as far back as high school.

Adam Jones and RATM’s Tom Morello had been in a school band called Electric Sheep before embarking on different careers: after attending art school, Jones ended up in Rick Lazzarini’s Character Shop in Hollywood, where he worked on cheesy rent-a-sequels such as Predator 2, Ghostbusters 2 and even A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. Honing a gift for claymation animation, he was as much a visual artist as a musician.

The next key to the Tool conundrum came from Danny Carey. Like his contemporary Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater, Carey was far more than just a skins-basher, bringing an awareness of philosophical theory and occult symbology to the band along with his brain-achingly complex poly-rhythms.

“I’ve always been fascinated with sacred geometry,” he said, explaining why he draws arcane shapes on his drum heads. “It’s about tracing the manifestation of matter into the physical world. The lunar current, rather than solar current, is what Tool is about.” Not your average drummer, eh? Add a bassist, Paul D’Amour (replaced by British four-stringer Justin Chancellor in ’95) and all that was needed was a singer…

Maynard James Keenan is – as the many ‘MJK Is God’ internet newsgroups attest – no ordinary human being, and indeed no ordinary rock star. A small, bald geezer who hates doing press because so many journalists are “buffoons who couldn’t manage a Starbucks” (his words), he finds the glitter of the Californian showbiz industry repellent.

Furthermore, he holds advanced views on more or less everything, and he’s full of contradictions: a soft-voiced singer in a crushingly heavy band; a left-wing campaigner who did time in the military at the über-establishment West Point Academy; and a vineyard owner who barely drinks.

He picks his friends carefully, enjoying a close friendship with Tori Amos but incurring the wrath of Courtney Love, although you’d expect the exact opposite from an alternative metal icon. After a spat with Love, he famously created the ‘Free Frances Bean’ T-shirt range in the mid-90s.

He explained: “Everybody was trying to get us to do benefit shows, like ‘Free Tibet.’ And I was gonna have my own platform: ‘Free Frances Bean.’ Just watching the tornado that is her mother, my first thought was, ‘Oh my God, how is Frances Bean gonna survive this insanity?’” Love retorted by labelling Keenan a “media whore”, which he thought hilarious under the circumstances.

After recording a taster EP called Opiate in 1992, Tool released their debut album, Undertow, the following year. Many of Jones’ early riffs echoed those of Morello, who had released his own first album with Rage the previous year – but in every other way the two bands differed.

Where RATM were overtly political, Tool addressed darker, more obscure subjects, specifically on the single Prison Sex, which concerned child abuse. Its video, a claymation affair directed by Jones, was terrifying – without resorting to violent images or the subject matter which many people assumed must be the song’s theme.

The clip was banned, although it often surfaces in academic discussion in the psychiatric field. Another single, Sober, came with an equally unsettling video in which a claymation prisoner in a shadowy dungeon breaks open a heating pipe to discover greasy, faecal chunks of meat flowing through it. As Jones said: “I like a picture that makes you uncomfortable on one hand and it’s beautiful on the other. It’s gross, but you look anyway…”

All this heavy stuff caused many metal fans to make assumptions about the members of Tool. They were said to be freaks, or malcontents, or psychopaths, when in fact the four men have spent most of their careers protesting that they’re just average Joes with more than average talent.

Understandably, most people ignored these claims when 1996’s Ænima was released – a truly sophisticated album that upgraded the raw vitriol of Undertow to a sleek malevolence that is still rather stunning today.

Dedicated to the band’s late friend Bill Hicks (who appeared in the artwork as ‘Another Dead Hero’), the album combined epic, Pink Floyd-style soundscapes with Keenan’s scathing lyrics – and in doing so, elevated Tool to an entirely new plane: the hitherto niche territory of prog metal.

A single, Stinkfist, kept controversy levels high, with Keenan sniggering at the predictable reaction to the song’s eye-watering title: MTV refused to air the video under its real name, renaming it Track #1, although the sexual implication was merely a metaphor.

By now Tool were having fun with their many critics, staying three steps ahead of those who tried to understand them and issuing red herrings as they went along. No-one really understands why Carey likes to have Enochian magic symbols in Tool’s rehearsal room, why Keenan chooses blue body paint and female lingerie as stage-wear, or why Jones creates such disturbing, biomechanoid art: they just pretend to.

The point, Keenan reiterates, is for the listener to find an individual interpretation of the maze of information – and the fans have done just that online, discussing every nuance of Tool’s work, provoked in part by Keenan’s initial refusal to publish his lyrics.

2001’s Lateralus was Tool’s Dark Side Of The Moon, the culmination of everything which they’d worked to achieve. A monumental achievement, the album led to delayed recognition by the American record industry, which awarded a Grammy to the lead-off single, Schism.

Perhaps the rise of lowest-common-denominator rap-metal bands such as Limp Bizkit – whose singer Fred Durst’s oft-stated love of Tool was not returned, tellingly – had led the metal-buying legions to look for something more challenging; maybe Lateralus’ hypnotic redefinition of heavy music was impossible to resist. Either way, Tool now had a huge audience, and were able to perform stadium-level tours every few years, rather than the constant club-level grind of the Undertow era.

After 9/11 and George W Bush’s War On Terror, there was a perceptible shift in Keenan’s lyrics. Enraged by US foreign and domestic policy, the American church and the control of the public by right-wing news outlets like Fox News, he formed a side-project called A Perfect Circle.

“Religion is basically a marketing plan,” he once spat. “They’re going to pass a plate in front of you, trick you into giving 10 per cent of your income to some child-molesting fuckhead, or worse, trick you into giving up your civil rights over some storybook.”

Poised on the brink of global superstardom, Tool took their time over their next move. Keenan had his new band to play with, as well as a vineyard in Arizona. Jones forged a second career as a sculptor.

Carey and Chancellor wrote new material, waiting for Keenan to return. For some fans, the hiatus went on too long: when the fourth Tool album, 10,000 Days, appeared in 2006, it was felt that some momentum might have been lost.

Still, the record was truly sumptuous, with the CD sleeve containing embedded glass lenses in order to view the stereoscopic artwork inside. Three singles (Vicarious, The Pot and Jambi) were as gripping as ever, and their videos as eyeball-searing as before – but it was thought by several critics that some focus was missing.

Despite this, 10,000 Days is a dozen times deeper and more intense than any album released in recent years, with the honourable exception of contemporary prog-metal bands such as Mastodon and Isis. What do the critics know?

It’s redundant to ask where they’ll go in the future: they elevated themselves from the status of a mere band a long time ago. Tool are a bona fide cultural phenomenon – and one that only the prog metal movement could provide. Like I said, some music isn’t meant to be understood…

Hanoi Rocks, the legendary Finnish glam punks largely responsible for Guns N' Roses, have announced a box set assembling their magnificent first five albums into a collection that'll look extremely sexy under any 2026 Christmas tree.

The Complete Collection 1981-1984 box set will include the band's first four independent releases – Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks (1981), Oriental Beat and Self Destruction Blues (both 1982), Back To Mystery City (1983) and their major label debut Two Steps From the Move (1984), as well as Motorvatin!!!, a sixth disc containing live tracks recorded for the BBC and previously unheard demos. Full tracklist below.

Regretfully, the collection does not include the 1984 live album All Those Wasted Years, one of the finest live recordings ever made by humankind, but then nothing's perfect.

“The new Hanoi Rocks Box Set includes all the albums by the original band, including the Oriental Beat 40th Anniversary release The Re(al)mix, which came out in 2022," says frontman Michael Monroe. "There’s also a special extra bonus LP of rarities with even some previously unreleased tracks.

"The artwork has been put together nicely, and it has a vast amount of great, rare and some never-before-seen photos. If someone is not familiar with Hanoi Rocks, this is a fantastic opportunity to get to know the band’s unique material. I recommend this box set to everybody!”

Hanoi Rocks broke up in 1985 – the same year Guns N' Roses formed – and were a big influence on their American counterparts, both musically and wardrobe-wise. Monroe would later collaborate with the band on two songs: Use Your Illusion I track Bad Obsession, on which he played harmonica and saxophone, and GN’R’s cover of The Dead Boys' Ain’t It Fun, which appeared on 1993’s The Spaghetti Incident?.

Hanoi Rocks’ The Complete Collection 1981-1984 will be released via BMG on November 13. It'll be available as a six-disc vinyl set in various pleasant hues, and as a six-CD package. Happily, it's available to pre-order now.

Hanoi Rocks: The Complete Collection 1981-1984 tracklist

Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks

1. Tragedy
2. Village Girl
3. Stop Cryin'
4. Don't Never Leave Me
5. Lost in the City
6. First Timer
7. Cheyenne
8. 11th Street Kidzz
9. Walking with My Angel
10. Pretender



Oriental Beat - The 2022 Re(al)mix
1. Motorvatin'
2. Don't Follow Me
3. Visitor
4. Teenangels Outsiders
5. Sweet Home Suburbia
6. M.C. Baby
7. No Law Or Order
8. Oriental Beat
9. Devil Woman
10. Lightnin' Bar Blues
11. Fallen Star


Self Destruction Blues

1. Love's an Injection
2. I Want You
3. Cafe Avenue
4. Nothing New
5.Kill City
6.Self Destruction Blues
7. Beer and a Cigarette
8. Whispers In the Dark
9. Taxi Driver
10. Desperados
11. Problem Child
12. Dead By Xmas

Back to Mystery City

1. Strange Boys Play Weird Openings
2.Malibu Beach Nightmare
3. Mental Beat
4. Tooting Bec Wreck
5. Until I Get You
6. Sailing Down the Tears
7. Lick Summer Love
8. Beating Gets Faster
9. Ice Cream Summer
10. Back to Mystery City

Two Steps From the Move
1. Up Around the Bend
2.High School
3. I Can't Get It
4. Underwater World
5. Don't You Ever Leave Me
6. Million Miles Away
7. Boulevard of Broken Dreams
8. Boiler (Me Boiler 'N' Me)
9. Futurama
10. Cutting Corners



Motorvatin’!!!

1. Two Steps From The Move
2. Underwater World (BBC Session)
3. Boulevard of Broken Dreams (BBC Session)
4. Oil and Gasoline
5. Shakes
6. Magic Carpet Ride
7. The Beating Gets Faster (I Know You) (Demo)
8. Sailing Down the Tears (Demo)
9. Rebels on the Run (Demo)
10. Malibu Beach (Calypso Version)

“We finally feel like we’ve reached that peak TesseracT sound,” vocalist Daniel Tompkins told Prog in 2023. The leading lights of the British prog metal scene had were poised to release their most recent album to date – but was War Of Being their most progressive work so far? Tompkins and bassist Amos Williams revealed the grand concepts behind their fifth record.

When your band haven’t released a studio album for five years, it feels like a very bold statement to return with an 11-minute prog metal epic. If that wasn’t sufficiently daring, TesseracT’s War Of Being – the title track from their latest album – is accompanied by a high-concept video in which the idea of inner struggle is expressed through a futuristic samurai battling their doppelgänger. It’s nothing if not a gamble.

“Every band must have those discussions: what’s going to be the most successful song to release first?” says frontman Daniel Tompkins. “The last album [2018’s Sonder] was relatively short for us. I felt like I’d seen enough feedback to know people were left a little bit dissatisfied, so I thought it would be a real unexpected thing to release an 11-minute track as the first single. Rather than releasing a song that’s just going to appeal to a wider audience, we wanted to honour the core fanbase that has stuck by us for the past 15 or so years. For me, this is really a song for the fans.”

War Of Being, both the single and album, transports listeners to a place called The Strangeland, experienced through two characters called Ex and El. “The story is fantastic,” says Tompkins. “There’s a lot to it; it isn’t as simple as two protagonists being thrown into a sci-fi world. They splinter into various manifestations of themselves in the form of different characters with unique attributes.”

Sounds complicated and metaphorical. “That’s our subconscious, our memory,” says bassist Amos Williams, when asked to explain The Strangeland. “Within that you’ve got fears and hopes all bundled together and what you end up with is a place where time is non-linear.” It becomes a means to explore how memories and experiences from the past can shape how someone perceives both their present and their own identity. Not that there weren’t reservations about leaning so heavily into science fiction.

“It seems like a cliché,” says Williams. “What are we? Prog metal? Tech metal? That sort of band is expected to do that sort of thing. It’s always felt difficult for me because it never really concentrated on the human; it concentrated on the platform or the staging. I’ve avoided that but, to go really geeky, a lot of the things we see within our genre are all setting and no story. Perhaps, to cause conflict among the geeks, we’re more like Star Trek: all story and no real setting, if that makes sense. I’ve just outed myself as a proper geek.”

“The whole point of the concept is to ask the listener the question: ‘Who are you?’ And the same for us. We’ve been asking the question, ‘Who are we?’” says Tompkins.

War Of Being comes from a band with the confidence to explore new territory musically and thematically. “On a personal journey, I feel like I’ve matured a lot,” says Tompkins. “I have two children. We’ve travelled the world together with many ups and downs, many life stresses, and it’s only at this point where I feel comfortable in my own skin.

“I’ve always suffered with anxiety and stress, and that’s affected my growth as an artist. Going through the process of creating this album has been an amazing experience. It’s very introspective and it highlighted lots of issues from a personal perspective that haven’t been addressed in a long time. It has helped me deal with that, without going into too much detail. I feel like this whole album has brought with it a lot of confidence, and maturity is at the root of that.”

For Williams, the idea is about looking within, not just towards the past. “When you’re saying, ‘Who are you, what are we?’ you’ve got to understand what took you to where you are,” says the bassist. “I talk about detritus, about walking through the rubble and the wreckage that we’ve created just to be able to understand who we are. You’ve got to be able to answer not just the question of projection, of what you want to be seen as, but also how did you get where you are.”

Tompkins put that idea into practice. “At the start of every album I always take a little trip down memory lane. I travel to the place I grew up and spend a bit of time just on the street reminiscing,” he says. “It helps me to write and create. I feel like every album is a stepping stone. It ties into what Amos is saying about understanding where you’ve come from and looking back at all the life events that have led up to this moment in time. It’s about looking back and seeing how far you’ve come and being empowered by that.”

For guitarist and producer Acle Kahney, the unexpected upside of being off the road during the pandemic was that TesseracT had far more time than usual for songwriting. They were able to jam, allowing them to play the music live as a band before recording it. Duly prepared, they headed to Devon for six weeks at Middle Farm Studios, where they brought in two co-producers to work alongside Kahney. Peter Miles has worked with Architects and Sylosis, while Choir Noir’s Katherine Marsh has collaborated with Bring Me The Horizon and even performed backing vocals on Marillion’s An Hour Before It’s Dark.

In the past, the band have recorded their parts individually in their home studios and obsessed over every note, but that wasn’t the approach that Miles and Marsh brought to the project. “You’re just following a direction there and then, no time to think about it, no preparation, and that’s really cool because that’s not TesseracT,” says Williams. “That’s almost the antithesis of TesseracT.

“We don’t sit down and write a pop song; we slowly craft a track. It takes hours and hours to get a small section down, so it was interesting to have Pete and Kat involved, who were of a different perspective. Like saying, ‘That’s fucking brilliant, why are you saying you need to do that again?’ ‘No, it’s not perfect.’ ‘That’s what makes it perfect!’ It was funny to have that interplay.”

“Another departure from the three preceding albums was being able to record drummer Jay Postones in a live room. “The major thing was getting real drums for the first time since One,” says Kahney, referencing their 2011 debut. “It was down to time and budget on previous albums, so it was nice to finally get Jay in a recording studio and do it properly, and just all be in a room together jamming. We spent the first two or three days experimenting with drum sounds and snare tones. Pretty quickly it was, ‘Yeah, that’s good, let’s roll with that,’ and we started tracking.”

The bigger budget for War Of Being came in the wake of 2020’s livestreamed event Portals, the success of which impressed Kscope. “That spurred them on to support us further, to invest a bit more, which gave us more freedom,” says Tompkins. “We’ve always been on side hustles as musicians, always having no time, so this was a breath of fresh air.

“I was there for four weeks just recording vocals and I had a vocal producer with me. Normally if I’m recording something I’m sat in front of the computer with a microphone, editing, tracking and writing as I go along. It was great to take a step back from that and just perform.”

The War Of Being concept is set to expand beyond the limits of the album itself. The video for the title track was created using the 3D creation tool Unreal Engine 5, originally designed for video games. And that’s going to be the next evolutionary leap.

“Before we went into the studio, I was working with a guy who is part of my livestream platform, a coder and programmer,” says Tompkins. “We started to build a computer game for TesseracT in Unreal Engine 5. When we started to develop the video for War Of Being, it was designed in Unreal Engine 5, so the characters and some of the landscapes that were made for the video have been ported across into our project.”

Consequently, second single The Grey is accompanied by a demo version of the game. “We’re pushing the boundaries of what is expected of bands to do with technology,” says Tompkins. “It’s a very interesting angle, crossing over into the gaming industry as a musical artist. I do believe it’s one of the first of its kind, where a computer game has been created around the concept and the full album.

“People are going to hear the song for the first time while experiencing the world we’ve created in virtual reality.” The full game is still in development, and Tompkins is hoping for a release in late 2024.

Simultaneously, Williams has been writing a novella to tie in with the album, with one third already written. “I wouldn’t want to stretch my incapability as a novelist, but it’s all there and it’s got to come out otherwise I’ll go mental,” says Williams. The ideas started pouring out at the end of 2022, so he just went with the flow.

“I got up every morning, had my coffee, and spent about four hours letting it happen, filling in the gaps of a story that just kept telling itself. I can’t promise anything because we’re very busy and, unless I can figure out how to do this on tour, it’s going to take a while to make it happen.”

TesseracT are pushing themselves to break new ground as musicians and creative artists. “We just want to keep doing bigger and better things,” says Tompkins. “We wanted to make a statement to show that we’re still here, we still want to be here, we’ve never stopped being here. Five years is a long time, but we’ve been very busy even though we haven’t put any albums out.

“We don’t write fast; that’s just the nature of progressive metal. We’re not the type of band that’s going to churn out singles every couple of months and put an album out every 18 months. So we wanted to make this as big a deal as possible.”

The sexual assault court case against Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler will have to be rescheduled, as the judge due to preside over the legal proceedings has unexpectedly stepped down.

Judge Patricia A. Young was due to hear the opening arguments in Los Angeles on September 28.

Plaintiff Julia Misley - formerly Julia Holcomb - is accusing Tyler sexually abusing her from 1973 to 1976, starting when she was 16-years-old, and he was 25. She allege that Tyler coerced and persuaded her into believing that their three-year relationship, which began in 1973, was a 'romantic love affair". Her legal team filed the lawsuit in December 2022 under California's Child Victims Act, suing Tyler for sexual assault, sexual battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress

At the time the lawsuit was filed, Misley’s attorney, Jeff Anderson, said that the music industry has "permitted, protected, and profited from severe violence for decades", adding "It’s time to face the music. It’s time for reckoning."

Tyler denies the claims and is seeking to have the case dismissed, arguing that the pair primarily lived together in Boston, where the age of consent was 16.

In May, Judge Young dismissed the majority of the lawsuit under statutes of limitations – meaning too much time had passed since the alleged crimes were committed.

Now Young has recused herself from the case, without specifying the exact conflict of interest which forced her withdrawal.

"As a result of the parties not waiving, I will officially disqualify," Judge Young said. "Once I discovered the basis for my disqualification, I did not take any further action, so anything that was an open question as of last Friday … I have not ruled on those, and I will not rule on those."

It is not yet clear when the next stage of the trial will begin.

Metallica have announced another run of North American M72 dates for 2027. The quartet will play a dozen stadium shows in May and June next year, kicking off at BC Place in Vancouver, Canada, on May 8, and concluding on June 19 at the Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The support acts for the 12 dates – which are in addition to Metallica's previously announced residency at Sphere in Las Vegas and a pair of shows at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut, this November – will be nu metal legends Limp Bizkit and Swedish stars Avatar.

Avatar previously supported Metallica on this year's European leg of the tour, which ended in July, when Metallica took to social media to sing their praises.

"Master of ceremonies Johannes [Eckerström, frontman] and the crazy Swedes from Avatar brought something completely new to the #M72 stage," they wrote. "Every night was a spectacle. Thank you so much for raising the bar and keeping the audiences in Europe and the UK thrilled!"

Fan Club presales for the newly announced shows will begin on Monday, September 21 at 10am local time, with additional presales running throughout the week before the general onsale begins on Friday, September 25 at the same time.

For information regarding tickets and additional packages, visit the Metallica website.

Metallica live shows 2026/27

Oct 01: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 03: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 08: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 10: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 15: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 17: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 22: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 24: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 29: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 31: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Nov 05: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Nov 07: Las Vegas Sphere, NV

Nov 19: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 21: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT

Jan 28: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Jan 30: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 04: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 06: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 18: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 20: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 25: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 27: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Mar 04: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Mar 06: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Mar 11: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Mar 13: Las Vegas Sphere, NV

May 08: Vancouver BC Place, BC
May 13: San Diego Snapdragon Stadium, CA
May 18: El Paso Sun Bowl Stadium, TX
May 22: San Antonio Alamodome, TX
May 26: Fayetteville Razorback Stadium, AR
May 29: Kansas City Arrowhead Stadium, MO
Jun 02: Raleigh Carter-Finley Stadium, NC
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Warren Zevon died as he had lived: fearlessly. After being diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2002, he refused to wallow in depression or self-pity. Instead this most mercurial of musicians released a final, valedictory album, The Wind, and embarked on a series of interviews in which he treated his impending demise as a source of black comedy and philosophical rumination.

But then Zevon was never your typical singer-songwriter. Born in Chicago but coming of age in 60s Los Angeles, he could easily have carved out a successful career as a straight-down-the-line piano man like Elton John or Billy Joel, were it not for his caustic wit, chemical-induced instability and general contempt for the world. He gravitated towards life’s losers, underdogs and addicts, maybe because he saw something of himself in them. “I’m insane. I’m fucked up. I have problems,” he told one interviewer. “But I don’t get depressed and I don’t get bored.”

Zevon’s career was anything but predictable. His underwhelming 1969 debut album, Wanted Dead Or Alive, proved to be a false start, and it would be another seven years before he released a follow-up. The 1978 single Werewolves Of London propelled him to fame, but it remained his sole hit – something that proved a source of frustration and amusement to the man behind it. The 80s and 90s were equally erratic, commercially and personally, and although in the early 00s he underwent a mini-renaissance, it was soon cut terminally short.

By all accounts, Zevon wasn’t an easy man to be around. He was vain and combustible, egotistical and petty. But he was also charismatic, funny and more often than not the smartest guy in the room. His magnetic personality attracted an astonishing array of collaborators over the years: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, David Gilmour and R.E.M. were just a few of the people who worked with him.

Zevon never made a ‘perfect’ album. But perfection was never the point; he was the rare artist who was defined as much by his flaws as by his successes, and it was those flaws that made him one of the most fascinating musicians America has ever produced.

Zevon died in 2003, aged 56. He was quipping to the end: “I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years. It was one of those phobias that really didn’t pay off,” he told longtime super fan David Letterman. He was never big enough and far too inconsistent to qualify for ‘American National Treasure’ status, although he’d probably bristle at the suggestion that he was a cult artist. The best description of Warren Zevon is that he was just Warren Zevon.

And one to avoid...

Following on from Phil Collins’ memories of his early days, he goes on to tell Prog about the progress Genesis made from a group of seeming misfits to a streamlined organisation capable of creating 23-minute masterpieces.

After you joined Genesis, the band went on to prove a productive, enduring blend of talents.

It was strange at first. I lived with Mike and his parents while we rehearsed in what was then a derelict farm. Just the four of us – before Steve Hackett – running through their ideas.

It’d be going fine, but suddenly someone would stand up, walk out, disappear for half an hour. I’d think, “What happened? Did I blink and miss something?” They were highly strung individuals, who could very easily get on each others’ nerves.

A lot’s been made of that in the past. But look, everybody is a totally different person now. Everyone’s mellowed out! We’re all a product of the way we’re brought up. They were raised to be officers and gentlemen; I was just living by the skin of my teeth. But that story’s become something of a cliché. That was just the early days.

You made extraordinary things together – not least Supper’s Ready.

We always pushed the limitations of a record. A 23-minute song was a cutting engineer’s nightmare! Our writing was... meandering. I was more of an arranger at that stage. I could see how things could be adapted or reprised. But we did like to stretch. Not with endless solos though – We never had that “let the guitarist go mad for ages” thing, ever.

Supper’s Ready was the first time we decided we could go that long. When we first heard it all edited together at Island Studios, later Trevor Horn’s place, we thought, “Oh, that’s great!” We were slightly surprised!

I always think we were better live, as we used to tense up in the studio when the light was on and the clock was going. When we got our own studio, of course, that changed.

Apocalypse In 9/8, at the end, is one of my favourite pieces of music that we did. Mike and Tony were playing in different time signatures, so sometimes I’d join in with one, sometimes the other – whichever I fancied! It all sounds very clever and arranged but it was a stroke of luck, really. Genesis were really good at that: playing together, improvising. It all started as free-flowing stuff, then we’d hone it.

The band itself streamlined as time went by, it’s fair to say.

Yeah, and I always used to get the blame for that, because it kind of coincided with me being the singer. People think the singer does everything! Not true. A band like Genesis is a writing commune, really. And as they’ve said, in the early days, before I even joined, they wanted to write hit singles.

We all grew up with The Kinks, Beatles, Stones: three-minute blasts. It’s just we weren’t very good at it! We were good at something else, so that’s what we did. Later, occasionally, we struck gold with something in that format, like I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) and Follow You Follow Me. But they were written first and chosen as singles second.

After Brian Eno contributed to The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, did you play on his record as a kind of trade-off?

That’s right, no money involved! But that sparked a lovely friendship. Eno and I got on pretty well, and he called me to play on not just Another Green World but Before And After Science and Music For Films – me, Percy Jones from Brand X, Robert Fripp, all kinds of interesting musicians.

Eno would come in with something he’d done the night before at home, just an abstract idea, and we’d use that and play with it. The fact that he brought things from home intrigued me. So when I started to do my music – basically trying to find something to do with my time because I was going through that post-divorce thing – I started working at home in my little studio.

And I was quite happy – in fact I became insistent – on using my home demos, copying them onto the multitrack. It didn’t matter if there was a bit of click or hiss. It’s more a case of, “Is it good?” I’d seen Eno do that. So the demos became the foundation of Face Value. And the same with subsequent albums.

By the time of Both Sides, which was ’93, my equipment had got more sophisticated and I did most of the album in my bedroom upstairs. Doing it when the mood strikes. It’s very freeing.

I’d sing rubbish until I sang something that felt right. Sometimes when the moon’s in the right place and all that stuff, you come up with something. In The Air Tonight was mainly improvisation. That’s what I sang when I opened my mouth that particular day. It’s like verbal jazz: when a saxophone player gets up and plays, he’s just playing what he plays. Often that was the case with my voice and words.

“Going back to your question about what I feared most when parting ways with him,” says Bill Kelliher, softly, “it was that he’d pass away.

On August 20, 2025, that fear became reality. Incendiary Mastodon guitarist Brent Hinds was killed in a motorcycle accident in Atlanta at the age of 51. It was a devastating punctuation mark to a 25-year creative partnership that had fractured just five months prior, with Brent acrimoniously quitting the band and taking his grievances to social media while the band remained silent.

In the recently released 35-minute documentary, The Mastodon In The Room, the surviving members addressed the messy reality of Brent’s departure and subsequent death with remarkable candour. But while that film looks backwards, sitting down with Hammer this afternoon, the conversation repeatedly drifts somewhere else entirely: forwards.

Spain is currently baking beneath a relentless, tarmac-melting heatwave, but backstage at Rock Imperium Festival, in Mastodon’s air-conditioned enclave, guitarist Bill is the very picture of chill.

“The tour has been going really, really well,” he says, leaning back. “Every single night is better than the last.”

Among all members of the band, the emotional baseline is identical. Drummer Brann Dailor is a blur of kinetic energy, plopping down on the couch with drumsticks in hand, hammering out a lightning-fast, spitfire rat-a-tat on his thigh, then nodding with approval; after a month of shows, this suffices for his readiness check.

“There’s a heatwave ripping through Europe and we’ve been following it closely, so it’s been pretty steamy,” he says. “But the shows have been awesome and it’s been a lot of fun.”

Grinning beneath his baseball cap, bassist Troy Sanders adds, “Usually people are getting grumpy by now. But the joy is real. We truly enjoy each and every show. It’s a real treat.”

Considering all that Mastodon have endured in the past 18 months, such boundless optimism sounds almost jarring. To understand how the band arrived here, we need to rewind.

Last year put the boot in as soon as it began. In February 2025, Brann lost his mother, Michele, after a lengthy period of ill-health. It was a tragic prelude to the tumult ahead.

Six weeks later, the other shoe dropped. In March, Brent quit Mastodon, severing a bond that had been buckling under progressive, heavy strain for years. As the band discuss in The Mastodon In The Room, the downward spiral had become impossible to ignore: missed cues, erratic onstage outbursts, and a widening social gulf driven by Brent’s escalating battles with alcohol.

For a long time, the remaining trio hesitated to act, holding onto memories of the early years when they were just four guys trying to make each other laugh in a cramped tour van. But by 2021, around the Hushed And Grim tour, the collective enthusiasm had withered.

The end, when it came, was abrupt. During a tense band meeting in their rehearsal space, as members discussed the impact of Brent’s behaviour, the guitarist rose up and stormed out, never to return. For Brann, it was an emotional haymaker after the loss of his mother.

“I was definitely struggling just being a person,” he explains. “Then the turmoil with Brent just made everything worse. I had this big, heavy grief cloak on, dragging my carcass around, and I wasn’t having fun.”

Fortunately, the raw material that would eventually emerge as the band’s latest album, Marrow Deep, had already taken shape. By the time Brent left the band, the skeletons of 23 songs had already been written – without Brent’s involvement.

“It had already been quite evident that Brent’s interest in participating was waning,” adds Troy. “We didn’t want to continually invite a dark cloud to come loom over us while we’re trying to be creative. We just kept doing it where the excitement and energy were at 100%.”

Two days after announcing Brent’s exit, the band drafted YouTube guitar virtuoso Ben Eller to handle immediate touring commitments, bringing a welcome predictability back to an erratic live engine. But while Ben provided vital onstage stability, the permanent role required something beyond pure technical proficiency – it needed the creative friction of two wildly disparate guitar personalities.

“Ben’s style is a little too similar to Bill’s,” Brann explains. “It would be like having two Bills. The special thing about our band was that Brent’s playing was so wildly different.”

Enter Nick Johnston. A virtuoso within the progressive instrumental scene, he wasn’t a standard metal journeyman; he was the necessary creative counterweight.

“We wanted a yin-and-yang situation,” Brann says. “Somebody who could emote during solos and bring a different side of the coin. Nick approaches the instrument like nobody else I’ve ever heard.”

“Nick’s been wonderful,” says Bill. “He’s one of the nicest humans I’ve ever met. He brings things to the table that I’d never come up with, and vice versa.”

Nick arrived in May 2025, working alongside longtime touring keyboardist João Nogueira, whose atmospheric textures added a fresh dimension to the arrangements. Rather than merely mimicking the past, the two began reshaping the transitions and interludes. Together, Nick and João injected a sophisticated progressive flourish –a level of intricate, fluid musicianship that felt striking even for a band with Mastodon’s formidable technical pedigree.

Amazingly, after 25 years, Mastodon were expanding their sonic palette. But the ultimate test of this new five-piece was fast approaching. In August, just 10 days before they were scheduled to enter the studio to record the album, the news broke from Atlanta: Brent was gone.

Word of his fatal accident spread rapidly. A subsequent Atlanta Police investigation concluded Brent had been travelling at nearly 70mph – twice the legal speed limit – and that excessive speed was the decisive factor in the crash. For the surviving members, whatever resentment had built up during the public fallout of the split evaporated the moment the news broke.

“I was immediately shocked and saddened,” says Troy. “But unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised. I don’t mean that in any distasteful manner, whatsoever. I’ve done everything I could as a friend and as a bandmate over the years. I don’t know what else I could’ve done, so I’m kind of forced to just let go.”

“I wasn’t surprised that it happened, but I was shocked,” adds Bill. “I just didn’t think it was going to happen like that.”

The fact was that they began grieving Brent long before the crash. Reflecting this afternoon, there’s only a quiet sadness and a deep, genuine fondness.

“Whenever someone rides by on a loud motorcycle, I think of Brent first,” says Bill. “He was omnipresent in my life. Even though we didn’t always see eye-to-eye – more times than not we did – I cared about the guy. I always thought
he would outlive us all, because he had nine lives and got away with everything.”

“When Brent was in a good mood – his normal, happy
self, not hungover Brent – it was so much fun,” Brann adds. “We were the funniest people we knew. I miss that aspect of it: the camaraderie, the jokes, and the fun. And musically, he would just rip some solos – snatch them right out of the sky and make you cry. I miss all of that.”

Barely a week after his passing and still reeling from the news, Mastodon entered the studio. “It was difficult. It was dark. It was sad,” Troy says. “But it was also necessary.”

Historically, Mastodon have processed personal tragedy through a cinematic filter of concept albums and mythology – Moby Dick, czars and villainous emperors – using grand metaphors to absorb the concussive force of real-world pain. On Marrow Deep, the masks are gone, the lyrics replaced by a stark, collective honesty, with the word ‘we’ frequently overtaking the insular ‘I’.

“It probably wasn’t intentional,” Troy says, considering the shift. “But that’s where we all were.”

Across towering tracks such as Your Ghost Again and Moth And Bone, grief and the wreckage of their fractured friendship with Brent are laid bare. When Troy roars, ‘Our faces hit the wall again… the wound is cutting deeper’ on the latter, there is no protective imagery left to hide behind. The nerve is fully exposed.

That starkness crystallises halfway through the album, on In The Ruins. Built around a long-gestating riff from Bill, the track took shape when co-producer Patrik Berger suggested slamming from its quietest moment straight into its most punishing movement.

“When Troy put his lyrics over the top, it shot to the top of everybody’s list,” reveals Brann. “He is pulling from his own experience there. He lost his home and all his possessions in a Florida hurricane. It’s something he’s very quiet about, but it was devastating.”

Conversely, A Vampire’s Demeanor offers a blast of straightforward metal built around a driving main riff written by Brann.

“Every time we played it in the rehearsal space, I just wanted to play it forever,” Brann says. “To me, that’s a festival song. I can already see a crowd jumping in unison at Download.”

The band’s newly unlocked chemistry really speaks for itself.

“If you want an example of the new dynamic, look at a song like Poisonous Weapons,” says Bill. “I threw a ‘riff grenade’ into the room to see what Nick and João would come up with. In the middle section, they turned my basic formula into this incredibly proggy space jam. It’s the same on The Three Fates – the placement of that part at the end of the song is a hint of what’s to come.”

That forward-looking outro anchors the album’s closing epic – a track that ultimately bridges the band’s raw new reality with their signature move. Because for all of Marrow Deep’s unvarnished realism, they couldn’t completely resist the gravity of ancient myth.

“I did squeak in some mythology anyway,” Brann laughs, tracking the origin of the song back to the Greek Moirai – mythological sisters who spin, measure, and inevitably snip the thread of human life. “I look at Brent and my mom as being similar in the way they both did a good job of hiding from that third sister with the scissors,” Brann muses. “One of them on purpose, and one of them not on purpose.”

It’s a telling inversion. Once, mythology was Mastodon’s shield against the world. On Marrow Deep, it arrives only as a postscript, after the band have already bared their souls in plain English.

“Hopefully,” Brann continues, “it ends the record on a hopeful note.”

Having navigated the brutal gauntlet of the last 18 months, the grief hasn’t vanished, but for the first time in years, Mastodon feel bound together by something far greater than mere survival. They are looking to the future.

“All five of us want to be here for all the right reasons,” Troy says. “All five of us are very much in sync. We’re all extremely happy to be here and so grateful for every fucking show.”

If Marrow Deep serves as the definitive, bruising conclusion to a traumatic chapter, it also kicks the door wide open to a thrilling new era. Because Nick joined the fold after much of the album was already sketched out, the next Mastodon record will be the first built from the ground up by this newly minted five-piece – a prospect that electrifies Bill.

“I feel like the next record, in another year or two, will showcase even more of Nick and me playing off each other,” he says. “Toward the end of Brent’s time in the band, I was writing most of the rhythms and song structures anyway, and he would come in like a finishing carpenter to add the crazy solos. It’s a similar set-up with Nick, but Nick is much more receptive and absolutely full of fresh ideas.”

“You’re never going to truly replace Brent,” Brann says. “He was a unique unicorn to the 10th power. But Nick is his own kind of unicorn; I love that about him. I love his playing, and I’m excited to dig in more with him writing-wise.”

But it isn’t just the promise of new riffs that has breathed life back into Brann. Given all that’s transpired, we ask him what’s making him happy these days.

“Besides my awesome wife, my cool dog, and all my amazing friends?” he replies. “It’s my kickass band. I feel more confident than ever going onstage knowing that the show is going to be fucking awesome.”

Troy agrees: “Coming off the stage, we look around and get to hug and high-five, because we’ve done this thing that I’ve always called magic. It’s just like, ‘Oh, wow, that was unbelievable. So beautiful. Thank you. I love you.’ ‘Fuck, I love you too, man!’ It’s great.”

“Mastodon now is the band I’ve always wanted to have,” says Bill. “It’s five guys who are all on the same page, who all want to be here, and who want to do what is best for the group. We love getting onstage, making people rock out, making awesome-sounding records, and continuously pushing ourselves. It’s a joy to go out there and do what we do best, which is play some heavy-ass metal and prog rock.”

The scars are permanent, but the uncertainty is gone. Mastodon have spent a quarter of a century turning tragedy into high art, but the view down the road is no longer defined by what they’ve lost – it’s defined by the vast, uncharted territory waiting to be conquered. For a band who have spent their entire existence screaming into the void about death, loss, and the cruel impermanence of time, this might just be the most subversive outcome of all. Not mere survival, but glorious, undeniable renewal.

Marrow Deep is out now

Brian May says that he's still weighing up the idea of an ABBA Voyage-style immersive avatar show for Queen.

Staged in the 3,000-seat ABBA Arena, a purpose-built venue in east London, ABBA Voyage features 'ABBAtars' based on the Swedish pop superstars as they appeared in 1979, alongside a 10-piece band, performing over 20 hit songs. The project took six years to realise, but within weeks of its launch in May 2022, the attraction had sold more than 380,000 tickets, and continues to sell out performances four years on.

At the final Kiss show, at New York's Madison Square Garden on December 2, 2023, the band announced their own avatar show, scheduled to launch in 2028, co-produced by Kiss and Pophouse Entertainment, a founding investor in ABBA Voyage. The Kiss show will be staged in Las Vegas, with avatars created by the George Lucas-founded visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic.

In a new interview with Absolute Radio, Brian May was asked if he might consider working on a similar virtual concert residency for Queen.

"Yeah, like the ABBA Voyage thing?" the guitarist responded. "It's not really a hologram, but it's an immersive experience, right? Yes, we looked at it very seriously, particularly after I saw the [Las Vegas] Sphere and what the Eagles did with the Sphere, which I thought was amazing. And I spent a lot of time planning out what I thought could be a Queen show.

"I've kind of backed off now because you can't do it without massive use of A.I., with all the consequences of that," May continued. "Now, in some ways, I don't wanna be stealing the work of other people. If you're stealing your own work, I'm not quite sure where I stand on it, 'cause you would be stealing from the Queen oeuvre, you know, which maybe is okay because that's ours. But at the same time, you're adding to the stresses that A.I. is putting on the world.

"So, I don't know," he admitted. "I'm not so keen as I was. I think it would be great to have a permanent place where people could go and feel like they're seeing us play live in our peak, maybe all over the world, maybe at all points in time. The doors are open, but I don't know if we're gonna walk through."

A film of Queen's July 27, 1986 gig at Budapest’s Népstadion, the first Western stadium rock show to take place behind the Iron Curtain, is to be screened in cinemas worldwide on October 7.

Queen Budapest is of major significance to Queen fans as it represents the last filmed live performance of the band with Freddie Mercury, showing the quartet at the height of their powers as a live act.

The band are planning to use a screening of the film to recreate the atmosphere of a Queen show for fans in London.

Across two screenings at London's iconic Roundhouse on October 3, the newly restored film will be shown on a giant LED screen, with the visuals augmented by surround sound and synchronised lighting. A range of original Queen merchandise will also be on display.

"It’s going to be definitively the most real experience ever of us, Queen, in our glory days," says May. "I think people will get lost in it and even forget they’re watching a film."

The much talked-about Back To The Beginning concert movie, capturing Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s farewell show, has finally got an official release date.

Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back To The Beginning will get a global cinema release on October 28, for a limited time. Shot at Villa Park in Sabbath’s hometown of Birmingham on July 5, 2025 and directed by Ben Wainwright-Pearce, who was also responsible for Taylor Swift’ The Eras Tour concert movie, the film’s producers say it “definitively captures the triumphant final live performance from Ozzy Osbourne and the original Black Sabbath lineup.”

The Back To The Beginning show featured the first performance by the original Black Sabbath line-up of Ozzy, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward in 20 years. It also marked Ozzy’s last ever solo performance – the singer died just over two weeks later, on July 22.

“It was a closure for the band and it was a good way to go out, I think,” says Tony Iommi of the show, while Geezer Butler adds: “To me it was like pure love. It was just a wave of love. It’s the only way I can describe it really. I mean I could feel it as if it is like tangible.”

As well as sets from Ozzy and Sabbath, the Back To The Beginning bill also featured a Who‘s Who of rock and metal, including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool, Slayer, Halestorm and more. Speaking to Metal Hammer recently, Sharon Osbourne said that footage of the other bands’ sets also appears in the film.

“Back To The Beginning came about because I asked Ozzy what would really make him happy,” says Sharon. “And he said the only thing that would make him happy was if he could perform again and say goodbye to his fans. That’s all he wanted to do. He wanted to say goodbye and thank you.”

“There’s never been anything like that that’s happened in the history of rock and roll,” adds Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who was musical director of the Back To The Beginning show and helped pull the bill together. “There’s never been a precedent for a show like this… [Black Sabbath] gets to play their final show basically in the Ground Zero of where they created heavy metal.”

Tickets for Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back To The Beginning go on sale Thursday September 24 at 3pm BST/7am PT/10am ET / 4pm CEST, and are available from backtothebeginning.com.

Kelly Osbourne has opened up about the last time she spoke to her dad Ozzy Osbourne before he died.

Ozzy passed away on July 22, 2025, just 17 days after he played his last ever show at the Back To The Beginning gig at Villa Park in his hometown of Birningham.

In an emotional interview with on the We Need To Talk podcast, Kelly reveals that doctors had warned Ozzy not to play the Back To The Beginning Show

“They told him, ‘If you do this show you’ll die’, but he chose to do it anyway” she tells host Paul C Brunson. “Because it meant more to him than anything.”

Asked what her last conversation with her father was, Kelly says: “He sat me down, and this was about three days before he died, and he goes, ‘You can live the rest of your life knowing there was one man on this planet who truly loved you.’ I started to cry and said, ‘Please don’t talk like this.’ Cause he said, ‘You know I’m not going to be here forever.’”

She adds that the Back To The Beginning shows, which also featured Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool and several other rock and metal A-listers, came from Ozzy’s desire to say goodbye to his fans, and credits her mother, Sharon, with making it happen.

“My mom allowed him to die the happiest I’ve ever seen him,” says Kelly. “All he wanted before he left this planet was one last show. My mom worked he arse off to make that happen, and it was one of the most incredible moments in music in music history.

“There’ll never be anything like that again. It was all the people who got to be who they are because of him coming to pay tribute to him, and he got to say goodbye. And then he let go.”

Sharon Osbourne recently told Metal Hammer that a film of the Back To The Beginning show would be released this year, featuring appearances from all the bands who played, including Black Sabbath and Ozzy himself.

“It’s coming. It will be out this year,” Sharon says. “The most precious thing that people can give you is their time, and they all took time out of their summer to come and do this show. Everybody deserves to be seen and heard.”

She also confirmed to Metal Hammer that Ozzfest would return in 2027 – and that it would take place at Villa Park.

“It’s going to be at Villa Park again,” said Sharon. “Whether it’ll be two nights [in Birmingham], that’s up for the fans to tell me.”

At the time of going to press, no date or festival headliners had been announced. “Of course we’re speaking to people,” she told Metal Hammer. “I can’t let that out yet, but it’ll be soon.”

Film director Danny Boyle wanted to reunite the original Sex Pistols and The Undertones line-ups to perform at his opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics in London.

And The Undertones came tantalisingly close to reuniting with original frontman Feargal Sharkey for the occasion, drummer Billy Doherty has revealed in an exclusive new interview with eonmusic.

The Derry punk legends, who are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, were approached about performing as part of a planned celebration featuring bands representing the four regions of the United Kingdom.

"They wanted to have bands from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland," Billy Doherty recalls.

"It was us, I think the Pistols, I think it might have been the Manic Street Preachers, and it might have been Simple Minds... [and] Feargal agreed to do it."

Although the original idea ultimately fell through, Boyle retained the concept: in the end, the four regions were represented at the ceremony on July 27, 2012, by Duran Duran [England], Stereophonics [Wales], Snow Patrol [Northern Ireland] and Paolo Nutini [Scotland].

The original proposal represented the most significant opportunity to put Feargal Sharkey back on stage with his former bandmates since The Undertones originally split in 1983. Sharkey went on to embark on a successful solo career, while Doherty, Michael Bradley, John O'Neill and Damian O'Neill returned to the stage in 1999 with new frontman Paul McLoone.

In his interview with eonmusic, Billy Doherty recalls in the mid-1980s, The Undertones were offered what he describes as "lottery money" for five reunion shows, but Sharkey refused to participate.

"He didn't want to know," the drummer recalls. "We contacted John Peel for John Peel to influence him. That actually made matters worse."

A second offer followed the next year, with even more money on the table, but Sharkey again declined.

The Undertones continue to tour with McLoone on vocals and are marking 50 years since their formation with an extensive UK and Ireland tour this autumn.

Danny Boyle later fulfilled his dream of reuniting the Sex Pistols... but only in his fictional FX drama Pistol.

The TV drama caused a huge row among the Sex Pistols, with John Lydon distinctly unimpressed by the director’s love letter to his band, calling the series "the most disrespectful shit I’ve ever had to endure".

Lydon’s former bandmates Steve Jones and Paul Cook, took the singer to court after he attempted to ban the use of Sex Pistols songs in the drama, and won.

Jones, Cook and Glen Matlock are currently touring the US with Frank Carter on vocals.

Nightwish keyboardist, co-founder and songwriter Tuomas Holopainen admits that the band were blamed “for good reason” for how they handled the dismissal of original lead singer Tarja Turunen.

Turunen, who fronted Nightwish from their 1996 founding until 2005, was let go via a scathing public letter from her bandmates. It alleged that “business” and “money” had become more important to her than the emotion behind the band’s music, and that her “attitude and behaviour” had changed due to the influence of her husband/manager Marcelo Cabuli. The couple denied the allegations.

Looking back in an exclusive interview with Metal Hammer, Holopainen says that Nightwish “get blamed for what happened, for good reason” but insists that “there was no future” for the band with Turunen: “We were just operating in survival mode and plagued by these dark thoughts.”

He adds that the remaining members “got completely butchered in the media” after the open letter was published. The split became such a hot-button topic that Finland’s then-prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, was asked to comment on it in parliament.

“It was like we were these evil neanderthals who’d hurt our wonderful ex-singer,” Holopainen recalls. “I got some really interesting letters, let’s put it that way.”

The keyboardist now has a civil but distant relationship with Turunen: the pair have exchanged a handful of emails over the years but not had any further interactions. He dismisses the possibility of reuniting with his ex-singer.

“It was a divorce, and an ugly one at that,” he explains, “so I think we have our own lives now. Someone did say to me if we got Tarja and Marko [Hietala, bassist/vocalist who left in 2020] back in, we could tour just South America for a year straight. That’s not gonna happen.”

Now fronted by Dutch singer Floor Jansen, Nightwish put out their latest album, Yesterwynde, in 2024. Holopainen revealed to Hammer last month that he has six songs written for the follow-up release.

“I feel more inspired than ever – proof of that is that I’ve already got six new Nightwish songs done,” he said. “Every time I sit in front of my keyboard, I’m like, ‘Ah yeah, this is great! Just wait till everyone hears this.’ It’s exhilarating.”

He added that the band have “reserved things” for 2027, hinting that they’ve booked studio time. He also suggested that 2028 will be the year that they end their ongoing hiatus from live shows, which started in summer 2023.

“Next year is too early to be going back on tour. The year after, possibly? I want to do another album before any live shows, and that’s definitely happening. We’ve already reserved things for that next year.”

Following her Nightwish exit, Turnen launched a solo career. Her latest album, Frisson Noir, came out in June. She will perform a special show with an orchestra at the Ancient Theater in Plovdiv, Bulgaria on September 18, then tour Europe from September 30 to October 25.

The Enid have announced they will no longer perform as a live band, and that Robert John Godfrey and fellow Enid musician Jason Ducker are currently working on a farewell album from the band

In a statement on the band's social media pages, Robert John Godfrey stated, "The Enid cannot continue as a functioning live band, and there are no plans for any future events/concerts.

As such, we cannot, in good conscience, continue to take money from our fans via a subscription. We have decided to close the Enidi bank and PayPal accounts.

For my part, I continue to compose. This morning, Jason and I have committed ourselves to creating a final Enid recording.

Many thanks for giving me the life I hope I have deserved and the one which has suited me best.

My love to you all.

Robert et al at The Enid."

The band's last studio album, U, was released in 2019, and the band have only performed sporadically in recent years, performing their last live show at The Stables in Milton Keyens last May.

Robert John Godfrey was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 2012, and announced he was retiring from touring with the band in 2016, saying, "The time has come for me to cross the footlights and devote myself to building our wonderful fan club, The Enidi, into a force to be reckoned with. I still have a few things up my sleeve before the sun sets upon my life’s work.”

In 2018, he announced that a brain scan had shown no presence of Alzheimer's and he subsequently returned to performing with the band.

At The Gates singer and melodic death metal icon Tomas Lindberg died on September 16, 2025, aged 52, after being diagnosed with a rare oral cancer. In early 2026, before the posthumous release of his final album The Ghost Of A Future Dead, his bandmates told Metal Hammer about his life, impact and endless curiosity.

No one else in Gothenburg looked like Tomas Lindberg. When twin brothers Anders and Jonas Björler first met their future At The Gates bandmate at a bus stop in 1989, he stood out like a snow-plough in the Sahara. His hair – bright blond at the time – flowed past his shoulders, he was wearing a knee-length leather trench coat and a t-shirt featuring the name of some obscure and long-forgotten death metal band, and he had the bushiest beard that the Björlers had ever seen on a 17-year-old.

“I’d never seen anybody who dressed like that,” remembers bassist Jonas, the older brother by 15 minutes. “With that huge beard as well, he looked like an old man.”

“When we went to his room at his parents’ house, he had obscure demo covers and fanzine clippings all over his walls,” adds guitar player Anders. “He had a cast of a human skull, because he was interested in the occult in his early days. It was like entering this weird kind of new world.”

It was impossible to know at the time, but that striking character would soon be the face of the city’s most important metal band. With Tomas’s anguished snarl and imposing stage presence front and centre, At The Gates became masters of the Gothenburg Sound: a reinvention of death metal that fused the harmonised guitars of classic metal and the rampaging speed of thrash.

In their original incarnation, At The Gates only lasted from 1990 to 1996, but they made a huge impact – their landmark fourth album, 1995’s Slaughter Of The Soul, influenced a generation of American bands, including Trivium, Killswitch Engage and Lamb Of God. They reunited in the late 2000s and continued to record and tour, until Tomas underwent surgery to treat adenoid cystic carcinoma, a rare cancer of the mouth and palate, in early 2024. Following complications in his recovery, he died last September, aged 52.

At The Gates’ new album, The Ghost Of A Future Dead, is an epitaph to their late frontman. Written in 2023 and recorded the following year, it uses vocal demos that Tomas tracked before his surgery – some parts, the day before. He approved every detail, from the artwork to the sequencing, before his death.

“He went into surgery just as I started drum tracking,” says drummer Adrian Erlandsson. “It was like, ‘OK, that was a good take’, and I was straight on the phone: ‘How’s he doing? How’d the surgery go?’ It was an uncertain time and a bit unsettling, but I don’t think there was even a consideration that he wasn’t going to make it.”

To people who didn’t know him personally, the man nicknamed Tompa seemed like the most intense person in the world. He strode all over every stage he played, often making war-faces at the crowd as he did so, and he screamed lyrics about suffering, politics and existentialism with intimidating ferocity. But what his bandmates remember about him first and foremost is how kind he was.

“He wasn’t only this metal singer and the godfather of the Gothenburg scene,” says Anders. “Everybody that met him knows he was a really humble guy. He was always making sure, if somebody was left out, that they were introduced and felt welcome.”

Born into a middle-class family on October 16, 1972, Tomas grew up in Billdal, a suburb half an hour south of central Gothenburg. He had two sisters, but was 15 years younger than them. “They moved out pretty early in his life, so he was alone with his parents,” says Jonas.

As the only kid in the house, it’s no surprise that his two favourite pastimes by his mid-teens were solo activities: reading books and listening to music. He enjoyed shoegaze, post-punk and everything under the Sub Pop Records banner, but his greatest loves were metal and hardcore, which he discovered through school friends blasting Metallica’s Kill ’Em All. He started writing and editing fanzines about the Stockholm death metal underground not long after.

“He really enjoyed discovering new things,” says Adrian, “and that’s something that went on throughout the years. He’d discover a new genre of music and he’d go deep in to find the root of where that scene came from. With death metal in particular, there was an aura around it – horror, death, decay – that suited him to a tee.”

With that same insatiable curiosity, he was constantly picking up books and putting other ones down. Through metal, he found horror greats Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley and H.P. Lovecraft. Then came a short-lived Aleister Crowley obsession (hence the occult stuff and the skull in his room), and from there it was a blur no one could keep track of.

“I remember when he was writing lyrics for [At The Gates’ 2014 comeback album] At War With Reality, sending me excerpts of books he was reading,” says Adrian. “I was just like, ‘Man, I really don’t understand!’ Ha ha ha! I was into techy things like games consoles, and when we were travelling, he’d be like, ‘How can you be bothered to carry these things with you?’ And I didn’t understand how he could take six to eight books with him on a tour, read them all and buy more along the way.”

Wanting to bring the Stockholm death metal sound to his hometown, the singer formed Grotesque with guitarist Alf Svensson in 1989. One of their gigs was a Christmas disco at Anders and Jonas’s school. They played three songs before being forced offstage.

“The PTA stopped the show because Grotesque were so Satanic,” Jonas recalls. “They had corpsepaint and one-metre upside-down crosses.”

“People were surprised,” adds Anders, “because the local scene back then was all white sneakers and thrash: Testament, Exodus, Metallica-style.”

After Grotesque split in 1990, Tomas and Alf started At The Gates. They took the name from the Fields Of The Nephilim song At The Gates Of Silent Memory, which sampled an Aleister Crowley speech. The Björlers joined soon afterwards, with Adrian completing the line-up after meeting Tomas on a coach to a Morbid Angel show.

“He told me, ‘You can’t be in the band! You’ve got short hair!’” the drummer laughs. “But then we had a few beers and he asked, ‘Can you play double-bass [drums]?’”

Their early albums were bizarre by their later standards, featuring violin solos and riffs that Alf wrote by playing old demos backwards, but Tomas’s lyrical identity was clear from the off. The title track of 1992 debut The Red In The Sky Is Ours voiced his left-wing beliefs and called for revolution.

Even though At The Gates simplified their songwriting after Martin Larsson replaced Alf in 1993, with the new approach reflecting Tomas’s roots in thrash and punk as well as the Björlers’ love for early-80s metal, that political focus carried on. Lines throughout ’94’s Terminal Spirit Disease and Slaughter Of The Soul spoke about how contemporary society was corrupting the human spirit.

The latter album put At The Gates on the map, but, barely in their 20s, they couldn’t deal with the sudden demand. They toured for eight months nonstop, hitting the US with Morbid Angel and then Napalm Death, yet made next to no money. Burnt out, Anders quit. Rather than continue without a founding member and key composer, the band broke up.

“[The schedule] affected me more than anyone else,” he reflects, “and I think the other guys were really let down by my departure. But I’m really easily bored. I need constant change. I can’t stand waiting around at airports and sitting on tour buses. I felt like a travelling salesman.”

Jonas admits that the brothers and Adrian didn’t talk to Tomas for a couple of years. “We had different friend groups,” he explains.

Post-At The Gates, the Björlers and Adrian reunited in thrashers The Haunted, whereas Tomas, true to his restless nature, joined an array of projects, including crust punks Disfear, hardcore/metal band The Great Deceiver and grindcore supergroup Lock Up. He settled down with his first wife and her daughter, had a son and pursued a career as a social studies teacher. Adrian reconnected with Tomas at the frontman’s wedding in 1998.

“It was like time had stood still,” he remembers. “There was some house band playing, and I asked him, ‘Should we play a few songs?’ I think everyone was too drunk at that point to pull anything off.”

With the fences mended, Tomas started attending local Haunted shows and talking to the Björlers again. Jonas says that the singer’s newfound fatherhood made him more “mature”, and as interest in Slaughter Of The Soul continued to grow amidst a new era of bands touting its significance, they began talking about a reunion. In 2008, At The Gates played their first shows in 12 years.

“The chemistry was great,” Jonas remembers. “Everybody was friends. The main intention was to make sure that every fan got to see us but, egotistically, we kind of missed doing it.”

Tomas lived something of a double life, balancing his role as a death metal screamer with a career in the classroom. The two rarely intersected. The singer told Loudwire in 2021 that he wanted to be a “nice-but-a-bit-boring teacher”, although he did let his students stand side-stage for an At The Gates show in 2015.

“They looked really freaked out,” Adrian laughs. “I think it’s quite a lot to take in: seeing your teacher screaming at the front of a stage when there’s a few thousand people in the crowd.”

At The Gates’ first three post-reunion albums tapped into what Tomas was reading in some way. At War With Reality was about the literary genre of magic realism, 2018’s To Drink From The Night Itself was based on Peter Weiss’s antifascist novel The Aesthetics Of Resistance, and 2021’s The Nightmare Of Being was inspired by texts on philosophical pessimism. Written before the singer’s diagnosis, The Ghost Of A Future Dead bucks that trend and digs into his greatest fears.

“What frightened him the most was the vastness of the universe and the deep sea, and combining those things with the smallness of man in the grand scheme of things,” says Jonas. “We had a general idea of what he wanted to do, but it’s too bad we never got to ask Tomas about it, because we never thought it would end like this.”

Tomas was told he had adenoid cystic carcinoma in December 2023, although he kept his condition hidden from fans. Plans to record vocals in the studio in late 2024 were scrapped, as he’d need time to re-learn to speak and sing after surgery. Despite the initial shock, Adrian remembers morale being surprisingly high.

“We were just like, ‘It’s going to be tough but he’s going to pull through,’” he says. “After the surgery, they said they’d cleared all the cancer off, he’s going to have a prosthetic piece [on the roof of his mouth] and everything’s going to be fine.”

But from that point until his death, Tomas endured a series of dramatic ups and downs. In April ’24, after he’d been put on disorientating opiates to help him through radiotherapy and the after-effects of his surgery, he was so concerned that he may never be able to sing or teach again that he suggested the new album be called The Ghost Of A Future Dead. But in early ’25, he was cancer-free and went out for dinner with Anders, Jonas and Martin – their first time seeing him in-person since he started treatment.

“He told me it was the first time he’d eaten a slice of pizza since his surgery,” remembers Jonas. “He was in really high spirits and looking forward to the release.”

Adrian, who now lives in the UK and has a day job driving trucks, wasn’t given the time off to visit his friend.

“My boss was having none of it,” he says, the frustration audible in his voice. “It was pretty shitty, because that was my one chance to see him in good condition.”

Then, in late spring 2025, Tomas got the news that his cancer had come back, and he returned to hospital. He contracted infections, one of which spread to his brain, and complications from another surgery led to him being put on life support. He died on September 16, a month and a day after the band publicly announced his diagnosis.

Reports of Tomas’s passing started circulating on social media that morning, followed by a wave of tributes from fans and peers. Trivium’s Matt Heafy called him “one of the most important singers/screamers of any metal band”.

“As a frontman… he was awesome, plain and simple,” said Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt, adding, “Intellectually, he seemed to be a step above and beyond your generic metal musician.”

At The Gates confirmed the news that afternoon and remembered him as a “true friend, both compassionate and sympathetic”. Today, the Björlers can’t talk about their emotions around Tomas’s death. Adrian is is choked up as he recalls getting a phone call from Anders on the day that Tomas had died.

“I was driving and I couldn’t answer it,” he says. “When I saw that it was Anders, I knew. It was shit, to be honest.”

Although some on social media have speculated about the band carrying on in some way or putting on a tribute show, none of the members have discussed what’s next with each other, because the idea of At The Gates without Tomas Lindberg just feels wrong.

“He was the heart of At The Gates, really,” says Adrian. “I can’t even imagine what we’d have sounded like without him. Even if you don’t consider his voice, just without him, I have no idea what the outcome would’ve been. He was the crown of the band.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 413, June 2026. The Ghost Of A Future Dead is out now. The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra will perform At The Gates, In Flames and Dark Tranquillity songs at Göteborgs Konserthus on December 4 and 5.

Ian Gillan has spoken to Classic Rock about Ritchie Blackmore's unexpected cameo performance with Deep Purple at the Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York, last month.

“I wasn’t really surprised it happened,” Gillan says. “I’ve been in touch with Ritchie for quite a long time now, and we’re on very good terms. All the nonsense from the past is now water under the bridge. We’re getting on great. So as we were in the area, I wasn’t that surprised [to see him], but I was very pleased.”

Blackmore had last shared a stage with Purple way back in November 1993, in Helsinki, during promotion for their aptly titled studio album The Battle Rages On. Bitterness and recrimination from both sides followed the guitarist’s mid-tour resignation, and any number of examples would serve to back up the theory that this was a wound – primarily between Blackmore and singer Ian Gillan – that was never going to heal.

We were wrong. A couple of days before the Jones Beach concert, Gillan had received a message from his former bête noire: “It said: ‘I only live around the corner. Do you mind if I come and jam with you?’” Gillan informed the audience in Wantagh, to massive cheers.

The request actually asked: “How would you feel about it if I got up just for an encore? Just one of the songs. I don’t want to intrude. No pressure, just for old times’ sake.”

After Purple happily accepted the olive branch in the spirit it had been offered, Blackmore divulged the plan – to the incredulity of the rock world – via his social media pages. Following the thirteenth song of the night’s set at Jones Beach, Space Truckin’, the stage went quiet as roadies scurried around with torches. The audience went wild when current Purple guitarist Simon McBride enticed Ritchie onto the stage.

The Man In Black placed his hat on top of the amps and, at first unaccompanied, delivered the most famous rock riff of all time. Six minutes later it was all over. It was probably not the best version of Smoke On The Water that Purple ever played, but as the smiles on stage and off confirmed, few are likely to have been more emotional.

“It was an absolute pleasure to have back on stage the founder member, the great legend, the immortal Ritchie Blackmore,” Gillan told the still-disbelieving audience. “Thanks, Ritchie. I must say it was a great pleasure. I’ll see you in the bar.”

Who bought the first round in the bar?

“Well, I brought along a bottle of whisky and had a couple of drinks for the first time in years at the venue,” Gillan revealed.

Was there time to talk?

“Yeah. We had about half an hour. But we’ve been in touch, as I said earlier, for some time now. Having said that, it was nice doing it face to face. And I’ll probably see Ritchie again next time I’m in the area.”

As well as delighting rock fans, presumably the on-stage reunion brought closure.

“To the public, probably yes,” Gillan responded. “But as far as I’m concerned, the closure was years ago, so I hadn’t even thought about it. But definitely it was a public demonstration of friendship, and good memories.”

The million-dollar question, of course, is whether something similar could ever happen again.

“I don’t know,” Gillan admitted. “The reason we did it there was because Ritchie only lives around the corner. So, I don’t know. If we play Jones Beach or New York again, possibly. Ritchie lives on Long Island but he’s always welcome.”

The following day, Blackmore wrote on social media: “A good night was had by all, I hope. I know that I had a great time. Thanks a lot, lads. Carry on and have a good tour.”

“It was a moving experience because I went on very quickly and had to play immediately,” Blackmore later told Guitar Player. “I couldn’t warm up, but I wasn’t there to play correct notes. I was there to see old friends I hadn’t seen in forty years, and we’re all getting older. I think we realised it could be the last time we see each other, maybe.

“It was tricky. I didn’t play anything too technical, as I felt I should stick to the rudiments of being simple,” the 81-year-old added. “I still lost my place at one point, but it’s not why I was there. I was there to heal any wounds – but there weren’t any wounds. Everyone was like we were in the army all along the Western Front, and we were all getting together again. [It was a] very emotional moment.”

On September 14, papier-mâché-headed alien duo Angine de Poitrine made their US TV debut on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

Of course, their detractors will say that guitarist Khn de Poitrine and drummer Klek de Poitrine are actually a pair of musicians from Saguenay, Quebec. But we're happy to suspend our disbelief. We like polka dots, alright?

The microtonal merchants, who released their second album, Vol. II, in April, debuted a brand new song titled Zugzegk on Fallon's show. The episode also featured guests including neuroscientist/podcaster Andrew Huberman, actor Salma Hayek Pinault and singer Becky G.

Enough with the facts, earthlings! Watch Angine de Poitrine perform Zugzegk in the video below and do that triangle shape with your hands.

The band are currently touring planet Earth until December. Catch them at the following venues across North America and Europe.

Sep 15: Washington The Atlantis, DC
Sep 16: Philadelphia Underground Arts, PA
Sep 17: Washington Lincoln Theatre, DC
Sep 19: Chicago Riot Fest, IL
Sep 20: Richmond Iron Blossom, VA

Oct 13: Bristol Prospect Building, United Kingdom
Oct 14: Glasgow SWG3 Galvanizers, United Kingdom
Oct 16: Dublin Opium, Ireland
Oct 18: Leeds Project House, United Kingdom
Oct 19: London Troxy, United Kingdom
Oct 20: London Troxy, United Kingdom
Oct 21: Paris Élysée Montmartre, France
Oct 22: Paris Élysée Montmartre, France
Oct 24: Lyon L’Epicerie Moderne, France
Oct 25: Antwerp Trix, Belgium
Oct 27: Berlin Festsaal Kreuzberg, Germany
Oct 28: Hamburg Molotow, Germany
Oct 29: Heidelberg Metropolink, Germany
Oct 31: Amsterdam London Calling Festival, Nertherlands
Nov 01: Groningen Vera, Netherlands

Nov 05: Toronto History, ON
Nov 06: Quebec Imperial Hall, QC
Nov 16: Brooklyn Brooklyn Steel, NY
Nov 17: Brooklyn Brooklyn Steel, NY
Nov 18: Brooklyn Brooklyn Steel, NY
Nov 19: Boston Royale, MA
Nov 20: Philadelphia Franklin Music Hall, PA
Nov 22: Mexico City Corona Capital 2026, Mexico
Nov 25: Atlanta The Masquerade, GA
Nov 27: Nashville Brooklyn Bowl, TN
Nov 29: Chicago The Salt Shed, IL
Nov 30: Chicago The Salt Shed, IL
Dec 01: Minneapolis First Ave, MN
Dec 02: Minneapolis First Ave, MN
Dec 04: Los Angeles The Wiltern, CA
Dec 05: Los Angeles The Wiltern, CA
Dec 07: San Francisco The Castro, CA
Dec 08: Oakland Fox Theater, CA
Dec 10: Portland Crystal Ballroom, OR
Dec 11: Portland Crystal Ballroom, OR
Dec 12: Seattle Showbox SoDo, WA
Dec 13: Seattle Paramount Theatre, WA

Find Angine de Poitrine tickets.