The best new rock songs you need to hear right now

Last week was a good week for Dinosaur Pile-Up, as the band celebrated the upcoming release of their first album for Matador Records by triumphing in the latest round of our Tracks Of The Week contest. So congratulations to them. You may reacquaint yourself with their winning entry below.

Joe Bonamassa beat out Jerry Cantrell for the silver medal, and now another eight hopefuls are lined up. They follow, in no particular order, apart from the order in which they appear.

Please vote for your favourite before exiting the page. Thank you.

Halestorm – Everest

Halestorm are back with the title track of their next album (the follow-up to 2022’s Back From The Dead). With some blistering guitar solo action from Joe Hottinger, and a bridge section that stretches into some of their richest, most classic-sounding territory yet, the omens for what’s to come look good. “Our song ‘Everest’ is the summit of everything we’ve fought for – every scream, every scar, every triumph,” firebomb singer/guitarist Lzzy Hale declares. “This album is us, louder and bolder, and more brutally honest than ever, standing tall in the face of the storm.”

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The Cold Stares – Evil Eye

Quickly following up last year’s The Southern Part 1, this commanding blues rock threesome are back with (what else?) this slice of The Southern Part 2, and it’s a winner from its emphatic first note. All slinky Hendrixian tone and groove, it packs a punch that feels sensual even as it grabs you by the shirt collar and… well, gives you the ‘evil eye’. Catch them on these shores at Love Rocks festival in Dorset this month (and across Europe before that).

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Cardinal Black – Breathe

Just ahead of their US tour, Welsh rock’n’soul power trio Cardinal Black have released this silky, impassioned latest taste of their forthcoming album Midnight At The Valencia. “It’s a long, shared history we have,” honey-voiced singer Tom Hollister reflects, of the prolonged, back-and-forth journey (via false starts, separate projects and other forks in their path) that’s brought them here. “We feel like we’ve paid our dues, and this album is the culmination of all that effort.”

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The Inspector Cluzo – As Stupid As You Can

Their new album Less Is More comes out this week, and this deliciously incensed, grungy taster – shot on their farm in Gascony, hay bales and geese included – offers an appetising peek at what’s inside. Expect ragged yet tight, laser-focused riffage, roaring vocals and fiery attacks on the rampant materialism and screen-gazing habits endemic to today. Socially astute but absolutely rocking with it. Their live shows are brilliant, well worth catching when they come to the UK later this year.

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Big Wreck – Believer

“The groove always felt right in this one,” says Ian Thornley, singer/guitarist with these hard-rocking, genre-twisting Canadians, now back with this punchy yet pensive, interesting mix of beefcake grooviness, tempo shifts and blissed out anthemic chorus. “It was written fast, it started with the riff and just kept going. It was important to me, too, that the guitar part had its own narrative, I wanted it to tell its own story.”

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Ihlo – Empire

Back with their first studio material in six years, British contemporary proggers Ihlo are the brains behind this driving, moody banger. Built from a gorgeous, crunchy set of opening guitar chords before soaring into yearning melody, gauzy textures and thoughtfully deployed spates of pummelling weight, it lands in the sweet spot where prog metal feels like less of a niche taste – and more like just another vehicle for good songs, as it should be.

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Luke Morley – Snakeskin Parachute

“This was a random title I’d written down a few years ago. I liked the bizarre combination of the two words,” the Thunder guitarist says of this loose-limbed Stones-y rock’n’roller from his upcoming solo album – he’s no Danny Bowes as a singer, but he holds his own comfortably here. “I had no idea what it meant until I started writing this tune. I guess ‘Snakeskin’ is a metaphor for my musical past and the ‘Parachute’ is me trying to convince myself that if my solo records don’t go down too well, I could always eject and land softly back where I was in my heavy rock comfort zone!” Catch him on tour across the UK in September.

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Sweet Desire – Easy Woman, Lovin’ Woman

This week’s edition of Look! It’s A Band Who Appear To Have Time-Travelled From The 1970s To Be Here features Sweet Desire, who hail from Altoona in central Pennsylvania. The band’s none-more-seventies name is bettered only by the even-more-seventies song title Easy Woman, Lovin’ Woman, a track which sounds a bit like Free, if Free had formed over the embers of a Woodstock campfire rather than in a rehearsal studio in London. It was originally released last year and is now the beneficiary of a new, period-friendly rooftop video, but if you’d like to explore further, two new songs – Cherokee Rider and Hummingbird – are on streaming platforms now. Sweet Desire’s debut album arrives this month.

Polly is deputy editor at Classic Rock magazine, where she writes and commissions regular pieces and longer reads (including new band coverage), and has interviewed rock’s biggest and newest names. She also contributes to Louder, Prog and Metal Hammer and talks about songs on the 20 Minute Club podcast. Elsewhere she’s had work published in The Musician, delicious. magazine and others, and written biographies for various album campaigns. In a previous life as a women’s magazine junior she interviewed Tracey Emin and Lily James – and wangled Rival Sons into the arts pages. In her spare time she writes fiction and cooks.