Author: fgt

L.A. Guns are the Joan Collins of the 1980s Sunset Strip scene: either impervious to age, or with a really good plastic surgeon on speed dial.

Coinciding with their 40th anniversary, and coming eight years after previously estranged singer Phil Lewis and guitarist Tracii Guns kissed and made up after years of lobbing insults at each other from across the street, the most surprising thing about Leopard Skin is that they’ve never used that title before.

But there’s no point in these Hollywood big cats changing their spots at this stage. Lucky Motherfucker and Follow The Master are classic late-period sleaze rock, all lowdown, chugging guitar from Guns and tomcat howl from the ever-characterful Lewis.

They garnish The Grinder with some cool slide guitar, and serve up a restrained ballad with The Masquerade, but no one’s reinventing the wheel here, and after 40 years nor should they be. Joan would be proud.

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.

I really enjoy Sleep Token. From the moment I discovered the UK masked metal outfit around their 2017 EP Two, I was impressed with their ability to leap from soulful verses to soul-crushingly heavy bludgeonings.

However, as the following behind Vessel and his gang of acolytes only grows and grows, so strengthens a narrative which I can’t let slide: that they are the first band in the history of their genre to do what they do. Truth is, even though Sleep Token are probably the most successful band to do what they do, they – like many others – have progenitors and influences that laid the groundwork for their ascent.

So, below, I’ve sung the praises of nine metal bands who set the stage for these cultists to take over.

Meshuggah

Meshuggah invented a new language of metal. During the Swedes’ 90s and 00s ascent, Tomas Haake raised the bar for technical drumming, tapping out wild rhythms with his feet while his arms offered a headbangable backbeat. At the same time, Fredrik Thordendal and Mårten Hagström’s seven- and eight-string riffs pioneered the subgenre of ‘djent’. It’s a style of playing that Sleep Token’s nameless guitarist has used since the band’s debut EP, laying down horrendous heaviness after sensual passages of keys and vocals. This lot wouldn’t exist without Meshuggah – and nor would half the metal artists who’ve blown up over the last 20 years.

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Bring Me The Horizon

Sleep Token were already rising stars by the start of 2023, but it was TikTok catching wind of them that sent them supernova. Where they began that year in 5,000-capacity academies, they ended it headlining an arena big enough for 12,500. They weren’t the first metal band that the platform launched to the stratosphere, though. In January 2021, Bring Me The Horizon’s Can You Feel My Heart soundtracked a viral trend and rocketed up the US and UK charts in the aftermath. The following September, the band embarked on their first arena tour, and they’ve stayed at those lofty heights ever since.

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Ghost

Ghost are another band whose audience expanded beyond belief via TikTok. In 2022, the app unearthed the b-side Mary On A Cross and made it massive. Tobias Forge’s cult have more than that in common with Sleep Token, though. They weren’t the first masked group in metal, nor the first masked group to have lore, but they were the first masked group with lore that fascinated the mainstream. The gimmick of a masked devil church with a skeleton pope singer simply proved fun to talk about and caught on like cholera. Without a doubt, Vessel was looking on and taking notes.

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Deftones

Once The Summoning went viral, many couldn’t get over how horny it was. “My love, did I mistake you for a sign from God? Or are you really here to cast me off? Or maybe just to turn me on?” Vessel asked, loins almost audibly turgid. However, when it comes to randy riffing, the last word is Deftones. For 30 years, frontman Chino Moreno has been wantonly moaning in fans’ ears, gushing alongside a soundtrack of leaden metal and gooey shoegaze. The Californians initially got lumped in with nu metal, but master-strokes White Pony and Diamond Eyes gave them a life well beyond that movement.

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Nine Inch Nails

Plenty of people talk about Sleep Token’s mix of prog, metal, pop, indie and so on, but it’d be disingenuous to ignore the electronic pulse that runs through much of their music, new single Emergence very much included. And, when it comes to the collision of the digital and the rocky, the idols for many are Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor’s project were at the crest of the industrial wave in the late 1980s, bridging the gap between sturdy, primal guitar playing and computerised accoutrements. With megahits including Closer and Hurt to their name, they continue to influence countless artists.

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Tesseract

Meshuggah may have invented djent, but it was Tesseract who unearthed its melodic potential. Originally, the Brits were one of an array of bedroom projects mimicking the ideas the Swedish luminaries introduced, but they gradually found a tenderness that lifted them above the pack. Singers Abisola Obasanya, Daniel Tompkins and Ashe O’Hara all deserve credit for finding beauty in the chuggy dissonance, while guitarist Acle Kahney layers ambient leads on top of his own hulking riffs. Listen to such anthems as Nocturne, Juno and Luminary and you’ll hear the same down-tuned push and pull that Sleep Token specialise in.

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Leprous

Sometimes it feels like Sleep Token owe Leprous royalties. On their 2013 album Coal and especially its masterpiece of a follow-up The Congregation, the Norwegians paved the “dynamic, hook-packed prog” avenue that Vessel’s bunch are driving down. It’s easy to hear the echo of such odysseys as Moon and The Valley – which journey from electrified verses to climactic, metallic refrains – in the likes of The Summoning. The band also touch on funk (I Lose Hope), post-rock (On Hold) and classical (The Last Milestone) across their spotless catalogue, while Einar Solberg’s vocals are as diverse as they are heart-rending.

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Failure

Failure are the sole band that we know for certain Vessel listens to. In his only-ever interview, the vocalist named the space/alt-rockers’ magnum opus Fantastic Planet as his favourite album from the 1990s. “It’s devastatingly bleak in a way that resonates into our deepest self,” he explained in his typically cryptic way. Released as the angst of grunge was on the downswing and nu metal was starting to rampage its way towards the mainstream, the band’s final release for 19 years never got the love it deserves, but its introspective lyrics and down-trodden mood definitely crept into Sleep Token’s material.

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Shining

Not to be confused with the Swedish black metal band of the same name, Norway’s Shining are the founders of ‘blackjazz’. Their 2010 album saw them leap from jazz to metal but carry some of their old instrumentation with them, resulting in dizzying compositions like Fisheye and The Madness And The Damage Done. These noisy achievements employed a hell of a lot of saxophone solos, and since then the instrument’s become more commonplace in heavier music. Rivers Of Nihil, Caligula’s Horse and – of course – Sleep Token have all used it to lend some loungy sophistication to their craft.

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Prog and Metal Hammer, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Guitar and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

The debut collection from includes: Die-Liner – “a rich, high-pigment black eyeliner designed to make a statement” – Liquid Lipstick, the Welcome To Horrorwood eyeshadow palette (“fifteen versatile shades to create looks from wearable natural, smoky to vibrant eye-catching styles”) and Devil’s ‘Do Grim Grip pomade, to “keep you looking sharp through even the most violent of nights.”

For more information about the range, go here.

Ice Nine Kills support Metallica in Toronto on April 26, before playing headline shows across North America, plus further select shows with Metallica, and US festivals including Sonic Temple and Warped Tour.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

In the middle of legal disputes over their name, Pink Floyd created a personal and emotionally exposed album. The Division Bell defiantly went against the Britpop zeitgeist to top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Prog explored its history in 2014.

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“Why is that bloke singing like Syd?” asked Rick Wright. It was May 1994, and Pink Floyd’s keyboard player had just heard Blur’s new album Parklife. Floyd were on tour in America and had gathered in guitarist David Gilmour’s hotel suite to listen to the album that had just supplanted their latest, The Division Bell, at the No.1 spot.

Wright might have been concerned that Damon Albarn sounded like his ex-bandmate Syd Barrett, but his was the only dissenting voice. “We wanted to hear what all the fuss was about,” bassist Guy Pratt said. “Most of us thought Parklife was very good.”

Pink Floyd could afford to be gracious in defeat. The Division Bell, released in March 1994, became the band’s first album since 1975’s Wish You Were Here to reach No.1 in both the UK and US. Their 14th studio release also went multi-platinum and turned out to be a lone victory for prog rock in the boom years of Blur-style Britpop and dance music.

The Division Bell should be remembered for its music rather than the intra-band bickering that had blighted the previous nine years.

In October 1985, three years after Floyd’s The Final Cut, founder member/bass guitarist Roger Waters took out a High Court application to try to prevent the band name being used again. Weeks later he informed the group’s record company that he was leaving the band, and that the group were no more.

Unfortunately for Waters, Gilmour had no intention of laying Floyd to rest. “Dave absolutely saw red, and finally got it together to go back to work,” wrote drummer Nick Mason in his memoir, Inside Out. A year later, the Waters-less Floyd made their debut with A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.

Wright, who’d left under duress in 1979, had returned midway through the sessions, but wasn’t made a full-time member again. Instead, his name topped a list of 16 session musicians deployed to help bring the band back from the dead. Gilmour worked briefly with several outside songwriters, and the process was frequently interrupted by calls from lawyers tasked with defending his decision to continue. Waters even tried to stop the new Floyd from touring – but failed.

We had what we called ‘the big listen,’ where everyone voted on each piece of music

He went on to describe A Momentary Lapse as “a fair forgery,” but it still reached No.3 in Britain and America, and was promoted with a tour that turned Floyd into the second highest grossing act of 1987.

“I didn’t think it was the best Pink Floyd album ever made,” Gilmour admitted. But it proved that Floyd could still be a commercial success without Waters, the man who’d devised the concepts for The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall.

The first steps towards making The Division Bell began in January 1993 with Gilmour, Mason and Wright jamming in their Britannia Row Studios in North London. Before long, Pratt, who’d played on the Momentary Lapse tour, joined them. It was a dream come true for the bassist who, as a teenager, had watched his colleagues play The Wall at Earls Court. “It was thrilling to know you were playing on a Pink Floyd record,” he said Pratt, recalling that Gilmour gently instructed him to lose “90 per cent of the notes I was playing”.

By spring, Gilmour had moved the operation to his houseboat-cum-studio, Astoria, on the Thames, and he brought in The Wall and Momentary Lapse co-producer Bob Ezrin. Having amassed around 65 of what Mason described as “riffs, patterns and musical doodles,” Gilmour reported that “we had what we called ‘the big listen,’ where everyone voted on each piece of music.”

Ideas were merged or discarded; but so much material was left over that the band briefly considered, then rejected, the idea of releasing some of it on a separate album, including a set they dubbed The Big Spliff – which was, Mason explained, “the kind of ambient mood music being adopted by bands like The Orb.”

The voting system was abandoned when the others discovered that Wright was awarding his ideas the highest possible score, and everybody else’s the lowest. Part of the problem was that he wasn’t a full band member: “It came very close to a point where I wasn’t going to do the album, because I didn’t feel that what we’d agreed was fair,” he said. Soon he was fully reinstated, and scored credits on four of the album’s 11 tracks.

High Hopes pulled the whole album together. It also gave us an idea around which to hang some of the broader concepts

Shortly before the summer, Floyd – joined by Pratt and fellow touring members Tim Renwick Gary Wallis and Jon Carin – entered Olympic Studios in Barnes, West London, and recorded a handful of new songs. They later reconvened on the Astoria and began developing those tracks further. But Gilmour now faced the hurdle of writing lyrics; and unlike Waters, he wasn’t a confident lyricist. Ex-Slapp Happy songwriter Anthony Moore – who’d co-written on A Momentary Lapse – and former Dream Academy singer-songwriter Nick Laird-Clowes would both contribute to The Division Bell. But Gilmour’s then girlfriend, journalist and author Polly Samson, would end up co-writing the lion’s share of the words.

“I started writing things and looking to her for an opinion; and gradually, as a writer herself and an intelligent person, she started putting her oar in, and I encouraged her,” explained Gilmour, who’d spend the day working on the music on the Astoria before going home to write with his soon-to-be wife. “There was,” he said, “a whole invisible side to the process.”

Not everyone was comfortable with the situation. “It wasn’t easy at first,” Ezrin admitted. “It put a strain on the boys’ club, and it was almost clichéd to have this new woman coming in and then get involved in the career. But whatever David was thinking at the time, she helped him find a way to say it.”

Between them, the couple wrote the album’s strongest song, High Hopes. “It pulled the whole album together,” said Ezrin. “It also gave us an idea around which to hang some of the broader concepts.” Partly inspired by Gilmour’s childhood and adolescence in Cambridge, its beautiful lap steel guitar solo evoked Shine On You Crazy Diamond, while composer Michael Kamen’s orchestral arrangement flashed back to the strings and woodwind he’d used on Comfortably Numb.

In the meantime, Floyd dragged some of their vintage keyboards out of storage and sampled their sounds for Take It Back and Marooned. Wright was delighted: “My influence can be heard on tracks like Marooned. Those were the kind of things that I gave the Floyd in the past – it was good that they were now getting used again.”

In fact, the whole album was full of familiar motifs. Dark Side and Wish You Were Here saxophonist Dick Parry returned to the fold. So too did Dark Side mixing supervisor Chris Thomas, who helped oversee the final mix instead of Ezrin. “That was disappointing,” understated the producer.

It’s more of a wish that all problems can be solved through discussion, rather than a belief

High Hopes’ themes of nostalgia and reflection were reprised in the Gilmour, Samson and Laird-Clowes composition Poles Apart. Its first verse was inspired by Barrett; its second by Waters. What Ezrin called “the broader concept” of The Division Bell was communication and the difficulties thereof: between friends, wives and lovers, and former bandmates.

The clues were there in titles such as Lost For Words and Keep Talking, the last of which sampled scientist Stephen Hawking’s voice. “It’s more of a wish that all problems can be solved through discussion, rather than a belief,” said Gilmour, who was well aware of the irony considering Floyd’s poor track record in communicating with each other.

However, The Division Bell also seemed to have a subtext: rebirth. On Wearing The Inside Out, Wright cast himself as a man venturing back into the world after years of isolation. “There’s a lot of emotional honesty there,” said Ezrin. “Fans pick up on a sad and vulnerable side of Rick.”

Wright wasn’t the only one being emotionally honest. Gilmour talked about ‘killing the past’ on Coming Back To Life. Many took this as a reference to embracing his relationship with Samson and rejecting the hedonistic lifestyle he’d been enjoying for the previous few years.

Revisiting The Division Bell now, the angst and tension remains clear. On What Do You Want From Me, supposedly inspired by good old fashioned marital strife, Gilmour sounds fired up and frustrated as he dishes out some heavy blues guitar. Play it alongside 2006’s charming if very contented-sounding solo album On An Island, and you can hear the difference.

The album was complete by the new year, and the band began casting around for titles. Nick Mason favoured ‘Down To Earth’; others preferred ‘Pow-Wow’. In the end band friend and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams, spotted the words ‘the division bell’ in the lyrics to High Hopes, and suggested that instead.

I wish it wasn’t the last Pink Floyd album. But I wouldn’t hold my breath

Although the record suffers from what Pratt calls some “80s production hangovers,” it’s compensated for by Gilmour’s sense of tension and urgency, along with Wright’s welcome presence. Unlike Momentary Lapse, The Division Bell feels like a group effort; and Gilmour was soon telling interviewers that he thought it was the most Pink Floyd-sounding album since Wish You Were Here. Everything from those spaced-out keyboards to the languid guitar solos and Storm Thorgerson’s grandiose cover art compounded his theory.

Waters called it “an awful record,” and Melody Maker likened it to “chewing on a bucket of gravel” – but Floyd’s fanbase disagreed and the album soon topped the charts in 10 countries. Naturally, you can’t help wondering what a follow-up might have sounded like. Bob Ezrin feels the same. “I wish it wasn’t the last Pink Floyd album,” he said. “But I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

Mark Blake is a music journalist and author. His work has appeared in The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and the magazines Q, Mojo, Classic Rock, Music Week and Prog. He is the author of Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd, Is This the Real Life: The Untold Story of Queen, Magnifico! The A–Z Of Queen, Peter Grant, The Story Of Rock’s Greatest Manager and Pretend You’re in a War: The Who & The Sixties.