On Monday, May 5, Coalition for Music Education will celebrate Music Monday with a cross-country sing-along to raise awareness for music education. The annual event celebrates the unifying power of music as thousands of Canadians join in singing and performing the Music Monday anthem at their schools and other community events. “Hold On” the uplifting, inspirational song by classic Canadian hard rock power trio, Triumph, has been chosen as the 2025 Music Monday anthem.
“We wanted to celebrate homegrown talent and Triumph’s ‘Hold On’ was a natural choice because of its powerful message of a belief in our own resiliency,” says Stacey Sinclair, Coalition for Music Education in Canada Executive Director. “The soaring melody, heartfelt lyrics and emotional resonance mirror the galvanizing need for support and connection which is at the heart of this nationwide celebration of the impact of music education in our schools and communities. We are so grateful to Triumph band members Rik Emmett, Gil Moore and Mike Levine for lending us this song and for their enthusiastic support of Music Monday.”
Released in June 1979, “Hold On” was the first chart-topping single for Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductees Triumph. Vocalist, guitarist and songwriter, Rik Emmett explains, “The song ‘Hold On’ was a tipping point for me as a recording artist: I felt I’d finally come up with a song that spoke directly to why the band I was in called itself “Triumph”. We were going to be a band about positivity, motivation and inspiration: long before self-help was even a thing, and this song was a catalyst for all that we went on to accomplish.”
Each year, on the first Monday of May thousands of students, musicians, parents and community members across the country will simultaneously sing and/or play the Music Monday anthem creating the world’s largest single event dedicated to raising awareness for music education. Created to celebrate the power of music and demonstrate how that power is rooted in school music programs, Music Monday will be observed in many ways across the country – in school classrooms, special school assemblies, group concerts of area schools, concerts of community bands and choirs with special events.
Gil Moore, Triumph drummer and co-vocalist and founder Metalworks Studios, Metalworks Institute and SoundsUnite says, “Mike, Rik, and I are honored that ‘Hold On’ is this year’s signature song, featuring Rik’s new collaborative recording of the song based on a poem he composed back in his high school days. We are all thrilled to support this year’s Music Monday event to highlight the importance of music education and music engagement for all people in Canada.”
The annual Music Monday event is the signature program of The Coalition for Music Education in Canada, Since its inception in 2005, Music Monday has touched the lives of millions of students and teachers across Canada who take their music programs into their communities to perform the same song on the same day, at the same time, uniting the entire country in song.
Past years’ sons have been composed by Luke Doucet, Serena Ryder, Dala, Chris Tait (Chalk Circle), Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield with Ed Robertson of Barenaked Ladies, Connor Ross, then a 16-year-old high school student and legendary Canadian singer songwriters Marc Jordan and Ian Thomas.
Registration is free and provides access to teacher resources, numerous audio and video recordings, arrangements, lyric sheets, sing-along video and an Artist Guide & Learning Guide. All registered participants also receive access to numerous online music education sessions released on Music Monday. Participants are invited to register their events for free at musicmonday.ca.
Music Monday would not be possible without the support of the NAMM Foundation, Long & McQuade Musical Instruments, Yamaha Music Canada, CMIEC, Whitecap Entertainment: Rising Tide Community Fund, Caju Multi Media, Metalworks Studios, Metalworks Institute, SoundsUnite, Victoria Lord PR and Universal Music Group.
The Coalition for Music Education in Canada exists to raise awareness of the vital role music education plays in our schools and the profound benefits music engagement brings to individuals and communities. Quality music education is a cornerstone of a well-rounded education, nurturing creativity, enhancing academic performance, building emotional resilience, and fostering social connection. For more information, visit coalitioncanada.ca.
Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductees, Triumph epitomized arena rock in the 1980s. Their virtuoso musicianship, soaring melodies, exceptional songs and outstanding live shows made them superstars and an enormous influence on stage and on record.
Vocalist/guitarist Rik Emmett, bass guitarist/keyboardist Mike Levine and vocalist/drummer Gil Moore met in Toronto in 1975. Their commercial breakthrough came in 1979 with their third album, Just A Game. It generated the band’s first Billboard Top 40 hit single, “Hold On”. In 1988, Emmett left Triumph to pursue a solo career. Levine and Moore recruited a new vocalist and guitarist – fellow Canadian Phil Xenidis, known as Phil X.
The classic Emmett-Levine-Moore line-up reunited in June 2008 to play at the Sweden Rock Festival, and then headlined the mammoth Rocklahoma Festival in July. Celebrated for their instrumental prowess, the band members excelled in other outlets as well. Levine co-produced some of the band’s early work. Emmett became a cartoonist for Hit Parader magazine. And Moore designed Triumph’s phenomenal live shows, which consistently evolved over the years and always used state-of-the-art lighting, laser and pyrotechnic effects. In fact, Triumph received the influential Performance Magazine “Innovators of the Year” award in 1981 for the unique way they changed the arena-rock landscape.
Triumph’s music reached a new generation of fans when “Lay It On The Line” was included in the Guitar Hero 5 video game in late 2009.
Triumph was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2008 and Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2019.
“Metal is the only genre that’s open to so many different types of music. That’s why Babymetal is here right now”: How Babymetal smashed the barriers and defied the haters to become Japan’s biggest metal band
(Image credit: Toru Yamanaka/AFP via Getty Images)
Babymetal are one of the biggest success stories of the last 15 years – and one of the most unexpected. Metal Hammer caught up with the Japanese sensations in 2015, at the start of their meteoric rise, to find out just how three girls from Japan had become metal’s most exciting new band.
We snake around the dressing rooms in the artist area of Download festival on Friday afternoon, and there they are: lead singer Su-metal, flanked by backing singers Yuimetal and Moametal, dressed in their signature red-and-black outfits. The disarmingly kawaii Marmite band of metal. They’re the biggest thing to have hit our scene in the last two years, yet they’ve split the vote on whether they actually belong. And all those arguments come down to these three, smiling girls, eager to meet us. We extend our hand in greeting, and ask how they’re doing.
“We are very good!” they exclaim in unison, faces lighting up. And, after a brief pause to find the right words, “We are looking forward to The Golden Gods!”
Babymetal aren’t officially playing Download today, but they’ll be making a surprise appearance during Dragonforce’s set, where the guys will take the place of the girls’ usual backing musicians, The Kami Band, in a real-life rehearsal for Metal Hammer’s awards ceremony on Monday.
Of course, this won’t be Babymetal’s first UK festival appearance. On July 5 2014, they made their debut on Sonisphere’s main stage, appearing higher up the bill than critically lauded tech metallers Tesseract. Two days later, they sold out London’s Forum, and a triumphant Brixton Academy show followed in November. A couple of weeks before this Download appearance, they played their biggest-ever show in Japan, at the 25,000-capacity Makuhari Messe venue in Chiba. And then there are the rockstar selfies: Limp Bizkit, Kiss, Metallica and countless more have appeared with the girls on snaps plastered all over Twitter.
This feature originally appeared in Metal Hammer issue 273 (August 2015) (Image credit: Future)
Like it or not, Babymetal are a seismic event in our world, rocking its core with riffs and cracking its tough facade with spin-kicks and smiles. This weekend, Metal Hammer will become the first magazine to spend 72 hours up close with the band, observing the Babymetal phenomenon first-hand as they continue their journey of global domination…
But first, we ask who they’d like to see at Download today, and their answer is a decidedly metal: “Judas Priest!” Their founder and manager, Kobametal, excitedly produces a Babymetal t-shirt that parodies the artwork of 1990 album Painkiller, with all three girls riding on the bike. The trio pose with it, flashing their Fox God horns sign (like normal horns, but with middle fingers pointing out to make a fox face, obviously), and we obligingly snap the moment on our iPhone.
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Signs of fame are all around us – Corey Taylor strolls by with a smile, and small clumps of people are hanging back and pretending not to stare in our direction. Then, as we walk from the closeted artist area to the less restricted media area, so the band can do a TV appearance, the reaction is akin to the Kardashians walking the streets of LA. A frenzy of photographers and selfie-hunters elbow each other out of the way to get a glimpse of the girls. Dragonforce mastermind Herman Li appears behind us in the scrum. “We haven’t played together before,” he reveals, his face showing the combined weight of responsibility and jetlag. “I couldn’t sleep last night…”
Babymetal in 2014: (from left) Moametal,. Su-metal, Yuimetal (Image credit: Toru Yamanaka/AFP via Getty Images)
Though Dragonforce are thrilled to be working with Babymetal, many metallers have criticised them for being “manufactured”. The three singers were in a schoolgirl pop idol group called Sakura Gakuin (‘Cherry Blossom Academy’), when Kobametal, a metal enthusiast who worked in media promotions, recruited them to fulfil his heavier vision. Their accompanying Kami Band is composed of a revolving lineup of musicians who are “summoned by the Fox God”, and the music is written by various secret composers. One contributor, who will only answer questions anonymously, reveals he grew up with metal but entered a Babymetal songwriting contest after Doki Doki * Morning “left such a strong impression” on him.
“I wanted to do something new, something to get people to look at Japan and associate it with metal, and that’s how I came up with fusing pop with metal that I love,” Kobametal explains.
Certainly the Babymetallers themselves are full of Disney Club-style teen spirit today when describing their joy at being selected for the band. As we sit down to chat, their entourage swarms around us – cameraman, security guard, make-up artist, women waving fans, and Kobametal, a slight yet ever-present ponytailed figure in a hoodie, watching over his charges.
“Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to be a singer, and now I’m able to sing and dance a lot, I feel like my dream has actually come true,” enthuses 17-year-old Su-metal, speaking through their tour manager and interpreter, Nora, as their crew constantly films. Moametal, 16, says that “even as a child, I have always wanted to be the reason of someone’s happiness, of someone being able to smile, and I feel like I’m doing that right now in Babymetal”. Yuimetal, also 16, confesses there was an element of hero-worship to her career choices. “As a kid – [‘Of course, they’re still kids!’ adds Nora during the translation] – I didn’t want to be a singer, but I saw Su-metal in her previous group and I loved it, and that made me want to do it,” she beams.
The group might look and sound like something people would associate with Japanese gameshows, manga or movies, but Kobametal’s fanboy fusion approach actually makes them something of an anomaly in the Land Of The Rising Sun.
“In Japan, the idol group is a big market. Metal is a small market,” confirms Naoyuki ‘Ume’ Umezawa, who founded Japanese metal magazine Headbang after discovering the band. “Babymetal are in the middle, because it’s a mixture of the two. People see them and think they’re idol, but what they’re doing is metal, so they probably think it’s strange – they’re such cute girls, so why are they headbanging?”
Closer to home, Kobametal witnessed similar cultural confusion. “I can’t really speak for the general public, but I gave my mum a CD, and obviously she doesn’t listen to metal. Her first reaction was to say, ‘This is very, very, interesting…” he laughs.
Ume also says that he’s seen the band grow slowly via word of mouth, in contrast to idol groups who operate like single-producing corporate machines.
“Idol fans are not stupid – they can smell money, and see what companies are behind the girls and boys,” he explains. “But Babymetal is actually the opposite. “If you just take a look at how they started, you can’t smell big money. They’re an idol group, but there’s an organic feel to it.”
Back at Download, it’s 7pm, and we’re behind The Maverick Stage, where Babymetal are readying themselves for their first live collaboration – and it’s with a genuine metal band. As Dragonforce shred the life out of their instruments, rain lashes down outside, dampening the festival mood. Team Babymetal gather for a huddle, putting their hands on top of each other’s before raising them triumphantly. Then they leap onstage and twirl through breakthrough song Gimme Chocolate!! (penned by Takeshi Ueda of Mad Capsule Markets), and crowd elation hits 11, buoyed by its earworm of a chorus. The phones come out, too. Hundreds of them. As well as 40 professional cameras down in the pit. As the trio shout a “Thank you!”, bassist Fred Leclercq forms his hands into a heart shape and presses them against his forehead, bowing to them reverentially.
Post show, Babymetal have lost none of their excitement, though it’s tempered as ever with slick, professional politeness.
“Today when we heard Dragonforce was watching our live videos from the recent tour to try to get the feel of the stage, it made us feel, like, ‘Wow, you’re really trying to make us feel comfortable’, and we’re so appreciative of that,” nods Moametal. “Also, they tried to emulate the sound of our support band, and we could feel it. It was really fun, and we feel so thankful for this opportunity.”
And with that, we leave them to watch Judas Priest and Slipknot.
It’s Sunday when we next catch up with Babymetal, at rehearsals for Metal Hammer’s Golden God awards inside London’s IndigO2 venue. The crowds are gone, snappers are banned, and the atmosphere is more relaxed. Yesterday, they went shopping at Camden Market and bought souvenirs for their friends, before heading to Wembley Arena to watch, um, Aussie pop group Five Seconds Of Summer…
“Their fans are more hardcore than metal fans!” exclaims Kobametal, reflecting on the screaming. The response from Babymetal is typically ambitious.
“They went and saw everything, and were like, ‘This is where we wanna play one day!’” translates Nora.
Who did the girls prefer out of Five Seconds Of Summer and Slipknot?
They collapse into giggles, chatting over each other. “Both of them!” says Nora.
Today is all about practising with Dragonforce, working out how they’ll interact and how they’ll pull off Road Of Resistance – a song they wrote together last year, which Herman Li describes as “fast”, on a level with the Guitar-Hero-famous Through The Fire And The Flames.
“When we were writing the song, we thought, ‘You know what? Let’s make it really difficult to play, complicated and crazy, because we never thought we’d have to play it live anyway,” he grins. “Luckily we’ve been on tour for a long time now, so we can learn it quickly, but it’s not your average song you can pick up…”
Babymetal retire to their dressing room to go over some secret moves for a show back home, so we sit in a backstage lounge area with the rest of the team and eat Japanese potato snacks with smiling chip characters on the packets. Behind a red door, Doki Doki * Morning rings out loud and strong. Make no mistake – these girls can sing. When they emerge, they ravenously refuel with water.
Babymetal’s Su-metal onstage at the 2015 Reading Festival (Image credit: Chiaki Nozu/Getty Images)
Over the weekend, countless people describe Babymetal as “cute”, and it’s easy to see why. The happy snacks. The pop hooks. Today’s off-duty uniforms of tour t-shirts and pyjama bottoms. Even the way they behave when they’re not onstage or on camera – leaving the venue later this evening, Yuimetal will fly out of the dressing room on the back of a skate- board attached to her suitcase. But being in Babymetal also requires a lot of hard work and dedication. There’s schoolwork with a tutor in the morning, and band stuff in the afternoon. Their days must be mentally and physically demanding.
“The girls are having fun on tour,” says Kobametal, when we ask how he makes sure Babymetal are taken care of. “For them, it’s probably not difficult. It’s definitely difficult for the adults, ha ha ha! This is something the girls can’t experience in Japan. They have so much interest in the culture abroad, and they’ll probably learn more English than any of their classmates in Japan, sitting in classrooms with their teacher.”
Do you feel paternal towards them?
“Definitely. They call me dad, and they have a ‘tour mum’ here – it’s like a family touring together.”
If the girls find their schedule tough, though, you wouldn’t know it. They’re always giggling, and any questions about the band are greeted with stage-school meticulousness. It’s a strange contrast that they sound wise beyond their years, yet their young appearances make you feel uncomfortable about asking anything too deep for fear of upsetting them.
Up on the venue’s stage, Babymetal execute the high-octane routine of Gimme Chocolate!! with the precision of programmed robots, Dragonforce respectfully giving them space. The second time around, the guys let loose. It looks like they’ve been playing together for years. Kobametal claps and gives an approving thumbs up. Then they try Road Of Resistance, Dragonforce looking relieved when it turns out well. After a few more run-throughs, they practise a simultaneous jump and a group bow, and there’s lots of laughter all round. “See you!” shriek the girls, waving to an imaginary audience. “See you!” echo Dragonforce, putting on comically deep voices.
Once the trio have left, it’s time for Kobametal to discuss improvements with Herman, before going to a meeting in town. It does seem that, for the grown-ups at least, Babymetal never stops. Ever the metal fan, he’s in awe of what’s just happened.
“I can’t believe I’m sitting in the same room as Dragonforce!” he tells us, holding out his hands and gesturing to the band.
Through the chaos and the circus, you get the impression Kobametal is living his dream, sharing conversations and stages and music with his life-long idols. And, if Babymetal are to be believed, they’re living theirs. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
It’s Golden Gods day! And it’s Babymetal’s fifth show in the UK – their most visited destination after Japan and the US, and testament to our ongoing obsession with them. Kobametal is amazed by his band’s success abroad. They’ve also played to passionate crowds in Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, Canada and Mexico, and he reckons they’re the first Japanese metal outfit to ever get this far, never mind the fact they’re out of the ordinary.
“There are many bands who have left Japan to try the market over here, but never a group of minors, girls – not a performing troupe,” he marvels.
Whether their success here is due to their actual music or their ‘novelty’ factor is another question. Either way, according to Headbang’s Ume, it’s this overseas attention that has made Babymetal’s own country sit up and pay attention. At Christmas, TV channel NHK, the Japanese equivalent of the BBC, aired a documentary about Babymetal, featuring footage of London’s Brixton show. “People weren’t really aware of Babymetal, because they didn’t do much publicity in Japan, but they did a lot of publicity outside of Japan,” he explains. “They played Sonisphere, they supported Lady Gaga, and then all this news coming into Japan made everyone aware.”
Ume says Japanese metal fans are split into two camps: people who think Babymetal are “really good”, and people who think they’re “really bad”, but more and more people are converting over time. On the flip side, pop fans have started to explore heavy music.
“Babymetal started as an idol unit, so the fans are obviously idol fans. But now they’re doing so much outside of Japan, with all the proper metal festivals, proper metal fans are becoming fans of Babymetal. And the idol fans have started to think, ‘OK, if Babymetal is so much to do with metal, then I’m going to start listening to metal,” Ume explains. “So there are not just Babymetal fans, but metal fans generally growing from idol fans.”
Babymetal pick up the Breakthrough Band Awards at 2015’s Metal Hammer Golden Gods awards (Image credit: Jo Hale/Redferns via Getty Images)
In England, reactions have also been mixed, with a flood of online criticism aimed at Babymetal’s cutesy appropriation of metal’s tropes. Tonight, on the most important date of the metal calendar, Babymetal are once again intersecting with heaviness in a pop-idol style, bringing the heritage of metal into their new future. Their trailer is opposite Brian May’s. Members of Napalm Death stroll by. Fresh initiates into the Babymetal celebrity photo cult include Gene Simmons, Dave Mustaine, Duff McKagan, Butcher Babies, Killing Joke, Bring Me The Horizon and Scott Ian. But for Kobametal, this genre cross-pollination is entirely the point of Babymetal.
“I don’t think Babymetal is metal, either,” he says, somewhat surprisingly. “I think Babymetal is Babymetal. If Babymetal had appeared 10 years ago, I would have been one of those people bashing them for ruining metal. But the reason I wanted to create Babymetal is that out of all the genres of music, metal is the only one that’s open to so many different types. There’s rap-metal, melodic metal, power metal and black metal. As much as the metal scene is very closed-minded, it’s open to all different types of music. That’s why Babymetal is here right now.”
Kobametal, Yuimetal, Ume and the anonymous songwriter all use the words “creating a new genre” in relation to the group. It sounds like marketing speak, though if Babymetal really can’t find favour in metal or pop, it’s perhaps a sensible aim.
“You can call it pop, you can call it heavy music, but it doesn’t really fit anywhere because it’s a combination of things,” reasons Kobametal.
But for now, it’s time to find out whether those rehearsals paid off. Inside the IndigO2, the crowd surges forward. The girls come on bearing flags for Road Of Resistance, as that strange synthesis of genres once again bounces off the walls, before a group singalong to the chorus of Gimme Chocolate!! Over here, we’ve only seen simple Babymetal shows, but in Japan they’re high-concept offerings with coffins, temples and shrines wreathed in smoke and fire, plus some heavy metal setpieces designed to satisfy fanatics.
“At one show, there was a big torso of a goddess. Towards the end of the show, it broke,” remembers Ume. “If you’ve seen Metallica’s …And Justice For All tour, Kobametal took the idea from that. So many people saw it from the beginning and thought, ‘Ah! It’s going to explode!’ Metal fans are so excited to see which band is going to be the next motif. Is it going to be Dio, Manowar…?”
This magpie-like borrowing isn’t limited to shows and merch – it’s the same with their music. Kobametal consistently and geekily references the history of the genre.
“He’s embedding phrases from Metallica, Sabbath and all these famous bands’ music into their songs,” notes Ume. “For example, in Onedari Daisakusen, they’re using a sample of Limp Bizkit. It’s like digging for treasure on the beach. Every time Babymetal release a song, the fans listen, listen, listen, to find those tiny bits. It’s like hip-hop [sampling].”
BABYMETAL – Road of Resistance – Live in Japan (OFFICIAL) – YouTube
As BabyDragon finish their Golden Gods set, the loud, Fox God horns-up response to their performance makes it easy to forget they even have detractors. Wherever they go, they leave a trail of jumping-for-joy emotion in their wake.
“I think people like them because metal has always been about fun,” says Max Vaccaro, general manager of Babymetal’s European label, earMUSIC, home to bands such as Stratovarius and Gamma Ray. They’ve just re-released Babymetal’s self-titled debut for Europe, which has sold as many copies in a few days as most of their label’s artists sell in a year. “Not every subgenre of metal, but if you think that bands like Kiss, Mötley Crüe and many others are still touring with great success, it means that people possibly want to have a bit of fun at the same time as enjoying pure, extreme metal music played and performed well, so I believe that that’s the secret.”
Dragonforce’s Fred has a more emotional response: “It’s like two universes colliding. It’s brutal, because it sounds like Slipknot, low and evil, and then those girls are going, ‘Eeeeee!’ And aw, they’re so cute. Inside every Babymetal fan there’s a small heart of gold, and that heart is melting when they see those Babymetal girls.”
Will Babymetal eventually melt everyone’s hearts? Only the Fox God knows. “If more people listen to Babymetal, and if that sparks an interest in metal, that’s good enough for me,” says Kobametal, ever the evangelist. The girls, on the other hand, are just looking forward to their afterparty: a well-earned, late-night snack. But what’s their favourite one? “Choco!” comes the response. Of course.
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 273, August 2015
Eleanor was promoted to the role of Editor at Metal Hammer magazine after over seven years with the company, having previously served as Deputy Editor and Features Editor. Prior to joining Metal Hammer, El spent three years as Production Editor at Kerrang! and four years as Production Editor and Deputy Editor at Bizarre. She has also written for the likes of Classic Rock, Prog, Rock Sound and Visit London amongst others, and was a regular presenter on the Metal Hammer Podcast.
“Our manager started making up rumours that I was back on heroin and the band were breaking up”: How Aerosmith defied grunge and a giant meteor to become bigger than ever in the 1990s
(Image credit: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)
The narrative of 90s rock is carved in stone. The grunge scene, according to the media party line, swept away all that excess, culled all those cosseted dinosaurs with their gratuitous guitar solos, teased hair and ravaged septums. But that doesn’t quite square with the second coming of Aerosmith: a band whose sound and persona ticked all those boxes, and threw in songs about elevator sex and a mic stand bedecked with silk scarves for good measure.
The Bostonians had indeed stumbled, but that was a lifetime before, in the newly sober and rudderless mid-80s. Stick a pin in the band’s imperious 90s run, by contrast, and you might have found them toasting back-to-back US No.1 albums, being inducted on Hollywood’s Rock Walk, sweeping the MTV and Grammy Awards, or finally reaching a crossover audience with their first and only US chart-topping single. As Steven Tyler beamed in one late-decade interview: “The last eight years have been what the first ten were supposed to be like. We climbed out of the ashes.”
Put the rebirth down to 1989’s Pump: the comeback special that gave Aerosmith their springboard into the new decade. A year later, in 1990, the fag-end of that album’s campaign was still burning, with single releases for What It Takes, The Other Side and Monkey On My Back. Meanwhile, the band’s label cashed in on what they probably assumed was a lucky blip, releasing 1991’s lavish Pandora’s Box compilation. That too went platinum, but there was a sense it was time to stop sweeping the vaults. “A patchy, expensive introduction to the newcomer,” griped Q magazine’s review, “and [it] falls irritatingly between the stools of rarities collection and definitive compilation.”
The decade’s first flash of creativity went down in early 1992 at LA’s A&M Studios, even if this initial attempt at what would become the Get A Grip album was aborted. “We decided the songs just didn’t jump,” noted Joe Perry, and the label agreed, with Geffen’s John Kalodner recalling that “when Steve, Joe and I sat and listened, I just felt they needed more variety.”
Aerosmith in the 1990s: (from top left) Brad Whitford, Joe Perry,, Tom Hamilton, Steven Tyler, Joey Kramer (Image credit: dpa picture alliance / Alamy Stock Photo)
A scan of the Get A Grip credits reveals how the band fixed that issue, bussing in an army of guest songwriters that included Jim Vallance, Desmond Child, Taylor Rhodes, Richard Supa, Jack Blades, Tommy Shaw, Mark Hudson – and even Lenny Kravitz (on Line Up). “With Permanent Vacation,” reasoned Perry, “we found out after it was out, when we were on the road, that certain songs didn’t work for us. Because of these experiences, we did a lot of editing before Get A Grip came out, and that’s another reason we ended up pulling back and writing a bunch more songs.”
Tyler was sanguine, telling Rolling Stone in 1993 that they had hatched “a shitload of great stuff. We knew we had to make it the biggest, the baddest, the bravest and the scariest Aerosmith record yet.
“We got a grip on all the things that make us Aerosmith,” the singer trumpeted in the same interview. “We got a grip on all the things that sometimes get too refined along the way. We got a grip on what we’re all about. I mean, this stuff is something. This is rocksimus maximus.”
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In retrospect, Get A Grip didn’t quite top Aerosmith’s 70s classics. But the highlights across these 14 tracks are undeniable, right from the neck-tingling moment that Intro’s tribal rap-rock breaks into the stinger riff and holler of Eat The Rich. Livin’ On The Edge was an arms-around-the-world soft-rock ballad, inspired by the 1992 Los Angeles race riots (the band would later order President Trump to stop using the song at rallies). Amazing and Cryin’ were an irresistible pair of power-ballads whose popularity would irk Perry in years to come (“I go, ‘I’m gonna go out to play fucking Cryin’ again?’”)
Elsewhere, Shut Up And Dance was a route-one crowd-pleaser, while the lighters-aloft Crazy came with a dubious rebel-schoolgirl video that saw actress Alicia Silverstone and Tyler’s own daughter, Liv, fling their shirts from a moving car. “If you only knew what it looked like originally,” said the singer. “It was total lesbian. I said, ‘That’s got to come out’.”
Aerosmith – Livin’ On The Edge (Official Music Video) – YouTube
Conversely, Tyler pushed hard for the inclusion of the title track’s references to their former lives as junkies. “Some of the guys said: ‘I don’t think you should be singing, “The buzz that you be gettin’ from the crack don’t last/I’d rather be OD’in’ on the crack of her ass” – it’s too sexist’,” noted the singer of Fever. “And I said: ‘I’m not putting this album out until this song is on there. I put this down as a statement of where I’m at now, and that’s gotta go on this album.’”
Released in April 1993, Get A Grip did even better business than Pump, hitting No.1 in the US and No.2 in the UK (only pipped by Cliff Richard’s The Album in the latter). Ultimately, it would become Aerosmith’s best-selling global release, shifting some 20 million copies worldwide, even despite protests from animal rights activists (quelled when it was revealed the sleeve’s pierced udder was a digital creation). And if some critics flagged up a surfeit of ballads and external songwriters, most reviews saluted an album that continued the upward trajectory. “Nothing stands between the world’s greatest hard rock band,” wrote the hard-to-please music critic Robert Christgau, “and their best album since Rocks.”
That summer, taking the album out on a 16-month world tour, the band’s stock had never been higher. The one frustration, noted Perry, was that some of the new songs didn’t ignite the crowd. “We worked on [the song] Get A Grip out at Long View Studio in Western Massachusetts,” he told the Radio website. “I can remember staying up in the loft with Steven and we were working on some different things. We said, ‘This riff is gonna work. This has got it’. We named the record after it… we played it live and it just laid there flat. We discovered there were other songs people would rather hear.”
As 1994’s multi-platinum hits compilation Big Ones reminded the world, Aerosmith had plenty of those. But the band had one eye on the future, too, with that summer’s prescient CompuServe promotion letting fans download the track Head First from the Internet: an industry-first from an A-list band. With the primitive bandwidths of the time, the download process could take as long as 90 minutes, but that didn’t dissuade more than 10,000 fans from doing so during the two-week promotion. Warming to this nascent technology, by year’s end, the band had also embarked on the Cyberspace Tour ’94 that saw them conduct a series of one-hour online interviews. “If our fans are out there driving down that information superhighway,” reasoned Tyler, “then we want to be playing at the truck stop.”
Steven Tyler onstage in the 1990s (Image credit: Mick Hutson/Redferns)
But for now, at heart, Aerosmith were a major-label band operating within the traditional industry and enjoying all its trappings: a fact underlined by their new record deal with Sony, worth an estimated $30 million. The first release under this contract was originally intended to be a straight blues album. Tyler: “And then we caught wind that Clapton was doing it, and we went, ‘Fuck!’ It always happens.”
Instead, setting up in January 1996 at Miami’s Criteria Studios with producer Glen Ballard, Aerosmith embarked on what became Nine Lives, this twelfth album’s title referencing the band’s famous resilience (Perry: “It should have been called Nine Hundred Lives”). That resolve was about to be tested. Joey Kramer was struggling; having lost his father, the drummer plunged into a “big blue funk” and stepped away from the band, telling MTV, “I went into a deep depression. It was an emergency that came up for me and I had to take care of myself. That was the most important thing at the time.”
There were deeper problems in the guts of the band. Manager Tim Collins, it’s universally acknowledged, deserves huge credit for dragging the drug-addled line-up back into contention in the previous decade. But by the mid-’90s, it slowly dawned on the members that he was using divide-and-rule tactics. Kramer alleges his position was put under threat by Collins. “While I was away taking care of this problem,” the drummer told Mojo, “[Collins] lied to my partners. He told them the record company was putting pressure on to get the album done. This was not true. He was trying to get rid of me.”
Aerosmith – Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees) – YouTube
Tyler accused Collins of even more damaging mind games in an Independent interview. “We were in Florida, on such a roll. There were beautiful girls and beautiful weather and ice-cream parlours. Then [Collins] started making up some nasty rumours – that I was back on heroin and the band were breaking up. He told the band a lot of things that I never said – that I wanted Tom [Hamilton, bass] thrown out and I wanted Joey thrown out. And they drank the Kool-Aid.”
“In the end he was pushing his doctrines on the band,” Tyler added in a Times interview. “Don’t get out of limousines with your wives at gala events, ’cos you’ll alienate your core fans. It was control issues. He went from being a really good facilitator and pilot of the Aerosmith ship, a conscious pilot to a Pontius Pilate. He went to Rolling Stone magazine and told them that I was still on drugs, and that he knew I was fucking women, just a whole barrage of things that no true friend or manager should do to their client.”
Collins had to go. And so did much of the early Nine Lives material, when the record label decided that Ballard’s multi-tracked production and the songs recorded with stand-in drummer Steve Ferrone “just didn’t have the Aerosmith kick-ass ability”. The sessions moved to New York, Kramer returned to the drumstool, and production duties were bestowed upon Kevin Shirley, whom Tyler noted “has got it somewhere stuck between Toys In The Attic and Rocks”.
In fact, Nine Lives had broader horizons than that. There were straightahead rockers, like the title track, written immediately after the band returned from watching AC/DC, and the horn-bolstered Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees). “The more you learn, the more you’re afraid to give up,” said Tyler of the latter’s lyric. “In the beginning you’ll fall for anything, if you don’t learn what to stand up to. Love can take you down. But it’s a strange world now. I’m not sure if I’m falling in love with more things, or just relying on the old things I love the most and trying to get back to them.”
But there were curveballs, too, like the louche, easy-rolling pop of Grammy-winning single Pink, and the sitar lines of the subcontinent-flavoured Taste Of India. “Nine Lives was different,” said Tyler on the Charlie Rose talk show. “In the sense that we hit upon a couple of East Indian vibe type-things that Yma Sumac and Donovan were into and the Stones and The Beatles. And it was something we’d never done together.”
Aerosmith arrive at the 1998 MTV Music Awards (Image credit: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc)
That vibe spilled into Nine Lives’ original sleeve art, which featured a cat-headed Lord Krishna prancing on the coils of the snake god Kaliya (until objections from the Hindu community saw it replaced by a feline tied to a knife-thrower’s wheel).
Released in March 1997, Nine Lives was another big one, once again hitting No.1 in the US, and while the album didn’t sell in the same numbers as Get A Grip, many critics were impressed (“Aerosmith can be relied on,” wrote Rolling Stone, “to temper their puerile machismo with plenty of humor, heart and artistic ingenuity”). As for the lineup, they were just glad to have made it through. “At the end of Nine Lives, I wanted to quit the band after all the shit,” noted Tyler. “Now I want to do another record. The air is clearing.”
As it turned out, it would be another four years before Aerosmith returned with Just Push Play. But they still had one more ace to play out the decade. Directed by action supremo Michael Bay and starring Bruce Willis (and Liv Tyler), 1998’s Armageddon was a forgettable popcorn movie about a space mission to thwart an asteroid headed for Earth. But when songwriter Diane Warren offered Aerosmith her power-ballad, I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing, the band’s emotive reading outlived the film. “When I first heard it,” Kramer told Classic Rock, “it was just a demo with piano and singing. It was difficult to imagine what kind of touch Aerosmith could put on it and make it our own. As soon as we began playing it as a band, then it instantly became an Aerosmith song.”
“‘I could lie awake just to watch you sleep…’” mused Tyler of the song’s opening line. “I mean, how much in love with someone do you have to be to do that? But [Warren] nailed it. That’s one of the most precious opening lines of any song I’ve ever heard. And with a movie behind it, that’s like the Titanic coming into shore riding a five hundred-foot tidal wave.”
Aerosmith – I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing (Official HD Video) – YouTube
I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing would give the band their first and only US No.1 single, as well as an Academy Award nomination. But in 2002, Classic Rock’s Ian Fortnam wondered if the band might have preferred their big crossover moment to be a self-penned song. “Well, yeah,” considered Perry. “But, at the time, we just didn’t have the time to settle down and do it. We were out on the road, so they brought us in to see the movie and said ‘Here’s the song, this is where it fits into the movie, you can do it if you want’. We were in the studio within the next three days cutting it. And yeah, we do wish that we’d had a little more time, so that we could have had a shot at writing it, but it was perfect timing. The song was great, people loved it, and I don’t think people care that much who wrote it.”
I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing tied a bow on a decade that had been as close to an unmitigated success as it gets in the hazardous business of major-league rock ‘n’ roll. And yet, in July 1999, as the band watched the grand opening of the Rock ‘N’ Rollercoaster Starring Aerosmith at Walt Disney World in Florida, the symbolism might not have been lost on them. After scaling such unimaginable heights, one wrong move and there was an awfully long way to fall.
Originally published in Classic Rock Presents Aerosmith
Henry Yates has been a freelance journalist since 2002 and written about music for titles including The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Classic Rock, Guitarist, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer. He is the author of Walter Trout’s official biography, Rescued From Reality, a music pundit on Times Radio and BBC TV, and an interviewer who has spoken to Brian May, Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie Wood, Dave Grohl, Marilyn Manson, Kiefer Sutherland and many more.
“I was definitely doing too much Bolivian marching powder.” Hollywood star Rob Lowe reveals that he once “cut a demo” with AOR superstars Toto, which might just be the most ’80s thing ever
Hollywood actor Rob Lowe has revealed that he once recorded a demo with Californian AOR giants Toto. Sadly, this no-doubt-wondrous slice of ’80s cultural history has yet to make it into the public domain.
Lowe’s revelation came during an interview with journalist Bill Simmons, the CEO of sports and culture website The Ringer, on the actor’s SiriusXM podcast Literally! With Rob Lowe.
The pair go deep on a discussion of Yacht Rock, as Simmons has an executive producer credit on Music Box: Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary, a recently-released HBO documentary focussing upon chronicling “the rise, fall, and rise again of the soft rock epitomized by artists such as Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan, and Toto in the late 1970s and early 1980s.”
During the conversation, Lowe reveals that he first heard the term ‘Yacht Rock’ from actress Rashida Jones (daughter of the late Quincy Jones) who suggested that Lowe was “a Yacht Rock guy”. He and Simmons then dive into an analysis of artists labelled Yacht Rock, with Simmons pointing out how many of the most popular acts were looked down upon by ‘serious’ music fans and critics at the time.
“I got one for ya,” Lowe chips in. “There was a minute in the 80s where I was definitely doing too much Bolivian marching powder and just being a fucking lunatic and [it was] also coming at the time in a young actor’s career where they’re too old to play the roles they’ve been playing, but they’re too young to play the roles that will last you the rest of your life, which are really the great ones. And you can kind of feel it.
“I love music so much, as evidenced by this talk and all of that, that I got it into my head that maybe I should think more about music and I cut a demo with Toto.”
Sadly, Simmons declines to grill Lowe on this unexpected revelation, and the conversation moves on, without any more details of this somewhat unlikely collaboration being revealed.
We demand to know more!
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Watch the interview below.
Bill Simmons Pitches Rob Lowe His “St. Elmo’s Fire” Sequel | Literally! with Rob Lowe – YouTube
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.
Chart-topping musicians typically hold both roles, including Paul Simon, Elton John, Ray Charles and Taylor Swift. Only four dual performers have been non-professional singers or musicians, according to The Hollywood Reporter, with the most recent dating back to Deion Sanders’ turn in February 1995.
Chalamet played and sang all the Dylan songs in director James Mangold‘s film, after working for years with dialect and harmonica coaches in preparation for the role. He’d presumably return to that material for Saturday Night Live, and Deadlineinitially reported that he would, but that has not yet been confirmed. The Hollywood Reporter describes Chalamet as a “huge fan of rap music.”
A Complete Unknown was shut out at the recently held Golden Globes, but Chalamet might still be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Actor category. If the 29-year-old were to win at the Academy Awards, he’d break the record for youngest-ever currently held by Adrien Brody by a few days. (Brody claimed the same honor over Chalamet at the Golden Globes.)
Chalamet previously hostedSaturday Night Live in December 2020 and November 2023, with a cameo appearance in April 2021. Oscar nominations are set to be announced on Jan. 17, with voting into February.
Saturday Night Live‘s season will also feature some special anniversary programming. A four-part docuseries called SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night debuts Jan. 16 on the Peacock streaming service. Ladies & Gentleman … 50 years of SNL Music follows on Jan. 27. The live primetime special SNL50: The Anniversary Special is set to air on Feb. 16.
Rock’s 60 Biggest ‘Saturday Night Live’ Performances
Gallery Credit: Corey Irwin
How an Unlikely Collaboration With Bob Dylan Changed Michael Bolton
Guesting on the new Jimmy Page episode of Premier Guitar‘s 100 Guitarists Podcast, Heart’s Nancy Wilson talks about discovering Led Zeppelin; from walking out on their opening set for 5th Dimension to eventually hearing them at the right place at the right time. She also shares her favorite songs, what it was like meeting Jimmy for the first time, and then what it was like to play for him at the Kennedy Center.
On seeing Led Zeppelin for the first time
Nancy: “He’s (Robert Plant) got his shirt wide open, he’s got his bare chest and his jeans were really low riders and he was moving in this way that was so super-suggestive and we were kind of shocked. We’re like, ‘Oh, my God.’ We were in a little folk band at the time, we were from the suburbs. So we were kind of square, square little hippie chicks to be unenlightened, let’s just say. And so, we were like, ‘Oh, they’re so loud. They’re just being so suggestive and loud.’ Then, he sang ‘Squeeze My Lemon’ and we’re like, ‘Oh, we must leave, we must leave the premises…’ because we were just shocked. So, we actually walked out on at the Green Lake Aqua Theater. We were scandalized, and we walked away.”
Heart legends Ann and Nancy Wilson guested on The Howard Stern Show on April 10th, 2024. A few clips from their visit to Stern’s studio can be viewed below.
Ann and Nancy reminisce on getting their big break opening for Rod Stewart after they were fired for their previous gig because Ann complained about the club’s food:
Ann and Nancy share details about meeting Eddie & Alex Van Halen on the road and how they turned down their advances:
Ann and Nancy give Howard Stern some behind-the-scenes stories of how they pulled off their now famous cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” at the Kennedy Center Honors:
In the new episode of Lipps Service With Scott Lipps, Scott sits down with the thrash metal guitarist and songwriter, formerly of Slayer, Kerry King.
They start off talking about Kerry’s love for Australia, his experience with snake trading and breeding, and other metal bands like Iron Maiden and Metallica. They also get into Kerry’s early music inspirations, friendships with the “big four” metal bands, and the PMRC controversy. Kerry also reflects on recording with Beastie Boys and Rick Rubin, working with Dimebag Darrell, and turning down opportunities to tour again with Slayer. They close the interview by talking about Kerry’s upcoming tour and his newest album, From Hell I Rise, and Kerry lists his top 5 perfect albums and guitarists of all time.
Kerry King and his solo band – drummer Paul Bostaph (Slayer), bassist Kyle Sanders (Hellyeah), guitarist Phil Demmel (Machine Head), and vocalist Mark Osegueda (Death Angel) – will hit the road for the twenty-eight date “North American Headline Tour 2025”. With Municipal Waste as Special Guest and Alien Weaponry supporting, the tour is set to launch in San Francisco on January 15, and wrap at House of Blues in Las Vegas on February 22. Tickets can be purchased here. The complete itinerary is below.
“Getting back on the road for the first time in five years wasn’t exactly like riding a bike, that’s for sure,” King acknowledged. “I’ve never had that much time off, but the first tours with my new band – in the UK and Europe, and then in America with Lamb of God and Mastodon – were all total blasts. We’ll be headlining on this next tour, so we’re playing a longer set than we did with Lamb of God and Mastodon. We’ve got a little bit of a learning curve, so will start rehearsing the first week of November. And we might put an extra Slayer song into the set and learn a cover song or two.”
North American dates:
January 15 – The Regency Ballroom – San Francisco, CA 17 – Spokane Live Casino – Spokane, WA 18 – Showbox SoDo – Seattle, WA 19 – Roseland Theater – Portland, OR 20 – Commodore Ballroom – Vancouver, BC (Canada) 22 – The Palace Theatre – Calgary, AB (Canada) 23 – Midway Music Hall – Edmonton, AB (Canada) 25 – Burton Cummings Theatre – Winnipeg, MB (Canada) 26 – The Fillmore – Minneapolis, MN 28 – The Rave – Milwaukee, WI 30 – The Majestic Theater – Detroit, MI 31 – House of Blues – Cleveland, OH
February 1 – Danforth Music Hall – Toronto, ON (Canada) 2 – L’Olympia – Montreal, QC (Canada) 4 – Royale – Boston, MA 5 – Theatre of the Living Arts – Philadelphia, PA 7 – Irving Plaza – New York, NY 8 – Baltimore Soundstage – Baltimore, MD 10 – Buckhead Theatre – Atlanta, GA 11 – Jannus Live – St. Petersburg, FL 13 – House of Blues – Houston, TX 14 – Emo’s – Austin, TX 15 – The Studio at the Factory – Dallas, TX 17 – Ogden Theatre – Denver, CO 18 – Sunshine Theater – Albuquerque, NM 19 – The Nile Theater – Phoenix, AZ 21 – House of Blues – Las Vegas, NV 22 – The Fonda Theatre – Los Angeles, CA
King and his band also announced their “European Tour 2025”. The dates kick off on July 29 in Frankfurt, Germany, and are currently scheduled to wrap up on August 19 in Krakow, Poland.
European dates:
July 29 – Zoom Saal – Frankfurt, Germany * 30 – Simm City – Wien, Austria *
August 1 – Rockstadt Extreme – Transylvania, Romania * 4 – Komplex 457 – Zürich, Switzerland * 6-9 – Brutal Assault Festival – Jaromer, Czech Republic 7 – FZW – Dortmund, Germany * 8-10 – Alcatraz Festival – Kortrijk, Belgium 12 – Academy 2 – Manchester, UK * 13 – SWX – Bristol, UK * 14-17 – Motocultor Festival – Carhaix, France 17 – Dynamo Festival – Eindhoven, Netherlands 19 – Tauron Arena – Krakow, Poland *#
While 2025 has barely started, Italian metal legends, Lacuna Coil, are already going full force with the release of their newest single, “Gravity”. This track, which comes with a striking music video, marks the fifth single from their upcoming record, Sleepless Empire, which is set to be released February 14 via Century Media Records.
Exploring themes of the inevitability of fate as well as the constant cycle of falling and rising, “Gravity” delivers an important message about resilience. Watch the video below.
The band shares about the single: “Balance is so difficult to keep as we navigate through desperate times, feeling lost and gasping as we ask for help. How do we deal with tough times? Do we ask for a hand? Or do we isolate ourselves from everything else to recollect in our own misanthropic golden cage? I hope you will love ‘Gravity’ as much as we do and that it will make you reflect on the time we have left and how to use it wisely.”
Sleepless Empire marks the 10th studio album of Lacuna Coil and is the first full-length release after their remake album Comalies XX, which came out in 2022.
The band shares about Sleepless Empire: “Sleepless Empire captures, through our eyes, the chaos of a generation trapped in a digital world that never stops, where social media consumes identity and every day pushes us one step closer to becoming soulless zombies. We find ourselves in between, having witnessed a full analogic world and the modern one, confronting the evolution and searching for a true meaning of it all. Throughout every song, the journey is an undercurrent of rebellion, a desperate cry to reclaim oneself in an era that seems to have lost its sense of time and reality.”
The new album is comprised of 11 tracks; each one is a richly textured soundtrack to a specific time and place. With Sleepless Empire, that place is dark, cinematic, and unmistakably true to the unique characteristics that have given Lacuna Coil such a celebrated entry in the annals of heavy music.
Sleepless Empire can be pre-ordered now here, where the album is available in the following formats:
– Ltd. Deluxe CD Box Set with symbolic dice oracle – Ltd. CD Digipak – Ltd. CD Digipak (US version) – black LP & LP-Booklet – black LP & LP-Booklet (US version) – Ltd. white LP & LP-Booklet – Ltd. deep blood red LP & LP-Booklet (exclusive Sony Music Entertainment Italy version) – Ltd. Sparkle Rainbow LP & LP-Booklet – Ltd. transp. glow in the dark LP & LP-Booklet (exclusive band version) – black LP & LP-Booklet (US version) – Ltd. ultra clear LP & LP-Booklet (US version) – Ltd. silver LP & LP-Booklet (US version) – Digital album
Sleepless Empire tracklisting
“The Siege” “Oxygen” “Scarecrow” “Gravity” “I Wish You Were Dead” “Hosting The Shadow” (feat. Randy Blythe) “In Nomine Patris” “Sleepless Empire” “Sleep Paralysis” “In The Mean Time” (feat. Ash Costello) “Never Dawn”
“Oxygen” video:
“Hosting The Shadow”:
“In The Mean Time” video:
“Never Dawn” lyric video:
After the release of Sleepless Empire, Lacuna Coil will not be slowing down. Shortly after the release of their new record, the Italian powerhouse will be touring through Latin America as well as Mexico in March 2025. They also recently announced that they will be joining Machine Head on their massive tour across North America in April and May 2025, alongside In Flames and Unearth. Additionally, the band has already announced some festivals in Europe during the summer.
Lacuna Coil lineup:
Cristina Scabbia – Vocals Andrea Ferro – Vocals Marco Coti Zelati – Bass, Guitars, Synths Richard Meiz – Drums
Rhino has announced the release of the new David Lee Roth box set, The Warner Recordings (1985-1994), available on CD, limited edition vinyl, and digital on February 21. Pre-order/pre-save here.
The Warner Recordings (1985-1994) features the first five solo releases recorded by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee and original Van Halen lead vocalist in one comprehensive collection for the very first time. Spanning one of the greatest runs in rock ‘n’ roll history, the set offers lifelong fans and newcomers alike the chance to experience Crazy From The Heat [1985], Eat ‘Em And Smile [1986], Skyscraper [1988], A Little Ain’t Enough [1991], and Your Filthy Little Mouth [1994] in succession.
40 years ago this month, on January 28, 1985, Roth officially debuted as a solo artist with the Crazy From The Heat EP. It crashed the Top 15 of the Billboard 200 and reached RIAA Platinum status. Plus, he logged a pair of Billboard Hot 100 hits – the medley of “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” vaulted to #12, while his take on “California Girls” by The Beach Boys soared to #3, replicating the 1965 chart success of the original. Meanwhile, Crazy From The Heat would later serve as the title of his New York Times best-selling autobiography in 1997.
The EP paved the way for his first full-length solo LP, Eat ‘Em And Smile. Released on July 7, 1986, it bowed in the Top 5 of the Billboard 200 and eventually went RIAA Platinum. Roth hyper-charged his sound, accompanied by an all-star band consisting of Billy Sheehan [bass], Gregg Bissonette [drums], and Steve Vai [guitar]. Together, they served up anthems such as “Yankee Rose,” “Tobacco Road,” “That’s Life,” and more.
1987 saw the platinum Skyscraper return Roth to the Top 10 of the Billboard 200, elevated by “Just Like Paradise.” Meanwhile, Roth kicked off the nineties with the gold-selling A Little Ain’t Enough in 1991. It marked his fourth straight Top 20 debut on the Billboard 200 and boasted fretwork from Jason Becker. Finally, he dropped Your Filthy Little Mouth in 1994, this time collaborating with none other than iconic producer Nile Rodgers [Madonna, David Bowie], churning out staples such as “She’s My Machine.”
Vinyl tracklisting:
Crazy From The Heat:
A1. “Easy Street” A2. “Just A Gigolo”https://bravewords.com/”I Ain’t Got Nobody”
During a packed autumn touring schedule of over 30 dates across Europe as part of the Nordic Invasion and Faces of Death tours, Cabal introduced fans to their latest album material. Now, in 2025, the band returns with their powerful new single, “Unveiled”, featuring Matthi, frontman of beatdown legends Nasty.
The new album, Everything Rots, will be released on April 11 via Nuclear Blast Records. In spring 2025 Cabal will support Caliban on their Back From Hell Tour.
Singer Andreas Bjulver comments: “If you’ve ever had your trust horribly betrayed this track is for you. This is Cabal at it’s most furious, it’s pure anger distilled into sound and it features none other than Matthi from Nasty, which only adds to the aggression.”
Stream the single here, and watch the video below:
Cabal has through the years proved themselves as one of the heaviest and most uncompromising metal acts hailing from Copenhagen, Denmark. The bands sound is visceral and destructive and aims to bring forth absolute chaos by drawing inspiration from everything from crushing death metal, contemporary metallic hardcore and metalcore to unnerving soundscapes and dark electronic music.
Since the release of their first album in 2018 the band toured most of the planet, from Europe and North America to Japan and Australia, as well as renowned festivals like, Roskilde Festival, Copenhell, Summer Slaughter, Brutal Assault and many more, and they have no intention of slowing down. All of the above combined with features from some of the modern metal scenes most prominent names like; Matt Heafy from Trivium, Jamie Hails from Polaris and Joe Bad from Fit For An Autopsy, the band has shown the world that Denmark has something to offer when it comes to bone crushing heaviness.
The band are now gearing up for the release of their 4th studio album, Everything Rots. Everything Rots is the most focused and ferocious Cabal has ever sounded, while still expanding on the sound that fans expect from the band. Ear piercing electronic parts and unsettling soundscapes fuse together with bone-rattling riffs and uncompromising breakdowns to create a sonic attack on the senses that’s sure to please and surprise any fan of extreme heaviness. Just like instrumentals the lyrics are dark and direct as they detail the cyclical nature of depression, addiction and trauma, as they work through and detail deeply scarring life experiences and invite the listernes inside a dark world were everything everything rots and falls apart again and again and again.
Tracks like ’Still Cursed’ dives into the struggle of dealing with depression and feeling eternally cursed, while the title track is an anthem for the generations born into a world of crushing uncertainty, that feels like it could collapse around them at any time. “No Peace” describes the harrowing real life ordeal of finding a dying suicide victim in the streets of Copenhagen, and powerlessly watching the life drains from their eyes. “Unveiled” and “Forever Marked” deals with two sides of the same experience of having an abuser close to you. One describes the intense anger and feeling of betrayal, that comes from finding out that someone you considered family could commit such acts, while the other the feeling of guilt in knowing that this happened so close to you without you catching on to it.
The album will be released through Nuclear Blast in April and like a rabid hell hound on a chain, this album is foaming at the mouth to be released and unleash the rot upon the world.
