Below, UCR staff note the best album they’ve heard this year so far.
Allison Rapp: I’ve been a fan of Larkin Poe for years now, so usually I’m tuned in to their new releases, but somehow I completely missed their new album, Bloom, that came out in January. In February, I happened to turn on Sirius XM’s Tom Petty Radio station and heard “Easy Love Pt. 1.” The rest of the album is just as robust — Rebecca and Megan Lovell have only gotten sharper in the studio. (I must give an honorable mention to Ringo Starr’s new country album, Look Up, which coincidentally features Larkin Poe on a couple of tracks.)
Bryan Rolli: It’s rare these days to hear a live album that hasn’t been doctored into oblivion, but Dirty Honey proudly bucks that trend on Mayhem and Revelry with a raucous 16-song set that lives up to its name. Culled from the North American and European legs of their Can’t Find the Brakes tour, Mayhem captures the California quartet’s infectious blues-rock boogie, with Marc Labelle’s elastic vocals and John Notto’s razor-sharp guitar solos front and center. Notto proudly informed UCR that the band did no overdub sessions for the album, but it would be a disservice to describe Mayhem and Revelry as “warts and all.” That would imply flubs instead of the tasteful improvisation and ad-libbing on display here — evidence of Dirty Honey’s road-worn chemistry and seemingly inevitable path to world domination.
Nick DeRiso:Jason Isbell recorded Foxes in the Snow without his usual backing band, the 400 Unit, and outside of a marriage that turned into a muse. What’s to become of Isbell’s career without that spark? This is the sound of figuring that out. There’s introspection about what it all means, even what his own old songs now mean, but he’s also become angrier and more lyrically impulsive. Isbell has been stripped bare, and you hear it everywhere on this new album. He’s never had more main-character energy. The results are often cathartic, and sometimes a little jarring, but Foxes in the Snow is a grower. It draws us in more deeply with each spin.
Matthew Wilkening: For years now, new Melvins music has largely arrived in two different orbits. About once a year you’ll get a “proper” full-length album from the group, almost undoubtedly featuring an outside collaborator, a lineup change or some clever twist on the songwriting or recording process. (The upcoming and excellent Thunderball, arriving April 18, is a perfect example.)
Then, a few times a year you’ll be alerted to the opportunity to purchase a new Melvins EP, frequently created in collaboration with another band, on extremely limited edition vinyl or via $5 CD. These EPs fly under the radar and are not to be found on streaming services. The most recent finds the band teaming up with grindcore legends Napalm Death for the six-song Savage Imperial Death March EP.
Truth be told, Napalm Death’s a bit stronger brand of coffee than I’d seek out on my own, but this record rips your head off quite nicely, and the true collaborative nature of the project means fans of either band who aren’t as familiar with the other already have one foot in the door and a great chance to expand their musical horizons.
Matt Wardlaw: Dream Theater reunited with co-founder Mike Portnoy in 2023 and put out their first record with the drummer in more than a decade earlier this year. While that sentence is exciting enough, Parasomnia is also a really, really good album. Openly embracing nostalgia, the record stylistically draws from a little bit of everything in the Dream Theater trick bag, yet still feels collectively like a fresh step forward. In short, Parasomnia is proof that sometimes you can go home again. Fans of their classic work and albums like Images and Words and Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence will enjoy this latest chapter.
Elton John‘s history as a collaborator has long been a significant and not-so-secret part of his success over the past half-century. From the 1976 No. 1 “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” with Kiki Dee and a 1993 duets album to stage and film work with songwriter Tim Rice and his longtime partnership with lyricist Bernie Taupin, the generous John has never shied away from sharing the spotlight.
His last album, 2021’s The Lockdown Sessions, was recorded during the pandemic with artists ranging from Dua Lipa and Gorillaz to Eddie Vedder and Stevie Wonder. John’s Lockdown Sessions song with another of the album’s collaborators, Brandi Carlile, was so encouraging and rewarding that they’ve teamed up for Who Believes in Angels?, an entire album of new songs cowritten by the pair along with Taupin and producer Andrew Watt.
John couldn’t have chosen a better-suited accomplice than Carlile for his first full-length, single-artist collaboration project since 2010’s The Union with Leon Russell. Both artists have long championed drama in their music, and more so than any of his past singing partners, Carlile slips effortlessly into John’s personal and performance aesthetic to the point where they become one voice at times on Who Believes in Angels? (They first worked together on a song from her 2009 album, Give Up the Ghost.)
The launching pad for the album started with “Never Too Late,” the pair’s duet from John’s 2024 documentary of the same name. The song appears near the middle of Who Believes in Angels? as an anchor to the tracks surrounding it, but new offerings “The Rose of Laura Nyro,” “Little Richard’s Bible” and “Who Believes in Angels?” are standout cuts on a record shaped by the artists’ shared center. Entering the studio with no plan or songs in the fall of 2023, John and Carlile recorded the 10 tracks in 20 days, using each other as springboards. The result is that these songs couldn’t exist without each other’s presence and input.
That Who Believes in Angels? loses some appeal by the end is likely because Carlile has yet to make a full album that sustains her initial enthusiasm, and John hasn’t done so in decades. But there are moments here – the raucous anthem “Swing for the Fences,” the theatrical pop of “Someone to Belong To” – that are among the best of their respective recent work. As far as John’s long list of collaborators goes, Carlile, save for Taupin, achieves a near-impossible feat: uniting the line where one artist ends and the other starts.
Top 100 ’70s Rock Albums
From AC/DC to ZZ Top, from ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ to ‘London Calling,’ they’re all here.
Gene Simmons has never met a dollar he didn’t like and he’s got plenty of wisdom on the subject. For example, if you’re going to be miserable, “it’s still better to be a rich, miserable fuck,” he tells us early in our conversation.
It’s part of the reason he’s been playing solo concerts in the past couple of years since Kiss said farewell to the road, because he still remembers his modest beginnings. “It’s funny, I’m an only child to my mother and I grew up with the hard knocks of not being very romantic about what it all means,” he shares on an upcoming episode of the UCR Podcast. “I developed a harder skin and for myself, realized that everything was about the search for power and money, which is not a very romantic notion. But I didn’t want to be poor, because I know what that felt like.”
“My mother worked at a sweat factory six days out of the week and survived the Nazi concentration camps of Germany. You know, life is tough, so the romantic hippie dippie notation about life never worked for me,” he continues. “All I ever did was try to figure out how to become powerful and make lots of money, for survival. The only thing money ever does, really, is give you the freedom to do stuff you actually like doing. It’s what it’s really about and also to keep you safe, pay for your hospital bills, create jobs, give to charity, all of that stuff. A poor person never gave me a job.”
Sure, that logic applies in part to his career with Kiss, but for Simmons, it goes further than that. “Throughout Kiss, fame was nice, but there are a lot of famous people who are relatively poor, that’s not a lot of fun,” he explains. “But on the other side, there’s a lot of industrial types whose names you don’t recognize who are filthy rich. It’s better to be rich than poor, it really is. And if you’re a miserable fuck, it’s still better to be a rich, miserable fuck. That’s all I ever tried to do.”
What Fans Can Expect From Gene’s Solo Shows
As he told UCR last month, he found that staying away from the stage wasn’t an option for him — and he expanded on those thoughts during our latest conversation. “I can say that I’m having more fun now in ways I never thought I’d have without 60 people on the crew, without a private jet, without three triple-decker buses, without 20 tractor trailers — without a small city setting up with more firepower than some third world countries, just getting up on stage and rocking out,” he says. “It’s like your favorite band rehearsing in a garage, and then the garage door opens and everybody in town rushes over and has a party.”
“It’s very flexible.There are no plans. I can pull up people from the audience. They can join me singing, if you can play an instrument, jump in if you know one of one of the tunes, dive in,” he continues. “You can Google ‘Gene Simmons Band, teenage guitar player, ‘Parasite’,’ and you’ll see some kid step up and rock out. There was a 15-year old kid in Scandinavia who yelled out from the audience that he wanted to play the drums. [We] brought him up on stage and never rehearsed with him. ‘What do you want to play?’ ‘Christine Sixteen.’ ‘Do you know the song?’ ‘Oh yeah, I know this.’ You’ll see that he kills it. That’s half of the fun, the idea of band and fan and not having the moat around them. With these solo shows, anything can happen.”
Sam Mendes announced that his four Beatles biopics will premiere one at a time over four weekends in April 2028.
The director of features including American Beauty, Road to Perdition and the James Bond films Skyfall and Spectre reassured Beatles fans that there was more to learn about John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
Sony Motion Pictures boss Tom Rothman described the move as the first “bingeable moment in cinema.” Each of the movies will focus on a different member of the Fab Four, and the project has been given the working title of The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event.
Here is the project’s official synopsis:
“Each man has his own story, but together they are legendary. The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event. In theaters April 2028.”
It had been previously revealed that Harris Dickinson will play Lennon, with Paul Mescal as McCartney, Joseph Quinn as Harrison and Barry Koeghan as Starr. You can see the first official cast photo below.
Mendes felt a TV series was the wrong format and it wasn’t until the four-movie concept arose that he knew his concept could work. “There had to be a way to tell the epic story for a new generation,” he said. “I can assure you there is still plenty left to explore, and I think we found a way to do that.”
Beatles Movie Month Will Dominate Culture says Studio Boss
He also said it would take more than a year to shoot the four films, to which Rothman joked, “Did I agree to this?” and added: “I’m getting Avatar flashbacks!”
Pitching the positives of Sony’s approach to theater owners, Rothman said: “We are going to dominate the culture that month.”
Beatles Albums Ranked
From the cheery ‘Please Please Me’ to the kinda dreary ‘Let It Be,’ we rank all of the group’s studio LPs.
As the temperatures begin rising, many of rock’s biggest acts will be hitting the road for 2025 summer tours.
Some of the most anticipated treks belong to artists we weren’t sure would ever tour again. Paul Simon needed a medical miracle to get back onstage, while AC/DC’s Brian Johnson similarly faced debilitating hearing loss. Despite what could have been career-ending conditions, both acts will be back on the road, captivating audiences once more. For Simon, it’ll mark his first US tour since 2018, while fans have had to wait for close to a decade for a full AC/DC North American run.
The summer will find some artists, like Foreigner and Cyndi Lauper, continuing their farewell tours, while others – most notably Oasis – will be reuniting for the first time in years. Then there’s the case of Sex Pistols, who will be touring America for the first time since 2003, but doing so without original frontman John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten).
A couple of notable bands were forced to move their Las Vegas residencies into the summer. Motley Crue rescheduled their Sin City stay so that frontman Vince Neil could deal with a health issue, while Scorpions pushed their Vegas dates back to the summer to give drummer Mikkey Dee more time to recover from a life-threatening infection.
You can find these artists and more in our 2025 Summer Rock Tour Preview.
“We have a very, very simple goal, to make this the greatest day in the history of heavy metal.” Tom Morello reveals what we can expect from Black Sabbath’s Back To The Beginning mega-gig, teases added surprise from “huge superstars”
(Image credit: Sara Jaye/Getty Images for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame)
Tom Morello has spoken about his role as the Musical Director of Black Sabbath‘s upcoming Back To The Beginning mega-gig in Birmingham, and stated that his aim is to make make the July 5 show nothing less than “the greatest day in the history of heavy metal’.
Speaking to Australian Musician about his involvement in the much-anticipated show at Villa Park, Morello says, “I owe a great debt to Ozzy [Osbourne] and to Black Sabbath. And it’s an honour to be a part of it.”
“It came about [because] Ozzy and Sharon asked me to do,” the guitarist explained. “They surprised me one day and said, ‘There’s gonna be one more Black Sabbath show, all four original members, the last-ever Ozzy Osbourne show. We wanna have a big day of celebration and will you help curate it?’ And I was, like, Well, that’s crazy. But yes, of course. Heavy metal is the music that made me love music, and Black Sabbath invented heavy metal.”
Pointing out that the “preparation” is already well under way, Morello continues, “Where it’s at now… First of all, when we first sat down, we have a very, very simple goal, and that’s to make this the greatest day in the history of heavy metal. And to that end, you’ve probably seen the listed setlist. And let me tell you, there’s some huge superstars who are gonna be surprises on that day too. So, the idea is to really acknowledge the importance of that band in a way that the whole world will forever know.”
TOM MORELLO: 2025 Bluesfest Australian Tour Interview – YouTube
Morello will be arranging an all-star “supergroup”, to include Billy Corgan (The Smashing Pumpkins), Fred Durst (Limp Bizkit), Jonathan Davis (Korn), Wolfgang Van Halen and more.
Actor Jason Momoa (Aquaman, Game Of Thrones) will compere.
Talking recently on Ozzy Speaks, the Sirius XM show in which he and his good friend Billy Morrison play some of their favourite songs, Ozzy stated “I’m not planning on doing a set with Black Sabbath but I am doing little bits and pieces with them.”
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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.
Are Bloodywood moonlighting as wedding planners? The band are in the middle of a 40,000 square-foot banquet hall on the outskirts of Chandigarh, a city in Northern India. With its massive chandeliers, European-style statues and vivid murals, it’s a popular location for couples who want to exchange their vows against a grand backdrop. Except there’s no Indian wedding today.
Instead, Bloodywood have booked the space to shoot part of the video for Tadka, a single from their soon-to-arrive third album, Nu Delhi. Guitarist and producer Karan Katiyar gets the hall’s manager to switch on what seems like at least 1,000 light bulbs. It seems to light everyone’s mood up as well, which was previously mirroring the cold, smoggy weather outside.
Vocalist Jayant Bhadula, dressed in his signature blue sherwani, jokes that you might find a body buried under the glitzy marble stairs. Rapper Raoul Kerr points at a chandelier and notes that a bulb is “winking” at him. The touring members of the band – bassist Roshan Roy, percussionist Sarthak Pahwa and drummer Vishesh Singh – are no less excited for the day’s endeavours.
“What’s about to happen here, it’s never happened and it won’t happen again,” says filmmaker Kushagra Nautiyal, who is directing the video.
The video, like Nu Delhi itself, marks a step up for Bloodywood. In just a few years, they’ve gone from an internet covers band to international metal sensations. Part of that success is down to their portrayal of their unabashed Indianness, but their emphatic, emotional songs have broken language and cultural barriers, putting both the band and Indian metal in general on the map.
Tadka features the unique interplay of growls, rapping, riffs and Indian folk rhythms that is Bloodywood’s signature sound, while the lyrics are a hearty love letter to Indian food in all its diversity. Summarising Nu Delhi, Raoul says: “The album has our signature, it has our evolution, and it has our future.”
Bloodywood – Tadka (Official Music Video) – YouTube
Karan, Jayant and Raoul are the core of Bloodywood. All three are friendly and welcoming, but where Raoul is garrulous and chatty and Jayant is always ready with a joke, it’s Karan who seems to keep the whole operation ticking over. He’s the one who is always on time and making sure everyone else is on time too.
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“Chaio aa jao,” he says when he wants people to get a move on, which translates as “Come on!”
Karan was working as a corporate lawyer when he started Bloodywood as a studio project in 2015, dropping metal covers of popular Punjabi and American Top 40 songs onto YouTube. By the time he was joined a year later by Jayant – whom Karan knew from Delhi band The Cosmic Truth, and who was working as a talent booker at the time – Bloodywood had begun to attract attention for their pairing of Indian music’s rhythmic elements with abrasive nu metal riffs and breakdowns. That sound was cemented by 2018’s viral hit, Ari Ari, a cover of a bhangra song featuring local rapper Raoul, accompanied by a memorable video featuring Karan playing guitar while riding a camel through the streets.
“When Karan and I first spoke about our collaboration, it didn’t feel like, ‘Oh this will be something new and different,’” says Raoul, who became a full-time member in 2019. “It was more like, hip hop and metal work so well together.”
In the wake of Ari Ari and their first original song, Jee Veerey, things got a lot more serious for Bloodywood. It was the end of a parody-loving, try-everything project and the start of an Indian metal band that the country, or indeed the world, had not seen before.
“When Karan and Jayant were building the channel, they were one of the few artists in India who had international attention,” says Raoul. “So we thought, ‘If we do something crazy, everyone’s going to hear it and it can amplify on all sides of the world at the same time.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”
YouTube undeniably played a huge part in Bloodywood’s initial rise. It allowed them to showcase their music and videos to the world. But at the heart of it was a DIY ethos that Karan says is still in place today.
“Some things never change from when we started out,” he says, as Raoul and Jayant begin setting up the props they bought from a local store. “You can see what’s happening right now. What has changed is the scale of things. We’re now doing things that we thought only probably big Punjabi or Bollywood artists could do.”
This is evident in the videos for the first two singles from Nu Delhi. The promo for the title track saw Bloodywood rocking out with fans and friends in a metro train compartment. The band were prevented from filming by local police until they could produce permits for filming. Permits sourced, things were soon back on – ahem – track.
“They halted traffic on the roads for us so that we could shoot,” recalls Raoul. “Nobody in the traffic was too pissed about it either!”
That was the most expensive video Bloodywood had made, at least until the striking animated promo for follow-up single Bekhauf, a collaboration with Babymetal that found the latter singing in both Japanese and Hindi. They took a gamble with it, and it paid off: the song has been viewed more than 1.8 million times on YouTube.
“Our aim isn’t to keep going more expensive,” says Jayant, “but the fact is that we can do stuff like that, and we believe this is the best way to go.”
(Image credit: Abhinav Sharma)
India has had metal bands for decades. One of the first were Millennium, formed in the South Indian city of Bengaluru in the late 80s. They were followed in the 1990s by the likes of Dying Embrace and Kryptos (both also from Bengaluru), while the new millennium saw the emergence of Mumbai’s Demonic Resurrection, fronted by the entrepreneurial Sahil ‘Demonstealer’ Makhija, and the following decade saw the ranks swollen by prog metallers Skyharbor, death metallers Gutslit, thrashers Amorphia and several others.
All of those bands undoubtedly paved the way for Bloodywood, but any initial suspicion that greeted their own rise (“Gatekeeper shit,” as Raoul puts it) has been supplanted by excitement at their success. They count Indian film stars, comedians and Bollywood composers among their fans at home, while everyone from Machine Head’s Robb Flynn to members of Avenged Sevenfold and Fever 333 have turned up to see them play live.
“He found it on YouTube,” enthuses Jayant, taking a break between scenes. “It was like YouTube magic, dude!”
For any Indian metal band, surviving without much of a touring circuit at home can be a challenge. Instead, Bloodywood have focused their attention overseas, touring in the UK (where they’ve played both Download and Bloodstock), Europe, Japan and America.
Their 2023 US tour in support of their second album – their first comprised of original material – Rakshak, saw them supported by Vended, featuring Griffin Taylor and Simon Crahan, the sons of Corey Taylor and Shawn Crahan. It was the through the lads that Bloodywood got to meet Slipknot.
“Corey Taylor came in with his aura and met me, shook my hand, said thank you,” says Jayant, who admits he welled up at the encounter. “He said, ‘I hope these boys are not troubling you.’ I just gave him my gratitude. I was like, ‘Thank you for existing.’”
It hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing, though. In October, ahead of a festival show in Kolkata, India – their first gig in more than a year – Jayant discovered that he had a polyp on his throat. During rehearsals, it began to bleed. “We immediately had to make the call to do the surgery,” he recalls.
The singer was rushed to hospital to have the polyp removed. The standard period of rest and recovery after such an operation is two months. Jayant was back onstage in just over a fortnight, though he noticed his voice had changed.
“I’m able to sing how I used to back when I was 19!” he says proudly.
Bloodywood have been running through Tadka for a few hours, so it’s time for a break. They chomp down on food they’ve ordered from a local highway restaurant: curries, biryani, naan. “Keep eating!” Karan orders exuberantly as they watch Raoul perform his raps for the camera.
It’s a fitting meal, given Tadka’s celebration of the diversity of Indian cuisine, especially home-cooked delicacies (‘Sizzle in the summer ’cos you know we like it hot / Rocking in the kitchen and we hitting like the pot’).
The cameras capture Jayant sweeping his arms like he’s throwing imaginary salt and masala as the rest of the band play behind him. But then India and its culture has always been central to who Bloodywood are. As well as a nod to their love of nu metal, Nu Delhi is obviously a reference to New Delhi, the country’s capital and the city the band call home.
“In terms of storytelling, we’re focusing more this time on where we come from, our culture and just us in general. It’s more about our story rather than a generic story,” says Karan.
The title track looks at how the city’s tough-love attitude shaped them, while Hutt is a fuck-you to bullies and Dhadak, Kismat and Bekhauf bristle with positivity (‘I take all the fear, blood, the sweat, the tear / Grind it in my mind and find another gear’ sings Raoul on the latter). Raoul reveals the album touches on the bandmembers’ personal side, but also broader themes such as colonialism and fighting against oppression.
“What we’re saying is that because you know what it was like for your ancestors to go through oppression, use your power to destroy the modern manifestations of those cycles now,” he says.
Equally important to the band are the traditional Indian sounds woven into their songs. Daggebaaz brings together bhangra influences, distinctive konnakol vocals, electronic/ hip hop flourishes and a deathcore-style beatdown.
The album really sees the band expanding the range of instruments they incorporate – Tadka includes a regal-sounding tutari horn, while elsewhere Nu Delhi features nagara drums, an esraj (a classical stringed instrument), and South Indian percussion in the form of the hand drum-like mridangam. Other instruments deployed by the band include the dhol, tumbi, tabla and santoor, and also, on Kismat, a sitar for the very first time.
“I think it’s the most amount of fun I have during the entire process,” says Karan. “Just looking for sounds and looking for new instruments.”
The band took almost a year off from playing live to focus on writing and recording Nu Delhi. Karan was anxious about whether people would forget about them in their absence, but the hard work Bloodywood have put in over the last few years has ensured the audience they built has been there for them now they have returned.
“The only thing you need to do is listen to your audience,” says Karan. “To make music that you like and your audience likes.”
It’s the end of a long day, and Bloodywood’s time in this grand hall is almost done. Equipment is packed away and food cleared up. But the work is only just starting. In a few weeks they’ll return to Europe for their Return Of The Singh tour ahead of the release of Nu Delhi, including a run of UK dates culminating in a show at London’s 2,300-capacity O2 Forum, their biggest headlining show yet outside of India. Where is all this leading? Bloodywood’s ambition is simple: to be India’s first truly globally successful band, and change perceptions – and misconceptions – of the country in the process.
“We want to get as far as possible and get as many people who are like-minded together, have a great time musically, but also create a community that can actually have an impact on the world,” says Raoul.
Bloodywood may have achieved more than any other Indian metal band, but it’s taken a lot of work to get to this point, not least for Karan.
“I have sacrificed my personal life, for sure, because this is all I do,” he says. “I don’t take vacations. I’ve stopped gaming. I stopped enjoying it because work was always on my mind.”
Jayant has no regrets about leaving his job as a talent booker to give Bloodywood his focus. “If it’s doing something I love, less money isn’t a problem. There isn’t steadiness in life, but it’s the price of what we’re doing, and I don’t mind paying that price.”
April is (almost) here! With this week’s new releases, we’re officially through a quarter of 2025 and already it’s shaping up to be massive. Spiritbox, Killswitch Engage, Architects, Arch Enemy, Cradle Of Filth, Deafheaven… to think we’ve managed to cram that into the first three months of 2025 alone is insane. But, we’re not done yet – not by a long shot!
That in mind, here are the results of last week’s vote! We’d got a hefty mix of bands in the running last week, but the top three stormed ahead of the competition. In third place, retooled French metalcore mob Novelists gave us Say My Name, in turn being beat out by Dutch symphonic metallers Blackbriar. The overall winners though – by quite some distance – were Lord Of The Lost, the german industrial-goths slinking back into the darkness of earlier records with My Sanctuary.
We’ve got some big names back in the running this week with new singles from Evanescence and Linkin Park, but there’s also slabs of heaviness from Ihma Tarikat, as well as rising stars aplenty in the likes of Employed To Serve, Volumes, Ten56 and more. Don’t forget to cast your vote in the poll below – and have an excellent weekend!
Evanescence – Afterlife
Is a new Evanescence album round the corner? We might be a tad optimistic as vocalist Amy Lee confirmed the band are currently writing their next release, but you’ll have to forgive our excitement given we’ve got new music to chew over this week in Afterlife. Taken from the soundtrack to Netflix’s upcoming anime take on Devil May Cry, the track is a typically grandiose and emotive blast of melody from the sometime-nu metal veterans. Hopefully we won’t be waiting too long for more.
Devil May Cry | Official Lyric Video | Afterlife by Evanescence | Netflix – YouTube
Speaking of bands we’d be happy to see new music from… This week Linkin Park also released a brand new single in the form of Up From The Bottom. Taken from the upcoming deluxe edition of last year’s From Zero – due May 16 – the track very much carries the triumphant, back-to-roots approach the band took on that album, hitting with a hale energy and massive hooks that are almost impossible to shake once you’ve heard them.
Up From The Bottom (Official Music Video) – Linkin Park – YouTube
If you prefer your metal to be steeped in the explosive energy of the underground, you’d do well to heed German black metallers Imha Tarikat. The band have just announced fourth album Confessing Darkness for a June 20 release and lead single Wicked Shrine blurs the lines between imperious black metal and thundering death metal with an oh-so-headbangable riff and some sublime guitar breakouts that’ll have you raising claws to the sky.
Imha Tarikat – Wicked Shrine [Official Music Video] – YouTube
The Duke of Spook, Wednesday 13 has been in the horrorcore game long enough now – 20 years just as a solo artist as of this year – to perfect the art of ghoulish rock’n’roll anthemia. Sure enough, In Misery is a massive wail-along that, even before new album Mid Death Crisis arrives next month on April 25, could easily be a live favourite.
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WEDNESDAY 13 – In Misery (Official Video) | Napalm Records – YouTube
Considering just about everything in the country can kill you, Australia has proven a fertile breeding ground for mind-melting extreme metal. Sure enough, newcomers Sálezianos – featuring former Scar The Martyr vocalist Henry Derek – put on an absolute masterclass in resplendent extremity with Temet Nosce. Pendulous prog metal meets Akercocke-style black metal with some seriously big left-turns to keep you guessing throughout. We’ll be keenly keeping an eye out for the album from this lot.
Onslaught taking on one of Motorhead‘s most furious tracks? Sign us the fuck up! It’s little surprise that the UK thrashers take to this track like a duck to water and it isn’t made any less delightful by sounding exactly how you hope it would. Fast, fun and fucking brilliant. Fingers crossed they’ll break this one out on their upcoming tour.
ONSLAUGHT – Iron Fist (Official Music Video) – YouTube
After a few isolated singles showed her love for the darker sides of the sonic spectrum, Vera Farmiga’s dark rock group The Yagas have announced their debut album Midnight Minuet will be with us in just under a month of April 25. To celebrate that fact, the group have unveiled new single Life Of A Widow, a darkly alluring slab of alt. rock with gothic overtures that has us plenty excited about the album release.
Split Chain – Bored. Tired. Torn.
With their UK tour kicking off today, it seems perfect timing that Bristol’s Split Chain have announced their debut album motionblur for a July 11 release. Album launch single Born. Tired. Torn. shows off their nu metal meets shoegaze tendencies with thumping, anthemic sensibilities that prove there’s so much more to the collision of styles than mindless Deftones aping. With festivals lined up including Slam Dunk, Mystic and Download, it’s looking like a massive year for the band.
Esprit D’air like to mix things up. After the sci-fi noir tones of Lost Horizon, the band have dipped their toes in the chunky, clanging tones of nu metal on new single Zetsubou no Hikari. As ever, they approach the stylistic shift without losing sense of who they are and the Japanese band’s identity is stamped all over the song, a soaring melodic chorus nailing the enormity of the band’s ambitious creative vision.
Esprit D’Air『絶望の光』(‘Zetsubou no Hikari’) (Official Music Video) – YouTube
French metalcore brutes Ten56 are back with a typically thudding track in Pig. There’s no melodic reprieve to be found here; this is as nasty and tooth-grindingly furious as metalcore gets before crossing over into deathcore realms (and we wouldn’t discount this in that field, in all honesty), nailing a visceral sensibility that will likely translate well to live audiences when the band undertake their first headline tour of the UK in September.
With a little under a month until new album Fallen Star arrives – April 25 – Employed To Serve are seriously ramping up the excitement. They might kick harder than a mule with lead boots, but ETS have shown capacity for surprisingly tender melodies in recent years and Breaks Me Down puts those elements front and centre… for a while at least, before diving headfirst into sludgy, chunky metalcore riffing. We do love those twinkling synths though, we won’t lie.
After a stunning guest spot on Architects’ The Sky, The Earth & All Betweenwith the track Judgement Day, LA’s Amira Elfeky has stepped up with new EP Surrender, which came out today. Tie-in single My Forever Overdose showcases her own genre-blurring tendencies, an electro beat and serpentine vocal melody giving way to breakout alt. metal choruses and some chugging, hefty metalcore guitars towards the song’s close. It’s a potent mix, and more than reason enough to check Amira out live when she comes to the UK in June for select headline shows and an appearance at this year’s Download Festival.
Amira Elfeky – My Forever Overdose (Official Music Video) – YouTube
Ministry have announced summer headline shows in the UK and Europe around their planned festival appearances.
Al Jourgensen‘s industrial-metal berserkers, who today release The Squirrely Years Revisited, a reworked 12-song compilation of their best early synth-pop work, will kick off their summer adventures on July 26, at the Tolminator festival in Tolmin, Slovenia, alongside Kreator, Cradle of Filth and more.
Light of Eternity, featuring Killing Joke‘s ‘Big’ Paul Ferguson, will support Jourgensen’s band on a number of their headline shows.
Aug 01: Hamburg Markthalle, Germany (with Light Of Eternity) Aug 02: Full Rewind festival, Germany Aug 05: Katowice MCK, Poland (with Mastodon) Aug 06: Brutal Assault, Czech Republic Aug 08: Kortrijk Alcatraz, Belgium Aug 09: Bloodstock festival, UK Aug 11: London Electric Brixton, UK (feat. Light Of Eternity) Aug 14: Koln Essigfabrik, Germany (with Light Of Eternity) Aug 15: Reload festival, Germany Aug 16: Dynamo Metal Fest, Holland
Last year, Jourgensen revealed to Metal Hammer that he will be reuniting with his former bandmate Paul Barker for what will be his band’s final album.
“It’s set in stone,” Jourgensen told Metal Hammer. “We’re going to be working on this album for the next year in between Ministry tours. He’s not going to come on tour with us, that’s [ex-Tool bassist] Paul D’Amour. But when we’re done with the touring schedule over the next year, me and Paul are going to be working in my studio on the final album.
Jourgensen continued: “He’s coming back into the fold to get us over that final hump of doing something that you haven’t heard from Ministry in 20 or 30 years. We had a really good writing relationship in the 90s and we work well in the studio together. I think it’s the perfect way to go out, wrapping a bow on the entire Ministry career, doing one final world tour and we’re done.”
“There’s only so far you can go before you bore yourself to death,” he said of his decision to bring Ministry to an end. “Do it until you puke, you know? And I don’t want to get to that puke point. I’m going to be pre-emptive.”
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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.
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“Deafheaven aren’t real black metal.” It’s a sentence purists have bandied about ever since the San Franciscans started tempering extreme music’s savagery with blankets of shoegaze. Pearls only got clutched tighter as 2013’s Sunbatherwon the acclaim of indie magazines, then again when Infinite Granite eschewed screeching and blastbeats almost entirely.
Now, Lonely People With Power seems tailor-made to shut whinging mouths. The proverbial yang to Infinite Granite’s yin, it bombards with torrents of volume and grants only fleeting glimpses of the band’s tender heart.
Lead single Magnolia epitomises Deafheaven’s rejuvenated might. With no atmospheric fannying about, it breaks straight into a sprint of bullheaded metal and progressive rhythms. George Clarke has rediscovered his scream to ear-splitting effect. It’s a display of brutality matched by Revelator, with its storm of death metal riffing followed by stampeding chords and drums, and opener proper Doberman with its neck-wrecking groove.
Moments of sensitivity sneak through during Heathen, where George croons the opening verse, plus the slow-burning centrepiece Amethyst. However, these ambient detours only strengthen the inevitable walls of metal to come.
The band’s shoegaze proclivities also occasionally show at the same time as their seething heaviness. It’s most notable during Body Behavior, where sticksman Daniel Tracy slows to a bounce sure to get crowds leaping as the vocals and guitars remain at full pelt.
Deafheaven were clearly hungry for metal after Infinite Granite’s all-atmospheric adventuring, and they could have made a second Sunbather to achieve that end while keeping the indie hipsters onside. That they decided to satiate themselves and make an even angrier statement instead says everything about their lack of fuck-giving. “Not real black metal”? Call the jury back in!
Lonely People With Power is out now via Roadrunner. Deafheaven play Outbreak in June and Damnation Festival in November.
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.
![Imha Tarikat - Wicked Shrine [Official Music Video] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/9arW85f2_eg/maxresdefault.jpg)
