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Our latest Tracks Of The Week extravaganza was a titanic battle, with French multi-instrumentalist-turned-rock-ace Lucie Sue triumphing over lead Strut Luke Spiller by the slimmest of margins. Buckcherry’s new song came in third, but really, it was the LS versus LS battle that took the breath away. So congratulations to both.

This week, just like every other, we’ve found another eight songs to titillate your ear sockets. Our super-sized selection of supreme sonic splendour is below.

When Rivers Meet – Break Free

One of those deceptively straight-shooting blues rockers that gets juicier and more interesting by the beat, Break Free packs a lot into its three-and-a-half-minute runtime. With guitarist Aaron Bond taking lead vocals, it finds the husband n’ wife duo rolling from bluesy opening riffage into a deeper, meatier chorus and spaced-out spirals – all of it fleshed out with rich 70s-tastic organ layers and the voice of singer (and violinist/mandolinist) Grace soaring over the top of it all. Nice.

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Mark Morton Come December (feat Charlie Starr & Jason Isbell)

The Lamb Of God guitarist is joined by Blackberry Smoke’s Charlie Starr on vocals, with Jason Isbell delivering a stunning slide guitar solo, on this beautiful ballad from his new solo album Without The Pain. Oh, and Morton’s no slouch either, processing his demons with melodious tenderness in stirring verses and a highly singable chorus. The whole record is stuffed with quality rootsified rock voices (Tyler Bryant, Neil Fallon and Jaren Johnston are just three collaborators), but this might be our favourite union. 21st century southern rock of real class.

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Joe Bonamassa – Still Walking With Me

Just when you thought he couldn’t spin any more plates without having some sort of cardiac arrest (in addition to tours, producing other artists, Black Country Communion plans, Rory Gallagher-tribute-in-Ireland plans, cruises, festivals, more tours…) Joe drops a new taste of his upcoming solo album. Billed as “an uplifting tribute to resilience, redemption, and the people who stick with us even when we don’t deserve it”, Still Walking With Me is a sunshiney, feelgood affair, all classic soulful blues with a generous spring in its step. He makes it look easy, in a good way.

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The Blue Stones – Happy Cry

With its parent album, Metro, centred on a protagonist navigating a dystopian subway (capturing “a personified version of their darker side” in the process) – and justified comparisons to Royal Blood abounding – you’d expect this Canadian duo’s new single to be a blackened, gritty affair. It is, sort of, but it’s also imbued with raw, cathartic feeling; bluesy and industrial in one sense, heartbreaking yet hopeful in another. Like the tentatively optimistic light at the end of a dark, apocalyptic tunnel.

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The Darkness – Hot On My Tail

We’ll be honest: we didn’t know that we needed a country ode to post-coital flatulence in our lives. Enter The Darkness, here to prove that we actually do need such a song with the enchantingly sweet, silly, immaculately executed Hot On My Tail – all acoustic strums, gauzy harmonies and bittersweet melodic twists in all the right places. And lyrics about farting. Think Queen with cowboy boots, ELO and Monty Python hovering close by, and you’re in the right ballpark.

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Matt C White – The Way Down

Matt C White grew up in rural North Carolina on a diet of Soundgarden, Mastodon and Mars Volta tunes. You can totally hear all that in the riffy, bonged out textures of The Way Down. It kicks off on a heavy stoner note, all head-swirling guitars and slinky bassline, but it’s that groovy beefcake of a chorus that really grabs you. The overall effect is kind of All Them Witches-esque, but rawer and spikier – less ayahuasca luxe, more jamming in your garage with a few fat joints, a stack of grunge and 60s psych records and a giant amp stack.

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Hollow Souls feat. Jared James Nichols – Borderline

Good old Kris Barras, he of the Kris Barras Band, has a new project. Hollow Souls describe themselves as “an exciting new musical collective”, and see Barras returning to the blues-rock template of his earliest work, with former KBB backing vocalist Phoebe Jane lighting a fire up front and US blueser Jared James Nichols burning rubber on the solo. “I have really admired Jared’s playing for some time,” says Barras. “His contribution to this song is massive, we gave him creative license to play whatever he wanted. I am so stoked with the results.” Catch ’em live in the UK this winter.

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California Irish – Big Question

Good old Cormac Neeson, he of Irish rockers The Answer, also has a new project. California Irish describe themselves as having a “psychedelic folk-rock sound”, and Big Question has a relaxed vibe indeed, conjuring up images of poolside parties at hip Laurel Canyon addresses, with spliffs passed around loon-panted attendees and free love in the air. The band’s debut album, The Mountains Are My Friends, is out in May. “This album is the opposite of boring AI-generated no soul perfection,” boasts Neeson. “We recorded this album in a room together over four days, allowing the music to breathe when it needed to, looking at each other for our cues and feeding off each other’s energy. It felt like a dream… but it’s the most real thing I’ve ever done in music.”

Step into the world of Kurt Cobain and explore the legacy of Nirvana, a band that defined a generation. Explore their iconic 1993 MTV Unplugged performance, one of Nirvana’s final televised appearances before Cobain’s death just five months later. See up close Cobain’s rare Martin D-18E guitar, uniquely adapted for his left-handed play, shaping the unmistakeable sound that defined Nirvana’s music. In 2020, it became the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction, bought for over $6 million by Australian entrepreneur Peter Freedman AM.

The exhibition, at the Royal College of Music Museum, reunites Kurt Cobain’s guitar with another piece of rock history – his famous olive-green mohair cardigan, worn during the MTV Unplugged performance, marking the first time these two legendary items have been displayed together.

Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged set was taped in New York on November 18, 1993.

Playing as a five piece, with Pat Smear on guitar and cellist Lori Goldston adding beautifully dark tonal colouring, Nirvana had never sounded more desolate or despairing, with Cobain singing of death, deliverance, betrayal and rejection. Though this was the band at their quietest – Cobain actually considered dropping Dave Grohl from the recording over fears that the powerful drummer might not be able to tone down his playing sufficiently – it was a punk rock performance in the same way that Bruce Springsteen’s dark masterpiece Nebraska is a punk rock record. Cobain’s version of Leadbelly’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night is one of the most haunting performances ever recorded, and the band’s take on David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World was another career highpoint.

Refused have announced their final tour of the UK and Europe.

The Swedish hardcore punk legends announced last year that they would be breaking up, for a second time, in 2025, after frontman Dennis Lyxzen suffered a heart attack last summer, ahead of a scheduled performance at at Stockholm’s Rosendal Garden Party festival.

Refused farewell tour, UK and Europe

The band had previously stated that they wish to play their very last show in Sweden.

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Speaking about The Shape Of Punk To Come to Kerrang! in 2018, Dennis Lyxzen said, “Not many people get to be associated with an album that’s considered a classic, so that’s pretty amazing. It’s such a fucking honour to be part of something that means so much to people. People have told me that their music tastes changed because of that record, and that’s humbling and cool. I’m glad that the music is still alive. Every time we play New Noise it’s exciting, it never gets old, and I’m eternally grateful for that.”

After three big rounds of voting, just four ’80s classic rock albums are left to vie for your votes in the next round of our Best ’80s Album March Madness bracket.

You’ve only got four days to vote for the best ’80s album in this round. You can see the results of last week’s voting below, then decide which two albums move on to our championship round.

Round Three Results:

AC/DC’s Back in Black defeated Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz with 78% of the vote. Angus Young and his bandmates are tearing through the competition, having previously defeated Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required 84% to 16% and the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light 86% to 14%.

U2’s The Joshua Tree defeated The Police’s Synchronicity by just 27 ballots in the closest race of the tournament so far, earning 50.13% of the vote. Bono and company previously beat Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. 54% to 46% and Iron Maiden’s Powerslave 59% to 41%.

Guns N’ Roses Appetite for Destruction defeated Journey’s Escape with 66% of the vote. Axl Rose and company previously bested Prince’s Purple Rain 58% to 42% and Rush’s Permanent Waves 62% to 38%.

Van Halen’s 1984 defeated Def Leppard’s Hysteria with 56% of the vote. David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen previously defeated Metallica’s Master of Puppets 64% to 36% and tattooed the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You 79% to 21%.

There are two rounds remaining in Ultimate Classic Rock’s Best ’80s Album tournament:

• Final Four: March 31-April 3
• Championship: April 4-7

You can cast your votes below for the Best ’80s album in our two remaining match-ups. You can vote once per hour now through April 3 at 11:59PM ET.

The winners of each round will be revealed the day after votes close and a new round of voting will begin that same day.

Adrian Borromeo, UCR

Top 100 ’80s Rock Albums

UCR takes a chronological look at the 100 best rock albums of the ’80s.

Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso and Michael Gallucci

More From Ultimate Classic Rock

Cheap Trick, Night Ranger and Winger are all planning to say goodbye to Japan in 2025.

All three bands have announced farewell tours for the Far East island country, which has played an important role in each of their careers.

Winger are nearly done with their last Japanese dates. They will perform at Tokyo’s Ex Theater Roppongi Monday March 31 and Tuesday April 1 before departing the country for good. Frontman Kip Winger says the group are winding down their touring career to allow him to focus on songwriting.

“I’m ending my touring days,” he told the Rockpit in March 2025. “I say this often to many people, interruption is the death of creativity. When you spend six months a year in an airport getting nothing done…. if you’ve got 40 gigs, you’ve [also] got 80 travel days. I’m just so replete with musical ideas.. I want to spend those days composing.”

Winger released the home video Live in Tokyo in 1991.

Night Ranger’s farewell to Japan doesn’t appear to be part of any overall retirement plans, as none of the promotion for their upcoming North American tour dates has included any mention of it being fans’ last chance to see the group. But the band has shared social media posts from Japanese promoter Udo Artists announcing “The Goodbye Tour,” which will find Night Ranger performing Oct. 14 at Osaka’s Grand Cube and Oct. 16 at Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan.

In 2019 guitarist Brad Gillis described Japan as “a beautiful country with excellent people, food culture and landscape.” The following year he explained the band’s long history with the country in an interview with Roppongiocks.com: “The fans have embraced us and all shows have been sold out. We’ve noticed the fans still love classic rock. We’ve played over 50 shows in Japan and can’t wait to head back over soon.”

To date Night Ranger has released five live albums and home videos recorded at concerts in Japan, including 1983’s Night Ranger: Japan Tour, 1988’s Japan in Motion, 1990’s Live in Japan, 1997’s Rock in Japan 1997 and 2007’s Rockin’ Shibuya.

The dates have not been revealed for Cheap Trick’s Japanese farewell tour, only a post and fliers from Udo Artists announcing it to be arriving this year. The country played a massive role in helping the band break through to a world wide audience after Japanese journalists praised their appearance as Queen‘s opening act on a 1977 tour.

After releasing three albums without breaking through in the United States, it was the 1978 live album Cheap Trick at Budokan – originally intended only for the Japanese market – that made the Rockford, Illinois-born group stars in their home country. They released a sequel, Budokan II, in 1994.

“[T]hey kind of like that quirky cartoon character thing [we had] going on, which Queen has or Kiss certainly has,” Robin Zander told Dan Rather’s The Big Interview of the band’s Japanese popularity in 2019. “We were like cartoon characters…[O]ur record company in the States and stuff, they thought, ‘Boy, this is too weird.’ But the Japanese, they got a kick out of it.”

Progressive rock’s biggest names are known far and wide, even if the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ignored the genre for almost 15 years after Pink Floyd entered in 1996.

It seemed inevitable that bands like Genesis, Rush, Yes and the Moody Blues would one day get their due. They were all finally inducted between 2010 and 2018, in that order.

Of course, plenty of worthy candidates remain, from King Crimson to Jethro Tull – but what about the progressive rock acts that somehow slipped between the cracks? For every platinum-selling group like Kansas or Emerson Lake and Palmer, there were scores underrated and often influential acts that never got near the Billboard Top 40.

READ MORE: Top 50 Progressive Rock Songs

Some actually tried, to vary degrees of cringe, but many admitted little or no interest in the trappings of fame. What could be more prog than that?

There were numerous acts who remained in obscurity because they were a little before their time – though they set the stage for others to find wider fame. In other cases, quite frankly, they may have been just a little too out there.

The best of the best appear in the following list of five prog rock bands that should’ve been bigger:

5. Can

To pigeonhole Can as simply “progressive rock” is kind of a disservice. Their mind-bendingly experimental music also fused Krautrock’s hypnotic grooves, sound collages, jazz, psychedelic rock and a sometimes-indescribable avant-garde vibe. Keyboardist Irmin Schmidt has questioned whether they were ever a rock group at all. But prog has also been a big tent, and Can certainly developed the genre’s fluid composition style through 1971’s Tago Mago and 1973’s Future Days, their best-known records. By the late-’70s and early ’80s, Can’s striking experiments in sound had built the foundation for post-punk and new wave.

4. Camel

Camel boasts member connections to King Crimson, 10cc and the Alan Parsons Project, but never achieved their name recognition or chart success. Well, at least not stateside – where their best showing was No. 118 with 1976’s Moonmadness. Camel has had five Top 40 albums in the U.K., and 1979’s I Can See Your House From Here just missed. Everything revolves around the deeply expressive guitar work of Andrew Latimer, both figuratively and literally: He’s the only constant in Camel’s lineup. That’s grounded the group as they moved from high-concept prog in the ’70s through jazzier detours in the ’80s and back again.

3. Soft Machine

Soft Machine provides an analog with King Crimson in that both served as a merry-go-round of talent. Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, Alan Holdsworth and Daevid Allen were all members along the way. Soft Machine became an all-instrumental powerhouse with 1971’s skronky Fourth, having left behind psych rock for prog and jazz rock. Such was the turnover, however, that no original member remained by the early ’80s. They also launched a series of offshoot bands, all confusingly starting with the word “Soft.” In retrospect, that might have played a role in Soft Machine’s failure to break through with the mainstream – but it certainly kept things interesting.

2. Van der Graaf Generator

In a twist, Van der Graaf Generator wasn’t even popular in the U.K., where they peaked at No. 47 with 1970’s The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other. (Instead, the band’s initial breakthrough came in Italy.) That was fine with frontman Peter Hammill, who said he never wanted mainstream success and then made sure he wouldn’t get it on dark and theatrical LPs like 1971’s Pawn Hearts and 1975’s Godbluff. Both were as outsized and musically cohesive and they were thrillingly weird – and Van der Graaf Generator remained so into the 21st Century, when Hammill jumpstarted the band again.

1. Gentle Giant

Gentle Giant shouldn’t have been surprised when their decade-long run ended in 1980 with little commercial success. After all, the liner notes for 1971’s Acquiring the Taste laid out the band’s intent to “expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of becoming very unpopular.” Gentle Giant was soon creating sweeping and always varied musical statements. It helped that every core member was a multi-instrumentalist. There was seemingly nothing they couldn’t do on rangy gems like 1972’s Octopus and 1975’s Free Hand – and, it seems, even less that Gentle Giant wouldn’t try. (Even, gasp!, pop music.)

Todd Rundgren has a wealth of legendary songs of his own that have powered his career through many decades. But if it hadn’t been for important inspirations like songwriter and producer Burt Bacharach, his path might have been different.

“I was a teenager in my junior high school years, I guess it was, and the Beatles sort of became everything. I didn’t pay much attention to who the composers were of the songs,” he tells the UCR Podcast. “And then ‘Walk on By’ came out. I really liked the song. It had this whole spooky thing and a different kind of sensibility from your typical pop song. So I bought the Dionne Warwick album that contained that song. Right there with my Beatles albums and everything else, it became one of my regular listens.”

Listen to Dionne Warwick’s ‘Walk on By’

“That’s when I became aware of Burt Bacharach as a songwriter and he was also the producer of the record. I also started paying more attention to who was writing the songs, even if it wasn’t [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney. So that’s when I got interested in the work,” he explains. “We didn’t have a piano in the house, so when I was in high school, I used to spend after hours in the auditorium, just fooling around on the piano. I discovered my hands and ears tended to go towards those major and minor sevens, the more sophisticated chords that you’d find in a Bacharach song. I realized there was a subconscious influence going on, just from having listened to that Dionne Warwick album so many times. Of course as the years went by and I became more of a serious songwriter, that influence [is still] somewhere in the mix.”

Rundgren is currently taking a deeper dive into Bacharach’s work as part of the tour called What the World Needs Now: The Burt Bacharach Songbook. It’s an outing which he acknowledges has presented him with some challenges. “Burt rarely wrote the lyrics and I don’t know what, exactly the process would be like,” he admits. “You know, whether Hal David would show up with a song, poem, or something like that, and Burt would put it to music. Maybe more likely, Burt had some musical ideas, and then the lyricist would would try and find something that that went along with it.”

He cites “God Give Me Strength,” Bacharach’s collaboration with Elvis Costello, as one example. “I have the responsibility of singing [that] and it’s [clear] that those are Elvis Costello lyrics,” he points out. “It’s that combination of self-pity and anger that [is a] thread through all of Elvis Costello’s lyrics. So I guess Burt is kind of the stable foundation for these things. And then it’s up to the lyricist to paint the picture to which the soundtrack already exists.”

Bacharach Was Apparently a Rundgren Fan

There’s an anecdote that the legendary songwriter and producer came to see Rundgren perform live because he wanted to hear “Hello, it’s Me” live. Unfortunately, that song wasn’t in the set list that particular night and the pair didn’t meet. “I never got to talk to him about exactly why he was there,” he says now. “So I can only make some assumptions. I never had the opportunity to see him in concert, but you know, that’s a different experience. I imagine the audience for a Burt Bacharach concert has a certain amount of deference and reverence for him. They know he’s not a singer, but he’s going to sing anyway. We won’t have the advantage of that [with this current tour]. We’ve got to stand up on our own. I think there will be people there to enjoy it and people [also wondering] how well we’ll capture it. He’s the kind of artist that if you get into him and you get into his songs, you don’t want to hear them screwed with too badly.”

Early reviews suggest that the late Bacharach’s music is in good hands. His former music director and arranger Rob Shirakbari is at the helm, helping to oversee the nine-piece all-star ensemble featuring Rundgren, his Utopia bandmate Kasim Sulton and vocalist Wendy Moten and others. The 22-date tour began with three California shows and will run through Ft. Lauderdale on April 23.

Watch Todd Rundgren Sing Burt Bacharach’s Music