Another tough week in the rock'n'roll mines is over, and this week's seam of gold belongs to These Wicked Rivers, whose recent single Sing Another Song (featuring Kezia Gill) received enough support to ensure it rode into the sunset victorious.

Sari Schorr's Mr In The Middle came in second, while Spiders' Creature Of The Night managed to clamber onto the bottom rung of the ladder.

This week's UFC of rock music is now underway. Check out the combatants below, and vote for your favourite at the foot of the page.

HOL1D4Y - Autonomatic

"It’s a word I came up with by combining the words: autonomy and automatic.” says Rival Sons guitar-hero-in-chief Scott Holiday, explaining the title of this latest single from his solo project. “Autonomatic: The built-in or intrinsic desire for autonomy.” Accompanied by a fittingly psychedelic, mixed-media video, Autonomatic offers another enticing taste of first HOL1D4Y album, Topology (out next month and highly recommended), playing out like a riffy, cinematic trip into the desert. Shweeet.

Joyous Wolf - In Your Shadow

When these guys parted ways with livewire, back-flipping singer Nick Reese (due to “creative differences”) we wondered if that was it for the punchy, commanding young Californians we first fell for around 2018. So we’re happy to find them on fighting form with this heart-warming highlight from their just-released album In Between, with new frontman Pedro Cordeiro bringing a gravelly, Chris Cornell-infused soulfulness to the mix. Straight-shooting in a good way.

Joanne Shaw Taylor - The Girl That You Loved Before

Gorgeous Telecaster tones, husky, soul-flecked pop and rock’n’roll abound in this latest chapter in JST’s current hot streak (this appears on her second album in two years, The Trouble With Love, coming out in October). Lush bluesy solo, too – Jo’s still very much a Stevie Ray Vaughan-raised blueser at heart, on the guitar front, though as TGTYLB reflects, her voice and melodies keep her in more cosmopolitan territory.

Girish & The Chronicles - Disintegrate

On this moody, oomphy newbie, Indian hard rockers Girish & The Chronicles swap their hair metal heft and 80s Sunset Strip opulence for grungier sensibilities with some proggy metal bass twangs. Still packs a simple-yet-effective punch though (“this would happily live on my gym playlist,” one colleague remarked), complete with a flashy guitar solo that harks back to their leather-jacketed roots.

Eddie 9V - Whole Lot Coming For You

Taking flight with Freddie King-laced fire and landing on the right side of ramshackle, the Atlanta singer/guitarist mixes up a hot cocktail of blues, Southern soul and headshaking vintage rock’n’roll. Feels like it belongs in a different era, in a totally fun way – the kind of bluesy jam that makes you want to grab the nearest axe and join in. Not hard to believe that it was one Eddie’s favourite tracks to cut, when he made its parent album, Down Here, with Black Keys man Dan Auerbach.

Earth Tongue - Dimly Lit Cadaver

Returning to their B-movie horror roots with the brilliantly titled Dimly Lit Cadaver and a video shot in the actual Swiss Alps, this might be the finest release yet from New Zealand psych-fuzz duo Earth Tongue. It includes some stellar riffing from Gussie Larkin – especially the section with the extra grunt that steams in at 2'35" accompanied by some strange burbling – and brilliantly propulsive drumming from Ezra Simons. Throw in Larkin's spooky, pagan-chant vocal stylings, and you get the perfect soundtrack for your next coven AGM.

Graveyard - A Means To An End

These Swedish rockers strap on their biggest, stompiest boots for this taste of their forthcoming album, the spicily titled Fever. Fierce, fuzz-heavy and full of ragged punch, A Means To An End finds them swapping woozy retro trappings for a heavier, more straight-shooting approach. Still alluring, still old-soul Sabbathian cool, but now it’s all kicking off on the dirtier, dicier side of their proverbial musical town.

De Staat - The Underdog

And now for a curveball. Offbeat, contorted and expansive, the Dutch art rockers’ return after two years gains another shot of momentum with this industrial mini-epic. The Underdog builds and builds over cascades of high, eerie organ and vocals, cavernous beats and thunderous basslines – sort of like Rammstein at a rave with glowsticks, descending into a kind of dystopian nightmare, but really this is very much its own, enigmatic thing. A compellingly odd but hooky taste of their upcoming self-titled album. This divided opinions in the office, and it’ll probably do so among you good folks. But isn’t that the point sometimes?

Metallica have never been shy of wearing their influences on their sleeves. Over the course of their 40-plus year career, the US band have paid tribute to many of the bands that inspired them by covering their songs, Countless artists have got the Metallica treatment, from household names such as Deep Purple, Iron Maiden and Motörhead to lesser-known bands like Diamond Head, Misfits and Budgie.

Yet one major band have missed out on the Metallica stamp of approval – British metal warhorses Saxon. It’s not as if Lars Ulrich and co weren’t aware of them. The drummer cited the band’s Strong Arm Of The Law as one of his favourite records from his formative years.

“Heavy Metal Thunder is just an anthem,” said Lars, who saw Saxon play in 1981 when he spent time in England. “Whenever you listen to the song, you were there, you were in the thick of it, you were a part of what was going on.”

Yet despite that, Metallica never got around to covering Saxon on record – and singer Biff Byford has a theory why.

In the early 80s, Saxon were one of the most exciting heavy metal bands in Britain. Formed in the South Yorkshire town of Barnsley in 1975 as Son Of A Bitch, they helped spearheaded the NWOBHM movement that also produced the likes of Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. In fact, Saxon’s second album, 1980’s Wheels Of Steel, had crashed into the UK Top 5 two weeks before Maiden’s self-titled debut album achieved the same feat.

“We were big in Britain, no argument,” Biff told Classic Rock in 2018. “Probably the biggest of our generation of metal bands at the time. We’d done it through hard graft and killer songs; none of that trendy image rubbish.”

Having conquered their home country, America was next in their sights. Saxon’s first experience of touring the US was as opening act for Rush in late 1980. But it would be another 18 months before they returned to the US as headliners in their own right - which is where they first crossed paths with Metallica.

On March 26 and 27, Saxon played two shows at LA’s Whisky A Go Go club – their very first shows in the city. The band themselves had picked the support band for each night after sifting through tapes of potential candidates. The band they picked to open on the first night were future 80s rock superstars Ratt, at the time carving out a name for themselves on the Sunset Strip scene. And for the second night, they’d come across a tape from a brand new band who had played just one gig to date. Their name? Metallica.

“It was the quality of the demo and the tunes that stood out,” Saxon guitarist Graham Oliver told Classic Rock in 2018. “The others were rubbish.”

A buzz surrounded the two Whisky shows. Several other musicians turned up in the dressing room, including Ozzy Osbourne, who was still reeling from the death of guitarist Randy Rhoads just a week earlier, and a hot new band named Mötley Crüe. “Our tour manager said, ‘Their favourite song is Motorcycle Man, they really want to meet you,’” recalled Biff. “We said, ‘Bring ’em in!’ Eighteen months later we were supporting them!”

Unlike Ozzy and Crüe, no one really knew who Metallica were, to the point where Saxon didn’t bother watching them soundcheck. Still, the singer did catch their set later that evening. “I remember watching them, thinking, ‘They’re gonna be huge.’” the singer told Classic Rock in 2018 (coincidentally, the other band playing that night were Trauma, featuring future Metallica bassist Cliff Burton).

The two shows Saxon played were both triumphs, even if they never really made the US breakthrough they should have. On the other hand, Metallica’s star was in the ascendency – just over a year later, they released their landmark debut album, Kill ’Em All, ushering in a new chapter in metal history.

Over the subsequent years and decades, Metallica repaid the debt they owed to the bands that inspired them by covering their songs, most famously Diamond Head’s Am I Evil?. Yet a Saxon cover never materialised – and according to Biff, the reason why stemmed from a petty incident at that Whisky A Go Go show.

“We had a fan onstage, built into a wedge – we used to get hot,” Biff told Classic Rock. “The fan used to come on every so often to cool us down. I think one of the Metallica guys asked if they could use it and our tour manager said no. I think that’s why they never did a Saxon song, or we never played with them again. We didn’t really talk to Metallica again until after my book [Biff’s 2007 autobiography Never Surrender] came out.”

Biff humorously addressed the ‘fan incident’ in the book. “I said, ‘Look, if you want to use the fan in the future, it’s no problem.’ They got in touch with me after that. They must have realised it was a bit stupid.”

Metallica have never explained why they didn’t record a Saxon cover, but any beef, real or imagined, has long since been squashed. In 2009, Biff joined Metallica onstage in Paris to sing Saxon’s 1980 biker anthem Motorcycle Man, and again in 2011 during the American band’s 40th anniversary gigs in San Francisco. “We’ve become really good friends,” the singer told Classic Rock. “So there’s a happy ending to it all.”

Megadeth singer/guitarist Dave Mustaine has revealed that the band have at least two songs left over from the recording of their final album. However, he’s not set on releasing them.

Talking exclusively in the upcoming issue of Metal Hammer, Mustaine, 64, reveals two tracks that didn’t make the cut on this January’s Megadeth, called Bloodlust and Farewell My Love. He also names a possible third, When Robots Rule, before conceding that he may have made that title up due to his 2019 treatment for throat cancer affecting his memory.

“But I might be mixing things up,” he tells us. “That’s another byproduct of chemo and radiation called ‘chemo brain’, where you have a really hard time remembering things.”

These songs are part of a bunch of unfinished tracks that Megadeth have made over the course of their 43-year career. But according to Mustaine, who plans to break the band up due to him living with the hand condition Dupuytren’s contracture, revisiting these ideas would not be at the top of his to-do list were he to continue his career.

“If I could play old songs,” he says, “why wouldn’t I want to focus on new songs instead?”

Mustaine announced Megadeth’s impending retirement last August, saying that he wanted the Grammy-winning thrashers, whom he formed upon his expulsion from Metallica in 1983, to go out on their own terms. He urged fans, “Don’t be mad, don’t be sad, be happy for us all, come celebrate with me these next few years.”

He revealed his Dupuytren’s contracture in December and said that it was a major contributor to his decision to break the band up. He added during an interview with YouTube channel MariskalRockTV that the condition, which causes one or more fingers to bend inwards towards the palm, “makes it really painful to play” guitar.

Megadeth came out via BLKIIBLK on January 23 and was a commercial success. It was the first of the band’s 17 studio albums to top the US Billboard 200 chart. The closest they’d come previously was with 1992’s Countdown To Extinction, which reached number two.

The band’s farewell tour kicked off with a run of North American concerts earlier this year and will resume with a performance at the Alaska State Fair on Saturday (August 22). They’ll support Iron Maiden on the North American leg of their 50th-anniversary Run For Your Lives world tour from August 29 to September 29, then again at the band’s Australia and New Zealand shows in November. A European headline tour is in place for March and April.

In addition, Mustaine is set to release his third memoir, In My Darkest Hour, on September 8 via De Capo. The book will focus on his 2019 cancer battle. He was diagnosed with a squamous cell carcinoma at the back of his tongue in the February and revealed his condition to fans the following June. Doctors gave him the all-clear that October.

In My Darkest Hour was co-written by The New York Times’ Joe Layden, who previously worked with Mustaine on 2010’s Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir. Mustaine’s last memoir, Rust In Peace, chronicled the creation of Megadeth’s acclaimed 1990 album of the same name.

The full interview with Mustaine appears in the next Hammer issue, which will be available to order from Thursday, August 20.

One night in 1976, Fred Schneider was in Atlanta at a club called 2001. “It was a real cheesy place,” the B-52s singer tells Classic Rock. “Instead of a light show, they just showed slides on a screen. And the slides were of babies and puppies, and weirdly, lobsters on a grill [laughs]. It made no sense to be at a disco and be seeing that stuff!” But Schneider says inspiration struck. “I thought: ‘Wow, rock this, rock that, rock lobster!’”

Using that title, Schneider wrote a poem, free-associating about undersea creatures, beach party movies and even a Coppertone tanning butter commercial (“Pass the butter, please!”). He brought the idea back to Athens, where, a few months before, he and four “nerdy friends” had started a band. Named after the 50s-style bouffant hairdos singers Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson loved, they called themselves The B-52s. After playing a few house parties, doing covers, they got serious about writing their own songs.

And they did it in a disused funeral home.

“It was actually a bloodletting room,” Schneider says with a laugh. “It was a concrete room, with one tiny window, and canals at the side, where the bloodletting once happened. It had no heat. I remember Kate playing the keyboards with mittens on. It didn’t even have electricity. We had to run a line to the restaurant next door. I think rent was like fifteen or twenty bucks a month. But we were troopers. People say: ‘Oh, you had it so easy.’ Not really.”

“It was scary and cold in there, but it’s all we could afford,” Kate Pierson told me. “That’s where we wrote Planet Claire, Dance This Mess Around and Rock Lobster - all our early songs.”

Schneider remembers guitarist Ricky Wilson having the spy-surf riff that started the song. “Ricky is very underappreciated as a guitarist, but he was totally admired by most of the bands that we came up with,” he says.

Indeed, the guitarist had a distinct, angular style, with aggro precision and open tunings (“Inspired by Joni Mitchell,” Pierson says). For Rock Lobster he deliberately removed the two middle strings from his Mosrite Ventures guitar. It gave the remaining ones an odd resonance. Pierson says of the riff: “It’s a song that when that starts, you know what’s coming.”

The B-52s songwriting method was to start with a riff or title, then just jam. Schneider says: “We’d jam and jam miles of tape. We’d make up a lot of parts, then try to string them all together. Rock Lobster has got an especially strange structure to it. It’s not verse-chorus. I mean in the six-and-a-half-minute version on the album, there are all kinds of sections.”

As its almost prog structure unfolds, Rock Lobster gets fathoms deep with the surreal (‘Here comes a bikini whale’) and the humorous (‘Put on your nose guard, put on the lifeguard’). And given that all but one of the band members were gay, it also sneaks in some gender-bending. “Yes, I sing: ‘Boys in bikinis and girls in surfboards,’” Schneider says. Though I’m not sure why the girls were in surfboards, rather than on them [laughs]. It’s just the way I write. I can’t always explain it.”

The band recorded the first version of the song at Stone Mountain Studio, near Atlanta, and released it on DB, an indie label started by their friend Danny Beard. They pressed up a run of 45s and consigned them to any record store that would sell them. Some of those stores were in Greenwich Village, where the punk/new wave scene was happening at clubs like CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City. In New York alone the band sold 2000 copies of the single within a few months.

Lots of buzz and a bidding war between labels ended with them signing to Warner Brothers. The band flew to the Bahamas to make their debut album with producer Chris Blackwell, owner of Island Records, who had a studio there. They hoped he’d give them a “big, full sound”. But when they heard the playbacks they were shocked. “It sounded really thin and rinky-dink,” Schneider recalls. “But I guess that’s what people like about us.”

The band’s big breakthrough came with a performance of Rock Lobster on US TV show Saturday Night Live (Dave Grohl later said it “opened a whole new world” for him). Schneider remembers: “When we played it on Saturday Night Live, people in the audience immediately stood up. There were no signs or directions from the TV crew to do that. We just get people going. And that’s how we started, because we weren’t practised entertainers by any stretch of the imagination.”

Fifty years on, they’re certainly more practised, and Rock Lobster is a beloved part of their set on their ongoing tour. “I never get tired of doing the song,” Schneider says. “But we’ve got to make it fun for the band on stage, fun for the people in the audience, and get them all going. I feel like that’s my job. I’m not the best singer in the world by any means. People might think: ‘Oh, he thinks he can sing.’ But I don’t. And who cares? I do what I do, and it works.”

Over the years, Rock Lobster has been omnipresent in pop culture, appearing in countless TV shows, movies and video games, including Family Guy, Knocked Up and Rock Band 3.

I asked Schneider if he thought the song’s kookiness had prevented The B-52s from being taken more seriously.

“Maybe, but we don’t care,” he replied. “We know who we are. And we always struck a chord with all the people who are different: gay people, introverts, outsiders. They’ve all told us how our music opened up their whole appreciation for music and art and other ways of looking at things.” Kate Pierson told me: “And even when we were singing about lobsters and volcanoes, we always sang like our lives depended on it.”

Queens Of The Stone Age have confirmed their new album title via the medium of five-finger fillet. It is believed to be the first time that the dangerous game – in which participants rapidly stab a knife back and forth between their spread-eagled fingers – has been used in such a manner.

In the announcement video, frontman Josh Homme and guitarist-keyboardist Dean Fertita play the game, and while Fertita is clearly a well-practised expert, the novice Homme plunges the knife deep into his hand on his first attempt.

"Does it hurt?" asks Fertida.

"Yes, it fucking hurts, dude," Homme responds

"Pull it out."

"I can't do it."

Homme eventually retrieves the knife from its fleshy target, and, after a moment of calm, a fountain of blood erupts from the wound, drenching both musicians.

Perfecth, Queens Of The Stone Age's ninth studio album and the follow-up to 2023's In Times New Roman..., will be released later in the year. A single, Easy Street, was released last month. The band are currently on the road in the US with Foo Fighters, and have shows in Australia and New Zealand lined up in the buildup to Christmas. Full dates below.

Queens Of The Stone Age 2026 tour dates

Aug 17: Washington Nationals Park, DC*
Aug 15: Regina Mosaic Stadium, SK*
Sep. 17: Edmonton Commonwealth Stadium, AB*
Sep. 20: Vancouver BC Place, BC*
Sep. 26: Las Vegas Allegiant Stadium, NV
Oct 04: Sacramento Aftershock Festival, CA

Oct 24: Reykjavík Laugardalshöll, Iceland

Dec 08: Adelaide The Drive, Australia^
Dec 11: Hobart MyState Bank Arena, Australia^
Dec 13: Melbourne Rod Laver Arena, Australia^
Dec 15: Sydney Afterpay Arena, Australia^
Dec 16: Newcastle Entertainment Centre, Australia^
Dec 18: Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Australia^
Dec 20: Auckland Spark Arena, New Zealand^

* supporting Foo Fighters
^ With Primus and Tropical Fuck Storm

Find Queens Of The Stone Age tickets.

It's been a big week for Crossbone Skully, the excellent Def Leppard-alike band led by Alice Cooper axe slinger Tommy Henriksen, who've just triumphed in our latest Tracks Of The Week tournament. So congratulations to them, and to Phil Collen, who joined them on the open-top bus victory parade.

Congratulations also to Jack J Hutchinson, whose fancy new song Rise Again pipped The Pineapple Thief's New World Order in the battle for the minor medals. And now we start again, with eight new candidates lined up to assume Tracks Of The Week Hall Of Fame status. We hope you enjoy them.

Green Lung - Black Magick Radio

Gallop your way into the week with these gothy London rockers, and this heartily good fun slice of their forthcoming album Necropolitan. Teamed with one of their best videos yet, it sucks you into an FM radio-powered kaleidoscope of cultish mischief, monstrously moreish riffs and '70s living room furniture. “Black Magick Radio is our love letter to occult rock itself, and a promise to spread its gospel as widely as we possibly can,” the band say. “All together now… Eko Eko Azarak, Eko Eko Zomelak…"

Spiders - Creature Of The Night

With a simple but very effective, toe-tapping verse riff, infectious levels of energy and a touch of Blondie in the chorus melody, the nostalgic Swedes’ latest rock’n’roller makes an appetising case for their next album, Crystal Eyes. Catchy and fast-paced, its rawness laced with glitter, sweat and leather, it was written about "a person or being so irresistible that they take pleasure in ruining relationships and destroying people's lives, watching them burn to the ground..." Lovely.

Royal Blood - Ten Over Ten

Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher return with a heavy, pummelling yet light-footed bang with this first new release following 2023’s Back To The Water Below. “After putting the Royal Blood engine in neutral for a couple of years, we've been building up the revs and are playing faster and harder than ever with this album,” the band say of Ten Over Ten’s parent record (coming out in full in November), Dead Company. “Written and recorded with the stage in mind, we cannot wait to play it live for years to come.”

Castle Rat - Dragon

With such a heavy boot in the medieval fantasy camp – where swords and chainmail aren’t so much fashion choices as a way of life – New York doomsters Castle Rat had to write a song with such a title at some point. And so they did, and it rocks. A heady fusion of Sabbathian sludge and treacly 60s/early 70s psychedelia, elevated by Riley ‘The Rat Queen’ Pinkerton’s sumptuous pipes, this newly released single/video version (featured on last year’s The Bestiary album) is just the shot of riffy, escapism we needed to banish those last bits of heatwave brain fog.

Sari Schorr - Mr. In The Middle

Kicking off with a killer, stabbing lead guitar blast that fans of contemporary blues six-stringers like Joe Bonamassa will lap up, Sari Schorr’s new single pounces straight out of the speakers with one apparent aim: to put the ‘rock’ in blues rock. Also, quite a bit of ‘roll’. And so it does, Sari’s vocals on powerful form as slickened Stevie Ray Vaughan vibes keep on punching out around her. Tasty guitar solo, too.

Battlesnake - Mud Apocalypse

On this new single, Aussie ensemble Battlesnake opt for a lo-fi alt rock approach, with a surprisingly gentle, folky… Just kidding, it’s a ridiculous (yet tight, on-the-money) feast of blood-spurting, skull-crushing, organ-squelching bravado, accompanied by down-tuned riffs the size of mythical monsters, Queen-glittered twin lead guitars and a level of metal-studded swashbuckling of which Rob Halford would be proud. There’s even a horse neighing in there somewhere, for some reason.

These Wicked Rivers - Sing Another Song (feat Kezia Gill)

Something with a dulcet, countrified sway now – country rock’n’roll by way of Derbyshire, if you will, courtesy of These Wicked Rivers and guest co-vocalist Kezia Gill. Think Lynyrd Skynyrd rugs, gospelly backnotes and heart-warming harmonies between Kezia and rough-crooned frontman John Hartwell. Need something a little gentler and sweeter to accompany your morning cuppa? Try this guy.

The Sixsters - Can You Believe It 

And finally, something a little more day-glo. The Sixsters are an all-female Ukrainian rock band who relocated to Essen, Germany, following the 2022 Russian invasion of their homeland. Formed in 2018 in a town near Kyiv, the group was founded by drummer Kateryna Kuziakina when she was just nine years old. Eight years on, they're producing a beguilingly effervescent mix of punk rock and pop rock, and Can You Believe It is more fun than a litter of puppies on a trampoline. The band's fifth album, Ghost, was released earlier this year.

At the end of 1974, Kiss were in trouble. Their self-titled debut album had shifted just 75,000 copies. The follow-up, Hotter Than Hell, had stalled at No.100 on the US chart. Kiss needed a hit, and they needed one fast.

Their label boss, Casablanca Records owner, Neil Bogart told frontman Paul Stanley, in precise detail, what kind of hit this should be, using Sly & the Family Stone's euphoric I Want to Take You Higher" as a model. “He said, ‘You need something that your fans can rally behind – a song that embodies what you’re about,’” recalled Stanley.

The singer chose the right place to write it – in his room at the famous Hyatt House hotel on Sunset Boulevard. This joint became known as ‘The Riot House’ after all the wild parties that had been staged there, one of which involved Led Zeppelin’s hard-drinking drummer John Bonham riding a motorcycle along the corridors. Paul took out an acoustic guitar and within a few minutes he had it.

“Right away I had the lyrics: ‘I wanna rock and roll all nite and party every day,’” he said. ‘It was very primal in that it really wasn’t anything that I pondered. At that time I don’t believe people talked about wanting to party. It was just a one-word description of a way of getting loose. Rocking and rolling all night and partying every day isn’t so much a physical action as much as it’s an attitude. It’s a way of looking at life. It’s a mindset – a mindset about liberation and celebration of the individual.”

The song was completed with a verse from a work-in-progress Gene had, Drive Me Wild. “I never had the chorus,” Gene said, “but I had this notion of a car as an analogy to a woman, the idea of, ‘You drive me wild, I’ll drive you crazy.’ So the pieces were basically stuck together. Take my verse and attach it to Paul’s chorus and you’ve got a song.”

When Neil Bogart heard Rock And Roll All Nite, he was ecstatic. But for all its populist genius, Rock And Roll All Nite, only made it to No.68 on the Billboard Hot 100 when it was released in April 1975. But it took on another life when a live version was extracted from the blockbusting Alive! album later that same year, reaching No.12 in the US. Just as Neil Bogart had instructed, it was the anthem that defined the band. For the members of Kiss – and for rock’n’roll partiers everywhere – things would never be the same again.

"Rock and Roll All Nite is astounding, in that every night we play it, it brings on a euphoria and a feeling of abandon in the crowd, everything that it was supposed to do," Stanley told Classic Rock. "It was meant to be a rock anthem that would sum up the philosophy and common point of view between Kiss and our fans."

It's done more than that. Rock and Roll All Nite has become part of the cultural furniture, referenced in everything from The Simpsons (in the famous Homerpolooza episode, Homer says, "I used to rock and roll all night and party every day, then it was every other day. Now I'm lucky if I can find half an hour a week in which to get funky.") to the Winter Olympics (where Katarina Witt and Kristi Yamaguichi skated to it at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City).

It's also become a soundtrack staple, featuring in the movies Dazed And Confused, Why Him?, The Nice Guys, Gulliver's Travels, Role Models and Less Than Zero (where it was covered by Poison), and in the TV series Family Guy, Friends, The Dangerous Book For Boys, Ugly Betty, Dharma & Greg and Full House.

Tellingly, it was also referenced by Kiss themselves, on their 1976 album Destroyer. During the intro to Detroit Rock City, after a newscaster (played by producer Bob Ezrin) reports a tragic automobile accident, Rock And Roll All Nite can briefly be heard playing on a car stereo. Kiss needed to set the scene for what would become their first platinum album, and they knew just how iconic the song had already become.

Be honest: who else is sick of summer? Don't get us wrong, long sunny days can be lovely, but after a few months we'll admit we're getting itchy for those cool nights and the things that go bump in them.

Speaking of which, here are the results of our last poll! Clearly we're not alone, as there's a definite spooky vibe going on in the winner's from our end of July round-up (we missed last week because we were being roasted alive at Bloodstock). In third place was the debut single from Sheri Moon Zombie, while all-round metal legend Tony Iommi took second. But our winners for the week - by some distance - were Silvertomb, the doom metal project featuring former Type O Negative alumni Kenny Hickey and Johnny Kelly, two musicians who clearly know their way around the Autumnal season.

We've got a diverse mix this week as we bring you new tunes from the likes of Green Lung, Mastodon and Godflesh, plus (potentially) newer bands to check out like Gradience, Netherwilds and Noctule. Don't forget to tell us which song excites you most by casting a vote in the poll below - and stay hydrated and cool out there. Halloween beckons.

Mastodon - In The Ruins

There's only a couple of weeks left to go before we get Mastodon's new album Marrow Deep (Aug 28, to be exact). It might be their first album without Brent Hinds, but the sound that's turned them into one of the 21st Century's most critically hailed metal bands is still very much present and correct in new single In The Ruins, a track that makes great use of tonal shifts to explore the space between heft and gentle melody.

Noctule - Goddess Of Rot

Next week Svalbard will play their final show at ArcTanGent festival. But while there's definitely sadness at losing one of the UK's most talented blackened post-hardcore bands, we aren't losing them entirely. Vocalist Serena Cherry unveiled her video game themed solo black metal project Noctule back in 2020 and second album Extinguish Thy Flame is due September 25. Latest single Goddess Of Rot definitely taps into a familiar sound that fans of Svalbard will recognise - furious, majestic and impossibly emotional.

Green Lung - Black Magick Radio

Green Lung know their way around a catchy tune. Spooky season might still be a few weeks off, but Black Magick Radio is practically dripping in ectoplasm, the Londoners clearly having a lot of fun with old school keyboard sounds as they evoke the dark magical appeal of the late 60s and early 70s. New album Necropolitan is due September 11. "In praise to the Sabbath" indeed.

The Cartographer - Griefworn

Newcomers out of Derby, there's something oppressive and hackle-raising about The Cartographer's Griefworn. Sure, it's got the kind of pummelling, relentless aggression we've come to expect of modern metal, but there's also a sense that pressure is mounting and it'll properly explode at any moment. Keep your eyes out for their debut The Collapse Of A Bitter End on September 18.

Godflesh - Living/Ending

For almost 40 years Godflesh have been the epitome of crushing, claustrophobic industrial metal. Justin Broadrick might be retiring the project in the near-future - a hernia surgery has left him unable to perform the band's characteristic bulldog snarls for long periods - but before they bow out we've been promised two more albums. Living/Ending comes from Decay, due September 25 and perhaps unsurprisingly, given everything Broadrick's been through, it's a nihilstic vision of a future you hoped would never come to pass. Naturally, we love it.

Zilqy - World’s End

A new group emerging out of Japan, Zilqy features former members of Aldious and Lovebites, though feels decidedly more contemporary than either of those groups. There's something almost industrial about the clattering low-end, balanced with clear radio sensibilities. World's End comes from the band's debut album Birth Of Riot, due October 7.

Battlesnake - Mud Apocalypse

They were the vomit, and they killed satan, now Battlesnake are harbingers of the Mud Apocalypse. The colourful Aussies have become first festival mainstays here in the UK over the past couple of years, and debuted this latest single at Bloodstock last weekend, delivering it with the typical po-faced, trad metal glory that all of their songs have championed thus far.

Gradience - Undone

Nobody is blending genres quite like Denmark's Gradience. Undone starts out like a post-black metal rager complete with blast-beats, only to give way to modern hip hop flows and melodies. It's a stark contrast of styles, but works incredibly well, the snarling blasts of heaviness only highlighting how well the band can fuse two disparate elements together. The group's debut album Anomaly is out September 4.

Netherwilds - Helm Yeah

Who says its only folk and black metal bands who can enjoy a bit of renaissance fair dress-up? Netherwilds sound like they come from New York in the early 90s and look like they're fighting their way out of the 16th Century, Helm Yeah a very tongue-in-cheek tune all about cutting loose and aspiring for more. We'll be honest, we're looking forward to debut Peasant Rising on October 9.

Hippotraktor - Oblivion Walker

Sounding like a fender bender in an asteroid belt, Hippotraktor have the remarkable ability to bridge the djenty technicality of Tesseract with the gorgeous, cosmic melodies of Mastodon. At least, that's what we've got with Oblivion Walker, a brilliant cut taken from new album Annihilist, due October 2.

This is where it all started. The groundwork had already been laid with the musical cross-pollination of Faith No More, the rap-rock polemic of Rage Against The Machine and the concrete-heavy grooves of Helmet and Prong, among others. For good or ill though, the movement that would come to be known as nu metal was birthed with the release of Korn’s monstrous first single and debut album opener Blind.

The sinister, skittering cymbals, that jagged, repeated slash of guitar and its counterpoint riff. Frontman Jonathan Davis growling, ‘Are you ready?’ like an invitation to a riot – which in a way it was. The song launched Korn and a thousand follow-the-leader wannabes into the musical mainstream, but its genesis goes back a little further.

A version of Blind had been written and played live in the clubs in the early 90s by Davis’ pre-Korn outfit SexArt. The band also featured guitarist Ryan Shuck who would go on to co-found Orgy and play with Julien-K and Dead By Sunrise – the latter with Chester Bennington.

“When my first band broke up, I asked my friend Ryan, who went on to join Orgy, if I could keep the song. The way we did it was completely different to the original version anyway,” Davis added. “What was I going for lyrically? I have no fucking idea, brother! This was just a stream-of-consciousness thing; it was all over the place. I think it’s about being blind to your reality; blocking the shit out that you don’t want to see or hear.”

“The riff came from Jonathan’s old band, SexArt,” guitarist Munky told Metal Hammer in 2020. “Head and I saw them play at some little club and I remember thinking the riff was pretty cool – it was in a different key, but still really heavy. It felt like new territory; like something I’d never heard before.”

How much of the song was actually rewritten and how freely it was given to Korn remains a matter of debate. The main songwriter in SexArt was drummer Dennis Shinn and neither he nor Shuck were originally credited for Blind (or Daddy, which also originated with SexArt) when it appeared as the opening track on Korn’s self-titled debut album, released in October 1994.

In a 2006 interview with God Is In The TV under his pseudonym Menace, Shinn alleged that Davis “had actually stolen the songs that I had written in SexArt”. It was only after the pair took legal action that they were credited on Korn’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1 a decade later, as well as all subsequent releases featuring the songs.

“Despite the old drama, egomaniacs and their politics brought forth, I am always very proud of what I wrote, and thankful for Korn, doing such a great job representing the music for all these years,” wrote Shinn on Instagram.

For his part, guitarist Head claims the song had “many writers”, while acknowledging that Shinn and Shuck wrote the original before Korn changed it up. “We came in with the cymbal part, and Munky came up with the 'Dan-a-nan-na,' then we decided after it kicked in we were going to bring it all right down. That was all Korn rewriting it,” he told Head told Metal Hammer.

And whatever the exactitudes of the original composition of the song, there’s no doubting that it was Korn’s delivery – along with the eerie-to-hulking sonics captured by producer Ross Robinson – that made Blind such a visceral gut-punch of a song.

According to Davis, the demo version of Blind was recorded using a purloined guitar belonging to hair metal/shock rock troupe W.A.S.P. "When we were doing the demos, I think it was W.A.S.P. was doing their record or some shit," the singer told Rolling Stone. "So when W.A.S.P. went home at night, we'd sneak in and use their shit, so we'd be up all night. And [Robinson] gave us wheatgrass to keep us up. Yeah, the demo of 'Blind was one of Blackie Lawless' guitars, I believe. Fucking funny, huh?"

The recording process as the band moved onto the debut album was unconventional. Davis has said he recorded Ball Tongue while high on crystal meth and his breakdown at the end of Daddy was genuine – with Robinson having motioned at the rest of the band to keep jamming as the singer wept.

“He’s a fucking sadistic bastard, that motherfucker,” Davis told Rolling Stone as they looked back on the 20th anniversary of the album. “I love him, though; don’t get me wrong. But yeah, I think it gets him off. He had his way and was digging in to me and pulling shit out. I was already writing stuff about it, but to get the performance out, he really just poured salt on the wound.”

The version of Blind that made the album, ushering in one of the most impactful debuts in metal history, as well as serving as the lead single, was reworked once more from the cut on the Neidermeyer’s Mind demo. It was also a slowburner. Initially released as a promo single, it never bothered the charts and the album never rose above No.72 on the US Billboard 200 chart. It made a big noise in the underground, however, and served as an introduction to Korn and their new breed of metal.

“It was a powerhouse, that was such an important song for us, we started playing it around Los Angeles, and we always opened with that song, because we were saying, ‘Get ready, because this is a new thing, this is a new sound, you’re going to be seeing some freaky looking dudes going nuts onstage!’” Head recalled.

By the time the end of the century approached, Korn were global stars who transcended the metal ghetto and Blind had taken on its own monstrous life. The band’s set at the infamously chaotic Woodstock ’99 event was one of the weekend’s highlights, providing a safety valve outlet for an increasingly agitated crowd. It was one of the moments that didn’t descend into outright anarchy but the energy was immense throughout – starting with the response to that instantly recognisable intro.

“I remember the intro,” Davis said on the Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 documentary. “We’re walking out, I come walking out and I see that fucking crowd. I’m like, ‘What the flying fuck?’”

Speaking of the sheer volume and energy of the crowd, he continued: “When you see it with your own eyes it’s just 10 times more shocking… I look over and I see just waves as the sound travelled all the way to the back… there’s no drug, there's no nothing on this planet that can give you that fucking feeling of having a crowd in your hand like that.”

More than two decades on from that. and three from its original conception, Blind still stands as an all-time classic and a seminal moment in metal history.

Godflesh leader Justin Broadrick plays electric guitar on a new song by pop hit-maker Phoebe Bridgers.

The industrial metal and post-metal pioneer performs on Bobby, a track from Bridgers’ long-awaited third album Lost Weekend, out today (August 14). Listen to the team-up below.

Broadrick, 56, makes the guest performance as Godflesh build up to the release of their penultimate studio album next month. Decay will come out on September 25 via Relapse, and lead single Living/Ending is now streaming.

It’ll be the two-piece band’s first effort since Broadrick announced his intention to end the project back in March, as the effects of a recent hernia surgery make it unsafe for him to scream onstage again.

The Birmingham-born musician wrote on social media: “I had a huge hernia, and for it to be repaired, I had to endure a six-inch incision in my groin. This unfortunately was not keyhole surgery. I have a very weak abdominal wall, which at being 57 years old this year, is not going to improve.

“If I continue to perform and shout/scream as I do with Godflesh, then I am at high risk for more hernias, and blowing out my abdominal wall entirely. Godflesh live ended the day of my surgery, and upon the surgeon making this statement.”

Godflesh will not play live again, but Broadrick has written one last album for the project. He said in his announcement that he hopes to record it at the end of this year. After the band’s dissolution, Broadrick will continue to make music with his shoegaze project Jesu and electronic solo project JK Flesh.

Broadrick formed Godflesh together with bassist B.C. Green in 1988, shortly after he stepped down from grindcore legends Napalm Death. Their first EP, 1988’s Godflesh, and debut album, 1989’s Streetcleaner, were cult hits, noted for their extreme heaviness and the use of a drum machine, unprecedented in heavy metal.

Broadrick explained to Whynow in 2023 that the drum machine was inspired by hip-hop stars Run-DMC and their 1985 single King Of Rock, while their industrial sound was a reflection of what he heard growing up in Birmingham.

“Birmingham, at that time, was the Detroit of fucking England,” he said, “and I immediately connected with, and was extremely sensitive to, that environment. At the council estate we lived on, at night you could hear factories. In summer, with the windows open, you could smell factories and hear the grinding of sounds.”

Despite Godflesh’s underground status, they have a host of high-profile admirers, including members of Korn and Faith No More. Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has praised them as “unbelievably crushing”. The band sought out artist Andres Serrano to make the covers of their Load and Reload albums after seeing that Serrano had directed the music video for Godflesh’s 1994 single Crush My Soul.

While Godflesh’s career winds down, Bridgers’ is reactivating following a hiatus. Lost Weekend is the US musician’s first album since 2020, and her recent spring tour was her first since 2023. She’s currently preparing for North American and European tour dates later this year, kicking off in Indianapolis on September 14 and 15.

Queen drummer Roger Taylor has released a second single from his upcoming solo album Violence Insane In A Beautiful World. The album's first single, Come On Summer (It’s Party Time), featuring The Ndlovu Youth Choir from Limpopo, South Africa, was released in June, and Taylor has followed that with the reflective I See You Now.

"It's a love song, it's really about my wife," says Taylor. "We've been together for quite some time, and I think when you really get to know someone, at first you really don't see everything about them, but when you really get to know someone, it's ‘oh, I see you now, that's it."

The song is accompanied by Taylor's longtime collaborator Simon Lupton, who also worked on the longorm Queen videos Greatest Video Hits 1 and 2, and The Show Must Go On: The Queen + Adam Lambert Story.

Taylor's new album, his seventh solo release and his first since 2021's Outsider, will be released on September 18 via Columbia, and finds Taylor pondering the state of the world.

“It's in the title really," he says. "What a beautiful world we live in, don't fuck it up. There seems to be all this insanity at the moment. The violence in the world seems to be as bad as it ever was, at any point, and certainly in my lifetime. It's just horrific, a lot of insane violence. And we do seem to be fucking up the world, plastics in the sea, and all these awful wars everywhere, and hatred born of different religions.

“It's a beautiful world, you know. And kindness is very important, I think, it seems to be forgotten quite a lot.”

Roger Taylor: Violence Insane In A Beautiful World tracklist

1. A Beautiful World feat. The Ndlovu Youth Choir
2. Violence Insane
3. What Really Matters
4. Don’t Photograph Food
5. I See You Now
6. Chump
7. Spit In His Eye
8. Jealous Guy
9. Come On Summer (It’s Party Time) feat. The Ndlovu Youth Choir
10. A Great Big Beautiful World (reprise) feat. The Ndlovu Youth Choi

Roger Taylor: 2026 UK Tour

Sep 21: Newcastle O2 City Hall
Sep 22: Edinburgh Usher Hall
Sep 24: Birmingham The Alexandra
Sep 25: Manchester Opera House
Sep 28: London Roundhouse
Sep 29: Swansea Building Society Arena

Find Roger Taylor tickets.

Bring Me The Horizon frontman Oli Sykes and Spiritbox singer Courtney LaPlante are collaborating on a new, original track called If The Sun Burns Out Tonight.

The song is due to come out at an unspecified date in the autumn and was written and produced by American DJ/composer Grabbitz. It will serve as the theme of this year’s Valorant Champions Tour, an annual esports tournament where teams compete on 2020 first-person shooter videogame Valorant.

It will mark LaPlante’s second collaboration with developer Riot Games, after she lent her voice to the electro-metal track Ties That Bind for their fighting game 2XKO last year. Grabbitz has worked with the company on three previous singles, including collaborations with Ashnikko and bbno$.

Grabbitz teases that If The Sun Burns Out Tonight “sits effortlessly between my electronic world and the heavy landscapes of Bring Me The Horizon and Spiritbox. The three of us just clicked – and the result is what I believe to be the best Valorant anthem to date.”

Sykes comments: “I’ve always been drawn to projects that blur the lines between storytelling and music, so working with Riot Games, alongside Grabbitz and Courtney, and becoming part of the Valorant world felt like a really natural fit.”

LaPlante adds: “I cannot wait to release this song! Oli has given me the opportunity to perform live with BMTH many times over the years, and we’re finally debuting something we worked on together. Grabbitz produced such a great atmosphere and a song tailored to all three of our voices, and Oli went in right away and made it a true collaboration.”

LaPlante has been a guest at multiple Bring Me shows. In May 2022, she joined the British pop-metal band at their self-curated festival in Malta and sang their song Chelsea Smile. The following year, she appeared during a gig in Budapest for 2020’s One Day The Only Butterflies Left Will Be in Your Chest As You March Towards Your Death (singing parts originally performed by Evanescence’s Amy Lee) and 2019’s Nihilist Blues (filling in for Grimes).

Bring Me released a re-recorded version of their 2006 debut album, Count Your Blessings, last month. They will wrap up their European festival tour with a show at Sziget festival in Budapest on Friday (August 14) and will play Rick In Rio in Brazil on September 5. They’ll play a run of US and Canadian shows from September to October.

Spiritbox released their second album, Tsunami Sea, last year. The Canadian metalcore band will headline a tour of Europe, supported by Jinjer and Dying Wish, from September to October. They’ll support Metallica at an intimate show at Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun Arena on November 21 before touring Australia in December.

The 2026 Valorant Champions Tour is currently in its second stage. The final, champions’ stage will take place in Shanghai from September 24 to October 18. The grand prize money is $2,250,000 (£1,666,226).

Riot Games have previously worked with such metal titans as Polyphia, who performed the official 2XKO theme song Let’s Go, and Linkin Park, whose single Heavy Is The Crown was the theme for the 2024 League Of Legends World Championship.

After a 32-year run, Barclay James Harvest split into two different bands in 1998. Bassist and vocalist Les Holroyd leads one while John Lees fronts the other. In 2016 Holroyd looked back on their early days, including one moment involving The Moody Blues that he’d rather hadn’t happened.

Les Holroyd remembers the time when he, John Lees, Mel Pritchard and Stuart ‘Woolly’ Wolstenholm were left to develop their own style without interference.

“Harvest, to whom we were signed at the time, really didn’t have much of an idea of what to expect from us,” he says. “The idea of progressive music was totally new, and we were right at the forefront of what was happening.

“So we were left to our own devices to write songs and create albums. We stayed in our farmhouse and just got on with the job of writing.”

He feels the music business wasn’t prepared for the progressive explosion. “The labels were all used to dealing with commercial, mainstream artists. There were so few who appreciated how to handle a band like us.”

While a lot of musicians in the late 60s and early 70s had a strong bond, BJH were a little removed from any notion of a movement. In fact, Holroyd recalls, there was just one band with whom they had any rapport.

“We got on really well with Argent. We did a lot of gigs with them. But we had very little to do with others like Yes, Genesis or any of the names getting attention at the time.

“We were often regarded as a cross between Genesis and Pink Floyd. Personally I never quite got that comparison. We were also seen as being close to The Moody Blues – but a lot of that was down to the fact that both bands used the Mellotron.”

BJH were sometimes referred to as a second-rate version of the Moodies. That led to the writing and recording of 1977 song Poor Man’s Moody Blues.

One of prog rock’s few diss tracks, it lampooned elements of the Moodies’ Nights In White Satin, with a similar pace and feel. The lyrics referenced nights, missing and loving someone – just as the 1967 song had.

Poor Man’s Moody Blues appeared on BJH’s eighth album, Gone To Earth, whih became their biggest-selling release. Eventually, perhaps predictably, there was a reckoning over the song in the form of Holroyd’s uncomfortable encounter with the other band’s vocalist, Justin Hayward.

“I met Justin a long time after we’d done that song and we had a chat about it. He wasn’t too pleased about that song. I can understand why.

“For me, it was never funny or clever in the first place. John Lees wrote it, and I was uncomfortable recording the song. I wish we’d never done it.”

Still, Holroyd regards that period as being highly successful. “We followed our own musical journey. Being commercial never worried us. All that mattered was being true to our vision.”

Free began as a serious-minded bunch, each member steeped in the spirit of the British Blues Explosion. Most of their 1969 debut Tons Of Sobs and the eponymous follow-up consisted of meaningful blues tracts, and their concerts ticked along to a medium tempo. The story goes that after a particularly lacklustre college gig in Durham, Free headed for the dressing room to the audible indifference of the crowd.

“The applause had died before I had even left the drum riser,” recalled drummer Simon Kirke. “It was obvious that we needed a rocker to close our shows.” A tune that always got the room shaking was their take on The Hunter, a raunchy, upbeat blues recorded by Albert King.

“We couldn’t drop it because it was too popular,” remembered Paul Rodgers. “We knew we had to write a song with all those same qualities and a singalong chorus.”

That night in Durham, Fraser consoled his bandmates, reassuring them things would be okay by riffing on a consolatory line, ‘All right now, it’s all right now’. It stuck, and their biggest song was pieced together from there. Fraser wrote the timeless riff on piano, with Paul Kossoff then arranging it for guitar. If there were similarities with the Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Women, Fraser claimed he was actually trying to channel the era’s chord-meister, Pete Townshend.

If All Right Now showed Free’s more frivolous side, it was driven home by their unparalleled musical pedigree. Kirke’s cowbell-studded beat is rock solid, Fraser adds flamboyant, high-up-the-neck fills to his low-end bass groove, and Kossoff – besides that crunching riff – plays his heart out through the song’s soaring guitar solo, cut short for the single edit by Island’s Chris Blackwell, who could smell a hit.

Meanwhile, Rodgers takes the of-its-time ‘boy-pulls-girl’ lyric and pours soul all over it. The lyric, the frontman revealed to Free biographer Steven Rosen, was inspired by an unplanned encounter with actress Marsha Hunt (then in a relationship with Mick Jagger) on a London street.

"I used to live near Oxford Street and Hair was playing right there on the corner," said Rodgers. "And I remember seeing this girl and she may have triggered the idea for that, because there she stood in the street, and she seemed to be smiling from her head to her feet. She obviously had a presence, do you know what I mean? Because there were a lot of people around and she just stood there and I thought, ‘Wow – look at her’."

First charting in June 1970, All Right Now peaked at No.2 on the UK singles chart and at No.4 in the US. Its parent album Fire And Water also landed at No.2 in the UK, its momentum maintained by Free’s turn at the Isle Of Wight Festival that year, where Free headlined for a crowd estimated to be between 600,000 and 700,000.

In reaching that commercial high-water mark, one of the all-time great British rock bands gave us an enduring anthem. With 380 million Spotify hits and counting, it’s still played on radio daily worldwide, still lovingly murdered by countless pub bands every weekend, still imitated by the legions of groups Free inspired.

"I never bought a yacht on the Riviera off it, but it’s been very handy," Rodgers told Classic Rock. "A couple of TV ads butchered it like the Wrigley’s Spearmint gum thing, where they just used my voice. Island Records did better than we did. The song broke us in America, but we couldn’t capitalise because we broke up and became an enigma there."

Indeed, the success of All Right Now was a factor in that breakup, robbing Free of the musical freedom their name implied. “All Right Now really was an albatross,” Kirke told Classic Rock. “What’s that old Chinese saying: be careful what you wish for? And we got it. Suddenly, instead of playing a different town every night, we were playing a different country."

“The pressure was on to come up with a follow-up to All Right Now, and we just couldn’t," he continued. "That’s when Andy and Paul thought, well, we’ve reached the end of our musical journey together, let’s split up. I’ll never forget Koss’s reaction. He slumped like he’d been hit in the stomach.”

Anyone unconvinced by Greta Van Fleet's return to action, pay heed, for their return to action has now been augmented by a hard-fought victory in our most recent Tracks Of The Week fracas. This historic triumph is despite the close attention of London's one-man rock'n'roll phenomenon Cam Cole, who finished second. So congratulations to them. And indeed, to him.

Third place was swallowed up by Hannah Wicklund, so congratulations to her, too. And now? We start again, with eight new candidates lined up to assume legendary status. We hope you enjoy them.

Sweat - Hilary

A loose-limbed, glam-booted banger with highly melodic feet in the camps of Heart and Cheap Trick, the latest single from these Pittsburgh rockers is a joyous thing to ingest. Also a strident calling card for their new album, In Dreams, which comes out in September. “Hilary lands in the sweet spot between glittering glam rock and late-’70s power pop,” the band say. “It’s a loud tribute to the friendships that become lifelines and the people who stay when things get messy, heavy, and uncomfortable — the ones who always show up when it matters most.”

Kris Barras Band - Beautiful Lie

The MMA fighting, blues noodling, hard-rocking singer/guitarist has the black attire and full sleeve tattoos of a metalcore star, but on Beautiful Lie he’s all about the oomphy yet tender hard rock with a moody, melodious heart under all the heavy, riffed-up muscle. Not long now til the release of its parent album, Monsters We Made – in fact, it’s out this week, accompanied by an in-store tour across the UK, with a full headline tour to come in October.

The Bites - Whenever You’re Ready

One of those rock’n’roll party-ready cheesefests whose substance sneaks up on you, Whenever You’re Ready put us in a great mood – it’s merrily, even proudly Route One lyrics (‘son of a gun / on the run’ etc etc) bounding into a warm, swinging pop rock chorus. Simple but effective harmonies complete the picture. Almost McFly-esque, but with more old-school heft. Feeling a little off today? Stick this on, turn it up and get some of those denim-clad Californian sunrays into your soul.

Grace Bowers - Eat Shit And Live

Earlier this year Grace Bowers quit Youtube, stating “I’m deeply uncomfortable with the amount of old men here. I’m no longer interested in playing blues or whatever the hell keeps attracting yall. I’m done.” It was a sad reflection of a certain portion of the online world (even if dismissing the blues itself feels a little reductive), but now she’s back with a bright, snappy bang – singing and playing on this taste of her next chapter. As a singer Bowers has something of a young Gwen Stefani going on, and her guitar chops here are full of punk rock teeth, sort of like the Runaways meeting Tom Morello for a jam.

The Pineapple Thief - New World Order

New World Order is the opening track of the British progressive quartet’s new album, Far And Wide, and it’s a biting, punchy beast with a note of dystopian menace. Still imbued with the moodiness and light, clever touches we expect from them, but packing an extra level of hard-hitting edge that nods to the increasingly big stages and globe-trotting adventures they’ve had in recent years (including successful first South America shows and an expanded US live presence).

Frenzee - Unapologetically Me

Need some proper, no-bullshit punk rock'n'roll with a feminist kick in your life this week? Meet Frenzee, the Greek-Australian siblings with Bikini Kill, Motorhead and Amyl & The Sniffers in their hearts and sweaty gigs written into their DNA (not to mention the marathon traditional Greek folk sets that guitarist Adonis and drummer Nikos cut their teeth in as kids). Unapologetically Me is fast, furious, over in about two and a half minutes and bursting with beefy, riffy fire – a strong showcase for these guys, in other words.

Jack J Hutchinson - Rise Again

Kicking straight in with an absolute ripper of a riff (conjured up one soundcheck), Jack J Hutchinson’s new track finds him channeling his blues-come-southern foundations into a big, upward-punching rocker – laced with the richness and grit of his heroes. “I told my producer Josiah that I wanted to write a track that sounded like a mix between Blackberry Smoke and Led Zep,” Jack explains, “with a melodic chorus like Neil Young’s anthemic rockers.”

Crossbone Skully - Thunder Love feat. Phil Collen

In which Crossbone Skully mainman Tommy Henriksen continues his apparent quest to create music for people who think it's all been downhill since Def Leppard finished touring Hysteria. There are gang vocals and booming drums and a euphoric chorus and executive production from "Mutt" Lange, and just in case that isn't enough, Leppard's very own Phil Collen guests on guitar and backing vocals. Oh, and there's a girl wearing a Pyromania t-shirt in the video. The Leppard vibe is recreated so perfectly it feels churlish to call out any lack of originality, and besides, we're enjoying the results too much to complain.

Like all Pete Townshend’s best songs, The Who's My Generation was a thrilling collision of body and brain. The title had highbrow roots, the guitarist inspired by the Generations collection by socialist playwright David Mercer. But the song’s visceral clatter was fuelled by Townshend’s disgust at his well-heeled neighbours in London. Despite the iconic ‘hope I die before I get old’ line, the songwriter later noted, it was wealth and class, more than age, that he despised.

"The line actually came from a time when I was living in a really wealthy district of London, just by accident," Townshend said in 1983. "I didn't really understand quite where I was living at the time. And I was treated very strangely on the street, in an imperious way by a lot of people, and it was that that I didn't like. I didn't like being confronted with money and the class system and power. I didn't like being in a corner shop in Belgravia and some woman in a fur coat pushing me out of the way because she was richer.

"I didn't know how to deal with that. I could've, I suppose, insisted on my rights and not written the song. But I was a fucked-up little kid, and so I wrote the song."

Townshend worked on My Generation during The Who’s Scandinavian summer tour of 1965, but on his return, the original demo proved a torpid thing, “very much inspired by Mose Allison’s Young Man Blues, my vocal casual and confident”.

Management saw the song differently, and pushed for a heavier riff and – after Townshend played them John Lee Hooker’s Stuttering Blues – the vocal tic that went down in history. Roger Daltrey had genuinely stammered as a child, but he was told to emphasise this. “[Manager] Kit Lambert came up and said ‘Stutter the words – it makes it sound like you’re pilled’.”

No doubt, it appealed to the mischief of all concerned that Daltrey was able to let a stammered ‘f’ hang in the air, the listener braced for ‘fuck’ (before the singer resolved the lyric with the less inflammatory ‘fade away’).

Both as a single – and on the Marquee stage, where the song had its first live airing on November 2 – My Generation let all four members shine. There was Daltrey’s rabblerousing vocal. Townshend’s slashed chords. John Entwistle’s rubber-band bass solo (“John was becoming the outstanding bass revolutionary of the day,” noted Townshend, “and I wanted to provide him with a vehicle for his incredible playing”). Keith Moon’s clatterous outro, chasing around the kit in a squall of feedback. Together, they made the heaviest sound in the pop charts of 1965. It also became the band's biggest UK hit – reaching number two in the chart – and denting the Top 100 in the US.

If Townshend felt any guilt at sticking it to the establishment, then shortly before the song’s release, he was reminded why he wrote it in the first place, as his 936 Packard V12 hearse was impounded on the orders of the Queen Mother. “She had to pass it every day and complained that it reminded her of her late husband’s funeral. So I resentfully dedicated My Generation to the Queen Mother…”

The song would influence a generation of up-and-coming rockers, including Alice Cooper, whose all-star Hollywood Vampires – named after the infamous drinking club whose members included Cooper and Keith Moon – play My Generation to this day.

“I think My Generation was maybe the first anthem," Cooper told Classic Rock. "That was the birth of the power chord, right there. And then you saw The Who performing it, and you saw [Pete Townshend] smashing into his amps, and you started going, ‘Is there any end to this British Invasion? I mean, who else is going to come up?’"

From Townshend's power chords to Daltrey's iconic stutter, via Entwhistle's string-breaking solo and Moon's wild, clattering finale, My Generation is one of those rare songs that's a solo tour-de-force for every band member, yet somehow comes together to be even greater than the sum of its virtuostic individual parts.

“Being a mod, I always thought My Generation was a fucking great song, an unbelievable song," said Kenny Jones, Moon's replacement in The Who. "Once a mod, always a mod, y’know? Moony was all over the place. That bit at the end where he goes crazy on the drums? I know – I’ve done it. There are fills that you have to play because the song dictates it."

In 1969, the Allman Brothers were in Jacksonville, Florida, staying at the home of a friend. In the middle of the night, Gregg Allman woke from a dream with some music and lyrics in his head. Because bandmate Berry Oakley was in the next room with his wife and new baby, Gregg knew he had to be quiet if he was going to get his idea down.

He couldn’t find a paper or pen, so he ended up writing lyrics and notes using the only things available – an ironing board and the burnt end of a matchstick. It was the seed of the song that would become Whipping Post. For a number about a man who’s helplessly awaiting more torture from the woman who betrayed him, words scrawled in ash seemed an appropriately poetic beginning.

As with many classic songs, Whipping Post had a different feel initially. Guitarist Dickey Betts recalled, “It was a ballad when Gregg brought it to us. It was a real melancholy, slow blues.” Bassist Oakley’s intro bass lick – worked on all night, but only five seconds long – soon propelled the song in a new direction. Unusual for rock, Whipping Post had an unorthodox time signature. Or two, really – 11/8 on the intro, 12/8 on the verses.

“I just stumbled onto ‘em,” Allman later said. “I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I just did it. My brother said, ‘That’s good, man. I didn’t know you understood.’ I said something intelligent like, ‘What’s 11/8?’ and Duane just said, ‘Okay, dumb ass, I’ll try to draw it up on paper for you.’”

Recorded at Atlantic Studios in New York in August 1969, the song took an entire day to get down on tape. It clocked in at five minutes and seventeen seconds. But once the band took it on stage, it quadrupled in length, a mélange of blues, rock, funk and fusion jazz (the 22-minute version on 1971’s At Fillmore East is definitive).

"We just felt like we could play all night and sometimes we did,” says Betts. "We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on Fillmore. Everything you hear there is how we played it."

If one song epitomises their concept of “hittin’ the note,” that interplay and musical telepathy they were famous for, it’s Whipping Post. The Brothers played it at every show they ever did, and no two versions were exactly alike.

They encored with it at their final show at New York's Beacon Theatre in 2014, Gregg Allman ended his last UK show with the same song the following year, and in 2020, when the surviving members of the final Allman Brothers Band lineup reunited as The Brothers at Madison Square Garden in New York, Whipping Post was the final number in a mammoth set. In 2025, they repeated the trick over three nights.

Whipping Post also developed an unlikely relationship with none other than Frank Zappa. During a 1974 show in Finland, an audience member famously disrupted Zappa by repeatedly screaming a request for the song. Zappa didn't know it, but improvised a response by playing his own track Montona while altering the lyrics to mock the request, which he subtitled Whipping Floss. This interaction became known as 'The Helsinki Incident'.

"We didn't know it, and I felt kind of bad that we couldn't just play it and blow the guy's socks off," Zappa told Guitar Player in 1983. "So when [pianist/vocalist/saxophonist] Bobby Martin joined the band, and I found out that he knew how to sing that song, I said, 'We are definitely going to be prepared for the next time somebody wants Whipping Post – in fact we're going to play it before somebody even asks for it.'"

Zappa eventually released his own satirical-yet-virtuosic cover of it on his 1984 album Them or Us, while Gregg Allman would rerecord the song for his 1997 album Searching for Simplicity, ignoring the original's mix of time signatures and rendering it in good old-fashioned 4/4.

While the Allman Brothers Band were rightfully proud of the song and its improvisational legacy, they remained resistant to easy labels. “I’ve heard that damn expression ‘jam band’ so many times,” Gregg told Classic Rock in an interview. “It’s b.s. The Brothers are not a jam band. We’re a band that jams."

The year 1971 was a momentous one for prog rock. Among the year’s signal albums were ELP’s Tarkus, Pink Floyd’s Meddle, Hawkwind’s In Search Of Space and Genesis’s Nursery Cryme, not to mention a brace from Yes.

The three-minute pop song had become passé. In its place were labyrinthine epics about things like Greek nymphs, moon dogs and strange Russian hogweed. This was music with a default setting of ‘challenging’.

Rock music was suddenly taking itself very seriously indeed. Never mind that much of it actually sounded thrillingly original, the battle lines between new and old – between knotty-browed experimentation and straight-up rock’n’pop – were well and truly drawn.

Enter Jethro Tull, who since 1967 had gradually morphed from a fairly conventional white blues band into avatars of something altogether weirder. Their fourth album Aqualung, released in March ’71, was a miasmic mix of folk, jazz and rock, wherein leader Ian Anderson vocalised all manner of thoughts on religion, consumerism and global poverty.

It sold by the bucketload, sealed their reputation at home in the UK and made them big stars in America. But critics suddenly started lumping Tull in with the prog pack, which Anderson didn’t exactly take kindly to.

“Prog was beginning to have a derisory and slightly critical note attached to it,” he explains today. “Bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes and Genesis were seen as being bombastic, over-the-top, pain-in-the-arse, showing-off kinds of performers. And to some extent I felt that, too.”

Anderson’s response was to pour his scorn for critics and portentous musos alike into Tull’s next album, Thick As A Brick. What began as a song idea soon flowered into an intricate, 45-minute treatise that made dizzying use of harpsichord, strings, trumpet, organ, acoustic guitar and Anderson’s signature flute, among other things.

The whole shebang was then housed inside a spoof 12-page newspaper, The St. Cleve Chronicle & Linwell Advertiser, which claimed that Anderson had adapted all the lyrics for the record from a poem by an eight-year-old child prodigy called Gerald Bostock. What could be more prog than that?

“When I wrote Thick As A Brick I tried to approach it in a humorous and satirical way,” Anderson says. “The whole idea happened very quickly. It was done in a fast and furious period of time. I’d just turn up at rehearsal every lunchtime with what I’d written that morning. Then the guys would dutifully grapple with it and we’d try to recap on what we did yesterday and the day before.

“By the end of 10 days we’d rehearsed to a performance level all the elements of Thick As A Brick. And we went in and recorded it, literally in a few days. The album cover actually took us longer than the music itself.”

So is Thick As A Brick a song, or an album? And was it intended as more than mere prog foolery?

“It was written very much as I went along, and was a very natural, organically evolving piece of music. There was an almost Monty Pythonesque idea in my head of this pastiche approach to creating this idea – ‘the mother of all concept albums’, as I’ve come to call it.

“It was presenting such a preposterous notion that an eight-year-old boy had written this saga in some poetry competition. Of course, you can then suspend disbelief and just go with it. But there were a lot of countries where they just didn’t get the joke. They thought it was a real story, that this precocious schoolboy had written this stuff and somehow I turned it into an album.

“You have to preserve the fiction to some extent, because that’s your starting point – the absurdity of precocious youth and complex ideas; that somehow Thick As A Brick is an album about what this youth might become and the distortion of his ideas as a prepubescent child. Essentially it’s setting out future scenarios of what might happen.”

So there was a serious side to it all?

“Some of the elements in the lyrics are quite serious,” offers Anderson, “where I drew upon my own childhood and my own early experiences for ideas for sections within the overall work. But I was also drawing very much on the world of the eight-year-old Gerald Bostock. It was part of the absurdity.”

Thick As A Brick was edited and released as a single in April 1972, a month after the album’s release. But skimming the cream from a three-quarter-hour masterwork was never going to be easy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it failed to make the charts on either side of the Atlantic.

The album, however, made No.5 in the UK, while over in the US it topped the Billboard chart for two weeks. It remains Jethro Tull’s second-biggest seller in America. Critics and fans generally adored it, but Anderson had all eventualities covered in any case.

One section of The St. Cleve Chronicle has the audacity to contain a mock review of the album, describing it as being marked by “ugly changes of time signature, and banal instrumental passages”. Was he trying to make it all ultimately bomb-proof?

“It’s okay for me to say those things about my own work,” Anderson reasons, “but I don’t think it’s too cool if somebody else tries to do it, because I’m already well aware of it. There’s every scope to say that this is noodly, extreme, anal, pompous, bombastic, arrogant – all of those words are applicable to prog rock and definitely applicable to Thick As A Brick – but they’re there on purpose. And if you don’t get the joke, fuck off! Don’t start telling me something that I know full well, because I wrote it to be like that. That’s the point!”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 159 (May 2011)

In January 1982, Def Leppard entered Park Gate Studios in Battle, East Sussex to make the follow-up to their breakthrough album High ’N’ Dry. Under the aegis of producer ‘Mutt’ Lange, they pieced together a record the likes of which had never been heard before: the gleaming pop-metal behemoth Pyromania. And Photograph was the perfect single with which to launch it.

Photograph embodied Leppard’s brave new sonic world. Gone were the gritty AC/DC-isms of High ’N’ Dry, replaced by machine-tooled melodies and Lange’s hi-finish gloss, oven-ready for brand new music channel MTV.

Lange himself came up with the song’s lyrical hook. “Mutt had the line ‘All I’ve got is a photograph,’” said Elliott. “I said, “That’s a Ringo Starr song.” He went, ‘Nobody will ever notice.’ For Elliott, the song title referred to an unobtainable someone.

"I said to Mutt, 'Wouldn't it be great to write a song about a woman who's the ultimate woman, but also a woman you could never have?' He said, 'What do you mean, never?' And I said, 'Because she's fucking dead!"

The video featured footage of Marilyn Monroe, suggesting the iconic Hollywood star was its subject. “Over the years it’s become exaggerated to Biblical proportions that Photograph was written about her,” said Elliott. “I don’t want to break anybody’s heart here, but Marilyn Monroe was just another average actress to me.”

"I used to live in a little basement apartment on the outskirts of London, toward Heathrow," he told Rolling Stone. "It was a real dump – there was a hole in the wall with a poster covering it up, kind of like in The Shawshank Redemption. It wasn't an escape hatch, but it looked like one! And the poster that was over this hole was Marilyn Monroe."

"Def Leppard's Photograph looked different from anything at the time," said the video's famed director, David Mallet, who'd previously worked with David Bowie, Queen, Blondie, the Rolling Stones and more. "Different colours, mood, visuals, editing, photography. It's hard to believe now, because it looks like every heavy metal video ever made. But nothing had ever looked like that before."

"When we did Photograph, we went mental," said Elliot, who frosted his hair for the first time on the morning of the shoot. "Phil wore a polka-dot top. Steve wore all white. The day before the shoot, I had £25 in my pocket, and I went down Kings Road in London to get some clothes. I found a pair of black pleather trousers that were too short by about four inches, so I bought them, and some leg warmers, which I'd seen in the TV show Fame.

"When I was done buying the pants and the effeminate leggings, I had £8 left. I walked past a punk rock shop, and they had a red, white and blue Union Jack shirt in the window for £7.99. It was all I could afford, and it was loud. After that video, the shirt became so iconic that we sold almost 100,000 of them on tour that summer."

The reception to Pyromania in Britain was decidedly cool, a hangover from Leppard allegedly “selling out” to America a few years earlier. In the US it was a different story: Photograph was a huge hit on radio and MTV. “Photograph blew out the door the way More Than A Feeling or Radar Love or Black Betty did,” says Elliott. “I met George Michael, and he said: ‘I bought Photograph – great song!’ That’s when you know you’re crossing over.”

Not everyone appreciated it. Photograph was one of the videos that spurred Tipper Gore to form the PMRC, the organisation that advocated for increased parental control over children's access to music, after she watched it on MTV alongside videos by Van Halen, Mötley Crüe and Scorpions. "The images frightened my children; they frightened me," said Gore. "The graphic sex and violence were too much for us to handle."

Nevertheless, the single was the first proper stepping stone on Def Leppard’s journey to megastardom, helping to push the sales of Pyromania into the multi-millions. It remains a staple of the band’s live set today.

“When I was a kid in Sheffield,” Elliott says, “I was this geeky twat who liked music and wasn’t living in the real world. All I ever wanted was to be a star.”

It was Photograph that helped him achieve that dream.

Ghost frontman Tobias Forge, Anthrax bassist Frank Bello and Korn drummer Ray Luzier have contributed to a re-recorded version of German heavy metal band Accept’s 1980 deep cut Save Us.

The re-imagining, which you can hear below, also features Accept themselves and is taken from an upcoming tribute album marking 50 years since the Solingen band formed. The 19-song set, Teutonic Titans 1976–2026, comes out on September 4 via Napalm.

Accept guitarist Wolf Hoffman says in a statement that Forge “was not really on my radar” until he met him at a show in Stockholm. The singer told him that Save Us was his favourite Accept song, and that he once wanted Ghost to cover it, but plans were scrapped.

“Save Us? I don’t even remember that song,” Hoffman jokes. “Nobody has even mentioned that song! I had to go back and listen to it. After I saw a Ghost show it all made sense to me. It really fits his style and I could really imagine him doing that song really well. He’s right, it’s a fun song!”

Teutonic Titans 1976–2026 was announced in April and features guest spots from 50 rock and heavy metal musicians. Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and ex-Motörhead drummer Mikkey Dee play on Fast As A Shark, Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford sings Balls To The Wall and The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan appears on Love Child.

Ex-Judas Priest guitarist K.K. Downing, Overkill singer Bobby Blitz, Fozzy frontman Chris Jericho and many others are set to appear on as-yet-undisclosed tracks.

Accept are also celebrating their 50th anniversary on the road. The band are currently making their way across mainland Europe and will perform at Helsinki Metal Fest on Friday, August 7. They’ll play two headline UK dates and a set at Stonedead festival in Newark later this month, before returning to the mainland for a headline tour from November to December.

Although Ghost are best known for such successful hard rock originals as the multi-Platinum-selling Mary On A Cross and the Grammy Award-winning Cirice, they’re a prolific cover act. They’ve released three EPs mostly or entirely composed of covers, the latest being 2023’s Phantomime. In 2021, they contributed a take on Metallica’s Enter Sandman to the US heavy metal giants’ tribute album The Metallica Blacklist.

Ghost are currently on hiatus following the completion of their globe-trotting Skeletour earlier this year, but are the subject of a new documentary/concert film, 2 Big To Rig, which hits cinema and IMAX screens worldwide from August 26. The film follows 2024’s Rite Here Rite Now and offers a rare look at the real-life workings of the band, who wear masks onstage and are made up of anonymous members apart from Forge.

Meanwhile, Bello’s band Anthrax are gearing up to release their 12th album Cursum Perficio on September 18. It will mark their first studio release in 10 years. Luzier’s Korn will tour Europe and the UK in October and November.

They'll be throwing up the bunting in the streets of Gillingham as news breaks that local heroes The Zac Schulze Gang have triumphed in our latest Tracks Of The Week contest, ferried there by their Robert Johnson-inspired single Hellhounds On My Trail. So congratulations to them on what might be the most historic event the town has seen since the Dutch navy sailed up the Medway in 1667.

Congratulations also to King Kraken, who finished well back in second place, and to Halestorm, even further adrift in third. Let's agree to meet back here in a week to see who triumphs in this week's rock'n'roll rumble.

Airbourne - Here She Comes

The latest riffer-rolla’ from the Aussies’ long-awaited self-titled new album (the follow-up to 2019’s Boneshaker) is a jubilant affair, packing the lovable, slightly mad energy of a galloping pack of labradors crashing a beach party. It’s only rock’n’roll, but sometimes that’s precisely what you need. After over two decades in the game, few really get that – and don’t fight it – quite like Airbourne.

Hannah Wicklund - Red Gorilla

Written ten years ago – in the shadow of the controversial death of Harumbe the gorilla at Cincinnati Zoo – Red Gorilla is a deliciously juicy, funky hit of bluesy rock with an environmentally conscious heart. All raw soul and swagger, no flab or faking it. “Human beings are but a small piece of a far greater ecosystem, and we must radically choose to care for our environment,” South Carolinian singer/guitarist Hannah says, “or we will be even more lost as a species than we are right now.”

Brothers Osborne - R.I.P

Few bands nail that sweet spot between currntry and plain old rock’n’roll as happily as these six-foot-something Maryland-turned-Nashville siblings. On R.I.P that feels as true as ever, its rollicking, Stetson-topped heartbeat teamed with a bang-on-the-money groove. At under two minutes it’s on the ‘punk’ side for the Bros, but if the idea was to whet our appetites for what’s coming next they’ve succeeded. “R.I.P. is us getting back to our musical roots,” lead guitarist/older brother John says. “This new music is a rear-view glimpse into where we came from while still driving forward into the new and the unknown.”

Bleeker - Outside

Soaring, punchy alt rock/power-pop anthemic sensibilities – with a mahoosive chorus – are the order of the week with this Ontario five-piece’s latest. The sort of track that makes them sound like a much bigger band, Outside has hints of Sugar and The Struts in its biting combination of sweetness and shadows, and feels like something a festival crowd would hungrily lap up over a few beverages and group hugs on a hot summer evening. Find more on their next album, Elephant, which comes out in September.

Greta Van Fleet - Saw You Stand

Teamed up with genre-hopping producer Mike Elizondo (Tedeschi Trucks Band, Turnstile, Eminem...) for their next album, Palace Of The People, Greta Van Fleet deliver arguably the ballad of their career with Saw You Stand. Hard-hitting, bright-eyed but tender, it finds them prizing incisive songwriting above noodly nostalgia theatrics. And anyone who normally finds Josh Kiszka’s vocals a bit too Jon Anderson-shrill for comfort may warm more readily to his stellar performance here – still high, still mighty, but married to a tight, on-the-money melody and weighted with real depth, reflective of an eventful few years.

Bywater Call - Way To Go

Building upward from sweet, stripped-back Delta-fried opening notes, Way To Go finds the rising Canadian ensemble at their heartwarming, boot-stomping best. A stirring, thoughtfully written melody around which gospel-fresh harmonies, guitars and horns swirl, natural as sunlight on water, with a touch of bittersweetness in the background. If you’re a fan of Tedeschi Trucks Band, Blackberry Smoke and others in their rousing, soulful southern rock camp, and you haven’t heard Bywater Call yet, for god's sake check them out now.

The Band Feel - Stay Around

St Louis rockers The Band Feel still sound like a band who could have parachuted into the set of Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous without anyone noticing they were from the future, but Stay Around does at least tinker with the formula a little. The Free-style riff is augmented by a chorus that leans into power pop, with perfectly pitched harmonies and a wibbly-wobbly keyboard that may or may not have been beamed in from deep space. Excellent stuff, as usual.

Cam Cole - Get Up Ya Honky Tonk 

Cam Cole's Fourth album, Lost In Creation, is out in October, and Get Up Ya Honky Tonk is a taster from what promises to be an uncompromising blast of twisted sonic savagery from the one-man London-based grunge-blues explosion. Cam's vocals sound like Butthole Surfers' frontman Gibby Haynes might were he guesting on a Jon Spencer single, and there's also a bit in the middle where everything slows down and gets kinda spooky before business is rowdily resumed. What a lovely racket.

When it came to nu metal, the UK never really stood a chance. The few nu-flavoured bands the country managed to birth always felt like pale, inauthentic imitations of what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. Mostly, anyway. In February 2002, a new single emerged bearing all the hallmarks of a nu metal banger: chunky downtuned riffs, chest-beating choruses and a hint of record scratching.

And it managed to break the Top 10 on the UK singles charts. Finally, a UK nu metal hit! Only, Suffolk rockers A had absolutely nothing to do with the subgenre.

“That’s a disservice to nu metal,” A vocalist Jason Perry says with a chuckle, when we put it to him that his band wrote the only major UK nu metal hit.

Winding the clocks (way) back, A started life in 1988 as a prog rock band called Grand Designs (“We were terrible, but we also loved Rush,” Jason explains). By the early 90s, it was obvious that their prog career wasn’t about to take off, so the band decided to follow in the footsteps of countless other hopefuls and move to London. Moving into the flat of future The Darkness guitarist Dan Hawkins, they began looking for new ways to express themselves.

“A mate of mine in the band Jesus Jones went out to America and came back, like, ‘You need to hear these guys, they’re called Green Day,’” Jason recalls.

“I loved the energy. It made me realise we had been so caught up in being something that we’re not, really – an arty prog band – without feeling that. We were in London, skint, but having the time of our lives, and that’s what we wanted to sound like. We stopped trying to get a record deal and within six months we’d got 10 offers.”

Rebranding as A, the group signed to Warner Bros Records and began making scuzzy punk rock. So far, so not metal. The only problem was, they’d come just a little too late. A few years prior, the Britrock movement had made waves as bands like The Wildhearts, Terrorvision, Skunk Anansie and Therapy? tore their way up the charts. But by the time A’s debut album, How Ace Are Buildings, arrived in 1997, the movement was already on the wane.

“We always felt like we’d just missed the mark,” Jason agrees. “We’d been signed as ‘a punkier Supergrass’, and if we’d made a record like that we’d have stood a better chance.”

1999’s A Vs Monkey Kong fared marginally better than their debut – it hit No.62 in the UK album charts at least – but it was still seen as a big disappointment by Warner. A could see the writing on the wall: if they didn’t do something big with their next record, they’d be out. So, they took a gamble.

“We said, ‘We know you’re going to drop us – we would drop us too. So why don’t we rip the record deal up? We won’t ask you to put out our third record as is, but keep us on the label,’” Jason reveals. “They were taken aback by that, but we just wanted to make an album. So it was like, ‘If we could get the money just to get in the studio – no advance, no wages – we’ll give you some songs.’”

The gamble paid off. Warner stumped up just enough cash to get the band to I.C.P. Studios in Brussels. While there, conventional wisdom – and knowledge of their sonic shift – suggests they stumbled onto a shabby, dreadlocked shaman wearing a tracksuit who enlightened them on the commercial magic of this newfangled nu metal music. As ever, British reality squashes that: Nothing actually came from a riff that guitarist Mark Chapman had been tinkering with in his shed.

“I was always really conscious of the fact people might look at Nothing and go, ‘Oh, the record company have made them write a big hit,’” Jason acknowledges. “It was never like that at all. We were just messing around with ideas, as you do, and Mark started playing that riff.”

There’s no denying the magnetic power of Nothing’s riff. A mid-paced stomp, it was exactly the kind of tune that could blast out in a metal club and gets heads banging. What makes Nothing really stand out, though, is that it doesn’t really sound like any other A song. That was by design – kind of.

“The chorus was originally the bridge – ‘Fly away’ – which I always think is more of a classic A bit, really,” Jason says. “I was obsessed with bands like EMF with Unbelievable and Van Halen with Jump, this one-word chorus. The song basically got written around that word because ‘Nothing’ sounded great on top of that riff!”

Nothing came out as a single in February 2002, and by the time the Hi-Fi Serious album was released on March 4, the song had peaked at No.9 on the UK singles charts. In turn, the single’s success helped Hi-Fi Serious earn a career-best placement at No.18 on the UK albums charts. Thanks to their newfound success, A began to get exciting opportunities. In summer 2002, they went to Japan to play the massive Summer Sonic Festival with The Offspring.

“We’d toured for five years, so it wasn’t like we had overnight success, but it opened a lot of doors for us,” Jason acknowledges. “Gigs-wise, the highlight was going to Japan for the first time and hearing the whole crowd sing Nothing. This little song we’d written in a shed in Suffolk now being sung by 90,000 people.”

Some of their gigs were memorable for other reasons. Playing at Coventry’s Colosseum on the Hi-Fi Serious tour, A made national headlines when police were called to the venue after reports that someone had shot at the band from a nearby building. It turned out to be a local with an air rifle who’d harassed them and their support band earlier that day, the BBC reporting that the suspect had pelted their bus with bricks as it pulled in, and “a pair of youths pulled a knife on their driver when he caught them trying to break into the vehicle”.

“Yes! One of the record label guys in Germany actually read a report that one of us had been shot,” Jason says, laughing it off now. “There was a guy literally shooting at us from his balcony in this block of flats. It turned out he’d been sniffing glue or something.”

Although Nothing helped A into the charts, the band weren’t interested in mindlessly replicating its success. The rest of Hi-Fi Serious was very much in keeping with the punk sound they had cultivated on their past two albums. 2005’s Teenage Dance Ordinance followed the same vein. Unfortunately, by that point the winds of change had kicked in for rock again. Nu metal was dead and A were too sunny for emo and too gritty for pop punk. So the record faltered at No.95 in the album charts, leading to the band getting dropped from Warner.

“We always felt like a square peg in a round hole,” Jason says. “The only time the stars actually aligned was when Nothing came out. Normality resumed when we went to do the fourth album. We’d gone to make a big rock record with Terry Date and the big thing at the time was the Kaiser Chiefs. It was just like, ‘We don’t stand a chance.’”

A entered hiatus in 2005, and the members explored other jobs in the music industry. Bassist Daniel P. Carter became a rock DJ for the BBC and drummer Adam Perry joined the Bloodhound Gang, while Jason became a producer, subsequently working with bands such as McFly, Don Broco and The Blackout.

The band came back for brief reunions and the occasional tour from 2008 onwards, returning to full ‘active’ duty in 2018. Then, in June 2021, they were booked for Download Pilot – a smaller version of the festival, initiated by the British government to research the spread of Covid-19 in crowds. Playing to people who hadn’t been to gigs for more than a year, Jason recalls the sheer rapture when the band started Nothing as their finale.

“Even people who don’t know our name know that song,” he says proudly. "I was once with Ellie Goulding and she began humming the riff because she’d heard it in catering – she had no idea it was my song!”

As for why Nothing has stood the test of time, Jason puts it down to its simple theme. “The idea behind the song was that everybody’s always concerned about money, jobs… all this stuff. But when you are left with nothing, all that matters is love,” Jason says. “It’s about how you live your life. Without love, it’s pretty hopeless. I really liked that we had this message of love in something that doesn’t sound like a love song at all."

A's new album Prang is out now. The band support The Darkness on tour in the UK in December.

Over the course of three albums, White Zombie gradually left behind their noise rock leanings to become that metal band you could dance to at your local rock club. According to J. Yuenger – their fifth guitarist by 1989 – this evolution wasn't by accident, either.

"The change in sound and attitude began well before I joined," Yuenger told Revolver. "When I met them, they were adamant about becoming a ‘real’ metal band. They didn’t want to become more normal, but they did want to be more accessible, to play to a wider audience."

"I was never happy with just playing at CBGBs in front of 300 people for the rest of our lives," band co-founder and vocalist Rob Zombie told Metal Hammer. "I had bigger aspirations. I thought, 'This scene has limitations. We like heavy metal, we look like a metal band, we'll just beef up our sound and start playing metal shows.'"

That beefed-up sound was fully realised on 1992's La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One, their third album and first for Geffen. It was recorded in New York City's 321 Studios with producer Andy Wallace (Slayer, Nirvana) over the course of a month. But with three years between their God of Thunder EP and their major label debut, the band were fully prepared once they entered the Midtown Manhattan recording facility.

"Riffs and riffs and riffs," remembers bassist Sean Yseult in an interview with VWMusic. "A ton of hard work in Ivan’s [de Prume, drummer] basement non-stop. Suffice it to say, after many years, we had honed our sound and ideas. With Thunder Kiss ’65, J. was over at me and Rob’s apartment, playing the opening rhythm over and over, then after a while, adding those classic descending thirds… it was an 'aha!' moment."

"It was our most normal song. A song that a normal person might enjoy," Zombie would later tell Rolling Stone. But whether a normal person would appreciate a song featuring a sample of Russ Meyer's, sexploitation film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is anyone's guess. However, the deceptively simple groove of the four-minute song, coupled with Zombie's half-snarled, half-grunted B-movie, "motor-psycho nightmare" lyrics, would invoke chaos in whatever venue they played.

"Playing it for the first time, writing as we went along, made it one of the easiest songs we ever worked on together," Yseult told Gut Feeling's Gregory Adams. "Rob had the beat, J. wrote the main riff over it, and I wrote the breakdown in the middle. Seeing audiences react was just incredible. J. would start quietly with the single note, the rhythm, and people would yell, then wait with anticipation. When the drums and bass would kick in at the end of the opening riff, it would be total mayhem! Mosh pit insanity. It was really exciting to watch every night."

The single was released on March 23, 1992, one week before La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One. Even for a major label signing, it seems that the label had reservations about ploughing even a modest amount of money into a band of metal misfits obsessed with cheaply made horror and science fiction.

"Geffen didn’t even have a budget for us to make a video, while other bands that barely sold a record were getting outrageous sums of money to shoot videos," Yseult told Adams. "We finally talked them into giving us $15,000 to make the Thunderkiss ‘65 video, which was barely enough to cover the price of the film. Nobody got paid, not even the director."

This is not a story where a single catapults the band into fame overnight. White Zombie basically lived in their van, toured the club circuit and sold a very respectable amount of albums the hard way. But thanks to two teenage metal critics in Highland, Texas, the band blew up like that dude’s head on the film Scanners.

"Before Beavis and Butt-head ever put us on their show, we'd sold a quarter of a million records and were doing really well by ourselves," Yuenger told The Virginian-Pilot in 1995. "Beavis and Butt-head is what kicked it over into the psycho, million-selling thing."

"Thanks to MTV, thanks to Mike Judge and Beavis And Butt-Head and [Headbangers Ball presenter] Riki Rachtman, we got on heavy rotation," remembers Yseult. "A lot of people say, ‘Oh my god, you owe your fame to two cartoon characters!’ But they liked the Butthole Surfers, they liked Iggy Pop, they liked us… we were keeping good company, I didn’t mind!"

The single's success pushed La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One up to number 26 on the US Billboard 200, and remains the band's most popular song on Spotify with over 173 million plays.

End of July already?! There's still a few major festivals to go - not least Louder Than Life and Aftershock in the US, while Bloodstock will take place in the UK next week - but it feels like the end of summer is fast approaching. But all that means is an even busier calendar as the Autumn touring cycles kick in, which of course also means a fresh heap of albums to listen to.

Before we get into new music though, the results of last week's vote! Rising metalcore stars Imminence took third place in the polls, narrowly beating out Kim Dracula and Hatebreed. In second place was Gjallarhorn, the new tune from Amon Amarth, but the overall crown was taken by newcomer Micah Martin, who swept the board with the wild Burn Them All.

It's all to play for this week as we have metalcore heavyweights like President, Electric Callboy and Miss May I, plus the return of Black Sabbath architect Tony Iommi. Check out our round-up for the best new metal songs below and don't forget to vote for your favourite in the poll. You can listen to all our previous winners in the playlist below.

Tony Iommi - World Alone

There's always a cause for celebration when one of heavy metal's original architects returns with new music. 21 years since his last solo release, Tony Iommi has revealed a new line-up and sound with new single World Alone, taken from the album From The Dark, due October 23. While there's no mistaking Iommi's thick guitar tones, the track is surprisingly closer to his Heaven And Hell era than the more traditional Sabbath fare, sharing more DNA with successors like Sabaton or Powerwolf (albeit without the gleeful cheese) than the doom overtones you might expect. Triumphant as you like.

Left To Suffer - Unwelcome Guest

Tight, claustrophobic and oh so satisfying, Left To Suffer's new single Unwelcome Guest comes with the news the deathcore mob will be releasing an album of the same title on October 9th. Starting out groovy before skittering across to something more feral, the Georgia band do a great job of balancing underground intensity with the genre's more crisp recent production.

Sigh - Unputenpu (ft. Mikael Akerfeldt)

Even as they close in on 40 years and 14 studio albums, Sigh don't sound like they're out of ideas yet. On Unputenpu they switch out wild eyed extreme metal for a decidedly Japanese folk sound. All that said, they're not exactly going gentle with it - the undulating rhythm is cut with quick flutes and rasped snarls that leave no mystery as to where their bread is buttered, while Opeth's Mikael Åkerfeldt adds a sublime lead guitar solo. New album Goh-Ka is due September 4.

Wargasm - Get Down

Of the nu metal revival's brightest stars, Wargasm have done best to drive the sound forward. While there's still a sense of retro love to new single Get Down - particularly in the EDM elements which get stronger towards the song's back end - the way Wargasm fuse scenes and sounds remains distinct and vibrant, and if Get Down is a taste of where they might be going next, we're very excited.

Iridium - Endgame

British metalcore has seriously stepped up over the past decade-and-a-half, the likes of Architects and Bring Me The Horizon breaking into arenas. There's a clear sense of similar ambition to newcomers Iridium, the London-based band capturing that same sense of cinematic scope on new single Endgame. Freshly signed to Napalm Records, we reckon it's well worth keeping an eye out for their debut.

Electric Callboy - The Way You Are

The UK has by no means held a monopoly on arena-sized metalcore heavyweights, though. There's a week to go until current Hammer cover stars Electric Callboy release their new album Tanzneid, and on The Way You Are they dig deep into their inner boy band... for about 70 seconds. Inevitably it's going to piss off scores of purists, but the switch-up to all-out extremity is an absolute delight, proof that even when they're not doing a song that's out-and-out "fun" they've got a killer sense of humour.

Sheri Moon Zombie - I Love My Robot

She's long been the star of her husband's movies and assorted music videos, but now Sheri Moon Zombie has announced plans to release her own musical project. Debut single I Love My Robot has some of the campy, carnival feel of Rob's output, but with more of a go-go beat and energy with the simplicity of a group like MC5. Well worth keeping eyes out for, we reckon.

Silvertomb - No Way To Live

Former Type O Negative men Kenny Hickey and Johnny Kelly have clearly been busy. Although they launched new band Sun Don't Shine earlier this year - featuring Crowbar vocalist Kirk Windstein - the pair have also completed a second album for their doom metal project Silvertomb, seven years after the release of their debut. The Interpretation Of Nightmares is due November 13 and lead single No Way To Live evokes some of the anthemic doom of Silver and Kelly's former band with some added doses of 60s Beatlemania.

Miss May I - Hand Me A Halo

Bucking the trend for softer, more pop-oriented sounds, Miss May I come out gnashing on Hand Me A Halo. New album No Place For Me is out October 2 and the track shows you don't need to go full boyband to deliver a killer chorus, switching between the more ferocious verses and a big, belt-it-out-so-they-can-hear-you-at-the-back chorus.

Clegane - Sun Decay

Sunshine isn't always cause for celebration (as the UK's recent slide into drought conditions proves). French doom metallers Clegane are here to deliver some hard-hitting gloom on Sun Decay however, bounding and crashing with reckless delight. Taken from new album Ocean Of Black Thoughts, due October 2, we suspect this might be as sunny as they get.

President - Dark Heaven

It's hard to believe it's only a little over a year since President first played a show. The masked UK group have since gone on to sell out just about every headline gig they've put on, and debut album Blood Of Your Empire is out September 4. Dark Heaven sees the band return to the religion-in-crisis themes of In The Name of The Father, producing the kind of powerful, emotive anthem that betrays ambitions to play massive venues going forward. Arenas? We wouldn't be surprised.

Kid Bookie - H.A.T.E.

Trap metal remains largely underground so far as subgenres go... for the moment. Kid Bookie is stepping up as one of the style's stars, H.A.T.E. delivering oppressive, bassy tones and snarled, Slipknot-like vocals in a trippy, hackle-raising tune. Taken from new album Cheaper Than Therapy II, out October 9, there's something undeniably magnetic and charismatic about the vocalist.

Inspired by her parents’ divorce, Halestorm singer/guitarist Lzzy Hale penned a confessional anthem that tested her vocal talents and broke sexual taboos. In 2022, she told Hammer about the story of the song – and how it impacted the rockers’ relationship with their fans.

In 2011, Halestorm were still young guns on the scene. Two years prior, the Pennsylvanian rockers had emerged from playing local malls, marking themselves out as an exciting new noise with their self-titled debut. But it was their second album, 2012’s snarling The Strange Case Of… that would prove to be their turning point.

The record that introduced the masses to their bombastic hard rock, it contained their most career-defining songs, the sound of a band running wild and free, coming into their own and testing their own limits. The quartet would start the album’s cycle as hungry upstarts and emerge as Grammy-winning, festival field-filling ass-kickers.

“With that whole record, I feel like we crossed over into not proving that we deserve to be here, but proving that we deserve to stay here,” remembers vocalist and guitarist Lzzy Hale. “As time goes on, you know more about the inner workings of everything, and it becomes a little less magical. Whereas that was our purgatory: it was the second record, everything was still super-new.”

She describes the album’s recording sessions that took place at multiple studios in Los Angeles and during which the band moved into a house in the coastal community of Marina del Rey as a sort of summer camp.

“I never went to college, and my replacement for that was this second record,” she continues. “We would meet complete strangers, become best friends and go over and stay at their house until 4am. The four of us are close anyway, but this was like a household. The parents aren’t around so it’s the four of us like, ‘OK, who’s going out to get groceries today? Do we have enough beer?’ Priorities!”

Initially, the album’s breakout song was thunderous first single Love Bites (So Do I), which, to the band’s amazement, beat out Iron Maiden, Lamb Of God and Megadeth to bag the Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance in 2013 – their shock evident as they stumbled down to the podium, reading an acceptance speech hurriedly typed out on drummer Arejay Hale’s phone. Over time though, another track has firmly supplanted it as the record’s defining moment.

The larynx-shattering I Miss The Misery had been one of the tracks they’d started testing live before the album was released, and on seeing how the crowd reacted to its incendiary chorus, they decided to release it as its second single.

Ten years on, it’s become their most enduring song, a fan favourite that currently stands at 86 million views on YouTube, dwarfing the 28 million views of its award-winning predecessor. Belting out of the blocks with a banshee scream from Lzzy: ‘OOOOOOH! I miss the misery!’ the track immediately put the band’s greatest asset – her gale-force vocals – upfront.

“It was such a whim to start it that way. Originally we were going to start it with the riff and then we said, ‘Let’s do it in a different way, let’s start with the voice,’” she recalls. “And now 10 years later, that’s kind of become my thing.”

The song is the kind of balls-to-the-wall sonic assault we now expect from Halestorm: mountainous riffs, a huge chorus and raspy, life-affirming vocals all reflecting an escalating confidence that ripples throughout the album at large, but it’s Lzzy’s growing assurance as a vocalist that shines through. Certainly, it impressed bands like Black Stone Cherry and Shinedown, who asked her to lend her pipes on the duets Peace Is Free and Breaking Inside around that time.

“I was definitely pushing vocally, versus the first album,” says Lzzy, who says she “came into her own as a vocalist” during The Strange Case Of… recording sessions. “We’d been touring a lot, we were doing 11 days in a row at one point, so I really got to know where my limitations were and where they weren’t.”

It was producer Howard Benson (Motörhead, Sepultura, My Chemical Romance) who challenged her to go one step further with each vocal take.

“He’d say, ‘Nope, I think you can sing higher than that,’” she laughs. “That was a huge confidence builder for me with my vocals because I started to not only expand my range, but find that control and that attitude that goes with it. It really laid the ground for literally everything I do vocally now.”

I Miss The Misery was also the moment Lzzy established herself as a true force of a nature, a figurehead whose confessional, resilient lyrics would be adopted by fans as emotional armour. It was written during a period of turmoil for the Hales – while the band partied and recorded in LA, back home in Pennsylvania, Lzzy and Arejay’s parents were in the midst of a divorce.

“I remember having a conversation with my mom about my dad,” says Lzzy. “They had been together for so long, the basis for [the] relationship is the arguments and the fights and the disagreements. That turned into, I don’t miss you, I actually miss the misery. I thought that was hilarious. I think it was my way of turning something that was negative into something positive.”

For Lzzy, the song also had a deeper, personal meaning, chronicling her break from a past toxic relationship.

“A guy cheated on me a couple of times and I swore I’d never go back,” she recalls. “There was that pull to go back and I never did, but I remember that feeling. It’s almost like you’re being a masochist in some way, it’s comfortable to live in those feelings.”

She considers I Miss The Misery to be her first anthem of empowerment, something that has since become her calling card. “I discovered I have this ability to write a song about how something sucks and try to maintain that hope or that attitude and control.”

One particular lyric, which was intended to force people outside their comfort zone, really ruffled feathers at the time: ‘I miss the rough sex / Leaves me a mess.’

“2012 wasn’t that long ago but it was in terms of women and evolution,” she says, noting that just 10 years ago a woman owning her desire and sexuality was considered “taboo”. “That almost made me want to double down on that kind of stuff too. By the time we made our fourth album, I’m talking about Do Not Disturb and threesomes and really getting people red in the face but to me, it’s fun.”

Building an open and frank relationship with the fans has been incredibly rewarding for Lzzy.

“I’ve had parents tell me that they hope their girls are as sexually confident as I am when they grow up,” she reveals. “That wasn’t something I expected. I expected to get angry parent letters – it’s been the opposite.”

Ten years after the song’s initial release, following #metoo and in light of increasingly transparent conversations around abuse in the music industry, she recognises that the meaning of the song has evolved for some fans.

“It’s really beautiful how people can take this song with me being a little tongue in cheek, and actually find that deeper meaning in it. Somewhere where I wasn’t even looking,” she says. “I know that song has helped so many people get over so many of those types of relationships, move on and find some type of superpower within themselves to walk away.

“In a lot of abusive relationships, the hardest thing is to break away from it. That song has helped break that stigma a little bit, or at least helped someone say, ‘This is the final straw and it’s OK if I miss it, but I’m not going back.’”

The Strange Case Of… was released on April 10, 2012 and changed the band’s lives. Armed with an arsenal of new anthems that were resonating with the fans, Halestorm headed into the 2012 summer festival season and found themselves being bumped higher and higher up the bills.

But more importantly, the album would secure the band an identity and longevity they’ve built on ever since. And while Love Bites (So Do I) won the Grammy, and the album’s third single, Freak Like Me, released in January 2013, was the band’s first single to reach No.1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Chart, I Miss The Misery has proven to be the track with the most staying power.

“I feel like the people have spoken and so it’s almost more rewarding for us than Love Bites and the Grammy,” considers Lzzy. “If you had told me, even in 2012, that I’d be standing onstage today encouraging young people to own their weird, to empower young women… that song was the groundwork for us being able to say that is what we do, and that is what people see when they look at me. It’s such a beautiful thing.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 369, December 2022. Halestorm support Babymetal across North America in September and October.

Picture this: it’s Saturday night in a field in Cropredy, Oxfordshire. An impressively large multimedia stage is framed by bars, food stalls, and little markets selling acoustic instruments, arty trinkets, pointy felt pixie hats. Under stars, or come clouds, rain or wind, 15,000 music lovers gather with real ale or frothy hot chocolate for the customary headline set by Fairport Convention, which closes the band’s annual three-day festival, Cropredy Convention.

The finale is a mass singalong to a song that has become a signature for Fairport Convention in the 40-odd years of this event, and is widely adopted as a hymn to the hereafter: Meet On The Ledge. When it appeared on the group’s second album, What We Did On Our Holidays, in 1968 it was played down by its young songwriter, lead guitarist Richard Thompson.

For him it was another stepping stone on the swift ascent of the London folk-rock group that he, at 17, had co-founded with 21-year-old bandleader and bassist Ashley Hutchings and 16-year-old guitarist Simon Nicol in 1967. Drummer Martin Lamble (also 16) and co-vocalists Judy Dyble and Iain Matthews would complete the group.

They were quickly signed to Island Records by producer and UFO club co-founder Joe Boyd, and their self-titled debut, recorded in late ’67, captured their raw youthfulness through West Coast folk and blues covers and original co-writes.

“We hadn’t long been professional as a group at this point,” Richard Thompson tells CR. “In terms of style, Fairport Convention was all over the place. We were young and experimenting, seeing if we could keep time, trying to figure out if we could write songs. We could, but most were collaborations because we didn’t have the nerve to say: ‘I wrote that.’”

After the album was released in May ’68, musical differences led to Dyble leaving and rising singer-songwriter Sandy Denny joining. Denny had gone from solo folk sets around the capital to search for a band where she could challenge herself vocally. Initially that was Strawbs, but Fairport were a better fit. Denny had kudos and excellent compositional skills.

Under her influence “[Fairport’s] songwriting definitely got better,” Thompson affirms. “You’ve got Sandy, me and Iain writing. Other collaborations [in the group] are going on, and we’re starting to play some traditional British music as well. Our playing was improving because we played live all the time, and we now had a really forceful vocal department with Iain and Sandy together.”

When Fairport weren’t out gigging, they were encouraged to build up a song pile. “I was getting a lot of instrumental ideas, but in terms of lyrics I was still quite shy,” Thompson says. “In the great spirit of sixties songwriting obfuscation, like Bob Dylan I buried the meaning of my songs under a superficial layer, and Sandy did the same.”

When Thompson was a kid, he and his school friends would climb the Pothole Tree on Hampstead Heath. Its lowest hanging branch was called The Ledge. According to childhood pal Brian Wyvill – who’d introduced Thompson to Hutchings and Nicol – Thompson had thought of reuniting his school friends there in adulthood.

“I shared a flat with Simon and Iain, and I remember sitting on my little single bed, strumming something in the key of A, and a kind of melodic idea came first,” Thompson recalls of the genesis of Meet On The Ledge. “Then I wrote the lyrics almost without thinking what they mean except: What’s this? A song about the future? What we owe to each other, how we need each other, how we love each other? I don’t know.”

Thompson then took the tune to Ashley Hutchings. “Meet On The Ledge immediately stood out as a very special song, and quite moving,” Hutchings tells Classic Rock. “However, Richard wouldn’t divulge the meaning. But that was fine.”

“To my knowledge, this was Richard’s very first song he’d written on his own,” says Simon Nicol. “It was a door to a whole new world for him, and he must have had a lot of confidence to bring it forward.”

Meet On The Ledge was recorded at Fairport’s regular studio hangout, Sound Techniques in Chelsea. The lyrics suggest missed opportunities, solitude and struggle, but eventually have an optimistic upswing, implied as the afterlife.

“I remember hearing it come together in the studio,” Nicol says, “and it really took its full shape as a big-chorus song. Up to that point we’d not attempted anything like that.”

Denny and Matthews sang alternate parts, tender and tremulous at first, then rousing and powerful as the chorus repeats: ‘Meet on the ledge, we’re gonna meet on the ledge/When my time is up, I’m gonna see all my friends.’ For those who hadn’t caught Fairport live, Denny’s vocal light and shade would be showcased on the track, which became their second single release, in December ’68.

Critics were supportive, and Matthews thought that this could be their first hit record. It wasn’t. However, its inclusion on the popular Island Records sampler You Can All Join In helped get the song beyond the Christmas charts and into hippie-kid homes from ’69 onwards.

Thompson left Fairport in ’71 to go solo. He was living with grief and trauma following the dreadful van accident in ’69 that killed his girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn and the band’s drummer Martin Lamble. In 1978, Denny died after a fall at home. At some point, Meet On The Ledge became imbued with the poignancy of these events, and a point of reflection and emotion for anyone experiencing loss. By the time of the first Cropredy Convention proper, in 1980, the song was a traditional curtain closer.

“I don’t know how this happened,” Nicol says. “It was incremental. One day you realise you’ve got this big song.”

“It’s such a privilege to perform Meet On The Ledge and see people respond to it. Every year it gets better for me, and it’s the tip of Cropredy’s pyramid,” he continues. “Fairport has somehow reached into people’s lives, and for a weekend we’re this community that really comes into focus when we’re singing this song.”

Thompson has often expressed embarrassment about the song. “I used to think it was immature, juvenile,” he explains. “As a songwriter you have to revisit your past work all the time. I’m glad I wrote it when I was eighteen, I respect that person. The music evokes the past in an extraordinary way. The public own it now, and it has a kind of magic to it. I’m not ashamed of it.”

“When the rest of us heard it, we didn’t think it was juvenile at all,” Hutchings says. “It was lovely to play, easy to sing, but a heavyweight composition. It deserves its stature.”

The music world has taken to social media to pay tribute to Irish singer-songwriter and actor Glen Hansard, who was killed in a motorcycle accident on the outskirts of Dublin in the early hours of yesterday morning.

Hansard, whose latest solo album Don+t Settle - Transmissions West was released last month, was the frontman of The Frames, one half of folk rock duo The Swell Season, and a member of Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder's solo band The Earthlings.

A book of condolence has been opened by Dublin Mayor Daryl Barron.

Bono: "He really was who you thought he was. He could never walk by a person living rough without checking they were OK, and more than that, he worked very hard so that fewer people had to live on the streets in the first place. Of all the grand and gigantic venues he and The Frames played, you sensed the street was his most favoured place to perform. And street people, his favourite audience. For me, he will always be everywhere I see a coin spinning into an open guitar case."

Bob Geldof: "Glen was wonderful. The universe lacks mercy or justice that such a sweet, thoughtful, burstingly talented man should be so wantonly and violently killed on an early Irish morning backroad.

"Tragedy does not do justice to this terrible calamity for his family, the world of music and Ireland itself. For we have lost one of the great ones. A person and a songwriter and singer and musician and performer of great depth, understanding, compassion, daring and bravado."

Catherine Connolly (President of Ireland): "Glen was one of the vital driving influences of the Irish music world, bringing people together in the sharing of live music. He will be sorely missed by all who knew him or experienced his work."

Andrew Watt: "You will never be forgotten. How lucky was I to spend as much time both on and off the stage with you? Studios, dressing rooms, bathroom floors, long car rides, guitar stores... your ability to move people with that bellowing Irish tenor of yours is unparalleled."

Amanda Palmer: "Glen was a fellow busker, a soul-scraper of a songwriter, a breath-exploding powerhouse on any stage. He strummed the guitar like he was killing something; he played and sang with this whole body, he shook the audience awake. His songs were screams into the heart of the matter. He emanated uber-human presence. He blasted feelings; like Nick Cave, like Ani. He was one of my favourite live performers. He never phoned it in."

Nels Cline (Wilco): "I only met Glen Hansard a few months ago, working on what will at some point be a new record by him. It was a marvellous experience, and I had the feeling that we would be collaborating or at least running into each other in the years ahead. I’m pretty sure everyone who came into contact with this man felt his warmth, passion, and massive talent. I sure did."

Lukas Nelson: "I’m so grateful to say that the understanding between us left nothing unsaid. It was just a few months ago we were talking about meeting up in Ireland and playing in his favourite little pub out there. My heart is broken. I hope to chat soon in dreams, Glen."

Elvis Costello: "We only sang together a couple of times but I was always glad to see his face and hear his voice. I'll never forget an incredible evening at the Royal Albert Hall on the occasion of the first State Visit by an Irish President with Glen and the great Donal Lunny leading the assembled chorus."

Thomas Walsh (Pugwash): "I'm truly shocked and deeply saddened by the tragic death of Glen Hansard. I was the first to give him a good slag when he'd overdo the Irishness, but boy he was such a lovely guy. Always with a smile, always with a kind word, always proud to be Irish (don't overdo it though, Glen!). I'm terribly upset. He was my age, 56. What a sad, sad loss."

David Gray: "Deeply shocked and saddened by the tragic news of Glen Hansard’s untimely passing. I first met Glen back in the Century Ends days, when we shared a stage together on one of my first tours of Ireland. A deeply passionate singer and songwriter and a gifted storyteller, he was always full of intensity and a restless energy. It just seems crazy that he’s gone. His talent and his generosity touched many, many lives, he will be hugely missed."

In 1976, Heart were riding high. Their first album Dreamboat Annie had yielded two instant classics, Crazy On You and Magic Man. They were touring non-stop, winning fans as an opener for Rod Stewart and Steve Miller.

To capitalise on their successful debut, their label, small Canadian indie Mushroom, took out an ad in the trade papers modelled as a send-up of the cover of the salacious tabloid newspaper The National Enquirer.

The ad showed a cropped, bare-shoulder photo of the Wilson sisters, making them appear as if they were naked. Beneath it was the caption “It was only our first time.” The suggestion of an incestuous relationship was sleazy, but typical of the times.

“To Mushroom executives, it was a funny, badass sales technique,” singer Ann Wilson said. “But to me and Nancy, who were raised by a feminist mother, we felt really violated.”

The ad wasn’t the only problem with the label. There was some dodgy accounting, and a sense of frustration that they didn’t have the infrastructure to support the band’s rise.

Cut to a Heart soundcheck a few weeks later. Guitarist Roger Fisher and drummer Mike Derosia were jamming on a galloping riff, part Peggy Sue, part Bonanza: dum-didda-dum-diddadum. They recorded it on cassette as an idea for the next album.

"We'd been opening for a band called Nazareth in Europe," said Nancy. "Nazareth had a hit with a Joni Mitchell song that they covered [in 1973] called This Flight Tonight that had kind of that riff. So we kind of borrowed that. And we made it into Barracuda.

"We saw the guys from Nazareth later, and they were pissed. 'You took our riff!' But that's kind of what everybody [does]. You borrow from what you love, and then you make it your own."

On the night of the soundcheck jam, at the after-show party, a record promotion man described as "a real sleazeball with a satin jacket" approached Ann Wilson and asked, "How’s your lover?" She pointed to boyfriend Mike Fisher – brother of Roger and Heart's manager and sound engineer – and the guy smirked and said, “No, your sister.”

"She was really pissed off about it," said Nancy. "And so she left; she turned on her boot heel, and she stormed away from the room and went up to the hotel room and just wrote the words to Barracuda in their entirety."

The band merged Ann's lyrics with the galloping riff, and Barracuda was born. The song emboldened the band to leave Mushroom. They had a clause in their contract that if their producer Mike Flicker left, the agreement was null. Flicker, equally frustrated, left, and the band signed with Columbia.

In response, Mushroom took five of Heart’s demos, combined them with five live tracks and released an unauthorised album, Magazine. Heart sued to block it. They won, but had to finish the album for Mushroom. The label went under three years later.

Meanwhile, Heart’s proper follow-up, Little Queen, featured Barracuda, which became a signature hit. "[Barracuda] has emerged as a single with gnashing teeth," wrote Cashbox. "It's an aggressive rocker, tempered with sparkling production and Ann Wilson's alluring lead vocal. Sounds like just the combination for top 40 radio and impressive singles chart performance."

“I hope the song will come in handy now when women are thinking about what they want to do and not do,” Ann said.

Fifty years later, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, the song resonates more strongly than ever, and the Wilson sisters are still fighting its corner. In 2018, they sent a cease-and-desist letter to John McCain's campaign after Barracuda was played without permission at the Republican National Convention, and they did the same seven years later when Barracuda was picked to soundtrack a military parade organised at the behest of President Donald Trump.

"Barracuda, written and performed by Ann and I, is a powerful piece of music that was never intended for political use," Nancy posted. "As daughters of a US Marine Corps major, we hold a deep and abiding respect for the men and women who serve in our Armed Forces.

"On a day meant to honour that service, it’s important that music used in such settings reflects not only the tone of the event but also the wishes of the artists who created it."

Serj Tankian, frontman of nu-metal icons System Of A Down, features on a newly released cover of David Bowie's paranoid classic I'm Afraid Of Americans.

The new version of Bowie's 1997 song appears on Can You Feel the End Begin?, the upcoming album by composer Brendan Angelides, who is most famous for his work on Netflix's 13 Reasons Why and Showtime's Billions, as well as the game Assassin's Creed Mirage.

"I always loved Trent Reznor's remix of Bowie's original," says Angelides. "I've been working on a new album for the past year, and as this particular beat came together, I unexpectedly started singing those words on top.

"The first person I thought to collab with was Serj. He has been an inspiration to me forever and I'm now lucky to call him a friend. The video is built from our childhood photos. We filmed ourselves to drive the motion capture, then face-tracked, composited, and had a mosh party."

"I keep thinking about what happens to creative communities during authoritarian times," he adds. "It's half of what this upcoming album is about."

Can You Feel the End Begin? will be released on August 14 via Angelides's Ancestor label.

This is the second time Tankian has guested on someone else's music this year – in May he featured on Tom Morello's Adjourn It single, which appears on the Rage Against The Machine man's upcoming album Everyone Gets Everything They Want.

System Of A Down, who headlined a pair of stadium shows in London earlier this month, have recently announced a run of dates in Australia and New Zealand, with Faith No More – who haven't played live in a decade – as support. Full schedule below.

System Of A Down live dates

Oct 24: Fort Worth Sick New World Festival, TX

Jan 22: Accor Stadium, Sydney Olympic Park, Australia*
Jan 27: Marvel Stadium, Melbourne, Australia*
Feb 01: Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane, Australia*
Feb 07: Hnry Stadium, Wellington, New Zealand*

*=with Faith No More

Find System Of A Down tickets.

In 1972 Yes’ record label released their 8:29 song Roundabout as a 3:27 single without telling the band. At first they were horrified. Then it reached Number 13 in the US chart and went on to win a BMI songwriting award. Reflecting on his career to date after being named as Prog God 2016 at the Prog Awards, singer Jon Anderson said the Roundabout release was the best thing to happen to a band whose future was unclear at the time.

“I was in a dream world for 10 years – it was truly magical. I was learning about structure. I’d work out a thematic piece, then a new section, then how to come back to the first themes. Like classical music, but based on a new energy. Not just verse-chorus-verse-chorus, which was what I grew up with – and don’t get me wrong, I loved that – but something new and powerful in a different way.

Of course, it helped that I was working with Steve Howe, Rick Wakeman and Chris Squire – people who understood all this and made it possible. I was there in the middle of it all, throwing out ideas all the time – and I mean all the time. And I still tend to do that every single day! For me, the idea of progressive music is always there. It’s never stopped. It’s my life.

It’s your challenge to make music that’s an adventure, a musical journey. It’s not so much about the business any more. The last thing I think now is whether that’ll sound good on the radio. I mean, Roundabout was eight minutes long as we envisaged it, with its midsection. And that was like a template to all the Yes music that was coming.

Atlantic took out the scissors and cut it into a hit record… thankfully! We were shocked at first, but now I think it was a gift. I remember we were driving through Pennsylvania and it came on the radio, and none of us knew it had been edited. We all sat up and said: ‘Wait a minute! What’s going on?’ But of course it became a big breakthrough record for us, so thank you! Without that hit, Yes might not have stayed around very much longer.

Fragile had all these extended tracks – Heart Of The Sunrise, South Side Of The Sky – and the idea was to extend the music for live performance onstage. Our audiences then were willing to sit through 10 minutes of our music without a sound; you could hear a pin drop. We wanted to please and inspire them. They came to our shows to listen then, not to dance. It was a unique period for music.

So we were able to do even longer-form music like Close To The Edge and Tales From Topographic Oceans. Thirty years later we went on and those audiences were still there at the beginning of the 21st century. Yes survived!

The 80s was such a successful time – the 90125 album went Top 10 all around the known world. No matter where we went, there were 10,000 or 20,000 people going bananas! It was very exciting. Being up there onstage and the audience getting so energised meant we got more excited, and so it fed into each other.

But I’d say to the guys back then: ‘We mustn’t lose our momentum. Musically, we’ve got to be very, very good.’ I was quite the taskmaster, wanting us to be healthy and everything! Being on the road a long time can drain you; you can finish up being a wreck. But you’re always a musician, and my ongoing dream is to be always evolving as one. And that carried me forward into new pastures.

All the music you ever do, it’s like a stepping stone to a bigger, better, brighter state of consciousness. Everything is perception; it’s all about how you perceive things. Life is like the ocean – it goes up, it goes down.”

Electro-metal party-starters and current Metal Hammer cover stars Electric Callboy have released their new single The Way You Are.

Accompanied by a music video that parodies 90s and 00s boyband clips, available to watch below, the German six-piece take the balladry you’d expect from acts such as Westlife and The Backstreet Boys, then turn it on its head into an outright deathcore rager.

The song is the eighth single to be taken from their upcoming seventh album (second since changing their name from Eskimo Callboy in 2022) Tanzneid. The album comes out on August 7.

The band say of their new song: “The Way You Are started with a pretty simple idea: what if the sweetest late-90s boy band love ballad suddenly turned into one of the heaviest songs we’ve ever written? We loved playing with that contrast, both musically and visually. The result is probably one of the most unexpected songs we’ve ever released, and definitely one of our favourites on Tanzneid.”

The build-up to Tanzneid started in 2024, when Electric Callboy released the single Ratatata in collaboration with three-piece J-metal idols Babymetal. Fellow singles Elevator Operator, Revery, Tanzneid and a cover of Sum 41’s Still Waiting followed in 2025, with Hypercharged and Let The Good Times Roll (featuring The Offspring) coming out earlier this year.

The band are currently making their way across Europe as part of the Tanzneid world tour and will play an ‘Electric Bassboy’ DJ set at Wacken Open Air in Wacken, Germany on Friday (July 29). On August 7, at their own festival Escalation Fest, they’ll put on an album release party featuring another DJ set at Huxley’s Neue Welt in Berlin. They’ll headline the festival the following day.

The tour will continue with Japanese and Australian shows from August to September, then return for another European leg from January to March. See details and get tickets via the Electric Callboy website.

Known for their high-energy, feel-good live shows, Electric Callboy were formed by vocalist/keyboardist Kevin Ratajczak in 2010. Second singer Nico Sallach joined the lineup in 2020. In the new Hammer, they talk about their history, including Sallach’s past throwing weekly house parties for all his friends.

“At its peak, we had 80 people in this tiny flat. People that we didn’t know were ringing the doorbell,” he says. “They treated our flat like shit. I wanted to go to bed, and there were drinks and liquids that I couldn’t identify all over my bed! Very good memories, even if it doesn’t sound like it.”

You can order the new issue now and have it delivered directly to your door.

Slipknot frontman, solo artist, one of metal’s loudest loudmouths – Corey Taylor wears plenty of hats. In 2011, Metal Hammer sat him down to learn about the music which made him him. From Iron Maiden to Depeche Mode and Ray LaMontagne, these are the albums that rewrote his DNA.

Iron Maiden – Powerslave (EMI, 1984)

“The first album that I ever got for Christmas was Powerslave. It was before gift certificates so I asked my grandma to take me out to get some music and she bought me this and Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls, Girls on cassette. I knew before we got to the store that I had to have Iron Maiden.”

Iron Maiden – Somewhere In Time (EMI, 1986)

“Something by Pink Floyd would come close but I always come back to Somewhere In Time. I got it and had the gatefold and pulled the whole painting out so I could look at all of the Blade Runner shit that’s going on and there is so much to take in, I must have looked at it for an hour at least.”

Amen – Amen (Roadrunner, 1999)

“That album is so fucking good! I remember when it came out – I had just bought a CD player for my shitty car, we had three days off on the Slipknot tour and I finally got to drive my car. I got that piece of shit car way faster than it should have been able to go to the sound of that album.”

Quiet Riot – Quiet Riot III (Pasha, 1986)

“That was the first album that I bought that made me go, ‘Ouch!’ I loved The Wild And The Young from it so I thought it’d be awesome but it was just plain fucking weird.”

Ray LaMontagne – Trouble (RCA, 2004)

“So. Fucking. Beautiful. I worship that dude. There’s not one bad song on here. Writing acoustic is what I love to do and that album is loaded with incredible songs that I’m pissed off that I didn’t write.”

Slipknot – Slipknot / Stone Sour – Audio Secrecy (Roadrunner)

“I’m pretty proud of everything I’ve done but if I had to do it, I’d say the first Slipknot album and Audio Secrecy. They’re both ends of the spectrum of what I do. The first Slipknot album is all chaos; the Stone Sour album is a baring of the soul.”

Metallica – Master Of Puppets (Elektra, 1986)

“Bar none, this is the quintessential metal album. Metallica have melody and ferocious riffs in abundance and every riff, every vocal, every drum beat, every performance, every second of that album is fucking perfect. Top to bottom, it is probably in my top two albums ever made.”

Led Zeppelin – Physical Graffiti (Swan Song, 1975)

“I don’t think I’d want an album, that’d be a long-ass funeral, but I’ve always wanted In My Time Of Dying by Led Zeppelin. It’s so multi-dimensional and goes through so many twists and turns and I don’t think it gets enough credit for how fucking gorgeous it is. It’s a killer tune: the slide guitars and Bonham’s backbeat on that tune is unrelenting!”

Depeche Mode – 101 (Mute, 1989)

“The first album I had sex to was a Depeche Mode live album. It was right after it had come out and I was dating a girl who was really into them. I was into them but that album − or it could have been the sex − really made me turn the corner with them. I’ll put my hand up as a Depeche Mode fan after that one! Ha ha!”

The Cast Of Les Misérables – Les Misérables: The Dream Cast In Concert (BBC Video, 2008)

“It’s a two-disc set and it comes from one of my favourite musicals. They handpicked the people who had played the characters best to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the show and it’s fantastic. I’ve put it in a playlist on my iPod and I will sit and listen to the whole thing from start to finish.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 220, August 2011. The brand-new issue contains a verbal history of Slipknot’s second album, Iowa, from producer Ross Robinson. Order your copy now and get it delivered directly to your door.

Rarely has a rock song deceived its audience so successfully as Pearl Jam’s Alive. To the casual fan, thrilled by the stadium-rock riff and radio-tooled chorus hook upon its release in July 1991, this was a feel-good anthem with no strings attached. But to those in on the secret – not least the Seattle band’s frontman and lyric-writer Eddie Vedder – Alive was a defiant shout from the murkiest emotional depths, exorcising poisonous demons of childhood. “It was a work of fiction based on reality,” Vedder once explained. “In some ways, that song was a way to get it out.”

The music for Alive, originally titled Dollar Short, pre-dated Pearl Jam themselves: the song had already been played live at a show in Portland, Oregon by the band’s future lineup in their early group Mother Love Bone, but the band never got round to recording it. Guitarist Stone Gossard recalled that “it was exactly the same arrangement, but [singer] Andy Wood had a completely different set of lyrics”.

When Andy passed away, we hadn’t done anything with that song,” Gossard recalled in 2013. “It stayed in my pile of demos. I liked the way it had this nice minor/major shift in it."

Gossard mailed the demo to Vedder in San Diego, who took a darker tack while surfing in the foggy swells off Pacific Beach. “It all came together as a piece, just in the water,” he recalls. “I didn’t catch any waves that day, but, well, one – the big one.”

If Alive’s chorus sounded euphoric and defiant, its verses were more troubled, Vedder chronicling a deceived child who is informed that ‘what you thought was your daddy was nothin’ but a…’, and that furthermore, ‘while you were sittin’ home alone at age thirteen, your real daddy was dying’.

Vedder knew of what he sang: he too had been unknowingly raised by a stepfather, discovering years later that his real parent had succumbed to multiple sclerosis.

“I think I would have just wanted to know if he loved me, and how much,” the singer reflected. “By the time adolescence came along, I didn’t really trust any adults.”

Shortly after Alive was released as Pearl Jam's debut single, the band stopped by RKCNDY, an intimate all-ages venue in Seattle, to shoot the now-iconic black-and-white video for the song. Directed by Josh Taft, a longtime friend of Gossard's who later worked on the videos for Even Flow and Oceans, it showed the band playing live rather than lip-syncing, a trick that captured the wildness of the band's early shows. It also featured an early glimpse of what would become a familiar Vedder pose, with the singer hanging upside down from the lighting rig.

"We were seeing our friends make videos, like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, and it seemed absolutely ridiculous to be spending so much money," said guitarist Jeff Ament. "One video could be as much as an entire recording budget. We went to Josh and said, 'We don't want to spend more than twenty thousand dollars,' and he said he could do it.

"We wanted the music to be live, so it was a little bit more representative of what it was like to be at one of our shows. Lip-synced videos had run their course, from our perspective. That way, if it failed, we didn't break the bank on it, and the record company wouldn't drop us for blowing three-quarters of a million dollars on two videos."

MTV loved the clip, even though the subject matter was hardly mass-market, but the band’s thundering musical backdrop ensured Alive went overground, cracking the Top 20 in the US and UK. Hearteningly, as the song became a benchmark of early-’90s alt-rock, Vedder found catharsis in its performances.

"A couple of years later, we’re playing for larger and larger audiences, and responding to this chorus that I, you’d never thought," he told VH1’s Storytellers. "You know, folks jumping down in the aisles, using their body to express themselves, belting down, singing along 'I’m still alive' en masse.

"So every night, when I look out on this sea of people, reacting on their own positive interpretation, it was really incredible. The audience changed the meaning of these words. When they’re singing 'I’m still alive,' it’s like they’re celebrating. And here’s the thing: when they changed the meaning of those words, they lifted the curse."

The recent news of Faith No More’s imminent return to action came as a wonderful surprises for those of us who regard the San Francisco band as one of the most inventive, inspirational and singular talents in our world.

Few bands have so successfully transitioned from the alt. rock underground to festival headliner status with their integrity intact, and the Californian quintet’s success was a welcome, and rare, reminder that it’s entirely possible to retain a subversive, maverick spirit while operating at the forefront of the music business.

But even committed fans might not be aware of some of the excellent curios tucked away in the quintet's rich, rewarding catalogue, so here are 10 deep cuts from their vaults…

New Improved Song (1988)

Faith No More’s final recording with mercurial frontman Chuck Mosley, New Improved Song was originally released on Sounds Waves 2, a free vinyl seven-inch EP (also featuring The Jesus and Mary Chain, Head Of David and The Godfathers) given away by the now defunct UK music paper Sounds in 1988. An out-take from the Introduce Yourself sessions, recorded by Matt Wallace, the song is an embryonic version of what became the superior The Morning After on 1989’s The Real Thing.

The Perfect Crime (1991)

Bridging the gap betweenThe Real Thing and 1992’s Angel Dust, The Perfect Crime – released on the soundtrack to Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey in 1991 – served as an early indicator that Faith No More’s assimilation into the mainstream rock world would not soften their abrasive, twisted aesthetic. “Boy hears teacher’s words so he closed his eyes and stepped in front of a train,” sings Mike Patton, tagging a cheery “Woo!” onto the end of this dark visual, just for shits and giggles.

Sweet Emotion (1989)

If you’ve checked out The Perfect Crime above, this FNM rarity might sound naggingly familiar. First released in demo form on a free seven inch flexi-disc (also featuring It Goes On by cult Scottish rockers Balaam and the Angel) given away by Kerrang! magazine in September 1989, Sweet Emotion is an out-take from the studio sessions for The Real Thing, later re-moulded into The Perfect Crime. Patton’s lyrics here (“The bitterness inside your heart, it shows through in your eyes and you can’t win in the end”) are no less bleak than on the remake.

As The Worm Turns (1992)

One of the stand-out tracks on Faith No More’s debut album We Care A Lot, As The Worm Turns was re-recorded with Mike Patton on vocals during the studio sessions for Angel Dust, and was first released as a bonus track on the Japanese version of the album. Both versions of the song are excellent, but Patton’s version manages to be simultaneously more commercial and more aggressive.

A Small Victory R-Evolution 23 Full Moon Mix (1992)

A relic of a by-gone age, back in the 1990s, record companies were fond of farming out rock singles to dance producers to remix in the hope of securing ‘crossover’ plays in clubs and on radio. Most dance artists treated the commissions as money for old rope, but Killing Joke bassist Martin ‘Youth’ Glover’s hypnotic re-interpretation of this Angel Dust-era classic actually brings something fresh and appealing to the original.

Let's Lynch The Landlord (1992)

Recorded for the Alternative Tentacles label compilation Virus 100 (which also featured contributions from Napalm Death, Sepultura, L7 and more) this cover of the Dead Kennedys’ classic features a gloriously sleazy, Elvis pastiche vocal from Mike Patton and an irritatingly jaunty accordion riff from Roddy Bottum. “Let’s Lynch The Landlord was recorded in my bedroom,” bassist Bill Gould told Billboard magazine in 1993. “We got the worst drum set I could find, I have a stand up bass and an accordion and we used the worst microphone.” Nice attention to detail.

Das Schützenfest (1993)

Even by Faith No More’s warped standards, this is a particularly bizarre and peculiar entry in their back catalogue. Recorded as a polka, with lyrics sung entirely in German, Das Schützenfest is the sweetly romantic tale of a man who seduces a young lady at a Bavarian shooting party and proceeds to make love with her in a pig barn. That the track appeared, alongside Easy, on a 1993 EP titled Songs To Make Love To makes it all the more special, obviously.

Evidence (Spanish Version) (1995)

One of the highlights of the King For A Day… Fool For A Lifetime album, the jazzy, finger-clicking, cabaret-lounge schmaltz of Evidence was pretty damn sexy in the first place, but when re-recorded in London with Mike Patton singing in Spanish (for an Argentinian edition of the album), it’s a whole new level of scorchio. Patton has also been known to sing the song live with Italian and Portugese lyrics too, the sickeningly-talented bastard.

Spanish Eyes (1995)

As with many of the cover versions tackled by FNM (see also Easy, War Pigs, Deep Purple’s Highway Star) it’s not immediately obvious whether this faithful take on the easy listening standard made famous by ‘60s crooner Al Martino (and later performed by Elvis, Engelbert Humperdinck and Willie Nelson, among others) is a piss-take or a loving homage. Whatever the intentions, released on the B-side of the 1995 single Ricochet, its sure to raise a smile, as Patton affects his best smarmy lounge singer intonation over a lush strings and brass arrangement.

Something For The Girl With Everything (1997)

Faith No More’s collaboration with oddball New Wave/art pop duo Sparks on a re-make of the LA band’s 1974 hit This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us made the UK Top 40 in December 1997, but Sparks’ seventeenth studio album Plagiarism also featured the two California bands (connected via guitarist Dean Menta serving time in both acts) teaming up for a less celebrated re-tooling of the deliciously demented Something For The Girl With Everything from 1974’s Propaganda album. Interestingly, Roddy Bottum told Time Out New York that FNM actually recorded a third song with the Mael brothers in 1997, but that rarity has yet to see the light of day.

Our latest Track Of The Week contest was a truly international affair, with Northern Irish rocker Ricky Warwick leading the charge, aided by the great English guitarist Phil Collen. Second place went to Greek stoners Villagers Of Ioannina City, while zesty New Zealanders Powder Chutes romped into third place. Congratulations to them all. Or Συγχαρητήρια, as they say in Athens.

Our latest competition is now underway, featuring heavyweight contenders of all sorts. We hope you enjoy their respective excellence.

Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Shapes Of Midnight

Back in our lives with a deliciously fuzz-heavy, boot-stomping boogie, the UK’s original 21st-century psychedelic/proto-metal revivalists are reminding us exactly why we fell in love with them in the first place. Part of a new, Abbey Road-tracked record (of the same name) that draws from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque Of The Red Death, and “the too-real nightmares of our modern age”, Shapes Of Midnight finds them mining the past in their own inimitably dark and delightful way. “Our albums exist in an alternate universe to our own,” band mastermind Kevin Starrs says. “They're all stories that could happen here, but everything's just a bit ‘off’.”

Ghost Hounds - Something Wicked

Picking up high-profile support slots, TV appearances and media hat-tips all over the US, Ghost Hounds have brought their slick, soulful brand of rootsy rock’n’roll to an increasingly wide audience. Now on Something Wicked they bring a touch of heartland-y outlaw heft and mystique to the table, singer SAVNT’s stand-out pipes (think Sam Cooke in a country club) front and centre, as they should be. Like what you hear? Check out more on their new album, Justified, which comes out in August.

Black Spiders - Cool Reaper

You know who’s misunderstood? The Grim Reaper. Or at least that’s the message ('message' is maybe a stretch, but you get the idea) of this rambunctious, shaggy-haired banger from Pete Spiby and his merry band of brothers in rock arms. Now given the single treatment with a video that taps into snippets from Black Spiders’ budget-friendly but no less fun or triumphant career, Cool Reaper is well worth cranking up. There will be denim. There will be riffs as thick and juicy as T-bone steaks. There will be puppets. Hell yeah.

King Kraken - I Am The Apocalypse

“Rolling with stomping, slow pounding grooves laden with soaring lead guitar work,” the Welsh hard rockers say, of this new marriage of heavy fire and brimstone, “all of which compliments the guttural vocals and thunderous bass making this song unmistakably King Kraken." Not sure we’re totally sold on that key-change in the final section, but otherwise this is a most satisfying slab of low-slung beefcake riffage, choice guitar flashiness and heavy, ribcage-rattling beats – like Clutch shaping up for WWE, in hell, or something.

Arthur Brown - Bursting The Bubble

There’s something freeing about the God of Hellfire’s latest release, as he both embraces his advanced years and defies them with a sizable, psychedelic spring in his step. All balloons, spacey synth bounce and 70s hippie freakout vibes, Bursting The Bubble is a beguiling swirl of existential fears, glitchy lo-fi textures and jubilant classic rock’n’roll. Lovely soaring, short n’ sweet guitar solo, too. More to be found where that came from on his new album, Nature.

Halestorm - Perry Mason

With a year gone since Ozzy Osbourne tragically left this mortal coil, the internet has been awash with memories, many of them from his epic last concert. Yungblud’s Changes was dubbed the surprise hit at the time, but for our money it was the sight of Halestorm smashing this gnarly, less widely celebrated but still ace Osmosis-era Ozzy number that really cracked a smile as we watched. So we were delighted to see it getting the spotlight it deserves – a fiery gem from a heavy metal event like no other.

The Zac Schulze Gang - Hellhounds On My Trail

In an age when rock bands have largely forgotten how to swing, along comes Hellhounds On My Trail by Gillingham rockers the Zac Schulze Gang, and it swings hard, pounding and pummeling and puffing its chest out and having a mighty fine time as it does. It's a cover of a song by late blues guitarist Tony Dowler, which in turn was inspired by Robert Johnson's Hellhound on My Trail. "We’d never rehearsed it before, but from the first time we played it, we knew it had to stay in the set," says Schulze. "Every time we perform it, it evolves. We improvise and discover something new."

Hoa - The Great Hazby

"Jang-in-jeong-sin" is a Korean word that describes obsessive devotion to achieving the absolute best outcome in one's work, and it seems to us that The Great Hazby by Seoul quartet Hoa might be an example of that. It's a beguilingly crafted song that sounds like it might have been written by the Beatles in their mid-Sixties pomp, with touches of The Kinks thrown in for good measure. Bassist Lim Jin-hwa plays a Paul McCartney-style violin bass while singing in a convincing English accent, and we might be suspicious of the entire project were it not so beautifully executed. Lovely stuff.

A New Zealand show by local stars Devilskin has been marred by what one eyewitness graphically describes as "a huge mess of shit, just completely spread all in the mosh pit."

The show, which took place at the University of Otago’s Union Hall on Saturday, was the second date of Devilskin's current tour, a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the band's Be Like The River album, which topped the NZ charts in late 2016.

According to the local newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, the incident started when a middle-aged concertgoer "shook a log" from their trousers during Devilskin's set.

“It was huge, like, massive," says the eyewitness, who prefers to remain anonymous. "I haven't seen one that big before.

"There was a lot of jumping. And then eventually someone must have looked down and noticed that there was just a huge mess of shit, just completely spread all in the mosh pit, all over the floor.

"It's on people's feet. People are wearing skirts and shit is up their legs and stuff, and then one girl went bleh – just vomited on the shit – and then everyone else starts vomiting.

"There was one lady with vomit in her hair, shit on her legs, and just crying, crying, crying."

"It was like a scene from a B-grade horror movie," Doug Stewart, bassist from opening band Pieces Of Molly, tells Metal Hammer. "This strong aroma wafted over the audience; the crowd parted like Moses parting the Brown Sea.

"Word quickly spread through the crowd as everyone realised what it was. It was at that point I started to see people throw up on the pit deuce. The other boys were in the green room, and that's when I decided to make a quick exit myself to take advantage of said green room and free beers."

According to the ODT, the loose-bowelled culprit was tracked down by local authorities but not charged with any offence. Devilskin's tour continues, while Pieces Of Molly's new single Alligator is out now.

Devilskin: Be Like The River 10th Anniversary Tour

Jul 31: Tauranga Mercury Baypark Stadium Lounge, New Zealand
Aug 01: Hamilton BNZ Theatre, New Zealand
Aug 07: Palmerston North Fly Palmy Arena, New Zealand
Aug 08: Hastings Toitoi Opera House, New Zealand
Sep 25: Auckland Spark Arena, New Zealand
Oct 24: Wellington Brewtown, New Zealand

Pieces Of Molly tour dates

Aug 15: Christchurch A Rolling Stone, New Zealand
Aug 21: Auckland The Mothership, New Zealand
Aug 22: Wellington Valhalla, New Zealand

Scott Gorham flashed that famous California-sun smile as he recalled his audition for Thin Lizzy in 1974. “The whole thing was wild and raucous, with the guitars out front,” he said. “Phil asked me to join that night, and gave me their records, because I’d never heard anything they had done. And here’s their one hit single, Whiskey In The Jar. I take it home, and I’m expecting to hear what I heard at rehearsal, right? Except what I’m hearing is ‘da-der-derble-derble-derble…’ I’m going: ‘What the fuck is this?’. Took an instant dislike to it.

“So after about six months of playing this damn song, I go to Phil and say: ‘You know, Whiskey In The Jar, it’s great, but we got a new band now, you know?’ He goes: ‘Yeah, I get it. Let’s get rid of Whiskey In The Jar.’ Like it was that easy. Now if I reverse the whole thing, and say a new guy comes in years later and goes: ‘You know, Scott, this is a whole new thing. I think we’ve got to drop The Boys Are Back In Town. Heaven to God! I’d be: ‘You’re so fucking fired!’”

But then, as Lizzy leader Phil Lynott once told me: “I hated it that for years that was the only song we were known for. It was like a novelty song. Like Yellow Submarine. Would the fuckin’ Beatles have played that?” Well, no. But then The Beatles already had a zillion No.1 hits when they threw Ringo a bun and let him sing Yellow Submarine.

In the summer of ’72, Thin Lizzy were nobodies, in desperate need of a hit. Their first two albums had been commercial disasters, and their label, Decca, was about to drop them. “We used to say: ‘When are we going to waste another few weeks making an album that won’t sell?’” recalls drummer Brian Downey.

When their manager Ted Carroll talked Decca into giving the band one last chance with a single, Lynott felt sure he had the answer in a powerful, Hendrix-influenced funk-rock groover he’d written called Black Boys On The Corner.

“Phil had written this great song especially for the single, which he saw as part Hendrix, part commercial pop tune,” Downey remembers. “I think it was the first song he’d written about being black, and it was important to him.”

All they needed was a B-side. But with Lynott determined not to use another of his own songs, preferring to keep the good stuff for the next album, the band worked up an electric version of an old traditional Irish ballad called Whiskey In The Jar that Lynott and original Lizzy guitarist Eric Bell had strummed in smoky Dublin folk clubs for Guinness-and-hash money.

As Bell recalled in 1973: “We were rehearsing in the Duke Of York pub in King’s Cross in London, and Phil picked up the Telecaster and just began singing Whiskey to his own accompaniment, and I found that little riff which announces the song and runs through it now on the disc. Ted Carroll heard us fooling around on it and started enthusing about how good it sounded. So we put it together a little more solidly.”

“It was an afterthought,” says Carroll. “But Eric worked up this fantastic electric guitar version, with that brilliant intro of his, and the first time I heard it I said: ‘This is a hit!’”

Decca head honcho Dick Rowe agreed, and unilaterally switched the tracks around, making Whiskey the A-side and Black Boys the B-side. It was left to Carroll to tell the band. And they were not pleased.

“Phil was furious,” says Carroll. “He’d put so much into Black Boys, seeing it as the band’s first big statement single. But we were in no position to argue. Lizzy were really in debt at the time and things were getting desperate. Decca wanted Whiskey as the A-side, so we went with it, and the band began playing it live.”

So desperate were the band, in fact, that they had just accepted £1,000 (around ten grand in today’s money) to record an album of Deep Purple covers, under the fictional aegis Funky Junction.

“Phil saw himself as more of a Rod Stewart than an Ian Gillan,” says Downey, “so he did the bass and some backing vocals, and Ted got in Benny White, the singer from another Irish band he managed called Elmer Fudd, who was like a copycat Gillan.”

With Jon Lord-style keyboards by Fudd’s Dave ‘Mojo’ Lennox, and a photo of another band completely on the cover (Hard Stuff, also managed by Carroll), the album Funky Junction Play A Tribute To Deep Purple went on sale in Woolworth in January 1973, priced just 50p.

“It was an embarrassment,” says a cringing Downey. “But we were desperate for the cash. It got us out of a jam so we could carry on going as Thin Lizzy.”

After that album, a rocked-up version of Whiskey In The Jar represented a massive step forward – at least in terms of profile in Ireland where it reached No.1. But despite Decca chopping the track down from five minutes-plus to three-and-a-half by editing out most of Bell’s dappled, Gaelic-lilt guitar solo, it looked like its chances of breaking the band in the UK were slight.

“John Peel liked the band and would play us on his show,” Lynott recalled. “And a few other ‘specialist DJs’, as they called them, like Kid Jensen and Stuart Henry, loved us, but you would never hear us on the radio in the day.”

Until, that is, Carroll had another brainwave. “I decided to send these miniature bottles of Whiskey to some of the producers at Radio 1 [and Top Of The Pops and the The Old Grey Whistle Test]. I peeled off the labels and replaced them with some we’d had made up with ‘Whiskey In The Jar: Thin Lizzy’ on them. It worked a treat, and Radio 1 finally began playing the song.”

By March it was nestled at No.6 in the UK chart and Lizzy were making their debut appearance on Top Of The Pops. But it was a joke version, Bell says now, not to be taken seriously. “When it became a hit I couldn’t believe it, having to go on telly playing it, or miming to it, which I hated.”

Further infuriating the band was Decca’s thoughtless misspelling of ‘Whiskey’ – the Irish spelling – on the record sleeve as ‘Whisky’, the English spelling of the golden grain. Heresy.

“Whiskey In The Jar was a huge embarrassment to all of them,” Lynott’s then live-in girlfriend Gale Clayden told me. “They were supposed to be a rock band! But Phil was driven. He was going to do whatever it took to make it happen.”

“Eric had a problem with it,” says Carroll. “None of them really liked it. But Whiskey was a huge hit. The biggest Lizzy ever made, selling more copies even than The Boys Are Back In Town [released later, in ’76]. It was a turning point for the band. They went from playing clubs to fifty people a night to headlining halls to a thousand people a night.”

Although he was loath to admit it at the time, fearing, as he said, that people would think of Lizzy as “this electric Irish folk band”, the fact is that Lynott felt a real connection to the song.

On the one hand, as Downey recalls: “Phil was such a tough cookie, a hard man. You didn’t mess.” But there was another side too. Lynott was shy, gently spoken, devoured Irish history books. He loved the plaintive folk ballads of the mythological Celtic past, and would reference 19th-century Dublin poets such as Clarence Mangan, who had influenced James Joyce.

“To hear Phil speak, Ireland was the greatest place in the world,” Scott Gorham says. “He’d drag me along to some well and go: ‘You know what happened here?’ I’d be: ‘You know what? I don’t really give a fuck.’ He’d be like: ‘Well, I’m gonna tell ya anyway! Here in the twelfth century…’ He knew all the dates and names and which battles happened.”

The origins of the song – about a stand-and-deliver Irish highwayman who robs a governor-laird – are caked in layers of unreliable oral histories, but likely go back to the 17th century, sharing some of its lines and plot with the broadside ballad Patrick Fleming, named after the notorious Irish highwayman executed in 1650.

Over the centuries there were dozens of versions of the song, with various locations mentioned including Kerry, Kilmoganny and Sligo Town. Thin Lizzy placed the tale of the highwayman betrayed by his woman in ‘the Cork and Kerry mountains’.

The names in the song also change. The Captain Farrell of Lizzy’s version becomes a Colonel called Pepper and many other nom de plumes; the ‘Molly’ that Lynott sings of is also variously known as Jenny, Emzy, Ginny – or indeed any name that fits the stanza.

Another notable rendering of the song turned up in 1728 in the English poet and dramatist John Gay’s The Beggars Opera, said to be inspired by Gay hearing an Irish ballad-monger belting it out in a Soho tavern.

According to the American music historian Alan Lomax, “the folk of seventeenth-century Britain liked and admired their local highwaymen; and in Ireland (or Scotland) where the gentlemen of the roads robbed English landlords, they were regarded as national patriots. Such feelings inspired this rollicking ballad”.

But for all the success and attention that Whiskey In The Jar brought Thin Lizzy, when their next album, Vagabonds Of The Western World, was another flop, and the band were finally dropped by Decca, Lynott’s fear that they would be one-hit wonders seemed to be confirmed.

As we now know, it was the dark before the dawn, and a new, upgraded ‘live and dangerous’ Thin Lizzy would become the one the world now recalls most fondly. Eric Bell, who left Lizzy not long after Whiskey, recalls watching the band on Top Of The Pops in their Boys Are Back pomp: “I thought: ‘Fuck me, Philip!’ He was dressed in black leather with a black studded armband on, portraying a hard man. I thought: ‘Ah, right, that’s his new image. He’s reinvented himself. He doesn’t want to play Whiskey In The Jar any more.’”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 298 (February 2022)

For the uninitiated, Mogwai are a post-rock band from Glasgow of three decades' standing. They’re masters of the genre and are able to switch from moments of vulnerability to sheets of howling feedback at the stomp of a pedal. They’re probably louder than most bands you could care to mention, and to witness them live is something akin to a religious experience.

We've got a feeling that some sections of the metal community have them pigeonholed as a band for 6 Music-loving, coffee-nerd soundtrack collectors, and while they'd be partially right, we can't help but feel some of you are missing out. And their song titles evoke more than a page of lyrics could.

Here, then, are 10 heavy Mogwai songs for metal fans. You lucky, lucky people.

My Father My King (EP, 2001)

A promotional sticker slapped on this 2001 single (if you could call it that) simply read: “two parts serenity and one part death metal”.

With a running time of 20 minutes and 12 seconds, My Father My King was released six months after their 2001 album Rock Action. Based on a Jewish prayer called ‘Avinu Malkeinu’ – translated as ‘Our Father, Our King’ – the song was something the band had been working on for an album by producer Arthur Baker, which never materialised.

After closing their set with the song for several years, the lengthy instrumental was recorded by Steve Albini over four days at London’s Mayfair Studios. It was the only time they would work with him, and guitarist Stuart Braithwaite paid tribute to the producer following his death in 2024.

“He was a very pleasant person to be in a room with,” he told The Guardian. “He didn’t eat anything apart from chocolate Hobnobs for the entire [time] that it took us to record the song – apparently you can’t get them in the US.”

The sticker's description of the recording was exactly right. It offers moments of delicacy, hard volume, and gargantuan sheets of squall, and ends on a wave of sludgy distortion. It remains an intense highlight of the Scottish post-rockers' three-decade-long career.

Like Herod (Mogwai Young Team, 1997)

Originally titled Slint, after the Kentucky band of the same name, this instrumental is guitarist Braithwaite's favourite song on the band's 1997 debut album. Recorded as a four-piece in Hamilton, the song wasn't named after the cruel king prone to acts of biblical violence but something far more uneventful instead.

“Like Herod was something someone misheard when they actually meant to say 'light-headed’," he explains.

It’s a post rock masterclass of quiet-loud dynamics and is a staple of their set today. Multi-instrumentalist Barry Burns was yet to join the band at this stage but recalls a moment of shock while listening to the studio recording.

"My ex-girlfriend and I, we used to listen to that album, and Like Herod came on and we were just dozing off to sleep, and then the fucking loud bit comes in," he remembers. "I didn't have anything to do with that tune, and when we play it live I just love playing it, it's so much fun. You see all these people in the front row who have obviously never been to a show before and they get such a fright! I mean, it's just a noise but it's really fucking funny... it's almost like a wind-up."

Should you wish, an even more intense, 18-minute version can also be found on Government Commissions: BBC Sessions 1996–2003.

Batcat (The Hawk Is Howling, 2008)

Taken from their fantastic album The Hawk is Howling, Batcat is a beast made out of droning riffs, a wall of fuzz, and a particularly hostile performance by drummer Martin Bulloch.

"We haven’t done too many really heavy songs over the years, and this is maybe the best one," Braithewaite tells The List. "It has a really demented structure and it’s fun to play, it shouldn’t really work but it does. What’s a batcat? I don’t know. People assign their own really profound ideas to our titles, which I really like.”

The video is disturbing, too.

Glasgow Mega-Snake (Mr. Beast, 2006)

"We had this idea to promote Glasgow by genetically modifying a sea-creature and somehow making it into a rollercoaster," Braithwaite once told this writer. "People will flock to Scotland when it's made.

"We wrote the song in the hope that we can sell it to Channel 5 when they do The Making of the Mega-Snake programme," he added. "We've got it sewn up."

Unfortunately, the Glasgow tourism board never pursued this ambitious idea and the programme was never commissioned, which is simply Scotland's loss.

Song-wise, it's a dense wall of riffs that attacks your ears – much like what an outsized urban snake would do if it was approached on Sauchiehall Street.

Christmas Steps (Come On Die Young, 1999)

Named after a steep, Grade-II cobbled street in Bristol, this nine-minute instrumental is exactly the sort of song you'd use to illustrate building tension. It begins with a fragile guitar line, which gradually evolves into a staccato riff backed by thunderous drums, before quietly fading out. Their Slint influences are proudly worn on their sleeves here. We wouldn’t be surprised if they wore Spiderland t-shirts in the studio, to be honest.

Old Poisons (Every Country's Sun, 2017)

Taken from their album Every Country's Sun, this song began life as a fully fledged electronic demo created by Barry Burns (complete with programmed drums, guitars, and keyboards) which the band then transformed into this woozy, distortion-packed stomper.

"That’s a banger," Braithwaite told Dazed. "That’s a lot of fun to play. And it’s not too hard for me! I’m not playing a hard bit. I'm not saying I’m some kind of virtuoso, but I can just enjoy the music rather than worry about what my fingers are doing."

Old Poisons is Mogwai at their most, what's the thing people say these days? "Aggy". The song is brooding and bellicose before fading out, only to deliver another round of riffs to your chops.

Sweet Leaf (Do the Rock Boogaloo single, 1998)

In 1999, Mogwai shared a split single with Norfolk indie rockers Magoo, released by Fierce Panda.

The enthusiastic liner notes on this 1998 treat outlined the reasons for featuring two Black Sabbath covers: "The concept is seethingly simple — release two old-school Black Sabbath boogaloos vamooshed by a couple of the swiftiest sonic yooofers around... as we celebrate the darkest riffs, the deepest moods, the longest hair and the richest of foods. Mammoth drums! Massive solos! Huge hairy balls! Yes!"

We're not sure whose hairy balls they were referring to, but Magoo chose Black Sabbath's eponymous song from their 1970 debut, while Mogwai picked Sweet Leaf, with Braithwaite performing vocals. It's loose and performed in the spirit of the original, complete with those hacking coughs.

"I think Black Sabbath are probably the best heavy band of all time," Braithwaite told The Quietus. "But the thing people forget about Sabbath is that they had a swing. A lot of heavy rock is very rigid and stiff, but Bill Ward and Geezer Butler had this jazz-influenced groove. It’s heavy, but it bounces."

Ratts of the Capital (Happy Songs for Happy People, 2003)

Making its live debut in Athens, this rodent-themed banger begins with a delicate, hypnotic guitar line. Over the course of eight minutes, it gradually builds into a monolithic wall of feedback, before fading out once more. It's like being caught at high tide and tossed around in the waves, before being returned to shore. If there were a sound for a moment when there's not enough time to panic, but you can feel the anxiety trapped in your throat, it would be found here on Happy Songs for Happy People.

We're No Here (Mr. Beast, 2006)

According to drummer Martin Bulloch, this existential song title was inspired by his brother mishearing a Celtic chant for manager Martin O'Neill. The weight of We're No Here makes its presence known just before the one-minute mark. It's slow and hypnotic and even if the volume is down, it still sounds loud. It's that kind of song. For its sheer heft, the Mr. Beast track was featured on the Miami Vice soundtrack (the 2006 one) and an episode of Top Gear (Season 9 Episode 3's American Road Trip).

San Pedro (Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, 2011)

Whereas songs like My Father My King and Batcat are propped up by riffs built like concrete plinths, this highlight from Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will is pacy and nervy. It also has quick washes of black metal guitar if Darkthrone hailed from Pollok Country Park rather than those frosty Nordic forests. Former guitarist John Cummings told The Quietus that it was fun to record: "It's probably the easiest song we've ever written. It’s basically just one riff played over and over again with different degrees of volume and panic."

Most musicians would absolutely love to pick the song that becomes their most cherished anthem. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work like that. As he cheerfully admits today, Angel Witch singer/guitarist Kevin Heybourne wrote the song that would give his band its name and become their perennial set-closer, when he was still a teenager, “literally just mucking about on my guitar, trying to write a song.

“It’s not like any of our other stuff, is it?” he continues. “At that point there was no Angel Witch anyway. I was just finding my feet as a songwriter. It was just bedroom stuff, when your parents tell you turn it down, you know?”

Much has been written about those heady days in the early 80s when the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal swept across the UK, conjuring countless great bands and inspiring Metallica in the process. But with the obvious exceptions of Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and Saxon, few of the movement’s key players truly deserved legendary status: Angel Witch being the key exception.

Darker, heavier and more adventurous than their innumerable peers, Kevin’s crew may not have equalled the commercial achievements of the aforementioned legendary trio, but their self-titled 1980 debut album is widely and rightly regarded as one of the genuine classic records of that era.

And while the upbeat boogie rock of its opening title track (yes, it’s Angel Witch by Angel Witch from the album Angel Witch) is in no way typical of their sound, it is a certified NWOBHM anthem. As Kevin notes with a chuckle, if he had tried to write a song that would endure for 40 years, it definitely wouldn’t have worked out.

“The whole NWOBHM thing didn’t exist when I wrote Angel Witch,” he recalls. “We were called Lucifer at that point and we were just a heavy rock band. I was in love with Sabbath, you know? I didn’t like anything else I was hearing. I liked bands like Led Zep and Deep Purple, but I preferred the Sabs because it just made more sense to me, with everything that was happening around me. I thought, ‘Why is everyone writing love songs?’ I was into the fantasy thing and horror and I just felt that was more of the way to go.”

In fact, Angel Witch is one of Kevin’s band’s only upbeat and cheerful tunes, with lyrics that do seem to point to the internal monologue of a surly teenager. In stark contrast to the music, which kicks all manner of unholy arse, lines like, ‘The more love I feel for you, the more you fade away’ are unlikely to give Slayer sleepless nights.

“Well, it was a load of shit that just came out of my head at 17 years old!” the guitarist laughs. “It’s like a love song, but gone wrong. But I didn’t spend days agonising over the words. It was just another rock song. I’ve no fucking idea what would go through a 17-year-old’s head now, but you had to think on your feet back then. Now you just go on YouTube and learn someone else’s solo or whatever. It’s a shame, really.”

While the rest of the material Kevin was writing as an aspiring teenage musician tended towards a more overtly Sabbath-influenced sprawl of riffs and atmosphere, Angel Witch itself was a snappy, three-minute rampage with a brilliantly simplistic chorus (‘You’re an angel witch! You’re an angel witch!’) that, as it turns out, even incredibly drunk people at metal shows can sing along with. None of this was in Kevin’s mind at the time, however. He was just trying to emulate one of his favourite bands.

“I’d been listening to a [British psych rock legends] Pink Fairies track, Walk Don’t Run,” Kevin says. “I just loved the groove they used for that and the way there was a pause between hitting each chord. I just worked around that and it just evolved from there. It was easy. The intro guitar part came a bit later. I thought, ‘I’ve got to start it somehow!’ I’ve got no idea where that came from. I was just messing around with the E and the B string, just to follow the chords, and it just appeared!”

Lucifer became Angel Witch in 1978, just in time for the arrival of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. The band’s eventual breakthrough came three years later when they contributed a track, Baphomet, to a compilation album called Metal For Muthas that was released by EMI in February 1980.

With two early Iron Maiden tracks and Baphomet standing out as the obvious highlights, it swiftly became a cult classic among NWOBHM aficionados, with Angel Witch widely acknowledged as the pick of the nascent bunch. As a result, as Maiden strode imperiously towards world domination, Kevin’s band were next in line for a significant record deal.

“We were actually one of the last bands to get signed from the rest of the NWOBHM bunch, but we were offered a deal by EMI,” Kevin remembers. “But I didn’t want to do it, mainly because Maiden had already been signed. The other guys in the band really wanted to do it, but the guy that was managing us at the time said, ‘Do you really want to be under the shadow of a band that have already made it?’ Maiden got a big deal. So we walked away from that. I don’t regret it. You can’t go back and change it.”

Signing instead to the more low-key Bronze Records imprint, Angel Witch headed to Roundhouse Studios in London, in autumn 1980, to record their first album. At this point, Kevin felt he was progressing as a songwriter and that Angel Witch was probably a bit too lightweight for inclusion on what could be the most important album his band would ever make.

“I honestly didn’t think about doing the song for the album, but everyone said it had to be a bloody single!” he laughs. “The producer said, ‘It’s got to be done!’ so that happened. It evolved in the studio, actually. I changed a few bits and shortened it, because it used to be much longer with three verses and an extremely long solo, which I call ‘practising on stage’! Ha ha ha!”

Angel Witch’s debut was released in December 1980, receiving a flurry of great reviews along the way. Nearly 40 years on, it still stands out as one of the few genuine classics of the NWOBHM era. But while deep cuts like Atlantis and Angel Of Death are a truer representation of Kevin Heybourne’s unique song-writing, it was the album’s titular opening track – released as a single just before the album’s unveiling – that somewhat inevitably became Angel Witch’s not-so-secret weapon for all future live engagements.

“Yeah, people were liking it straight away,” Kevin says. “There was a big push from the record company when it was released as a single. So people knew it and they expected it and it ended up that we had to play it. I think at one point we were doing it twice, at the beginning of the set and at the end! That was stupid, really. But yeah, as a song, it’s basically nailed to my back! Ha ha ha!”

After calling it a day in the mid-80s, Kevin brought Angel Witch back from the dead multiple times, most recently reuniting the band in 2008 with a new line-up and realising, much to his surprise, that they were more in demand than ever. Of course, he can never scratch Angel Witch from the setlist, but playing it every night isn’t an issue.

“Oh, I have to. It’s the name of the band! If you take it out then there is no Angel Witch.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 330 (December 2019)

If there was one subject that was like catnip to thrashers in the 1980s, it was man-made environmental destruction. Kreator had Toxic Trace, Testament offered Greenhouse Effect, while Nuclear Assault spoiled ecologically minded fans with climate collapse bangers Critical Mass and Inherited Hell.

Metallica made a late contribution with the ecological doom of Blackened, the opening track on their 1988 album ...And Justice for All.

Opening the album with a theme of apocalyptic annihilation, Hetfield imagines Earth's destruction in the aftermath of a nuclear winter. If the 1984 film Threads was ever turned into a musical, Blackened would be the showstopper: ‘Death of Mother Earth, never a rebirth, evolution’s end, never will it mend, never…’

The song’s genesis falls squarely at the feet of bassist Jason Newsted, who’d joined the band just weeks after the death of Cliff Burton.

As bassist in Flotsam and Jetsam, he co-wrote the music on their debut Doomsday for the Deceiver and was the band’s primary lyricist. After recording his parts for The $5.98 E.P. – Garage Days Re-Revisited, he was keen to contribute ideas for their fourth studio album.

The bassist had a four-track Tascam recorder set up in his Bay Area apartment and kept returning to one particular riff while working on ideas.

“The main riff is mine,” Newsted told Guitar World in 2013. “I wrote it on bass, though. I’ve never told this story before, and it warms me a bit. I’d only been in the band for a very short time. I was still in a little one-bedroom rented apartment. And James would come over to the house, like buddies. He’d come over for dinner. We’d hang out and play guitars on the couch. It was pretty fucking dreamy for me. Metallica was my favourite band.

“I’m fucking around with this riff and then he started playing along,” he continued. “The song started forming right at that time. I’m sitting up in my chair, like, 'Holy shit, dude. This is something!' That was the first thing we ever constructed together. And him going, “Dude, that riff’s good enough to open our fucking album,” really gave me a feeling of victory, because I looked up to him greatly, and still do to this day.”

You can hear the song’s progression – and Newsted’s complex bassline – through a series of demo tapes included in the 30th-anniversary reissue of ...And Justice for All. The song would earn Newsted his first of three co-writing credits throughout his 14-year tenure (My Friend of Misery and Where the Wild Things Are would follow).

On the album itself, Blackened opens with the sound of multi-tracked guitars played backwards which sounds like they’re ominously unraveling. When the song starts properly, it begins quickly and continues apace for its duration.

Blackened is the seventh fastest in Metallica’s extensive back catalogue, and surprisingly, is a fraction slower than the …And Justice For All closer Dyers Eve. The song averages 190 beats per minute and changes tempo a staggering 19 times. This can pose its own challenges for the band’s timekeeper, especially during a physically punishing two-hour set.

“It's great when music leaves your head and inhabits your body, but there are some Metallica songs where you need to keep thinking," Ulrich told the BBC. "Like Blackened, for instance, you have to really stay on top of all the starts and stops and tempo changes. 'Here it comes. Four bars away, I hope I don't screw this up!’”

Blackened debuted at MTK Stadion in Budapest in September 1988 on the Damaged Justice tour and became a regular fixture in the set list, even when their lengthy Justice songs were later condensed into a medley.

Fast-forward more than three decades, Hetfield looked to this specific track for inspiration during the pandemic. He reimagined Blackened as a surly, apocalyptic cowboy singalong as a way for his bandmates to overcome the challenges of being in quarantine and play music together again, albeit remotely.

"I kind of got a little annoyed and pissed,” Hetfield told Steffan Chirazi for the band's own So What? fan club magazine. “What would be a great thing to reconnect the band again? Why not take a song and just mess around with it? So I got Blackened... I don’t know, there’s just something that clicked for me, and I just said, ‘Hey, guys, here’s a challenge. I’m going to send you something. You add onto it. You’re musicians.'

“I had an acoustic mic and my regular vocal mic and just threw it down on a couple different tracks," he adds. "I said, ‘Hey, put whatever you feel you want to on this. Let’s have fun with this, don’t study it, don’t over-listen to it, just feel it.’ And Blackened 2020 is what happened from that, and that was the beginning of the reconnection online with our creative flow.”

Almost four decades later, Blackened remains a fan favourite and an integral part of the band's identity, inspiring the name of their record label and American whiskey. It has been performed over 550 times since 1988, including the band’s recent summer show at London Stadium. A masterpiece.

Has it really already been a year since Ozzy Osbourne left us? This week has seen some commemorations of heavy metal's original icon, the metal world still reeling from his loss. Yet, metal continues to evolve - as this week's collection of brilliant new songs shows.

First, the results of last week's vote! The all-star team-up between Mastodon and Queens Of The Stone Age clearly got a few people excited, as they've bagged themselves third place in the poll, while In This Moment's industrial thumper Crawl took second. Our overall winners for the week however were nu metal revivalists Red Method, whose single Detonate sweeped the poll.

This week has been an absolute rush on new releases, but we've still whittled it down to 12 brilliant new metal songs you need to hear. Whether that's the latest from Amon Amarth, Hatebreed or Halestorm, or rising talents like Black Spikes, Kim Dracula and Imminence, we've got you covered - so don't forget to cast your vote in the poll below and have an excellent weekend!

Amon Amarth - Gjallarhorn

Amon Amarth never fail to deliver an epic. Even so, Gjallarorn feels properly anthemic, befitting a band who've played arenas and bigger festival slots in recent years. Taken from new album The Allfather Awakens, due October 2, its another mighty tune for the band to add to their live arsenal. We'll look forward to hopefully hearing it when the band return to the UK in October.

Imminence - False Light

Imminence look ready to blow up. After selling out London's Roundhouse last year, they've lined up a Brixton Academy appearance for January next year. But that doesn't mean they're suddenly softening their edges. If anything, new single False Light feels like a demonstration of how furious and stark the band can be, mournful violin standing out against Eddie Berg's larynx-shredding howls. New album Axis Mundi is coming October 2.

Wormwood - Yra|Extras

Scabrous black metal from Sweden, Wormwood are indulging their most grandiose songwriting tendencies on new single Yra|Extras. Taken from the new Å EP, due out in a couple of weeks on August 7, the track melds explosive BM blasts with surprising elegant moments of melody, even ducking into some Leprous-style undulating gentleness around three-and-a-half minutes, all contributing a sense of being sent on a sonic odyssey.

Kim Dracula - Molecular Conversion

With their 2023 debut, Kim Dracula emerged as one of metal's wildest new bands, with a madcap sense of throwing together everything from jazz and nu metal to Mr. Bungle style avant garde to make something properly fascinating. New single Molecular Conversion is a surprise change of pace in the same way Faith No More's take on Easy was to anyone who knew the band from Epic and Surprise You're Dead. The song's core melodies feel like something only Maynard James Keenan could invoke in A Perfect Circle, giving way to a surprise horn section that somehow doesn't feel a million miles out of place. Freshly signed to Rise Records, we reckon album 2 can't be too far away.

Black Spikes - Zelvar

Lithuania's Black Spikes have an insane look - and a sound to match. New single Zelvar starts out in clanging, snarling metal, only to contrast it with a gentle, Swan-Lake like melody. Which promptly gets stomped under a colossal boot. It's a killer contrast as the song switches between the two extremes, and has us plenty excited for new album Ydos, due out on August 28.

Showing Teeth - Bad Exchanges

There's something delightfully unhinged and feral about Showing Teeth's latest new single, Bad Exchanges. Maybe it's the frequent blast-beats, or the shrieking, grindcore like screeches, but the Nashville artist really nails a sense of frenzied mania. New EP A Fate Worse Than Loneliness is coming on September 4.

Hatebreed - Kill Count Increase

Hatebreed have been comfortably clattering skulls for coming on 30 years, so why stop now? Six years since their last album, Kill Count Increase comes with the announcement that new album Fatal Paradox will be out November 6. Short, sharp and delightfully thrashy, its a reminder that Hatebreed are masters of their own distinct brand of thumping metallic hardcore.

Rattlesnakes - Shadows In The Night

Classic heavy metal is enjoying a glorious, triumphant revival. Joining the ranks of Asomvel and Tailgunner are Nottingham-based newcomers Rattlesnakes, freshly signed to Listenable Records they've put out the killer Shadows In The Night to show what they're all about. Sat somewhere between the thrash of Nervosa and the classic speed chops of early Venom or Diamond Head, Shadows... is also the title track of their debut album, due October 30.

Micah Martin - Burn Them All (ft. OddKidOut)

The fusion between metalcore and EDM is nothing new at this point, but newcomer Micah Martin is offering a fresh new spin on the meeting-of-worlds. Chuggy riffs give way to some proper drum'n'bass electro that somehow feels like a throwback to early rave rock pioneers Enter Shikari whilst also feeling fresh and exciting. His full debut All I Need is out November 20.

Ripper - The Source Exterminator

How's about a bit of Chilean death metal to take you into the weekend? Ripper's The Source Exterminator is a high speed assault on the senses, all wailing guitars and machine-gun drums as they race towards annihilation, slipping in some great half-pace switches to nail some crossover energy amdist it all. The band's new album - aptly titled Towards Rebirth, considering it comes ten years since their last - is out today.

Broken By The Scream - Hanakabura

Sometimes only the most frenzied noise will do. Japan's Broken By The Scream have been putting out music for almost a decade now, but will be making their way over to Europe this summer with gigs lined up across the continent including an appearance in London and at Wacken Festival. To celebrate the fact, they've put out an absolute mania-inducing headfuck of a track in Hanakabura, a song which swings from manic goblin extremity to Babymetal-like kawaii melody with frequent infusions of distinct Japanese folk flourishes.

Hypno5e - Lost Fires

If you've made your way through all the feral and frenzied songs we've offered above, we figure you've earned some respite. Of a sort. Hypno5e aren't lacking for heft, but the French post-metallers are offering up at least a few moments of delicate respite with new single Lost Fires, the first single taken from their new album Trame Noire, due November 6. And when it gets heavy, it goes.

"I recently heard that on the Ukraine war front, the soldiers were resting at night, and they were playing Living On A Prayer," the song's writer, Desmond Child, tells Classic Rock. "The song ended, and then they could hear it being played on the other [Russian] side. It's like they were communicating with each other, and it was a levelling. It's very moving to hear that."

Desmond is extremely good at writing songs that move people. With huge, euphoric choruses, they frequently ferried the musicians he co-wrote with into unfamiliar territory in the upper echelons of the charts. Those bands needed his help; the songs struck a chord, and they sold millions.

You Give Love A Bad Name? That's Desmond. I Was Made For Loving You? So is that. Dude (Looks Like a Lady)? Yep, that too. You know this. Songs so ubiquitous there's no need to identify the bands whose names adorn the cover art.

Desmond hasn't slowed down. Speaking to Classic Rock from his home in Nashville, he's a livewire interviewee, delivering a masterclass in storytelling, regularly bounding off on unexpected tangents and excitedly revealing the details of future projects no one's officially supposed to know about.

But we're here to talk about the songs that influenced Desmond's career in music, and to get the lowdown on his new live album, recorded in 2022 at the 2000-year-old Odeon of Herodes Atticus, a Roman amphitheatre set on the slopes of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.

"People like Maria Callas sang there," says Desmond. "Why would they want me?"

The show, which was put together by the Ministry of Culture of Greece and the Acropolis Museum – with a helping hand from the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis – was a celebration of Desmond's songs. Ticket sales benefited the Museum's ongoing work to repatriate the ancient Greek sculptures commonly known as the Elgin Marbles, which are currently housed at the British Museum in London.

Jon Bon Jovi was asked to appear but turned the opportunity down ("I don't know what he thought it was going to be," muses Desmond, "like some kumbaya experience or something"), but others were happy to come on board: Alice Cooper, the late Bonnie Tyler, Kip Winger, The Rasmus and many more.

The staging was designed by Fokas Evangelinos, who'd worked on multiple Eurovision Song Contests and directed the Athens edition of the show in 2006. So it was always going to be spectacular, with just the occasional hurdle overcome.

Six months before the show, Desmond injured himself in a fall, which necessitated sleeping in a reclining chair for two months. Still unsteady as the date neared, he told Evangelinos that he was concerned about part of the staging.

"The way Fokas designed the set was a circle, but there was a higher level, and there was a staircase down the centre. It didn't have handrails or anything, and so I said, 'I don't think I can make it down those stairs,' and so he said, 'I'll take care of you.'

"He hired four gladiators dressed all in blue, and when it was time for me to come out, they all came up the stairs, and then they all put their arms up, and I used them as guardrails. And they wrapped a beautiful Steinway in blue vinyl that matched my outfit. It was very, very Liberace. And I had knee-high blue boots that had been sprayed blue. I just came down like a superhero."

The show itself? It was big. Really big. So big that Desmond himself didn't know what to expect. During The Rasmus's performance of Love Will Keep Us Alive (originally written by Desmond with the Scorpions), as frontman Lauri Ylönen descended the stairs, dressed in angelic white, Desmond spotted some unexpected movement.

"Suddenly, from the very top staircase down, all these children were holding these glowing orbs, and then they went around the periphery of the stage, just all dressed in white and holding these orbs," he reveals. "And then all of a sudden, there were about 50 more people coming after them, and they were up and down the stairs. It was so impressive. I mean, it was like, wow. I didn't know that was going to happen."

Desmond Child Rocks the Parthenon: The Live Concert Album is on streaming platforms now. Below, Desmond picks the 10 songs that guided his path through music.

Dionne Warwick - Walk On By

"I was about 13 years old, and the first album I bought was Dionne Warwick's Greatest Hits. I'd play it on vinyl, and those songs were so magical; the orchestration, the chords. My mother was a songwriter, so I grew up around music, but that was Cuban style, and it was a different thing.

"The [Burt] Bacharach and [Hal] David songs were influenced by Brazil and jazz, and then they brought Brill Building pop to it, which made it so innovative. And so when I heard Walk On By, which was so haunting, I said, 'I want to do this,' and changed my life."

Carole King - (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman

"When I worked with Carol King (it took me years upon years to finally get in a room to write with her) she told me the story of how that song came about. They were on the sidewalk at the Brill Building, and Jerry Wexler, the grand producer, came around in his car and saw them smoking outside, and pulled over and said, 'Hey, I'm doing an Aretha Franklin date tomorrow night. I need a song,' and and they said, 'What?' And so he said, 'Yeah, write it, and it has to be called Natural Woman.' So they gave him songwriting credit for that title. Isn't that great?"

Laura Nyro - Eli's Coming

"A friend of mine played me her music, and the song that stuck out was Eli's Coming, which was later recorded by Three Dog Night. That song is so special because it has parts that speed up and then slow down. They weren't done to a drum machine. It goes all over the place, tempo-wise.

"I got a chance to sit next to Joni Mitchell at a dinner. She was smoking a joint, and she passed it to me, and I don't do anything like that. Then (songwriter) Diane Warren kicked me under the table. She said, 'Smoke it! It's fucking Joni Mitchell! So I went [acts out briefly smoking a joint], and then handed it to Diane.

"I asked her what she thought of Laura Nyro's music, and she said that she maybe wouldn't have started playing piano had she not heard Laura's records. She said, 'Laura Nyro is one of my biggest influences.' I got a chance to spend time with Laura, and Joni said the same thing. She was saying she was influenced by Miles Davis, and Laura said the same thing, which was very interesting."

Sade - No Ordinary Love

"That song. I never tire of it. We play it anytime company comes over. It's so classic but sounds like it was made today.

"She performs very rarely, I saw her but at the Staples Centre, and her set was magnificent. Every every song had a different set. All of a sudden, five stories high, red curtains came down, and all of a sudden it looked like a cabaret, or it was all in gauze, and it looked like snow, and then it was like you were on a sleigh, and then she pops up in the middle of it all on this pedestal. It was one thing after the other!"

"We think of Sade as a jazzy, soft singer, but live, her voice was so strong, and she could sing really high. I didn't know she could do all that, and she was like Catwoman in this tight black leather outfit with these high heels, and she came up out of the floor on a staircase."

Seal - Crazy

"One of my favourite songs of all time, and I think it was revolutionary. Just the sound of it, and the way that the harmonics of that song unfold, that was very influential to me."

Barbra Streisand - People

"When I was 15 years old, I went to see a movie called Funny Girl that had Barbra Streisand starring in the role, and when she got to the song People Who Need People I had goosebumps all over. So it had been my ambition my whole life to work with Barbara Streisand, and I finally got to do it in 2016.

"I wrote her a special song that I solely wrote. Most of my songs are collaborations, mainly because I couldn't sell songs to anybody that I had written on my own; I had to co-write with the artist to make sure I got on the albums. But I wrote it by myself and produced it, and it's called Lady Liberty. I got her to sing like she hadn't in many years, because I pushed the key half step higher than she was comfortable, and she was calling me a taskmaster, slave driver, and all this kind of stuff. And as soon as she let go, Streisand arrived."

"She really believed in the lyrics. It starts out, 'Lady Liberty / Lift your lamp of hope a little higher / Burn that flame of freedom / Just a little brighter for all the world to see and still believe,' and it's more appropriate now than ever."

Duran Duran - Ordinary World

"One of the things that I coveted and was so special to me was the British pop movement of the 80s. Duran Duran's Ordinary World is a masterpiece, and I was so jealous of that sound because I had gotten into a thing where I was writing with all these rock bands because that's who wanted to hire me. I mean, I did OK with that. But I longed to write songs like Ordinary World, and I never get sick of that song. The way it modulates. It's just so great."

Toto - Africa

"That song was revolutionary."

The Police - Every Breath You Take

"I got to hear it before it came out because the guy who was mastering the record was a friend of mine, and he said, 'Want to hear something cool?' And he played me Every Breath You Take, and I couldn't get a copy of it, so I kept going back every day. He'd play it for me one more time, and it was so magical. All of that was exotic for me because it was British music or Irish music or just from over there, from people who have funny accents. I wanted to do what they were doing."

George Michael - One More Try

"It's just stunning. That's the most stunning vocal performance of his: the lyrics, the song, everything about the way it was produced. I just so longed to work with him.

"It was the night before the Grammys, when I was up for three Grammys for Livin' La Vida Loca, and I had gone to this Korean bath spa to try to relax, and they had these plunge baths. I go into one where there were two showers, and I walk in. There's a guy in there, bent over, trying to get the soap off the floor. And then he stands up, and it's George Michael, and he's looking at me, and I was like, wow!

"First of all, he was a very hairy guy, very Greek. Yes, hairy, front and back. I said hello, and he reeled back. Like, 'Hello, who are you? Why are you talking to me?' And I said, 'Oh, I'm Desmond Child.' 'Oh, Desmond Child! Oh my God!' We became fast friends going in and out of the plungy plunge, and then I said, 'Okay, I'm having a win-or-lose Grammy party tomorrow night, and he said, 'I'll come, ' and I was like, 'Yeah, right.' You know, doesn't he have something better to do?

"And he showed up, and he stayed all night, and so we exchanged numbers. I didn't know what was going on in his life, but I wanted so much to write with him, and I didn't get a chance to. I have to say, One More Try by George Michael is superb."

Desmond Child Rocks the Parthenon: The Live Concert Album is on streaming platforms now.

In 1969, Jethro Tull had a Top Three UK single with Living In The Past and also a No.1 album, Stand Up. They hadn’t yet breached the US Top Ten, though, coming close a year later with the folky/experimental Benefit. That accolade would come in 1971 with Aqualung. And what would become Tull’s best-selling album began with one of their best-known riffs.

Ian Anderson recalled that, like much of the album, the title track emerged as a result of the singer-songwriter approach he brought to the project. “That came out of an acoustic jam; you’ve just got to have the imagination to hear that. You have to know that you can make it sing.”

Tull recorded Aqualung at Island Studios in London, and while the final arrangement of the title track explored the many styles they had brought together previously, with folk and rock in the mix, it also had a more metallic edge.

In both tone and theory, the distinctive six-note guitar intro shared much DNA with the doomy, imperious riffs associated with the nascent Black Sabbath, even containing ‘The Devil’s Interval’ itself, the tritone. Indeed, Tony Iommi had briefly been in the band in ‘68, replaced by long-time Tull alumnus Martin Barre.

As well as livening the song with a brilliant solo, Barre brings heft and menace to Anderson’s tale of the heavy-breathing titular homeless person who’s ‘Sitting on a park bench/Eyeing little girls with bad intent’. But as the music broadens out and the album’s prevailing acoustic aesthetic comes into play, Anderson treats the ‘poor old sod’ with some sympathy, as he bends to pick up dog-ends on aching legs.

“Aqualung is a song about homeless people, but more importantly it’s a song about our reaction – those of us that are fortunate enough to have homes, to have a degree of wealth and happiness and family and friends and support," said Anderson. "It’s about our reaction of guilt, distaste, awkwardness and confusion, all these things that we feel when we’re confronted with the reality of the homeless, whether it’s the slightly Chaplin-esque tramp figure on the Aqualung album or whether it’s a 17-year-old criminal, drug-addicted or working in the sex trade or whatever it might be."

Anderson has credited his then-wife, photographer Jennie Anderson, with much of the song’s earthy, quasi-Dickensian lyrical content. She had also given him early inspiration by showing him a set of photographs she had taken of homeless men in London while at art school.

At six and a half minutes, Aqualung didn’t lend itself to AM radio play, and never came out as a single. But then Tull were already way past the stage of striving for hit singles.

“It was too long, too episodic,” Anderson said later. “It starts off with a loud guitar and then goes into more laid-back acoustic stuff.”

"Many of the songs mix acoustic and electric moments, in such a way that the album became the blueprint for a lot that’s happened since," said Barr. "Honestly, I don’t listen to it, except for reference. When you’ve played a song like Aqualung for so long live and very loudly, it’s good to go back and remind yourself what it should sound like."

Barre's biggest challenge came in the shape of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, who was working on their fourth album in the studio next door, and paid a visit just as Barre was recording his guitar solo.

"We’d locked ourselves away, and I hadn’t seen Jimmy at all," Barre told Guitar Player in 2015. "Finally he walked into the control room to say hello, just as I was recording the solo to Aqualung. In those days, if you didn’t get a guitar solo in one or two takes, it might become a flute solo. It was, ‘Go in there and do it or else.’

"And here was Jimmy, waving like mad – ‘Hey, Martin!’ – and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t wave back or I’m going to blow the solo!’"

The title track set the tone for Jethro Tull’s most iconic collection of songs, which hit No.7 in the US and No.4 at home. And in 2004, the band revisited it, playing the entire album for a radio audience of just 40 people in Washington, DC. Aqualing Live was released the following year, with royalties going to appropriate homeless charities.

More than a decade later, Anderson recorded a new version of the song, entitled Aquafugue, with the UK's Carducci Quartet. Released on the 2017 album Jethro Tull: The String Quartets, it featured Anderson playing Barre's iconic six-note riff on his famous flute, an instrument that hadn't appeared on the original.

"The idea of having the string quartet play it as a fugue to introduce it and then to kind of get into the obvious payoff rendition that the fans would recognise was a little bit of arts meets crafts," Anderson told Songfacts. "I think you've got to try and balance it up so that it's not all too clever. You've got to mix it up a little bit."

Along with Living In The Past and Locomotive Breath, Aqualung remains one of Jethro Tull’s essential musical moments, as well as one of the all-time great prog anthems.

Looking back on Steely Dan’s immense success and impact, it’s hard to envision a time when the supremely honed and highly original jazz-rock group weren’t at the top of their game. But when the core duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were starting out, recognition for their talent and approach would take some time – and some getting used to.

Keyboard player Fagen had stumbled across Becker practising guitar in the campus cafe at New York’s liberal arts school Bard College in 1967. Fagen wanted to start a band, but he’d struggled to find a guitarist who could play jazz and blues the way he wanted to, not “like Dick Dale”, as was the trend, he said.

Becker was playing a wild blues-based style, and Fagen had “never really heard anything like that”. The duo soon started writing together and played in various musical configurations. They found incongruous employment as part of the touring band for doo-wop crooners Jay & The Americans, whose lead singer Jay Black recalled his impression of the pair as “yoghurt-skinned” beatniks who seemed to surface only at night. “The Manson and Starkweather of rock’n’roll,” he called them.

Graduating in 1969, Fagen took the duo’s songs to Manhattan’s legendary Brill Building, the hub for popular songwriters and publishers of every stripe, from Burt Bacharach to Lou Reed, Carole King to Ellie Greenwich.

Becker and Fagen had little success there. The musical climate was not quite ready for their hipster hybrids. However, a Jay & The Americans connection clicked. Group member Kenny Vance was now a Brill resident, and he commissioned from them a soundtrack to 1971 screwball hippie film You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It Or You’ll Lose That Beat, which starred Robert Downey Sr and Richard Pryor.

Their style caught the attention of young producer Gary Katz, who’d begun his career working with pop and rock entertainer Bobby Darin and was newly installed at ABC/Dunhill Records, where he looked after acts including the Mamas And The Papas, Three Dog Night, the James Gang and Steppenwolf.

“I don’t have much to do with the songs,” Katz told RecordProduction.com in 2000, “but I can spot talent.”

Katz would later A&R Jim Croce and Chaka Khan, and while at Warner Bros Records would be instrumental in the signing of Prince. Katz concluded that Becker and Fagen’s stuff was too weird for anyone to handle but them, and their own band. Becker and Fagen were private, introverted creators, and Katz recognised that their work would be best cultivated in a small social bubble.

“They weren’t outwardly public… they had their own relationship,” he told broadcaster Denny Saunders. “They were totally bound to each other. The expression ‘soul brothers’ applies. There was very little fighting in the studio because… no matter what was going on, in the end, Donald was mother.”

Having relocated from New York to LA, by day they wrote for the label roster; by night they had a group that included jazz guitarist Denny Dias, ABC-signed drummer Jim Hodder, session guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter and vocalist David Palmer, brought in due to Fagen’s lack of confidence when it came to singing live.

In August 1972, Katz took the group, now named Steely Dan (a nod to their beatnik roots, using the moniker of the steam-powered strap-on dildo from William S Burroughs’s mind-bending 1959 novel Naked Lunch), into Village Recorder studios in Los Angeles to make their debut album, Can’t Buy A Thrill. The album began with the chilled Latin groove of Do It Again: glossy with its slick musicianship, arch lyrical commentary and pristine production, and blending soft rock, jazz, blues and soul in a singular 70s – and very Steely Dan – fashion.

The highlight of the album was Reelin’ In The Years. Fagen stepped up to the mic for an effervescent – perhaps autobiographical – break-up narration (‘The trip we made to Hollywood is etched upon my mind/After all the things we’ve done and seen you find another man’) as the band galloped along in shuffle time.

The main guitar part needed something special, and this marked the Dan’s first time of what would become a regular ploy of bringing in hand-picked aces. They called another old contact from Jay & The Americans, Elliott Randall, who was just out of the orchestra pit playing for the Broadway version of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar and now getting some freelance muso rep.

“It was my first session for them,” Randall told Produce Like A Pro. “I thought they were really special, and they must have thought I was special too.”

“They were having trouble finding the right ‘flavour’ solo for Reelin’, and asked me to give it a go,” he told Guitar World. Randall read the lyrics and got a sense of what the song was about. Unable to find a guitar amp in the studio, he plugged his 1965 Strat into a bass amp and played. Afterwards Katz called to the recording engineer: “Did you get that?” But he’d missed it, thinking it was a practice run.

For take two, Randall recalled that his imagination was fired up. “Something got me going,” he told Produce Like A Pro. He jazzed up the chorus for the intro, and, using a sprinkling of salsa, pulled off the most joyous, expressive musical conversation, from start to finish.

“That was it! Nobody said: ‘Can we try that again?’,” Randall remembered. “I was delighted, they were happy.”

The track has made millions of others happy too, including Jimmy Page, who knows a thing or two about guitar licks. In Classic Rock in 1999 he said the Reelin’ In The Years solo was his favourite, and in 2016, in conversation with YouTuber Oliver Patrick Loughnan, Page rated it 12/10.

“I’m flattered [by that],” Randall said in 2021. “It was actually very easy [to do]… The song virtually played itself.”

In this week's podium of greatness, we have three English bands. Triumphing in our latest Tracks Of The Week tournament, Juliet's Not Dead – originally from the North East – saw off a worthy challenge from Lancaster's Massive Wagons, while Torquay-born Kris Barras and his Band took out third place, in the process consigning the entire rest of the globe to ignominy. Like a World Cup that England actually wins, if you like. So congratulations to them all.

By the time you read this, our latest competition will already be underway, with challengers from Greece, New Zealand and the Turkish precinct of Los Angeles challenging the usual Brits and Americans. Enjoy!

Villagers Of Ioannina City - Veneremos

These hard rockers from the North West of Greece combine heavy metal and stoner sensibilities with the traditional flavours and instruments of their homeland. It’s a commanding combination, not least on this title track from their upcoming album. Galloping Iron Maiden-meets-Metallica oomph comes with primal, hypnotic heat, courtesy of old-world Hellenic folk streaks – think heady woodwind screams from Greece’s rugged, mountainous Epirus region. The music video involving castles and cloaked figures also helps, natch.

HOLID4Y - Veridream

2026 is turning into the year of the Rivals Sons solo album, as guitar maverick/moustache-twirler-in-chief Scott Holiday releases this expansive, cinematic first taste of his new solo project (following Jay Buchanan’s Americana-fuelled singer/songwriter fest earlier this year). It’s *not* what you’d expect – in a good way. Opening with 70s prog synth textures, Veridream grows into a psychedelic but hooky adventure. A strange, trippy beauty, paving the way for the full album, Topology, coming later this year.

Split Dogs - Suffer

The UK punk’n’rollers veer into beefier heavy metal territory on this game-raising new single. At first it’s pure heavy-booted Sabbathian doom, but then Harry Martinez starts singing and everything kicks into a bouncier gear, creating a rough-throated, theatrical world of cobwebs and black leather that invites much dancing of the not-cool kind (i.e. the most fun kind). “The song deals with the struggle of letting the past dictate your happiness,” Martinez says, of the personal lyrics here, “but ultimately it’s about taking your power back, knowing your worth, and moving forward.”

Queens Of The Stone Age - Easy Street

Back in our lives with a beautifully weird, catchy swirl of lo-fi alternative sweetness, psychedelia and shadows, QOTSA team Josh Homme’s warmly heartbreaking croon with the countrified harmonies of singer/songwriter Nikki Lane. Built upward from gentle acoustic strumming and hand claps, Easy Street comes with a video cast of oddball characters, and it all gets…well, stuff happens. It’s probably best if you watch it. Tender, dark and ultimately kind of lovely.

Ricky Warwick - Seek Zen Destroy (feat. Phil Collen)

Almighty frontman, voice of Black Star Riders and solo artiste, among other things, Ricky Warwick has always had a way with a tune, and this one’s no exception. A bright yet dirty, strutting rock’n’roller with a touch of Prince under its skin, it features Def Leppard’s Phil Collen on guitar and backing vocals.“I wanted to make an album that captures everything I love about rock’n’roll,” Ricky says of parent album Fire & Vengeance, “its power to bring people together, to make us dance and connect with one another, even in a world that often feels consumed by fire and vengeance. At its core, this record is about finding hope and unity in the chaos.” Amen to that.

Eddie 9V - Blowin’ Up

In our experience, the best country-fried rock’n’roll has an edge to it, a little bit of a dark side, even. Such is the case with Dan Auerbach-produced Atlanta dude Eddie 9V. Yes his name sounds like a battery or piece of gear, but Blowin’ Up is swell – a deliciously greasy, easy-on-the-ear Southern groove machine with a laidback funky blues kick, its musings on breaking through as an artist flipped into an actual, explodey-explodey ‘blowing up’ situation in the video. Fine summer holiday fun.

Powder Chutes - Rivers

We somehow managed to miss this when it came out a couple of weeks back, but we're putting that right now because Rivers is an absolute beast of a song, driven by the angriest riff you'll hear this week, the kind of savage, lurching stomp that'll prompt listeners to check that Godzilla isn't rampaging through their neighbourhoods. It's the first new song to emerge from the feisty New Zealanders since last year's (rather excellent) debut album, and it bodes well for whatever big noise they have lined up next.

ÖLÜM - Yılan Kadın (Snake Woman)

ÖLÜM are a Los Angeles-based Turkish psychedelic rock band, so it won't surprise you to learn that Yılan Kadın (Snake Woman) is both mysterious and exotic, with a video populated almost entirely by extras who appear to have been freighted in from an underground shisha lounge in Istanbul circa 1975. It's beautifully crafted – melodically as well as aesthetically – with a slinky groove, excellent use of Middle Eastern melodies, and a keyboard player who wears a towering hat.

A previously unheard tape of an early Guns N' Roses rehearsal has surfaced online. The 40-year-old recording contains early – often significantly different – versions of several songs that featured on the band's debut album, Appetite For Destruction, including Nightrain, My Michelle, Out Ta Get Me and Rocket Queen, as well as Move To The City, which appeared on the band's debut EP Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide.

"Here is a completely unreleased rehearsal tape from 1986 of Guns N' Roses," says uploader Red's GNR Videos! "Some of the recordings are incomplete, unfortunately. Once again, this tape has been hoarded for a long time by select members of the GNR community who believe hoarding these rarities for no good reason is better than letting the community hear them. For the love of God! Please release the rarities!"

It's not clear when the recording was made. The cassette is dated January 1, 1986, but the writing has been crossed out, suggesting that the songs may have been taped on another date. However, it's likely they were recorded at the Gardner Studio, a rehearsal space behind the Sunset Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, where Guns N' Roses spent several months working on their songs in late 1985 and early 1986.

"We stole wood, we built a loft and slept above the equipment," frontman Axl Rose told Hit Parader in late 1986. "But, you know, we almost miss it. Every weekend, the biggest party in LA was down in our place. We'd have 500 people packed in an alley and our old roadie was selling beers for a buck out of his trunk. It was like a bar and everyone had their whiskey. We could get away with whatever we wanted, except when the cops came."

Guns N' Roses signed to Geffen Records in March 1986, and Appetite For Destruction emerged in July 1987.

At the point in their career when they recorded Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division were one of the most vital new bands in the country.

Fronted by charismatic singer Ian Curtis, their charged and foreboding soundscapes were the work of intensely driven young men inspired by the Sex Pistols to create a new rock music of fearsome power – and meaning – out of post-industrial pre-gentrification Manchester’s urban decay.

On their 1979 debut album Unknown Pleasures the one-time outsiders of Manchester punk had, through hard work and a crucial relationship with maverick producer Martin Hannett, defined a compelling and audacious landscape of apocalyptic dread.

In the months that followed Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division had moved on even further. One of the songs they wrote was , Love Will Tear Us Apart, which signalled a major shift in their sound, with Bernard Sumner’s previously abrasive guitar replaced by svelte keyboards, all the better to gild Peter Hook’s haunted, memorable bass melody line.

“It came from the dirty streets of Salford,” says Hook. “It’s a thing that I still wonder about: where does any music
come from? The part of your brain when you write music that’s unconscious?

“It was written on the bass and drums and then Bernard put the keyboard on it. I was just playing around with a riff and Ian spotted the melody,” Hook continues. “He jumped on it and goes: ‘That’s good, that’s good… Now put some drums on.’

“It was the way we always wrote. Ian didn’t write the music but he could spot it. We’d jam, he’d sit there and pick out the bits he thought were good.”

The band’s working process was open-ended, primitive and combustible.

“Strange as it may seem, there wasn’t tape recorders in those days so everything was in your head,” says Hook. “That was one of the wonderful things about Joy Division: we didn’t have tapes of us rehearsing the songs, they only existed when you put the four people together.”

The decisive factor in shaping Love Will Tear Us Apart came from Hannett, who arranged the elements to highlight Curtis’s exacting but resigned baritone. Arranged for mounting effect, with its swooping and soaring, it creates an indelible imprint.

“It was a funny song for us because it was quite poppy, a contrast to the rest of the Joy Division stuff,” Hook says. “We weren’t that struck with it. The ones that were our favourites were ballsy and angsty, like [earlier songs] Shadowplay or Transmission, because you could hide behind the song. Love Will Tear Us Apart was fragile and a lot lighter. We knew it was good but not great.”

Curtis insisted that his lyrics were open to interpretation, but his words to Love Will Tear Us Apart may have been partly inspired by his crumbling marriage to his wife Deborah: ‘Why is the bedroom so cold? You’ve turned away on your side/Is my timing that flawed? Our respect runs so dry,’ he sang in a rich croon. Tony Wilson, head of Joy Division’s label Factory Records, reportedly gifted Curtis a set of Frank Sinatra albums, which is thought to have influenced his vocals.

“Tony and Martin Hannett seemed to think it was a good idea for Ian to sound like Frank Sinatra,” says Hook. “We laughed at the idea. We were young punks full of fire, the last thing we wanted to be was subtle.

“That was Martin Hannett’s doing, something I thought would be impossible to do,” continues the bassist. “But it’s the subtlety that makes it last. Bernard and I would just have done it balls-out, legs akimbo like Status Quo, and probably would have fucked it up in the process. Martin gave us a depth that 20-year-old kids couldn’t have got on their own.”

Capturing that subtlety was easier said than done. The band recorded a version of Love Will Tear Us Apart at Penine Studios in Oldham in January 1980. But Hannett wasn’t happy.

“I couldn’t understand why he was constantly remixing it – four or five times in different studios,” says Hook. “I remember getting phone calls at 3am – I had to get down to the studio immediately because Martin was remixing Love Will Tear Us Apart again. He was obsessed with it.

“Martin sensed it was a song that was going to last forever and wanted to make
it really special. We recorded a lot of versions of the song, because back then nothing was too much trouble.”

Hannett was right, but Curtis wouldn’t live to witness its impact at the time and subsequently. The singer had epilepsy, and would sometimes have fits onstage. But he kept his feelings about his condition – and the turbulence of his personal life – guarded, choosing to obliquely explore them in his lyrics.

“We never talked about our music, we just got on with it, we didn’t analyse it,” says Hook. “It’s only when you read his lyrics you realise… If anyone had done that they would have steamed in straight away. But we didn’t, we just used to go by what Ian told us, and he always told us he was fine.”

It turned out that he was anything but fine. In the early hours of May 18, 1980, Ian Curtis took his own life, hanging himself in the kitchen of the house he owned with Deborah. He was 23.

Love Will Tear Us Apart was released as a posthumous standalone single in the UK a month later, giving Joy Division their first Top 20 hit. It was followed in July 1980 by the band’s second and final album, Closer. His surviving bandmates would reconvene as the more keyboard-orientated New Order, with Bernard Sumner stepping up as singer.

Curtis’ death robbed the world of a remarkable, magnetic talent. His gravestone bears five simple words: Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 119 (June 2008)

Anyone else done with summer yet? Now, we're not saying we hate the long, glorious hours of daylight, but a bit of crepuscular cooling wouldn't go amiss. Still, we're right in the thick of it so far as festival season is concerned, with Inkcarceration happening in the US this week, while Wacken, Bloodstock and ArcTanGent are all to come in the next few weeks.

But, we digress. We're here to talk about new music, so let's round-up the results of last week's vote! Indian prog metallers Fallen Letters sailed into third place with A Familiar Absence, while thrash legends Anthrax nabbed second with The Edge Of Perfection. Our overall winners however were Japan's Hanabie., Life Is Short, O Brave Girl almost taking double the votes of the competition.

It's all to play for this week as we have returning metal veterans and exciting new talent alike with the likes of Mastodon and In This Moment up against Burner, Brat and Loathe. Don't forget to cast your vote in the poll below, and have an excellent weekend!

Loathe - No Stranger To You

It's been a long wait for a proper follow up to I Let It In And It Took Everything. But Loathe are back and swinging for the fences on new album A Stranger To You, latest single No Stranger To You capturing the band at their most shoegaze inspired with a sense of both heft and gorgeous, weightless melody.

Mastodon - Snakes For Dinner

Speaking of new albums with a lot of hype and interest, Mastodon have announced their upcoming ninth album. Titled Marrow Deep, it's their first without founding member and lead guitarist Brent Hinds, and will be out August 28. The retooled 'Don have been out on the road since last summer so we kind of already knew they were still firing on all cylinders, but Snakes For Dinner confirms it with delightful gusto, the band even drafting in Josh Homme for a surprise guest vocal that fits surprisingly well amidst their cosmic-yet-earthy sound.

In This Moment - Crawl

With some real pop'n'lock industrial beats, In This Moment are getting good and sweaty in the club on new single Crawl. Taken from new album Witch, due August 28, it's a seriously infectious track that makes us want to shimmy and headbang till our spines crumble like stale cookies.

Red Method - Detonate

Championing the heavier end of the nu metal revival, Red Method are in full feral force on newest single Detonate. Tight, claustrophobic grooves are met with what sounds like a wolverine operating a turntable, old school record scratches fitting in well amidst this delightfully vicious showing from the band's new EP As In Life, which is out today.

Bury Tomorrow - Sx

While this isn't the first time Bury Tomorrow have made a stylistic shift, we'll admit we were pretty surprised to hear them swinging for some industrial thump on new single Sx. Coming with the announcement they've launched their own independent label imprint Death Records, it sounds like the British band are tiring of the metalcore pool and looking to expand their sonic horizons.

Employed To Serve - A Moment Gone Too Soon

It's always oh so gratifying to hear Employed To Serve let rip. Whether it's the booming swing of I Spend My Days or the Araya-like howl of Treachery, they've shown they know how to go hard in a satisfying way, and new single A Moment Gone Too Soon is no exception to that form. From it's blast like opening to the steady rhythmic bombardment that lends it a sense of infectious invigoration, it's exactly the kind of tune that's made for sweaty club pits. Lucky that there'll be plenty of chances to see them on tour in the UK in November, then.

Scene Queen - Metalicious

They don't call her the queen for nothing. Bimbocore pioneer Scene Queen is offering up a crash course in the subgenre on newest single Metalicious, taking 00s pop and culture then brutalising it with some thick, thumping grooves and riffs. It's short and straight to the point, and while it might not have the killer hook of 18+ or Finger, it has an addictive quality that'll have the refrain "I'm hitting the mosh" sticking in your head for days. The full Metalicious EP is coming September 11.

Brat - Manslayer (Hell Hath No Fury)

Surely a Brat/Scene Queen tour would be a slam dunk? Granted, Brat profess to be champions of Barbiegrind rather than bimbocore, but we reckon the overlap between two audiences is nothing to sniff at. Nor is Brat's latest single, for that matter, Manslayer (Hell Hath No Fury) a straight ahead brute of a track that shows Brat aren't fucking about when it comes to the nasty stuff with lashings of 90s death metal chucked in for good measure.

The Ocean - Belligerence

We're starting to get a real sense of what this new line-up of The Ocean is all about now. Where previous single Light Pollution was based heavily on melody, Belligerence balances the melody out with the seismic, crashing-tectonic-plate riffs that were so prevalent on their earlier records when the band leaned harder towards post-metal than prog. New album Solaris is coming on September 25 and promises to be an odyssey.

Burner - What Will You Give? (ft. Josh Middleton)

After gatecrashing their way into Hammer's Top 50 albums of 2023 with their debut It All Returns To Nothing, Burner are back with a new record. Titled No One Is Coming To Save Us, it's due September 25 and first single What Will You Give shows off some deft extreme metal nuances, one minute a slavering, death metal brute, the next chucking hardcore pace-shifts like Hatebreed gorging on Cannibal Corpse. With a guest appearance from Sylosis' Josh Middleton, they're clearly looking to stake their territory in the British metal landscape.

Soulgrind - Jylhä metsämies

Careening in on a hard riff and then unleashing some of the gnarliest, tumorous vocals we've heard in a hot minute, Soulgrind might take the prize for the hardest single of this week. The Finnish extreme metallers clearly delight in chucking out curveballs: kicking around since the 90s, they started out doom but these days have more of a blackened bent, albeit with surprise forays into prog that add a nice twist to their sound. New album Ad Pulchram Mortem comes on August 14 - stick it on if you want your brain melting a bit.

Native James - Never Been Scared (ft. Frisco)

Grime metal is still in its infancy, but Native James looks to be stepping up as one of the subgenre's stars. Intense flows meet clanging, juddering riffs as James spits his flows with guest vocalist Frisco. The pair debuted the track at this year's Download Festival and if you're looking for a harder strain of rap metal, you'd do well to give this a spin.

California Grammy-nominated metal band In This Moment have returned with anti-abuser single Crawl, the first taste of their newly announced ninth studio album Witch.

The song, released today (July 17), comes with a glossy music video, available to watch below. Singer Maria Brink calls the lyrics “a reckoning – a reflection that those who dominate and cause pain will ultimately reap what they sow”.

She continues: “As above, so below. The fall is inevitable. Bearing witness to the harm they inflict, the song declares that those who once stood tall will be brought to their knees.”

Guitarist Chris Howorth adds: “Crawl is a visceral track that delivers the undeniable observation of powerful entities dominating and abusing the weaker and compromised masses: something that continues to repeat itself throughout human history. The song empowers and, at its core, is about standing up and fighting back.”

Witch, the follow-up to 2023’s Godmode, will come out on August 28 via Better Noise (Five Finger Death Punch, Sabaton, The Hu), marking the band’s first release through the label. Press materials say the new album “showcases every side of In This Moment: the fury, the femininity, and the fire. It’s an 11-track opus that does not relent in intensity and introspection”.

The tracklisting and artwork have been revealed and can be seen below, as has the list of guest stars who’ll appear. US post-hardcore outfit Dayseeker will be on opener I Want To Believe, with Aussie alt artist Kim Dracula on Heretic. L.A. Ink TV host Kat Von D is lined up to perform on a cover of Pink Floyd’s 1979 three-part suite Another Brick In The Wall.

Brink says of the album: “Witch is my declaration of inner transformation. It’s about embracing the duality within – taking pain, persecution and struggle – and alchemising them into strength and power. The album reflects both ancient trials and my own journey: where being a ‘witch’ means being a creator, connected to the universe, manifesting my own reality.”

In This Moment have a busy autumn touring schedule in place for after Witch’s release. Following a standalone show in La Crosse, Wisconsin on September 17 (supporting labelmates Nothing More) and a set at Louisville festival Louder Than Life on September 19, the band will co-headline across the US with Hollywood Undead.

Tickets are available now. Head to the In This Moment website for dates and details.

Formed by Brink and Howorth in 2005, In This Moment broke through with their 2014 album Black Widow, which reached number eight on the US Billboard 200 chart. In 2021, their song The In-Between was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance, but lost to Bum-Rush by Body Count. Their 2013 single Whore was certified Platinum in the US in 2022.

The band have collaborated with a number of successful musicians, such as Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford, Shinedown singer Brent Smith and former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Gus G. They’re also known for their array of cover songs, including takes on material from Radiohead and Phil Collins.

In This Moment – Witch:

1. Shame
2. I Want To Believe (feat. Dayseeker)
3. Crawl
4. Into The Dark
5. Sleeping With The Enemy
6. Wrapped Around Your Finger
7. Heretic (feat. Kim Dracula)
8. Father
9. Without Me There’s No You
10. Another Brick In The Wall (Pink Floyd cover; feat. Kat Von D)
11. Something I Can Never Have

With its seductive snarl and hooky riff, One Way Or Another provided a bridge between Blondie’s grimy, CBGB past and glossy commercial future. It is in many ways the quintessential moment from the ultimate new wave album, 1978’s Parallel Lines, which yielded six singles in the US and UK and sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.

Those statistics would have been inconceivable just two years earlier. Blondie were the least likely candidates for global fame to emerge out of New York’s seedy punk milieu. Ramones, Television and Talking Heads were all marked out for critical, if not commercial, success. Blondie, by contrast, were regarded as a joke, with their attempts to bring girl- group sass to garage rock.

And then in 1977 their single Rip Her To Shreds, from their self-titled debut album, became a Top 5 hit in Australia. Suddenly it didn’t seem ludicrous at all that this platinum-blonde sexpot backed by four identikit, dark-haired male musicians should become a mainstream staple. And by 1978 that’s exactly what happened: Denis, (I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence Dear and Picture This reached numbers 2, 10 and 12 respectively in the UK chart.

But the group still hadn’t cracked the US market. Enter Mike Chapman, the bubble-glam producer for The Sweet, Suzi Quatro and Mud, among others, who was brought in to finish the job that Richard Gottehrer, producer of Blondie’s previous album, Plastic Letters, had started: to make them worldwide stars.

“I don’t know if it was that deliberate,” the band’s guitarist and main songwriter, Chris Stein, considers, “but certainly Mike Chapman had been involved in a lot of number one records.”

Stein agrees that Chapman gave Blondie an essential polish, notably on One Way Or Another: “It definitely connects punk and pop, especially in the vocals and the raw guitars. It’s got the snarl of punk and the glossiness of pop.”

One Way Or Another was recorded between June and July 1978 at the Record Plant studio in New York. It packed a lot into its three-and-a-half minutes: a snappy guitar riff, keyboards, bass and drums that achieved the perfect blend of tunefulness and menace, some swirling organ, a police siren sound, and a coda that nodded to the band’s 60s garage roots.

Then there was Debbie Harry’s voice. It started off gently, carrying just enough icy disdain. Soon, though, louche irascibility set in for the ‘get ya, get ya, get ya, get ya’ hook, which swiftly turned into ‘meet ya, meet ya, meet ya, meet ya’. At this point, it became unclear who Harry was playing in this song about a stalker: the protagonist or the prey.

“He was so wild, I had to move out of New Jersey,” she has said of her ex-boyfriend who worked all day in a chemical plant and drank all night, at which point he would “start after me”, calling her on the hour, every hour, and then hanging around outside her door.

“The girl in that song is certainly not a victim,” says Stein. “The protagonist is a self-empowered figure.”

The lyrics to One Way Or Another were written by Harry, while the co-writing credit went to the British-born Nigel Harrison, who had joined the band as bassist after Plastic Letters. The basic musical structure was Harrison’s, but the details and flourishes could have come from any of the musicians in the band. “Everybody played their part, and the songs were shaped in the studio,” says Stein.

Those studio sessions were fraught. Chapman, an Australian living in LA, found his first meeting with Blondie, at the Gramercy Park Hotel, decidedly “unnerving”, perhaps because they sensed that he had been brought in to clean up their act – or rather hone it until they became a well-oiled chart machine. “They were all over the place, musically,” he said. “The group didn’t know what hit them.”

Chapman’s memory is of the “dark, silent and serious” Harry. As for the others, there was no little antagonism when they realised how hard he was going to work them to turn their demos – “embryos of a musical masterpiece”, as the producer put it – into finished works of pop art.

“He [Chapman] was a hard taskmaster,” Stein says with a laugh. “He would go over and over a part until we got the right version. That’s something we hadn’t been familiar with prior to working with him. By the time we got to [1979’s] Eat To The Beat it was much more loose. That was like ‘school’s out’ compared to Parallel Lines.”

Stein got off lightly – during one session Chapman claims to have “rode [Harrison] so hard he threatened to take me apart piece by piece if I didn’t back off. No one,” he adds, “was happy with my technique.”

It worked, though. One Way Or Another, although never released as a single in the UK, became such a favourite with audiences it felt as though it had been. In the US it reached No.24. It presented a new type of female role model: the intimidatingly glamorous, every bit as tough as Poly Styrene or Siouxsie Sioux, but with added boho, SoHo chic, as though Patti Smith had been remade/remodelled by Warhol.

Surprisingly, for all its qualities, Stein didn’t think One Way Or Another would make a good single, let alone a hit. “You’re never 100 per cent sure,” he says.

With a little help from One Way Or Another and its parent album, Blondie became one of the biggest bands of the era. They also invented a new paradigm: catchy, danceable new wave, the sort that has been unavoidable these past few years.

Asked whether he’s amazed at their achievement, Stein’s wry reply is as pure New York cool as the song itself. “Somewhat,” he says, “yeah."

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 160, published in June 2011.