The dark nights are drawing in, but don't worry - we've got an excellent soundtrack to keep you warm in these Autumnal months. Speaking of which, let's go through the results of last week's vote!

As we've come to expect, a big name doesn't guarantee top billing in the Hammer TOTW chart, and the likes of Tony Iommi and Hatebreed were left behind some emergent talent. Aussie metalcore mob The Local Romance took third place, while Japanese newcomers EMNW stormed ahead with the fun Party Loud. But our overall winners for the week were the brutish, no frills hardcore champs of Inherited, Wasted Space proving anything but.

We've got a wide-ranging selection for you this week, as we always hope is the case. Trivium and Hanabie. have announced new albums for this side of Christmas, while Battlesnake and Resolve are eyeing early 2027 release dates for their new records. There's also brutish death metal, CoB-style melodeath and some wild and wonderful music that crosses so many genre boundaries it's pointless even trying to pin down (Hello, Calva Louise). Don't forget to vote for your favourite in the poll below - and have an excellent weekend!

Trivium - Crown In The Grave

It's only been a couple of weeks since Trivium dropped Dead Inside Of Me, but they've barely let the dust settle before announcing that new album Crown In The Grave will be out on November 20. Alongside the announcement, the band unveiled a video for the title-track, a song which certainly upholds the classic-meets-contemporary sound they've been honing over the past few records with sublime guitars and a big, chest-beating chorus that's sure to land when they hit the road again next year.

Thy Catafalque - Tombok

Want some weird black metal? Thy Catafalque have been masters of the art for decades now and if you ever thought jaunty flutes couldn't work against crushing, blackened heft then clearly this is your first time listening to the band - welcome, things are about to get wonderfully weird! Tömbök comes from the Hungarian band's new album XIII: Sárga erdő, which is due out November 20. Opening on 70s style keys, its not long before the track is blustering forth on blackened death metal blasts, only to get suddenly jaunty with jazz flutes. It's glorious.

Wage War - God Complex

Metalcore with a bit of meat between its teeth, God Complex is a plain banger. From its bounding main riff to the shrieking high-end that adds a nu metal energy to the track, Wage War's latest single has serious metal club anthem energy and we dare say that'll translate well to gigs and festival fields next summer. Either way, their new album Landfall is out today and well worth a spin if you like big, hooky metal.

Employed To Serve - Absolute Onslaught

More proof that metalcore isn't in a creative dead-end, you say? Well, look no further than the killer thrash-friendly pace of Absolute Onslaught, which isn't a tribute to Bristolian thrashers, but instead a new offering by Woking's Employed To Serve. With a guest appearance from Cabal's Andreas Bjulver - who ETS will be touring with next month - it's a solid fist to the lugs that'll make you want to dropkick a pumpkin till the mush becomes a fine paste.

Power Trip - Precinct 3

Want thrash riffs? Power Trip have always had 'em and in spades, and look - THEY'RE BACK! It's been a rough six years since the passing of original frontman Riley Gale, but the Texans have come back with a renewed force and fury with new vocalist Seth Gilmore. The band have released two new songs this week, Precinct 3 and Scavenger, and both are excellent, muscular showcases for why this band got people so excited in the first place. There's even an air of Ministry's mid-00s car-crash thrash to the early riff (we're proper hearing Rio Grande Blood), which is a delight when that band have dialled back in recent years. Either way, we're getting new Power Trip in 2027 and we couldn't be happier.

Calva Louise - La Promesa

We fell in love with Calva Louise last year when they unveiled the wild genre-hopping opus that was Edge Of The Abyss. It's looking like the band - based in the UK but made up of members from Venezuela, France and New Zealand - will have a new record coming next year, and if new single La Promesa is anything to go by, it's gonna be even wilder than the last. Mixing snarling metalcore, Venezuelan folk (Joropo) and even little Mozart-like key flourishes, it's typically madcap and utterly delightful.

Black Royal - Extremophiles

Slowing the pace down some, Finland's Black Royal excel at chucking together elements of black'n'roll and sludge metal. You can hear both of those elements in full swing on Extremophiles, a stomping, Motorhead-friendly riff delivered with tar-thick heft and grinding force that makes you wanna bang your head until your neck muscles pop. New album Abyssian is coming October 30, and well worth raising some hell to.

Hanabie. - Bari Bari Buddy

Well this one crept into the schedule! Hanabie.'s new album Umami is coming on December 2, and the Japanese group have celebrated the fact by dropping a typically unhinged mixture of snarling, riffy metal and cutesy J-pop melody. We've come to expect nothing less at this point and they're still one of the most vibrant new things in metal right now.

Battlesnake - Bog Bringer

Battlesnake must be the most disdainful band of Satan since Mr. Lordi announced the devil was a loser and also his bitch. After killing the horned one on a single earlier this year, now the weird and wonderful Aussies are apparently bringing us a whole album of colourful tales and weird fantasy themes, new single Bog Bringer toeing the line being ridiculous and utterly brilliant. There's plenty of run up to this one - the album isn't coming until February 19 next year, but we reckon its a strong contender for the maddest metal album of 2027. All hail the bogpocalypse...

Resolve - Godtier

If you're looking for a tune to bound around to and lose your mind, Resolve have you covered. Godtier practically leaps off its main riff, mixing up melodic hooks, quick rap flows and grimacing snarls in a delightfully energetic package. The band's new album Spread My Ashes Into Space is coming in January next year and is exactly the kind of energy we want to greet 2027 with.

Undeath - Arterial Bombardment

Propelled with all the force of a goods truck careening through a shopping centre, Undeath aren't reinventing the wheel with Arterial Bombardment. But why the hell should they? The New York death metallers have carved a bloody niche for themselves by making primo old-school-style death metal and this latest single is no exception, lumbering forth like the only thing they need is a bit of carnage and a great riff.

Ulthima - Midnight’s Call

Coming out of Mexico via Finalnd - and boy can you tell - Ulthima offer up a distinct fusion of worlds. Starting out in the realms of grandiose symphonic/power metal - hello, Nightwish - they're soon giving way to something more feral and extreme. There's an air of Children Of Bodom to the fusion of styles they offer, but Ulthima don't sound beholden to any one band or scene. Keep your eyes out for new album Midnight's Call on November 27.

How do you recover from the death of a beloved vocalist? It's a question many bands have had to face, and fewer have managed to satisfyingly answer. So when Power Trip frontman Riley Gale passed away in August 2020 it was immense blow to a band who'd only just begun to really hit their stride.

In the wake of Riley's passing, the band were nominated for a Grammy for Best Metal Performance for a live rendition of Executioner's Tax - surely one of the best pure-blooded metal songs of the 21st Century - but for a while it looked like that might be it.

But now, Power Trip are back, with new music to boot. Almost three years since they returned to playing live, with Fugitive vocalist Seth Gilman now on vocals, the Texan thrashers have released two new singles in Precinct 3 and Scavenger. In an exclusive interview with Metal Hammer, they admit this is just the beginning for a full-scale comeback in 2027, when they'll release a new record. Hammer caught up with guitarist Blake Ibanez to talk about the new songs, how they approached their comeback and why they still think of Riley Gale in everything they do.

It’s incredibly exciting to be speaking about new Power Trip music again.

“Obviously it’s a long time coming! We haven’t put out new music in almost 10 years, so it’s been a really long time since we put anything out. We’re really excited though, we worked really hard on this new music and put everything we had into it. The whole time we’ve been doing it, it’s felt like Power Trip.”

Did you approach the songs in the same way as before?

“It gives us the same feeling we had working on the other albums, though obviously it does feel different because we’re missing one of our creative partners who’d been so instrumental in everything we did. But you know, I learned so much working with Riley and its helped me so much as a songwriter to have been in a band with him.

Starting another band a few years ago [Fugitive] with Seth [Gilmore, new Power Trip vocalist] and the chemistry I’ve got with [Chris] Ulsh on drums, it all just felt natural. We’ve picked up where we left off – it always felt like there was unfinished business we had to attend to.”

There’s a story you shared a while back that you actually recorded “an album’s worth of stuff” with another vocalist but it didn’t work out...

“Yeah. There was music we’ve left behind in the past, some of that got reworked and re-recorded, and I’m just really happy that happened. When everything went south [after Riley’s passing] we wanted a sense of closure, but also to one day be able to realise those ideas in the right way. We’re the kind of guys where, if we couldn’t write good songs, we just wouldn’t play music. If we weren’t doing something that felt right to us, we also wouldn’t do it. So reforming the band and putting stuff out under the name, it was like, ‘We’ll only do this if we do it right.’

We recorded a bunch of stuff that we’d written around 2019/2020, but it didn’t come together. We’re really fortunate to be in the circumstances we’re in, that one of my great friends, Seth Gilmore, has been in our orbit for years. He’s been sitting right next to me the whole time I’ve been in a band, you know? I didn’t really even think about [him joining] because we were so close.”

What made Seth the right guy for the job?

“Right from the first songs we wrote together [in Fugitive], you could tell we’d got chemistry, but it was like, to get to where we are now has taken years of writing together. So then when its like, ‘Let’s make a Power Trip record’ the answer becomes, ‘Well, of course.’ It’s come together naturally. That doesn’t mean it’s not hard to write songs – especially in this day and age – but I feel really good about what we’ve done and there’s a lot of new music in the pipeline. This is just a taste of what’s to come.”

It’s taken almost six years since Riley’s passing to put out recorded output again. I guess you must’ve had those “Do we even want to do this?” conversations?

“It’s not easy. Every decision we’ve made has been thought out. It was kind of between me and Ulsh to be like, ‘Can we write songs?’ In the back of my mind I think I knew we’d eventually figure it out, but without a singer you can’t do anything.

All I know is how to write music. The only way I can get out of this and feel better about everything with this loss would be to write some music. It makes the loss feel less… immeasurable, I guess. I’m still mourning the loss of my friend, my bandmate and I just want to be with all my friends and do what we did for so long. I’ve been playing in bands since I was 15, 16 years old. The only way out of all that was to write music.”

Were you surprised by the amount of love the band – and Riley – got in the wake of his passing?

“I wouldn’t say ‘Surprised’. I could tell people thought highly of us in our world, and Riley was always a great frontman and so recognisable. It showed just how large our community had grown though and even now, the hardcore scene we came from has grown so much more popular.

All that was brewing back then and it was amazing to see all the love Riley got, though as you’re going through hell its like, ‘This is nice but I wish it wasn’t happening’. We just wanted to do what we had been doing. But we all miss him – it didn’t feel real when everything happened, it was like a blur. It took a long time to come to terms with everything.

I’ll always give credit to Riley for all the stuff we did together and everything he taught me about songwriting. I’m so thankful we got to spend the years we did together and every time we write a new song, I think about him. Any time I write anything, I think about what he’d say or what he’d do. That’s the yard stick for how I write. I hope we capture that same spirit and make people happy. We want to keep waving the banner and keep his name alive.”

There must also be a sense of, “We don’t want the last chapter of this band to be the death of our friend?”

“That is exactly how we feel. 'Death… that’s gonna be it?' We put out our last record and it wasn’t even three years later that Riley passed away. Those songs he’d helped us write, with these amazing lyrics, I don’t want that to be it. We should play those songs, otherwise there’s gonna be generations who’ll never have heard of us and that’s just sad. It’s not a good way to finish the story.

When doing this, its like, ‘This sounds like us, but it’s a new and different thing.’ People will appreciate that I don’t think any of these songs is just a retread of the past. We’re very careful not to just do what we’ve done before, repeat ourselves and say the same things. We wanted to keep things moving. If you liked our band in the past, I think you’ll like this.”

Precinct 3 and Scavenger are available to stream now. Power Trip's new album is expected in 2027.

Surviving Moody Blues musician Justin Hayward has shared a surprise brand-new single, a cover of Hello, Young Lovers from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King And I.

“I have loved the songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein II since I was a boy," Hayward enthuses. "My mother, who was a fair pianist, bought the songbook of The King And I after she had been to see the movie, and this song always seemed to express something so kind that an older person might say - now, I am that person and can say it from the heart”.

“I started recording the song just for my own personal pleasure, but after a couple of hours I realised it could actually be a record and I got serious. The orchestral arrangements of Alfred Newman and Ken Darby are magical, and that evening myself and my recording partner Alberto Parodi experimented with surrounding my track (of guitars, bass, keyboards and vocal) with their orchestrations and the effect was beautiful. Alberto’s friend Roberto, who plays old-fashioned accordion, came round, and in one take it was perfect."

The single is backed with a live version of The Moody Blues' own Haunted, which Hayward penned for the band's 1999 album Strange Times. The new version was recorded at The New York Society Ethical Culture and features longstanding tour musicians Julie Ragins, Karmen Gould and Mike Dawes. You can hear both new tracks below.

Hayward is currently on his The Story In Your Eyes UK tour, which is tonight at the Torquay Princess Theatre. You can see the full list of dates below.

Justin Hayward The Story In Your Eyes UK tour dates

Oct 7: Torquay Princess Theatre
Oct 8: Truro Hall For Cornwall
Oct 10: Salisbury City Hall
Oct 11: London Cadogan Hall
Oct 12: London Cadogan Hall
Oct 14: Aylesbury Waterside Theatre
Oct 17: Dunfermline Alhamera Theatre
Oct 18: Newcastle Tyne Theatre And Opera House
Oct 20: Bexhill De La Warr Pavilion
Oct 21: Southend Cliffs Pavilion

Get tickets.

It’s the cowbell-clanking, civil rights-based psychedelic soul anthem that put four African-American brothers on the popular music map. But the Chambers Brothers 11-minute signature song nearly didn’t make it onto plastic, let alone become mainstream listening.

Born and raised in Mississippi in the 40s and 50s, the brothers George, Joe, Lester and Willie Chambers worked on their father’s cotton farm and, having been taught to harmonise by their mother, sang all day in the fields and in their local Baptist church at weekends.

After George returned from two years army service during the Korean War, the siblings relocated to Los Angeles to escape racial tensions. Using the name the Chambers Brothers (“we couldn’t agree on anything else,” stated Willie), they brought their soul and gospel mix – complete with washtub bass, harmonica and guitar – to the city’s coffee shop circuit. “We were the first group to do gospel music in clubs,” Willie told interviewer Kevin Grace. “We got really good.”

But the folk café gig set-up took a weird turn when conservative complaints were made about a gospel band playing establishments such as The Ash Grove that not only sold coffee, but alcohol too. “We were asked [by promoters], ‘Can you mix it up? Play some blues and rock'n'roll so we’re not booking a gospel act?’” says Willie. So their genre palette expanded, using electric guitars on folk and gospel songs, like trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe had, ahead of Bob Dylan’s landmark moment.

Social activist, vocalist, guitarist and producer Barbara Dane spotted the Brothers at The Ash Grove. “The minute I heard them I knew they’d be perfect to do these freedom songs that people were wanting so much to hear and sing in the 60s,” Dane said. Dane championed the quartet, taking them out on tour and telling them, “Do your thing.”

Dane also badgered folk maven Pete Seeger to give the Brothers a break. They caused waves at Seeger’s Newport Folk Festival in 1965 with a set-list that included sped-up Jimmy Reed songs. The audience “broke down fences, ran and rushed the stage,” Joe Chambers told Richie Unterberger. After their show, the MC stated, “Whether you know it or not, that was rock'n'roll." Bob Dylan also appeared, famously going electric for the first time.

New Yorker Brian Keenan was recruited on drums that year and the band recorded a cover of the Isley Brothers’ Shout! for Vault Records, and backed Bob Dylan on a version of Tombstone Blues. Signed to Columbia in ‘66 by Dylan’s influential A&R man John Hammond – who had heard them play on Tombstone… – they rushed out a rough-sounding revolutionary rally-cry for hippies, a single called Time Has Come Today that guitarist Joe Chambers had written after taking LSD at a Timothy Leary lecture at UCLA.

The song featured a repeat call-to-action yell of ‘Time!’, which seemed to urge the listener to act on halting the social and political justices of the day, such as segregation and the Vietnam War. The now-familiar ‘tick-tock’ percussion motif was added by Lester Chambers, to “keep the drummer straight”.

“I first [played that] on a car bumper from a ’49 Buick,” Lester says. He and his tour manager cousin Julius Chambers then found a music store that sold cow bells and Lester went through the whole lot until he found the one most “in tune.” Time… became a highlight of shows played in front of rock audiences as the band were booked alongside acts such as Johnny Rivers, The Doors and The Nazz.

By ‘67 the group were ready to record their debut album with in-house producer David Rubinson (Moby Grape, Taj Mahal, Santana). But Columbia’s President, Clive Davis, was obstructive. At a formal ‘welcome to the label’ meeting, he told the group to not re-record Time…. He said Columbia didn’t want to work with “that shit”. In fact, he was thinking of giving it to a white group.

Rubinson had other ideas. A few days after the meeting, he called them to say, “I might lose my job, but [when we record the album] come up an hour earlier and we’ll do it.”

“We [couldn’t] re-record, overdub, or listen back,” Willie Chambers recalled to Kevin Grace, explaining that Davis would allow the group very little studio time. “[Rubinson] said, ‘We have to shut down the machines as if we’d never been there.’”

The session day came, and the band turned up early and recorded Time… in one take. Rubinson added effects at the same time as the band performed. The song evolved from a tight-but-groovy garage rock number to an 11-minute beast featuring a wild, experimental jam, worthy of the lyric "my soul has been psychedelicised".

The next time the group heard the song, it had made it onto their album, The Time Has Come. DJs across the US clamoured to play the full-length track, not the radio edit, and sales of the LP soared. The song reached Number 11 in the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968, where it stayed for five weeks.

The band were now somehow in favour with Davis. When they were to be presented with a gold disc on the Smothers Brothers national TV show, he turned up in the green room. “He smiled and said, ‘Well, fellas, you got one,’” says Willie Chambers. “And we glared at him and said, ‘Yeah… and you are one.’”

Time Has Come Today has inspired cover versions by acts such as Joan Jett, Steve Earle and Sheryl Crow, and Me’Shell Ndegeocello. It’s featured in over 100 films and countless TV shows and adverts, lending a strident, inspirational flavour. Lester Chambers now performs the track with his son Dylan in the cosmic collective Moonalice.

The Chambers Brothers were pioneers of socially-aware Black American soul, rock and funk, alongside Sly And The Family Stone, Rotary Connection, The Temptations, Funkadelic, Curtis Mayfield, The Isley Brothers, Betty Davis and many others. Their songs built future rock and soul music, and future activist generations. Time… makes all our souls a little psychedelicised when we hear it.

“We never tried to have a Number One record,” says Willie. “We wanted to make music that had a meaning and substance, and that might help someone."

Starless is one of King Crimson’s most recognised songs, and closes the band’s seventh album Red, released in 1974. But by that time the band who’d struggled to make it had broken up, the result of Robert Fripp’s desire to change his life. Under-appreciated on their arrival, Starless has come to be seen as one of the band’s crowning glories. In 2024, within a detailed analysis of Red, Prog told the story of the song’s creation.

At King Crimson soundchecks in the early to mid 70s, Robert Fripp often threw out a chord or motif which might or might not be picked up on by the others. One of those had been the see-saw riff of Red. Sometimes, however, a more fully fleshed-out idea would be presented in the more formal surroundings of the rehearsal room. But one of those, Starless – among the most well-regarded and most recognised King Crimson tracks – almost never happened.

Bassist and vocalist John Wetton and lyricist Richard Palmer-James penned a ballad and presented an early draft at a rehearsal in late 1973. Wetton once recalled being crestfallen when his sensitive song was met with polite indifference, as the band quickly went on to other things. “Rehearsals were always an icy and rather bleak kind of engagement,” comments drummer Bill Bruford. “There was a lot of floor staring.”

However, Wetton’s bandmates did like the line from the song’s chorus, ‘Starless and bible black.’ Co-opted by Palmer-James from the opening passage of Dylan Thomas’s 1954 radio play Under Milk Wood, it connected so strongly with the Crims that it was assigned to an instrumental improvisation and used as the title to Larks’ Tongues In Aspic’s follow-up album.

Before that record’s release, hoever, the quartet revisited Wetton’s ballad. This time it would be augmented by several decisive and transformational new elements. The first came while the band were touring during the tail-end of 1973. “I can remember standing onstage in a soundcheck messing around with it, and just trying to trying to find some kind of satisfaction with it,” violinist David Cross says of the mournful, woebegone melody that opens Starless.

“I was experimenting with this kind of leap. I was always trying to find a way to get up and come down again. And I wanted to get up the octave and I wanted to feature the ninth of the scale, which is very powerful. I wanted to do it in a satisfying way. So I was always playing around with it, just wearing everybody down around it until we took some notice of it.

“Robert probably just got bored with listening to me fluffing around with it, and he picked it up and did some stuff with it and probably turned it into a proper tune, or I’d have just kept flapping around with it. He reckoned I started it and he finished it.”

Another feature of the new piece came when Bruford was playing piano at home. “I was interested in music in its totality,” he explains six decades after he came up with the glowering bass melody that underpins the central section. “A piano is wonderful because you can see the notes and it’s highly rhythmic.

“So for someone like me who’s going to do a rhythmic thing, just bang on a note, and out comes a rhythm on a pitch. If you then change some of those notes you get a rhythm with a bit of melody, and then you give it to John Wetton or Robert Fripp to see what they do with it.”

What Fripp did was distil all his years of experience, skill and dexterity into one note played across two strings with some pitch bending for over four minutes – which that Steven Wilson would come to describe as “the ‘death of prog solo.’”

Adding to this already exciting brew was a bass riff that had originally been part of the early versions of Fripp’s Fracture, written and performed during 1973. That fast-moving jazz-rock-style figure, propelled by the bass, provided the platform for the blowing/soloing section before the majestic recapitulation of the main theme brought the whole piece to a thunderous completion.

Receiving its first live airing just days after the arrangement had been completed, Starless was a huge hit with crowds – thanks in part to the simple but incredibly effective lighting cue that suffused the entire stage in an infernal, glowering crimson/red light as the piece relentlessly grew in power and magnitude over that memorable Bruford bass line.

As Fripp noted in his diary after the band’s last performance in New York’s Central Park on July 1, 1974: “Lights at the end of Starless really blew the crowd. Rapturous reception... Everyone was pleased with the gig. Conversation with John Wetton – lighting effects like that really make the difference.”

By the time they came to record the song at Olympic Studios in July 1974, the trio who remained after the departure of Cross had played it in concert more than 51 times. It was poignant that Crimson had at last been able to channel the raw energy of their live performances into the studio, considering what was going on within the psyche of the group.

As the sessions got underway, Fripp told his colleagues that he was “withdrawing the passing of his opinion” and that his thoughts didn’t matter any more. Bruford and Wetton decided he was simply “pulling a moody,” and got on with the task in hand. Fripp’s approach was part of what he would later describe as a strategy of radical neutrality: “the doing nothing that enables doing everything.”

His avoidance of taking the initiative in the way he’d done in previous recordings came in part as a response to reading JG Bennett’s work; and, during the weeks and months out on the road, a growing realisation that the madness and excesses of the music industry were contrary to the life he wished to lead. The burden and responsibility of steering King Crimson against the crosswinds of commerciality and artistic compromise was becoming too much for him.

His idea of a Frippless Crimson, with original member Ian McDonald rejoining the group on a permanent basis, was discussed; but ultimately nixed by EG Management. Exhausted at the prospect of another year on the treadmill, Fripp came to believe the only way out was to put an end to the band. Very little was discussed with Bruford or Wetton. “I think it was probably very hard for them,” Fripp reflects. Looking back on the making of Red, Bruford agrees with his ex-bandmate’s assessment.

“It was extremely hard to deal with. But I also understand that if you impose these incredibly hard obstacles and hurdles to making something, and people stay in the room, you might just get there.

“John and I stood our ground and said, ‘All right.’ Well, we said, ‘Sod that – we’ll do whatever we can here to make something up out of this.’ I think John and I were emotionally very, very involved.

“Towards the end, it got down to the mixing and it was very much John and George Chkiantz who took the baby from the bathwater, wrapped it up and towelled it down. Giving birth to the thing was rough work. I’m glad Robert acknowledges that at least his radical neutrality was quite a creative stimulant.”

Celebrations will surely be the order of the day in the Crossbone Skully camp, as news breaks that their recent single Riding With The Angels triumphed in our latest Tracks Of The Week contest. Indeed, the song received exactly 50% of the vote, which means Tommy Henriksen has officially been elected Prime Minister, with Anna Cara as Foreign Secretary and Mutt Lange as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Clutch and Crown Lands are also to be congratulated on their podium positions, but it's already time for another election. Who will you vote for?

Slash feat Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators - Flying Blind

Back with a bright-eyed, sharp-toothed banger (it starts gently, but true to form that doesn’t last long), Slash n’ Myles and co announce their fifth record in a manner befitting such a group of voices – and we very much include Slash’s riffs and solos in that (one of those players who makes the instrument sing in an instantly recognisable way). Accompanied by a stop-motion video narrative involving a campervan, a SFMK&TC fan with a deadbeat boozer boyfriend and a hot-air balloon, it’s a promising omen for what’s to come.

Tony Iommi - Stormwatcher

They don’t call him the Riff Lord for nothing. Need proof? Stick on this mighty lil’ number and soak up that inimitably deep, majestic chug-chug-chug and feel heartily satisfied. Accompanied here by an artfully menacing black n’ white visual narrative (brought to life by Budapest indie studio CUB Animation) and a great vocalist match in the form of Jorn Lande, Iommi MBE still rocks harder than we have any right to expect from a bloke of 78.

Hannah Wicklund - Marionettes

The latest single from this South Carolinian singer/guitarist’s new album (War on Women; Calling All Good Men, out now) is a sumptuous, piano-decked rocker with a hot-blooded chorus and chunky blues rock guitars. Complete with a video produced and directed by Hannah – all red bodypaint, backdrops and tarot cards – it’s a commanding statement from a musician reclaiming control of her catalogue and everything that goes with it.

Steven Wilson - On Chapel Slope

An enveloping, beautifully sinister snapshot of the mysterious village in Steven Wilson’s new album emerges on this striking slice of Anglophile folk-horror, directed by Mike Bennion (a recurrent Wilson collaborator). Low, tension-building violin scrapes and a softly bluesy guitar line set the stage for a gothic tale of life, decay and rebirth, in a place caught somewhere between ‘bucolic 70s bolthole’ and ‘supernatural hotbed’. It’s a lo-fi yet cinematic contrast to last year’s intergalactic odyssey The Overview, and all the more interesting for it.

Stanley Simmons - Dystopia Boogie

Messrs Stanley and Simmons take another step further from the sounds of their KISS-founding fathers with this rocking, rollicking marriage of Mick Jagger vocals, percussive hand claps and limb-jangling acoustic blues shindiggery that isn't a million miles from Led Zeppelin's Bron-Y-Aur Stomp. Another colourful string to their collective bow, in other words. More to be found on their new album, Dancing While the World is Ending, which is out now.

Jack J Hutchinson - Solar Fire

Having swapped the Black Crowes threads for a more Oasis-adjacent barnet and shades, Jack continues to raise his songwriting game on this blend of crunchy verse riffage and sunny, bittersweet 90s Britpop touches in the chorus. “I wanted to write a heavy song that combined my love of hard riffs with the catchy, melodic power of bands like the Beatles and The Jam,” Jack says. “The lyrics are incredibly positive and affirm that even though we may argue and have opposing views, we can always bridge the gap and work things out.”

The Paradox - It's Over

Formed in 2024, Atlanta scamps The Paradox channel an extremely lively brand of early 2000s pop-punk noise, and It's Over – the final track on their new Proceed With Caution EP – is pumped full of fizz and fire, with a chorus that sounds like it might fit the uplifting finale of a Hollywood teen drama. They've already opened for Green Day, and their fans include Blink-182 man Travis Barker and basketball legend LeBron James, so we reckon we'll be hearing more of them.

Dexter and The Moonrocks - Why Don’t You Say So (feat. Avery Anna)

More early 2000s nostalgia as Dexter and The Moonrocks conjure up something they call "western space grunge." In reality, this means they sound like Bush, with hints of shoegaze, plus some twang supplied by country-pop hopeful Avery Anna. The end result is extremely slick and undeniably big, with Anna and James Tuffs' voices dovetailing like they've been doing this for years, and the video is rapidly heading for the million-view count. The band's debut album, Friends That I Don't Like, came out on Friday.

October! Finally! With Aftershock closing out the festival calendar (for outdoor events, at least - we see you Damnation!), our eyes are cast ahead to the autumnal and winter months where we can get stuck into tours and new albums aplenty. That in mind, we're once again rounding up some of the best metal songs around.

But first, the results of last week's vote! It was a tight race for a podium position with all three bands coming within 15 votes of each other, but ultimately Clutch won out with the swagering Wasted Lands over Dragonforce and Apocalyptica, whose own fine efforts landed them in second and third respectively.

We've got a diverse spread again for you this week, from medidative alt. metal to deathcore, metalcore and even some Brazilian thrash and Japanese nu metal. As ever don't forget to cast your vote in the poll below - and enjoy some loud music this weekend!

Hatebreed - The Carrion Choir

You'll never guess what Hatebreed have done: made another wicked Hatebreed record! Consistency has always been key for the hardcore bruisers, and their contributions to the field of metalcore can never be overestimated. Fatal Paradox won't be out till November 6, but The Carrion Choir shows their music is as thuggishly unstoppable as ever, Slayer riffs meeting chugging breakdowns and NYHC style barks.

Distant - The Shallow Gaze (feat. Darius Tehrani)

Oh you want heavy heavy? Distant aren't exactly known for their restraint, the Dutch/Slovakian deathcore mob delighting in some punishing breakdowns on The Shallow Gaze. With an appearance from Spite's Darius Tehrani, it's a proper beatdown of a track that'll surely have crowds crabwalking and crushing invisible oranges in no time.

A Perfect Circle - To Whom It May Concern

Nothing can keep Maynard James Keenan down. Not content with releasing a Pusicfer album earlier this year and headlining festivals with Tool, the multi-hyphenate has also unveiled a new single for A Perfect Circle in To Whom It May Concern. Gentle and driven largely by Maynard's distinctive melodic tones, it's a nice taster for where the band may be headed on a follow-up to 2018's Eat The Elephant.

EMNW - Party Loud

Lets pick up the pace, shall we? It's been 25 years since Andrew W.K. declared we should Party Hard, now Japanese newcomers EMNW are telling us to Party Loud too. Riffing on nu metal but with a distinctive sense of Japanese bubblegum melody, it's an energetic first showing we've heard from the group and might be a tad late for summer anthems of 2026, but could be a nice early forerunner for next year...

Tony Iommi - Stormwatcher

If you're in the mood for something more classically heavy metal, it doesn't come more classic than Tony Iommi. The Brummie boster's new solo album From The Dark is coming later this month on October 23, and new single Stormwatcher is some primo trad metal glory, right down to its choppy, trudging riff while Jørn Lande belts out his best NWOBHM impression.

Pryti - Corner Of Midnight

Speaking of Brummies, Pryti also has a new single out. Corner Of Midnight shows her continued growth as an artist, each new release finding a sleeker sound and somehow even bigger hooks than before, definite echoes of the likes of Evanescence or Linkin Park in her sound whilst never sounding derivative of those acts. She's not released an album since 2022, but this influx of new music suggests we might not be waiting much longer for a new record...

Feuerschwanz - In Extremo

Legs up - it's time for the heavy metal can-can. It wouldn't be the weirdest thing you'd see at a Feuerschwanz show - not by a long mile. The German folk metallers clearly delight in having a massive knees-up with their medieval-themed folk party anthem In Extremo, fist-pumping anthemia that was born for festival fields the world over even if you don't speak a lick of German.

Annicke Shireen - Loud Hag

T'is the season for self-styled Dutch witch rocker Annicke Shireen. A contributor to Heilung and several other projects besides, she's gearing up for her solo debut Delirium on November 13. Loud Hag finds her in the foreboding tones of occult rock, doomy riffs and light melodies proving a powerful combination.

To The Grave - Limb From Limb

Dark, suffocating and more brutal than a game of blindfolded-whack-a-mole in a slaughterhouse, To The Grave's Limb From Limb is a great demonstration of Aussie deathcore. There's no courting arena anthemia here: this is mired in 90s death metal, the only concession to not beating you to death with your own ears in the widdly guitar line that pops up before they drop a nasty, sub-dropping breakdown. New album Liberation Front is out today.

The Local Romance - Ecdysis

Sticking in Down Under, alt metallers The Local Romance are tickling the Architects/BMTH radio-metal senses nicely on new single Ecdysis. Granted, the song goes a lot heavier than either of those bands are likely to these days, but it only adds to the satisfying clatter of styles the band offers.

Critical Fear - Age of Darkness

Hailing from Brazil, Critical Fear have been kicking out high-speed thrash riffs for almost 20 years now. That said, upcoming album Dark Fate is only their third and arrives on December 11. Age Of Darkness shows what the band are all about - evil 80s-style thrash with echoes of Slayer and Kreator, as well as a few of their own countrymen. It's solid, satisfying and exactly what the doctor ordered if you're looking for classic-style speed.

Inherited - Wasted Space

If you're tired of hearing hardcore that sounds like its been produced like Drake, Inherited have your back. The Zeeland, Netherlands crew are scrappy and feral on Wasted Space, chucking in death metal growls to drive home the fact they aren't planning on doing sportswear ads anytime soon. Their new EP All 4 One is out today.

When Santana had a Top 5 single with Black Magic Woman in 1971, it was a great example of how music can often be the result of – to borrow a phrase from Sir Isaac Newton - “standing on the shoulders of giants.” In this case, guitar-wielding giants.

The evolution of Black Magic Woman stretches back to 1957, with an obscure record by Chicago guitarist Jody Williams. Williams had cut his teeth in the early '50s, playing on the street with his mentor Bo Diddley, then gigging with such blues artists as Memphis Minnie and Elmore James. That's him playing the incendiary solo on Diddley's classic Who Do You Love?

In his extended break, you can hear several licks that would inform the styles of both Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. Williams made his own records too, and the B-side to his 1957 single You May was an instrumental called Lucky Lou. From the phrasing of the opening guitar riff to the slinky Afro-Cuban groove, it's obviously the blueprint for Black Magic Woman.

A year later, fellow Chicago blues guitarist Otis Rush “borrowed” that riff and feel for his record All Your Love (I Miss Your Loving), adding a vocal melody. Produced by Willie Dixon and featuring Ike Turner on rhythm guitar, it became one of Rush's signature hits.

Eight years later, in 1966, it was covered by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, on the landmark “Beano” LP featuring Eric Clapton. The bass player on that record was John McVie. And a year later, after Clapton left to form Cream, there was a brief three-month window when the Bluesbreakers line-up included McVie, drummer Mick Fleetwood and lead guitarist Peter Green, the nucleus of the soon-to-be-formed Fleetwood Mac.

From there, we cut to Green writing a song for his svelte fashion model girlfriend, Sandra Elsdon, who he'd nicknamed “Magic Mama.” Green said in Peter Green: The Biography: “One of the things John Mayall said was that if you really like something, you should take the first lines, and make up another song from them. So that's what I did with Black Magic Woman.”

The song, nodding to All Your Love and Lucky Lou, was released as a single by Fleetwood Mac in 1968 and hit #37 on the UK charts.

And that's where Carlos Santana enters the picture. In the book Guitar Greats, he said, “I used to go see the original Fleetwood Mac, and they used to kill me, just knock me out. To me they were the best blues band.”

So in 1970, when Santana keyboardist Gregg Rolie started to play Black Magic Woman during a soundcheck, it was a memorable moment. Santana told Rolling Stone, “I swear to you, and this is for real, whenever we play the song, I remember the first time we played it in a soundcheck in Fresno in a parking lot. Gregg brought the song from Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green. And I remember saying, 'Hmm, I can bring a little bit of Otis Rush here and a little bit of Wes Montgomery here.'”

Santana's recorded version, featuring Rolie on lead vocals, was on the their best-selling second album, Abraxas. Adding yet another shoulder and another giant, the single switched gears into a double-time outro jam, based on Gypsy Queen, by Hungarian jazz guitarist Gábor Szabó. Discussing the song's long journey, Santana told Raised On Radio in 2016: “We all listened to everything, and we sculpture our own beauty and expression from the things that we love.”

In 1998, when Santana was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the band was joined by Peter Green for a seven-minute version of Black Magic Woman.

During the ‘70s Yes pushed musical boundaries about as far as any band could go while selling out stadiums and regularly going platinum. But is it possible to select their 10 best tracks of that era? In 2016 Prog bravely gave it a go.

10. Astral Traveller (1970)

Taken from Time And A Word, the song is driven by short-lived original guitarist Peter Banks’ recurring jagged riffing, and pushed into overdrive by original keyboardist Tony Kaye’s searing organ and Bill Bruford’s skittering, high-tuned drums. They’re rocking out, veiled behind psyche-tinged effects that properly belong back in the ‘60s. However, the ruminative, ornamental middle section hints at what lies in the future.

9. On The Silent Wings Of Freedom (1978)

Spawned from a jam between bassist Chris Squire and drummer Alan White, Yes end controversial album Tormato with a commanding flourish. There are times when Steve Howe’s terse guitar and Rick Wakeman’s Polymoog sound as though they’re jousting for supremacy, goading each other with a series of escalating runs.

8. Going For The One (1977)

You want an ebullient air-punching song whose lyrics involve attainment in sport as well as the sometimes tricky art of songwriting? Want it to sneakily co-opt some hairy-arsed, back-to-basics rock ‘n‘ roll with a pinch of punk and soupcon of succinct symphonics? This blast from ‘77’s album of the same name should sort you out.

7. Starship Trooper (1971)

Punchy grooves, tremulous bass and nebulous harmonies that sound like the Beach Boys in outer space. Though Tony Kaye famously got bored with the repeating chords of the song’s striking conclusion, there’s no denying that this cut from The Yes Album is a masterclass in tension; and when it comes, ecstatic release, this is where Yes really took off.

6. The Revealing Science Of God (1973)

Just ignore those fair-weather friends and naysayers. Sixth studio album Tales From Topographic Oceans remains an astoundingly ambitious venture, filled with glorious themes and impressive dynamics from a band willing to take a leap into the unknown. When Jon Anderson sings that he’s waited all his life for this moment, you know he really means it.

5. Roundabout (1971)

From 1972’s Fragile – and the song that broke the band in America via FM radio – Roundabout is a tumultuous yet catchy synthesis of West Coast harmonies, with shards of spiky bass cartwheeling around Howe’s deft chords and glancing harmonics. It shouldn’t work but it does, as new boy Wakeman’s firework-filled organ solo unabashedly seals the deal.

4. Yours Is No Disgrace (1971)

The template for the classic Yes sound is crystallised with this song from the aptly-titled The Yes Album. With sections seamlessly integrated, you can almost hear the giddy shock they experienced during its recording. Blending Howe’s dizzying, euphoric soloing with the central soaring theme, it’s an overture awash with joyous invention.

3. Heart Of The Sunrise (1971)

Squire’s thunderous bass, Bruford’s surgical strikes, Wakeman’s shiver-inducing Mellotron, Howe’s galloping runs and Anderson’s yearning vocal – it’s the moment Yes proved they could go beyond anything previously attempted. Epic in every sense of the word, this moment from Fragile is the point at which they acquire the confidence to be a world-beating band.

2. Awaken (1977)

Anderson once said that all the extended compositions the group had been working in the ‘70s were leading to this track from ‘77’s Going For The One. A sublime arrangement of several contrasting elements, the convergence around the Master of Light section builds into one of the most transcendent moments in the Yes catalogue.

1. Close To The Edge (1972)

The final act by this particular incarnation of the group, from the album of the same name, is nothing short of astonishing. Retaining a magical aura even now, due to its masterful arrangements, some of Anderson’s most potent wordplay and their exceptional instrumental firepower, the focus isn’t lost for even one of its 18-plus minutes.

Much-loved Brit-rockers Little Angels have released their first new music in more than three decades. Hero (That Was Then, This Is Now) comes from the band's upcoming Big Bad & Back EP, which will be released on November 6. It's their first new music since the Too Posh to Mosh, Too Good to Last! album in 1994.

“This was never in the plan,” say the band, who announced their first shows in a decade earlier this year. "We would never make a new record unless we felt we still had something to say… and it turns out we do. Toby [Jepson] started writing new ideas, and while we were rehearsing the set for the tour, we started to jam around this new material, and it just felt great."

“Lyrically, the challenge was always going to be: how do you take what Little Angels represented back then and bring it into the modern world with guys that are now in their mid-50s?" adds frontman Jepson. "We discussed what the past meant to us and the penny dropped.

"This wasn’t about youth anymore. Of course not. It’s about reflecting on where we had come from, and the kind of people we are now, and all of a sudden, it made sense - this is about returning home."

The Big Bad & Back EP was recorded at Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire and mixed by Mike Fraser in Vancouver. Fraser, best known for his work with AC/DC, Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, also recorded and mixed Little Angels' 1994 single Ten Miles High.

"We encouraged him to evoke the spirit of those great records that he mixed back in the day," say the band.

The Big Bad & Back EP is available to pre-order now. Little Angels' UK and Ireland tour kicks off in Dublin on November 9 – full dates below.

Little Angels: Big Bad & Back tour 2026

Nov 09: Dublin Opium, Ireland
Nov 10: Belfast Limelight, UK
Nov 12: Glasgow O2 Academy, UK
Nov 13: Manchester O2 Ritz, UK
Nov 14: Leeds O2 Academy, UK
Nov 16: Norwich UEA, UK
Nov 17: Newcastle O2 City Hall, UK
Nov 19: Oxford O2 Academy, UK
Nov 20: Nottingham Rock City, UK
Nov 21: Wolverhampton KK’s Steel Mill, UK
Nov 23: Cardiff Depot, UK
Nov 24: Liverpool O2 Academy, UK
Nov 26: Bristol O2 Academy, UK
Nov 27: Bournemouth O2 Academy, UK
Nov 28: London O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire, UK
Nov 29: London O2 Forum Kentish Town, UK

Find Little Angels tickets.

One of the highlights of Marillion’s second album Fugazi was its top 30 second single, Assassing, which remains regarded as a high point of the band’s Fish era. Its video, however, was less well-received – especially by the band. When they spoke to Prog n 2021 they seemed as bewildered about it as they’d been when it was released in 1984.

The early 80s was the Wild West when it came to the emergent art form that was the music video. But even by the maverick standards of the day, the clip for Marillion track Assassing was something else.

The second single from 1984 album Fugazi was accompanied by a promo that yoked state-of-the-art digital effects to a plot that was somewhere between would-be spy thriller and office training video. The results were both visually striking and utterly incomprehensible.

It was directed by Simon Milne, who’d overseen the eye-catching clips for He Knows You Know and Garden Party. This time, the filmmaker was determined to try out the new chroma key technique, aka green screen. The only problem was, no one had quite got a handle on how it worked.

“Because they were inexperienced, they didn’t light it properly, so they weren’t able to superimpose the images on the screen,” says keyboardist Mark Kelly. “That’s why some of the time you just see a plain blue or green screen.”

The ‘plot’ featured Fish joining a group of dark-suited office workers – possibly spies – gathered in a dim room to watch a woman give a presentation, in which footage of the band playing is accompanied by lines of computer-generated data, mainly describing the colour of the text that’s appearing

“What the fuck they were doing with all the computer-generated graphics and Jimmy Bond spy stuff, I have no idea,” says Kelly. “It was just rubbish.”

At one point, the woman finds herself trapped in the middle of screens showing separate performances by the each bandmember. There’s also a moment of high comedy on the set when a car is driven through one of the giant green screens.

“The stunt driver was, like, ‘Oh yeah, I can do that,’” says Kelly. “So he drives through this screen – then bounces through the warehouse and crashes into a wall on the other side of the room.”

Fish recalls: “The first time Ian Mosley saw the video for Assassing, he said, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’ I had to agree with him.”

It's been another triumphant week for Kiwi rockers Pieces Of Molly, with new single Skinwalker the fourth song by the band to top the Tracks Of The Week podium, ahead of hot things Greta Van Fleet and Dirty Honey. This quadruple victory is a feat matched by very few, and bodes well for Pieces Of Molly's debut UK shows in November.

This week, another eight contestants are on the starting grid, and look! The lights have changed! Off they go!

Clutch - Wasted Lands

Listen up, rock fans: the title track of Clutch’s next album is here, and it does not disappoint. H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King are name-dropped within seconds. Fallon and co’s inimitable blend of bluesy hoodoo, punk-addled fire and piledriver riffing sounds match-fit and ready for a fight. It’s like hearing ZZ Top with lead boots. Or the dirtier, gnarlier cousin of their 2015 groovefest Psychic Warfare. The sort of shit you definitely want in your life, in other words.

Thundermother - Bimbo Boost

With that hard-kicking, Smoke On The Water-in-reverse riff and shoutalong AC/DC vibes, the Swedish foursome made us smile with this one. Yes it’s about as subtle as a bowling ball to the head (not to say that the point about women in the public eye being held to disproportionately more exacting beauty standards than men isn’t spot-on – it is), but pulled off with the right combo of humour, melody and quality chops. Familiar and faintly ridiculous, in a good way.

HOL1D4Y - Holotropic

“Some albums I’ve made have been pretty arduous, filled with debate and ideas from many different directions,” Holiday says, as he releases his psychedelic new album Topology. “We’ve made a joke that it is difficult, like birthing a child. Topology was more flowing and came quick and without strain…like releasing a valve.” You can definitely hear that here. Holotropic is the hypnotic, blissed-out opening track with a touch of QOTSA in its veins, evocative of childhood nights spent stargazing to Pink Floyd’s Echoes in his Californian desert home.

Europe - Come This Madness

The title track of the returning Swedes’ new album is a banger, reflective of the big, moody but groovy good stuff to be found therein. Capped off with a casually ace solo from John Norum – and with Joey Tempest seemingly yet to feel the wear of age on his voice – it’s the sort of textured, dynamic banger you’d be genuinely stoked to hear in a setlist. Classy work from one of classic rock’s most consistent groups.

The Temperance Movement - Silverlight Blues

Further teasing their much-anticipated comeback album, New Promise Land Incorporated (out in full next month), The Temperance Movement are on prettily bittersweet form with Silverlight Blues. Like the rest of the album it’s a raw, hot-off-the-floor affair with the ease and warmth you’d hope for from such a tight group of seasoned pros – while also channelling the life experiences of the last few years. It’s good to have them back.

Crown Lands - Through The Looking Glass

Tales of ancient darkness, riding on dragon’s wings and a pedalboard the size of a swimming pool all feed into this sumptuous live single from the Canadian prog duo. Weaving textures of Rush and Zeppelin with their own old-world atmosphere and fantastical storytelling, Cody Bowles (percussion and vocals) and Kevin Comeau (guitars with *all* the necks) create something that feels luxurious yet light, its heaviness and technical flexes offset by a melody that slips down very easily.

The Sedonas - Reckonin’ More

Stomping into Tracks Of The Week in a rich, gritty flurry of blues rock guitars and strident lead vocals (“Is he an American Toby Jepson?” one Classic Rock staffer wondered) The Sedonas mix swaggering US roots and rock’n’roll into one juicy, classic but bright-eyed package. You could say it’s what’d happen if Joe Bonamassa wore denim shirts and made a heartland record, but really Reckonin’ More is its own thing. No rulebooks are rewritten and yet it has a certain edge that makes us sit up and pay attention.

Crossbone Skully - Riding With Angels

Tommy Henriksen and the gang are back with another track from their upcoming, Mutt Lange-assisted second album Condemned To Rock 'N Roll, and it's undeniably huge, with drums that boom like Def Leppard at their peak and a chorus so big it can probably be seen from space. Riding With Angels is so confident it begins with that chorus, with Henriksen's Joe Elliott-meets-Marc Storace voice handling the vocal with the right amount of razor-throated ease. The album arrives in January.

Bad Brains will release their first-ever recordings this November through Trust Records.

The studio sessions were captured in 1979 at Inner Ear, a recording facility synonymous with the Washington, DC hardcore scene, and were only available on the tape-trading circuit. Now, following a remix by their longtime friend, Ian MacKaye, they're about to get an official release on all formats.

“In 1979-80, not only did we have this great local band, we actually had the greatest band in the world playing in Washington,” MacKaye told WTOP News in 2016, following the news that Bad Brains had been nominated for a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "I don’t know who the nominators are, and frankly don’t care, but the person who put Bad Brains' name in the hat is either a visionary, or they’re savvy and trying to bring some legitimacy to their brand.

"The Bad Brains obviously connected with a lot of people in the 1980s,” he added. “Maybe some of those kids swam upstream to where they now want to bring Bad Brains along. If this is something they want, I’m happy for them. I know the impact they had on my life, and that of other people."

While the Washington quartet did not make the Hall of Fame cut the following year, their impact on punk is immeasurable. The intensity of their early live performances can be felt in this archival six-song collection, which includes an early version of their 1980 debut single, Pay to Cum.

This, then, is the story behind the song.

If punk lit a fire under metal, Bad Brains strapped a rocket to it and shot it into the sun. Four Black youths from the South West side of Washington D.C., they started out as a jazz-fusion outfit named Mind Power before they discovered punk rock.

“I was a fan of [jazz fusion bass pioneer] Stanley Clarke and now I was getting into punk,” bassist Darryl Jenifer recalls of the band’s turning point. “Most kids were just into punk, but here I was loving fusion. So I was like, ‘Punk rock? Shiiit, I’ll kill this.’ I can remember turning to Sid [McCray, original Bad Brains vocalist] and saying, ‘If the Ramones think they can play fast, watch this!’”

Clocking in at less than two minutes, their 1980 debut single, Pay To Cum, was a blast of hyperactive lightning, pushing the genre to almost absurd speeds. In Bad Brains’ own way, it was just paying forward the impact punk had on them. Darryl remembers that the band’s early songwriting was “stream of consciousness,” ideas put together in a jam with “tricky bits” that helped differentiate the likes of Don’t Need It, Supertouch/Shitfit and Pay To Cum.

“The Bad Brains sound was a combination of plain old D.C. soul, [jazz fusion group] Return To Forever technical shit, and The Damned mixed with the Ramones with a little nudge from The Dickies on the speed,” he explains.

The song’s immense speed didn’t happen overnight, though.

“I created Pay To Cum as a takeoff of the Ramones’ approach – it was actually a lot slower at first,” he says. “It got faster as we went on. There’s a cowbell in that original version, and you realise as it gets faster there’s no way you can turbo-bang a cowbell – it’ll only go so fast!”

With less cowbell and more speed, Pay To Cum helped plant the roots of hardcore punk, and with it thrash metal. Bad Brains bridged those worlds, inspiring everyone from Minor Threat to Metallica, Killswitch Engage and Dave Grohl among countless others, occasionally popping up on bills with the likes of Slayer to remind everyone who did it first.

“All the metal dudes could play and had pretty girlfriends,” Darryl concedes. “But they started coming to our shows and saw how energised little bald punk kids were, and realised they had to get up and get on it!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 388 (July 2024)

If Larry E. Williams had written just this one song, he’d have probably been okay with it.

Williams wasn’t even a songwriter by trade, but a guitar tech for Neil Diamond across much of the star’s touring career. Their relationship was such that in the mid-70s – undaunted by his employer’s own way with a melody – Williams felt comfortable enough to present Diamond with a song he’d written with him very much in mind.

Let Your Love Flow was a gently upbeat piece with a smile on its face. A simple, three-chord, three-minute-and-change ride with a southern-country lilt and summery vibe, it had a sweet verse, an uplifting chorus and a positive, almost hippie lyric about letting your love flow like a mountain stream, like a bird on a wing. These were dark times – Watergate. Saigon. OPEC shenanigans – so any consolation or hope music could give were welcome.

At the time Diamond was busy turning his slowing career around with his ambitious Beautiful Noise album, produced by The Band’s Robbie Robertson. Williams’ song wasn’t for him, but Diamond did see to it that it was published by Bicycle Music Company, the boutique publishing imprint set up by Diamond’s manager, David Rosen.

The song got its first bite from pop/folk artist Gene Cotton, best known for the subsequent US Top 30 hit, Before My Heart Finds Out. With its staccato brass, rather stilted rhythm section and workaday female backing vocals, Cotton’s recording for ABC Records failed to trouble the chart on release in 1975. But around that time some of Diamond’s band had begun to hang out with two musicians, twenty-something brothers, who’d come out to LA from Florida to make it big.

David and Howard Bellamy had played live music all their lives. Growing up near Tampa, they’d been taught the ropes/strings by their rancher father, who was an enthusiastic amateur country swing musician on the side. The radio at home only ever played country music, but by high school David was playing in a gospel group, and Howard was getting into soul, and they wrote songs.

The band they formed together, Jericho, played clubs across the South, with a set covering quality soul acts such as Percy Sledge and Otis Redding. At Studio 70, a small-town studio in Tampa, they played sessions for other artists, and wrote and recorded jingles for local TV and radio too.

A demo of a David-penned tune, Spiders & Snakes, made it to record producer Phil Gernhard. He had made his name recording Maurice Williams and The Zodiacs’ 1960 doo-wop classic, Stay, and by the 70s was working with singer and TV star Jim Stafford, who’d had a US Top 40 hit with Swamp Witch. Released in January 1974, Stafford’s recording of Bellamy’s Spiders & Snakes hit No.3 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and No.14 on the UK singles chart.

“That sold a couple of million records,” David said later, “and Phil suggested that we should move out to LA. I didn’t want to at first, but when we started making money from the sales of that record, I knew things would be pretty good in LA.”

With the brothers signing to Curb Records, David’s own debut song, Nothin’ Heavy, did nothin’ much, but through the recording he befriended some of Neil Diamond’s group, including drummer Dennis St John. It was through him that the demo of Williams’ Let Your Love Flow got to – depending on who you ask – either the brothers or Gernhard. Either way, David and Howard loved it.

In the autumn of ’75, despite Curb’s reticence about the viability of the song, the Bellamy Brothers convened at LA’s Wally Heider Recording Studio with Gernhard as producer and some of Diamond’s seriously talented band around them: St John, bassist Emory Gordy, guitarists Doug Rhone and Richard Bennett and keyboardist Alan Lindgren. David has said that it only took the group a few takes to cut the song that would launch their career and make Larry E. Williams some serious royalties.

"I would say the guy who wrote this song is the wealthiest roadie now that ever was," said Howard.

With their plangent two-part harmonies and country twang, The Bellamy Brothers channelled Let Your Love Flow’s pure-heartedness beautifully. Their producer and elite group cottoned on to the crucial, elegant simplicity of the song’s groove and arrangement, and their easy, laidback recording found unexpected favour on US radio, then across the world.

In the States Let Your Love Flow hit No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100 that May (sandwiched between the likes of Johnnie Taylor’s Disco Lady and Welcome Back, the theme of John Travolta-starring sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, performed by ex-Lovin’ Spoonful frontman John Sebastian). The following month the song peaked at No.7 in the UK charts, sharing an eclectic Top 10 with The Wurzels’ The Combine Harvester, Diana Ross’s Love Hangover and Cliff Richard’s superb Devil Woman. Over 30 years later, in 2008, it would re-chart in Britain at No.21, after its use in a heavily rotated TV ad for Barclaycard.

Back in ’76, the international success spread to Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Sweden, all the way to New Zealand and Australia. Germany offered a testament to the song’s musical appeal: after the song’s five-week run at the top slot in that country, it was replaced by a German-language version of the tune, by Schlager singer Jürgen Drews, which stayed at No.1 for a further six weeks.

The song’s popularity caught both the Bellamys and their label by surprise. The downhome duo had just had a worldwide pop hit, and this apparent contradiction flummoxed their marketing bods. The debut album – called, inevitably, Let Your Love Flow – was rushed out that year, bouncing just shy of the UK Top 20, and barely making the US Top 70.

It didn’t matter. The Bellamy Brothers career was set. Their first major tour was with fellow crossover duo country/pop duo Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina. They played with The Doobie Brothers (whose own life-affirming Listen To The Music makes a neat segue into Let Your Love Flow). Whereas their debut single was sweetly callow, the Bellamys’ subsequent hit, 1979’s David-penned If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me was gleefully cheesy. Still, it was also the first of a strong run of US country No.1s across the 1980s, which helped them seal their reputation. They still tour today, with Let Your Love Flow tucked away, their encore-friendly ace card.

Joan Baez, Tom Jones, Ray Charles and Bowling For Soup are among the many artists who've tackled the song over the years, but it’s hard to separate that song from the duo it suited so well. Thanks to them, in 1999 the single made the list of BMI’s most played songs of all time on US TV and radio. In this ‘Top 100 Songs of the Century’ it landed in a respectable 68th place, right behind Take It Easy by – another band who blurred the boundaries and understood the power of a crossover tune – Eagles.

And as for Larry E Williams, he did write other tunes, but his only other major writing credit was for Gentle On Your Senses, Easy On Your Mind, a Country Top 20 hit for Mel McDaniel in 1976. But what an incredible life Let Your Love Flow must have given him. Wherever he is now, odds are it’s somewhere nice, and he’s not tuning another man’s guitar…

September is done! We're closing in on spooky season now (and damn if we can't hear the faint rustle of bells in the distance) but before we hit the end of the year there's still plenty of great new releases to explore, meaning its important as ever for us to cut through the clutter and bring you some excellent new metal songs.

First, the results of last week's vote! Belgian speed metallers Evil Invaders charged into third place, while Waterlines took a very healthy second with Giant Killers. But the overall winners for the week were Ukraine's Ignea, whose collab with Combichrist Prefab proved too good to resist.

This week we've got the first glimpse of an Alissa White-Gluz fronted Dragonforce as well as new music from Bullet For My Valentine, Crypta, Enslaved, Clutch, Apocalyptica and more. As ever - and with the end of year rapidly approaching - we need you to tell us which songs excite you most, so don't forget to cast your votes in the poll below - and have an excellent weekend.

Apocalyptica - Upperhand (ft. Kalandra)

Partnered up with nordic folk star Kalandra, Apocalyptica's Uppherhand makes great use of the Finns' ability to create a sense of scope and drama. It's a slow building track, Katrine Stenbekk's voice soaring over brooding melodies before the song really leans in on its symphonic metal elements at the 2:30 mark. Gorgeous.

Dragonforce - Hunger Of The Beast

Recruiting Alissa White-Gluz was always going to have a big impact on Dragonforce's sound, but we'd wager few people were expecting this. It feels like a full mash-up of the powerful melodeath that Alissa has been belting out for over 15 years now, colliding head-on with Dragonforce's brand of full-tilt power metal. With a self-titled record set for March 17 next year, we reckon this is just the start of exciting new realms for the power metal vets.

Crypta - A Portrait Of Decay

It's been three years since Crypta's last record, but we're finally getting a glimpse of what comes next. With guitarist Victoria Villarreal joining their ranks, the Brazilian death metal group have offered up something grandiose and sweeping on A Portrait Of Decay, a six-minute monolith with some gorgeous proggy guitars creeping in before the end.

Bullet For My Valentine - Social Apocalypse

Picking up from the more metallic edge they reintroduced on 2021's self-titled album, Bullet For My Valentine are going big on Social Apocalypse. Far from going back to The Poison playbook after celebrating that album, the Welsh band have picked up where they left off and crafted something that would fit comfortably in the modern metalcore bracket alongside the likes of Parkway Drive or Bring Me The Horizon. They're certainly writing for the arenas they've eyed up for the UK tour next year.

Tom Morello - Unconquered (ft. Kneecap)

Tom Morello has never shied away from making political statements. The fact he appears in this video wearing a Bob Vylan shirt, with Kneecap guesting is a pretty clear line in the sand. Musically, Unconquered feels like that all-too-often unexplored realm of rave-rock energy, not quite using EDM but bringing to mind acts like the KLF or The Prodigy with a tight, dancy riff. Tom's new album Everyone Gets Everything They Want is out today.

Polyphia - With Eyes To See

Keeping those danceable riff vibes going strong, Polyphia's With Eyes To See also delivers some tight, stomping beats. In truth, if you heard this on radio - or a club, which seems like a much more fitting setting for it - you could be mistaken into thinking this is some Glastonbury-friendly dance group, such is the track's infectious energy (with the looping vocal definitely helping cement the sense). New album Be Not Afraid is expected October 23.

Clutch - Wasted Lands

If you were worried that rock'n'roll had all but given up on its street walkin' cheetahs with hearts full of napalm, and fellas who make love to mountain lions and sleep on beds of red-hot branding irons, rest assured: Clutch have you covered. The band's latest single - and the title-track of their next album, due January 22 - Wasted Lands is exactly that kind of dick-swinging, chest-beating bravado that made rock so damn brilliant in the first place: "What's it's name? This creature of malice? No one knows for sure, but the locals call him Neil Patrick Fallon."

Suicide Silence - Make Your Exit

It's been a hot minute since Suicide Silence sounded this feral. There's been no shortage of heft on the last couple records, but Make Your Exit is genuinely abrasive and punishing in the most satisfying ways, spelling good things for new album Graceless, due November 20.

Wolfbrigade - Doomrunner

If the d-beat and barked vocals weren't a dead giveaway, Wolfbrigade love them some crusty punk. Doomrunner is a rampaging, slobbering beast, simple yet effective as the band kick it out fast and hard like Discharge and Napalm Death did before them. New album Howl From Underground is out October 9.

Leng T'che - Hammered Into Collapse

Wait, is that another d-beat we hear? For the briefest moment, yes, but Leng T'che aren't exactly the kind of band to stick in one lane, Hammered Into Collapse managing to sprint its way through a extreme metal's diverse land-scape in under two-and-a-half minutes as they go from squealing deathcore, grind and death metal to sludgy filth. Its been almost a decade since their last record, but they're making up for lost time.

Haerdsmaelta - City Of The Dead

"We built this city on rot 'n' mold." Its hard to say exactly where you'd place Sweden's Haerdsmaelta, the gaskmask-festooned group pogoing on skronky, off-kilter riffs that bring to mind Voivod's X-Stream with their weird punk-metal weirdness. Taken from the band's upcoming self-titled album - due October 23 - it's a delightfully weird and fizzy track well worth your time.

Brat - Speculum Bleed

Fancy some gore? Brat are going full Cannibal Corpse with the lyrical content to Speculum Bleed, while adding a subversive twist that is really highlighted in the splat-happy video. With some big, thrashy riffs, it's proof that they're pushing their brand of bimboviolence into new directions on new album Manslayer, out today.

Enslaved - Tale Of Trees

Prog be damned, Enslaved are back in the realms of frosty nastiness. Alright, not entirely, but you'll forgive our excitement after shanties and folk tunes (which were great, we'll concede) just having the Norwegians go absolutely barmy with raspy black metal scratches the itch nicely. Taken from upcoming album Mið, Tale Of Trees suggests the album will be anything but.

Peter Gabriel has shared his latest single from his upcoming o\i album. After the relatively upbeat previous single, One By One, Face The Wall finds the 76-year-old singer pondering death.

"After last month, where we were ‘looking for the happy’, we can just follow that line all the way through and come to Face The Wall, which is looking directly in the face of death. A nice, cheerful subject," Gabriel says.

“The lyric is partly about getting older, facing illness, and it's looking death in the face, which I think we don't do enough of. I know I've talked about this before, but cultures which seem to include death as a normal part of life seem more comfortable with it and live life to the full. That was the starting point.

"Music is a cathartic process for a lot of us, and when I'm singing at the end, ‘I see you coming through’ that is a cathartic moment. I think that is an important line; conditions are getting worse and more intense as the song progresses, but with that lyric it suggests there is a reason to be hopeful.

"You never quite know when you’re in the studio whether the song is going to be a vehicle that can carry people, or not. I know this is going to speak to some people."

As with 2023's i/o album, Gabriel has been releasing a new track every full moon, and Face The Wall is the ninth track he's released ahead of his upcoming album, o\i, which is due out later this year.

The cover art for Face The Wall features a piece entitled The Nest by Tadashi Kawamata, photographed by Mika Huisman, which you can view below.

"When I saw The Nest at Amos Rex, I fell in love with it," Ganriel adds. "To me, the wall is there, big, solid, you know, a bit like death. These messy human chairs are falling over the wall and, somehow, they spill over the top. It's funny, but it's also hopeful and against unbelievable odds.

"I wasn't aware of Tadashi Kawamata's work before seeing this image, but this was the thing that got me excited. I thought it was perfect for this song and got me looking at a lot of his other work.

“I guess I'm attracted to stuff that is going against the rules or doing what it does in an unconventional way. We are used to seeing art in a museum or on walls, and here it is tumbling over the walls. That feels like a more interesting, adventurous, and unlikely context. Tadashi was taking a lot of the elements, the chairs in particular, from local reclamation sites, so they, if you like, belong to that community, that area. [The Lasipalatsi building in the heart of Helsinki]. The site-specific nature of the work is really something that he's having fun playing with.

“An artist to explore for those of you that love this image like I do.”

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the world's most foremost authority on verifying facts and achievements, Napalm Death hold the record for the shortest recorded song.

In the time it takes light to travel from the Earth to the Moon or a Zoomer to lose their attention span while watching online ads, the Birmingham grindcore pioneers recorded their shortest song in 1986. It has a running length of just 1.316 seconds.

You Suffer appears on the first half of the band's 1987 debut Scum. We say first half, because two-thirds of the band who wrote and recorded the first 12 songs – guitarist Justin Broadrick and bassist/vocalist Nicholas 'Nik Napalm' Bullen – left to pursue other musical interests and university studies before a brand new line-up joined drummer Mick Harris to complete a further 16 songs for the album's second half.

The first half of Scum was mostly written in the Broadrick's teenage bedroom in Shard End, Birmingham, where he lived with his mother and step-father. Partly inspired by Oregon crossover thrashers Wehrmacht's own cough-and-you'll-miss-it-song, titled E!, Bullen added his lyrics – four words: 'You suffer, but why?' – before the trio entered Rich Bitch Studios in Birmingham's Selly Oak in August, 1986.

"I was a barely functioning 15-or-16-year-old during my time in Napalm Death," Broadrick told Metal Hammer. "Everyone else in the band was two years older, but what I could do prolifically was write music and create songs. I was writing the majority of the music, and Nic was writing pretty much all the lyrics."

"You Suffer was largely a comedy thing, a one-second song," Bullen told Decibel magazine in their book, Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces. "It's ridiculous, but it was hilarious. We played that song in front of 30 local kids, like, every weekend. We played that song 30 times. It was a laugh."

Sometimes the laughter was directed at the teenage band, rather than with them. But gradually, people began to embrace the Napalm Death's relentlessly chaotic take on metal and punk.

"People would often come to laugh at us because we were like a kid band who played super-fast," Broadrick told Skinny Puppy's cEvin Key on his podcast. "We were like a laughing stock, you know, but eventually we weren't – people started taking this quite seriously. We saw people flocking to this sound. I remember thinking, 'What the fuck is happening here?'"

By the time Scum was released in the summer of 1987, the band's line-up had solidified to feature Lee Dorrian on vocals, Bill Steer on guitar, Shane Embury on bass, and Harris on drums. The four-piece were invited by John Peel to record the first of several Maida Vale sessions for his BBC Radio 1 show, and the late DJ would later play You Suffer a handful of times during a single show.

"There was a period when we had thrash band after thrash band after thrash band coming in to do Maida Vale sessions," said Peel. "These bands played pretty hard, full-on music, and they'd been in a tour van for the last two weeks, and you'd walk into their studio and you'd know they'd been working hard, if you know what I mean. Napalm Death was an extraordinary session because the songs were so short. When a song only lasts two seconds you can hardly say to the band, 'Can you play that again, please, I think a guitar was out of tune."

During this session, which was broadcast on September 22, 1987, the band performed a slightly longer version of the song, titled You Suffer (Part II).

"There is a bit of a novelty," said Harris. "Let's do the shortest, fastest thing you can do. And yeah, there are notes there. People think we just go, 'Blllp,' and that's it. And I believe there's, like, four notes or something. There's a lyric, 'You suffer, but why?' And it's played quick, fast and sharp and as tight as we could. We had a bit of reverb on there. It probably made it longer."

In 1989, the song was given away as a free seven-inch single as part of Earache's scene-defining Grindcrusher compilation. Backed by the Electro Hippies' micro-ballad Mega-Armageddon Death Part 3, it became the shortest single ever released, a feat recognised by Guinness Book of Records.

"We didn't ask for it," Harris told Decibel. "It just got put in there. We were told, 'You've made the Guinness book of World Records.' And we were like, 'Nah, get out of here,' and yes, there it is. It's sort of funny, isn't it? A bit of achievement, I guess."

Unbelievably, the song was brought to national attention two decades after its release, when current Napalm Death vocalist Mark 'Barney' Greenway guested on Labour MP Ed Miliband's BBC Radio 2 show.

The MP, sitting in for presenter Jeremy Vine, invited Greenway into the studio to talk about the band's upcoming appearance at the Glastonbury Festival. During the segment, the former Labour leader was given a lesson on how to become a grindcore vocalist.

“I’m going to now take my career into my hands if it’s not already gone down the pan and you’re going to try and help me to sort of do a bit of this extreme metal," said Miliband, before failing as quickly as the song itself.

The MP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bullet For My Valentine have announced their first album since 2021.

The Bridgend metalcore favourites have detailed Social Apocalypse, the follow-up to their self-titled effort, due to come out on March 19 via Spinefarm Records. Pre-orders are now live, with the artwork and tracklisting available below.

Two guest spots have been confirmed: Lorna Shore screamer Will Ramos is set to appear on I Don’t Trust Tomorrow, while Chrissy Costanza of Against The Current is lined up for In The Absence Of You.

Bullet have also released Social Apocalypse’s lead single and title track. Watch the music video below.

Singer/guitarist Matt Tuck says of the new album’s themes: “Everything in life is changing at such a rapid pace, and it is hard to find a great deal of positivity when you look at events in the world.

“People are being pitted against each other. The world is full of conflict instead of unity. As a father, I look at what the world is like for younger people, and how completely different it is now.”

The album was produced by longtime collaborator Carl Bown, also known for his work with Sleep Token, While She Sleeps and Malevolence. “Carl doesn’t let you settle,” says Tuck. “He is always ready to speak up, push and challenge you to be the best version of you.”

To accompany the news, Bullet have detailed a new European tour for January and February 2027. The band will play arenas across the continent and in the UK, with support from Australian drum and bass group Pendulum. Florida metalcore young guns Dark Divine will open. Tickets go on sale on Wednesday, September 30, at 9am local time. See the dates below.

Drummer Jason Bowld spoke about Social Apocalypse last May, saying that the band intend to release a new single every month from the album’s announcement until its release. He promised “five singles, maybe, before it comes out”. In December 2025, Tuck said that Social Apocalypse will musically be a cross between their breakthrough 2005 debut The Poison, 2010’s Fever and the self-titled record.

Bullet attracted controversy in May 2025, when they announced that they’d cut short their co-headlining tour with Trivium to focus on making their new album. The Poisoned Ascendancy run was initially promoted as a world tour set to last from January to December; it ended up lasting just four months, with legs on two continents.

After Trivium’s Paolo Gregoletto and Corey Beaulieu blamed Tuck for the premature end via social media, Bullet issued a counter-statement saying that they wanted to focus on writing new music. Still, Bullet went on to play further shows in Australia, Asia and South America later that year.

Bullet For My Valentine: Social Apocalypse

1. Social Apocalypse
2. In The Absence Of You (feat. Chrissy Costanza of Against The Current)
3. I Don’t Trust Tomorrow (feat. Will Ramos of Lorna Shore)
4. Here Without You
5. Acid Rain
6. Fragile
7. CVLT
8. Masquerade
9. Read Between The Lines
10. Enough Is Never Enough

Bullet For My Valentine 2027 tour dates:

• Jan 21: Lisbon Campo Pequeno, Portugal
• Jan 22: Madrid Palacio Vistalegre, Spain
• Jan 23: Barcelona Sant Jordi Club, Spain
• Jan 25: Milan Forum, Italy
• Jan 26: Zurich Hallenstadion, Switzerland
• Jan 27: Dusseldorf Mitsubishi Electric Halle, Germany
• Jan 29: Hamburg Sporthalle, Germany
• Jan 30: Copenhagen KB Hallen, Denmark
• Jan 31: Stockholm Annexet, Sweden
• Feb 02: Helsinki Ice Hall, Finland
• Feb 04: Katowice MCK, Poland
• Feb 06: Munich Zenith, Germany
• Feb 07: Paris Zenith, France
• Feb 09: Luxembourg Rockhal, Luxembourg
• Feb 11: Frankfurt Festhalle, Germany
• Feb 12: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
• Feb 13: Vienna Stadthalle, Austria
• Feb 15: Budapest Budapest Arena, Hungary
• Feb 16: Prague O2 Universum, Czech Republic
• Feb 17: Berlin Velodrome, Germany
• Feb 19: Amsterdam AFAS Live, Netherlands
• Feb 20: Brussels Forest National, Belgium
• Feb 23: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
• Feb 25: Birmingham BP Pulse Live, UK
• Feb 26: London The O2, UK
• Feb 27: Manchester AO Arena, UK

UK power metal six-piece Dragonforce have announced their first album with new singers Alissa-White Gluz and Alessio Garavello and unveiled its lead single.

The new song, Hunger Of The Beast, is out now with a music video and precedes the release of their self-titled 10th album on March 19 via Napalm. The video can be seen below and preorders are now live.

Hunger… is the first song with Garavello, who replaced longtime singer Marc Hudson last week, following the announcement that Hudson had stepped away from touring and recording due to his struggles with the hearing condition tinnitus.

It’s their second song overall with White-Gluz, following an alternative version of 2024 track Burning Heart where she handled guest vocals, and the first since she became a full-time member earlier this year.

White-Gluz comments: “I have loved the entire process of making music with Dragonforce. It’s great to connect with such elite musicians and work together to really bring out the best of our respective styles. I think this new combo of speed and ferocity is refreshing and exciting. It's going to be so much fun to perform live.”

Guitarist and co-founder Herman Li adds: “Every time we begin making another album, we just think, ‘Wow – I can’t believe we're still doing what we love after all these years.’ The approach of the 10th album is as important as the first one, or any of the albums, because the way we look at music is we're making a piece of art that's going to be frozen in time.

“We always try to use everything we’ve learned from our years of experience, and put that into the new music. This is unlike any Dragonforce album you’ve ever heard, and unlike any metal albums out there. There’s just nothing like it, and everyone listening will realise that straight away. We’re not trying to be commercial. We’re not trying to be popular. We’re not trying to be famous. We make music because we want to make something that we love to hear and elevate our musicianship to the next level.”

White-Gluz, who left her longtime band Arch Enemy last November and also fronts the metal trio Blue Medusa, joined Dragonforce in May. The plan was for her and Hudson to be co-vocalists, but then, ahead of the new lineup’s debut shows at US festivals Welcome To Rockville and Sonic Temple in May, Hudson dropped out due to his hearing issues.

Dragonforce will return to the road in November, when they kick off a North American tour celebrating 20 years of their third album, Inhuman Rampage. The album contained their breakthrough single Through The Fire And Flames, which won the band many new fans when it appeared on hit videogame Guitar Hero III. Get tickets via their website.

By 1998, the initial wave of nu metal was breaking. Korn’s third record, the aptly named Follow The Leader, became the scene’s first album to top the US charts. It kickstarted a label scramble to sign any nu-adjacent band, in the hopes of scoring the next big commercial behemoth. But unlike their peers in System Of A Down, Linkin Park, Slipknot or Papa Roach, who all emerged in the same general surge, Godsmack didn’t have an immediate impact.

Awash in a turn-of-the-century sea of downtuned riffs, curious facial topiary and just-so frosted tips, their first couple of releases hadn’t boosted them to the A-list. One single changed it all. Specifically written for a 2002 fantasy film featuring then-pro wrestler Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, I Stand Alone propelled the band properly into the big leagues.

“The director, Chuck Russell, was a fan and got in touch with me and said, ‘I want to tell you about this film that I’m doing’,” recalls Godsmack founder, vocalist and rhythm guitarist Sully Erna. “It was The Rock’s debut starring role. I mean, he had done some stuff before, but this was his first lead, that I believe was being considered his breakout role into the film industry.”

The wrestling icon, who would go on to be one of the highest-paid and most successful actors in Hollywood, had made his film debut the previous year with a cameo in The Mummy Returns. Spin-off and prequel The Scorpion King was essentially a vehicle designed to transition The Rock from the ring to the silver screen.

“I already had this body of work that I was working on,” Sully recalls. “I didn’t have any lyrical content or melodies yet, but the more Chuck talked to me, the more he kept using the words ‘he stands alone’. You know, this guy is this big warrior who can slaughter armies, but deep down inside he’s just yearning to be loved and not be by himself.”

“It was kind of a metaphor for me in my life at that point, where I felt like I always stood alone,” Sully continues. “I wrote all the music, I had the vision for the band. It’s a bittersweet thing when you’re kind of the leader, that ‘heavy is the crown’ kind of thing.”

Two decades after the single, when the singer collaborated with director Troy Smith and writer Noah Berlow to produce the 2023 documentary based on his memoir, they titled it I Stand Alone: The Sully Erna Story. Focusing largely on the young Sully’s pre-Godsmack years growing up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the film doesn’t skimp on his struggles and brushes with criminality.

In one remarkable segment, he recalls a moment when he experienced extreme anger during a fight and pulled the trigger on a shotgun – only to discover it was thankfully unloaded.

“I had been through a lot: crime, drugs, violence, music, women… things that continued to throw us curveballs and take us out at the knees,” Sully says. “We have to learn how to stand back up, as painful as it is, and walk forward again. After so many times and all that pain, you become stronger and bulletproof to a certain degree, and I think that’s when the magic happens. That’s when the opportunities present themselves.”

It was impossible to predict just how big an opportunity writing the theme song to The Scorpion King would be, but Sully was always one for grasping the moment with both hands. Rather than presenting a particular challenge, he found that writing to commission gave him a fresh impetus.

“It was actually refreshing, because sometimes as artists we get stuck in our own habits and patterns,” Sully says. “You start to feel like all your riffs sound the same, all your melodies sound the same, all the lyrical content is about the same shit.”

The result was a song that Sully believed opened up new territory for the band.

“The first thing I did was play it for my friends, like we all do,” he recalls. “The reaction would be the same every time: we’d crank it up. It’s a big, powerful song, but it was the first time we were introducing harmonies into the band. We had a little bit more melody going on, and the song is kind of epic and anthemic. So the song would finish and they would just stare at the at the carpet for a minute in thought. Then they would go, ‘Play it one more time.’ Because no one could wrap their head around it.”

The single was accompanied by a CGI-heavy music video directed by The Brothers Strause, who would go on to direct their own feature films including Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem and Skyline.

“The skeletons, all that stuff was all CGI, but we were really in a desert, I really climbed those rocks and the scenes with The Rock were real,” Sully says. “We did get to meet and hang out for the day and he was as kind as could be. He treated us really well and it was our first time doing a video of that magnitude. I think Universal paid about $750,000 for that video.”

Although The Scorpion King was hardly hailed as a classic, it proved to be absolute box-office dynamite, debuting at No.1 and pulling more than $36 million in its opening weekend. Naturally, that success helped I Stand Alone become a monster-sized hit in its own right.

It reached No.1 on the US Mainstream Rock chart and was certified Gold. It also saw Godsmack nominated for two Grammy Awards, for Best Rock Song and Best Hard Rock Performance. They ultimately lost out to Bruce Springsteen and the Foo Fighters respectively, but Godsmack’s profile had undoubtedly been boosted.

Originally planned as a standalone (no pun intended) release, it was impossible to leave I Stand Alone off Godsmack’s next album. 2003’s Faceless debuted at No.1 on the Billboard 200, knocking Linkin Park’s Meteora off the top spot in the process.

“It solidified the band,” Sully asserts. “When you put out your first record, you’re the new thing, they are discovering you, and there’s, like, this buzz happening. Then there’s an expectation on record number two, and people are paying attention but they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s the sophomore slump’. That album [Awake] actually did really well because of the song Awake, which the US Navy used as their recruitment song. When you hit the third one and go as big as we did, I think that really cements your career. People knew, ‘OK, this band’s going to be around for a little bit.’”

“Around for a little bit” is something of an understatement. The success of Faceless, which would go on to sell more than a million copies, established Godsmack at rock’s – never mind nu metal’s – top table. Arena shows and a huge tour supporting Metallica followed. Sully found himself living the rock star dream he’d pursued since his teenage years.

“Boy, did it ever live up to it!” he laughs. “Those opportunities throw every scenario you’ve ever heard about living a rock star life at you. That’s really when you can get in trouble too, with drugs and alcohol and all the debauchery that goes along with the stereotypical rock star lifestyle.

“Our biggest challenge was keeping each other grounded. You know, we’re four street kids that come from an area of blue-collar workers and from families that were immigrants.

We definitely allowed ourselves to get out of control, but we did the responsible thing when it got really bad, because there were so many times where things were just getting really bad between the drinking, the arguments, the hangovers, the schedule, the exhaustion. We had to bring in a therapist and regain that brotherhood because we were derailing so many times.”

After their own Some Kind Of Monster moment, Godsmack continued strong. Their next two records also hit No.1 in the US, and the following two both went Top 10. Their latest release to date, 2023’s Lighting Up The Sky, broke the Top 20. Throughout it all, I Stand Alone has remained their signature song.

Long-term guitarist Tony Rombola and drummer Shannon Larkin bowed out in 2024, the band initially planning to ride off into the sunset. Their final show was immortalised in new live album Live At Mohegan Sun – complete with I Stand Alone as the expected curtain closer.

However, after a period of reflection, Sully and bassist/co-founder Robbie Merrill decided there was still “some gas in the tank”, and recruited guitarist Sam Koltun and drummer Wade Murff (who was replaced by Mike Mangini on their latest tour). Wherever this new chapter takes them, I Stand Alone will continue to loom large and Sully Erna is fine with that.

“It’s still one of our biggest responses live,” Sully says. “It’s the one song everybody waits for. It’s just a feeling of being proud that we were blessed with a song like that.”

Live At Mohegan Sun is out now via Primary Wave.

It was double celebration time for Los Angeles rockers The Bites this week. The band's second album hit the stores, and new single Dancing With The Devil tore our Tracks Of The Week contest up, blazing through the opposition like a scythe through dairy-free spread. So congratulations to them.

Steven Wilson and The War On Drugs weren't too far back, so congratulations to them, too. This week? Listen hard, vote harder, and we'll see you back here in a week.

Greta Van Fleet - Tear It Down

Blending a Heart/Zeppelin-style gallop with urgent acoustic strains that build into something grand and heavy, Tear It Down finds Greta Van Fleet on pensive, commanding form. Another juicy tone-setter for their new album, Palace For The People. “The function of the artist is to provide what the universe cannot,” declares gleefully loquacious frontman Josh Kiszka. “We wanted to make a record that personifies adventure, passion, brutality, beauty, sex, and imagination, so that’s what we did.”

Villagers Of Ioannina City - Requiem

We’re big fans of VIC’s new album Venceremos, and Requiem makes a sprawling yet stirring, hooky case for it. Eight hypnotic minutes of old-world atmosphere (think mournful, heady swirls of clarinet and bagpipes, native to their home turf in north-west Greece), its traditional folk heart comes with Maiden-esque heavy metal boots, deft tempo changes and soaring lead guitars. “Requiem is a reflection on endings, where the journey fades, and only truth remains,” singer/guitarist Alex Karametis says. “It’s about facing yourself at the final moment, weighing a life lived.”

Dirty Honey - Lights Out

Kicking into life with an anticipation-building, AC/DC-flavoured guitar hook, Dirty Honey’s new single romps biker-jacketed through oomphy classic rock touchstones (‘DC, GN’R, Black Crowes…), settling into a juicy, dancealong chorus. “Lights Out was the first banger,” said guitarist John Notto. “It’s one of those rare times when I got the solo right on the demo! It’s only one flavor of the album though. There’s so much more.”

Royal Blood - Swallow The Bomb

Childhood mates turned rockstar duo, Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher make a deliciously gnarly, groovy racket on this latest taste of their next album, Dead Company. It’s sort of like hearing their first two records, newly ripped and raring to go after a few sessions in the gym, plus a refreshing touch of Supergrass in the higher notes of the chorus and Mike’s vocals in general. Just over three minutes and it goes by in a heartbeat – never a bad sign. More, please!

The Pineapple Thief - God Knows

One of our favourite tracks on the contemporary alt/prog rock luminaries’ latest album, Far And Wide, God Knows rocks like 2026’s delicate but fierce answer to Radiohead’s gnarly Bends-era highlight Just. Driving, enigmatic, progressive music ready for big stages. Or, to put it another way, a proper banger with brains. Like the sound of that? Be sure to check out Far And Wide in full when it comes out next month.

Kit Trigg - Glass Ceiling

British surfer/DIY dude Kit combines puppyish energy with a winning melody full of sunshine and skatepark-fresh optimism on the tight-but-loose Glass Ceiling. Warm, bittersweet harmonies, Kit’s high lead vocals and an infectious ‘can-do’ quality give this homespun affair healthy sprinkles of fairy dust. “We had a music video organised, but the rain had other plans so we used my iPhone to make this instead!” Trigg says.

Pieces Of Molly - Skinwalker

Feisty New Zealanders Pieces Of Molly are heading to the UK in November to support Asomvel on tour, and this should give you a good idea of what to expect: 100mph, turbo-assisted rock'n'roll, powered by a riff that isn't too far removed from Lenny Kravitz's classic Are You Gonna Go My Way. The song's relentless, punched-repeatedly-in-the-face momentum is matched only by a chorus that proves there's more to the band than solid riffing, and the solo is a Thin Lizzy-meets-NWOBHM doozy.

Speed Of Light - Inch By Inch

Speed Of Light are a sibling power trio from Santa Monica whose roots can allegedly be found in a joke gift guitarist Cameron Christiansen received from his grandparents to annoy his parents at the age of seven: an acoustic guitar. Fourteen years on, Cameron has graduated to electric, and – joined by sister Riley on vocals and bass, and brother Tyler on drums – the band are an extremely lively proposition, with a hybrid modern-rock-meets-grunge sound and plenty of attitude. Inch By Inch is a banger.

Back in the early 90’s, the movie soundtrack was in its chart dominating pomp. The formula was simple; take a huge band or artist, have them write an exclusive tune for a Hollywood blockbuster, sit back and watch the song and the movie rake in the dough.

In 1991, the biggest, buzziest movie on the slate was James Cameron’s spectacular Terminator 2: Judgment Day, starring bodybuilder-turned-Hollywood A-lister Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titular T-800 robot. The same year, the biggest, buzziest band on the planet were Guns N’ Roses, still riding the wave of the astounding success of their 1987 debut album Appetite For Destruction. Pairing them up together made perfect sense – two massive names for the price of one.

In 1991, hunger for new GN’R music was huge. They’d released a cover of Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door on the soundtrack to 1990 Tom Cruise movie Days Of Thunder, and a brand new song, the mini-epic Civil War on charity album Nobody's Child: Romanian Angel Appeal the same year. But it would be their Terminator tie-in You Could Be Mine that would properly announce their return – with a huge helping hand from Arnie himself.

For GnR, the song that would eventually come to be associated with Terminator 2 was one that they had being toying with since before Appetite For Destruction’s release: the swerving, juddering You Could Be Mine. Initially titled Cocaine Talking, the song rode along on a massive sleazy riff, frontman Axl Rose’s, threat-laced screams and pointed lyrics: “With your bitch-slapping rapping and cocaine tongue, you get nothing done…” – rich coming from a band famed for their chemical proclivities.

“If you listen to the lyrics, it’s about how all these nice young girls in L.A. can’t do anything before they do their coke,” bassist Duff McKagan said in 1988, three years before You Could Be Mine was released. “The song’s definitely not a pro-cocaine song. It’s about how the shit really fucks up your head.”

GN’R planned to include the song on their forthcoming Use Your Illusion double album set, but while the band were in the studio, filming was wrapping up on T2. As part of the films marketing campaign, executives believed a single, with a big budget music video, was needed to promote it. Enter The Terminator himself.

“Back then, if you could get a good video, it would get played on MTV 15 times a day,” producer Larry Kassanoff told SFX in 2017. “So, I asked him [Schwarzenegger] if he would do it, and he said ‘Only if you get the best band in the world to do it.’ And I said, ‘Okay, who’s the best?’ Arnold thought about it, came back to me and said, ‘If you get Guns N’ Roses I’m in.’ But to get them there was a lot of schmoozing with the band. Arnold and Maria [Shriver] invited the band over to their house for dinner one night, and sure enough they agreed.”

Thanks to the mutual respect between the two unlikely parties, an agreement was quickly reached.

“They’re big fans of Terminator,” Schwarzenegger told MTV in 1991. “They’ve expressed that many times. I’ve always been a fan of their music, so we checked into what it would be like to do a video together, or to get some of their music.”

“Duff and I actually went and hung out at his house,” Guns guitarist Slash continued to MTV. “He seemed to be into the whole thing. We had a lot of shots with Arnold!”

As well as tequila slammers round Arnie’s house, the band were also invited to see an exclusive screening of the movie alongside Cameron and Schwarzenegger.

“We had a specific screening; it was just for the cast, James and myself, and Guns N’ Roses,” Schwarzenegger told The Ringer in 2021. “I think that Axl Rose was extremely impressed. I remember him going to Jim [Cameron] and saying, ‘I’m in.’”

Given that whichever song they released would be the launchpad for the next chapter in Guns N’ Roses’ career, it needed to have an impact. “It worked out really cool,” Axl told MTV in 1991. “We let them listen to a lot of material and they picked was You Could Be Mine.”

But this was more than just a cross-cultural soundtrack tie-in. Schwarzenegger decided he wanted to appear in the accompanying promo video.

“We filmed the show in [New York venue] the Ritz,” Axl said. “And Arnold was flying back from Congress and going ‘I want to be in the video’. So, Arnold got all his people and put together a video.”

The clip saw the band performing live as they are stalked from the crowd by Arnold’s Terminator, interspersed by action from the movie, before he confronts GnR backstage and decides they are a “Waste of ammo”. Just seeing the combination onscreen immediately made it one of the most memorable and exciting videos of the 90s.

“We hung out and he was really, really cool,” GN’R guitarist Slash said. “He gave the whole band jackets from the movie and these French bikers jackets with bullet holes everywhere.”

The single was released on June 25, 1991, a week before Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The idea of bringing these two cultural behemoths together was a masterstroke: Terminator 2 became the biggest movie at the box office the weekend it was released, and the highest grossing film of the year. And while GN’R didn’t quite reap the same benefit, with You Could Be Mine peaking at No.29 on the US singles charts, it paved the way for the blockbusting one-two of the simultaneously released Use Your Illusion I and II later than year.

It’s all aged very well for everyone; T2’s 4K restoration is back in cinemas, Skynet robots still quite haven’t enslaved the human race, and You Could Be Mine is still being played by Guns N’ Roses to stadium sized crowds around the globe.

Iron Maiden was one of the earliest Iron Maiden songs written by bassist and founding member Steve Harris, who took the band's name and title from a medieval torture device from a film based on Alexandre Dumas's book The Man in the Iron Mask. And 50 years after its creation, it remains one of the most aggro songs committed to tape by the British metal legends.

"It was kind of the attitude we had at the time," remembers Harris. "We were just going to go out there and go for it and basically take no prisoners. We obviously were young and hungry and we had the adrenaline.

"We were just trying to get out there and play fast, heavy music with lots of melody," he adds. "There wasn't really anybody playing the stuff we were playing; we were heavily influenced by people like Wishbone Ash with the very melodic guitars. But we had a fire in it."

By 1977, the band were a quartet, which meant Harris had to embellish the song's twin guitar harmonies with his bass.

"We stayed that way for quite some time," he explained on the band's excellent 2004 documentary The Early Days. "We were always on the lookout for another guitar player, so some of the songs – like, for instance, Iron Maiden, where you've got the answering guitar riff from the other guitar, I'd have to do that on the bass. It worked really well for a while."

The song is responsible for birthing the band's mascot, Eddie, too.

One of their earliest vocalists, Dennis Wilcock, was inspired by the theatrics of Kiss. During the song's climax, he would pop some blood capsules into his mouth and drag a prop sword across his lips to create a gory stage effect. It certainly had an impact when one fan found his gory theatrics a little too much and fainted.

"When [Dennis] left we thought, ‘It’s good for people to come and see that sort of thing’, but we didn’t want it to be within the band itself," said the bassist, and plans were put in place to create a head, or a face, or something, that would spit blood onto drummer Doug Sampson's head for dramatic effect while vocalist Paul Di'Anno sang: "See the blood flow watching it shed up above my head, Iron Maiden wants you for dead!"

Eddie began as a kabuki-style mask, made from a face mould of their lighting tech Dave Beazley. A fish tank pump was attached to the mask and, hey presto, thick, fake blood would ooze from its mouth and directly onto Sampson's long blond hair.

The song itself opened their punchy, raw debut EP The Soundhouse Tapes, which also featured Invasion and Prowler.

Recorded at Cambridge's Spaceward studios during New Year's Eve in 1978 (a cost-effective move by the fledgling band) they released the EP on their own Rock Hard label in late 1979; limited to 5000 copies, the record became something of a Holy Grail for Maiden collectors.

Iron Maiden and Prowler would be re-recorded for their debut. While the quality of the second recording remains a bone of contention for Harris, the 1980 album captures the band's spirit and the raw energy of their legendary club gigs. With an EMI deal in place, the eight-song collection was recorded in London's Kingsway Studios, produced by Wil Malone and engineered by Martin Levan. It reached number four in the UK Albums Chart a week after its release.

The eponymous song, which closes their debut album, remains a live staple to this day. The band's production budget has expanded somewhat over the decades, and now the six-piece are joined by a huge, live-action Eddie.

Setlist.fm has calculated that the band have performed the song at least 2,467 times, followed by The Number of the Beast.

"As long as I can remember, we've closed our set with this song," says Harris. "It's quite simple. The bass line is fairly straightforward as is the drumming. But the guitar is over the top with harmony, and the bass is descending behind it. I think this makes it pretty special."

A fair point, well-made. And remember, wherever you are... Iron Maiden's gonna get you, no matter how far.

Time marches inexorably on, and so must we. We're over halfway through September now and the massive tours are rolling through with regularity (hello Evanescence and Spiritbox!), bringing with them the knowledge there's a tonne of new records to explore in the coming weeks. So, we're cutting through the clutter and picking out some of the finest metal songs around right now.

Speaking of, the results of last week's vote! The big news was, of course, that Slipknot were back with new music but we'll admit even as big as they are, we were surprised to see them slip into the top three given the discourse around Arsenal. Goes to show, the haters are always louder than anyone else. Elsewhere, Miss May I took second place with Highbrow Thieves, but our overall winners for the week was Ando San and Hype Man / Triggas.

This week we've looked far and wide for exciting new sounds to bring to you, whether that's the new offerings from Trivium and Godflesh, or emergent talent like Hulder and Sable Hills. As ever, we need you to let us know which songs excite you most, so don't forget to cast your vote in the poll below - and have a great weekend.

Sable Hills - Homura (ft. Fuki)

Epic metalcore coming out of Japan, Sable Hills' Homura kicks off with the kind of gorgeous, soaring solo you'd expect to hear in a power metal record. They're not imbibing the cheese though; there's something Trivium like in their adoption of classic metal tropes - including a healthy love for In Flames style melodeath - in a slick, modern package with some Japanese folk flourishes. Keep your eyes out for new album Homura, out November 13.

Trivium - Dead Inside Of Me

Speaking of Trivs, they're back! Fresh off the back of announcing dates in 2027 with In Flames, the boys from Orlando have offered up Dead Inside Of Me. After the more trad-metal inclined energies of In The Court Of The Dragon and What The Dead Men Say, this feels like a conscious choice to change up their sound, going for something almost Machine Head like with lumbering, bassy verses and big breakout choruses.

Hulder - …And We Will Sing

Summer is well and truly dead and we're ready for frosty Scandinavian forests to take us into Autumn. Granted, Hulder actually hail from Washington, but there's an undeniable Scandi-influence on their brand of black metal, with ...And We Will Sing going hard on pure frosty ferocity.

Evil Invaders - Dreamstate

We had a long summer, so why not get a jump start on Halloween too? Evil Invaders sound so steeped in 80s Satanic Panic we wouldn't be surprised if they didn't so much form as get summoned from the Necronomicon. Slayer meets Mercyful Fate, it's gloriously over-the-top and theatrically evil, all high pitched wails and galloping guitars.

Ignea - Prefab (ft. Combichrist)

Teaming up with 00s metal veterans Combichrist, Ignea are exploring the heavier ends of their sound on Prefab. The booming, apocalyptic tones are a stark contrast to some of the more melodic fare the Ukrainians have indulged in the past, though there's still rays of light breaking through in the keytar work that adds a little bit of levity to the whole song. The group's new album Monumental is due October 23.

Mental Cruelty - Frost

"I'm lost in the dark!" So goes the hopeless declaration right up top in Mental Cruelty's Frost, a desolate and suitably frosty track that sounds like staggering on a death march through the tundra. Taken from new album Echoes of a Forlorn Land, the track does a great job of balancing the relentless heft with some soft, folky melodic sections that feel are like stumbling onto a roaring hearth after an eternity out in the cold.

Cabal - Hurt Me (ft. Justine Jones)

You can practically taste the sweat flying on Cabal's Hurt Me. From riffs that switch up between bounding beats, sudden thrashy two-steps and a spine-worrying breakdown, to the snarling exchange of vocals between Andreas Bjulver and Employed To Serve's Justine Jones, who guests on the track, it takes metalcore back into the dingy clubs it inhabited for decades before arena stardom plucked out the likes of BMTH or Architects. Both bands are touring the UK together in November, so we'd say its good odds this one will be roadtested before long.

Zilqy - Run

With a killer main beat and big, breakout pop metal choruses, Zilqy's Run is at once something you could see fitting in with the likes of As Everything Unfolds or Luna Kills, while being undeniably Japanese in its melodic structure without ever sounding like anyone else. It's a dramatic and powerful track, and comes from the band's upcoming debut Birth Of Riot, due October 7.

Ministry - Singularity

"Your time on this planet has passed." Ministry are getting a little ahead of themselves on Singularity, but not by much. The band's final record Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery) is set for an October 30 release and this new single leans on the mechanised, end of the world bacchanalia that's been their bread and butter for the past four decades. Just a shame the band seem to have opted for a cheap AI video to back it up.

Godflesh - Master And Slave

It's not a great time to be an industrial metal superfan. Or at least, not one who is hoping for a bright future. Justin Broadrick's Godflesh are also gearing up for a big finale, though next week's Decay album will actually be their penultimate. Master And Slave finds the group in typically apocalyptic, claustrophobic form, sounding much as you'd expect it would if you'd been sucked into a great machine and ground to dust and mulch by unyielding gears.

Vesseles - Eternally Within Us (Reclaimed)

Mining the vein of gothic, symphonically underpinned black metal, Vesseles might be a masked and mysterious band but there's very little Sleep Token-ish about them. Instead what we get is something feral and crawling, grandiose in its use of strings and piano without ever feeling overblown or fully orchestral. The band's debut Home (Reclaimed) isn't due until March 26, 2027, but this will tide us over nicely in the meantime.

Waterlines - GSiant Killers

Metalcore mixed with EDM is nothing new, lest we forget that Enter Shikari's Sorry You're Not A Winner blew up 20 years ago now. Even so, the number of bands who've found ways to properly incorporate it into their music beyond a tentative smattering of bleeps and bloops remains surprisingly low, making Waterlines still one of the standouts in the art. Rather than going down the fun, eurodance cheese route of Electric Callboy, Giant Killers takes a BMTH/Architects style hook and underpins it with some buzzing electro that at one point goes full Skrillex.

“I always wanted my songs to have a strong sense of place,” says Bruce Hornsby. “I was influenced by Southern fiction writers like William Styron and Lee Smith, who had that sense of place in their writing.”

The piano man is telling Classic Rock about how his home town of Williamsburg, Virginia - “my own little area” - inspired his 1986 breakout hit single The Way It Is.

“It’s a song about growing up in the sixties in a small town with narrow-minded, provincial attitudes,” he explains. He recalls that as a kid he was often led to believe that civil rights activist Martin Luther King was “a terrible, evil man” for working towards racial equality. “Not everyone in Williamsburg felt like that, of course – certainly my parents didn’t - but it was the prevailing attitude.”

Hornsby says that writing about the South always means dealing with issues of race and religion. “It’s clearly a moral thing,” he said in an interview with Dutch TV. “Allowing all citizens to vote, all citizens to be able to eat in the same restaurants, go to the same bathrooms, drink out of the same water fountains, ride in the front of the bus. From Rosa Parks on through the Greensboro Woolworth luncheon counter sit-ins, I was deeply interested in all that, and it related to that idea of creating a sense of place in my songs.”

Fast forward 20 years. Hornsby was living in Van Nuys, California, a working-class neighbourhood in LA, writing songs, playing gigs with his band The Range and trying – and failing - to get a record deal. One day in his garage studio, he started reflecting on his childhood in Williamsburg. Maybe it was that kind of Ernest Hemingway idea of how being far away from home, “three thousand miles allows you to see things more clearly.”

He wrote the lyric to The Way It Is first, then put music to it. “I work that way a lot,” he says. While the title and chorus lyric (‘Some things will never change’) might give the sense that it’s a sad song about resignation, Hornsby told Howard Stern that the “key line comes at the end of the chorus - ‘But don’t believe them’”. That mix of melancholia with a glimmer of hope is mirrored in the jazzy shifts of the piano chords and cascades that Hornsby laced through the song.

Forty years on, it’s easy to forget how startlingly different this all sounded from anything at the time. The prevailing style of 1986 was glossy synth-pop and power ballads, typified by hits such as Addicted To Love, West End Girls and Take My Breath Away; and here comes a five-minute piece with a 50-second intro, complex harmonies, two piano solos and an unsentimental lyric that referenced the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Hornsby himself was doubtful of its chances in the pop arena. He later told Rolling Stone that it was a “very even-running song that doesn’t reach the highs and lows that I think of as desirable”.

He first approached new age label Windham Hill, who offered him a deal after hearing the demos for both The Way It Is and Mandolin Rain. “I would’ve been happy to go with Windham Hill,” Hornsby says. “I thought: ‘Maybe this is what’s supposed to be for me.’” But his manager soon intervened, convincing Hornsby that these new songs deserved a much bigger audience.

Even though he had been passed on repeatedly by all the major labels, he took another shot, with The Way It Is as a new calling card. It worked. Two labels - Epic and RCA – wanted to sign him immediately. Hornsby told producer/ YouTuber Rick Beato in 2026: “We picked RCA, and everyone said: ‘Why are you picking them? They don’t have anything going on. Epic has Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson.’ And we said: ‘That’s exactly why we’re picking RCA! Our sorry little asses, we need some attention [laughs].’”

Hornsby’s debut album for RCA, The Way It Is, was a slow starter. Released in April 1986, its lead single Every Little Kiss stalled at No.72 on the Billboard chart. The title track was the follow-up that summer. Hornsby told Portfolio Weekly in 2006: “You’d have to give credit to the BBC Radio One disc jockey Mik Wilkojc. He picked this one song, put it on the air - boom! It exploded. We got these faxes: The Way It Is is exploding in England, then in Holland. By the time they put it out over here it was number one in Holland and Top Ten all around the world. The United States was late to the party.”

Six years after the song had launched Hornsby’s career, it had an unlikely resurgence when rapper Tupac Shakur sampled it for his hit Changes. “The song has always struck a chord in the hip-hop community,” Hornsby said. “There were so many others [who sampled it]. Tupac’s is only the best-known version. Almost all of the remakes have the word ‘change’ or ‘changes’ in the title.

"The Way It Is had been a complete fluke. Nobody thought it was gonna be anything. So to have become a big hit record was a beautiful thing, frankly, because it was totally unexpected. A song about racism, with not one but two improvised piano solos, is not the standard formula for pop success.”

Obviously it’s still a part of the setlist for every Hornsby concert, although he’ll often introduce it with disclaimers such as, “This next song is not my favourite song. I’m mostly proud of it because of its post-hit life.” But in the current US political climate, he is acutely aware of its continued relevance. As he told American Songwriter: “Just when one thinks we are making progress in race relations and tolerance, appalling incidents will occur that shock and sadden anyone who is interested in equality in American life. So sadly, the song still retains a bittersweet topical quality.”

Tony Iommi has revealed that he turned down the opportunity to record a final Black Sabbath album with the band's original lineup.

In an exclusive interview in the new issue of Classic Rock, Iommi reveals that Andrew Watt, who produced Ozzy Osbourne's final two albums, 2020's Ordinary Man and 2022's Patient Number 9, had approached him in the early 2020s about making a Sabbath album with the original lineup.

“I’d met Andrew Watt when he was producing Ozzy,” says Iommi. “He was very keen and a bit too excited. He also didn’t know what it was like working with the original Sabbath, working with Bill [drummer Bill Ward]. Also, we’d done 13, and I didn’t like the idea of: ‘Now here’s another album.’”

Iommi has also admitted that he had doubts about Black Sabbath performing at last year's historic Back To The Beginning show at Villa Park in Birmingham. The metal legend reveals he was initially dubious when Sabbath were asked to reunite for the show, which saw Metallica, Pantera, Guns N’ Roses and Tool among those lining up to play a tribute to Sabbath, with proceeds going to several charities.

“I said to Ozzy: ‘I don’t think we should do it.’ I said: ‘We should just let the other bands play our stuff, and us come out at the end and say thank you.' But it was for a good charitable cause, and eventually we said okay.”

Iommi had last seen Ozzy when the two of them performed Paranoid at the closing ceremony of the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. The singer had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2003, but only made his condition public in 2020 when his symptons worsened.

"I hadn’t seen Ozzy for a bit, and it was difficult seeing him like that,: Iommi says. “Fucking hell…” He adds that he didn’t want Ozzy to play a solo set before Sabbath’s closing performance, either: “I was concerned he was going to blow himself out, and by the time we came on he’d be struggling.” Read more from Iommi - including the inside scoop on his new solo album - in the new issue of Classic Rock, on sale now. Iommi’s forthcoming album, From The Dark, is due for release on October 23 via BMG.

While Europe (the continent) increasingly shows signs of wear and tear, Europe (the band) are more cohesive than ever, and the band's epic Scandinavian Eyes single finds them in fine, early Rainbow-shaped form. So fine, in fact, that it picked up our Tracks Of The Week single with a mammoth 50% of the overall vote. So congratulations to them.

Scarlet Rebels' Chains was second, while Airbourne's Kid In A Candy Store came in third. This week? You'll need to wait an entire seven days to find out.

Steven Wilson - Requiem For A Village

Just a year or so after his Classic Rock No.1 Album Of The Year (2025’s splendid, intergalactic deep-dive The Overview), our favourite luxury-offbeat auteur is back with something completely different. Instead of outer space, we have a village. Instead of Floydian epics, we have a dark, twisty atmosphere that nods to his earlier solo work (little bit Luminol, some ominous Grace For Drowning-era shadows) 70s British folk-horror cinema and the gnarlier ends of his artistic palate in general. Scrappy yet heavy. Still cinematic, still narrative-driven, but in a quietly macabre way. Also, do check out the new website, which someone has clearly had a lot of fun making.

Gyasi - You Got The Look

West Virginia’s glam-tastic prodigal son returns to his signature glitter-infused style (having dipped into rawer blues for latest album Songs From The Holler) on this raucous, hard-strutting marriage of proto-punk, pink lipstick and no-nonsense rock’n’roll. Imagine The Stooges raiding Marc Bolan’s wardrobe and then throwing an all-nighter at some sticky, low-lit dive, and you’re in the right territory. Nice.

The War On Drugs - Who’s That

“Who’s That was written in 10 minutes somewhere between first coffee and school drop off,” says bandleader Adam Granduciel of this stirring, beautifully inward-looking swirl of 21st century alt heartland and Americana (and War On Drugs’ first new studio music since 2022). “It’s a song about trying to love yourself despite things we can’t always control, like the anxiety, depression and self-doubt that may stand in the way of living the life we truly desire.”

Split Dogs - Speed Demon

Need a dirty, hooky, punk-riddled antidote to the Back To School blues? Step into our office – or rather, the new Split Dogs house of thick, juicy riff ‘n’rollin’ good times. Plus they’re having such a blast in the video (swimming pools! Fairground rides! Crowd-surfing! Angus Young duck-walks in, like, every other shot!) it’s hard to not get at least a little swept up in it.

Twin Temple - Love You To Death

Jealousy, betrayal and the messy extremes of love are wrapped in a sumptuous package, on the ‘Satanic doo-wop’ duo’s latest dose of 50s/60s opulence and heartache. “With Love You to Death we wanted to put our own spin on two distinctly American musical traditions,” the band explain, “the romantic innocence of 1962 RCA-style pop and the darkness and brutality of the traditional murder ballad… It’s about devotion taken to its most dangerous extreme, to madness, and crimes of passion.”

Grace Bowers - Cigarettes For Breakfast

‘Cigarettes for breakfast, nothing for lunch,’ Grace Bowers sings in the catchy, 90s-fuzzed chorus of her latest solo venture, inspired by snapshots of life as a model at Paris Fashion Week. Expect skateboards, ill-fated shop mannequins, sharp guitar teeth and tonnes of attitude. Different from her earlier funky blues stylings, but packing its own baggy-jeaned punch.

The Bites - Dancing With The Devil

LA’s The Bites slam straight to the point on this juicy taste of their upcoming self-titled album, which comes out this month. ‘Go big or go home!’ they declare, making good on that statement with a combination of hard swagger and chest-thumping beats and basslines – plus a hand-clapping, shoutalong chorus. Little less 70s/80s big hair vibes compared to earlier releases, with a little more RATM-influenced bite.

Twisted Teens - When We First Met 

Now signed to Sub Pop, New Orleans-based punks Twisted Teens have just announced their third album of 2026, which is a helluva feat, but the crackling lo-fi electricity of When We First Met suggests they're not the types to be picking up the phone to Mutt Lange and booking 18 months in the studio. It's all done and dusted inside two minutes, but it packs a lot of joy into that time, and singer Caspian Hollywell's worn but impassioned voice is a genuine thrill.

As Deftones' Chino Moreno once sang, early September is synonymous in the UK with going "back to schooooool." Sad times for those still in full-time eduction - best days of your lives, though, just wait 'til you see what lies ahead kids - but a time of sweet, sweet celebration for stressed and exhausted parents from Bellshill to Belfast.

But we digress. Before bringing you this week's beautifully curated crop of metallic bangers, it is both our pleasure and our solemn duty to bring you the winners of last week's vote.

Bigly love was shown to NWOBHM standard-bearers Saxon, who claimed a [level] 42 per cent of the vote for the aptly-titled Gods Of Thunder. Respect is due also to Hansen and Evanescence who landed in the silver and bronze medal positions. Well done everyone, and remember, it's the taking part that counts, as school teachers regularly lie.

Moving on then, and as ever we've got a diverse selection for your listening pleasure this week, from a "pummelling" surprise release by the new-look Slipknot to a mighty slab of retro-metal from Napalm Death bass bod Shane Embury's Absolute Power, featuring guest vocals from former Judas Priest vocalist Tim 'Ripper' Owens.

Check out the selection below, and don't forget to vote for your favourite!

Suicide Silence - Graceless

It's been a few years, but Suicide Silence are gearing up to release their follow-up to Remember... You Must Die in November. Graceless is the title track from their eighth full-length and the California quintet deliver an inhuman slice of deathcore in under two minutes. No messing about here.

Miss May I - Highbrow Thieves

Next month, Miss May I return with their new album, No Place For Me. Picking up where 2022's Curse of Existence left off, the Ohio four-piece manage to sound inspirational while digging you in the gut with waves of compelling chug. Movie buffs will enjoy the Quentin Tarantino shout-out at the beginning of the track too.

Slipknot – Arsenal

It feels weird to think that Slipknot are now an eight-piece, but Arsenal marks their first new song since the surprise exit of DJ Sid Wilson this summer. Delivering the aural equivalent of a clenched fist to your chops, the Des Moines mob are in a combative mood with this latest offering. "It’s like we’ve got everyone by the hair and we’re just going, ‘Go, Go, Go!’" says vocalist Corey Taylor, seemingly comparing it to a dirty fight between rival comprehensive schools.

From First To Last - They Said Your Ghost Was A Promise

Earlier this summer, this Tampa post-hardcore five-piece introduced their new vocalist Lil Lotus with a brand new song, Your Name In Red Ink, taken from their forthcoming release We Were Bleeding Anyway. Here's another thumper from the six-track EP. One YouTube user was prompted to comment: "best accidental click ever". They're right. There's far, far worse stuff you could accidentally click on, believe us.

Ando San – Hype Man / Triggas (featuring Mazbou Q)

Fans of President will recognise Ando San from his guest spot on the track Hate Figure. For the uninitiated, he's the latest addition to the Sumerian family, and deftly blends a delicious metal crunch and hip hop. Here's a double helping from the San Fernando Valley rhyme purveyor, which draws inspiration from Darkthrone's seventh album Ravishing Grimness. "I thought it would be cool to start the song with a black metal vibe and then lead into a heavy beat.” Catch him on tour with Don Broco later this month.

Absolute Power – Needs Must When The Devil Drives

Here's an idea for mathematician Hannah Fry: using a big equation, work out just how Shane Embury has managed to write and record so many albums for his side projects as well as play bass for Napalm Death. It can't be done, even with one of those scientific calculators that no-one could quite work out how to use at school.

After releasing his self-titled debut and another Dark Sky Burial album, he's back with his metal band Absolute Power. This time, he's joined by former Judas Priest vocalist Tim 'Ripper' Owens on the track Needs Must When The Devil Drives. Verdict: it has more gallop than the 2.30 at Uttoxeter.

Spiritbox – Mourning

Canadian metalcore quartet Spiritbox surprise-released this soaring standalone track ahead of their European tour which begins in Glasgow on September 12. Once their live commitments are out of the way, maybe it’s time to get on with recording the follow-up to Tsunami Sea?

Silvertomb – Graves in the Sky

Now the dark nights are beginning to draw in and skies are turning grey, here’s Silvertomb with a song to suit the bleakest of moods. Featuring Type O Negative alumni Kenny Hickey and Johnny Kelly, plus Inhuman's Hank Hell, Agnostic Front's Joseph James and Empyreon's Aaron Joos, Graves in the Sky rumbles with an Ozzy-style vocal in the mix. Look out for their album The Interpretation of Nightmares in November.

When I interviewed Lemmy in LA, it was over a Jack and Coke – at 10 o’clock in the morning. Nobody seemed to find that unusual, least of all Lemmy. Yet when the conversation turned to Bon Scott, he sounded less like a rock star remembering another rock star, more like a witness recalling what everyone else missed.

The first time Lemmy saw AC/DC, they were playing a London pub. He’d gone along with a girl to see what all the fuss was about. Bon was charging around the stage with Angus on his shoulders, creating the sort of chaos that would later become their trademark.

“It was obvious they were huge then, although they weren’t huge then,” he recalled.

Lemmy had spent his life watching bands come and go, and few people were better qualified to recognise the difference between a good band and a phenomenon. “Some bands you see, and you just know. The Beatles were one. The Stones were one. AC/DC were one of those bands.”

What stayed with him, however, wasn’t the spectacle. It wasn’t the drinking, the lyrics or the mythology that would later surround Bon. It was the give-everything effort that Bon put into every single show. “He always looked knackered, because he gave everything in the stage show,” Lemmy remembered.

Then came an image that seemed to summarise Bon Scott in a single scene: “I remember seeing him come on stage and, in between songs, fall down, then get up and get pushed back on.”

To Lemmy, this wasn’t recklessness. It was commitment. “He really gave it all. That’s how you should do it.”

Coming from anyone else, it might have sounded like praise. Coming from Lemmy, it sounded more like a code. Both men belonged to a generation that treated the stage as a place to empty the tank every night, and deal with the consequences later. “It’s a workout,” Lemmy said with a laugh. Perhaps that’s why Bon resonated with him so strongly. You showed up. You delivered. You left everything on that stage.

Tellingly, when asked to name his favourite AC/DC songs, every one of Lemmy’s choices came from the Bon Scott years. “There are so many great songs, but I’ve always loved Can I Sit Next To You Girl, Whole Lotta Rosie and It’s A Long Way To The Top,” he said. The live version of Rosie was a particular favourite, he said, but it was It’s A Long Way To The Top that seemed to capture something essential.

Years later, Lemmy would record his own version of the song, with former AC/DC drummer Simon Wright helping bring the connection full circle. He wasn’t entirely happy with the mix that was eventually released, and insisted he had a better version at home. It felt less like a cover than a salute between fellow road warriors. Of all Bon’s songs, it might have been the one Lemmy understood best. Asked why, he offered the explanation: “It’s A Long Way To The Top is just a great song. It’s that simple.”

Near the end of our conversation, Lemmy’s tone softened ever so slightly when he talked about something he wished he had done. “I would have liked to get to know the guys better, and I would have liked to meet them earlier on.” It wasn’t regret. Not quite. More an acknowledgement that some connections arrive a little too late.

What Lemmy saw when he looked at Bon Scott wasn’t a legend, a pirate, a poet or some larger-than-life character; he saw something he understood instinctively and respected deeply: a fellow road warrior. A man who, every time he stepped onto a stage, gave everything he had. And in Lemmy’s world there wasn’t a higher compliment than that.

Birds of a feather don’t always fly together.

For Steve Hackett, 2022 was – even by his standards – a feverish period, seeing the release of a memoir, a live album and an acoustic record. He followed that with full-power LP Surrender Of Silence, which raised eyebrows, and even drew accusations of favouring quantity over quality. But the former Genesis guitarist took it all in his stride.

Nowhere on Steve Hackett’s album Surrender Of Silence is his desire to challenge himself and the listener more evident than the track Wingbeats. Fusing his core guitar sound with African-inspired world music – perhaps evocative of his former Genesis bandmate Peter Gabriel – has caused a rare division of his fanbase.

Musicians are familiar with the familiar, unsolvable dilemma: repeat yourself and criticism for being predictable will follow, but alter what’s perceived as your genre of choice and there’ll be accusations of disrespecting your fanbase.

“There’s always going to be that,” says Hackett. “You can gain some and you can lose some. That particular song was written after a visit to Ethiopia and I’d been struck by the beauty of the place. The response to it has been extraordinary.

I think brave music is bound to divide people – if you do a brave song, you can’t expect everyone is going to get it. Music is always having to justify itself and it isn’t going to sit still. The hunger for it is never going to go away. I don’t aim to please my core audience – I love them, but at the same time I want to go: ‘Have you thought of this? You might like it!’

During the early days of Genesis, audiences would boo and walk out during songs which, in time, became regarded as classics. Many things can be met with a stony silence; you have to allow a certain amount of time for people to absorb it. Music becomes more powerful and sweeter as you re-encounter it, like an old friend.”

In the instantaneous, disposable society of today, that space for fans to absorb and fully nurture material is often absent. Witness the scathing comments which appeared shortly after the release of the gallant – and occasionally awkward – video for Wingbeats.

“Most of our own social media was full of praise for it,” Hackett says. “I think that with YouTube, you open yourself up. For all artists life is a coconut shy with yourself as the coconut. A certain number of balls are going to hit you. But if you’ve got your helmet on, as a long-term performer, you’re going to go, ‘Well, so what?’”

A previously unreleased Van Halen song is to be released as a 7" picture disc. The 1974 live recording, Glitter – made with the band's first bassist, Mark Stone – will be packaged with Van Halen, a limited-edition anthology written by drummer Alex Van Halen.

1500 copies of the anthology will be published by Genesis Publications in November. A Deluxe boxed set edition of 350 is already sold out, but the Collector boxed set run of 1150 – yours for a trifling £345 ($525) – is still available.

Each Collector copy is quarter-bound in black vegan leather with silver page edging, and features a silver debossed Van Halen logo. The book is housed in a black clamshell box with silver foiling.

In addition to the Glitter picture disc – which is backed by spoken word excerpts from interviews with Alex Van Halen – the package includes a Van Halen Productions keychain, three replica Eddie Van Halen stage-used guitar picks, and six 6" × 4" art postcards. Each copy of the book has been personally signed by Alex Van Halen.

While Glitter has not been officially released before, a demo has circulated widely as a bootleg, notably on the unofficial Van Halen/David Lee Roth CRr compilation Back In Circulation. It was also released in 1998 via the Dave TV section of David Lee Roth's website, alongside another demo from the same session, Gentlemen Of Leisure.

These recordings were originally made at the home of David Lee Roth's father, Dr Nathan Roth, a prominent Pasadena ophthalmologist. The tapes were then distributed to club bookers in the Los Angeles area in the hope of securing live shows.

Alex Van Halen published a memoir, Brothers, in 2024.

Spiritbox have released a new single, Mourning, as they prepare for their headlining tour of Europe.

The Canadian metalcore stars have put out the standalone track with a music video directed by guitarist Mike Stringer and Alex Bemis. The band co-produced alongside frequent collaborator Dan Braunstein. Watch and listen below.

Mourning comes just days before Spiritbox hit the road with support from Ukrainian djent band Jinjer and US metalcore bruisers Dying Wish. The tour starts at Sec Hall 3 in Glasgow on Saturday, September 12, then continues through the UK before hitting mainland Europe. The last show takes place at La Seine Musicale in Paris on October 9. See the list of dates below and get tickets via the Spiritbox site.

Spiritbox released their latest album, Tsunami Sea, in March 2025. It was met with positive reviews, including a near-perfect 4.5 stars from Metal Hammer.

“Whether they will continue to influence wider trends across the metalcore and alt metal landscape remains to be seen,” wrote journalist Rich Hobson. “But Tsunami Sea feels like the moment Spiritbox firmly step into their own as a band who could contend with the likes of Bring Me The Horizon and Sleep Token, as the next zeitgeist-setting act.”

Last September, singer Courtney LaPlante teamed up with pop-metal solo act Poppy and Evanescence frontwoman Amy Lee for a standalone single called End Of You. Produced by ex-Bring Me The Horizon member Jordan Fish, the song was a viral hit; it currently has more than 15 million views on YouTube.

In February, Tsunami Sea track Soft Spine was nominated for the Grammy Award For Best Metal Performance. It lost to Turnstile’s track Birds.

After the European tour, Spiritbox will support Metallica at an intimate show at Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut on November 21. They’ll play three Australian dates as part of travelling heavy metal festival Good Things from December 4 to 6.

Spiritbox 2026 European tour dates:

• Sep 12: Glasgow SEC Centre Hall 3, UK
• Sep 14: Nottingham Motorpoint Arena, UK
• Sep 16: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
• Sep 17: Cardiff Utilita Arena, UK
• Sep 19: London OVO Arena Wembley, UK
• Sep 22: Berlin UFO im Velodrom, Germany
• Sep 23: Gliwice Gliwice Arena, Poland
• Sep 25: Prague Forum Karlín, Czech Republic
• Sep 26: Vienna Gasometer, Austria
• Sep 28: Zurich Halle 622, Switzerland
• Sep 29: Munich Zenith, Germany
• Sep 30: Frankfurt Jahrhunderthalle, Germany
• Oct 02: Hamburg Sporthalle, Germany
• Oct 03: Amsterdam AFAS Live, Netherlands
• Oct 04: Düsseldorf Mitsubishi Electric Halle, Germany
• Oct 06: Esch-sur-Alzette Rockhal, Luxembourg
• Oct 08: Antwerp Lotto Arena, Belgium
• Oct 09: Paris La Seine Musicale, France

Farnham trio Kit Trigg are about to embark on their first headline tour, and we hope they'll be buoyed by the news that their recent Down To Earth single is the latest winner in our Tracks Of The Week fandango. Indeed, we hope they mention it every night.

Danielle Nicole and Grace Potter picked up the silver and bronze medals (disclaimer: there are no actual medals), and an exciting new batch of rockers and rollers are now eagerly awaiting your ears. They're below.

Sweat - Open My Eyes

Pittsburgh’s bell-bottomed, curly-cabled brigade evoke the freewheeling, anthemic heat and richness of The Who circa Who’s Next (along with some tasty 70s organ action and swirls of psychedelia) on Open My Eyes. And is that a touch of Elton John’s Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting we hear? Tried n’ tested classic rock sensibilities, lovingly cooked up to commanding effect. A vibrant, fulsome three minutes and forty-seven seconds.

Bleeker - Feel It Again

A big, hard-kicking rocker, full of teeth and swagger, the Canadians’ latest sounds like something that belongs in arenas and on festival stages. It’s anthemic but gritty; the riff and central hook are relatively simple, but they jazz it all up with dynamics and subtle touches (e.g low-key backing vocals, pacing shifts) that elevate it above standard pop/rock song territory. Check out more on its parent album, Elephant, which has just come out.

Gen & The Degenerates - Hotter On The Internet

A raw, garage-fresh hit of New York art punk riffing (from the North West of England), Hotter On The Internet kicks, sidles and struts with the same power, self-deprecating humour and sensuality captured in Genevieve Glynn-Reeves’ deliciously satirical lyrics. The synthed-up, dreamlike bridge section feels a bit out-of-the-blue, but just about works. Either way, a lip-smacking cocktail, teasing their next album Earthly Delights, which comes out in January.

Europe - Scandinavian Eyes

One of our favourite tracks from the Swedes’ excellent new album, Come This Madness (their first since 2017’s Walk The Earth), Scandinavian Eyes finds Messrs Tempest, Norum, Leven, Michaeli and Haughland going full Deep Purple – in the best way. Think galloping riffage with fiery organ lines and beats in hot pursuit, plus theatrical flourishes in the form of orchestral layers. Nice growl from Opeth mainman/friend/fan Mikael Akerfeldt, too.

Airbourne - Kid In A Candy Store

Ahhh Airbourne, doing their Airbourne thing in such a straight-shootingly likeable manner of which has never shifted and is not about to change now. Accordingly, Kid In A Candy Store finds the Aussie foursome rocking the bejeezus out of a big fat A-chord boogie, complete with drums that charge forth like dinosaurs gatecrashing a school sports day, and lyrics about using ‘the back door’ and ‘69 on the seventh floor’ that make Def Leppard sound like Shakespeare. Imminently reliable fun.

Scarlet Rebels - Chains

Captured on film as headliners at Chepstow Castle, the Welsh rockers fly high on this upward-punching new single. The sort of moody, euphoric banger that lifts them up a league. It all sets the stage in style for their next album, Flawed By Design, which comes out in November. “This song dropped out of the blue, quite literally,” frontman Wayne Doyle says. “I picked my acoustic guitar up at home, hit the first chord and sang ‘Set my soul on fire again’. It went from there. This was the first song we started to work on for the record.”

Stanley Simmons - Cold

Stenley Simmons have now released an estimated eight singles (to be honest, we've lost count), and the quality shows no sign of dropping. The latest, Cold, has a Fleetwood Mac vibe, with the sweetest of harmonies and the kind of relaxed, impossibly breezy vibe you only get with Californian types and those attempting to sound Californian. Lovely guitar solo too. The pair's debut album, Dancing While The World Is Ending, is out on physical formats now.

Silvertomb - Graves In The Sky

American doom metal supergroup Silvertomb (featuring members of Type O Negative, Inhuman, Agnostic Front and Empyreon) have come up trumps on a new single that sounds like Black Sabbath (expected), Pink Floyd (less so, but not a surprise) and Oasis (probably an accident). The end result works well, with Kenny Hickey's Ozzy-ish vocal matching both the spectral vibes of the first half of the song and the Gallagher-ness of the second. New album The Interpretation Of Nightmares will surface in November.

The wah-wah guitar pedal was a relatively new invention in 1968, when Jimi Hendrix used it to devastating effect on the unforgettable introduction of Voodoo Child (Slight Return), and while that intro is the song’s most memorable feature, Hendrix treats the entire composition as a vehicle for expression.

He alternates between rhythm and lead playing at the blink of an eye, and both riffs and solos frequently pan from left to right to add to the swaying, hypnotic nature of the performance. His guitar parts are backed up by the solid, unwavering playing of bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, who allow him the breathing space he needs to take the dynamics down and up.

"If you listen to Voodoo Child, you can hear the way the room just resonates," engineer Eddie Kramer told The Recording Engineer's Handbook. "That’s because I had mics everywhere, and the fact that Jimi was singing live too! I wasn’t afraid of recording an artist in the room live as he was cutting. To me, anything that was in the room was fair game to be recorded. Don’t forget that I had an artist who was an absolute genius, so it made life a lot simpler."

Released in a format somewhere between a single and an EP – Voodoo Child (Slight Return) was backed with Hey Joe and Hendrix’s immortal cover of Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower – the song remains another reason for Hendrix’s reputation as a man for whom a guitar was not simply an instrument.

As his devotees believe, his iconic Fender Stratocaster was a vehicle for the expression of his essential soul. Which legendary guitarist hasn’t played at least part of this song at some point or other in their career? It has been hailed as an all-time classic by Joe Satriani among many others, who praised it as the very peak of guitar creativity, and has been covered by players as varied as Yngwie Malmsteen, Stevie Ray Vaughan – who employed it to quell a bottle-throwing crowd at the Reading Festival in 1982 – and Mick Mars of Mötley Crüe.

Other bands who have taken a shot at the track include Extreme, Pearl Jam, Earth, Wind & Fire, Neal Schon, Tom Morello and Pride And Glory, the last of whom featured Hendrix devotee Zakk Wylde. In the world of hip-hop, it's been sampled by a plethora of A-listers including Mos Def, 2 Live Crew, the Beastie Boys, Schoolly D, Ice-T and Del the Funky Homosapien.

Note that this song is not to be confused with Voodoo Chile, a much longer and more freeform blues workout played alongside the great Steve Winwood. Both songs are found on Electric Ladyland (1968), the third and final album recorded by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Indeed, …Child was based on …Chile, as a shorter, more succinct song that grew from the longer original, with the addition of several key parts such as that heavily wah-wah’ed introduction.

Just to add to the complexities, Voodoo Child was actually released as a single after Hendrix’s death in 1970 under the title Voodoo Chile, without the distinguishing (Slight Return). As the man himself said, was this love or just confusion?

Fittingly, Voodoo Child (Slight Return) was the last song Hendrix sang, at the Love + Peace Festival on the Isle of Fehmarn, off the coast of northern Germany in the Baltic Sea. Ironically, the final lines of the song – the final lines that Hendrix would ever sing in public – almost preshadowed his death: ‘If I don’t see you no more in this world/I’ll meet you in the next one and don’t be late, don’t be late.’

When they were finding their feet as a band in the industrial town of Fagersta, Sweden, The Hives would look to New Jersey garage punks Electric Frankenstein for clues to unlock the vast potential bubbling away in their rehearsal space.

"We could never figure out what they did – every part either twice or four times as long as you're supposed to do," guitarist Nicholaus Arson told Vice. "It was kind of a joke, like, to see how long you could play the riff before you felt like you needed to go to another part. You have a riff, you play it for 10 seconds, and then people expect you to switch to a different riff. But if you keep going for a minute, people go bananas for that."

The band already had an arsenal of catchy riffs in their locker, but there was something about their single Hate to Say I Told You So that made people go absolutely bananas.

When the band first went into the studio to record their second album, 2000’s Veni Vidi Vicious, producer Pelle Gunnerfeldt said an early version of the song sounded like "a Swedish ZZ Top or something", according to vocalist Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist.

"He didn’t like the song," the singer told The Guardian. "He thought it was boring trite rock, so he made all these sonic changes like adding the swooshing effects, which were all the way through the song at one point. I got him to remix some songs with me and we changed the arrangement. Having less of the swooshy, fast guitar made the end more intense."

Veni Vidi Vicious was released in April through Burning Heart (the one-time home of fellow countrymen Refused), with Hate to Say I Told You So following as a single in November.

"It’s pretty easy to get, it’s total spinal rock," Almqvist later told Entertainment Weekly. "There’s nothing intellectual about it. It hits your reptile brain. Plus, it’s fairly monotonous, and I think people need that on the radio."

Following the closure of Creation Records, Alan McGee launched Poptones at the turn of the millennium, just as the garage rock revival was picking up steam. After watching the video for Hate to Say I Told You So on German TV, he quickly signed the band to his label and repackaged the Fagersta five's first two albums (including their 1997 debut Barely Legal) and an EP as a compilation album titled Your New Favourite Band, which peaked at number seven in the UK albums chart.

"The title was ballsy and funny because we didn’t actually have any hits, but maybe if you say something enough people start believing it," remembers Almqvist.

Following the single's re-release in February 2002, the band's profile in the UK gathered pace, helped along by an exhilarating appearance on Top of the Pops later that month.

"We were an underground punk-rock band; a hit in our world was 500 people having our record and 400 of them we didn’t know," Almqvist told Louder. "We expected it to do that but not to be so massive.

"When we put it out, contemporary music made no sense to us, it was only a year or two later when The Strokes and The White Stripes got popular that it seemed like we had a place in the popular world," he added. "Becoming famous overnight was like old-school Frank Sinatra, New York New York — it was awesome! You go on television and everyone sees you.”

The band was later caught in a major label bidding war, and went on to sign a deal with Universal Music, worth a reported $10 million and praise from boss Jimmy Iovine.

"They created a buzz on their own," Iovine told Spin once the ink had dried. “I respect that. I will pay for that. I will let them drive.”

The song is their most popular song on Spotify, with over 303 million streams, and remains an integral part of their set 26 years on. Not bad for a “fairly monotonous” song.

September is here! Today sees the release of the new records by Chat Pile, Sleep and President, kicking off a real rush for the Autumn release calendar. The next few weeks look pretty stacked for new releases, so we're here yet again with a round-up for this week's best new metal songs.

Speaking of which, the results of last week's vote! There were some big names in the running last week, but as ever that isn't always enough to sway your vote on what songs excite you most. Amon Amarth galloped into third place with Eight Legs Of Thunder, but were beat by a hair by black metallers I Helvete. Our overall winners for the week however were In This Moment, the industrial/metalcore mash-up of I Want To Believe taking the crown.

As ever we've got a diverse selection for your listening pleasure this week, from sludge to black metal, alternative to death metal. Check out the selection of new songs below, and don't forget to vote for your favourite - the big end of year lists are just around the corner now!

Blue Medusa - Crocodile

Alissa White-Gluz might’ve teased that she could go proggier with Blue Medusa when speaking to Hammer earlier this year, but Crocodile is pure annihilating force. Slaughter Of The Soul-style melodeath, it gallops in at thrashy pace and hits like a speeding cement mixer. For all the ferocity, Alissa doesn’t do away with melody entirely - there are some great cleans in the chorus and little quirky sonic asides that show this project is looking to do something different. Keep your eyes out for their debut next year, we reckon.

Fear Factory - Roboticist

It’s been a funny few years to be a fan of Fear Factory. The departure of Burton C. Bell in 2020 shook the band up immensely, and even with new vocalist Milo Silvestro joining in 2023 and the band heading out on tour, it was hard to imagine what new material would sound like. Turns out, pretty much the same as the old material. Sounding like they’ve got a fire lit under their arses, Roboticist delivers well on FF’s foundational sound with gattle-gun beats and a relentless sense of force. Silverstro sounds more like Robb Flynn than Bell, but the difference is negligible - if you’re a diehard fan of the band, it’s hard to see you not loving this.

Evanescence - Tell Me When You’ve Had Enough

Picking up where 2021’s The Bitter Truth left off, Evanescence’s new album Sanctuary is as fired up as we’ve ever heard the band. Don’t believe us? Check out new single Tell Me When You’ve Had Enough, a slick and hard-hitting track that proves not only did Amy Lee and co. survive nu metal, but they don’t need to look back to create something vital and powerful. Vive le Evanaissance.

Blind Channel - Stars We See

So your singer quit to make Rasmus-y pop rock with, erm, one of the blokes from The Rasmus. What’s a band to do? If you’re Blind Channel, you knuckle down and lean in on your metalcore elements and kick out a few bangers. That’s where the Finnish band are at with Stars We See, at least, an emotional track that brings to mind the arena-sized singalongs of Architects. It might lack the nu metal bounce of their last album, but it suggests the band are starting fresh on new album Painstream (out October 30).

Lacey Sturm - Forever & Ever (feat. Lindsay Stirling)

Lacey Sturm’s been kept busy with Flyleaf in recent years, but clearly not so much that she hasn’t had time to hit the studio and make new songs. Forever & Ever sees Sturm reunite with violinist Lindsay Stirling, the pair having worked together on 2023’s Kenotic Metanoia. With Eastern European-like folk melodies and thumping, hefty guitar lines, it’s a track that has great - and dramatic - sonic range, proving that even with her return to Flyleaf, Sturm isn’t abandoning the work she’s done since.

Saxon - Gods Of Thunder

Saxon have been kicking out heavy metal tunes for over half a century and they’re not about to stop now. Unlike many of their contemporaries who are slowing down on releases, the boys from Barnsley are keeping up the pace with Gods Of Thunder coming on January 22. Lead single - and title track - Gods Of Thunder is very much Saxon as we know and love them, an implacable march with some howling guitars laid atop like sonic ballista.

Boss Keloid - Landslide

Given how much of stoner rock is dedicated to mind-altering substances, the amount of novel invention remains disappointingly low. That is, until you get to Boss Keloid - the UK’s answer to the cosmic sludge of Mastodon. Landslide is a typically dextrous and trippy track, chucking up delightful, stompy riffs in a 9-and-a-bit-minute epic that feels like a full sonic journey in itself. New album Float & Aperture is due October 23.

Hansen - Wait And See

Considering he’s best known for his work with Helloween, you might be surprised at the sound of Kai Hansen’s Wait And See. There’s no power metal nor fantasy themes in sight (though we do detect a little of the iconic Halloween theme in the keys). Instead the track has the slick, almost industrial tone of turn-of-the-millennium metal (though crucially, not nu metal) with a massive riff front and centre and an irresistible beat that’ll make you want to headbang, mosh or just shake your ass. Hansen’s new album Born With A Hammer is out September 18.

Illan Kaapan - The Rising Tide / Keeps Me Alive

Sri Lanka isn't an obvious hotbed for hardcore, or maybe it is and we're just idiots for overlooking it. That's the prevailing thought after hearing Illan Kaapan this week, the Aussie/Sri Lankan band putting out easily one of the most refreshing beatdown tracks we've heard in a while in The Rising Tide / Keeps Me Alive. Put it down to the frantic, tribe-like drums that skitter beneath the lumbering riffs, or just that this track swings like its got wrecking balls for arms. New EP Undeniable is out now and if it's half as ferocious as this, we could be looking at new stars of the scene.

Jasmeno - His Rebirth (ft. Bart Krysiuk)

What the hell can you classify something like Jasmeno's His Rebirth as? Doom metal, prog, symphonic... there's little bits of all of the above and more crammed into the song's five minutes and 39 seconds. It's wild and unique, droning vocals suddenly meeting cosmic synths, which give way to gorgeous, glorious guitar solos. The Polish band's new album Assemblage of Cinematic Idioms is out next week (September 11) and we reckon you need to hear it.

Nails - Dollar Bin Generation

Need a palate cleanser after that absolute headfuck? Leave it to Nails, the grindcore brutes dropping a surprise double-single this week and serving up no frills nastiness that'll put a massive grin on your face. It's fast, it's hard, it's heavy... it's Nails.

Love Sex Machine - The Herd

Oppressive and menacing like a bad neighbourhood given a nervous system, Love Sex Machine's The Herd is exactly the kind of song you don't want to listen to when walking home alone at night. Set somewhere between industrial (albeit Godflesh/Ministry's end of the spectrum - no dancing here!) and sludge it's a real brute of a track.

First of all, Bat Out Of Hell isn’t even the best song on the album. But it is the title track, and therefore the most representative of that mammoth, life-changing, world-eating magnum opus. Is there any other album ever produced that is viewed so favourably as one recognisable, self-standing entity? Did it even need singles? It was meant to be devoured in one ravenous sitting, and that’s exactly how we all did it.

If anything represents the concept of “album rock”, it’s Bat Out Of Hell. It is album rock. And it’s probably the greatest stand-alone rock album ever made. It’s also completely ridiculous, albeit in the best way possible. Consider the source: Meat Loaf, a sweaty, overweight leather-lunged theatre kid hungry for an arena, and Jim Steinman, the piano-plinking, black-gloved, Wagner-worshipping trickster who wanted to create immortal rock'n'roll death operas.

"Meat was the most mesmerising thing I'd ever seen," Steinman told Classic Rock. "He was much bigger than he is now; he was fucking huge, and since I grew up with (German composer Richard) Wagner, all my heroes were larger than life. His eyes went into his head, like he was transfixed. [At the audition], he sang "You gotta give your heart to Jesus"… I can seem arrogant at times because I'm certain of things and I was certain of him."

In any other era, they’d be sent to the loony bin or the unemployment line. Instead, they were locked in a room with Todd Rundgren, and gold was inexplicably spun in vast quantities.

Of course, no one knew it at first. Here’s the crazy part. Well, the crazier part. Bat-the-album was released in 1977. Bat-the-single wasn’t released until two years later. And let us not forget it’s 10 minutes long (sure, there’s a four-and-a-half minute radio edit, but everybody knows that one is bullshit). Bat is completely inexplicable in every way, and yet it was perfect for the time, place, emotions and parlances of the day. 1979 demanded Bat Out Of Hell, and when it finally got it, it steamed up countless cars blasting the song at make-out points all over the US and the UK.

The structure is your basic teenage death ballad, complete with leather-clad street gangs, gleaming motorcycles, a breathlessly beautiful teenage virgin, and ‘even young boys down in the gutter’ foaming from the heat. Who knew you could foam from heat?

It starts out as a theatrical piano ballad, but you just know from the first chord that it’s eventually going to explode into an orgy of over-amped hard rock madness, and that’s just what it does. It entangles you in its drama, shakes you back and forth like a wolf with a rabbit, and leaves you bloody, bruised, and thoroughly satisfied. Steinman originally wrote it for a Peter Pan musical. We should all be eminently thankful that Meat showed up in his life.

"I never really saw classical music and rock 'n' roll as different. I still don't," Steinman told Classic Rock. "I grew up liking extremes in music - big gothic textures. I never have much regard for more subtle stuff. Dire Straits may be good, but it just doesn't do it for me. I was attracted to William Blake, Hieronymus Bosch, I couldn't see the point in writing songs about ordinary, real-life stuff."

Regarded as one of the hardest working men in punk rock, John ‘Speedo’ Reis has been making compelling music for almost four decades. Speedo, as we’ll refer to him from now on, has fronted Rocket From The Crypt, The Night Marchers and Sultans, as well as play guitar for Pitchfork, Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes and, most recently, with his solo band Swami John Reis.

Here are the 10 definitive moments from his prolific career…

PITCHFORK – Sinking (Saturn Outhouse, 1989)

After finding his feet in high school bands like Conservative Itch, Speedo’s first notable band featured future Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes frontman, the late, great Rick Froberg. His slow-burning, intricate guitar style and quiet/loud dynamics would later provide the blueprint for many post-hardcore bands. The San Diego quartet would release one full-length album, Eucalyptus in 1990, but our attention turns to Sinking, taken from the Saturn Outhouse EP released one year earlier.

DRIVE LIKE JEHU – Bullet Train To Vegas (Yank Crime, 1994)

Formed from the ashes of Pitchfork, Speedo and Froberg were joined by bassist Mike Kennedy and drummer Mark Trombino. Drive Like Jehu is where the magic really started to happen. Named after a king in the Bible, the band’s two albums – their self-titled 1991 debut and the 1994 follow-up, Yank Crime – yielded a frenetic, progressive take on twisting hardcore, topped off with Froberg’s rasping howl. Rye Coalition recorded an exceptional cover version of this song for the 2025 Paid In Full charity single (along with their take on Shellac's Wingwalker) in tribute to Rick Froberg and Steve Albini.

BACK OFF CUPIDS – Trivial Pursuit (Back Off Cupids, 2000)

Back Off Cupids was the result of a solo project recorded sporadically during the mid-90s. Largely compromised of instrumental tracks, this self-titled release features guest appearances from RFTC’s horn section, Jason Crane and Paul O’ Beirne. Check out Trivial Pursuit, which takes its name from the popular Parker Brothers board game. Next time you play the game, remember the pieces are officially called wedges. If you call those bits cheese, you're dead wrong.

HOT SNAKES – If Credit’s What Matters I’ll Take Credit (Automatic Midnight, 2000)

Speedo reunited with Froberg and enlisted The Delta 72 drummer Jason Kourkounis for Hot Snakes’ debut album, Automatic Midnight, which was released at the turn of the millennium. They later enlisted Tanner frontman Gar Wood to assume bass duties on tour. Picking up where Drive Like Jehu left off, Hot Snakes simplified their previous sound to create a more direct, yet similarly powerful proposition, represented best with this searing cut from that album.

SULTANS – Just A Fool (Ghost Ship, 2000)

Sultans released two albums during their seven-year career. Initially, Speedo played bass alongside RFTC guitarist Andy ‘ND’ Stamets, to offer fans a raucous, stripped back take on traditional rock n’ roll. For this album, he assumed the name of Slasher. No idea why.

THE NIGHT MARCHERS – All Hits (Allez! Allez!, 2013)

For his next band, Speedo combined the distinctive sounds of his other bands to create The Night Marchers’ ominous bursts of rock n’ roll. Check out All Hits, the third song from their 2013 album, Allez! Allez! presumably named to appeal to the fickle Gallic market. The Night Marchers were, are, and will continue to be miles better than Johnny Hallyday. It's just a scientific fact.

SWAMI JOHN REIS AND THE BLIND SHAKE – Wet Greek (Modern Surf Classics, 2015)

Just over a decade ago, Swami John Reis – one of Speedo’s many aliases – joined forces with the Minneapolis trio The Blind Shake for an album of baleful surf rock. Check out Wet Greek, which takes the traditional music of the sun-drenched country and firmly hits the accelerator pedal.

ROCKET FROM THE CRYPT – On A Rope (Scream, Dracula!, Scream, 1995)

Where to begin with this band is a whole other feature. Formed around the same time as Drive Like Jehu, Rocket From The Crypt was a very different beast. The result of a head-on collision between punk and Motown, the band – who wore matching outfits and inspired fans to ink themselves with their Pushead-designed logo – gradually expanded to a sextet, including a two-piece horn section. They disbanded in 2007, only to reform in late 2011 for a surprise appearance on the US children’s TV show, Yo Gabba Gabba (Speedo appears on the show as ‘The Music Swami’). The band were something of a mainstream attraction in 1996 on the strength of their classic On A Rope, which peaked at number 12 in the UK singles chart. Check out this vintage Top Of The Pops performance and keep your eyes peeled for sporadic live announcements. “Take it away, Teddy men…”

PLOSIVS – Rose Waterfall (Plosivs, 2022)

Like Speedo, Plosivs frontman Rob Crow has helmed many, many projects over the years, including Pinback, Heavy Vegetable, Goblin Cock, Thingy, Anal Trump and Rob Crow's Gloomy Place. As an integral part of the San Diego music scene, it made sense that he'd eventually team up with Reis for Plosivs, a supergroup also featuring RFTC drummer Atom Willard and Mrs. Magician's Jordan Clark. Rose Waterfall, taken from their self-titled debut, distills the very essence of what makes their individual musical endeavours great and presents it in the finest alt-rock glassware. Salud.

SWAMI JOHN REIS – Future Moods (Navajo White, 2026)

Over the last few years, he's released savage blasts of "junk shoppe punk that kicks you in the ding ding" with tempos that are "often breakneck" while "dense arrangements tumble like bricks into hot cheese" (bands – make your press releases more like this). His recent output has been presented under the Swami John Reis banner: 2022's Ride the Wild Night, 2024's All Of This Awaits You (as Swami & The Bed of Nails) and 2026's reflective Navajo White (named after a paint colour used by Reis during his time served as a house decorator). Future Moods features one of the last recordings by Rick Froberg before his death from an undiagnosed heart condition in 2023. With this in mind, it gives the lurching song added emotional heft.

If anyone forgets how experimental – and therefore weird – the 1960s were in the pop charts, there’s no need to look further than Excerpt From A Teenage Opera, which reached Number 2 in 1967.

It’s weird enough that it was the story of a local trademan and his passion for serving his village, who’s only truly appreciated after dies at the age of 82, leaving the area’s kids asking, ’Grocer Jack, Grocer Jack, is it true what mummy says, You won’t come back, oh-no-no?‘ Its effect on the careers of Steve Howe and Keith West was even wierder.

The brainchild of producer Mark Wirtz – who wrote the music for what was supposed to be a large-scale rock opera in the style of the era – the song was sung by West, who at the time was pursuing fame with Howe in their band Tomorrow.

“I knew Mark, who came up with the idea," West told Prog in 2011. "He invited me round to his place one day and played me a lot of the music he was working on. What he needed was for someone to put lyrics to the songs – that just wasn’t his thing.”

So West set about the task; and the first song he finished was Excerpt From A Teenage Opera – often known as Grocer Jack.

“Mark had given me the title of the song, and at the time having eccentric characters at the centre of songs was all the rage,” West recalled. “Maybe it was something to do with the fact that we were in an era when everyone was dropping acid!”

With Howe laying down guitar for the demo tape, West agreed to record guide vocals for an unconfirmed bigger name to do a ‘proper’ job. But that never happened. “The label, EMI, liked what I’d done,” West remembered.

“And as they already had me under contract through Tomorrow, they thought it would be a good thing for me to sing on it. I agreed – it would never amount to much, and certainly wouldn’t interfere with the band. How wrong I was!”

West was on tour with Tomorrow when the label ordered him back home to promote the single, which was starting sell in major quantities. “It just took on a life of its own,” he said. “In Germany it was even bigger than in the UK; it made it to the top of the charts.” He added: “Everywhere I went I was mobbed by girls – I could have gotten used to that lifestyle!”

In 1999 Howe reflected on the dead shopkeeper’s spirit having haunted the final months of their band. “For a while we did well off of Keith’s success – we all went out and we earned much more money than we were doing as Tomorrow,” the guitarist said.

But the fact that they played as a guitar trio was a problem. “We disappointed people by not being the sort of group that featured Keith in the way as might be thought with Grocer Jack.

“In Ireland we played the Tomorrow set with Grocer Jack. That wasn’t enough. They didn't want Tomorrow – they wanted Keith West and that kind of a singer. So they hurled money at us. It was painful – we got hit!

“That was the effect of trying to be two things at once; trying to be Tomorrow and Keith West and Tomorrow. It didn’t work. Gigs fizzled out and then we were left with not with very much.”

Wirtz – who died in 2020 – meandered elsewhere in the music industry when the Teenage Opera project wilted as the result of second single Sam failing to emulate the success of Excerpt. West followed his own route too, without regrets. “It was a good song, and I loved the experience,” he said.

Self-styled metal queen Doro Pesch joins Whitesnake and Sepultura members on a new, heavy cover of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 classic Go Your Own Way.

Former Warlock vocalist Pesch, Whitesnake guitarist Joel Hoekstra and Sepultura drummer Grayson Nekrutman tackled the Rumours song for upcoming heavy metal Fleetwood tribute album Steel Rumours: The Songs Of Fleetwood Mac Reforged In Metal, set to drop on November 20 via Cleopatra Records.

Other musicians lined up to appear include ex-Judas Priest vocalist Tim “Ripper” Owens, ex-Black Sabbath/Dio drummer Vinny Appice, Rainbow singer Ronnie Romero and Blackmore’s Night singer Candice Night.

Pesch says of her take on Go Your Own Way: "I’ve always liked the song. And it was fun to give it a new twist – especially with a great guitarist like Joel Hokstra and powerhouse drummer Greyson Nekrutman.”

The Fleetwood Mac single was written by guitarist Lindsay Buckingham about his failed relationship with vocalist Stevie Nicks, who hated some of the lyrics he'd penned.

“I very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do,” Nicks told Rolling Stone. “He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said.”

The song was released in December 1976 and became a Top 10 single in the US Billboard Hot 100 and reached number 38 in the UK.

Many bands have covered the song in the 50 years since it was first released, including Biffy Clyro, The Cranberries, NOFX and Thunder.

Doro's last studio album, Conqueress – Forever Strong and Proud, was released in 2023.

Bring Me The Horizon's Can You Feel My Heart will be added to Fortnite Festival on September 3.

The addition of the song will allow fans to play along to the song on the Main Stage, create a unique mashup or add as a loop emote in the game or Battle Royale. It will be free to play, or for 500 V-Bucks, gamers can add it in their library.

They join the likes of Metallica, Linkin Park and Slipknot, who've all had their music feature in the Fortnite ecosystem.

The Sempiternal song was released as a single in 2013 and appeared on the soundtrack of the EA Sports UFC video game three years later.

In 2024, the single was awarded platinum status in the UK by the British Recorded Music Industry, signifying 600,000 sales and streams, and it is currently the band's most popular song on Spotify, with its play count reaching 905 million streams.

In other video game music news, it was recently announced that frontman Oli Sykes and Spiritbox vocalist Courtney LaPlante have collaborated on a new song titled If The Sun Burns Out Tonight.

The song, which was written and produced by American DJ/composer Grabbitz, will be the theme of this year’s Valorant Champions Tour, an annual esports tournament where teams compete on 2020 first-person shooter videogame Valorant.

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

The band are set to perform at Rock in Rio in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 5, then begin a North American tour later in the month. They play:

Sep 20: Rogers Arena, Vancouver BC
Sep 23: Rogers Place, Edmonton AB
Sep 24: Scotiabank Saddledome, Calgary AB
Sep 26: Canada Life Centre, Winnipeg MB
Sep 30: Centre Vidéotron, Quebec City QC
Oct 02: Canadian Tire Centre, Ottawa ON
Oct 03: TD Coliseum, Hamilton ON
Oct 06: Canada Life Place, London ON
Oct 08: Van Andel Arena, Grand Rapids MI
Oct 11: Furnace Fest 2026, Birmingham AL

The band's new album Count Your Blessings | Repented is out now via RCA/Sony.

There are 20 seconds, if that, in Foo Fighters’ most popular song that are bound to trigger anyone who absolutely loathes whispering.

The moment that will get misophonics gnashing their teeth is the sound of Dave Grohl softly talking into a lo-fi microphone towards the end of the song. The compressed recording sounds like a whispered secret trapped in soft waves of static, yet perfectly suits the mood of the track.

Grohl began writing the song while the Foo Fighters were recording their future single Monkey Wrench at Washington’s Bear Creek Studios at the tail-end of 1996.

He’d been served divorce papers by his wife Jennifer Youngblood’s lawyers at Christmas and spent the holidays at home in Virginia. The song demanded to be finished.

"I was sort of in the middle of this intense emotional period," he explained 24 years later. "And for whatever reason, the emotion or the feeling I got when I would play [Everlong's] succession of chords sort of touched on whatever emotion that was.”

He asked Gray Matter frontman Geoff Turner if he could use his WGNS studio so he could record a demo of the song.

"Without having it fully formed, I put down a drum track, the guitars and the bass, and sang it into a microphone for the first time,” explained Grohl. “The lyric and the melody, and where I was emotionally, it all made sense."

Grohl was "deathly afraid" that he'd inadvertently ripped off Sonic Youth on his latest composition. After playing the rough version to Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, they responded with "Why is that a demo? Why isn’t that on the album?". Buoyed by their encouragement, the song made it onto the album.

The lyrics were inspired by a romance with Veruca Salt’s Louise Post. But in the bridge towards the climax of the song, there’s that static-filled spoken word section. The original version was based on a dream Post had.

“I sang these back-ups over the phone at 2am after being woken up from a deep sleep in Chicago by DG who was tracking the vocals for Everlong in LA,” Post wrote on Instagram. “He wanted me to sing the doo-doo’s, which were inspired by our song Shimmer Like a Girl. While I was at it, I wrote a harmony for the chorus and sang that too. The whispered section of this song was originally the dream I was having when the phone rang. It was a dream about us. He later removed it and replaced [it] with his own whispers, one [of] which was a love letter to me.”

Bradley Cook, who is credited with recording all the songs on The Colour and the Shape, told Produce Like a Pro host Warren Huart about the process of creating that crackly, mysterious section and what was used on the final version.

“The assistant Ryan Boesch told us a story where his dad would come home from his night job and he had to sleep in the daytime,” he revealed. “When he and his brother were too loud, his dad would give them military punishment and have them hold boots at the foot of his bed, hold them up while he slept. That's Dave retelling the story.”

The whispered passage is: "So, dad would take the Sundays off and that's the only time he could ever get any rest. And so, because we were loud on Sundays, he'd make us hold his construction boots over our head, 'til he'd sleep. They were really heavy boots and I used to say, 'Dad, come on, please' and like start crying, 'cause they're too heavy..."

“There was some book around, I don’t know if it was a tech book or something. We did three tracks," continues Cook. "There was Ryan’s story and a couple of tracks of him reading from a random book.”

Only the studio assistant’s story about heavy boots was used in the final mix. It was later discovered that the "random book" was about the original Neve 8028 recording console from Sound City Studios, on which Nirvana recorded Nevermind in 1991.

Grohl eventually purchased he console for his own Studio 606 in Northridge, California and was moved to make his own documentary about Sound City in 2013.

Yes entered what most die-hard fans would consider their golden era in 1971 with their fourth album. Fragile was their first record to feature former Strawbs keyboardist Rick Wakeman, and by then the brilliant, eccentric Steve Howe was firmly in place as their guitarist and contributing composer.

Yours Is No Disgrace and Starship Trooper had hinted at the progressive potential of the band on their previous offering The Yes Album, and while they were touring that record, fresh inspiration struck.

Their bus was headed from Aberdeen to Glasgow when singer Jon Anderson noted not just the magical Scottish countryside, with its mountains and lochs, but also the remarkable number of roundabouts they were having to negotiate. Howe recalled that he and Anderson wrote the song in their hotel room in Scotland, collating all the lyrical and musical ideas they had.

“We had all these bits of music,” he said later. “I was big on intros back then, and the classical guitar intro I came up with for Roundabout was one of the most signature things.”

While preparing for the Fragile recording sessions at Advision Studios in London, the pair presented the germ of the idea to the other members of Yes for input.

“The way Yes worked, it would end up seamless," said Waleman. "We’d all bring along bits of the jigsaw, then between us we’d slot the pieces in. If a piece didn’t work, it would get slung away. Glueing it together became my job, in a strange way. All these little bits would be in different keys so we’d need chords over it. Bill said, ‘That’s Rick’s job. He went to the Royal College Of Music. We didn’t. He studied orchestration. We didn’t.’

Wakeman’s reversed piano chord ushered it in, while Chris Squire’s typically funky, fidgety bass and Bill Bruford’s tricky, jazz-inflected drums gave the whole song movement as it progresses suite-like through its unpredictable structure. Howe’s tender classical guitar and tough R’n’B electrics vie with Wakeman’s burbling synths and organs, and the helium-high Anderson recites his lovable stoner-pastoral lyrics about the landscape that inspired them.

Its virtuosic complexity couched in catchy melodies and wreathed in Anderson’s hippiespiritual spell, Roundabout encapsulates all the hallmarks that would see Yes hailed as one of the founding acts in the progressive rock movement.

The song was selected as Fragile’s opener and lead single, with Atlantic’s cut-and-shut radio edit compacting the song from its majestic eight and a half minutes into just over three. But it worked.

"Atlantic took out the scissors and cut it into a hit record… thankfully!" Anderson told Prog in 2016. "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."

The single didn’t trouble the UK chart, but it did them great favours in the US the following January, hitting No.13 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Yes have existed in many incarnations in the half-century since they made this thrilling and influential signature piece, but this fan favourite and live staple has been a consistent presence in their canon.

In 2017, when Yes were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they opened their performance with Roundabout, with Rush man Geddy Lee stepping in for Chris Squire, who had died two years previously.

"Chris Squire was one of the most inventive-sounding bass players ever," Lee told a press conference. “So to play his parts… I mean, it’s one thing to mimic his parts – you can mimic anything if you practice it – but to write those parts is sheer brilliance. It was a great honour for me to step in."

Twenty years after they formed in Gothenburg, Sweden, neo-psychedelic hard rockers Graveyard have finally achieved what all neo-psychedelic hard-rocking bands set out to achieve: victory in our Tracks Of The Week contest. So congratulations to them, and may their journey continue unthwarted.

Joanne Shaw Taylor locked in second place, while our old friends Girish & The Chronicles came in third, but we've already moved on from that, and the new combatants are listed below. Vote for your favourite at the foot of the page.

Grace Potter - Main Street U.S.A.

Oh hell yeah, this totally rocks and then some. A sumptuous, boot-scootin’ groovefest with gritty heartland and Americana in its blood, Main Street U.S.A serves as a reminder of Grace Potter as one of rootsy music’s quietly superior voices. Expect vivid storytelling, dirty guitar swagger and a big juicy chorus draped in sparkles. Hot off her new album, Trespasser, which is out now.

The Scratch - Roses And Poses

These guys’ gig at London’s Electric Ballroom is still one of the best shows we’ve been to this year, so we were delighted to see this clever setlist highlight (from their latest album Pull Like A Dog) getting the single treatment, complete with a video montage of recent live triumphs. It’s heavy and introspective, straight-shooting yet subtle. A powerful, unexpected but searingly effective cocktail: pummelling beats fresh off the Dublin streets they used to busk on, riffs straight out of the Metallica-come-Pantera guidebook and the tenderest of traditional folk storytelling.

Brothers Osborne - Bottle It Up

John and TJ reconnect with the bluegrass heritage of their hometown – Deale, Maryland, in the shadow of the Appalachian mountains – on this sweetly lilting, swamp-slidin’ new taste of their next record, Watertown. If Little Feat grew up playing bar gigs in a working-class fishing town (as the Osbornes did) they might have played this. “We’re not just getting back to where we were born and raised, but to the roots of where we started musically,” TJ Osborne says. “A time when music wasn’t dictated by anything other than what our hearts and souls wanted to say.”

The Temperance Movement - Always Been Love

Kicking off with a riff that made us think a little of Free’s Fire And Water, Always Been Love puts you right in the room with the reunited Temperance Movement – no excess polish, just a lot of simmering, bouncing energy that peaks in an arresting bridge section. Frontman Phil Campbell recently told us it’s his favourite track on the album, New Promise Land Incorporated, which comes out this month.

Queens Of The Stone Age - Insignificant Other

Artfully, gently conjuring the sort of pensive melancholia and emotional baggage that comes with much of midlife, the latest QOTSA single sets lo-fi soulfulness to a toe-tapping mid-tempo beat. "It's a song about distance,” Homme says. “About how someone can be your entire world only to simply vanish. And about the strange vertigo of being on the receiving end of that.”

Kit Trigg - Down To Earth

Skate-rocker, surfer dude and friend to the seals (he’s partnering with the Cornish Seal Sanctuary, among others), Kit Trigg combines environmentalist wordplay and scrappy 90s energy in one sharp yet loose-limbed rock banger, all sunshine, lurking rain clouds and the British seaside. “The riff came quickly as soon as I got home [driving to his new Breacon homestead from Farnham, where he grew up] and the chorus was inspired by early 90s hiphop,” Trigg says. “We have such a sweet deal on this planet, let’s look after what we have!”

Clutch - The Drifter Returns

Maryland's favourite sons Clutch are back with their first new music since 2022's Sunrise on Slaughter Beach, and long-term fans will be relieved to discover that they still sound exactly like Clutch, pumping and grooving along in the most righteous rock'n'roll manner imaginable: If songs came with an aroma, The Drifter Returns would smell of creosote. There's no news of a long-player yet, but we suspect it won't be too long before album number 14 is hoving into view.

Danielle Nicole - Gaslight

Danielle Nicole made her name as one third of blues-rockers Trampled Under Foot with brothers Kriss and Nick, but has been flying solo for more than a decade now. New album Fireflies was written in the wake of Kriss's early death from cancer, and grief kept Danielle from completing some of the songs, but you'd never know it from Gaslight, which is uplifting and funky, packed with sass and swagger. Danielle is currently on the road in the US, and plays five UK shows in February.

Knocking on the door of success for years, Styx embodied the never-say-die, never-surrender ethos of their blue-collar Midwestern roots. Signed to Wooden Nickel Records, their self-titled debut was released in 1972 to little fanfare. A quick succession of studio albums followed in its wake (Styx II, The Serpent Is Rising, Man Of Miracles, Equinox and Crystal Ball); these prog-pop confections, anchored by muscular musicianship and consummate song craft, failed to make a major dent on the national charts, save for power-ballad Lady, penned by vocalist/keyboard player Dennis DeYoung, which reached No.6 in the US Top 40 in March 1975.

Steadily building their audiences on a grassroots level off an exhaustive touring schedule and explosive, well-oiled live presentation, Styx remained resolute in their quest for superstardom, seemingly undeterred by the obstacles that lay in their path. The Grand Illusion (1977), the band’s seventh album, finally connected with the public on a grand scale, delivering the smash career-changing hit they so desperately needed with Come Sail Away. The group’s gifted trio of songsmiths, DeYoung and guitarists Tommy Shaw and James ‘JY’ Young, supplied the firepower that kept Styx permanently residing in the upper reaches of the album and singles charts.

Following their initial split in the wake of 1983’s divisive Kilroy Was Here, the band regrouped at the end of the decade minus Shaw. Another split in the mid-’90s was followed by yet another reunion, though DeYoung and the band parted company in 1999. The two parties have never reunited, though the singer has continued to fly the flag for the band he formed decades earlier.

In 2014, as he prepared to release a new CD/DVD combo, Dennis DeYoung And The Music Of Styx – Live In Los Angeles. Classic Rock sat down with the charismatic frontman to discuss the stories behind a suite of his old band’s classic songs.

Lady (1973)

DDY: “Lady was the first song I ever wrote and sang by myself on a record. I was not a songwriter when we started making records in 1972. We started writing a few songs in those early days in 1970-71, but we were really a covers band. We spent most of our time getting hired and playing gigs by covering other people’s music.

“So I was not really a writer, and Lady was my first attempt to write a song from start to finish by myself. It was written for the first album, but the producer kept it off and made us record four other songs that were by outside songwriters – one [After You Leave Me] being George Clinton, believe it or not. Styx and Parliament/Funkadelic, yeah, they go together [laughs].

“Lady is really one of the first songs of its kind, and I can tell you why. When it was released to radio, they wouldn’t play it at first because they said they didn’t know how to categorise it. It started out like a sweet ballad and ended like a big rock song. Now that defines pretty much 50 per cent of all the music that’s written these days. Back then they didn’t really know what to do with it, so there you go. We’d often be compared to bands like Queen, but that was written before I ever heard a Queen record.”

Lorelei (1975)

DDY: “Lorelei was a song that was originally written by James Young and myself. It was the first song we wrote together in 1970 when he joined the band. It was originally called Live Our Lives Together. We wrote it, and then two years later we got a record deal. We’d never completed it, so in 1975 we revisited the structure. I wrote the lyrics, and it was influenced by the Stones’ Let’s Spend The Night Together. They were changing times in the 70s, where for the first time people were moving in and living together – I know it’s hard to imagine today but people gasped over that kind of thing. In fact, James was actually living with his girlfriend, later to become his wife.

“So they lived together, and at the time while it wasn’t unheard of – it was definitely groundbreaking. So I wrote those lyrics for Lorelei based on the idea of people living together and not being married. That’s what was the impetus to the lyric. The original hook was ‘live our lives together’, so I needed a three-syllable name. I started thinking of the letter ‘L’ and I came up with ‘Lorelei’, which is a made-up name. I never knew a Lorelei, and I’ve met many since who have told me their mothers named them that, and of course I apologise to them [laughs].”

Suite Madame Blue (1975)

DDY: “Suite Madame Blue was written in 1975. Everywhere you looked they were advertising the coming Bicentennial celebration in 1976. They were advertising Bicentennial mugs and trinkets, and I think there were Bicentennial panties too [laughs]. This is the first song I ever wrote about America. I got to thinking about how I felt about the state of the country in 1975, and I didn’t feel too good about it, considering we had just come through the end of Vietnam, Watergate and the oil embargo of 1974.

“At the time, we were on the road trying to travel in a van. For the song, I used a metaphor of a once-beautiful lady who had refused to acknowledge that she’d grown old, and that it was time for her to look in the mirror and figure out a new way to make it in the world. I guess because I was afraid of saying it literally, I used some sort of phony baloney metaphor. At the end of the song I do say red, white and blue – so Suite Madame Blue was the metaphor for the United States.”

The Grand Illusion (1977)

DDY: “The Grand Illusion was my way of expressing to the audience that the pressure that is put on them by advertising, media and, yes, rock stars, to believe in an illusion that really does not exist, was not healthy for them.

“I was trying to point out to them simply that they shouldn’t believe the myths that other people create for them; they should understand that it really is in some ways a form of entertainment or simply advertising. That message comes across in the song: ‘Don’t be fooled by the radio, the TV or the magazines/they show you photographs of how your life should be/but they’re just someone else’s fantasies.’

“It’s about trying to fulfil a fantasy and feeling that you come up short if you don’t meet these certain requirements, but that’s a never-ending chase. You can’t ever get the carrot, because there will always be another one placed in front of you. It’s under the guise of me telling the audience clearly in the opening lines of the song: ‘Here we are and don’t we look good up on the stage because we’ve got the great lights and we look larger than life’ – we had this big PA.

“But really, in The Grand Illusion, I was warning them not to buy into what we were presenting to them, the whole idea that [recites lyrics again] ‘deep inside we’re all the same’. This is something I thought about in 1977. The people who write about music are ultimately the people who kind of determine what is cool and what is not cool. I don’t think the band ever really received much credit ever outside of our audience, which was pretty substantial, about what we were trying to say in a lot of our songs.

“We really wrote a lot about what it was like to be an American. I’m proud of those lyrics in The Grand Illusion and the fact that I was clear to the audience. The funny thing is, when you’re dealing with an audience of younger people at the time – let’s figure that they were between 15 and 20 years old – I don’t know that they understood what was being said as much as that it had a good beat, that they like the singer and how tight their pants are [laughs]. But I’m proud of those lyrics, and I can look back and say that wasn’t the stupidest thing I ever said.”

Come Sail Away (1977)

Dennis DeYoung: “This song was written out of frustration from always having been the bridesmaid and never the bride in terms of a touring band.

“Before Come Sail Away we were everyone’s favourite backup band. We backed up groups like Kiss, Aerosmith, ZZ Top and [Bob] Seger – you name them, we played with them. But we never seemed to be able to make that leap to headliner status. So Come Sail Away to me is a reflection on my life to that point. It’s a song about a yearning to sail away to a better place.

“When I was writing the song I was just writing it about little old me, and somehow it became embraced by other people, some I know and a lot whom I don’t know personally.”

Babe (1979)

DDY: Babe was never intended to be a Styx song. It happened by accident. It was 1979, and it was my wife’s birthday. I wanted to write her a song to tell her how much I understood how hard the separation between us was on me as well as on her, because Styx were on the road a lot. So I went into Pumpkin Studios with John [drums] and Chuck Panozzo [bass] and we did a demo. Our guitar players were not around – JY was in California and Tommy was in Michigan. I’d just written the song, and it was supposed to be a demo for my wife only. The grand piano in the studio was out of tune but in the corner was a Fender Rhodes owned by a musician who hadn’t picked it up that day. I’d never played a Fender Rhodes before; I had
a Wurlitzer but I never played a Rhodes. But I said: “Hey, what does it matter?” Babe was just for my wife. So anyhow, they rolled out the Rhodes and we did the song, and I sang all the background harmonies.

“I played it for my wife, and then we played it for family members, because it was her birthday present. People were weeping openly and saying: “That’s a great song.” So then I played it for the band, and played it for the record company, and they loved it. So we went back in to try to re-record it, because it was just a demo and I thought I could sing it better, but we couldn’t recapture what was on there. I sang it better, but there was some frailty in the original demo. So the record you’ve heard on the radio all these years is that demo that I did, with me singing all the background vocals. The only thing we added was Tommy came in and played the guitar solo.”

Borrowed Time (1979)

DDY: Borrowed Time was a real collaboration between Tommy and I. In the last 20 years or so the political divide in this country has become so rampant, particularly with the media, whether it’s on TV or in magazines. But when I look back on that song today, I didn’t feel exactly that way in 1979.

“In Borrowed Time, I was reflecting on what I felt like as a teenager in the early 60s, when I say: ‘I was so cool back in ’65’. People seemed to know what they had to do and what their purpose was in this country at that time. They knew what they had to do to survive, and then suddenly things changed. [Recites lyrics:] ‘I’m so confused by the things I read/I need the truth but the truth is I don’t know who to believe/The left says yes, and the right says no/I’m in-between and the more I learn well/the less that I know.’ And that’s when we sing: ‘Yes! No!’ To me, that was like the left and the right, the conservatives and the liberals, yelling at each other. And I say: “I’m in the middle”, because that’s where I feel that I am in terms of my politics.

“When I look at politics today, even though I tend to be more conservative than liberal on certain things, I am not easily defined. I say right in the song [recites lyrics]: ‘I had my car and I made the scene/didn’t give a damn about no gasoline…’ That was the point. In 1965 gasoline was ridiculously cheap. In that song I’m reflecting on the change that has come and the change that is coming for this country.”

Rockin’ The Paradise (1981)

DDY: “All the lyrics in Rockin’ The Paradise are mine, but the music is an equal collaboration between JY, Tommy and myself. I was walking to an art gallery and saw a serigraph by a Chicago artist called ‘Paradise Theater’. I loved it. It was image showing urban decay of an old movie theatre with the Paradise Theater marquee, and it said ‘temporarily closed’.

“This was in 1980 and it was a very difficult time for America. We had suffered the Iranian hostage crisis all through 1979, and there was the Presidential election between [Jimmy] Carter and [Ronald] Reagan. Those lyrics really sprung from my feelings about the country.

“I used a metaphor of an old broken-down movie palace in an inner city, a once proud example of paradise as it’s often referred to as America. It’s the land of plenty and milk and honey, and the streets paved with gold. In 1980, to me things seemed even more dire. Carter was doing those fireside chats without the fire. He was wearing a sweater, and talking about turning your thermostat down, and the end of oil as we know it.

“There was this feeling that we had definitely lost our way, and our place in the world. The lyrics in Rockin’ The Paradise deal directly with my feelings. Lots of people tell me the intro riff sounds like The Who. My apologies to Pete Townshend, but I have subconsciously and consciously been ripping him off as long as I can remember [laughs]. My first attempt was a song on Styx II called Earl Of Roseland; that was my first attempt to be in The Who, but they never called me.”

The Best Of Times (1981)

DDY: “I can honestly say in all seriousness that I have pretended with great aplomb to know exactly what I’m doing when actually all I’m doing is making things up as I go along.

“Performers are 50 per cent pure unabashed ego and 50 per cent complete insecurity, and those two things are always clashing. But I’ve always known when I’ve written something special. It’s a good quality to have as a creative person. You have to be able to be honest with yourself and know when you’re writing mediocre crap. You don’t want to assign As to C-minus work. So with The Best Of Times I felt, “Hey, this is a good song but where it goes from there will be dependent on the music business and less upon what I do. But I can only cover what I do.” So when I wrote The Best Of Times I thought, you know, Dickens had a good idea when he wrote the beginning to A Tale Of Two Cities, why shouldn’t I have this idea again?”

Mr Roboto (1983)

DDY: “Here’s how the song was written. At the time I had
a little keyboard set up in my loft that was in the front of my house – it had 16-foot ceilings and was a cool little space. I bought this brand new Roland synthesiser, and it was the first synthesiser with an arpeggiator on it: you can hold one key and it plays a rhythmic pattern. It’ll do anything you want to programme. I put this programme up and I held this note down and it was going [imitates sound] ‘ding, ding, ding, ding…’ I had this other keyboard and I went [imitates percussive single note] ‘bomp, bomp’ – and that’s where the music came from. It really sprang from my purchase of a brand new synthesiser. And why it was written? It was a song that was supposed to take the narrative of the film that would precede our concert and connect it to the very first song on stage. It was a transitional piece of music to connect a film with a concert.

“That’s all I ever thought of it as, and Mr Roboto was the only song that I’ve ever written that was a million-seller and became a hit that I didn’t ever think would ever be a single. Never. It was never written as a single. When we were doing it, and we did it collectively, nobody in the band would have ever imagined it as a single when we were recording it. It was my wife who said to me: “That is a hit record, Dennis.” I said: “You’re nuts! What are the fans gonna think this record is about? At the end I’m yelling, ‘I’m Kilroy!’ Where the hell does that come from? How can anybody make any sense of that?” And she said: “That’s a hit record.” And it was and I was fooled. All it was, was a transitional piece going from point A to point B on the Kilroy Was Here album.

“The fact that it became a hit record surprised the hell out of me. And contrary to popular belief, the band wasn’t leery of Mr Roboto. To dispel all craziness and rewriting of history, everyone dug that song when we were doing it. Now, was there some scepticism or was there some doubt as to whether or not we could pull off a concept like Kilroy on stage, by having the band members to act in character? Yes.

“There was trepidation and there was fear; there was all that stuff. So none of us ever considered the fact that it was going to have any effect on our audience, however, we didn’t initially see it as the first single. Imagine the first song you heard off Kilroy on the radio was Don’t Let It End. Imagine that. People would have been totally comfortable and understood who that was. Right? That was no shock to the system. But we all agreed collectively to put out Mr Roboto first. The consequences were both positive and negative. But it was a hit. With the fear of sounding like a pompous ass, Mr Roboto has somehow manoeuvered its way into popular culture. And I’m expecting
a cheque any day now from the Japanese people for making Americans aware of how to say ‘thank you’ in Japanese.”

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents AOR issue December 13

The Cult’s Billy Duffy divides his band’s career into two massively uneven parts. “It goes Death Cult to She Sells Sanctuary,” the guitarist told Classic Rock in 2022, “and then She Sells Sanctuary and everything else.”

It’s right that he names The Cult’s 1985 single as the point on which everything pivots. This instantly recognisable swirl of patchouli-soaked psychedelic goth-dance genius transformed these ambitious post-punk contrarians into unlikely chart stars. The Cult weren’t the first alternative rock band – everyone from Siouxsie And The Banshees, U2 and The Cure to Devo and REM might have something to say about that. But She Sells Sanctuary is one first true alternative rock anthems, a song that quickly became bigger than the narrow scene it came out of.

Duffy and singer Ian Astbury first teamed up in early 1982 after leaving their respective groups, Theatre Of Hate and Southern Death Cult. They figured the latter had enough brand recognition to repurpose part of their name for the new band: Death Cult. By the time their debut album, Dreamtime, was released in August 1984, the name had been truncated even further, and Death Cult had become The Cult.

Dreamtime was a fine start, defined by Duffy’s ringing white Gretsch and Astbury’s fascination with indigenous cultures around the world. But these post-punk gunslingers were in love with the mythology of rock’n’roll too. They namechecked Led Zeppelin, The Doors and Hendrix at a time when most of their peers would rather admit to having a poster of Margaret Thatcher on their wall than owning a copy of Physical Graffiti.

“There were certain guidelines in the post-punk, new wave movement, and that was to stay clearly away from long hair and guitar solos,” Astbury told Classic Rock in 2010. “Then you hear Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and The Doors, and suddenly it’s like, ‘What is this? We’re not supposed to listen to this? You’re kidding me!’”

Dreamtime had barely cooled on the shelves when The Cult – completed by bassist Jamie Stewart and drummer Nigel Preston – began working on the song that would become She Sells Sanctuary.

“Sanctuary came together very easily,” Astbury said in 2010. “I took the bassline from [The Cult’s 1984 single] Spiritwalker. Billy came up with the melody, and we worked out a vaguely psychedelic guitar sound which seemed to fit it well. We were heavily into 60s psychedelic music.”

They debuted the new song in October 1984 on the Dreamtime tour. It immediately became a fixture of their set and a shoe-in for their next album. An early demo of the song shows all the parts in place, albeit in more muted form – The Cult hadn’t quite thrown off the shackles of post-punk at that point.

It was a marker of the band’s ambition that they wanted Steve Lillywhite to produce the follow-up to Dreamtime. Lillywhite was white-hot at the time thanks to his worth with U2 and Simple Minds. A meeting was arranged at the offices of the band’s label, Beggar’s Banquet. There was just one problem – they’d got the wrong Steve.

“This guy turns up and says, ‘Hey, I’m Steve,’” Astbury told The Telegraph in 2023. “We sat down and we started to work out that it wasn’t Steve Lillywhite, it was Steve Brown. But he was cool. We said ‘What have you produced?’ and he said ‘Wham!’. I’m like ‘Wham!?’ We just went with it.”

Brown – a schoolfriend of Lillywhite, ironically – would ultimately turn out to be a blessing in disguise. But at the time, the band still needed to make sure they could work with him. “Our record company said, ‘Look, this is a gamble. Why don’t you go in, do one song with him and see how it goes?’” Duffy told Classic Rock. “That turned out to be Sanctuary.”

The Cult and Brown entered London’s Olympic Studio in March 1985 to road-test this new partnership. It worked better than Astbury and Duffy could have imagined. As Brown put it in 1985: “I like to produce songs that you want to turn up.” It was a maxim that the band fully brought into. Between them, The Cult and Brown punched up the song, and She Sells Sanctuary went from being black and white to full colour.

“He was very focused on pop and wanted to bring out the commerciality in the band,” Duffy told Classic Rock. “He felt we had talent but hadn’t quite gotten our pop hooks together. He was instrumental in helping us work on that.”

The finished song drew on the band’s love of classic psychedelia and hard rock (Duffy employed a violin bow he found lying around in the studio on the song’s instrumental opening, reasoning that if it was good enough for Jimmy Page then it was good enough for him), as well as their more recent post-punk past and the goth scene in which they had one military surplus boot firmly planted. But Brown gave it a modern pop gloss and a pulsing heartbeat that made it eminently danceable.

Lyrically, it was wilfully enigmatic, all turning heads, burning backs and sparkling eyes. “The fire in your eyes/Keeps me alive,” Astbury sang on the chorus, wolverine howl set to max. “I'm sure in her you'll find/The sanctuary.” What was it all about? “Sex,” said the singer, “plain and simple.”

The Cult hadn’t even started recording their new album when She Sells Sanctuary was released in the UK in May 1985. It climbed to No.15 in the singles chart and got the band on Top Of The Pops for the first time.

Not everyone was convinced by the all-new Cult. Astbury’s commitment to their rock-forward transformation had extended to his look. The mohawk he’d sported during his Southern Death Cult days was long gone, replaced by beads, paisley shirts and long, ironed black hair – Jim Morrison by way of a Native American shaman. “When I grew my hair, people were having a meltdown,” he told Classic Rock. “They were tripping out.”

Shit-talking was the least of his worries. “I remember going out when She Sells Sanctuary got in the charts and some kid came up and punched me right in the face at a concert,” Astbury said. “There was so much hatred in his eyes, and all that was because we came from the streets in Brixton, we came from punk rock and I think this guy saw us as breaking the code by not pretending we couldn’t play our instruments or for having success.”

There was turbulence within the band too. She Sells Sanctuary would be the last Cult song Nigel Preston played on. The drummer was fired after failing to turn up to the video shoot for the song (Preston died of a heroin overdose in 1992).

But the good stuff outweighed the bad stuff. She Sells Sanctuary ensured Brown passed his unofficial audition as producer, and went on to work with the band on their second album, Love (that title was a fuck you to the notoriously vitriolic British music press – the NME sniffily dismissed She Sells Sanctuary as “gimmicky”).

The song also cracked open the door to America for The Cult. College radio picked up on it, and the band even got to play it on a December 1985 episode of Saturday Night Live. Tellingly, it was a big radio hit in Seattle, where it didn’t go unnoticed by some of the city’s young musicians. Future Mothe Love Bone singer Andrew Wood was a fan, as was Layne Staley, later of Alice In Chains. “[AIC guitarist] Jerry Cantrell told me that Layne was really into us – the gothic stuff,” Duffy recalled. (Perhaps coincidentally, another local band, Nirvana, shared their name with Love’s opening track).

It wasn’t just grunge’s future superstars who were listening to The Cult. A line can be traced from She Sells Sanctuary’s psychedelic rock swirl to the shamanic stew of Jane’s Addiction, who were just beginning to coalesce in the freakier corners of the LA club scene. (Ian Astbury’s godfather-of-the-alternative-nation bona fides were solidified by 1990’s The Gathering Of The Tribes, his visionary-but-forgotten festival which cross-pollinated genres a year before Perry Farrell did the same with Lollapalooza).

She Sells Sanctuary heralded the first of The Cult’s many transformations: the bangle-shaking hippie-goth era soon gave way to AC/DC-channelling rock’n’roll, hair-swishing arena rock and beyond.

The song itself has had a similarly unlikely journey, travelling from mid-80s goth club dancefloors to big-budget movies (Singles, Layer Cake, The Pope’s Exorcist), TV shows (Billions, Euphoria, even Love Island), games (notably Grand Theft Auto) and TV ads (it’s been used to sell everything from Budweiser to online gambling games). Today, it stands as one rock’s great all-purpose anthems, up there with the classics that inspired them in the first place.

“It’s funny,” Duffy told Classic Rock, “you write a song like that, where everything comes together far beyond what you could’ve expected and then you spend the rest of your life trying to write another one as good.”

If The Terminator was a band, it would be Fear Factory – a gleaming mecha-human powerhouse who, with classic early albums Soul Of A New Machine, Demanufacture and Obsolete, harnessed technology to open up a door to a bold and terrifying new future.

The band’s new single Roboticist makes the link with the iconic Arnold Schwarzenegger movie series explicit. Their first new song in five years has just dropped on August 29 – the day the movies’ malevolent AI system Skynet became sentient.

“In Terminator 2, August 29 is the exact date Skynet becomes self-aware and launches the apocalypse,” FF guitarist Dino Cazares tells Metal Hammer. “Roboticist deals heavily with the rise of AI. The ‘roboticist’ is the architect who creates the artificial intelligence, like a human Skynet who doesn’t realize what he’s unleashed until it goes haywire.”

While Roboticist, which is the first single from Fear Factory’s upcoming 11th album, doesn’t directly reference the Terminator movies, it does share many of the same themes – something Fear Factory have tackled from the beginning of the band.

“If you go back to Demanufacture and Obsolete, we've always explored man becoming obsolete and machines taking over,” says Dino. “We've always sung about the relationship between man and machine, and now it's caught up to reality. People complain about AI, but they’re using it every day, they just don’t realise it. We all have to embrace it in some way because it's already integrated into everything we use, from cell phones to cars. Unless you live off the grid in the mountains, you can't avoid it.”

Roboticist marks the recording debut of the very definitely flesh-and-blood Milo Silvestro, who replaced original Fear Factory singer Burton C Bell in 2023 following the latter’s acrimonious departure. Cazares discovered the Italian singer during Covid via the FF Facebook page, where he had been posting cover versions.

“As soon as airlines opened up, I flew him out, auditioned him, and was blown away,” says Dino. “We had a tour booked with Static-X in 2023, so I brought him into the band a month before we left, and we didn't stop touring for three years straight. Milo's voice brings a new energy, but it feels familiar because Burton was one of his favourite singers growing up.”

The guitarist is keeping details about the upcoming album close to his chest, though he does reveal that it will feature 10 songs, including Roboticist and the band’s next single, Detonizer. “He’s a character who is fighting back against the AI, who wants to detonize the system,” says Dino of the latter song.

The album, which will be released in 2027, comes on the heels of a turbulent decade-and-half in the band’s career. Cazares and Bell spent much of the 2010s embroiled in lawsuits with former FF drummer Raymond Herrera and bassist Christian Olde Wolbers, which eventually led to the guitarist filing for bankruptcy in order to retain the rights to the Fear Factory name. Bell himself officially departed in 2020, citing a breakdown of his working relationship with Cazares. If the new single is anything to go by, the 2026 model of Fear Factory have a massive point to prove.

“For me, every record is made out of desperation,” says Dino. “I always feel like I have to prove something. With this, it took a while to get back on our feet after all the lawsuits we went through and Burton quitting. But we’ve come out of it stronger than ever.”

Summer might be over (or almost, at least), but the big season for new releases is well and truly upon us. Just today, there's new albums from Mastodon, Beartooth and In This Moment, plus what feels like hundreds of new singles arriving each week. That's exactly what we're here for though, cutting through the clutter to bring you a collection of brilliant new metal songs each week.

First, the results of our last vote! As ever, brand recognition isn't always a guarantee of top placing, though Mastodon still managed a very respectable third place finish in the poll. Above them however were Japanese newcomers Zilqy, who edged into second, while Derby newcomers The Cartographer proved your overall favourite by some way.

It's all to play for this week as we've got more big names returning to the mix in the form of Amon Amarth, Clutch, Imminence and Comeback Kid. But there's still some rising underground talent in there too, so check out the tracks below and don't forget to cast your vote!

In This Moment - I Want To Believe (ft. Dayseeker)

If any metal band is overdue a TikTok blow-up, it's In This Moment. The industrial outfit have been going for over 20 years now, and their striking visuals and canny earworms have made them a mainstay of the metal scene, but it's not outside the realms of possibility that they'll get a Crowbar-style lift-off at some point. I Want To Believe sees them team up with Dayseeker's Rory Rodriguez for a powerful, atmospheric track.

Imminence - If Not Now, When

Imminence have gone full Deftonescore. There's no shortage of bands tinkering with heavygaze in 2026, but the Swedish metalcore group's dive into thick, floaty melodies doesn't sacrifice their own unique sound, the violins adding a gorgeous, melancholic tone to If Not Now, When that shows new album Axis Mundi - due October 2 - might be their true breakout moment.

Comeback Kid - Chosen Hell

Stride with absolute confidence to yet another howler from Comeback Kid. Pounding beats and big riffs make Chosen Hell a real swing-for-the-fences from the Canadians, marking the announcement of their new album - also called Chosen Hell - for a November 6 release date. We'll be keeping our ears out for the planned Courtney LaPlante collab, too.

Amon Amarth - Eight Legs Of Thunder

Thor might have a hammer, but he doesn't have an eight-legged steed, does he? That's the topic of Amon Amarth's latest melodeath banger, Eight Legs Of Thunder appropriately powered by a galloping riff and the distinct sense the Swedes are having the time of their lives on new album The Allfather Awakens, coming October 2.

Turnstile - Birds (Dying Fetus version)

#WhynotDyingFetus indeed. On a remix album that features appearances from Elton John and Hayley Williams, the biggest left-turn is surely Birds being 'reimagined' by Dying Fetus. It's gloriously short and to-the-point, bringing to mind DF's earlier grindcore-adjacent material.

Kamelot - Sanctuary (feat. Clémentine Delauney and Ignacia Fernández)

Kamelot know their way around an epic composition. Their new album Dark Asylum is positively packed with 'em, but with guest appearances from Visions Of Atlantis' Clémentine Delauney and Decessus's Ignacia Fernández, they've expanded their repertoire impressively on this new track, making great use of melody and Ignacia's brutal howls.

Burner - Accelerationist

If you're in the market for something fierce and nasty, you'd do well to give Burner's Accelerationist a spin. Lumbering, limb-swinging hardcore meets guttural death metal in a whirligig of violent intent. Taken from new album No One Is Coming To Save Us - out September 25 - it's sure to scratch an itch for underground brilliance.

Maple’s Pet Dinosaur - Child’s Play

Quite literally the next gen of talent, Australia's Maple's Pet Dinosaur has been signed by Warner Music at just 15 years old. Child's Play - the title track of her upcoming debut EP - gives an insight as to why, the track taking horror aesthetics and pulsing riffs to create something unique and striking.

Clutch - The Drifter Returns

In a week that's robbed us of legends, it's good to have some of the old reliables come back as fiesty and fierce as ever. The Drifter Returns is a slick, punchy Clutch song in the vein of Earth Rocker or X-Ray Visions. There's no word on when we'll get a new album just yet, but this has us excited nonetheless.

Black Spikes - Dulkés

Lithuania's Black Spikes released their new album Ydos this week, and Dulkés shows off their unique sound. There's an odd, slightly off nursery rhyme quality to the song to start with, but when the band flex their more aggressive side they hit with pure nightmare-fuel force.

Love Is Noise - Smile

Bounding into life, Love Is Noise have announced their new EP The Space Between Happiness And Heartache for an October 9 release with the infectious Smile. The heavygaze markers are unmistakeable, but the band also inject so much energy and enthusiasm it's hard not to want to leap about the room with joyous abandon.

I Helvete - Nälkätalvi

If you didn't gather from our recent albums of 2026 round-up, black metal is having a stellar year. You can add I Helvete to the pile, if Nälkätalvi is anything to go by. The Finnish band have been through some line-up turbulence as of late, but this new single sees them asserting a ferocious and classic take on the BM sound, laying just enough melody atop a bedrock of frosty, furious extremity.

Watching The Tide, the posthumous album by late guitar great Steve Cropper, is out today. Amongst its dozen tracks is My Angels Are Calling, a poignant number co-written and sung by Queen guitarist Brian May – featuring a solo from ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons – and a video for the song has been released today.

“We were all incredibly sad at Steve's passing, and I was already collaborating with Steve and his band on a track for this album," says May. "The backing track, which Jon Tiven, producer of the album and a very old friend of mine, sent me, includes Steve Cropper's unmistakable riff in a style which has influenced us all massively over the years.

"As soon as Steve was gone, I could hear something different in my head – a tribute to Cropper himself. The way I saw it, I wanted to try to step into his mind at the moment when he knew it was time to move on. So in the track I'm attempting to speak with his voice, and I felt that spiritually he would find a way of bringing his usual optimism into play.

"In the song, the angels are calling, and it seems to me that, along with being grateful for his wonderful life, he would imagine heaven to be something like going back to sitting on the dock of the bay, a moment in time that he shared with Otis Redding, creating that immortal hit, Dock Of The Bay. Having Billy Gibbons play a spectacular solo for me is the final wonderful bonus to this experience. The whole band did a terrific job, and I'm very proud to be a part of it.”

“Brian is singing from Steve's point of view,” says songwriter/producer Jon Tiven, who oversaw the project. "Looking back over his life and his road. It’s very powerful.”

Cropper, the legendary guitarist with Booker T. & the MG’s, the Blues Brothers, and many more, passed away on December 3 last year, aged 84. He had been working on Watching The Tide, the follow-up to 2024's Friendlytown, in the months prior to his death, and had completed 10 of its 11 tracks with Tiven. The album features several guest players in addition to May and Gibbons, including Ronnie Wood and Eric Clapton, who delivered a transcendent solo on the first single from the album, Ticket First.

"I told Eric, ‘Man, you just turned that song inside-out – I think we’re gonna have to give you a writer’s credit,” says Tiven. “And Eric said, ‘Well, anything to get my name next to Steve Cropper’s…’”

Watching The Tide – named in tribute to Dock Of The Bay – is out today.

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?