Bad Omens collaborate with Poppy on new industrial metal banger V.A.N.

(Image credit: Bryan Kirks)

Bad Omens have teamed up with pop-metal sensation Poppy for their new single, V.A.N..

The Richmond metalcore stars’ track was released yesterday (January 25), and sees Poppy take lead vocals while the band play powerful industrial riffs.

The collaboration is the first taste of Bad Omens’ upcoming Concrete Forever: a companion piece to 2022’s The Death Of Peace Of Mind, featuring remixes and team-ups with other artists.

Of the song, the title of which is an acronym for “violence against nature”, vocalist Noah Sebastian has commented: “That’s a song that started just with the hook, ‘violence against nature’.

“And then after saving the project with the acronym and seeing it we realized it could be fun to think of V.A.N. as a name.

“Thus the rabbit hole of ideas began that led us to decide to write lyrics from the perspective of an artificial intelligence gone rogue.”

Bad Omens will follow the release of the single with a tour of Europe, beginning in Berlin, Germany, on January 27.

The two subsequent dates – January 28 and 29 at the Palladium in Cologne, Germany – will be livestreamed worldwide.

The band will continue to tour continental Europe until February 11. They’ll then do a string of US dates until May 18 before returning to Europe to play festivals, including Germany’s Rock Am Ring, France’s Hellfest and the UK’s Download.

Tickets for Bad Omens’ live shows are available now.

Bad Omens are one of four cover stars on the newest issue of Metal Hammer, which celebrates the greatest up-and-coming bands in heavy metal. Lorna Shore, Scene Queen and Hanabie also have their own covers. The issue is available here.

Talking to Metal Hammer, Sebastian foreshadowed his recent decision to back away from social media.

“I was trying to use my socials, and I just had to constantly mute them,” the singer said.

“I got really tired of seeing my own face, or seeing a stranger’s opinion of me every day. I don’t think that’s healthy. I’ve seen these accounts that collect baby pictures of me they find on a distant relative’s Facebook and make an entire shrine out of them. It’s very one-sided, you know. If there was a female artist that I admired and I had a collection of pictures of her as an underage child, people would probably fucking try to put me in jail. It’d be weird, it’d be extremely inappropriate. It’s really funny how selective people are with their ethics.”

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Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Metal Hammer and Prog, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, NME and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.