Back in 1997, many people noted the personnel involved in Flesh & Blood and assumed that the outfit had to be some kind of melodic rock supergroup. It was a forgivable enough error, given that the quintet’s rich pedigree came from such bands as Touch, Tyketto, Saraya and Asia.

In fact, Flesh & Blood came after former American Tears/Touch/Drive, She Said keyboard player Mark Mangold sat down to write blues songs for ex-Free/Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers. When Rodgers' new band The Law (which paired him with The Who's former drummer Kenney Jones) recorded only one of those songs, For A Little Ride, on their eponymous debut album in 1991, Mangold had an embarrassment of riches remaining.

It took him six years to release them, by which time the music scene was still adjusting to the fallout from grunge; few people were disposed towards a band that sounded like the Black Crowes jamming with Creedence Clearwater Revival. Emerging via the independent Now & Then Records label, Blues For Daze created few headlines and failed to trouble the Billboard chart, but it certainly seduced those with a discerning ear.

Joining Mangold in Flesh & Blood were ex-Alice Cooper/Savatage/Asia and future Megadeth guitarist Al Pitrelli, Saraya drummer Chuck Bonfante and unknown bassist Mitch DeStefano, with former Waysted/Tyketto singer Danny Vaughn stepping into the picture at the last minute.

Vaughn sounds more relaxed, soulful and confident on Blues For Daze than he ever did before. Which is a considerable achievement considering that his vocals were added to the already recorded music, replacing those of another singer (to this day, both Mangold and Vaughn refuse to divulge the name of the mystery original vocalist).

For Mangold, Flesh & Blood was an opportunity to revisit his blues-enriched youth, pouring lashings of Hammond organ on Man Enough and Shake Ya Tail Feather. The swaggering power of the title track is the closest the album gets to hard rock, although Feel The Power is a great Cry Of Love-flavoured opening song that Mangold re-recorded in 2004 with his side project The Magic Freak Society. Bed Of Roses and Jenny Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the latter a particularly moving lament to a late girlfriend, are its more introspective moments. Voodoo Moon, on the other hand, revealed some ersatz Cajun promise.

Though Pitrelli is regarded more as a metal-oriented shredder than a thoughtful bluesman, he’s in surprisingly restrained form throughout, his finest moment arguably being the Thunder-meets-Whitesnake of Sweet Sister Rose, some soaring playing bringing the song to a gospel-tinged climax. Unfortunately, because all except DeStefano had other commitments, Flesh & Blood never toured. In fact, it wasn’t until 2002 when Mangold joined Danny Vaughn and his band Vaughn on stage at a Belgian festival that any of the album’s material was played live.

“We got to kick out Feel The Power and Jenny Doesn't Live Here Anymore, which was a fantastic experience,” Danny told Classic Rock. “In fact, Mark and I have talked several times about doing another Flesh & Blood album, but we’ve both been pretty busy. Still, never say never.”

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 53 (May 2003). Blues For Daze was reissued in 2021 by Bad Reputation Records, when Flesh & Blood reformed to record two new tracks for the release: a brand new song called Ready To Roll, and an acoustic version of the track Riverside, featuring Danny Vaughn on acoustic guitar and blues harp.

Mastodon describe a lawsuit filed by the estate of the late Brent Hinds as "meritless" and say that they "strongly deny allegations of ill intent on our part".

The band split with guitarist Hinds early last year after 25 years, and he tragically died in motorcycle crash in August 2025 at the age of 51.

As they prepared for the release of latest album Marrow Deep, Mastodon released a video in which they discussed Hinds' alcohol abuse and the decision to part company with the founding member.

This week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that the Hinds' estate had filed a civil lawsuit making a number of claims against the band – including that they used his likeness to promote Marrow Deep, revealed information that he wished to keep private, and that they never bought Hinds out of his share of the band and its related business interests.

In a statement posted to social media, Mastodon say: "Sadly, a private business dispute with the estate of our dear departed friend Brent Hinds was made public.

"We strongly deny allegations of ill intent on our part and intend to vigorously defend what we believe is a meritless lawsuit.

"We don’t intend to speak publicly on this going forward, as we feel this wouldn’t honour Brent’s memory or the legacy of his musical gifts."

The artwork for Marrow Deep includes a subtle image of Hinds' face.

The lawsuit claims that the band offered $80,000 as a buyout but that Hinds never agreed to the terms of the separation. The estate held off accepting the payout until a full accounting could be carried out.

It adds that details about Hinds' private life shared by the band were "learned in confidence" and were "details he chose to keep private while he was alive."

In 2006, My Chemical Romance were already one of the biggest little cult bands in the world. Their first two albums – 2002’s I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love and 2004’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge had established the band as leading lights in the burgeoning emo and post-punk scene of the early 2000s.

MCR album three was an altogether different beast, with an ambition, reach and musical scope that went far beyond punk rock ghettos. A full-blown concept album, The Black Parade featured a grandiose, epic feel that shattered any stylistic and generic fetters they might have once had and established the New Jersey quintet as one of the biggest bands in the world full-stop.

Where they had previously channeled punkier influences like Misfits and Black Flag, The Black Parade saw them give freer reign to their love of Queen and the expansive rock of the 1970s. In particular, they pinpointed two classic concept albums from that era in David Bowie’s The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars and Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

“I hadn’t even thought it about it until very recently, but it’s almost as if we’re trying to spearhead some kind of neo-classic rock movement,” Gerard Way told Kerrang!, shortly after the album’s release. “Bringing the pageantry and the theatre back. Paying tribute to those old songs – not ripping them off, but a total tribute. We wanted to capture that glory, that over-the-top-ness and that essence of classic rock in the ’70s."

In order to capture this vision the band decamped to a supposedly haunted house known as the Paramour Mansion in Los Angeles, which might not have been the best idea for a band with members who had been struggling with mental health and substance misuse issues.

Gerard Way suffered from vivid dreams and sleep terrors during the recording – some of which seeped into the album. The dialogue at the start of Sleep (‘They're these terrors, and it's like it feels like as if somebody was gripping my throat…’) was recorded when the singer woke up in a cold sweat and grabbed his voice recorder, while the line in which he says ‘Sometimes I see flames…’ refers to recurring dreams about “Joan of Arc and brimstone and damnation”.

There were other strange occurrences. Drummer Bob Bryar recalled that guitarist Ray Toro told him he had seen a ghost in his room but it was Mikey Way who had the worst time of it. The bassist, who was battling a combination of serious depression and alcohol addiction at the time, was staying in what was reputedly the most haunted room in the mansion.

“When we were at the Paramour in pre-production basically still writing, things got kind of dark,” Gerard recalled recently in an interview with Travis Mills on Apple Music 1. “I know that Mikey struggled with some mental issues. The place, we liked it, but it had this weird energy that it was kind of haunted.”

Speaking to Tom Bryant, author of Not the Life It Seems: The True Lives of My Chemical Romance, Mikey Way said: “The band had engulfed all of us and I found it overwhelming. There were some things I had never addressed about that and they were festering away too. The combination of all of that was beginning to eat away at me. Recording Black Parade was the moment it all came to a head. I just had to go fix myself."

He temporarily left the band to seek help, a decision that was partially reflected in the bittersweet album closer proper Famous Last Words. Incidentally, while filming the none-more-dark video for the track there were a number of injuries, with Gerard tearing muscles in his leg and foot and Bob suffering third-degree burns on his hands and legs from the flames in the studio.

If the recording sessions themselves were plagued by misfortune and left the band exhausted, they resulted in a truly special creation. A concept album revolving around a dying protagonist known only as The Patient, it tells the story of his apparent death, experiences in the afterlife and reflections on his life. It makes a fascinating whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts but the individual songs all get their chances to shine.

From the knowing swagger of Dead! through the emotional drive of This Is How I Disappear to the anthemic Teenagers – the one song that seems to stand apart from The Patient’s story and was written by Gerard as “a commentary on kids being viewed as meat; by the government and by society” – there’s still plenty of guitar-fuelled grit on display. But then you have the more fragile likes of I Don’t Love You and the piano-led Cancer, not to mention the fabulously unhinged Mama with its inspired cameo by Liza Minnelli.

And, of course, the album’s epic centrepiece, Welcome To The Black Parade. Initially started years previously and titled The Five of Us Are Dying, the song very nearly didn’t make the album. "We just kind of had this punk song that was really cool and we liked it, but nothing about the song was speaking to me," Gerard told Apple Music 1. "It didn't feel like it was going to be on the album because all the other songs had really strong themes and titles and things like that. But we didn't want to just give up on the song."

Instead, Gerard brought in the lyrical concept of The Black Parade itself - an abstract memory from The Patient’s childhood that meets him in death - and the band dismantled the song and started rewriting it from the bottom up. “It was around this time that I wrote the opening melody for piano that [producer] Rob [Cavallo] played. Then once we re-approached it from the perspective of starting with a completely new introduction and a new way to start the song, it helped us fix the rest of it," the singer continued.

The result was what would become the band’s signature song, a sort of updated Bohemian Rhapsody whose sense of ambition and sheer grandiloquence waves the flag for the entire album. In many ways it also sums up the heart and soul of My Chemical Romance.

“The triumph of the human spirit over darkness was something that was kind of built into the DNA of the band from the beginning,” Gerard told Steve Baltin’s My Turning Point podcast. “There’s darkness in the world. And I think overcoming that darkness, that darkness externally and internally, is a beautiful thing…So that’s a theme that’s definitely in ...Black Parade, the song, and it’s in my work.”

If The Black Parade was greater than the sum of its not inconsiderable parts, the whole campaign surrounding it was even bigger. The band dramatically changed their look and adopted the altar-ego of the Black Parade for the accompanying tour. Said tour was marred by further injuries and illnesses (including a bout of food poisoning) but their march was relentless and they ended it as true global superstars.

Not that everyone was onboard. If you want an illustration of how embarrassingly conservative the mainstream music scene can be, let's revisit this 2007 assessment of MCR by former Kasabian frontman Tom Meighan: “It’s like ventriloquists’ music," the spooked Leicester 'lad rock' frontman frothed. "It’s weird and dark. They don’t have anything positive to say. The only good news is that it won’t last. These clowns won’t be around for much longer."

My Chem even made the Daily Mail’s radar as the rag attempted to label the band a ‘suicide cult’ band, laughably describing The Black Parade as “a nickname for the place where Emo fans believe they will go when they die”.

In a statement the band retorted: “The message and theme of our album The Black Parade is hope and courage. Our lyrics are about finding the strength to keep living through pain and hard times. The last song on our album states: ‘I am not afraid to keep on living’ – a sentiment that embodies the band’s position on hardships we all face as human beings.”

Small-minded, ignorant nonsense aside, The Black Parade was an absolute triumph and, 20 years on, it still stands as My Chemical Romance’s masterpiece.

Speaking at the time of the album’s release Mikey Way said: “We want this to be the album that My Chemical Romance is remembered for. We all have records that shaped our childhood and teen years. When you hear a song, it shoots you back to a moment in time. We want this album to do that for people.”

Mission accomplished.

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.’”

Ward was initially slated to appear alongside Iommi, Ozzy and bassist Geezer Butler on 13, but the recording lineup was eventually completed by Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave drummer Brad Wilk after Ward backed out of the sessions following a contractual dispute.

In early 2014, Ozzy told Classic Rock that 13 wouldn't be the band's final album.

“The whole Sabbath experience this time around was great,” he said. “We all made friends, we didn’t fuck around, we all knew that we had a job to do, and we did it. It was a lot of fun. So we’re going to do one more album, and a final tour."

While Sabbath completed their year-long The End tour in early 2017, the only new release from the band was an accompanying EP, which included four previously unreleased tracks from the 13 sessions and four live tracks from their 2012–2014 reunion tour.

The new issue of Classic Rock is on sale now. Iommi’s forthcoming album, From The Dark, is due for release on October 23 via BMG.

Back in November 1981, just less than 12 months after they got together, Mötley Crüe were total unknowns; young, dumb and practically overflowing with cum. The four band members – singer Vince Neil, bassist Nikki Sixx, drummer Tommy Lee and guitarist Mick Mars – inhabited the Mötley house in Los Angeles. a den of iniquity later portrayed so graphically in their book The Dirt, and without the proverbial pot in which to urinate.

The band’s sleazy adaptation of hard-rock themes was hardly in demand at the time. Gigs were in short supply – as was toilet paper. Six months earlier all 100 copies pressed of their aptly titled seven-inch vinyl debut single Stick To Your Guns (b/w Toast Of The Town) had been given away free at the band’s live shows. And yet the full-length album they’d been dying to make would ignite a glam-metal revolution.

In the days before Doc McGee and Doug Thaler handled their affairs and Elektra Records signed the group’s royalty cheques, Mötley Crüe were managed by Allan Coffman – a former construction worker who was the brother-in-law of a friend of Mars – and his wife. The group were being paid just $20 a week. Indeed it was drummer Tommy Lee’s willingness to ‘take one for the team’ that enabled them to visit the studio at all.

“We were all in relationships at the time except for Tommy, and the manager at Hit City West studio was this girl,” singer Vince Neil reminisces with a mischievous grin. “She wasn’t very attractive, but we made Tommy do her for some free recording time.”

Self-produced by the group, recorded over just three days and mixed at Cherokee Studios (with Coffman And Coffman Productions credited as executive producers), the album was made for the miserly sum of $2,500. Just 20,000 copies were pressed on their own label, Leathür Records.

“Too Fast For Love was a demo tape, man,” Neil exclaims. But, without doubt, its audaciousness paid off. Once Elektra signed the group, Roy Thomas Baker, of Queen fame, was brought in to remix the original Leathür edition.

“A lot of people say Roy screwed up the album, and I agree,” admits Neil. “I prefer the rawness of the version that we did ourselves.”

In fact Mötley had apparently tried to persuade Andy Scott, guitarist of The Sweet, to oversee the record, but their efforts were in vain

“That’s absolutely true,” Neil confirms. “Mötley Crüe loved Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard album. We also asked Herman Rarebell [drummer with the Scorpions] to produce us and take a share in the band, but he passed. I still tease him about that.”

Neil is amused to be reminded that the press release that accompanied Too Fast For Love called the group’s style “A return to the hard-driving sound of The Beatles re-energised for the 80s”.

Considering that Mötley Crüe went on to become one of the most copied bands in the world, it didn’t sound like they thought of themselves as particularly original.

“You’ve gotta remember that in the 1980s, music was still recovering from the punk rock movement,” the singer protests. “We were one of the first bands to take punk and mix it with glam and metal. We started a whole new trend.”

So many acts never quite manage to surpass their first two or three albums. So what is it about the spark of a group’s earliest work?

“Well, you have your whole life to write your first album, and then a year before the sophomore curse kicks in,” Neil reasons. “To me, Too Fast For Love has some great material. We still do most of those songs on stage. Some are pretty juvenile, Come On And Dance makes me want to cringe a little, but we were a young band back then, and for the time that it came out, we were so far ahead of the game.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 150 (September 2010)

Primus are not like other bands. A bewildering anomaly for the last 40 years, these Bay Area oddballs must be the weirdest band ever to conquer the metal world. Record companies have no idea what to do with them, magazines tie themselves in knots trying to describe them, and their fans are almost as weird and unconventional as the band themselves. When Primus played at Lollapalooza in 1993, in support of their bizarrely successful third album, Pork Soda, the response was a little… well, meaty.

“Back then I was a strapping young fellow and I’d play with my shirt off,” says singer and virtuoso bassist Les Claypool, whose band played their first UK dates in a decade this August.

“I go up to the microphone and boom! It was like somebody punched me in the chest. I looked down and there was a giant, red welt on my chest, and at my feet there was a huge pig’s foot with a big toenail on it. There was a juggler at the festival, and he used to juggle chainsaws, and for some reason he’d cut up some pig onstage, so someone thought they’d be clever. ‘Pork soda? I’m gonna throw this pig knuckle at Les!’ If it had hit me in the face it would’ve fucked me up hard!”

While Les never expected to be dodging chunks of pig carcass, he had already become accustomed to people reacting strangely to his band. Formed in El Sobrante, California, in 1984, when Les was 21 years old, Primus were anything but conventional.

Inspired by a dizzying array of disparate influences, from Funkadelic and the Grateful Dead to Frank Zappa and Rush, they were never a metal band in any meaningful sense. In fact, after a brief involvement with Bay Area thrashers Blind Illusion, Les – who had gone to high school with Metallica’s Kirk Hammett – had primarily learned his trade via funk, jazz-adjacent improvisation and freewheeling jam band rock.

After a slow gestation, during which Les worked with numerous drummers and guitarists, Primus finally coalesced around the now classic line-up of Les Claypool, guitarist Larry ‘Ler’ LaLonde and drummer Tim ‘Herb’ Alexander. They sounded heavy, funky and doggedly eccentric. It really shouldn’t have worked.

“Once Larry and Herb showed up, it was like, ‘OK, I’m the only guy that has any kind of R’n’B or soul background’,” says Les. “Herb was this world music and Rush fanatic, and Ler came from the metal world. He was in Possessed when he was 15! But his heroes were Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia and Eddie Van Halen. So it just became this weird hodgepodge. These three guys, who didn’t necessarily fit together, just happened to have this amazing chemistry, and it became Primus.”

Being fiercely original has its benefits, but in mid-80s San Francisco Primus found themselves firmly out of the musical loop. The Bay Area thrash metal scene was absolutely flying, but it was no obvious home for this deeply peculiar power trio. Famously, Les auditioned for Metallica when they were searching for a replacement for the late Cliff Burton, but it quickly became apparent that he was too damn weird for the job.

“We were always this weird band!” laughs Les. “Promoters didn’t know who to put us with! They put us on with Swans one time, and put us on with [cult Californian punk troupe] the Pop-O-Pies, but there was never really anyone for us to play with. Then suddenly, Fishbone and the Red Hot Chili Peppers would come to town, and we were like, ‘Woah, that’s cool!’ Then along came Faith No More, and we’d play with them too, and Mr. Bungle would open for us… so a scene developed in the Bay Area.”

As heavy music entered a new and subtly radical era, Primus were still unlikely contenders for success, but Les had the ambition to back up his extraordinary musicianship and unique approach to songwriting. When his band’s local popularity increased, he asked his auto mechanic father for a favour.

“Well, we were as poor as church mice, but I told my dad that if we recorded some live material and we pressed up some albums, I thought they would sell,” says Les. “So he loaned us $3,000, which was a big deal for a mechanic, and we took that money and we made that live recording, which became [debut release] Suck On This. We printed up 1,000 units and went around and sold them at local record stores and took that money and pressed up some more, and paid my father back.”

Suck On This was released on Les’s own label, Prawn Song, in November 1989 and swiftly became a huge underground hit. Sensing an opportunity, the trio took the money they had made from selling their debut and hit the studio to record their debut studio album, Frizzle Fry, which emerged a few months later.

Full of songs that had been honed over their first few years as a live band, including Too Many Puppies and John The Fisherman, it was another word-of-mouth triumph and, against the odds, Primus were soon pursued by a number of record labels, including the recently founded Interscope Records.

"My manager didn’t want us to sign with Interscope because they had no track record, the only thing they’d ever released was that song Rico Suave by [Ecuadorian rapper] Gerardo,” says Les. “But their A&R guy, Tom Whalley, came to one of our shows, and he saw the crowd going crazy, came backstage and said that he wanted to sign us! He knew nothing about us. He didn’t know that we’d already sold 80,000 records on our own. I said, ‘This is who we’re going with, because he wants us because of us, and not because we sold 80,000 records…’ and obviously it worked out!”

Despite still being resolutely weird, Primus were well-suited to the musical developments of the early 90s. Their second album, Sailing The Seas Of Cheese, was widely associated with the then inescapable funk-metal movement that brought us the Chili Peppers, Faith No More and other bands that blended metal with slap bass, to varying degrees of efficacy.

In truth, it was a much more perverse and distinctive piece of work, with two sort-of-hit-singles – Jerry Was A Race Car Driver and Tommy The Cat – that became ubiquitous on MTV. The latter song was also played by Primus during a cameo in movie sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, which also helped to push the record towards its eventual gold status.

In constant demand as a live act, they spent the next few years touring relentlessly, pausing occasionally to make new albums, including the dark and moody Pork Soda (1993) and Tales From The Punchbowl (1995), which provided Primus with their next significant hit, Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver. A scratchy, country-funk riot, with a suitably bizarre video, its popularity threatened to reduce the band to a novelty act.

“Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver was a kind of double-edged sword,” says Les with a wry smile. “It was just going to be one of those upright bass and banjo ditties that we’d throw on a record for texture, but the record company picked it because it was catchy, and it became some kind of hit. But for a lot of people who didn’t necessarily know Primus, they thought we were a joke band after that. We became the beaver band!”

To make matters worse, Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver was commonly interpreted as a rather unsavoury tribute to Hollywood star Winona Ryder. Awkward.

“She approached me at a radio festival, and she was a little miffed. I said, ‘Hey, look, it’s not about you!’ In fact, it’s spelt differently! I just needed a name. It could have been Jessica or anything. But the song is literally about a beaver.”

An even more significant encounter with pop culture came in 1996, when South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone invited the band to record the theme song to their new TV show.

The duo had been fans of the band since they performed at the University Of Colorado in the 80s, for an event called Alferd Packer Day, named after the first person convicted of cannibalism in the United States during the gold rush era.

Pre-South Park, Parker and Stone would later make their directorial debut with Cannibal! The Musical, which Les would pick up on VHS during a trip to Tower Records in London, not knowing that its creators were Primus fans.

“I bought it because I remembered Alferd Packer Day, not knowing that Matt and Trey were the ones that made it. A few years later, we get a letter, ‘Hey, we’re big fans, can you do the theme song for this cartoon we’re doing?’ So we did it and obviously they’ve taken over the world!”

Primus spent the rest of the 90s making more weird music. Tim ‘Herb’ Alexander quit, and was replaced by new drummer Bryan ‘Brain’ Mantia, with whom the band released the grubby and polarising Brown Album in 1997.

“I relish the fact that it’s Tom Waits’ favourite Primus record,” says Les, referencing the grizzled American singer and frequent Primus collaborator. “He says, [gruff Tom Waits voice], ‘It sounds like it needs a good wash!’ Ha ha ha!”

1999’s Antipop was even more polarising. Released as nu metal became the dominant force in mainstream heavy music, it featured appearances from James Hetfield, Tom Morello and ex-Police drummer Stewart Copeland, and the album’s first single, Lacquer Head, was controversially produced by Fred Durst. The band still sounded as unique as ever, but the album’s reliance on star cameos and the presence of the Limp Bizkit frontman divided fans.

“It took a long time for me to be able to listen to Antipop, because it was an odd time for us as people,” Les explains. “It just got messy, we were in different head spaces. It was an awkward time. It was not fun anymore, so we stopped. I was thankful that we stopped before we shit our pants.”

Primus called it quits in the year 2000. Les Claypool embarked on a dizzying array of other projects, including Oysterhead and Colonel Claypool’s Bucket Of Bernie Brains, before seeing the error of his ways in 2003, whereupon the classic Primus line-up, featuring a returning Tim ‘Herb’ Alexander, reformed for some celebratory live shows.

The reunion did not last, and, by early 2010, Herb had fled the nest once again. He was replaced by Jay Lane (who’d also played with band in the late 80s), with whom the new-look Primus recorded 2011’s Green Naugahyde. By 2013, the latter was out and Herb was back in for a third go-round on the carousel.

But as chaotic as Primus may have seemed from the outside, Les and Larry were still having fun. In 2014, they released their most out-there album yet, a full-scale interpretation of classic 1971 movie Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory.

“There’s a few things, especially now I’m older, that I’ve had the idea to do, and I need to start knocking a few things off the list!” says Les. “I’ve always wanted to reinterpret the Willy Wonka movie. I told Ler that I wanted to do it and he was stoked. We only had a certain amount of time to perform it, because we had to get licences from Roald Dahl’s family, so it was one and done, but it was a lot of fun.”

2017’s The Desaturating Seven was equally leftfield, based on Italian author Ul de Rico’s classic children’s book The Rainbow Goblins, which the frontman used to read to his children when they were little. To date, it’s the last record the band have released, though Les says they hope to have their first album in a decade ready to roll (almost inevitably, it will feature yet another drummer, John ‘Hoffer’ Hoffman, replacing the once-again-departed Herb Alexander).

What Primus’s 10th album will sound like is anyone’s guess, though their new EP, A Handful Of Nuggs, gives a few clues, with strong echoes of the Frizzle Fry era filtered through a wonky, psychedelic lens (alongside a ripping version of Dio’s Holy Diver, sung in characteristically depressive fashion by cult clown Puddles Pity Party). But ultimately, who knows?

“It’s part of the joy and part of the agony,” concludes Les. “I always joked that we were ‘psychedelic polka’, but we’re this odd, eclectic, dynamic mixture of fromage. We’re like the gum on the bottom of your shoe!”

Funk? Metal? Psychedelia? Polka? Four decades in, and Primus remain gloriously unpredictable freaks following their own deranged logic. Long may they baffle.

A Handfull Of Nuggs is out now via AFO Records.

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 Talk Talk delivered their third album Spirit Of Eden, it took their record label by surprise. Asked to make it more pop-friendly to match their earlier successful output, leader Mark Hollis refused. The album didn’t do well on release in 1988 – but its stature has continued to grow since then, as Prog argued in 2009.

The term ‘progressive’ has come to denote – at least in the minds of the unthinking mainstream critics and consumers – a genre or style, something to do with sparkly capes and impenetrable lyrics about wizards.

Actually, most bands are progressive in their way, trying to move their music forward. It’s just that they don’t get the label because they don’t sound like King Crimson in 1969.

Talk Talk are a prime example of a band who progressed; a band who made a great leap forward and changed everything.

In interviews, frontman Mark Hollis always spoke about Miles Davis and Bela Bartok, though it was hard to square his professed influences with the happy-clappy synth pop that his band made.

Songs like My Foolish Friend and It’s My Life were beautifully crafted pop artefacts, but nobody at the time saw Talk Talk as anything other than the band you got into while Duran Duran were on a hiatus.

Talk Talk were successful Smash Hits and Top Of The Pops mainstays. Along with Culture Club, Tears For Fears and A Flock Of Seagulls, they were part of a second British invasion of the US.

Their big hit, 1986’s Life’s What You Make It, and the album The Colour Of Spring showed a new maturity as well as sustained Top 10 status. Their parent label EMI gave them carte blanche to record the follow-up: unlimited time and money with minimal interference. The result of a year spent in the studio was Spirit Of Eden, a monumental work whose iconic status continues to grow.

Constructed from hours of improvisations – sometimes they played in complete darkness to get the mood right – and edited by Hollis and producer Tim Friese-Greene, Spirit Of Eden bears little resemblance to the band’s pop incarnation. Plaintive Miles Davis-like trumpet solos are layered on top of glacially slow ambient washes; Hollis’ distinctive voice is the only thing with any seeming continuity with the band’s previous sound.

On hearing a cassette of the album, EMI panicked as executives saw their fat bonus cheques evaporate. They asked Hollis to replace some songs and rerecord others. He refused. The album sold poorly, partly because of the challenging nature of the material, but also because the band didn’t tour in support of it. It was, Hollis, admitted, impossible to play live.

In retrospect Spirit Of Eden and its almost-as-good follow-up Laughing Stock started a sea change in music – along with US rockers Slint – paving the way for a new post-rock underground movement that includes the more experimental side of Radiohead as well as Chicago-school bands like Tortoise.

Hollis, after one brilliant solo album, retired from music, and lived life away from the spotlight up until his death in 2019. But his legacy lives on through Spirit. Now regarded as a classic, it just took the rest of the world a little while to catch up.

It's been 10 years since Anthrax released their last album, For All Kings. In that time Slayer have split up and come back, while Megadeth have embarked on a lengthy farewell tour. Metallica remain at the top of the Big 4 pile, of course, but with the title of Anthrax’s new album hinting at another potential conclusion – Cursum Perficio translates from Latin to ‘My Journey Is Over’ – it seems like it’s time for them to drop something monumental. A fittingly heavyweight statement, even if it only proves to be the beginning of the end rather than the final stop.

Scott Ian has certainly been talking Cursum Perficio up, comparing it to the band’s defining moment, 1987’s Among The Living. It’s quite disappointing, then, that it gets off to a relatively tame start. Don’t believe the hype, as Anthrax’s good friends in Public Enemy once said.

There’s a brief orchestral intro as Persistence Of Memory gives a nod to 1990’s Persistence Of Time, before The Long Goodbye muscles in. Anthrax have become adept at mid-tempo, melodic chuggers and the song is perfectly fine. The lyrics, dealing with the protracted loss of a loved one, circle around the album’s sense of finality, but it doesn’t provide the explosive impact the occasion demands.

That comes with It’s For The Kids – a slice of classic Anthrash with all the elements that made them the fun pioneers of the thrash metal pack. There are Madhouse-style squeals of guitar, piledriving drums and a sledgehammer mosh section, all wrapped around sentiments that are far more serious than the song suggests.

Everybody’s Got A Plan drops back to a moderate pace before The Edge Of Perfection heaves into view. Scott, getting overly giddy again, has described it as the best song Anthrax have ever written. It isn’t, but the guitarist can be forgiven for getting excited about the fact that they’re still trying new things 45 years on. A near-seven-minute epic built on swaying atmospherics and with a frostbitten black metal feel in places, it’s an experiment that very much works.

Infectious is built on a slow, almost doomy rhythm while NYC 93 is another slab of stomping punk-metal nostalgia, and the title track is more dynamic hard rock than thrash metal. T.O.M.B. rides a driving groove, while Watch It Go channels a rasping Slayer vibe and pairs it with low-slung grungy riffs that wouldn’t have sounded entirely out of place in Metallica’s Load era. It’s been a diverse and sometimes surprising ride by the time My Victory brings things to a conclusion with a readily recognisable mix of heft and melody – the sort of mid-range thumper that Anthrax have grown comfortable in delivering over the years.

Cursum Perficio, then, mixes the familiar and nostalgic with a more adventurous streak that should only be applauded at this point in their career. It’s a perfectly serviceable Anthrax album with some excellent moments, but it’s not quite the glorious showstopper it could and perhaps should have been.

Cursum Perficio is out September 18 via Nuclear Blast.

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.

Marillion’s ever-present guitarist Steve Rothery tells Classic Rock about the band’s upcoming extensive British tour, a forthcoming studio album – the prog band’s twenty-first – and The Roaring Waves, his new collaborative record made with former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett.

Marillion frontman Steve Hogarth fell off stage recently in Frankfurt. Is he okay now?

Steve’s absolutely fine. He just used up one of his nine lives, I think.

Apparently he didn’t miss a beat, and continued to sing Easter from the photo pit.

Steve’s a professional and completed the rest of the show. He got off easily. He could have broken a leg, an ankle or anything else.

There’s a 14-date British tour beginning in September. With more than forty years’ worth of music, how do the band pick a setlist?

It’s about finding a balance between old and new. On this tour [of Germany] we’ve added one or two new songs as rehearsal for the two shows that are coming up in Pompeii. It probably will change a bit by the time we get home, especially from tonight and tomorrow in Leipzig, because those will pretty much be rehearsals for Pompeii, which we are filming.

You must be excited by the prospect of appearing at the legendary Amphitheatre rendered iconic by Pink Floyd playing there in the 70s.

I’m excited and a bit nervous, to be honest – especially about the heat. Over the last few days temperatures have been in the mid-thirties, so in Pompeii it could reach the forties. My valve-preamps have been crackered out. When we get there I might have to stick them in a bucket of water. During the eighties I visited Pompeii as a tourist, to play there is going to be mind-blowing. We’ve got a few surprises.

The press release for the British tour suggests that “hopefully” we will hear new material from Marillion’s forthcoming studio album.

We’ve been playing a new song every night. It’s called Rhythms And Lace. It’s a slow-builder with powerful lyrics and a long guitar solo at the end – so of course it’s gonna be great [laughs].

When, realistically, might the album be released?

If we get it mixed in December after we have finished touring, it could be out by the following springtime. Maybe around May?

Whose suggestion was it to have the Cornish alt. rock quartet Haunt The Woods as support act?

They have supported us a couple of times before. Their music is really interesting. They’re great musicians and a lovely bunch of people. We were more than happy to have them along again.

Outside of Marillion, you have a new collaborative album with Steve Hackett, The Roaring Waves. It’s a beautiful, evocative record that requires no words to depict the power of the sea.

Thank you. Yeah, we wanted something cinematic. You make movies in your head to go along with the music. I’m really satisfied that it came together the way it did. Steve and I had our first writing session nine years ago.

So there was plenty of time to percolate.

That’s right. The bulk of it was written in 2018 during a two-day jam session we had at [Marillion HQ] the Racket Club. Steve and I get on really well socially, which helps. It’s a really nice, noncompetitive collaboration.

Whose idea was the nautical concept?

Mine. I grew up in Whitby. In fact, Steve, Jo [Rothery’s wife] and I had a trip up there just after the pandemic. It was nice to show him around the place where the fifteen-year-old me listened to Genesis Live [1973] and was inspired by his playing.

Might you play a show or two with Steve?

Not yet, but what is being discussed is a second album. I’ve already got some ideas for that.

Were you sad and/or nostalgic to see your former bandmate Fish retire from touring in 2025?

It’s a shame that the world lost such a remarkable poet and frontman. His decision to live in such an isolated place [the Outer Hebrides] seemed like a very strong reaction to whichever pressures he has felt. But at the end of the day everyone deserves to be happy, and if he is then I understand that decision.

Marillion have no retirement plans at this stage?

We will carry on until one or all of us falls over.

Will you know when the time is right to stop?

At our ages, I don’t see us working beyond maybe six more years. But at the end of the day, what are we going to do? Retire and sit in our kitchens?

Marillion’s UK tour begins this evening (September 12) at the Guildhall
in Portsmouth. For full dates and tickets, visit the Marillion website.

After Mike Portnoy left Dream Theater acrimoniously in 2010, the band’s new line-up – featuring drummer Mike Mangini – faced the task of making an album that would answer all questions about their status as leading lights of prog metal. 2011’s A Dramatic Turn Of Events did just that. Around the time of its release, vocalist James LaBrie accepted the irony that Portnoy had been right when he’s said the band needed to change.

There can’t be many progressive drummers who’ve quit a band and caused quite so much of a stir as when Mike Portnoy left Dream Theater. Perhaps Cozy Powell replacing Carl Palmer in ELP, or Bill Bruford’s exit from Yes,. But often, drummers are seen as replaceable assets, and the ripples caused by Portnoy’s decision were decidedly rare.

Dream Theater’s rebuff when he wanted to rejoin a few weeks later, the quest to find a replacement, the hiring of Mike Mangini and the legal dramas that tend to follow acrimonious splits, would seem to have this a particularly stressful time for the band. Yet on the eve of the release of their new album, the aptly named A Dramatic Turn Of Events, frontman James LaBrie reveals it’s been far less of an upheaval than you might imagine.

“We knew we were swimming into uncharted waters,” he reflects. “The legal situation was definitely going on when we were in the studio, and that can be a distraction, but you’ve got to put everything in perspective. We knew it was going to come with the territory. We all realised it was going to be an exceptionally important album for us, and that there’d be scepticism. So I don’t think it was what most people would call a stressful period – it was just us accepting our situation and handling it with grace.”

With Portnoy’s departure, the reconvening members discovered that their studio dynamic had considerably changed. One of his pivotal roles had been musical director, guiding the band in terms of which riffs to adopt, which to discard, and forming the bigger picture of an album’s direction.

“Even though Mike was very involved, it’s really about John Petrucci and I, with some help from the others, writing the music,” explains keyboardist Jordan Rudess. “The biggest change that happened is that we put even more energy into making sure that everything we wrote was as fantastic as we could make it. We knew things were going to be under a microscope.

“Another thing is the freeing of John Myung’s spirit. He’s been more involved than he has been in a while. He’s writing some lyrics and he had a lot of riff ideas; he was very excited about going forward with the new situation. He really presented a lot of energy, whereas in past albums he was more in his quiet world doing his thing.”

LaBrie suggests that Portnoy’s absence also ensured that the atmosphere was far more conducive to writing , which allowed the previously withdrawn and somewhat reclusive Myung to flourish. “You could see the atmosphere was much more calm and relaxed, and far more interactive.” the singer says. “It really allowed everyone to be able to assert themselves throughout the entire process. John absolutely stepped so far up and onto the plate that it was unbelievable. He was just being himself, involved and dedicated – and the same goes for everyone.”

Rudess laughs: “The studio was a whole lot quieter as we didn’t have any drums in the room when we were writing! For me as a composer, having that space really helps. I mean, it’s kind of fun to write when there's a drummer in the room. They can certainly add something. But I prefer to write in a peaceful place. There was an atmosphere of patience surrounding the writing of this album; we’d give each other the time and space. I think it was productive.”

Certainly the band were more than aware that if their new album fell short, critics – and some fans – would castigate them for choosing to continue without Portnoy. Fortunately, A Dramatic Turn Of Events is one of the most alluring albums they’ve ever written, containing all of the elements that fans demand. Yet Rudess is pragmatic about the situation.

“Obviously we’ll have people who love Mike Portnoy, who won’t be able to accept the change; won’t be able to just listen to the music, and will probably still be bitter,” he admits. “I guess that’s just one of the things we’ll have to accept. That’s just real life. Mangini could be God’s gift to drumming and it wouldn’t matter. People will still miss Mike, which is understandable. I mean, with his personality he was such a big part of our situation, and yeah, I’m going to miss him too. But musically speaking, we’re all happy – the music lives on and I’m very pleased with how this new album turned out.”

“We knew we were going to be scrutinised because we were replacing somebody who was very much in contact with our fans worldwide,” says LaBrie. “For the most part, it was a matter of making sure that it would be a classic Dream Theater album. We had to really think about who and what we’ve been up until now, and then take it even further.

“We wanted to arrange all those classic elements so the progressive side and the heavy side were presented in a more complementary fashion. I think on some our albums, the heavy element overshadowed the progressive element. The beauty of this album is that everything is in its rightful place.”

There’s a huge irony, though – Portnoy’s primary reason for wanting a hiatus was that he perceived them as jaded in need of time apart to refresh themselves and return stronger. That’s definitely not lost on LaBrie. “Oh yes, it’s really ironic. I believe the universe has a way of orchestrating things to happen for a reason.

“Ultimately, I think the universe wants to give us back positive energy and vibes, and that’s exactly what’s happened here. A lot of people are saying you can really feel and see the spirit on stage every night. I think it’s been missing for quite some time, though we did a good job of camouflaging it.”

Can he pinpoint a time when the fun of touring started to disappear?“I think it’s been a little challenging, off and on, for the past 12 years, maybe more. You just keep finding ways to keep things in check – or worse, you start to accept it. You think that maybe this is the only way that it can exist. It’s not until you’re flipped upside down, and somebody gives you a fresh perspective, you even see it in that light.

“I think that if anything, what’s happened to us in the last year has proved to be a good thing. The bottom line is that we really love what we’re doing, and this has only enhanced our appreciation of our lives.”

By the time Carmine Appice joined Rod Stewart’s band in 1977, the powerhouse drummer was already rock royalty, having helped redefine hard-hitting heavy rock percussion as a founding member of Vanilla Fudge, Cactus, and the power trio Beck, Bogert & Appice. Yet, while his mammoth grooves brought an arena-ready edge to Stewart's band, Appice’s contribution to the singer's career went far beyond the drum kit—he would end up co-writing one of Stewart's biggest, most defining chart-topping hits of the decade, only to be sacked by the singer a few years later.

In the current issue of Classic Rock, Appice looks back on his uo-and-down career with Rod The Mod – as well as what he thinks about him as a performer. “Being in Rod’s band was the best,” says Appice. “I’d become really good friends with Rod when Cactus went on the road with the Faces. That’s when they were crazy – they had a bar on stage. After Cactus, I had a band called KGB with [guitarist] Mike Bloomfield, which didn’t happen. And I was asked to join Rainbow, but I couldn’t do it cos they were signed to someone else.

“Then I hear that Rod’s looking for a drummer. I get a message from Rod via his tour manager, saying: ‘Tell Carmine to come up to the house, see if he likes the band.’ Rod wasn’t there, but I knew those guys, [guitarist] Jim Cregan, [bassist] Phil Chen. Rod came back a couple of days later and says: “You got the job if you want it. Just one thing: how do you say your fuckin’ name? You’re like five different people.” (It’s pronounced ‘Ap-piece’, if you’re interested).

A highlight of the drummer’s time in the band was undoubtedly co-writing Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?, the disco-inspired monster hit that would give Rod a Number 1 on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Rod would say: ‘I want a song like Miss You by the Stones,’” recalls Appice. “I wrote it on a keyboard with a drum machine, I went to my buddy Duane Hitchings’ house, I played him the chords, we put a groove together, he wrote a bridge. So when we presented it to Rod it sounded like a finished song. He said: ‘Great, let’s do it.’

“We did it a few different ways - great big drums, big guitars, it sounded freakin’ great. Then [producer] Tom Dowd came in and put so much other junk on it – orchestra, percussion, Linda Lewis singing the high line. We were like: ‘Is that gonna work?’ Then it went to Number One in fifteen countries. I guess he knew what he was doing.”

Appice would stay with Rod until 1982, when he was fired by the singer – and he’s still not sure why it happened. “I don’t know, and neither does he. When I did my autobiography, he said in the intro: ‘I fired Carmine. Fuck knows why.’ There you go. Too much drinking, too much drugging, somebody didn’t like the fact that I was the second-most popular person in the band. I don’t remember how we made up. I went to one of his weddings. By ’83 or ’84 we were friends again.”

Appice currently leads the latest incarnation of Cactus, who have just released their new album, Cactus, Temple Of Blues II. Read the full interview in the new issue of Classic Rock, available to buy here.

Dave Mustaine has shared his memories of firing his long-time Megadeth colleague and former friend David Ellefson in a new extract from his forthcoming memoir, shared exclusively with Rolling Stone.

Mustaine sacked Megadeth's long-standing bassist in May 2021, after footage emerged online of Ellefson engaging in what he admitted were “private, adult interactions” with a fan.

At the time, the-then 56-year-old bassist said that the graphic video footage and texts were “taken out of context and manipulated to inflict maximum damage to my reputation, my career and family", and he later suggested that he would sue for defamation if the source of the 'revenge porn' leaks could be identified.

Within days, Ellefson was dismissed from the band, with Dave Mustaine writing, "We are informing our fans that David Ellefson is no longer playing with Megadeth. We do not take this decision lightly. While we do not know every detail of what occurred, with an already strained relationship, what has already been revealed now is enough to make working together impossible moving forward."

In the extract from his new book, In My Darkest Hour, Mustaine reflects on the situation.

"I found out about the scandal the same way that everyone else found out: I heard about it online. On May 10, 2021, sexually explicit videos of David Ellefson masturbating appeared on Twitter. The videos resulted from an online interaction with a nineteen-year-old Megadeth fan with whom Ellefson had engaged in some sort of relationship. When more details were revealed, the story quickly went viral. It was impossible to separate fact from fiction, truth from fantasy, as the internet exploded in typically histrionic fashion. But this much was clear: that was definitely David Ellefson, Megadeth bass player, in the videos."

Mustaine goes on to say that he was "reevaluating my nearly 40-year relationship with David and the turbulence it had so often caused in my life".

"We had played a lot of great music together," he acknowedges in the book. "We were codependent junkies, feeding and fueling each other’s addictions. Ultimately, we had grown apart, trust shattered (at least for me) by David’s 2004 lawsuit after the band’s breakup."

[Ellefson had filed a lawsuit against Mustaine in 2004, claiming that he was owed millions in outstanding royalties. The case was dismissed].

"Would David have remained a member of Megadeth if that video had not surfaced?" Mustaine muses. "Who’s to say? I’ve seen enough guys come and go with Megadeth, and I’ve experienced enough upheaval with David to know that the end was likely near. But, certainly, the scandal hastened the process."

In 2022, Mustaine discussed Ellefson's removal from the band in a Metal Hammer interview.

"Let me just say this – it was a hard decision that had to be made," he said. "There were a lot of people involved and I had to make a decision, because unfortunately, when you’re the leader, you’re the one that has to suck it up and face the music.

"All I wanted to do was make a clean break, and not hurt anyone, not hurt the fans and not hurt him," he continues. "I just wanted to move on, and I hope the gentleman concerned is doing okay."

In 2024, Ellefson also discussed the subject with Metal Hammer.

"There’s two sides to it," he said. "One: when you bare it all, you’ve got nothing to hide. Fuck it, now you can truly be yourself! We all come into the world with our birthday suit on, so what are we ashamed of? What I feel the worst about is the embarrassment that it caused some people, like my family, who didn’t deserve it."

Dave Mustaine's memoir will be released on September 24.

It's well-known that late Motörhead legend Lemmy Kilmister was fond of an alcoholic tipple, and was a generous host when inviting fans, friends, and peers to join him for a celebratory drink.

But as Ricky Warwick, frontman of The Almighty and Black Star Riders, and a solo artist in his own right, recalls in the new issue of Classic Rock magazine, trying to keep pace with the indomitable rock 'n' roll hero could be a challenging, and indeed potentially hazardous, pursuit.

When The Almighty first burst onto the UK music scene at the tail end of the 1980s, Ricky Warwick made no secret of the fact that Motörhead were one of the band's key influences, and that Lemmy was one of his heroes. As it turned out, Lemmy was a fan of The Almighty too.

"When we started coming to London we’d bump into Lemmy in places where he hung out, like the St. Moritz club [in Soho]," Warwick recalls. "He was brilliant with me straight off the bat, very friendly, very funny, and he always offered loads of advice."

In 1991, The Almighty were offered the opportunity to support Motörhead on their 1916 album tour, which Warwick recalls being "huge" for his band. Ahead of that tour, both Motörhead and The Almighty were booked play a music conference in Los Angeles called the Foundations Forum, and Lemmy invited Warwick to hang out whenever he got to LA.

"So we arrived at the hotel," Warwick tells Classic Rock, "and Lemmy had left a note for me, saying: 'I’m in room blah blah blah, come up.' It’s, like, three in the afternoon, and I’m jet-lagged to fuck, but I knock on this door, and there’s a full-on party going on.

"Through the smoke I see Lemmy in his denim cut-off, his tight denim shorts and a cowboy hat. They’d just finished mixing 1916, so he sat me down, racked me out the biggest fucking tramline of whatever the fuck it was, poured me a pint of Jack Daniel’s and Coke, put headphones on me, and goes: 'Listen to this'."

"I’m buzzing, I’ve got the new Motörhead blasting, and Lemmy keeps topping up my glass. I’m trying to be cool, but as it’s coming to the end of the album, the room is spinning, and I’m thinking, Fuck, I’m in a bad way here, this isn’t good."

What happened next makes for painful reading, even if Warwick is laughing as he shares the memory.

"So I get up to tell Lemmy what I think of the album," he continues, "and my legs just go, I fall flat on my face on the floor, the pint glass shatters and cuts my fucking eyebrow when I land on it, and I throw up at the same time.

"So I'm fucking lying there in a pool of blood, and vomit, and glass, and snot, and then I feel this acrid breath close to my face, and it’s Lemmy going, 'Warwick, you’re a fucking lightweight, you’ll never make it'."

Happily, losing face in front of Lemmy didn't ruin Warwick's friendship with the great man.

"We did the 1916 tour, and we couldn’t have been treated better," he recalls. "Lemmy and all the guys in Motörhead were just fantastic, and I miss them a lot."

You can read the interview in full in the new issue of Classic Rock.

In 2010 Prog tracked down some of Peter Gabriel’s collaborators on his solo and soundtrack albums, with the intention of offering an inside view of working with the Progfather – as we’d dubbed him, much to his amusement. While we were at it, we also asked some of prog’s biggest names if they had any opinions on the former Genesis frontman’s career. They didn’t disappoint.

Bob Ezrin – Producer, Peter Gabriel 1 (Car)

If there’s anything that made me work with Peter Gabriel in the first place it was his natural sense of humility. Humility in the Christian sense of the word, in that he’s a humble guy. I was impressed that a person that brilliant can also hold himself on such a realistic level of esteem.

All I know is that Peter played me Here Comes The Flood in my living room on our first meeting. I was in the middle of producing albums for both Kiss and Alice Cooper, working on tight deadlines. In the midst of all that I went to bed singing Here Comes The Flood instead of my own records! There’s not many songs I’ve heard fresh from the writer’s mouth that are that great.

Robert Fripp – Guitarist / producer, Peter Gabriel 2 (Scratch)

Peter’s second album is a much subtler proposition that tells a lot on the production side. I think it is impossible to judge unless one has listened to it at least a dozen times. Peter was afraid of using me as a producer. He knew that my production would not be “commercial” and he was right. I was not guaranteeing any hit.

What I wanted was to record him faithfully. I could have produced two or three cuts only and let Bob Ezrin do the others. So it was with some reserves on Peter’s commercial interests that I was chosen to produce the album.

Steve Lillywhite – Producer, Peter Gabriel 3 (Melt)

I think a lot of people have quoted Peter’s third album as being a new departure in sound. I see Peter as a really important artist. He’s extremely talented, but he has to push himself. It doesn’t come easy, unlike Phil Collins. Things probably come easier to Phil than to anyone I’ve ever met. And things come more difficult to Peter than to anyone I’ve ever met. He will put off making a decision until the last possible moment, – but that’s only because he doesn’t con himself into thinking he knows what he’s doing.

David Lord – co-producer, Peter Gabriel 4 (Security)

I like the way he really perseveres and struggles through things that you might not think would work. I could be sure he wouldn’t get a song out of an idea; sure that he was going round in circles and not getting anywhere – but he always knew at the end of it he would.

He doesn’t like being proved wrong, though he’s not dogmatic. Most of the people I think are interesting musically would regard Peter as being influential, though I don’t know how much effect he has had on the mainstream hit parade stuff.

Alan Parker – director, Birdy

We got on so well; he’s such a sweet man. It was such a refreshing change from working with megalomaniacs like Roger Waters.

Peter’s record company were very difficult to begin with, and so I phoned them to ask if they’d mind if Peter took a little time to do Birdy. They said as long as it didn’t take more than a couple of months, because he was already a year late or something.

He had strong views and I would never be able to persuade him to do something he didn’t feel comfortable with – but we didn’t have any confrontation as such.

Tony Levin – bassist, So

On Big Time I asked the drummer, Jerry Marotta, to play on the bass strings while I did the fingering – not a new idea, but what is?! Then, live, I was attempting to play that part with a drumstick in my hand. One day at soundcheck, Peter looked at me and said: “why don’t you attach sticks to your fingers?”

What a great idea! I asked my tech, Andi Moore, to help devise a way to do it, and voila, Funk Fingers! Of course, the first sets broke the bass strings – some adjustments had to be made!.

Martin Scorsese – director, The Last Temptation Of Christ

I began listening to Peter’s music back in 1982-83 and I especially liked Rhythm Of The Heat with its drums, and then I Go Swimming where the lyrics start quite ordinarily before taking off to reach a spiritual level – especially in the live version.

I said I’d be interested in having him do the music for The Last Temptation Of Christ because, for me, the rhythms he uses reflect the primitive and his vocals reflect the sublime – it’s as if the spirit and the flesh are together right there.

Of course, he had to do it as a labour of love because there was hardly any money in it. Normally, he says, it takes two years to do 40 minutes of music, and this was two hours and 40 minutes, which he did in three months!

Daniel Lanois – producer, Us

It’s true that Peter likes detail, but he also likes performance a lot. Having watched him for a long time now, I know this is the aspect of recording that he enjoys the most: giving it hell and jamming it out with the band. His attention to detail generally goes into the area of sonic creativity. He likes to break new ground sonically and I encouraged him to spend time on that.

David Noyce – director, Long Walk Home and Rabbit Proof Fence

I think Peter’s major contribution to the film Rabbit Proof Fence was not only to underscore the drama that is the traditional function of a film composer – but he also gave the film a poetry. Peter was largely responsible for allowing the audience to really participate in the emotions that were at play in the story.

What he said to me at first was: “I want to do a score that comes out of the earth. I want to do a score that expresses the Aboriginal ’oneness’ with their land.” He said he wanted me to provide him with all the real sounds that would be used in the effects and atmosphere track of the film – birds, insects, winds, rain, water, all sorts of animal sounds.

He then sampled, programmed and synthesised these sounds, and made them part of his score.

Richard Chappell – engineer, Up

I think Peter invited Tchad Blake because he was producing himself and wanted to have a fresh pair of ears towards the end of the project to keep things under control. Tchad is very strong-willed – having someone like him around is a good discipline. We tried out a few songs with him, and Peter liked the results, so we kept going.

Tchad is a genius with what he can do sonically. Peter would be in here recording things with me for the same song that Tchad was mixing, and we’d walk towards the main building to add these things to the mix. Tchad would either agree or disagree, and they’d have to figure out between them what was going to be used.

Not only… but also:

Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull: “Peter Gabriel’s work has always been admirable and innovative, from the arty, theatrical beginnings of Genesis through to his latest, sans guitar and drums covers. He defies convention and searches out the deeper and more satisfying reaches of rock music without it ever losing all popular and commercial appeal. Clever chap, that Gabriel!”

Doug Pinnick, King’s X: “I’ve been a fan since Genesis – Sledgehammer is one of the funkiest jams there is. And the man has soul.”

Arthur Brown: “Peter’s modesty has not hidden the immensity of his achievements. His generosity and integrity matched his love for worldwide music. He carried out a vision. To do that you need strength and courage.”

Sonja Kristina: “Curved Air and Genesis shared the same bill in 1970. Peter was very shy and silent offstage, yet very extrovert and eccentric in his performance on stage. His first solo album was one of the few albums that really engaged me.”

Tom Morello, Rage Against The Machine: “He’s one of my all-time favourite artists. His song Biko is as moving and inspiring as any song I’ve ever heard. He is a true artist who brings a powerful poetic, musical and humanistic vision to life in his work.”

Taylor Hawkins, Foo Fighters: “He’s a unique character. He’s got the artistic integrity of Neil Young and the constant restiveness to push the envelope of David Bowie. I’d still love him to do some shows with the great Genesis line-up though!"

Carmine Appice: “I love Peter Gabriel’s genius – all his theatrical masks. His approach and voice are unique. He’s a great, innovative talent.”

Steven Wilson: “Peter is one of a small group of innovators that completely deconstructed the blueprint of popular music and reinvented it as something fresh. As a producer and a songwriter he’s been an inspiration to me.”

Mike Portnoy, Dream Theater: “I have a deep appreciation for his Genesis years, obviously. Foxtrot, Selling England and The Lamb are landmark prog albums. But unlike many prog icons who went solo, Peter Gabriel continued to push the envelope with each album. His solo albums are as close to studio perfection as you can get.”

Roye Albrighton, Nektar: “The guy is innovative. My all-time favourite tracks with him are Carpet Crawlers and Don’t Give Up – the latter is a truly moving piece.”

Trevor Rabin: “Peter Gabriel is a true artist. He never ’settles’ – he’s always pushing, from Foxtrot to Sledgehammer. I love him.”

After the somewhat divisive 1998 album Diabolus in Musica, Slayer entered The Warehouse studio in Vancouver with producer Matt Hyde, bristling with a renewed sense of purpose.

With a working title of Soundtrack to the Apocalypse, the band's 13-song effort sounded leaner, hungrier, and more pissed off than they had in recent memory.

“I think we refocused on God Hates Us All," King said on the Metal Hammer: In Residence podcast in 2016. "I think in the '90s, me and Jeff Hanneman just didn’t pay any attention to anything.

"I didn’t like where music was going and I let it get to me for the only time in my career – and that was basically the 90s," he added. "I couldn’t understand why things were popular and it just bummed me out completely, and I had to forget about it and refocus because it was just bringing me down."

Their 1996 punk covers album, Undisputed Attitude, was, according to King, a reaction to the pop-punk explosion led by the likes of The Offspring and Green Day.

“It’s not their fault, but everyone called them punk bands and me and Jeff were like, ‘This isn’t punk, guys.’" said King. "We just took offence to it and Undisputed Attitude was that coming out.

“For me especially, it took 1998’s Diabolus In Musica to come out and get past that and then say, ‘This ain’t what Slayer’s about, we gotta redefine and show everybody that Slayer’s still here and not trying to be somebody we’re not.’ I think that’s what God Hates Us All was."

The title Soundtrack to the Apocalypse was eventually shelved for later use (a career-spanning box set would bear its name in 2003) and, after hanging out with Pantera, it was decided that God Hates Us All would be a more appropriate title for their new album. Taken from a line in the song Disciple, their ninth studio recording was set for a July 2001 release.

“I played the songs for Pantera and they were like, ‘Man, God Hates Us All would be a great shirt!’" King told Ink 19. "I was like, ‘That would be a great title for the record!’"

The scheduled summer release was nixed, thanks in part to mixing issues and a change in record label distribution. The heavy-handed, problematic artwork, a bloodied Bible with nails driven through it, didn't help matters either. King later admitted that the cover “looked like a seventh grader defaced the Bible”. A slipcase, featuring a a series of gold crucifixes arranged in a pattern, was created to allow the album to be sold in larger, more family-friendly outlets.

The album was met with largely positive reviews. "Don't worry – eight albums into their reign, Slayer still sound like Slayer," said Spin, while Rolling Stone reckoned it was the band's most brutal record since 1986's immortal (or undead) Reign in Blood."

With everything in place, God Hates Us All was set to come out in the second week of September 2001.

Slayer's autumn was tightly scheduled. The day after the band's record release party at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on September 10, they planned to fly from Los Angeles to Ireland. There, they would play the inaugural Tattoo the Planet show in Dublin on September 13.

Slayer were set to co-headline with Pantera on a bill that also featured Cradle of Filth, Biohazard, Static-X, Vision of Disorder, and Raging Speedhorn.

Then on September 11, America woke up to horrifying news.

At 8:46 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. At 9:03 a.m., a second plane, Flight 175 was flown into the South Tower. Every passenger died along with an unknown number of casualties inside each building,

Another aeroplane, Flight 77, hit the side of the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. A total of 184 people died at the scene. An hour after the second tower was hit, passengers overpowered the plane's hijackers and crashed the aircraft in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

Millions of people would witness the Twin Towers collapse live on television, while news outlets would later report that 2,996 people had died, including the terrorists who had hijacked the aeroplanes.

International travel was thrown into chaos and uncertainty; North American airspace was closed completely until September 13.

Pantera, who were already in Europe preparing for the tour, announced that they would no longer participate in the Tattoo the Planet dates and would return home as soon as possible.

“There are no words worthy to express the sorrow we feel for those who lost loved ones in yesterday’s terrible tragedy,” the band said in a statement. “We have made the decision to cancel our participation in the upcoming Tattoo the Planet tour of Europe that was scheduled to begin tomorrow, Thursday, September 13. We apologise to our international friends and fans that we planned on jamming and partying with, but there is absolutely nothing in the world worth compromising their safety or ours.”

“It was kind of the end for them as a band, so maybe it was a relief in some way, maybe deep down they didn’t want to do it," King told Metal Hammer. "But that wasn’t an option for us.”

Araya told Irish magazine Hot Press why they would continue to perform: “I think we’d be letting our European fans down if we cancelled. We all have families and are aware of the potential dangers. But many kids in Europe have experienced attacks and assaults and terrorism throughout their lives, so I think Slayer should make the effort to go over there and play for them.

"As a band, we simply refuse to play into the hands of these terrorists. We won’t allow them to disrupt our lives any further.”

Slayer eventually made it to Europe, having already lost "a lot of money" keeping their crew on standby until the shows began.

The first show took place on September 22, at the Kongresshalle Böblingen, Ida-Ehre-Platz, alongside Cradle of Filth and Destruction.

"Traditionally, the show must go on, which is a stupid thing to say. But that, in a nutshell is what's going on," King told Ink 19. "We have a new record out; if we won't tour, the new record dies. It's reality – it's what business is nowadays. You just need to tour to sell your albums. If you don't tour, you cannot expect to sell huge numbers of your albums either. It was both a business and an economical decision and we wanted to play anyway. We just wanted to get out for the tour when it was safe enough for us.

"[I didn't feel] as safe as I did before for some obvious reasons," he added about their journey to Europe, "but it's probably the safest time in recent history, with all this passing through tight security and stuff."

While a national tragedy hung heavily over the release of God Hates Us All, its intensity, coupled with the band's resilience in the weeks following the attacks, resonated with their fans, marking a return to form after a creatively unsteady period.

The band later sparked controversy on their 2006 album Christ Illusion, when they were inspired to write about the 9/11 attacks from the perspective of terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta. On the song Jihad, written by Hanneman and Araya, the outro lyrics were based on a document belonging to Atta.

When Eric Vanlerberghe isn’t screaming or growling as frontman of I Prevail, chances are he can be found backstage playing a round of Magic: The Gathering with a bunch of other band dudes.

“It’s fun and crazy to think some death metal fan is probably like, ‘Oh, I Prevail suck. They’re just weak shit!’” he laughs. “Well, I’m actually good friends with your favourite bands and we’re playing trading card games!”

Ahead of I Prevail’s Violent Nature tour hitting the UK this autumn, Eric tackles your toughest questions…

If you have one fully cooked lasagna, and then stack a second fully cooked lasagna on top of the first one, how many lasagnas do you have? The_Wurdalak, Instagram

“I have an answer that is a question: Do you count a lasagna by how many layers? Is it like, after nine layers or six layers, that’s it? If you don’t, then if you put another lasagna on top of a lasagna and bake it together, I’d say it’s one lasagna. But, if you just take this precooked lasagna and this other cooked lasagna, you stack it on top, it’s two separate lasagnas. A lasagna sandwich.”

What’s your favourite word to scream or growl? Mike O’Neill, Facebook

“There’s a line in Bad Things where I scream ‘fun!’ And anything with the ‘e’ sound is a fun sound to scream… it’s the most metal of the syllables.”

Hammer: When did you first try screaming or growling?

“After I found Metallica in eighth grade. I went from a private school to a public school and, as I was making friends, someone gave me a Ride The Lightning CD. After that, I was searching for heavier bands and came across Slipknot. When I realised it was just one guy doing the singing, screaming and shouting, I was like, ‘How do they do that?’ Whenever I was riding with my friends to school or driving myself, I’d have that 10-minute drive to try to figure it out.”

What’s the closest you’ve ever come to being arrested?
Andy May, email

“In Prague. I had a neck issue and had some medication. I usually have a backpack for tour and I left that bag sitting in my room with the medication for eight months or so. Right before I left for that tour, I dumped my bag and saw the pills, and I was like, ‘Oh, toss them. I don’t need them.’

We’re in the Prague airport… Dylan [Bowman, guitarist/vocalist] and I are boarding, and the dogs sniff and paw our bags, so the cops pull us aside. We almost missed our flight and ended up in a Prague prison, but they let us go. I guess it turned out the dogs smelled the pills on the bag that had been in there. We were like, ‘Oh shit, we’re going to prison in Europe. This is not good!’”

What’s your musical guilty pleasure? Thrashmemetal, Instagram

“I don’t think any of my musical pleasures are guilty; I’ll own up to them all! I mean, it used to be cool to hate Nickelback, but I never stopped listening to Nickelback. There’s some Japanese pop artists that I really like and some K-pop I’ve come across. I’ll play it in my truck, coming out of Whitechapel and going into something pop or country.”

Who’d be your dream collaboration, no limits?
Mae Samson, email

“I recently became acquainted with my new friend, Teddy Swims, and I think that would be an insane collaboration. I know he comes from the rock and not metal world, but man, he’s got such a unique and beautiful voice. I think that would be a really cool way to make an I Prevail song with some R’n’Bvibes to it… I know he can scream.”

When are you gonna collab with Lzzy Hale again? JeremyWilliams81574, Instagram

“I don’t know if we’ll do another original song together. It’s hard to catch lightning in a bottle twice, as they say. But it’d be cool next time if Halestorm come through Detroit and I’m home, or vice versa, or we’re on tour near them and Lzzy can come out. Maybe the stars will align and we can perform Can U See Me In The Dark? again.”

What’s the greatest challenge you’ve prevailed over?
James Vernon, email

“We’ve had quite a few over the last decade in the band. One that we’re still trying to navigate is the death of our manager, Dave Shapiro; that was very difficult. We released our first song on the new record, Violent Nature, the day after we found out that Dave passed.

Getting ready for the tours, the announcements and all the things that are involved in releasing a new record, we were just ghosts walking through that release because we didn’t have our best friend with us. He was huge in the rollout and the plans for world takeover. To go through everything, missing him, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to go through.”

Hammer: How did it impact the band?

“To come together through that loss and grief, and continue pushing forward and get back out on the road and tour… it really made our bond between the five of us stronger. The emotional walls came down, and we’re able to communicate more deeply and effectively with each other through this year-long grieving. Wherever he is, floating in the sky right now, whatever you believe in, he’s got his hands on things. He’s looking out for us.”

What are your favourite albums of all time (metal and non-metal)?
Niamh_Honor, Instagram

“I’d have to say Slipknot’s Iowa is up there. The Artist In The Ambulanceby Thrice is one of my favourite records of all time. Some of the riffs, the vocals and the writing, I think, set the stage for the new age, MySpace metalcore era. Nothing But Thieves’ Dead Club City has been one of my favourite records since it came out.And I’ll give a shoutout to Citizen’s Youth. I absolutely love that record; it’s timeless.”

Where would you take us if we came to visit Southfield, Michigan?
Smileybones, email

“I grew up in the St Clair Shores area, so I’d take you to Lake St Clair – but it’s not one of the Great Lakes, so I’d have to take you to one. I just opened a trading card shop, Black Vault Gaming, with some friends in St Clair Shore, so if you’re a nerd, I’d have to show you there. There’s a bunch of breweries and new restaurants too, and they’re all right off the water. It feels like a coastal town, but you’re in the Midwest.”

Hammer: What was the idea behind opening Black Vault Gaming?

“In lockdown, I’d invite friends over to hang out, listen to music and just have some connection. My buddy was like, ‘You want to learn how to play Magic: The Gathering?’ I was like, ‘Sure!’ I became obsessed with it: the whole aspect of building a deck, meeting new friends that played and having this new language to speak with them. Then, once we got to tour again, I started making friends with bands on the road, ‘Oh, you play Magic, too? Dude, I brought a deck. Do you want to play?’

Like Fit For A King; I became really good friends with those guys through playing Magic after shows. We started a group chat and added Josh [Moore] from We Came As Romans, and now we have 40 people in that chat, all from different bands. We’d go to MagicCon, and, through that, I made friends with these guys that owned a card shop in my hometown, and they were going to start a new store. I said, ‘That sounds awesome. I’d love to be involved.’”

Your birth name is Richard, but you go by Eric. Do you hate all Richards?
Richard Dudfield, email

“No, I don’t! I went to a small private school [as a kid] and my last name’s Vanlerberghe, so I was one of the last to get called on the first day of school. Every year it would be: ‘Richard Vanlerberghe?’ All the kids would laugh, make fun of me and call me ‘Dick’. I didn’t like it. I was like, ‘It’s actually Eric.’

The story I got growing up was, my mom’s got 15 brothers and sisters, and the brothers were into sports and Air Jordan. My dad’s name is Richard; he goes by Rick, so they started calling me ‘Little Rick’ and ‘Ricky’, and I think there’s a baby card somewhere that they signed ‘Air-Rick’. The other story I heard is, my mom was like, ‘I was looking at a baby book and it said Eric and Richard were synonymous.’ So they just started calling me Eric. Sometimes I forget my real name’s Richard!"

Violent Nature is out now via Fearless. I Prevail's UK tour starts on September 19.

Oasis have given their strongest hint yet that they'll be returning to the road in 2027.

Last night, September 10, the Manchester band arranged a drones display over their hometown, with their logo, the date 14.09.26 and the time 4pm BST [16:00], illuminating the sky above the Etihad's Joie Stadium, home to Manchester City Women's football team.

The band have been teasing their return in recent weeks with a series of subtly coded videos on their social media channels. Eagle-eyed fans poring over the videos have suggested that Glasgow's Celtic Park, Manchester's Etihad Stadium and Knebworth, the site of their historic 1996 concerts, will be among the venues hosting shows next summer. There have also been nods towards gigs in Paris, Rome and Amsterdam.

Earlier this month, during an interview on UK radio station TalkSport, Noel Gallagher dropped a less-than-subtle hint about the band's return, saying, "There’s no football tournament on next year, so we’ve got to do something in the summer, right?"

News of a 2027 tour is set to follow on from this week's release of Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger, a new documentary film charting the band's hugely successful 2025 reunion tour, which grossed $405,428,435 according to Pollstar.

The film's producer Steven Knight, who also created Peaky Blinders, House of Guinness and SAS: Rogue Heroes among others, says: “The Oasis world tour united generations, cultures and countries and spoke to a broken world about reconciliation.

"Don’t Look Back In Anger is not only your ticket to the show – it’s a backstage pass and a seat at the table when Liam and Noel sit down together for the first time in 15 years and tell it how it is and how it was.”

The film has received overwhelmingly positive reviews.

"An epic summer for Oasis fans becomes a euphoric cinematic experience," film magazine Empire stated." It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely, maybe the decade’s best concert movie yet."

We're back with a brand new Tracks Of The Week! This week we've got another seven new and diverse slices of progressively inclined music for you to enjoy.

Congratulations to Welsh heavy proggers Godsticks, whose guitar and bass playthrough of Hold Back got the most votes last week. Well done boys! Downes Braide Association came in second, with Wingan prog rockers Boss Kelod in a respectable third place.

The premise is simple - we've listened to a batch of new releases by bands falling under the progressive umbrella, and collated them together in one post for you - it makes it so much easier than having to dip in and out of various individual posts, doesn't it?

The idea is to watch the videos (or listen if it's a stream), enjoy (or not) and also to vote for your favourite in the voting form at the bottom of this post. Couldn't be easier, could it? We'll be bringing you Tracks Of The Week, as the title implies, each week. Next week, we'll update you with this week's winner and present a host of new prog music for you to enjoy.

If you're a band and you want to be featured in Prog's Tracks Of The Week, send your video (as a YouTube link) or track embed, band photo (please, don't forget the photo!) and biog with quotes to us here.

LONELY ROBOT - THE RIVER

Lonely Robot have shared a new video for their latest single, the reflective The River. It's the third single to be taken from the band's farewell album, An Ending, which is released today through White Knight Records. It's the sixth and final album from the band. And, dare we say it, one of their very best!

“The River represents the first time within the Lonely Robot universe that I have embarked upon a writing collaboration with someone, which in turn somewhat ironically renders the process a little less lonely," mainman John Mitchell explains. "Writing and recording The River with Jez (Fielder) proved to be a most fruitful partnership centred around themes of memories and loss born of our shared life experience as a pair of adopted kids.”

ØLYP - MOLDEN

France-based instrumental prog metal duo Ølyp are a new one for us, but we're mightily impressed with what we've heard so far. They are Thibaud Lépicier (guitar, bass, additional production) and David Annenkoff (drums) and they will release their debut album, I(m)MORTAL, through Klonosphere Records/Season Of Mist on November 25, on which the addition of violin, viola and cello, pushes the band's cinematic side even further.

"I(m)MORTAL explores humanity’s increasingly fucked-up relationship with nature, environmental collapse and our own role in shaping what comes next," the pair say. "And they do it without a single lyric, just massive instrumental landscapes that swing between beauty and total devastation."

QUIVIRA - THE TURK/FOLLOW THE WIND

US progressive rock trio Quivira have shared a video for their latest single, The Turk/Follow The Wind. It's taken from the band's recently released self-titled debut album, which is out now through Melodic Revolution Records. The band hail from Topeka, Kansas and the connection is further emboldened by the fact the band feature Jake Livgren, nephew of Kansas founding member Kerry Livgren, as well as a member of Proto-Kaw. He's joined by John Baker (Mars Hollow) and keyboardist Lisa LaRue.

The band's debut album focuses on the story of pre-Kansas “Quivira”, the Native American villages that Coronado believed held gold.

KOMPENDIUM - LILLY

Steve Hackett stars in the new video from Robert Reed's Kompendium project, a director's cut of whose Beneath The Waves was released last week through Tigermoth Records. Hackett features on an extended version of the track Lilly. The original album was released in 2012, and alongside the former Genesis guitarist also featured the likes of Gavin Harrison, Nick Barrett, Jakko Jackzyk, Francis Dunnery, Chris Fry, John Mitchell, Nick Beggs, Troy Donockley, Mel Collins, Steve Balsamo and Angharad Brinn.

"I always thought the album was one of the best things I’ve ever done, so as it was out of print, I thought it would be a great opportunity to get the album to a new audience," Reed says. "Also, there were some compromises made with the original album, as there always are towards the end of making any album. Some songs are left off because of time constraints, some not finished, and other choices made in the mix, as you really run out of time and have to say it's finished at some point."

GIANT SKY - LIFTING APPLES

Giant Sky, the solo project from Norwegian musician Erlend Viken, best known as the vocalist, keyboardist and principal songwriter of acclaimed progressive rock outfit soup, have shared their latest single, Lifting Apples. It's taken from Giant Sky III, the third and final instalment of the band's trilogy, which features a guest appearance from Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite. A companion album, The Further We Go The Deeper It Gets, will follow on October 16.

"This album has been with me for a long time," says Viken. "Some of the ideas on Giant Sky III go back many years, and in a way it feels like a cross-section of the last 25 years of my life as a composer. We live in a time where music is increasingly shaped by algorithms, AI and endless digital possibilities. I suppose this record is my way of walking upstream a little bit — taking the slower route, trusting the human imperfections, and letting the music find its own shape. It wasn't a quick album to make, but I'm proud of what it became: ambitious where it needed to be, modest where it should be, and above all, honest.”

SAMUEL JACKSON FIVE - TEMPORARY HAPPINESS REVIVAL

The rather brilliantly named Norwegian instrumental art/prog/post-rock quintet, The Samuel Jackson Five, have shared their latest single, Temporary Happiness Revival. The track is taken from the band's upcoming album, A Passage to Elsewhere, which is released through Karisma Records on October 30.

"Temporary Happiness Revival quickly became a unanimous favourite within the band, and one we knew early on that we were on to something special," the band say. "Built around a sense of nostalgia and quiet optimism, the track aims to capture the feeling of warm summer evenings, the scent of youth. And a bittersweet longing for simpler times. Musically, it blends James Jamerson-inspired bass grooves, neoclassical piano, tape loop experiments, shimmering 80’s synth textures, and traces of imaginary folk music into a lush and layered sonic landscape."

DITCH THE DEMON - MEAT HONEY

Hastings psych/prog rockers Ditch The Demon return with another new single, the distinctly creepy Meat Honey. No, we're not sure what it means, either, but the band describe it as "a prog-rock’n’rollercoaster of a song about the Devil’s hunger for fresh souls." The band’s forthcoming second studio album Fallen Angels, is now due for release early next year.

"Meat Honey came about after bassist Steph stumbled upon an article about vulture bees feasting on carrion, which sparked an idea for a tongue-in-cheek spin on rock music’s obsession with the Devil," the band state. "The accompanying video was shot on a shoestring budget at a former Hastings tap house owned by a neighbour of vocalist Amanda Brooks-Byron. The band’s drummer Neil Warman does his best to look 'seductive yet sly’ in his portrayal of Lucifer…"

A man has accepted a charge of outraging public decency at Leicester Magistrates Court after being seen having sex on a Ferris wheel at Download Festival in June.

Nottinghamshire man Innes Miller, 33, pleaded guilty to the offence following the incident at the festival on June 13.

Footage of the encounter, which took place shortly before headliners Guns N’ Roses took the main stage on the Saturday evening was widely circulated over social media after the festival. And it was reported in court that Miller learned of the public outcry after his boss rang him to tell him, 'You’re all over the internet'."

Miller had initially refused to comment when questioned by police, but pleaded guilty during his court appearance yesterday, September 10.

The complaint against Miller was made by a woman who had taken her son for a ride on the Ferris wheel at the same time.

The Nottingham Post reports that prosecutor Sally Bedford told the court, "At lunchtime on the Saturday, [the witness] decided to take her young son on the Ferris wheel.

"Her son, who has autism, looked round and said, 'Oh my God, what are they doing?'

"She looked and could see the woman standing up but bent over, and her head was hanging to the side, and the man was behind, and they were clearly engaging in sexual intercourse.

"Other people with children were having picnics, and a number of people's attention was drawn to what was going on.

"[The witness] said she was mortified. She said her son was in shock and since the incident, her son's behaviour has changed."

When contacted by police, the woman involved in the incident, who had met Miller earlier on the day in question, was apologetic and admitted the offence immediately, and therefore was not prosecuted.

Miller, who is studying civil engineering at Nottingham College, was fined £80 and ordered to pay £85 court costs and a £32 victim surcharge. His lawyer told the court that he was "thoroughly ashamed and embarrassed" about the "moment of madness".

Steven Wilson has announced that he will release his latest studio album, Requeim For A Village, through Fiction Records on November 6. He has also shared a video for the album's title track.

Earlier this week Wilson telegraphed the release of the album with a seemingly cryptic website, also titled Requiem For A Village, changing the imagery on his social media pages and releasing a short video trailer which featured the Scottish actor David Tennant.

Tennant provides the narration on the new album, Wilson's ninth, which steps back from the modern world and ventures into the unfamiliar, settling in a village that exists beyond time and place. He is joined on the album by former XTC man Andy Partridge, who has written the narration and some of the lyrics, multi-instrumentalist Randy McStine, drummer Russell Holzman (on the tracks Requiem For A Village, Now Departing, A Basket Of Bees and Wheel) and vocalist Katherine Priddy (Murmuration).

"I wanted to get back to a kind of music where you can hear the metaphorical thumbprints," Wilson says. "Doubling down on the human gestures and flaws in the music, stuff that can’t be created using software. For example, using only analogue synths with all their unpredictability, or not having instruments perfectly in tune. But it also led to me picking up the violin, the oboe, or trying my hand on the drums – playing things I don’t really know how to play but getting something out of them that inspired me in ways I didn’t expect. Approaching the music with a sense of innocence and seeing where it took me. And where it took me was to the village."

Wilson will be hosting a night at The Social in central London on September 22. Songs From The Village will act as an introduction to all the music that inspired the album, where Wilson will perform a DJ set featuring both songs from the album and the music that inspired it: "expect everything from the gauzy otherness of Boards of Canada and Demdike Stare, the haunted ragas of Third Ear Band, to the creeping dread found in British children’s TV and other broadcasts from the ’70s." All proceeds from tickets will go to the Here 2 Belong charity, which provides first home kits for care-experienced young people stepping into independence.

Get tickets.

Requiem For A Village will be available on CD, Blu-Ray, 140g two 12” black vinyl, oxblood coloured two 12” vinyl and as a boxset featuring 2 CDs, Blu-Ray disc packaged in a 96-page hardback book box. Limited amounts of signed CDs will be available through Amazon, and CDs with exclusive packaging will be available through HMV.

Pre-order here.

Wilson will play two sold-out shows at the Royal Albert Hall on October 28 and 29, accompanied by his band, the Parallax Orchestra & Sansara choir, conducted by Tom Richards, playing previously unheard orchestral arrangements of The Overview and more which have been prepared especially for these shows.

Steven Wilson: Requiem For A Village
1. Swirl In A Lark’s Eye
2. Requiem For A Village
3. The Same River Twice
4. Now Departing
5. Hiraeth
6. On Chapel Slope
7. Murmuration
8. Curcus Fingerprint
9. A Basket Of Bees
10. Great Green Map
11. Wheel
12. The Old God Is Buried

Mastodon’s first two albums, Remission and Leviathan, turned them into cult underground sensations, but it was 2006’s major label debut Blood Mountain that announced their arrival to the wider world. Hammer caught up with the prog metal boundary-pushers on the road that summer to talk psychedelics, mountaineering and ‘magical gnomes’.

Sky’s gone red again.

The noise is whirling rotor-blades glancing off rocks, and human voices stretching and screaming as one into a fierce, hot ash-flecked wind. A 90° incline with failure snapping at our heels and fate spunking in our faces. Traction. Grit. Endurance. Love and death in the afternoon going on here at Blood Mountain.

I’m listening to the new Mastodon album, Blood Mountain, and instead of noting the skilfull synthesis of their key influences – Melvins, The Call Of Ktulu, bits of Kyuss, bits of Slayer, seasickness and hallucinogens – my head’s stuck on two things. One: the colour of the sky in a level of a computer game I haven’t played since I was 13. Two: an abstract symbol of cod-philosophy in a ropey 1960s sci fi novel. It’s making my head feel fucking trippy.

“The blood could also mean ‘blood brothers’, you know?” suggests Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher. “Like, family as well. Our mountain. It’s our journey.”

“Or it could mean the fuckin’ blood of many slain, tryin’ to get to the top,” snarls his Flying V-toting counterpoint, the ink-scrawled, demon-eyed Brent.

“It could be the blood of the devil that is us,” chuckles Bill, with only the mildest mock-profundity.

“Could be the fuckin’ blood comin’ outta the devil’s penis,” rages Brent, tattooed arms flailing around his head, eyes flying-saucer-wide. “Peein’ on the top of the mountain, tryin’ to wash us away… ”

“Wash away the sins. Of humanity,” says Bill solemnly.

“That’s right, dude.”

So what happens at the top?

Brent bounds into life, suddenly ferocious in the last minute of our hour long interview, glad that someone’s finally asked him an intelligent question for once. His voice distorting on our tape recorder as he manically rattles out his masterplan: “We place the crystal skull on to the top of the mountain where the blood is pourin’ outta the fuckin’ king of the dudes and we place the crystal skull inside of his belly – on this, like, perch – and get these like crazy magical powers and we all grow unicorns and chocolate feathers and we ride into outer space and we write a new album about the universe.”

“Yep,” says Bill. Solemnly.

Even if you haven’t been on the Mastodon trail since the beginning, tracking the hairy, lumbering four-headed beast as it crushed clubs and toilet venues around the world – never pausing, always looking for fresh meat – you will almost certainly have picked up a copy of 2004’s Leviathan after it was hailed by Hammer as officially the third greatest metal album of the past 20 years a couple earlier in 2006.

Despite its status, on first listen Leviathan doesn’t scan like the Master Of Puppets-esque masterwork that the Mastodon faithful proclaim it as. There isn’t any of the naïve, greedy, wolf-eyed ambition of young gods like Trivium. In its place there’s creaking beams, lurching seasick riffs, baleful bellowing and an epic story about whales. In many ways it’s scarcely even metal, Mastodon seemingly having more in common with under-the-radar noise assassins like Lightning Bolt or Comets On Fire than metal royalty like Metallica.

Mastodon didn’t ever pledge allegiance to any flag. They’re not here to defend the faith. They don’t exist to support Iron Maiden. They probably could care less what people think of them.

So why should you care?

Because Mastodon are monumental. Leviathan is monumental – like Slayer’s Reign In Blood, rather than a ‘classic metal album’ in its own right, it’s simply the most accurate, fully-realised representation of what Mastodon is, or was up to that point. Their endless live shows are monumental – non-stop touring has whipped them into nasty machines and a global audience into begging for something spectacular and soul-saving.

Having made the jump from cult noise stable Relapse records to the glittering palace of evil that is major label Warner Brothers, Mastodon are now equipped with the necessary firepower to blow holes into heavy metal’s armour. They could change everything. They have a new album, it’s called Blood Mountain.

“My grandfather has a photo of me in a diaper and I’m huggin’ a bass drum. I just looked at the drum set and it totally made sense for me to be behind that.” Brann Dailor has the look of a younger, prettier Josh Homme. Onstage his kit is dappled with polka dots like Randy Rhoads’ iconic Flying V guitar, and the doomed guitarist’s image adorns his kick drum. It makes sense, in a way – Brann is a virtuoso drummer, simply the best in metal this side of Dave Lombardo, but his drumming is supremely lyrical, not propulsive. It ripples into crescendos – crashing waves of percussion on Leviathan – spiralling into weirdly melodic passages, like Rhoad’s solos, while Bill and Brent’s guitars crunch angrily beneath him, like two slowly duelling Triceratops.

“My next door neighbour, John, would put this Judas Priest record on and I would sing to the record and he would play drums,” he remembers. “And we’d call my mom and his stepdad and give them concerts. I would steal my mom’s strobe and black lights and put up some posters and we’d be like, ‘Alright! We got ourselves a band’.”

Somewhere along the line Brann met Bill in their hometown of Rochester, New York, forming a musical alliance that threaded through myriad noisy incarnations.

“The first band was called Crinkled Pig,” recalls Bill. “We did all Sex Pistols and Ramones cover songs. And then there was Skullduggery, Death Comes Ripping, Lunchlady. Butterslacks. Uh… Girdle. Nurse Ratched. Brann and I played in a band called Lethargy. Goofy tech metal, slidey riffs, lots of harmonies, just really fast grinding sick vocals – really hard shit to play.”

After a stint in prog-metal mainstays Today Is The Day, the duo relocated to Atlanta on the eve of the millennium with the intention of advertising for new jamming partners. Within days they’d met another pair – Brent Hinds and his bass-playing best-buddy Troy Sanders, who shared a similar seven-year symbiotic history – at a High On Fire gig. Immediately, before any songs were written, Troy booked a tour for the unnamed group – who then had to recruit a vocalist (one Eric Saner), and nine songs were hastily written and recorded, to be sold at gigs. Saner soon departed the band – with Troy, Brent and assorted guests furthermore dividing vocal duties between themselves – although the demo resurfaced on Relapse under the title Call Of The Mastodon.

“We put these songs together and we said our music is never gonna go anywhere unless we take it to the people,” explains Troy, the towering and eminently likeable frontman. “We’re not gonna write a cool song, record it and it’s gonna get played on the radio somewhere. That was just never gonna happen.”

Conceived from the start as a touring entity, over the next couple of years, the “Dirtier… less layered” onslaught of Mastodon expanded, mellowed, got stronger and stranger – with a definite stylistic jump between 2001 debut Lifesblood and 2002’s Remission. But the switch from simply being face-melting firebrands to Mastodon, the canonised auteur of Leviathan, wasn’t prompted so much by a musical redress as an ideological one.

Brann saw the phrase “salt-sea mastodon”, referring to the monster whale in the opening pages of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and the band immediately fell in love with the parallels between the rolling, crashing unfathomable nature of the ocean and its whale – not to mention Ahab’s perilous voyage of discovery – and their own, then-undirected, tempestuous force.

The lyrics and – crucially – music for ‘Leviathan’ were scripted to Moby-Dick’s narrative, evoking almost magically the brine-drenched spirit of Melville’s work in a ferocious, alive and totally unexpected delivery.

“Once we had something to look at, it brought us together,” says Brann. “We were extremely focused after that.“ After Leviathan we had a reason to write songs,” says Brann.

Really, more than simply nicking an idea out of a dog-eared paperback left in a tour bus bunk, what changed is that Mastodon had stopped looking to other rock bands, other music, for inspiration, and looked instead for something more elemental. Bigger. More pure.

The noise is horrible, loud, fantastic. Troy clamps his hands over his ears, the grinning, perma-gurning face-of-Mastodon contorting to a painful grimace. Hammer photographer Mick Hutson pauses the shoot and looks up, waiting impatiently as the train thunders over the rickety, corroded Chicago railway bridge above us. Upon hearing it, Brent immediately snaps into position: legs splayed, head thrown back, arms slashing furiously at an imaginary Flying V, howling in delight as he envisions that abrasive metal-on-metal grind screaming out of guitar and speaker. “Oh man,” he mutters, shaking his head. “If only.”

Tonight Mastodon are performing at Chicago’s opulent Aragon ballroom – galleries fashioned into battlements and towers, a breathtaking vista of the cosmos, a painted galaxy, splashed across the ceiling – supporting Slayer on the US leg of their Unholy Alliance tour.

“I’m not the biggest Slayer fan in the world,” Brent admits. “I’m just not. But I do realise Slayer is one of the best bands in the world. You see them play live – they’re fuckin’ amazing! They BLOW ME AWAY every night, I’m like, ‘holy shit dude’.”

Don’t you see any parallels between what they do and what you do?

“I really don’t. To be honest with you. Because they totally go out there and thrash and shred. And we go kinda out there and fuckin’… POUND and… DROP. You know? Like BOOOM!! Waah!Krah!GAHkraar! BOOM!! We’re more like that. And they’re more like raddlyraddlyrahWOOROOWOOROOraddlyraaggggggggh!!”

Brent’s so cool. He never stops moving, never stops thinking, constantly grinning, twitching and verbalising – fixing you dead in the eye as he does so. Throughout our interview he will alternately fiddle with the substantial pile of mary jane in front of him, or snatch up a barbell – pumping iron and hissing out breath as we talk or he thinks, his head continually reeling back and forth.

In terms of writing and decision-making Mastodon is very much a democracy, but Brent is Mastodon’s Kerry King. Brent is fucking intense.

“But I think we’re both doing the same thing,” adds Bill.

“We’re both punishing,” considers Brent.

How do you feel when you’re playing your music? Do you think different? Do you see things?

“Yeah,” sighs Bill, nonchalantly. “When I’m in front of fuckin’ thousands of kids and my amp’s fuckin’ blarin’ and I’m just rockin’, jammin’ out, I feel… I feel good. It feels awesome. It’s a powerful thing.”

Brian Chippendale from Lightning Bolt once said that when they play, rather than model themselves on another band – like Slayer or whoever – they try to model themselves on, like, a storm. Or he envisions that if he drums fast enough that a weird magical being will appear, or a door will open up and elves will come running out. Do you visualise your music like that?

“We fuckin’ LOVE Lightning Bolt!” Brent explodes at the mention of the infamous math-metal duo. “Yeah, all that shit happens if you’re tripping on mushrooms or somethin’.”

“We had a couple of songs on Remission,” offers Bill. “For instance, we couldn’t come up with a name for one song, Trainwreck. And someone was like, ‘Man, that fuckin’ song! I can just envision this train like goin’ off the tracks and fuckin’ exploding!’ We were like, ‘Wow, cool!’ Or Motherpuncher? Our old singer was like, ‘Man! This song makes me wanna punch my mother!’”

“But as far as the way I physically feel when I’m playing music,” returns Brent thoughtfully, “I feel amazing. That’s why I do it so often and I thank my lucky stars that I get to do it for my livelihood nowadays. But, um, yeah, it makes me feel like fuckin’ portals and magical gnomes and all that shit. Totally.”

Do you ever try and write while tripping?

Brent snorts and shoots us a dismissive glare, like we just choked on my first doobie. “Oh fuck, yeah!”

What do Mastodon sound like on mushrooms?

“Oh, dude! I would totally love to take mushrooms and listen to Mastodon, anytime. I have mescaline! It’s this powder and it makes the walls fuckin’ start breathing and all that shit. It’s an American Indian thing.”

“They use it in a lot of rituals,” explains Bill. “To get on with mother nature. I dunno, I don’t mess with that shit any more. I did enough acid back in the day.”

“I might do a little bit of mescaline on this tour but that’s it,” reasons Brent. “I would never, ever do anything to fuck up the show. If I fuck something up I’m gonna get bummed out.” He darkens, glowering. “I’m gonna be Bummed Out Brent. And no one wants to be around Bummed Out Brent.”

So… Blood Mountain. It’s not a particularly long album – 50 minutes – but it feels epic. It feels strenuous and hard; something that has to be endured. A trial by fire – something occult. It has moments of relapse, of tense, locked repose, but as exhilarating and fist-pumping as the songs are, everything feels steep – uphill. Maybe it’s the fiery, ascending guitar lines and cascading drums, or maybe it’s the ever-onwards, triumphant surge in Troy’s vocals as they urge us on.

Listening to the album from start to finish, you get the sense of ascending, enduring. Of climbing Blood Mountain.

“That’s exactly it,” exclaims Brent. “The sequencing, the climax of the middle… A band – or a group of people – tryin’ to fuckin’ climb a blood mountain, and it’s called Blood Mountain because it’s a fuckin’ dangerous, nervous situation, you know? It’s like tryin’ to do music, you know?”

“We’ve just taken on Warners now, and now it’s like this fuckin’ huge mountain that we’ve got to climb to the top of,” says Bill.

“Warner Bros is the blood mountain,” affirms Brent. “We’re also tryin’ to touch on all the elements as well. Like Remission had a fire theme – burning man and fuckin’ horses on fire and there was a flame for the logo. ‘Leviathan’ was water. Blood Mountain is a very earthy album. The next one will probably be very astrologically oriented.”

Blood Mountain… it’s got this weird ambience to it. I’ve been trying to put my finger on it for ages, but the closest I can come up with is this really abstract association. It reminds me of a level in the 90s computer game ‘Doom’, where you’re outside and the sky is just this strange deep red colour. But instead of it being a demonic or scary thing, it’s just this weird melancholic feeling – this empty, lost feeling. How do you engineer a mood like that?

The non-musical associations with the band – the name, the artwork – seem to feed into the music as much as describe it. Like the entity that is Mastodon is a kind of magic spell or whirlpool that drags in these different elements and associations and consumes them to make itself stronger.

“Basically it all stems from dreams,” nods Brent. “Dreams talked about and then turned into artwork and songs and situations.” He pauses. “There’s a lot of Masonic imagery too, which I love.”

Brent, the last time you were in this magazine the interviewer asked why you had a depiction of Baphomet tattooed across your back and you refused to say anything…

For the first time since I’ve met him, Brent quietens, his voice shrinking sharply. “That’s just a personal thing.”

That’s what you said last time!

He snaps defensively, “Yeah, well, what – do I have to answer different this time?”

What have you got to hide?

“Well…” he takes a deep breath. “I’m a Capricorn and I’m a Pagan. I don’t believe in one thing, I believe in the universe. Baphomet is woman, man, goat, child – it has every element to it…”

He gets visibly agitated and squirms uncomfortably. “That’s why I fuckin’ hate talking about this – people think it’s the devil and it’s not the devil at all. The devil is not Baphomet. The devil is Beelzebub. Two totally different things. This is a Pagan icon. I’m in love with goat imagery because I’m a Capricorn, I think. And I really don’t feel like describing that to most people, because to me, it’s really none of their business.”

“He was a goat in a previous life,” smirks Bill.

“I was a goat in a previous life!” Brent roars. “I wouldn’t doubt it, dude!”

The only other reference point I have for Blood Mountain is equally clumsy and suitably esoteric. In Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (the novel that inspired Blade Runner) future society is founded on a humanistic philosophy known as Mercerism.

To commune with Mercer – not so much a prophet as an eternal symbol of endurance and perseverance – citizens plug into a kind of virtual reality machine which allows them to visualise a mountainside. A barren ascent, with an old man in rags, Wilbur Mercer, slowly climbing, and the thoughts of whoever was logged in to the machine at that time humming powerfully as one as they struggle to ascend – pelted with rocks from unseen aggressors. Communing daily with the interface, no one ever reaches the summit. But that isn’t the point.

It’s all a bit far-fetched – not totally – but watching Mastodon grind out their weird, muscular hymns to ‘Cysquatches’ and sub-Paganistic (Paganism being a similarly humanistic and individually interpretive philosophy) forest deities, in the Aragon Ballroom, in Chicago, with a throng of metalheads saluting them, surging towards them, urging them on, you glean the relevance of the concept.

Mastodon, like the best heavy metal, engender a sense of community – of faith. The most human thing we can do is endure. Like Mercer, ‘Blood Mountain’ is a symbol of abstract faith. A demand that we should all aspire to a better time and place.

Mastodon’s metal is supreme rocket fuel. Ascend to this.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 156

Bruce Springsteen has revealed that he has not one, but two new albums in the pipeline.

Springsteen's most recent record, Only the Strong Survive, his 21st studio album, was released in 2022, but in a new interview with Rolling Stone, the 76-year-old singer-songwriter says that he has already completed one new album, and is at work on a second collection.

"I’m currently working on a couple of records," he tells Rolling Stone writer Andy Greene. "I did finish one, and it is done. I’m in the process of working on this other one, which, because of the nature of the material, felt like it should come out first. So that’s the situation I’m in. I’m trying to finish that up, and I’d like to release that first. And then this other record that I made, which is not time-relevant, it can come out at any time and it’ll work."

Asked by Greene if it is a solo record or an E Street record, Springsteen replies, "It’s a surprise."

Yesterday, September 10, Springsteen released a 37-minute live video shot on the final night of the E-Street Band's Land of Hope and Dreams Tour, at the Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia.

“I’m thrilled to be releasing our final show from the Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour – recorded in the birthplace of American freedom, Philadelphia, USA,” Springsteen said in a statement. “On the tour, we rocked the house from one end of the country to the other and, while we were at it, we spoke up everywhere in defence of our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our sacred democracy – which are under attack by a lawless President and his regime. It's all captured on our Philadelphia Freedom Cut – hope you enjoy it.”

In his interview with Rolling Stone, Springsteen was asked about the fact that, being so vocal about his opposition to Donald Trump each night on his tour, he is undoubtedly destined to lose some fans who support the President.

"Well, I’m old now and I do what I want to do, which I’ve actually always done my entire life," an unapologetic Springsteen replied. "I always made the records I wanted to make and then went out and found the audience for them. So it was the same thing with this show. This was the show I wanted to make, the story I wanted to tell. I went out to find its audience, and I’m sure there were people, and I’ve read things where people were vehement about the content of the show, and that’s just the way the chips fall. And that’s OK with me right now."

The remainder of the Philadelphia concert is to be made available in three additional videos released before the end of 2026.

As ever, as always, welcome to the jam-packed new issue of Classic Rock.

This month we have the first interview with Tony Iommi about his forthcoming new solo album From The Dark. It’s hard to believe that when we spoke with him, it had been just over a year since the passing of Ozzy Osbourne, his friend and Black Sabbath partner in crime.

The Iron Man tells us all about the unexpected genesis of his new record, revisits key moments in his Black Sabbath history, remembers his late pal and offers some important words to live by – do what you believe in.

In other news, I wasn’t expecting to ever write this next sentence: a few weeks ago Ritchie Blackmore reunited on stage with Deep Purple! Yep, it turns out that sometimes hell freezes over and pigs do fly. We grabbed a chance to chat with Ian Gillan to discover how the Man In Black came to get up and jam a certain Deep Purple-defining song with them in Long Island.

Elsewhere, we speak to Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon about his new solo album, Not Bad For New Jersey, and we've produced a limited edition Brian Fallon x Classic Rock bundle to celebrate. The bundle includes the new issue with a bespoke cover, the album on pearl white vinyl, and a signed art card.

And shortly before we sent this issue to press, we learned of the sad passing of ZZ Top legend Frank Beard, so we pay tribute to him. Rest in peace, sir.

• Get the new issue of Classic Rock
• Get the Classic Rock x Brian Fallon bundle edition

Features

Tony Iommi
Prosthetic arms, royal honours and a final curtain call with Ozzy: Mr Black Sabbath looks back at his band's stormy history and forward to his latest solo adventure.

The Classic Rock Interview: Joey Tempest
After writing The Final Countdown, life became a whirlwind of fame, money and everything else that came with a monster 80s hit. But the Europe frontman has survived it all intact.

Brian Fallon
The Gaslight Anthem man shares some of the life lessons of an eternal underdog .

Roger Taylor
Queen’s drummer talks wild party days, big-money deals, his new solo record and why the idea of stopping is horrific.

Mastodon
After being knocked sideways by two deaths last year, making their new album proved to be cathartic.

Night Ranger
Jack Blades, Brad Gillis and Kelly Keagy look back on 40 years of Floyd Rose flicking, big hits and avoiding retirement.

Regulars

The Dirt
Blackmore guests with Deep Purple, Ozzfest to return, and Back To The Beginning film in the pipeline; Glenn Hughes retires from the stage; The Kinks to reunite? Welcome back Triggerfinger and Zan/Cody. Say hello to Getdown Services and Villagers Of Ioannina City. Say goodbye to Frank Beard, Jennifer Finch and Glen Hansard.

The Stories Behind The Songs: Bonnie Raitt
How she came to be the first person to record I Can't Make You Love Me, the ultimate unrequited love ballad.

Q&A: Rodrigo Y Gabriela The Mexican acoustic duo on the new album, outrunning the long arm of the law, and the pleasures/perils of busking.

Six Things You Need To Know About… Green Lung
They’re big on cemeteries, spirituality and the occult.

Ever Meet Lemmy? Ricky Warwick
Left jaw-dropped when David Bowie walked into his dressing room, whip-smacked on the head by Alice Cooper, got blind drunk partying with Lemmy, enjoyed a quieter drink with Steve Harris: These are just a few of the famous names Ricky Warwick has met while travelling the rock’n’roll highway.

Reviews
New albums from Europe, Anthrax, Audrey Horne, The Meffs, Roger Taylor, The Strokes, Peter Hammill, Ricky Warwick, Dinosaur Jr, Bob Catley, The Strokes. Reissues from Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, David Bowie, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Bernie Marsden, Small Faces, T.Rex, Hawkwind. DVDs, films and books on Freddie Mercury, Bob Dylan, Dave Mustaine, Big Big Train, Marco Pirroni. Live reviews of System Of A Down, The Wildhearts, Saxon, Judas Priest, Doro, The Almighty, Black Label Society, Girlschool and more.

Lives
We preview tours by Flamin' Groovies, Marillion and Devin Townsend. Plus gig listings – who’s playing where and when.

The Soundtrack Of My Life: Scott Holiday
The Rival Sons' guitarist picks his records, artists and gigs of lasting significance.

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Tony Iommi has admitted that he had doubts about Black Sabbath performing at last year's historic Back To The Beginning show at Villa Park in Birmingham.

In an exclusive interview in the new issue of Classic Rock, Iommi 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…”

Iommi 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.”

Elsewhere in our exclusive interview, Iommi talks about the making of his new solo album, From The Dark, and looks back over Black Sabbath's long career.

The new issue of Classic Rock is on sale now. From The Dark will arrive on October 23 via BMG.

Toyah has updated fans about the film that's being made about the Sunday Lunch performance videos she makes with her husband, King Crimson leader Robert Fripp. The clips have been delighting the internet since they debuted in a pandemic-stricken world in 2020.

In early 2023, Toyah wrote on her blog, "We have a New Zealand-based film crew following us from March onwards for 12 months for a full-length documentary about the phenomenon of Sunday Lunch and our relationship. They will be in our home and on the road with us. Surprisingly, Robert is completely open to this."

Later the same year, Toyah told eonmusic that the movie was in pre-production but that it might "take years" for the script to be accepted, and now she's updated the same website, saying that she "doesn't know" the film's current status.

“We shot a lot of stuff,” she says. “They've got to make the movie first. They've got the footage."

The videos on Toyah's YouTube channel have garnered almost 150 million views, with the most popular being the much-watched cover of Metallica's Enter Sandman. Since premiering in January 2021, the clip – which features Toyah performing while straddling an exercise bike – has been viewed nearly nine million times and generated more than 11,000 comments.

In barely related news, Robert Fripp and King Crimson manager David Singleton will be guesting on the BBC’s Between The Ears series on Radio 3 and BBC Sounds this Sunday (September 13) at 7pm UK time. The show, entitled A Circular History Of The Loop, will tell the story of tape looping using tape loops.

"Looping is the best way I know of making a lot of noise with one guitar," says Fripp.

Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine has revealed the physical toll of receiving a lengthy bout of chemotherapy for stage-three squamous cell carcinoma in his new memoir, In My Darkest Hour.

Mustaine received his throat cancer diagnosis in the summer of 2019, and in an interview with California Post, he says that he struggled while working on material for their 2022 album The Sick, the Dying... and the Dead! due to radiation-related cognitive impairment.

"A lot slipped through the cracks due to a phenomenon known as 'chemo brain'," says Mustaine recalling that period of his life. "Putting all that stuff into your system, the chemotherapy is killing you. The job of the doctors is to take you to the brink of death and bring you back.

"A couple of things that happened because of the radiation and chemotherapy was that fog that I struggled through the first couple years," he adds. "It was really bad. I couldn't remember stuff I would say. We were making The Sick, the Dying... and the Dead! at the same time. So it was particularly hard doing that record; trying to have an idea concept for a song and to develop it when you can't remember what your middle name is.

"The second thing that happens that has been really awful has been what the radiation did to my teeth. My teeth have been breaking and I'm having to have them replaced. You know, they look good, but it's the cost of of fighting a debilitating disease and winning."

The Megadeth founder also said it was important for his family and friends to share their perspectives from his period of treatment in the book, so that it may help others in the same situation.

"I wanted to have everybody that was there telling their story because you know, like the guitar tech that I had at the time that was driving me to the appointments," he explains. "I doubt very seriously when he signed up to be my guitar tech, he thought he'd be driving me to life-saving doctor's appointments, but that's what happened.

"I wanted to get everybody's emotional state around the whole thing – not only to help the patient or the reader who has somebody in their life that has been diagnosed. If they're thinking, 'What do I do now?' You do everything you're supposed to and and then some. And then after that, you keep doing everything that you're supposed to."

In My Darkest Hour: A Memoir by Dave Mustaine with Joe Layden, will be released in the UK through Constable on September 24.

Turnstile have added Obituary to the lineup of one of their US shows this month.

The Tampa death metal nasties will support the Baltimore hardcore punk stars during their stop at the Red Hat Amphitheater in Raleigh, North Carolina, on September 29, alongside Angel Du$t and Agnostic Front. Meanwhile, metallic hardcore outfit No Warning have been added to the bill this Saturday, September 12, at Woodbine Park in Toronto, Canada.

The acts replace electronic musician Yves Tumor on their respective lineups, after Tumor was accused of sexual assault and abusive behaviour last month. Tumor strenuously denies the allegations. The artist has also dropped out of Turnstile’s gig in Portland, Maine on September 26, with no replacement yet announced.

Obituary and No Warning join a genre-busting selection of support acts that Turnstile have put together for their ongoing North American tour. Appearing at select other dates are hardcore luminaries Hatebreed, rising rock band Die Spitz, synthpop project Porches, electropop musician Slayyyter, hip-hop duo Clipse and more.

Obituary’s addition to the Raleigh gig has surprised fans on social media. “What a random-ass lineup,” one commenter writes. “This is like Black Sabbath opening for Green Day,” says another.

However, Turnstile have a history of demolishing genre constraints. Last month, they issued a remixed edition of their 2025 album Never Enough, under the title Never Enough: Versions, featuring a roster of guest musicians including Elton John, Paramore singer Hayley Williams and death metal punishers Dying Fetus. Louder gave the album four stars out of five and called it “one of 2026’s boldest and most entertaining releases”.

Turnstile’s North American tour kicked off on September 5 at Bumbershoot festival in Seattle, just six days after they played MEO Kalorama festival in Lisbon, Portugal, 5,200 miles away. They performed at The Rave in Milwaukee on Wednesday, September 9, and touring continues on Friday, September 11, at Russell Industrial Center in Detroit.

This packed travel schedule continues what has been a whirlwind year for Turnstile since Never Enough’s release last June. The album was a commercial success, topping the UK Rock & Metal chart, and critically acclaimed. The band were nominated for five Grammy Awards at the 2026 ceremony and took home two: Never Enough won Best Rock Album and the single Birds won Best Metal Performance.

Meanwhile, Turnstile’s former guitarist, Brady Ebert, remains in custody after allegedly driving his car at William Yates, the 79-year-old father of frontman Brendan Yates. He was arrested in April and stands accused of attempted first- and second-degree murder. After insisting in court that he “did not commit a crime”, Ebert has been ordered to undergo a competency evaluation, to determine if he has the mental capacity to understand the charges against him.

Steven Wilson was in a storm of change when he prepared his first solo tour in 2011. Having recently put Porcupine Tree on the backburner, he’d moved out of London back to his home town. He’d also received a crash course in music production by remastering King Crimson’s catalogue. All that fed in to his second solo album Grace For Drowning, as he told Prog before the tour began.

Over the past three years Steven Wilson has been remastering King Crimson’s catalogue. His exposure to the band’s tapes – and the forensic insight into their music that provides – has had a profound effect on him. “I cannot emphasise how much I’ve learned doing the Crimson records,” he says.

“What I thought I understood about them I really didn’t. The albums aren’t very layered. There’s something about the tone of the instruments and the interaction of the players that gives this wonderfully warm full sound that still has a lot of space around it.”

When Wilson was learning his trade in the late 80s, more was more. If you wanted a guitar riff, you’d multi-track the guitar five times. “The thing is you lose a lot of the character of the instrument and performance,” he says. “When Robert Fripp’s playing on those early Crimson records, it’s one guitar single-tracked – but it sounds monolithic. I tried to bring that to this record; stripping things down, not multi-tracking for the sake of it.”

Big, heavy guitars are noticeably rare on Grace For Drowning. “The heaviest music is produced by things like choirs and woodwind, and how the chords are voiced,” he says. “One of the heaviest things is the main riff of Raider II, which begins with two baritone saxophones double-tracked. It’s pure 21st Century Schizoid Man.”

He fully intends to carry his lessons into his future recordings. “It’s almost like I’ve unlearned something. I made records by layering and layering, but I’ve come to appreciate the tone of the instruments; the music gets to breathe more and you get more the character.”

Wilson’s lyrics, and his trademark thin voice, are just a little heartbreaking on the album. No Part Of Me In You is about a relationship gone sour; Postcard’s character sings: ‘The fire in my eyes has gone out.’ Elvis Costello once remarked that he doesn’t write songs when he’s happy, because he’s too busy being happy. “I’m exactly the same,” WIlson says. “You’re exercising that part of your personality in the writing, in order that your more well-adjusted positive elements can prevail in your everyday life.

“One of the most beautiful things in the world when you’re sad is to listen to a song that lets you understand you’re not alone feeling that way – we’re all part of the same human consciousness.”

The album features some notable players, and a very special guest on Deform To Form A Star. “I met Steve Hackett last year. I’ve never been a big Genesis fan, but I’m a huge fan of his first solo albums: Spectral Mornings, Voyage Of The Acolyte, Please Don’t Touch, Defector. He said those records came from his love of – guess who – Crimson and Van der Graaf! I was already in the process of writing Grace For Drowning and those two bands are touchstones for me, so having Steve on the record made perfect sense.

We hooked up for dinner, and I asked why he doesn’t play Shadow Of The Hierophant live. He said he would if I guested on it. So I did, at Shepherds Bush Empire in November. That was scary!”

The Empire will soon host the sole UK date of his very first solo tour. It’ll be 12 months since Porcupine Tree sold out the Royal Albert Hall on the last night of their tour for The Incident, so the venue seems a little modest. “In this business brand name is everything,” Wilson says. “I’m not naïve enough to believe that everyone who buys a Porcupine Tree album will know the names of all the members of the band.

“A larger minority for us do, perhaps, but 80 per cent of people buy records because they heard a song on the radio they like, or they saw it in their local HMV. They have no idea who’s in the band. Just ask Roger Waters – he found out the hard way when he left Pink Floyd!”

He continues: “I don’t expect to reach everyone Porcupine Tree reaches. This is a tentative dip in the water. It’s such a huge financial risk for me; I have to employ a crew and a band, and I’m going out with a big multimedia show.

“I guess I’m overcompensating for the fact some people might think this is a side project. It’s isn’t – it’s as epic as anything I’ve done with any of my bands, and it took the longest time. I’m very proud of the album, and the fact that I’m taking it out on the road too. In so many ways this is my biggest endeavour.”

Robert Fripp was at the first playback of Grace For Drowning, at Air Studios. Did he pick up on his band’s influence on it? “No!” Wilson relishes the irony. “Everyone else I played it to picked up on the Crimson, Lizard element. The only person who didn’t was Robert Fripp! He told me that it sounded like me.

“I think I’ve got to the point in my career where it doesn’t matter what I do or how much I think I’m ripping something off; it’ll still ultimately sound like me. I hope that’s true.”

Is it just me or have the Descendents replaced the Misfits in the punk rock must-have merch stakes? I’m definitely witnessing a decrease in Crimson Ghosts and plenty more Milos when I go to hardcore shows. The hand-drawn caricature of Descendents singer Milo Aukerman either appears on the band’s own T-shirt, or features on an imitation design by myriad clothing companies and new bands. I’m not entirely convinced that this trend is inspired by the music itself.

So for those of you unfamiliar with the Descendents discography (but have a tote bag bearing their logo at the bottom of your wardrobe), then I urge you to begin your journey with their rawest effort, 1982’s Milo Goes To College.

The Descendents of the early ’80s bore little resemblance to the Californian punk which was, at the time, overdosing in its own rock ‘n’ roll excess. The underground splintered into a feral style of music pioneered by local bands like Black Flag and Fear. It was called hardcore and inspired the Descendents to retire their surf pop roots. Milo Goes To College is a far cry from modern pop-punk, a genre that the Descendents are widely credited for starting. And while today’s genre leanings are more towards the pop end of the musical spectrum, this record is as punk as it comes.

Opener Myage has a hint of the new wave stylings first heard on Descendents’ single Ride The Wild, but the trashy guitar tones and Aukerman’s snarl reveal a far more confrontational band not out to make friends. I’m Not A Loser and Parents distil teen angst into two-minute ferocious blasts: "Well you can fuck off, I’m not a loser!" On the whole, Aukerman’s lyrics offset charming awareness with churlish immaturity, traits later pushed to their limits by giants Blink-182.

Suburban Home is a scathing commentary on the conformist way of life in America – "I want to be stereotyped, I want to be classified, I want to be a clone, I want a suburban home." Backing the frontman’s dry wit is the kind of musicianship rarely seen in the early punk days. Lombardo, Navatta and Stevenson steer the music through tempo changes and together display a level of skill beyond their youthful years.

Milo Goes To College is significant because it establishes many of pop-punk’s nuances, such as vocal harmonies (Statue Of Liberty), infectious choruses (Kabuki Girl) and lovelorn lyrics (Hope). Not only did it create the blueprint of an entire genre, this record stands as one of the most important albums to come out of the California punk scene.

When Slipknot hit the public consciousness with their self-titled album in 1999, the impact was as huge as it was immediate. Nine men in masks, who huffed the fumes of dead crows in jars for giggles, playing a noise that sounded like the end of the world; it was the perfect calling card for a band who would come to define metal in the 2000s. Not every album they’ve made since has had as much impact, but they’ve remained an unwavering presence on the modern metal scene. In the aftermath of their surprise-released new song Arsenal, here are their seven studio albums (plus one album-ish) ranked in order of greatness.

8. Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat.  (1996)

It barely seems fair to include the first Slipknot album in this list - the band themselves effectively count it as a demo. It lacks Corey Taylor, Sid Wilson and Jim Root , instead showcasing a band very much in their infancy. Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. is only really worth revisiting as an exercise in researching their early days. Some songs, such as Only One and Tattered And Torn, went on to appear on their ‘proper’ self-titled 1999 debut. Hearing them in their embryonic form here is interesting, but there is very little in the way of evidence here that Slipknot would go on to become a band to define a generation. For completists only.

7. The End, So Far (2022)

The noise around Slipknot's seventh studio album proper did not exactly bode well. Jim Root seemed to confirm rumours that the record's studio sessions were chaotic, stating that the band were "flying by the seat of our pants", while his guitar cohort Mick Thomson openly stated that "some people are gonna hate it".

And so, when it landed, fans shouldn't have been too surprised to find a record that felt disjointed if surprisingly freewheeling, the Radiohead-aping wooziness of Adderall and Alice In Chains-through-a-meatgrinder vibes of Acidic bumping up awkwardly against the more traditional but lacklustre fare of The Dying Song and The Chapeltown Rag. That said, there's some fascinating experimentation going on here that bodes well for Slipknot's future - a band this far into their career pulling out genuine surprises should always be cause for celebration.

6. All Hope Is Gone (2008)

It’s unfortunate that All Hope Is Gone is the final recorded document showcasing the “classic” Slipknot line-up when it’s such a deeply flawed record. Within two years of its release bassist Paul Gray had passed away, and three years later drummer Joey Jordison was unceremoniously ousted from the band.

But while those events were tragic and regrettable, it is clear that something needed to change in the Slipknot camp, as their fourth album does not hold up well to scrutiny. Songs like the messy title track and the forgettable Dead Memories bear little resemblance to the powerhouse that Slipknot previously were. Even the album's one saving grace, the anthemic Psychosocial, is essentially an inferior retread of better songs from their previous albums.

5. .5: The Gray Chapter (2014)

Coming in the aftermath of the genuine trauma that the band experienced at the start of the 2010s, it’s an achievement that we got a fifth Slipknot album at all. So maybe we shouldn’t be too harsh on the fact that it's certainly not one of their best.

.5: The Gray Chapter – dedicated to the late Paul Gray – is an uneven record. Understandably, there's far more in the way of sombre material here – not always a bad thing, as in the case of powerfully moving opening track XIX – and when Slipknot do launch into the heavier likes of Custer and the menacing The Devil In I they sound great. The main problem is that, with 14 tracks and a running time of around an hour, it could have done with some editing to turn a flabby effort into a truly great record.

4. Vol.3: The Subliminal Verses (2004)

It’s not easy having to follow up two genuinely groundbreaking albums, but that’s the position that Slipknot found themselves in heading to the recording of their third effort. It’s by no means a failure of Vol.3 that it finds itself at this place in our countdown. This is a genuinely great collection of songs, and it’s the moment where Slipknot began to really branch out and become better songwriters.

For proof, there’s the inhumanly huge Duality, which might just be their definitive, festival-rousing song, but it’s also on tracks like Prelude 3.0 and Circle, which lean on the right side of melodic without losing any of the band's famous intensity. If there is a criticism then it would be the fact that, once again, at just over an hour, it lags towards the end. That aside, Vol.3 still out-punches most metal bands' best efforts.

3. We Are Not Your Kind (2019)

You’d be forgiven for believing that, for all their continued success and consistently great live shows, Slipknot were never going to scale the heights of their earliest material as their sixth album came over the horizon at the start of 2019. But they certainly silenced the doubters with We Are Not Your Kind.

This didn’t just feel like a return to form, but a brand new chapter and a pointer to what Slipknot could still achieve. Once the band released the album’s first single, Unsainted, it was clear that they had something special on their hands. The Slipknot of 2019 came with a greater grasp of melody than ever, with a wider pool of influences – see the gothic, industrial crawl of the excellent Spiders for evidence. Yet the fire that had been re-lit in their bellies fuelled crushing metal stompers such as Solway Firth with an intensity that hadn’t been there for years. A welcome return to their best.

2. Iowa (2001)

Comfortably the heaviest album that has ever topped the UK album chart, Iowa is a genuine one-off. Released in an era when it seemed the best way for a band to achieve commercial success in a nu metal-dominated world was to make themselves seem poppier, cuddlier, cartoonish and maybe chuck in an 80s cover or two, Slipknot became the ugliest band on the planet.

From the second the gruesome and tormented screams of (515) dovetail into People = Shit it’s obvious that there was to be no compromise. There is very little in the way of respite throughout the 66-minute runtime and the sole reason it isn’t topping this list is that the lack of different shades affect the album just a little.

But that’s nitpicking. Iowa is an astonishing piece of work: as bleak, seething, furious and hate-soaked as metal has ever sounded in the mainstream. It’s no coincidence that in the album's aftermath there was a direct rise in the amount of extreme metal that began to flourish within the scene – something that's hard to imagine happening without the blastbeats and death metal riffs of this record ushering it all in. If that alone is Iowa’s legacy then it’s a pretty awesome one.

1. Slipknot (1999)

Has there ever been a more perfect opening to any album in the history of metal as the five-song run that kicks off Slipknot’s self-titled Roadrunner Records debut? (Sic), Eyeless, Wait And Bleed, Surfacing and Spit It Out – If Slipknot’s career had ended right there then they would have done more than 90 per cent of other metal bands.

Despite protestations from a handful of nitpickers that it’s front-loaded to its detriment, the entirety of Slipknot is a hell of a ride. It starts with the most furious, white-knuckle pummelling imaginable before slowly descending, via the creeping and psychotically sick likes of Tattered And Torn and Prosthetics, to the eight-and-a-half-minute long nervous breakdown nightmare of Scissors that closes the record.

Slipknot would go on to change and mutate, variously upping the brutality, pushing their material to arena-level, writing skyscraper choruses and anthemic, generation-defining songs. But they would never again sound as unhinged, unpredictable and consistently effecting as they do here.

Soundgarden teamed up with The Pretty Reckless vocalist Taylor Momsen and Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready on September 9 for a special NFL show at Seattle's Lumen Field.

Following McCready's pre-show rendition of the US national anthem, the hometown heroes performed Outshined and Spoonman during the halftime break at the Seattle Seahawks' NFL season opener against New England Patriots.

The Seahawks, who defeated the Patriots earlier this year in Super Bowl LX, won 13-10.

Momsen has performed lead vocals with the surviving members of Soundgarden on several occasions since the death of frontman Chris Cornell on May 17, 2017. Her band, The Pretty Reckless were the opening act on Soundgarden's last tour with Cornell, and she subsequently sang at the 2019 I Am the Highway tribute concert and at their 2025 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil and drummer Matt Cameron also guested on The Pretty Reckless' 2021 album, Death By Rock And Roll, on the song Only Love Can Save Me Now.

"Chris Cornell’s work speaks to me on a level that nothing else does," Momsen told NME earlier this year. "When something touches you that way, it’s hard to put into words just exactly why. There is just this connection, and it’s like it is speaking to you on a level that is so deep that it feels like a part of you. I’ve listened to his solo work and to Soundgarden so many times, but every time I listen to them, it evokes something different in me.

"There is the sheer amount of depth and sensitivity and aggression… [but] also, it’s so smart. It’s musically exquisite and complex — like this never-ending onion where you discover something new about it and about yourself every time you listen to it. I think that is so powerful and so fucking rare. It’s coming from a place that’s so deep and so powerful that it touches your soul."

Soundgarden are currently putting the finishing touches to unreleased material featuring Cornell.

"It's atypical in the way we approach it," Thayil said in an interview with LifeMinute. "There isn't a record label budgeting time and money with a particular schedule with everybody else's obligations, professionally or with family or whatever. We have to find the time and coordinate amongst ourselves to address the work. It's coming.

"It's important for the legacy of Soundgarden," he added. "It's important for the legacy of Chris Cornell. It is doing right by our collective work. It is doing right by our partner and friend."

When the 9/11 attacks took place in 2001, former Yes keyboardist Tony Kaye’s need to express his emotions sent him back to making music for the first time in several years. The result was his debut solo album, End Of Innocence, which took two decades to complete. In 2021 he told Prog about its creation.

Tony Kaye has a very good reason for not previously making a solo album in his lengthy and distinguished career. “The Dark Side Of The Moon has already been done and so has The Six Wives Of Henry VIII,” he says. “I had no clue what else to write about!”

Now living in Florida, the former Yes keyboardist – a founding member of that band’s predecessor Mabel Greer’s Toyshop, who went on to work with David Bowie, Yoso, Badfinger, Flash and Badger – adds that despite considering a solo project, he’d never found any passion for the idea. “I’m the sort who needs to be inspired,” he explains. “I’m not a natural songwriter who can sit down and it all comes out. I have musical ideas in my head; but in the past I had to abandon thoughts of making my own album because there was nothing for me to focus on.”

All that changed on September 11, 2001. “I was living in LA at the time, and a friend of mine phoned and told me to turn on the TV. Like so many, I was transfixed by what was happening before my eyes. My mind was racing, telling me I had to go to the garage and dig out my keyboard, which I hadn’t touched for five or six years. I set it up in a very hot room and started coming up with music – and so I began this 20-year journey, reaching the point where the album has finally come out.”

Two weeks after 9/11 occurred, Kaye met his wife-to-be, Dani Torchia, who’s been heavily involved with the album. “We’ve shared this adventure. She’s a singer and songwriter herself, and came up with the track Sweetest Dreams. I told her I wanted something about the first responders who arrived on the scene, and that’s what she wrote. It was perfect; we recorded it immediately.”

However, Kaye wasn’t exactly set up to record. “All I had was an eight-track cassette recorder. I used it to do the 911 Overture, the first piece I composed,” he explains. “But I then I got to grips with new technology, so I could transfer everything I’d done on that cassette machine to a much more advanced computer programme.” It was far from plain sailing: “I lost some of the multitracks! So I was forced to go back to the original recordings and use a few on the final album. That worked out much better than I’d feared.”

This resultant album, End Of Innocence, might have been in the pipeline for two decades, but he hasn’t been concentrating solely on the project all that time. “No, that would have driven me crazy! I wrote and recorded in batches. I had no record deal, so no deadline. But when I reconnected with the Yes guys for Cruise To The Edge in 2019, their management took on the project and signed me to Spirit Of Unicorn. They said if I wanted to have it ready for the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I had to hurry up and complete it. That’s where being in lockdown really helped – I could fully focus on the album as there was nothing to distract me.”

Along with his wife, Kaye had help from several others. “I got to know Jay Schellen, who’d been helping out Yes, and he came in to do some of the drumming. You can hear him on Flight 11, which is my interpretation of the conversations on the plane; Jay did a brilliant job in bringing it to life. There are also some local friends of mine who play on some tracks.”

Kaye argues that End Of Innocence doesn’t allow the listener to dip in and out. “You have to play the album from start to finish. It’s is the only way you can sense what was going through my mind. How did I feel once this was completed? Emotionally exhausted! I wouldn’t say it was in any way cathartic to write and record it, but when I listened back, it fully reminded me of my personal journey over these last 20 years.”

He believes the title sums up the impact of 9/11 and its aftermath. “The world seems a more dangerous place as a result of that atrocious attack. I wanted to reflect that and End Of Innocence does that – it sums up the darkness and fear, which inevitably colours the musical atmosphere.”

He’ll donate 10 percent of the profits from sales of the album to the Gary Sinise Foundation, which supports veterans and first responders when they face times of hardship. “I’m a very big fan of him as an actor and have always been interested in the fact that he raises a lot of money for those who put their lives at risk to help others,” he says. “It’s a charity I’m very happy to support.”

Now he’s bitten the bullet, is he ready to make a second solo album? “I’ve no plans for another,” he admits. “As I said , I’m not someone who can just sit down and have songs pour out. If I was to do a second solo record, it would be because something had truly inspired me the way 9/11 did.”

Chat shit on social media as much as you like. Identify your audience, formulate your engagement, manufacture rage bait, monetise the feedback. That’s the creatively bankrupt industry dullard approach to which The Meffs are the truly authentic antidote. There’s still no replacement for crafting and polishing your trade on the road in rock’n’roll. There never will be.

Lily Hopkins (vocals, guitar) and Lewis Copsey (drums) of The Meffs have been gigging consistently for five years since their 2019 formation and continuing before, during and after their bolshie punk debut, 2024’s What A Life. And with second album Business, producer Dan Weller (of prog-metallers Sikth) has captured The Meffs at their confrontational best by delivering a triumphant near-live performance. The duo are also proof you don’t need a bad haircut slapping a Fender Precision to balance the treble; Business boasts more bottom end than a Brazilian butt lift.

The short, sharp blast of 64-second opener Dreamin’ – with Copsey pounding the toms like an over-stimulated Martin Atkins – kicks your head open from the upper teeth. What A Nightmare crashes into the back of it like a column of articulated lorries.

The real voice of Clacton, Hopkins screams her uncompromising yet insightful lyrics in a vernacular and style that even the most knuckleheaded small-boats obsessive could grasp: ‘Chaos precedes all great change, but all I see is great despair/You want your country back, lest we forget that we are culturally in debt’.

One of the greatest young songwriters in the UK today and determined to puncture her target like a silver bullet, Hopkins knows what she wants and is stopping for no one. An honours student of classic rock, she bends influences to her will, making them her very own. Throughout the sardonic So Modern (Keep Up) and irate Where Did It All Go Wrong, her vocal phrasing is inspired by her beloved Courtney Love and Hole.

The title track features Hopkins in full scathing acerbic mode, mocking music industry marketing prerequisites with biting sarcasm. Like The Cramps getting down at a funk party, Law is a serious bop and the 3:21 minutes (a prog-punk epic in The Meffs’ world) Like Gravity is a hurricane of wild, climate crisis-inducing riffs. Storm’s coming.

Bruce Springsteen has released a 37-minute live video shot on the final night of the E-Street Band's Land of Hope and Dreams Tour. The footage, filmed at the Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia, finds the Boss in an impassioned mood, opening the set with a variation of the fiery speech he first made at Manchester's Co Op Live in May 2025.

"It is great to be in Philadelphia, home of our Declaration of Independence and birthplace of American democracy," Springsteen tells the 20,000-strong audience. "Welcome to the Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour. We begin the night with a prayer for our men and women in service overseas. We pray for an end to this conflict and for their safe return."

The musicians onstage with Springsteen include E-Street regulars Roy Bittan (piano, synthesiser), Nils Lofgren (guitar, vocals), Garry Tallent (bass guitar), Stevie Van Zandt (guitar, vocals) and Max Weinberg (drums), in addition to Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who previously played with Springsteen on the Wrecking Ball Tour in 2013 and the following year's High Hopes Tour.

“I’m thrilled to be releasing our final show from the Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour – recorded in the birthplace of American freedom, Philadelphia, USA,” says Springsteen. “On the tour, we rocked the house from one end of the country to the other and, while we were at it, we spoke up everywhere in defence of our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our sacred democracy – which are under attack by a lawless President and his regime. It's all captured on our Philadelphia Freedom Cut – hope you enjoy it.”

The seven songs in the video include covers of The Temptations' War and The Clash's Clampdown, Born In The USA and ​Streets Of Minneapolis, the song Springsteen wrote in honour of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the two civilians shot and killed by ICE agents in the city. Full tracklist below.

The rest of the concert will be available in three additional videos released before the end of the year.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band: Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour (Philadelphia Freedom Cut) tracklist

War
​Born In The U.S.A.
Death To My Hometown
Clampdown
No Surrender
Darkness On The Edge of Town
​Streets Of Minneapolis

The 90s were something of an unusual time for hardcore. With the genre's birth and wild evolution throughout the 80s seen as something of a golden age and the 2000s marking various sonic and commercial breakthroughs, you may think the 90s were nothing more than a holding period, a bridge between those two iconic eras. That would ignore some truly exceptional and landmark releases for the genre, though.

These five releases may not get name-checked as much as Black Flag or Minor Threat or have received mainstream recognition like Turnstile or Knocked Loose, but they certainly defined a period of glorious evolution for hardcore music.

Earth Crisis – Firestorm (1993)

OK, this isn't an album, but bear with us: clocking in at a mere 15 minutes over just four songs, it’s hard to truly appreciate today just how revolutionary Syracuse, New York collective Earth Crisis’ second EP was at the time. Firestorm brought metallic influences that the band had already dabbled in to the surface of their music, a trick that Agnostic Front, Cro-Mags, Integrity and a few others had touched on too, but no one had ever hit the bullseye in such a manner as Earth Crisis do here. The real legacy of Firestorm, though, is Karl Buencher’s lyrics and the band's militant, often savagely violent commitment to the straight-edge movement. It reviled some in the hardcore scene, but others were utterly inspired by the extremity, leading to the rise, and change in mindset, of the modern straight edge movement. Love it or loathe it, Firestorm is as influential as it is infamous.

Sick of it All – Scratch the Surface (1994)

The idea of a pure, true hardcore band being signed to a major label would have been considered pure fantasy in the 1980s, so it showed just how much attitudes were changing to the genre when NYHC legends Sick Of It All signed to Warner imprint East West and released this album in 1994. There were more than a few eyebrows raised, with some hardcore fans wondering if SOIA were about to going to pressure by their new label to make an album that sounded like Green Day. They needn’t have worried; Scratch the Surface was heavier, faster and contained what went on to be some of the band's most iconic songs, such as the title track, Maladjusted and, of course, the call to arms of Step Down - promoted with possibly the most famous hardcore video ever.

CIV – Set Your Goals (1995)

The youth crew movement of the late 1980s brought some much-needed melody and positivity to hardcore, so when members of hugely influential acts such as Gorilla Biscuits and Youth of Today combined to form CIV, hopes were high. CIV’s 1995 debut album Set Your Goals was as good as anything the members had previously put their name to, taking the pace of punk, some brilliantly aggro chant-along hooks and a sense of pop melodicism that felt superbly fresh at the time. They never followed it up with anything near as good, but the seeds of the melodic hardcore boom of H20, Strike Anywhere, Avail, As Friends Rust and more can be heard on bangers like Can’t Wait One Minute More, Boring Summer and So Far, So Good... So What.

Hatebreed – Satisfaction Is The Death Of Desire (1997)

Hatebreed would go on to become the band that put hardcore in front of a more mainstream audience than any other artist before them. After only one EP Jamey Jasta's wrecking crew signed to Victory Records, then the biggest label in hardcore, and Satisfaction... ended up selling more copies than any other debut album in the company's history. It led to Hatebreed being invited out to open tours with Slayer, Slipknot, Napalm Death and more, exposing hardcore to a completely new audience in the process. None of it would have been possible without pummeling tunes like Empty Promises or Before Dishonor, and when they returned with 2002’s Perseverance they became stars. Not just a great album: a ceiling-smashing one.

Botch – We are the Romans (1999)

Throughout the 90s, hardcore was being twisted into various unusual shapes. Bands such as Converge, Coalesce, Deadguy, Shai Hulud and Cave In were bringing in alt-metal, odd time signatures, grindcore and jazz influences to the genre, often with hugely exciting results. But if one band were considered the finest of those artists by their peers then it would be Tacoma, Washington quartet Botch. Their second album, We Are the Romans, is rightly considered the high watermark for any band who deal in wildly complex and unpredictable heavy music; songs like Saint Matthew Returns to the Womb, To Our Friends in the Great White North and Mondrian Was a Liar still sound impossibly savage and unstable nearly a quarter of a century after their release. In We Are The Romans' wake The Blood Brothers, Norma Jean, Zao, Drowningman came immediately, but even now its influence can be heard on beloved new hardcore bands like Vein.fm, seeyouspacecowboy, Frail Body, Show Me the Body and The Callous Daoboys.

Bryan Adams has announced details of his 17th album. How's It Goin' is the follow-up to last year's Roll with the Punches, and will be released via Adams' own BAD Records on November 6.

According to Adams' representatives, How's It Goin' is "a deeply personal musical love letter to Canada" which is "rooted in the people, places, landscapes and stories that have shaped his home country."

"The idea was simply to make a record about Canada," says Adams. "It started with writing the song for the documentary Canada’s Wild Eastern Edge, and after doing so much research, I was inspired to start writing more songs about Canada. Musically, it took me somewhere a little different too, which made the whole thing exciting."

Adams has already released two singles from the album. 51st State arrived in July as a tongue-in-cheek response to the suggestion that Canada might be better off as part of the US, and The Ballad Of Terry Fox – released last month – is a celebration of Fox, the amputee who famously ran 5000 miles across Canada from St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador to Victoria, British Columbia, to raise money for cancer research.

"I remember Terry’s run back in 1980 when I was on tour in Canada playing 200-capacity clubs," says Adams. "I was 20 years old, and I think Terry was a year older than me.

"When he stopped near Thunder Bay on September 1, I had just played in Ottawa, and his run was all over the news. Without knowing it, Terry gave our country a ‘something' and ‘someone' that everyone could agree on and unite behind."

How's It Goin' will be released in the usual formats, as well as a hardback book edition containing the album on CD and images connected to the songs. It's available to order now. Full tracklist below.

Bryan Adams: How's It Goin' tracklist

How’s It Goin’
Highway 16
Diesel & Dirt
The Battle Of Lundy’s Lane
The Ballad Of Terry Fox
51st State
When Canada Joined Newfoundland
A Handful Of Gold
Iron Ribbon
The Bridge
Canada’s Wild Eastern Edge
Heave Away
Lake Ontario *

* digital album bonus track

Evanescence singer Amy Lee and pop-metal solo artist Poppy have played End Of You, their collaborative track with Spiritbox frontwoman Courtney LaPlante, live for the first time ever.

The pair performed the 2025 standalone single at the first date of Evanescence’s European tour on Tuesday, September 8, at First Direct Arena in Leeds. Poppy is a support act on the tour, along with US singer K.Flay. Even though LaPlante wasn’t present, it was the first time End Of You has been played onstage since its release last September.

The End Of You debut was part of a 22-song setlist that featured material from Evanescence’s new album, Sanctuary, plus such hits as Bring Me To Life and My Immortal. K.Flay appeared onstage for their collaborative single Fight Like A Girl, which was part of the soundtrack to 2025 action film Ballerina before making it onto the Sanctuary tracklisting. See the setlist and watch the End Of You debut below.

End Of You was produced by ex-Bring Me The Horizon member Jordan Fish and released on September 4, 2025, via Sumerian Records. The idea for the song came during the making of Poppy’s 2024 album Negative Spaces, from a conversation between her and producer Fish.

“I knew he was friends with Amy, and I thought she would really be a great person to meet and get to talk to,” Poppy told NME. “It was mine and Jordan’s idea to start with, and then we thought, ‘What if we made our version of a dark Moulin Rouge [referring to Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 jukebox musical], like Lady Marmalade?”

Lee said that the lyrics were about “about taking on the patriarchy”: “In order to make way for the new, we have to let some old ways die, and I don’t feel that should be as hard as it is. I love change, and things can stand to definitely get a lot better than they are right now. It’s about challenging the norms and showing how strong we are when unified as women.”

Although more music from the three singers wasn’t in the pipeline when End Of You came out, Lee said she was open to future collaborations with Poppy and LaPlante, including appearing on a game show with them. “We’ll see what fun shenanigans could come out of this collab!” she said.

Sanctuary came out in June and received positive reviews, including four stars from Metal Hammer. Evanescence’s tour continues tonight, September 10, at Co-op Live in Manchester. See the remaining dates and get tickets via their website.

Meanwhile, Spiritbox released a new single, Mourning, this week and are about to embark on a European tour of their own with Jinjer and Dying Wish. The first show takes place at Sec Hall 3 in Glasgow on Saturday, September 12.

Evanescence setlist: First Direct Arena, Leeds, UK – September 8, 2026

1. Sanctuary
2. Tell Me When You’ve Had Enough
3. Afterlife
4. Rapture
5. Going Under
6. Lithium
7. Like You
8. Self Destruct
9. Calm Down
10. Call Me When You’re Sober
11. Fight Like A Girl (with K.Flay)
12. Beautiful Lie
13. Wasted On You
14. Forever Without You
15. Bring Me To Life
16. Imaginary
17. Better Without You
18. About Us
19. End Of You (with Poppy)
20. Who Will You Follow
21. My Immortal
22. Wide Open Heart

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?’”

There are many ways you can get people’s attention at the start of a record. I’ll never forget the first time I heard Pantera’s The Great Southern Trendkill and was blown away by how an album could open with that level of ferocity. The drums that fill your ears like gunfire at the opening of Mastodon’s Blood Mountain also spring to mind when it comes to memorable album openings but the daddy of them all, to these ears at least, comes in the form of naming more drugs than the anti-heroes of Trainspotting could consume in a weekend. Feel Good Hit Of The Summer’s thudding, trance inducing call to arms is as captivating an album opener as you will find and is the prefect starting point for this trippy, all encompassing journey from Queens of the Stone Age.

On an album that goes from pure rock fury to laid back, baby-making vibes, the one true constant throughout the album is groove. Sweet, sweet groove that grabs you like a velvet chokehold on each and every one of these tracks (even when those fucking trumpets come in at the end of the album) and never relinquishes her grip.

Whether that groove is found on the pumping, hip-shaking feel of Monsters In The Parasol, the campfire beauty of acoustic instrumental Lightning Song or the psychedelic stop-start vibes of Leg Of Lamb, each song is driven by beats that enthrall and hook you to the point that they could go on forever and you’d be too lost in it’s constraint to give a single, solitary fuck.

Something that Queens aren’t given enough credit for is the catchiness of their songwriting and Rated R is rammed full of all-time classic songs that have vocal lines the size of mountains. The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret brims with flamboyant guitar licks and that irrepressible liquid bass but when the guitars go off like a landmine, that chorus is the stuff of legend. The desert punk of Quick And To The Pointless might have a Nick Oliveri vocal that could best be described as unhinged but, by god, that “Baby, baby you’re so sweet” refrain is a motherfucker to dislodge from your head. I’d also mention Homme’s smooth as butter delivery on Better Living Through The Chemistry but, frankly, we don’t want to make ovaries all over the world explode.

In truth, you could pick any of QOTSA’s first three albums and describe them as a classic record. Dave Grohl’s powerhouse tub-thumping on Songs For The Deaf adds the stuff of legends on top of stellar songwriting and that debut album is all rock and roll abandon and ‘couldn’t give less of a fuck’ attitude but Rated R gets our vote just for its ability to take you out of the world and make you truly lose yourself in the music. There’s magic in that. We can romanticise it all we like but there’s nothing like experiencing it.

Play it now and surrender.

Austrian audio firm Pro-Ject have teamed up with Harley-Davidson for a new turntable which is said to bring the “mechanical soul of the open road to your living space”.

The two-speed, belt-driven unit’s plinth design has been inspired by the iconic Harley-Davidson “Bar & Shield” logo and whole turntable has been created from polished aluminium and stainless steel, while it also has a leather mat to represent the motorcycle brand’s bike saddle.

Getting into the “engine” of the Harley-Davidson turntable, and you’ll find a diamond-cut aluminium sub-platter and heavy glass main platter, an 8.6” aluminium S-shaped tonearm, a DC/AC generator, a Pick It Pro Moving Magnet cartridge, height-adjustable feet for total balance and a heavy duty Record Puck for keeping your vinyl on top of the platter.

Pro-Ject say: "Every edge, every curve is a deliberate nod to over a century of American motorcycle heritage – reborn here as a platform for pure high-end audio performance.

“The glass platter is a heavy, zero-resonance design. The high mass of the platter produces the tightest and most accurate playback speeds and at the same time, allows you to see the stunning turntable and all of its high-quality parts and incredible build quality – avoiding the flaws of plastic or lightweight construction.

“Find your groove. Hold your speed.”

Coming in at €2590, this unit definitely can't be classed as a budget turntable, but if you'd like further details on the Harley-Davidson record player, visit the official Pro-Ject website.

Specs

• Speed: 33, 45 (electronic speed change)
• Drive principle: belt drive
• Platter: 300 mm glass with leather mat
• Mains bearing: Stainless steel/brass
• Tonearm: 8,6” S-shape aluminium with SME-headshell
• Effective arm length / mass: 8,6“ (218,5 mm) / 23,8g
• Overhang: 18,5 mm
• Included accessories: Leather it, Record Puck
• Power supply: 15V DC / 800 mA (universal)
• Power connection: 110/240 Volt - 50 or 60 Hz
• Power consumption: 4W max / 0W standby
• Dimensions (W x H x D): 543 x 124 x 437mm

Slipknot have surprise released a brand new song, Arsenal.

The Iowa group's first new music since 2022's The End So Far, the song was premiered in the 'Hottest Record' slot on BBC Radio 1's New Music Show With Jack Saunders.

It's the band's first release since they shed long-standing members Sid Wilson and Craig Jones, and replaced drummer Jay Weinberg with ex-Sepultura man Eloy Casagrande. It's also the first Slipknot release on their own (sic)est Records label.

Speaking to presenter Jack Saunders, Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor describes the song as "pummelling".

"It pummels, it is absolutely a pummelling experience," he says. "One of my favourite things about it is, it kind of encapsulates everything that we do. Like it's got these great moments of hyperactivity, and then at the end, man, there's this sublime drop that just makes it. It's like we've got everyone by the hair, and we're just going, Go! Go! That to me sums up Slipknot completely."

The chorus of Arsenal runs:

"I got a lot to fuckin' say
And if you didn't listen
You didn't hear me anyway

LETS GO LETS GO LETS GO
LETS LETS GO LETS GO LETS GO"

Watch the video below:

Earlier this year, in April, core Slipknot trio Taylor, Shawn Crahan and Jim Root plus the now departed Sid Wilson released Look Outside Your Window, the arty, experimental album they recorded during the studio sessions for 2008’s All Hope Is Gone.

Shawn Crahan first revealed the existence of Look Outside Your Window during a 2018 interview with Hammer, looking back at All Hope Is Gone 10 years after its release. 'Clown' said that the sessions for the album were so chaotic that they split the band into two unofficial factions, leading one half of the lineup to track what would become the long-shelved music.

“While too much politics was happening in the studio, I was blowing my fucking brains out with art,” he explained. “It was a positive thing. I had my negativity and positivity, but doing that kept me equal.”

Rob Halford was disappointed. It was April 1975, and Judas Priest had been invited to make their TV debut on music show The Old Grey Whistle Test. Halford, their lead singer – and later self-anointed Metal God – presumed this meant visiting the BBC’s flagship facility at London’s White City; not a quick trip from their native Walsall to the Beeb’s Pebble Mill Studio in Edgbaston.

“I was dying to meet the show’s legendary presenter, ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris, who always talked as if he was sharing a sacred secret,” Halford recalled years later. Instead, the group trundled up to Pebble Mill in their Ford Transit. There, they found the studio amps covered with carpet off-cuts to muffle the noise, a cardboard box full of earplugs, and no sign of ‘Whispering’ Bob.

Judas Priest performed a new song, Dreamer Deceiver, and the title song of their first album, Rocka Rolla, with the Whistle Test logo behind them and an unseen audience of cameramen, presumably wearing earplugs, in front.

“Thank god that footage still exists,” Halford says today. “The BBC constantly reused tapes, but that one was saved, and it’s become legendary.”

Thanks to the joy of algorithms, the clip sometimes pops up when Halford is scrolling online, affording him an unexpected glimpse of his 23-year-old self, wearing curtains of blond hair and his sister Sue’s blouse, flanked by guitarists Ken ‘KK’ Downing sporting a white fedora hat and Glenn Tipton in a spangly blue jacket.

“We looked like three bands in one – a tin of heavy metal Quality Street,” Halford wrote in his 2020 memoir, Confess. “But when I look at that clip now, I see so much self-assurance, so much confidence,” he marvels. “It was as if we’d been around for ages, and we were practically a new group. But the day after, we probably walked a bit taller. You think: ‘Well if we can get on the BBC, where can we go next? Anywhere?’”

Judas Priest were everywhere this summer. It’s the 50th anniversary of their second album, Sad Wings Of Destiny; their Faithkeepers tour arrived in the UK for a headline appearance at the Bloodstock festival in Burton-On-Trent; and their story so far is the subject of a new Best Of collection, as well as a documentary, The Ballad Of Judas Priest.

Rocka Rolla is the oldest song on this new compilation, and an ideal starting point for Halford to explore his journey as a writer and lyricist. He joins Classic Rock from his home in Phoenix, Arizona, materialising on screen all in black, with sunglasses shielding his eyes, his neck draped with heavy metal bling, and a silver ring through his columella (that’s the medical term for the flesh at the bottom of your septum, apparently).

Despite having a home in the US for more than four decades, Halford hasn’t lost his Brummie burr. If Black Country accents were shades of brown on a Dulux colour chart, then Halford’s would be ‘Gentle Fawn’. For comparison, his near neighbour growing up, Slade’s Noddy Holder’s is ‘Intense Chestnut’.

Halford has spent more than half a century helping create the lexicon of heavy metal, with songs about power, corruption and biblical doom and pestilence. Or, in his words, “psychological and philosophical traumas via dramatic, apocalyptic tales of gods, devils and warriors fighting epic battles”.

But he has written about more than just those subjects. “If you want to go deep into the territory, then it’s pretty wild where some of those messages were coming from,” he says.

Halford, who grew up on the working-class Beechdale Estate in Walsall, once described himself as an “ordinary boy doing ordinary things at the end of the 1950s”. He discovered his phenomenal singing voice after belting out the Scottish lullaby The Skye Boat Song in a music lesson. At sixteen, he took a part-time job working the lights at Wolverhampton Grand, which fuelled his love of theatre and performance.

In May 1973, at his sister Sue’s recommendation, he joined her future husband, bassist Ian Hill, and guitarist KK Downing’s struggling local group Judas Priest. The band’s first deal, with independent label Gull Records, was comically bad (“They couldn’t afford to pay us a fiver each in wages”), but it led to Rocka Rolla and its breakthrough follow-up, 1976’s Sad Wings Of Destiny.

The old adage that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ is borne out by Judas Priest’s early hand-to-mouth existence. “It was a case of: ‘Do we spend this five pounds on some chips, or do we buy petrol?’” recalls Halford. “And we always chose the petrol so we could get to the next gig. But most bands go through the same.”

In their early days, Ian Hill lived in a drab block of flats in Handsworth Wood, where Halford and Downing often crashed after listening to records and trying to write songs.

“I honestly can’t remember what the first song I ever wrote lyrics to was,” Halford insists. “But it’s probably something like Rocka Rolla or Winter’s Retreat on that first album. These days I look at the words to Rocka Rolla and do a bit of an eye roll. But we were young and I was a different person then – and we had to write our own material.

“Priest had been out on the road doing pubs and clubs before we got the deal with Gull, but I don’t recall doing covers. From day one we were playing songs like Never Satisfied or Whisky Woman, which later turned into Victim Of Changes, and whatever else we were noodling with at the time.

“But I took inspiration from everywhere,” he continues. “We were at the beginning of something new and experimental in music. We were passing from the hippie phase into a time when everything was getting louder. I can remember sitting with KK, listening to Hendrix, Wishbone Ash, Yes and Jethro Tull as well as the obvious stuff like Sabbath, Zeppelin and Purple.

Glenn Tipton’s arrival in Judas Priest in May 1974 was a game changer.

“Glenn had this ability to create unusual, abstract riffs, which put him apart from other guitarists,” says Haford. “He came up with that riff for Rocka Rolla – which we played recently for the first time in living memory – and it’s an unusual arrangement.”

This experimentation fed Halford’s imagination as a lyricist. “I hated how so many heavy rock songs were about getting drunk or fucking women – lame predictable stuff,” he said in 2020.

“It was accepted I’d be the lyricist, that it was my job,” he says now. “The seeds for many of these lyrics were planted by books and movies and all this other stuff in my life. If there’s a theme to my lyrics, then it’s probably the battle between good and evil – and good usually wins.”

For a time, Halford was, in his words, “obsessed” with author Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy: Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. These escapist gothic fantasies were written after the Second World War, but became popular again in hip 60s and 70s circles.

“Peake made me want to look further than the simple framework of songs in heavy rock,” Halford explains. “It was his attention to detail. If someone walked past a wall in one of his books, it was never just a wall. He’d tell you exactly what it looked and felt like. Peake made me think you can take one word, like ‘light’, and think about what it can mean. It can illuminate, it can mean fire, it can destroy.”

Mott The Hoople’s 1972 hit All The Way From Memphis includes the line: ‘And you look like a star, but you’re still on the dole.’ It could have applied to Judas Priest. Despite having made their first TV appearance, some of the group had to take part-time jobs while recording Sad Wings Of Destiny; Gull allowed them just 50p each to spend in the studio canteen while mixing the record. Back on the Beechwood Estate, Halford sometimes glimpsed Noddy Holder’s white Rolls-Royce parked a couple of streets away outside his mum’s house, and wondered if Judas Priest would ever make it like Slade had.

Priest’s penury rarely impacted on Halford’s swashbuckling image or grand ideas, though. In August 1975, the band made their Reading Festival debut, with their singer promenading in a red cloak and waving his father’s silver-topped walking cane. Meanwhile, his lyrics to Sad Wings Of Destiny song Island Of Domination were inspired by novelist Isaac Asimov’s prescient tales of artificial intelligence and galactic social unrest. “I always found classic authors such as Chaucer and Shakespeare a bit foreboding. I got well into science fiction and fantasy. I loved the escapism of it.”

Sad Wings Of Destiny scraped into the UK chart at No.48 – good enough for the band to improve their living conditions by signing with Columbia. But the new label started pushing for more radio-friendly songs: “We were told this was what was needed if we wanted to make a footprint in America.”

The new Best Of includes Priest’s cover of folk singer Joan Baez’s Diamonds And Rust, a song suggested by Gull but rejected by the band while making Sad Wings. There was a tenuous connection, in that it was about Baez’s ex-boyfriend Bob Dylan, from whose song The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest the group had taken their name.

“We were in the studio, and someone at Gull sent us a copy of Diamonds And Rust and a note: ‘Have a listen, we think you can do magic with this.’ So we played it, and started laughing,” Halford recalls. “I couldn’t make the connection to us. But as the song progressed, we all looked at each other and said: ‘Okay, we know what we need to do.’ Which was to give it some big heavy metal balls.”

Diamonds And Rust became the only single from 1977’s Sin After Sin, Priest’s third album, and wasn’t a hit. “But we’d learned a valuable lesson. That is, if you’re going to cover someone else’s song it has to become a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing. You have to stamp your identity on it, or there’s no point. We did the same when we covered [Fleetwood Mac’s] The Green Manalishi and [Spooky Tooth’s] Better By You, Better Than Me later on.”

When Priest started work on the album, with former Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover producing, Halford brought his copy of Roget’s Thesaurus into the studio. Glover mistook it for something else: “He said: ‘Is that a bible, Rob?’” In a way it was: “It’s helped me write the lyrics for every Judas Priest album from Sin After Sin onward.”

The gothic mausoleum on the album cover could have been one of the gateposts on Mervyn Peake’s Castle Gormenghast, but the lyrics to one of its most powerful tracks, Dissident Aggressor, were inspired by Halford’s first visit to the Berlin Wall: “I was looking over from West Berlin, and there were these Russian guys in East Berlin looking back at me with binoculars.”

“Rob was always a reader and a watcher of the world generally,” KK said Downing in 2018. “He has a naturally inquisitive nature about all things.”

Halford had known he was gay since childhood, and his bandmates accepted his sexuality. On Sin After Sin’s Raw Deal he smuggled in a lyric about cruising gay bars on New York’s Fire Island without having ever been there.

“It all came from my imagination,” he says with a laugh. “All that stuff about walking into a bar, asking the bartender for a bourbon and slapping him across the face, and the leather dudes and denim dudes… But at the end of the song there’s a line: ‘Love knoweth no laws.’ It’s a famous quote by someone I can’t remember. [The proverb is generally credited to the 16th-century dramatist John Lyly.] But it’s true, love doesn’t have a law attached. Everybody in the band trusted me so much that they never questioned that lyric. They just said: ‘Here’s the song, put some words to it.’”

Despite his bandmates’ acceptance, this was 1977, when in the UK homosexuality had been decriminalised only 10 years earlier, and there were few ‘out’ gay musicians. While Halford deploys a lot of droll humour (“I’m a vanilla type of gay”), he doesn’t hide the loneliness and frustration he felt at times.

Beyond The Realms Of Death, from 1978’s Stained Class, is widely regarded as the grandest of Priest’s grand epics. “Glenn is responsible for one of the most glorious lead breaks in the history of metal on that song,” Halford claims. “But subconsciously there’s a lot of yours truly in it. [Recites the lyrics] ‘He’s had enough, he couldn’t take any more, he found a place in his mind, and slammed the door… I’m safe here in my mind, I’m free to speak with my own kind.’

“It’s about isolation and rejection, a feeling of darkness,” he reveals. “I think for men particularly there’s this angst about growing up – how do I fit in? And you just want to shut yourself away in your room. That’s the story behind Beyond The Realms Of Death.”

There was a similar sense of isolation in the ballad Here Comes The Tears, which Halford has since described as “me, aged twenty-six, wallowing in self-pity”.

“Although there were these little steps into my world and sexual identity, I’ve never had an agenda,” he stresses. “I never tried to use the band for my own ends. We never discussed the lyrics or what they meant, only whether they worked for the song or not. Nobody else knew.”

Rob Halford saw out the 70s invariably clad in black leather and chainmail and occasionally brandishing a whip on stage. All of Judas Priest had adopted an image that would become heavy metal’s visual lingua franca, and allowed their singer to effectively hide in plain sight.

It was this version of Judas Priest that made their Top Of The Pops debut with Take On The World in February 1979. The song’s lyrics were unashamedly on the nose (‘You got to leave your seat, you got to get up upon your feet’), its football-terrace chorus led to it being adopted by Wolverhampton Wanderers as their club song, and Halford admits it was heavily influenced by Queen’s We Will Rock You.

“I’d seen Queen early on at the Birmingham Odeon, and it was very inspiring,” he recalls. “But it wasn’t just that song. When we did Tyrant [for Sad Wings Of Destiny], and that line ‘Tyrant, capture of humanity, tyrant, conqueror of them all’, we said let’s do it like Queen and take certain words and stick a load of vocal harmonies on them. Queen made us think: ‘We can do whatever we want. We can do anything.’”

This self-belief paid off when 1980’s British Steel album reached No.4 in the UK, with the hits Living After Midnight, Breaking The Law and United helping to attract a broader audience.

“I’ve always been a pop tart,” Halford admits. “As much as I loved Ian Gillan and Janis Joplin, I also liked Marc Bolan and T.Rex and Bowie, and I’d grown up on The Beatles and Gerry And The Pacemakers and looking at Top Of The Pops.”

Living After Midnight was a route-one pop-metal song with a universal theme. “It might sound simple, just like The Beatles’ ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah’ sounds simple, but it’s not. People hear ‘Living after midnight, rocking to the dawn, loving til the morning and I’m gone’ and they all go: ‘Yeah, now I know what that’s about.’ It’s the simplest thing in the world to write songs. It’s the hardest thing in the world to write songs that live for ever.”

Even today, no Priest show or ‘best of’ is complete without that track or Breaking The Law. In the documentary The Ballad Of Judas Priest, Billy Corgan, Scott Ian, Lzzy Hale and the film’s co-director Tom Morello listen to US rapper/producer Darryl McDaniels comparing Breaking The Law’s lyrics to a hip-hop protest song (“like some Ice Cube shit”).

Grim footage of 80s-era protestors clashing with police, and the then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher denouncing those who “attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law” are also shown alongside Halford declaring it “a revolutionary song”.

Judas Priest recorded British Steel at Ringo Starr’s Berkshire manor, Tittenhurst Park, in barely more than a month. “We worked all day and didn’t put the telly on until after dinner,” Halford recalls, “and it was always the same news – riots, riots, riots. That was stimulating enough for me to come up with the words ‘There I was completely wasting, out of work and down.’ So Breaking The Law was about a rough time in the UK. But sadly it’s still relevant today – and it’s worldwide.”

The 1980s brought some personal challenges. While Priest’s career accelerated in the States with Screaming For Vengeance (1982), Defenders Of The Faith (1984) and an appearance at 1985’s Live Aid charity concert, Halford was still hiding his sexuality from the world, “for fear of destroying the band”, and self-medicating with cocaine and alcohol.

But his sense of humour didn’t desert him. Years later he would cheerily divulge that Defenders Of The Faith’s Jawbreaker and Eat Me Alive were “about a giant cock, and the joy of getting a good blow job”, respectively. “But the moral of the story is probably write lyrics when you’re sober,” he admitted.

Halford finally hit the wall while making 1986’s Turbo. He checked into rehab, and claims not to have touched booze or an illicit substance since. Returning to the band clear-headed made him self-critical, too. The band still play Turbo Lover (“a song about car sex”) live regularly, but Halford dismisses the album’s Wild Nights, Hot And Crazy Days and Rock You All Around The World as the nadir of his lyric writing: “Rubbish, just clichés,” he scoffs.

Halford still believes that 1990’s Painkiller is Judas Priest’s Sgt Pepper (“It’s the definitive metal album”). But, weary of the group’s infighting and keen to explore elsewhere, he left the band after its release for what turned out to be almost a decade. While on sabbatical, Halford formed two groups, Fight and Halford, and collaborated with other musicians, including Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, before returning to the fold for 2005’s Angel Of Retribution, the first of five more Priest studio albums.

During this time, Priest have weathered the departure of KK Downing and been re-energised by his replacement, Richie Faulkner. Later, Glenn Tipton’s retirement from touring due to ill health led to the band bringing in guitarist/producer Andy Sneap.

“There’s a lot of love for each other in this band, then and now,” Halford insists. “But there will always be creative friction. Every fucking musician thinks they’re the greatest in the world – ‘How dare you suggest I change this lead break?’ Or ‘How dare you suggest I change my lyrics?’ I have a lot of difficulty with compromise, but that’s because I’m a diva and I want the best things to happen. But sometimes you have to try a different angle. I’ve learned to accept that.”

Whether on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1975 or at Bloodstock in 2026, Rob Halford remains Judas Priest’s ringmaster, and he’s still singing about psychological and philosophical traumas. ‘I’ll bring you the head of the demon, I’m peeling the skin from his face,’ he declares on 2018’s Lightning Strike – with utter conviction, although presumably one eyebrow raised.

“It’s a hundred per cent never po-faced,” he says, smiling. “Priest music is about escapism and joy. I’ve always said we take our music deadly serious as professional musicians, but if you can’t have a laugh and a good time then you might as well pack it in.”

In February this year, Halford’s musical life flashed before his eyes when he and his husband, Thomas, watched The Ballad Of Judas Priest at the Berlin Film Festival. “It was very powerful,” he says. “I didn’t know what to expect, and there were lots of emotions – laughter, tears – all the different elements that make up this band. I left that movie theatre and walked back to the hotel with my head held high, the same way I did leaving Pebble Mill Studios after The Old Grey Whistle Test.”

Halford pauses, puts his fingers together like a priest about to recite a prayer and cracks a sly grin. “And back at the hotel I had a cup of Yorkshire Tea and a Hobnob biscuit, and felt very good about myself.”

Surely the perfect way for any Metal God to end his day. Amen.

The Best Of Judas Priest is out now. The band are currently on tour in Europe, and play London on September 21.

The surviving members of Supertramp, along with the Estate of Rick Davies, have launched a brand new website under the collective banner of 'Supertramp Partnership: The Classic LineUp'.

In a message to fans, former bassist Dougie Thomson, saxophonist and vocalist John Helliwell, and drummer Bob Siebenberg said, "As surviving members of the classic lineup, we reflect on the year since Rick Davies’ death, more grateful than ever to have brought Rick’s dreams for Supertramp to life. Two iconic writers with indelible voices led to a body of work that is revered by millions. We are proud of what this music represents as much today as we were when it was created.

"Dougie, John and Bob are happy to mark this milestone with this new path to connect with Supertramp fans around the world for whom this music has been formative and who have kept Rick’s legacy burning brightly. The polarity of Rick Davis and Roger Hodgson within Supertramp was a source of fruitful creative tension, and relations between the players have been challenging over the years. Nevertheless, the music is a common thread that binds us all. The classic era of Supertramp endures…"

Co-founding member, keyboardist and vocalist Rick Davies sadly passed away in September 2025. However, Helliwell and Seibenberg both recently spoke to Prog on the back of the recently released Crime Of The Century: In Concert At Hammersmith Odeon 1975 Blu-ray release.

The band's social media presence has never been particularly strong, even when they were a going concern, but the new Supertramp Partnership website also boasts links to a new Facebook and Instagram page.

Visit the new website here.

Former Boston drummer Jim Masdea has hit out at bandleader and guitarist Tom Scholz, labelling his old friend "the Donald Trump of rock ’n’ roll."

Masdea met Scholz in 1970, when the two musicians auditioned for a Massachusetts Institute of Technology band named Freehold, which featured future Boston guitarist Barry Goudreau. When that band dissolved, Scholz formed the group Mother's Milk, with Masdea, Goudreau and vocalist Brad Delp. But realising that the band was making little impact on Boston's live circuit, Scholz decided to focus on recording demos in his basement that aimed to replicate the sound of the dream band he had in his head.

With Masdea and Delp, he recorded demo of songs such as San Francisco Day (later to be renamed Hitch A Ride), It Isn’t Easy (re-titled Something About You), Foreplay (originally composed in 1969), Peace Of Mind, Rock ’N’ Roll Band, Don’t Be Afraid (eventually included on the 1978 Don’t Look Back album) Ninety Days (later called More Than A Feeling). But when these demos caught the attention of Epic Records, Pure Management partners Paul Ahern and Charlie McKenzie decided that Masdea was surplus to requirements, and the drummer was 'let go' ahead of Boston signing their record deal.

Subsequently, Masdea’s drumming is heard on only one Boston song, Rock & Roll Band.

Speaking in a new interview with The Telegraph, Masdea suggests that it was his desire to write more for the band that led to his being ejected from the line-up.

"I tell Tom that I don’t just want to play songs, I want to write songs, to contribute songs to the album," he recalls. "I’m gone a week later.”

"Tom Scholz is the Donald Trump of rock ’n’ roll," he adds. "He’s not horrible, but he’s a narcissist. He believes it’s only him, that everything was only him."

It's unlikely that Scholz would be flattered by this comparison from his former friend. In 2008, after Republican Party presidential Mick Huckabee played More Than A Feeling at campaign rallies, Scholz stated, "Boston has never endorsed a political candidate, and with all due respect, would not start by endorsing a candidate who is the polar opposite of most everything Boston stands for."

Think of a superlative and you can probably apply it to Metallica. Easily the biggest band in heavy metal history, they’ve sold more than 150 million albums worldwide and will fill any building that you put them in – including ones in Antarctica. It’s a level of success that was hard-won for the American foursome, earned by a string of some of the greatest albums ever made (no record collection is complete without Ride The Lightning, Master Of Puppets and their record-setting ‘Black Album’) and persevering through such hardships as the death of their classic bassist, Cliff Burton.

Singer/guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich started the future Grammy-gobblers in 1981, after Ulrich placed an ad in L.A. paper The Recycler. They picked up lead guitarist Dave Mustaine and bassist Ron McGovney as they started their quest to mesh the NWOBHM of Iron Maiden and Diamond Head with the scrappy hardcore of the Misfits, then quickly became a cult sensation in southern California. After replacing McGovney with Burton and Mustaine (who’d soon form Megadeth to enact his revenge) with Kirk Hammett, they released 1983 debut album Kill ’Em All and went nationwide, supporting Raven across the US.

1984’s Ride The Lightning and 1986’s Master Of Puppets continued their climb, but it was nearly all derailed when Burton died in a bus crash aged 24. Wounded and grieving yet refusing to give in, the band hired Jason Newsted and released 1988’s …And Justice For All. The subsequent Damaged Justice tour saw them headline arenas, but that was nothing compared to what they did after 1991’s self-titled follow-up, AKA the Black Album. Turning their scrappy thrash jams into stadium-sized stompers, it topped charts in dozens of markets and thrust them into the biggest rooms on Earth. They became the kings of metal and, 35 years on, still hold the crown.

Even though the mid-90s proved treacherous, with fans spurned by the members cutting their hair and embracing blues rock on Load (1996) and Reload (1997), their critiques merely pinged off of Metallica’s armour. The first true threat to their existence since ’86 came in the early 2000s, when a creatively stifled Newsted left and Hetfield entered rehab. The band responded by hiring Robert Trujillo and releasing St Anger: another fiercely divisive effort that cast them back to the rough-’n’-ready garage days before their debut.

After Death Magnetic (2008) brought back the long-missed thrashing of old, Metallica are once again bulletproof. Hardwired…To Self-Destruct (2016) and 72 Seasons (2023) were well-received and the band cemented their generational status with multimedia experiments, including the feature film Through The Never. As they prepare to become the first metal band to host a residency at Las Vegas venue The Sphere, cast an eye over their entire discography of original studio albums (sorry, no covers projects or live releases allowed!).

11. St Anger (2003)

Is it predictable that St Anger is rock bottom of another list like this? Yup. Is it still justified? Sadly, still yup. Metallica’s most hated album is far from the complete write-off many would have you believe; Frantic and the title track still go hard, songs like Invisible Kid and cult fan fave Dirty Window could have been world class with more work and the countrified re-dub of All Within My Hands the band have experimented with in recent years shows there’s a decent little song hiding under there.

Of course, none of that can cover for compositions that feel messy and disjointed and one of the most infamously disastrous production jobs in metal history. Artistically, St Anger is an interesting chapter in Metallica’s career at least: a raw, ugly cry from a band on the edge. Musically? This just ain’t it, no matter how you try to paint it.

10. Reload (1997)

When Reload hits the mark, it does so in style. Fuel might be basic as hell, but it remains a wonderfully simple, full-throttle burst of heavy metal adrenaline; The Memory Remains packs not just one but two of Metallica’s most earwormy moments (both its iconic chorus and Marianne Faithfull’s ‘Da da da daaa da, da daaaa’ refrain); The Unforgiven II is a more than worthy sequel to its predecessor and an outstanding power ballad in its own right.

That all said, Metallica’s confidence in their leftover material at this time was just a tad too optimistic, because Load’s sequel is packing way too much filler. James Hetfield’s wonderful lyrical streak was at least still in full flow, but even he wasn’t enough to save Reload from feeling largely unnecessary.

9. Death Magnetic (2008)

Critics were delighted with Metallica’s return to more traditional heavy metal fare (and solos!) when Death Magnetic arrived five years after the spectacular misfire of St Anger. In the cold light of day, it’s undoubtedly superior to its predecessor, featuring some full-on metal bangers (That Was Just Your Life, Cyanide) and two genuinely great power ballads in The Day That Never Comes and the severely underrated The Unforgiven III. Unfortunately, Death Magnetic as a whole is held back by two pressing issues.

Firstly, while a clear improvement on St Anger, the production is poor, Lars' drums still sounding like they were recorded using kitchen utensils. Secondly, and not for the first or last time, many of the songs just go too long. The End Of The Line, All Nightmare Long and The Judas Kiss are all solid tracks pulled down by meandering riff repetition, while forgettable instrumental Suicide & Redemption feels particularly self-indulgent at a whopping ten minutes. Decent, but far from a classic.

8. Hardwired…To Self-Destruct (2016)

Hardwired…To Self-Destruct was both a refreshing reminder of Metallica’s ability to pen top-tier metal hits and frustrating further evidence of the problems that come with their now trademark lack of self-restraint. The first half of the record in particular is filled with killer material, from the pulsating thrash assault of Hardwired and Moth Into Flame to the groovy, Load-ish power of Now That We’re Dead and epic, anthemic closing moments of Halo On Fire.

The second half, however, is a big letdown, the likes of Confusion, Am I Savage, ManUNkind and Murder One largely plodding and toothless (a particular shame given the latter’s status as a tribute to the legendary Lemmy Kilmister). Luckily, Spit Out The Bone turns up right at the end to finish things on a big high. What a rager.

7. 72 Seasons (2023)

For the third time in a row, Metallica put out an album that was solid as hell and packing plenty of great moments, but a little bogged down by a lack of incisive editing and at least a couple of tracks that just didn’t quite measure up. What can’t be in any doubt, however, is that 72 Seasons is the best-sounding Metallica album in over 25 years, the likes of its rollocking title track, the triumphant Lux Æterna and majestic album-closer Inamorata sounding truly stadium-sized under the bedded-in fingers of Greg Fidelman.

Papa Het’s voice also has no right sounding this good this far into his career, the band’s talismanic frontman bellowing like a vengeful mountain god during the pounding If Darkness Had A Son. A couple of minutes snipped off here and there and a little more ambition on the musical side of things and this could have been special. As it is, 72 Seasons is still pretty damn decent.

6. Load (1996)

Throwing caution to the wind following the absurd success of The Black Album and confirming that their thrash metal days were well and truly behind them (at least for now), Load saw Metallica dip their toes into everything from grunge to alt-rock to country. The result is a deeply fascinating record that unquestionably features some of the Four Horsemen’s most boldly realised leaps of faith; both the emotional Bleeding Me and album-closing epic The Outlaw Torn remain deservedly thought of as two of the most compelling compositions of the band’s entire career.

There are missteps for sure, and it’s a little too long overall, but for many, Load remains the point where Metallica were still truly blazing their own trail and letting ambition guide their creative impulses. It also features some of Hetfield’s most impactful lyrics, his introspective self-dissection reaching a new level of insight and raw vulnerability.

5. Kill ’Em All (1983)

Metallica would become far more layered and sophisticated in their songwriting as the 80s wore on, but even four-plus decades later, there’s still something so primal and satisfying about Kill ‘Em All’s snotty, ‘fuck-you’ attitude and relentless, proto-thrash assault. Smashing together Messrs Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton and Hammett’s love of punk rock fury and NWOBHM might with the subtlety of a brick to the groin (with some not inconsiderable help from a certain Mr Mustaine), the quartet kickstarted a movement and produced one of heavy metal’s all-time great debut albums in the process.

It’s easy to overlook just how stacked with classic ‘Tallica cuts Kill ‘Em All is, too: Hit The Lights, The Four Horsemen, Motorbreath, Whiplash, Seek & Destroy…plenty of bands could release all that, call it a day and consider their career a job well done. Incredibly, Metallica were only just getting started.

4. …And Justice For All (1988)

Depending who you ask, …Justice is for all intents and purposes the last of Metallica’s ‘thrash’ records, but sees the band turning their backs on the short, sharp shock stylings they had embraced with their debut in favour of the more epic fare that had become their bread-and-butter. The loss of bassist Cliff Burton can be felt keenly, not least in the controversial decision to completely flatten the mix of newcomer Jason Newsted’s contributions, but also in the subtle shifts away from more classical-leaning compositions that Burton had contributed to the band’s sound.

In its place is an almost prog-like approach to song structure, Metallica effectively crafting their own metallic symphonies with even the more straight-ahead fare of Blackened, …And Justice For All and The Frayed Ends Of Sanity having multiple movements and segments. Fans might still clamour for Justice For Jason, but …AJFA shows just how hard Metallica were fighting to reinvent themselves and push their artistry to new levels, towering ballad One awarding them a level of MTV-friendly success that few of their contemporaries have ever been able to match, certainly never surpass.

3. Metallica (The Black Album) (1991)

Responding to the overly-ornate compositions of their previous album, Metallica ground their sound into its essential dust on The Black Album, producing one of the best-selling records of all-time in the process. The band didn’t lose their thrash entirely – Through The Never and Holier Than Thou have the same bulldozer-through-a-China-shop power that Master Of Puppets used so excellently, while the likes of Sad But True, Enter Sandman and Wherever I May Roam deliver an enormity and instantly gratifying sound that better suited the arenas they were now playing.

Even with that, the band also found a whole new universe of depth and artistry with huge ballads like The Unforgiven and Nothing Else Matters, the latter even setting the stage for the band’s orchestral S&M thanks to some sublime arrangements by Michael Kamen. Naysayers might point to The Black Album as the point where Metallica stopped being Our Band, but therein lies the rub: Metallica were always too ambitious, too commercial and just too damn big to be satisfied with being the biggest fish in a small pond.

2. Ride The Lightning (1984)

There’s still a youthful rawness to …Lightning that captures the sparks flying between a youthful Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton and Hammett, the band already extricating themselves from their peers by sheer dint of having the finest songs and most ambitious compositions around. The album’s title-track is effectively a dry-run for the epic grandeur the band would ride so thoroughly on follow-up Master Of Puppets, while For Whom The Bell Tolls and Creeping Death awarded Metallica their first genuine arena-sized anthems.

There are also moments of respite and reflection; Fade To Black’s anti-suicide ballad might have ruffled feathers with the full-speed-or-nothin’ brigade, but the song’s beautiful composition, reflective lyrics and undeniable breakout headbangable moments showed that they had plenty to say and weren’t afraid to take chances on themselves.

1. Master Of Puppets (1986)

If you drilled down into the atomic structure of heavy metal, the genre’s evolution and its watershed moments, you’d probably find Master Of Puppets embedded at the core. Black Sabbath might have kickstarted the genre almost 16 years earlier, but Metallica codified metal with their third studio album in ways that are evident in the sheer mind-bending number of bands who have professed an undying love for the album over the subsequent decades.

Thrash gone cinematic, Master… refined and reinforced everything Metallica had done with their second album but bigger, better, harder and yes, more metal. From the delirious rampage of Battery to the tooth-gnashing militaristic blows of Disposable Heroes and careening violence of Damage Inc. to the iconic title-track, Metallica never again sounded as all-conquering as they would on Master Of Puppets, slower efforts like The Thing That Should Not Be introducing a sludgy dynamism that showed the band’s toolkit was varied.

Again wetting their beaks with ballad Welcome Home (Sanitarium), Metallica were carrying themselves away from being anybody’s back-up to instead be absolute champions in their own right. A tour with Ozzy Osbourne helped cement them as metal’s Hot New Things and even the tragedy of the crash that took bassist Cliff Burton couldn’t slow the unstoppable machine the band had set into motion by writing an album so undeniably massive and untouchable that it basically created a division between themselves and just about every other metal hopeful at that point.

A serious contender for the greatest metal album of all time, it’s no overstatement that the spirit of Master echoes in everything from Machine Head’s The Blackening to Gojira’s Magma and just about any other grandiose, epic metal effort put to tape. You can all rest easy: the Master is here.

Metallica’s residency at The Sphere, Las Vegas starts on October 1.

When it comes to choosing your favourite R.E.M. record, there are many versions of the Athens, Georgia alt-rock heroes to choose from. You could go for the jangly college-rock of their early days or the jaunty expansive anthems of the late 80s, the moody country-fied twangs of Automatic For The People or the experimental grooves of the late 90s? So many R.E.M.s to pick from.

In an interview with this writer in 2021, frontman Michael Stipe said that his favourite from the group who released 17 studio albums before calling it a day in 2011 was one that marked the end of an era because it was the last to feature drummer and co-founder Bill Berry, who left the band in 1997, having collapsed on stage during a gig in Switzerland on March 1, 1995, suffering from a brain aneurysm.

“I never thought of R.E.M. as a “rock band” – I’m going to put that in parentheses,” said Stipe. “I never thought of myself as a rock person. I always felt like I was a punk rocker who was immersing myself into some post-new wave something and through just presenting ourselves as who we were helping to radically spearhead and alter what pop music was going to become from where, certainly from where it was.”

For Stipe, the band’s 1996 album New Adventures In Hi-Fi was the one that really captured what they were all about.

“For [1994 record] Monster, we were having to go on tour and we needed material that wasn’t from Automatic For The People and Out Of Time – we needed big, loud songs and so we wrote a quote-unquote 'rock record',” Stipe explained. “But it was very distanced and taking a lot from glam-rock, an ironic distanced version of rock music. New Adventures… might be as close as we came to being a four-piece rock band and I say that with no regret. It was was Bill [Berry, drummer] and Mike [Mills, bassist] and Peter [Buck, guitarist] performing at their very best as a three-piece and me doing what I do on top of that, creating a fearful force.”

New Adventures In Hi-Fi was written and partially recorded on the road as the group embarked on a huge tour to support Monster, the result being a band who are well and truly locked in with each other, the confidence of playing the world’s biggest venues also prompting them to experiment and break new ground.

“Looking back, it does feel like it's pulling from all through our career,” Stipe said. “I'm so proud of that record.”

Stipe said there was one other R.E.M. album that for him shared the top spot.

“I have two favourite records that we ever put out, one that has joined New Adventures... as my favourite,” he said. “It’s the record Reveal. It’s just my participation. My contribution to those albums is probably my favourite in those two records.”

Bassist Mike Mills also rates New Adventures In Hi-Fi highly.

"It usually takes a good few years for me to decide where an album stands in the pantheon of recorded work we've done," he told MOJO. "This one may be third behind Murmur and Automatic for the People."

"We got into the studio feeling very happy and relieved that everyone was okay, especially Bill. It brought us all much closer and made us realise how important we are to each other. Once we'd been through a crisis like that [Berry's collapse from a brain aneurysm on tour], making a record was a piece of cake.

While there will be no new music from R.E.M., Michael Stipe is currently working on his debut solo album.

"I want it to be great, but I’ve got the pressure of having been in R.E.M. and it’s a high bar, because I want this to be as good as that, and that’s near impossible," he said earlier this year. "So it’s fucking exciting but also terrifying, and I’m doing the music for the first time too, and I think I’m good at it but not great."

There have been few more satisfying phenomena than the rise of Green Lung. Forged in the choking fog of sinister south London streets, they’ve defied every passing trend and become the UK’s leading exponents of proudly traditional heavy metal, with all the occult trimmings.

Everything, from the all-encompassing bombast of their meticulously crafted songs, to the symbiotic relationship they have with the artwork of legendary illustrator Richard Wells, chimes so brilliantly with a very real contemporary need for authenticity that the band’s success has been inevitable. For those looking for the festival headliners of the future, Green Lung have already staked a formidable claim.

On their fourth album, they make their case with such exuberance and bravado that it takes the breath away. Necropolitan is siphoned from London’s dark, otherworldly corners. Green Lung have always revelled in the twilit haze that separates the living from the dead, and these songs offer an even more vivid and disquieting glimpse into the capital’s hidden secrets and immortal antiheroes, pin-sharp modern analogies included as a courtesy.

The dizzyingly thunderous Dance To The Grave casts a damning eye on the kamikaze greed of tyrannical tech giants and bloated billionaires dragging us all into an idiotic apocalypse. On the insanely catchy Black Magick Radio, they reimagine pirate radio as a conduit for supernatural malice. The full-throttle uproar of Necropolitan Line fills the Tube network with zombies in tribute to the London Necropolis Railway and its early 20th-century transporting of corpses out of the city centre. And grand finale To The Gallows Born evokes Iron Maiden’s Hallowed Be Thy Name for a bone-chilling tale of death at the Tyburn gallows.

Green Lung even manage to pay their respects to revered poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose florid verse provides the inspiration for the wild and esoteric Ozymandias. None of this would count for a hill of beans were it not for Green Lung’s unerring brilliance as songwriters and musicians.

Necropolitan is fit to burst with great riffs, incisive vocal melodies, and smart, nuanced arrangements that imbue every song with startling colour and character. From the treacly organ tones that underpin Black Magick Radio to the shimmering Mellotron and blissful, pastoral harmonies that make To The Gallows Born so gloriously timeless and eerie, this is a sustained explosion of fine details and earthy enhancements, with every element honouring the band’s singular vision.

Frontman Tom Templar has never sounded so charismatic or commanding. Keyboard wizard John Wright is a perpetual source of textural audacity, and Scott Black makes yet another bid to be the most inventive six-string maverick of his generation. The rhythm section is hugely impressive, too.

There aren’t too many reasons to be cheerful in 2026. But the sound of a certifiably great, young-ish band asserting themselves with this much intelligence, charm and bite should give even the most weary pessimists cause for celebration. British heavy metal is alive, well and out of its mind on laudanum, absinthe and riffs the size of St. Paul’s Cathedral. All aboard!

Necropolitan is out September 11 via Nuclear Blast.

Louisa Livingstone, the woman whose ghostly figure adorns the cover of Black Sabbath's debut album, has released a rock opera based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books. Livingstone was identified as the model on the cover of Black Sabbath in 2020, after five decades of silence.

Earlier this year, Livingstone – who records music under the name Indreba (short for Incredible Dream Band) – released a pair of songs celebrating her place in history, with Witch Woman alluding to her iconic appearance and The Woman By The Mill referencing the location of the photograph, at Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire.

"Witch Woman came out of nowhere as a sudden idea of what I could do," she tells Rolling Stone. "Black Sabbath fans loved the songs, which was gratifying as it was aimed at them and definitely deliberately in the metal genre for that reason.”

Now Livingstone has released Alice, an AI-assisted five-track EP she describes as "a psychedelic rock opera featuring Alice who returns to explore the crazy 2026 world of the internet and AI."

"Tracks one to five tell the story in sequence with an abundance of captivating musical changes," she adds. "The lyrics are a key element in this rollercoaster ride of a music trip."

"I used to be very judgmental about AI like many people," she tells Rolling Stone, "but it’s a tool that you can use to create either absolute rubbish or ‘slop’ as it’s called, to something really good and interesting."

The songs include the opening Feed Your Head, which takes Jefferson Airplane's own Alice In Wonderland-themed classic White Rabbit as its starting point, but updates the lyrics to include lines like "One pill makes you scroll for hours" and "If you go chasing white rabbits / down the algorithms of your mind."

Alice is available via Bandcamp.