In 2016 and 2025, Washington alt-rock innovators The Melvins toured as co-headliners with UK grindcore veterans Napalm Death under the banner Savage Imperial Death March. The tours showcased contrasting heavy styles. The Melvins, pioneers of the grunge and sludge metal movements, bring intricate riffing at various tempos and odd time signatures, while Napalm Death, pioneers of the grindcore scene, favor an abrasive, ultra-fast mixture of punk and metal with harsh vocals. Now the bands join forces for their first collaborative album, Savage Imperial Death March, and the result is wild, messy fun.
The album features The Melvins’ Buzz Osborne on vocals, guitar, and bass, and Dale Crover on drums. From Napalm Death are singer…
Category: hard rock/heavy metal
Morning Star finds Këkht Aräkh arriving at a truer, more refined version of himself. Recorded between Berlin and Stockholm, the album emerges from a period of intense personal and artistic growth, blending aggressive black metal passages with immersive, textured soundscapes that feel both intimate and vast.
Since his origins in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, Dmitry (a.k.a. Crying Orc), the sole mastermind behind the project, has sought a distinctive path within black metal. This vision unfolded through his debut Through the Branches to Eternity EP (2018) and the albums Night & Love (2018) and Pale Swordsman (2021), establishing a signature tension between ferocious, visceral black metal and delicate, introspective ballads.
The twelfth album from Los Angeles metal veterans Black Label Society has all of the band’s trademarks. Loaded with pummelling riffs, blazing guitar solos, bluesy licks, and a southern rock twang, Engines of Demolition is undeniably heavy without sacrificing hooks or accessibility.
Frontman Zakk Wylde broke into the industry as Ozzy Osbourne’s new guitarist in 1987 and ended up creating some of Ozzy’s best riffs. Fronting his own band, Black Label Society, since 1998, Wylde took with him Ozzy’s penchant for pairing bone-crunching heaviness with beautiful melodies. Black Label Society’s music hits hard, but beneath that heavy exterior lies intricate melodies and Wylde’s soulful voice.
The album opener, “Name in Blood,”…
This release unearths a previously unreleased live recording from Boris’s 2019 US tour, captured shortly after the release of the single tears e.p and the album LΦVE & EVΦL.
Released in 2019, LΦVE & EVΦL is a conceptual work consisting of two contrasting yet intertwined albums. Following the heavy yet catchy Noise (2014) and the organic deepening of Dear (2017), the 2019 single tears e.p arrived as a pendulum swing toward pure popness, featuring collaborations with Narasaki (Coaltar Of The Deepers) and Shinobu Narita. Subsequently, the album LΦVE & EVΦL peered into the abyss of “heavy” even further-manifesting a world of saturated contours and gridless, intoxicating soundscapes that redefined…
This release marks the second installment of the 20th anniversary project celebrating the original studio album Rainbow (2006). It documents a live performance recorded on February 8, 2019, at U.F.O. CLUB in Higashi-Koenji, Tokyo.
Michio Kurihara is a singular guitarist who has played a central role in Japan’s psychedelic rock scene through his work with YBO2, White Heaven, THE STARS, and other key projects. Rainbow, created and released in 2006 under the name Boris with Michio Kurihara, reaches its 20th anniversary this year. Since 2007, Kurihara has also joined Boris as a support guitarist on tours and live performances, while performing on several occasions under the Boris with Michio Kurihara name in parallel.
Before Chat Pile took on sold-out tours and widespread critical acclaim, they played Roadburn 2023-their biggest show to date, in front of a packed room of 3,000 on the festival’s main stage. Fresh off the release of God’s Country, the Oklahoma quartet brought their suffocating, sludgy noise rock to Tilburg for their first-ever European performance, delivering a set that felt like a milestone. The bleakness, the anguish, the raw absurdity-it all scaled up effortlessly, proving that Chat Pile’s chaos could consume any audience, no matter the size.
The set was recorded by the Roadburn staff and later remixed by the band’s longtime engineer, Jared Stimpfl, capturing the full weight of the performance. The result is something both…
Taking their name from the mining byproducts that litter their home state of Oklahoma, American four-piece Chat Pile attempt to make sense of a crumbling world through their sludgy strain of noise rock. After finding online viral success with their 2019 debut EP, This Dungeon Earth, the group built their tense sound across the 2020s with acclaimed albums like God’s Country (2022), Cool World (2024), and In the Earth Again, a collaborative album with guitarist Hayden Pedigo.
Blood at Night: This release contains the entire collection of manipulated tape loops recorded during the making of Cool World. Sections of most of these tracks were dissected and subtly woven into the final version of the record. All the original cassettes used on this collection were sourced…
And so continues the Californian quartet’s mythic two-part journey. Horizons/West – the twelfth studio album from Thrice – might not have arrived quite as hot-on-the-heels of first parter ‘Horizons/East’ as some might have liked, but better late than never eh? Where 2021’s ‘Horizons/East’ opens with the soft glow of possibility, though, its counterpart crashes in with the aftermath. Less a sunrise, a warming haze of hope, and more the moment the sun disappears, the long shadow cast by the doubts that came before. If ‘Horizons/East’ asks what it means to believe, ‘Horizons/West’ asks what remains after belief has been tested, cracked, and dragged through the murky waters.
Opening track ‘Blackout’ feels like the negative…
The Studio Albums 1992-2016 brings together nearly 25 years of groundbreaking music. It unites 12 of the band’s core studio works for the first time across 14CDs. The boxed set charts more than two decades of Dream Theater’s musical growth-a career that helped define the sound of modern progressive metal while selling more than 12 million albums worldwide.
It begins with the band’s gold-certified 1992 breakthrough, Images and Words, featuring the Top 10 hit “Pull Me Under,” then navigates a prolific decade as the band scaled new creative heights on albums like Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Memory, one of the greatest concept albums in progressive-rock history.
The band continued adding to its legacy…
Dream Theater celebrate their 40th anniversary with a special live release Quarantième filmed during their 2024 European tour, their first to feature Mike Portnoy back in the band after over 13 years.
Recorded in Paris at the Adidas Arena, the tour saw the band debuting a track from their latest studio album ‘Parasomnia’, as well as classic tracks from throughout their career, including ‘Metropolis Pt. 1’, ‘Hollow Years’, ‘Octavarium’, ‘Pull Me Under’…
“From the moment we announced our 40th anniversary tour, we knew it would be a very special event for both the band and our fans and must be captured. With this release, our performance in Paris is presented so beautifully in both stunning audio and video and really encapsulates this momentous occasion for all to enjoy”…
Japanese legends Boris are celebrating the 20 Year Anniversary of landmark albums Pink and dronevil -example- with special deluxe reissue out on Relapse. The 20th Anniversary Edition presents the original CD track sequence on a 2xLP for the very first time, with an exclusive etching on Side D. In addition, PINK will be released as a deluxe reissue box set: a limited 6xLP collection that includes three full LPs of previously unreleased material. The deluxe box set features the original vinyl version of PINK, expanded “Forbidden Tracks” from the PINK sessions, never-before-released live material on vinyl.
dronevil will also be reissued for the first time since its original release. A work consisting of two different albums—an ambient soundscape and extreme heavy rock—designed to be played simultaneously, dronevil now returns in a brand-new edition. This version is presented as a joint 2xLP mix, under the title dronevil – example –
Despite how unlikely it may have seemed decades ago, when they were best known for their singer jumping on Korn’s Ice Cube cover and their own Top 40 hit about shoving things, Deftones are now among the most respected and influential bands of the 1990s. When they debuted with Adrenaline in 1995, they weren’t even the best rock band with an awkward rapper in the city of Sacramento; they were, like so many young men of their time, joined on stage and in the studio by a DJ.
Now, Hayley Williams is joining the band on stage to sing “Minerva”; we’re a full decade past the days of Deafheaven and Nothing using their tricks on black metal and shoegaze; the nation’s indie venues are lousy with bands playing drop-D punisher riffs while hoodied…
In 1994, having left Iron Maiden for a time (he rejoined in 1999), Bruce Dickinson released his second solo album, entitled Balls To Picasso. Named in honour of the cubist pioneer whose representations of spherical objects were as squares, and reflected on the cover in graffiti style on a tiled bathroom wall, the album belied its irreverent title by solidifying Dickinson’s reputation as a serious solo artist.
His first record with collaborator Roy Z, and recorded with Z’s band Tribe Of Gypsies, it went through various iterations before its release, produced by Shay Baby. The original album included a number of classic tracks and live favourites from Dickinson including the singles ‘Tears Of The Dragon’…
…feature new remastering from the original analog tapes and include two bonus tracks, “Some Kind of Woman” and “Black Moon”.
After years of playing a dispiriting game of musical chairs with various lead singers during the early ’80s, Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi finally stumbled upon a dependable frontman when he admitted relative unknown Tony Martin into the fold, thereby initiating the original heavy metal band’s long awaited return to respectability — if not chart-topping success. Martin joined the oft-interrupted sessions for what would become 1987’s The Eternal Idol album already in progress, stepping in for an unreliable Ray Gillen when the latter moved on to Jake E. Lee’s Badlands, and helping Iommi rescue an astonishingly….
Things have never been easy for Metallica’s 1996 album Load, a multiplatinum record nobody ever admits to liking, especially the band’s most avid fans. In early 1995, Metallica had a “good problem”: how to follow up The Black Album, the 1991 smash that turned them from metal heroes into global rock stars. It wasn’t an easy question. Featuring their megahit “Enter Sandman,” The Black Album was Nineties metal’s Dark Side of the Moon, the moment when an already stadium-filling band became a household name. Then, in the middle of the three-year tour to support the incredibly popular record, grunge became the lingua franca of mainstream rock, forcing Metallica to reconsider their place in music.
The answer? Lean into the issue by cutting off…