MVD Audio [Release date 06.11.26] We last reviewed Bob Holz in 2023 and his album which gave equal billing to co-producer Rob Stathis. The latter takes more of a production role on this latest release which once again harnesses the … Continue reading
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The band’s twelfth studio album was recorded earlier this year.
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Just in time for Halloween, legendary Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash is bringing back his acclaimed Music Of Universal Studios Hollywood – Halloween Horror Nights collections with two brand-new limited-edition vinyl variants through Snakepit Records LLC and Deko Entertainment.
Following multiple sellouts in previous years, Music Of Universal Studios Hollywood – Halloween Horror Nights Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 return as exclusive vinyl-only releases featuring 21 original compositions written and recorded by Slash for the world-famous haunted attractions at Universal Studios Hollywood‘s annual Halloween Horror Nights event.
For the past eight years, Slash has served as the musical architect behind many of Halloween Horror Nights‘ most memorable haunted house experiences, creating immersive scores that enhance the atmosphere, suspense, and terror encountered by millions of guests each season. His compositions have become an integral part of the event, blending cinematic storytelling with his signature musical style to create unforgettable sonic landscapes.
Among the featured material is Slash‘s score for 2024’s Universal Monsters: Eternal Bloodlines, which spotlighted an all-female gathering of iconic Universal Monsters including The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula’s Daughter, She-Wolf of London, and the ancient Egyptian princess Anck-Su-Namun. Also represented is music from 2025’s Scarecrow: Music By Slash, a haunting tale of nature’s revenge where sinister scarecrows become agents of destruction against those who have wronged the land.
Approaching each haunted attraction much like a film composer approaches a motion picture, Slash crafts music scene by scene, building tension and atmosphere while guiding listeners through every terrifying twist and turn. The result is a collection of compositions that stand on their own as compelling instrumental works while perfectly capturing the spirit of Halloween Horror Nights.
Both albums are presented in deluxe gatefold packaging and are strictly limited to just 300 copies each. Vol. 1 is available on exclusive “Swamp Thing” Colored Vinyl, while Vol. 2 arrives on “Yellow Smoke” Colored Vinyl.
Whether experienced as a companion to the attractions or as the soundtrack to Halloween night, these limited-edition releases offer fans a unique opportunity to own a piece of the Halloween Horror Nights legacy created by one of rock’s most celebrated guitarists.
Music Of Universal Studios Hollywood – Halloween Horror Nights Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 are available exclusively through Deko Entertainment.
Slash also returns to Halloween Horror Nights this year to contribute to the original house KILLceañera: Music by SLASH.
Slash is one of the most influential guitarists in rock history, best known as the lead guitarist of Guns N’ Roses. Beyond his work as a performer and songwriter, he has established himself as an accomplished composer, creating original music for film, television, and themed entertainment projects. His ongoing collaboration with Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights has produced some of the event’s most memorable and immersive musical experiences.
The post SLASH’s “Music Of Universal Studios Hollywood–Halloween Horror Nights” Returns On Two New Limited-Edition Vinyl Colors appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.
As the frontman of Emperor, Ihsahn rose to prominence in a black metal scene laced with screaming and violence. Since then his music has only grown more progressive, symphonic and melodic. In 2024 he told Prog about his latest release to date, the self-titled album that pursues a cinematic atmosphere.
It’s a frigid January when Prog calls Ihsahn. Outside, our hometown of London is enduring a particularly harsh winter, with temperatures hovering below freezing and ferocious winds only strengthening the bite of the chill in the air.
However, we’re on the phone with a progressive metal musician who’s lived his whole life in Norway: we don’t get any sympathy. “It’s around 0 ̊C?” Ihsahn asks rhetorically, sat in his home while wearing a jet-black turtleneck jumper. “That’s springtime!”
He grew up looking the extreme potential of Norwegian nature dead in the face. When standing right outside the farm he was raised on in the rural town of Notodden, he could see snow-capped mountains and ice-cold rivers. Indoors, he spent most of his time shielded from the elements playing piano and guitar, inspired by the majesty of such metal icons as Iron Maiden and Twisted Sister, alongside swelling soundtracks composed by Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams.
“There weren’t really neighbouring kids,” the now 48-year-old maverick remembers, “so music became a big part of my free time. I got my first guitar, electric organ, played the bass with my feet and would do jam sessions with myself.”
From those origins as an isolated child in middle-of-nowhere Scandinavia, Ihsahn has grown into one of the most idolised solo artists in prog metal. After he first found notoriety as the frontman of Emperor – who redefined the typically furious black metal subgenre with soundtrack-esque keyboards and Maiden-inspired harmony – he’s continued to push boundaries under his own name since 2006.
And nowhere is his ever-adventurous spirit better encapsulated than on his new, eighth album, which is very deliberately and fittingly self-titled. “It’s the stuff that I feel I am best at,” Ihsahn says to summarise the record. “If you were to draw a straight line from the beginning of my career up until now, the common denominator would probably be black metal singing with dual guitars and orchestral elements. In that perspective, I thought I’d focus on those core elements.”
The word ‘focus’ undersells it. Ihsahn is the most definitive yet progressive work the artist’s ever done. The two-disc, 100-minute LP is a story of two halves. The first re-explores Ihsahn’s classic extreme metal energy, yet proves its prog credentials with its proudly unconventional approach to melody. Rather than rely on typical rock’n’roll chord progressions, the songs eviscerate the rulebook and turn to the kind of composition that Ihsahn’s film-scoring favourites preferred to use.
“I tried to focus more on the scales and harmony structures typical of film music,” he explains. “That was the atmosphere I was going for. I had to take a theoretical approach to study that, because unless you’ve analysed it, it seems very random – especially for someone who’s self-taught and comes from a very Iron Maiden, very diatonic background.”
Meanwhile, Ihsahn’s latter half is exclusively orchestral, pulling the strings from each track on disc one and letting them consume the foreground. The result is a juxtapositional symphonic prog opus. While the ‘metal’ version of single Pilgrimage To Oblivion begins with all-guns-blazing aggro, blastbeats and screaming, its purely classical counterpart is the opposite: ominous, dynamic and tense. The melodies are inarguably the same, yet the emotional odysseys often end up being vastly different.
Tethering the halves together is an appropriately cinematic concept. Ihsahn weaves a narrative with a monomythical hero, inspired by the writing of US scholar Joseph Campbell, battling the norms of culture to forge his own identity. It’s a journey starkly similar to the musician’s own.
Ihsahn has always been the rebellious type. After his early days making music as a lone youngster on a farm, he met guitar player Tomas ‘Samoth’ Haugen aged 13 at a local blues festival. The pair bonded over an appreciation of classic black metal bands like Bathory, and formed their own to continue that lineage: Emperor.
The duo quickly got swept up in a movement of fellow Norwegian black metal artists, from Mayhem to Darkthrone, and the scene revolutionised heavy music with new forms of melody – alongside, in Emperor’s case, symphonic grandeur. The movement also found controversy with its violent antics. Samoth was briefly imprisoned in 1994 for burning down a church; ex-Emperor drummer Bård ‘Faust’ Eithun was found guilty the same year of murdering a gay man.
I had a need to go in a more experimental way… I didn’t want anyone else to dictate what Emperor should be like from the outside
Ihsahn refrained from such savage extra-curriculars, however, favouring sonic rebellion. “My role as a part of the black metal scene is probably exaggerated, because I was the visible frontman in one of those bands,” he says today. “In many ways, I was just the nerd making music.”
As Emperor resumed, the frontman assumed more and more songwriting duty, to the point that their swan song, 2001’s Prometheus: The Discipline Of Fire & Demise, was composed entirely by himself. Its complexities were deemed too esoteric and far removed from typical black metal by his bandmates, and their growing musical differences necessitated a break-up.
Samoth and drummer Trym Torson stayed put in the genre with a new band, Zyklon, while Ihsahn ploughed forward with his much more progressive solo music. “I was 15, 16 when the band started, and we ended Emperor when I was 25, so I was still pretty young,” he reflects.
“There were quite big leaps between the albums and where it was heading. You change so much: I had a need to go in a more experimental way. Listening to Prometheus…, because it’s not that accessible, it almost seemed like a ‘fuck you’ of an album. I didn’t want anyone else to dictate what Emperor should be like from the outside.”
Starting with 2006’s The Adversary, Ihsahn’s solo career began to draw from much more avant-garde influences. Even more melody and accessible singing was brought in, as was spacious, catchy, Judas Priest-like riffing. Then came the ambient textures, noise, saxophone, the instruments and chords of classical music.
I get this a lot: ‘Why do you do more experimental stuff?’ I’m thinking, ‘Why didn’t more people continue that journey? Why stop at 18?’
Despite his ongoing fascination with aggressive sounds and screaming, Ihsahn has always been a progressive adventurer. He also finds it baffling and infuriating when contemplating why his black metal peers stopped pushing against the audial grain almost 30 years ago. “I ended up doing the most extreme music I possibly could at 16,” he remembers.
“We all had that, pushing music forward. Why would you stop pushing forward when you get an opportunity to continue? I get this a lot: ‘Why do you do more experimental stuff?’ I’m thinking, ‘Why didn’t more people continue that journey? Why did they stop at fucking 18?’
“There’s nothing wrong with it. You can’t take away from Motörhead or AC/DC for being what they are. But I always found it much more interesting with Radiohead. Their response to OK Computer – one of the most successful and best rock albums ever – was Kid A and Amnesiac. I wanted that developing, chameleon style.”
Even though Ihsahn reformed Emperor in 2006 and the band regularly tour, they are yet to make any new music together, nor do they have any intention to. Instead, the multi-instrumentalist is much more fulfilled composing for the future than for nostalgia’s sake. He’s been progressing what heavy music can get away with for three decades now, yet, as his time with Prog comes to a close, he declares he’s “only just scratching the surface” of his capabilities.
“With every album I have tried to take another step; with Ihsahn, I took about 10 steps,” he says. “The biggest gratification is, closing in on 50 and having done this for a very long time, to find myself in a situation where I’m so fired-up and excited. There’s a realisation that I could set the bar much higher than I did previously and work my way through it. It’s just made me even more excited to do the next one.”
“We sat on this one for almost two years, and it was one of the first tracks where we really leaned into a more pop-driven sound.”
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Three years on from Fatalism elevating them to the status of giants, Polaris have released their latest track.
Also marking three years since the devastating loss of guitarist Ryan Siew, the band’s new track Without You is “the sound of crushing loss, shock, grief and heartache, and the beginning of us learning how to share that with the world”, catharsis and a dedication to their fallen comrade.
Without You is available now. Catch Polaris live at Good Things in December.
System of a downed webstore?
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One of the things I enjoy most about folk metal is that I never know exactly what I’m going to hear until I press play. This is, of course, due to the fact that folk music in general varies so widely depending on the region from which it originates. Hyver, who runs the label Antiq Records in France, has been crafting medieval-style folk/black metal under various musical projects for some time now. Twelve found plenty to praise in 2021’s Au Fleuve de Loire, notwithstanding its patchwork nature. The latest collection of Hanternoz songs is each about a different type of devil from Breton folklore. From what I can gather, A Hed an Noz, a Noz, a Noz loosely translates as “At Night, At Night, At Night” in Breton. Does this album go bump in the night or does it fall with a flat thud?
A Hed an Noz should sound familiar to those who have heard Hyver’s other work. The bread and butter is still the heroic trem-picked guitars and gallant drumming that one can also hear from Véhémence or (to a lesser extent) Grylle. Hyver’s vocals are as chameleonic as ever, adopting many different shades of demonic rasps, growls, and groans that embody the album’s theme. This diversity in vocal styles is fortunate because the diversity of instrumentation has greatly diminished. This time, Hanternoz mostly takes the Cnoc An Tursa approach of examining folk music through a metal lens without much in the way of actual folk instruments, which are sequestered to the lone instrumental interlude “Pe trouz War an Douar.”
The fact that the bag of tricks from which Hanternoz draws is much smaller ends up holding back A Hed an Noz. It’s a sizable step backward from Au Fleuve de Loire, where the folk music and synths were woven directly into the black metal in a more energetic and dynamic fashion. Hanternoz may have taken to heart Twelve’s prior observation of the compositions feeling stitched together because A Hed an Noz is certainly more cohesive, but at the cost of much of its zeal. To be fair, this is not an issue across the board. Most notably, “La Lessive des Trépassés” is punchy and to the point, with Joanna Maeyens’1 guest vocals overlapping enchantingly with the predominant growls. The production of A Hed an Noz is nice and crisp, especially with regard to the bass mixing, which greatly enriches the guitar lines (“La Peste à Limoges,” “Quand j’ai tué le Roi de la Forêt”).
Yet, these promising core elements of A Hed an Noz are undermined by an overreliance on repetition. Opener “Sur le Chemin des fées” is somehow galloping and plodding at the same time, the triumphant guitars becoming muted as they build up again and again towards a payoff that never comes after nearly 12 minutes. Closing track “Quand j’ai tué le Roi de la Forêt” gets stuck in a mid-paced rut, resulting in a more lethargic sensation than should be warranted given the valiant guitar leads. The long-form songwriting in “La Peste à Limoges” fares better, centered around an infectious, bouncy groove which gets my head bobbing, though the midsection is a tad protracted and disjointed. The charismatic vocal delivery helps but isn’t enough to overcome the fact that no song on A Hed an Noz is justified in being over 6 minutes long, yet most of them are.
Ultimately, A Hed an Noz left less and less of an impression on me the more time I spent with it. The delightful unpredictability from Au Fleuve de Loire is simply not present here. I am left puzzled as to why Hanternoz decided to discard the majority of the toolkit that served them well in the past. There is a fair amount of decent material here that would have done better without as much padding, and it’s worth a listen by anyone who enjoys Hyver’s take on medieval black metal. Just expect less medieval and more monotony this time around.
Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Antiq Records
Websites: antiqofficial.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/people/Hanternoz-Pagan-de-Bretagne
Releases Worldwide: August 3rd, 2026
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