In the spring of 1980, Judas Priest released an album that was to prove so successful within the parameters of its genre that it would almost come to define the term ‘heavy metal’. British Steel, the Birmingham group’s sixth studio record, was a masterclass in leather-and-studs bombast.
More than four decades on, British Steel remains a cherished gem from the golden age of British metal. What separated Judas Priest from the heavy metal crowd was their ability to marry the primal, industrial pounding that had reverberated around their industrial-heartland birthplace to a bloody good chorus.
“Although I say so myself, British Steel is a very, very good album,” says guitarist Glenn Tipton. “We had gone into Tittenhurst Park, the home of Ringo Starr, who’d bought it from John Lennon, after a previous attempt at another studio, and with only half of its songs written. Until that point, we’d never worked that way before.
“I’ll always recall that 1980 was a great summer, and being in such an inspirational surrounding definitely rubbed off on us,” he continues. “What came out was a set of very simple yet effective songs that, I’d like to think, helped to shape what else was going on [in heavy rock music] at the time.”
Living After Midnight, the first of the album’s three huge hit singles (the others being Breaking The Law and United), was among the songs conceived at Tittenhurst, near Ascot.
“One night while we were there, John Lennon was on the TV playing Imagine, and of course it was very weird to be in the actual room where he’d been filmed,” Tipton remembers. “You could almost visualise the white piano in the corner.”
In an equally eerie scenario, singer Rob Halford got the inspiration for the lyrics for Living After Midnight as his bandmates kept him awake by blasting out riffs and drum beats in the studio below. “He came downstairs to complain and said: ‘Hey, guys, come on. It’s gone midnight.’ Which shouldn’t really have bothered such a heavy metal icon as Rob,” Tipton says, laughing at the memory.
“It was 4am and we’d been working all day,” Halford protests. “But when I said what I did, the guys went: ‘That’s a brilliant title. Write it down.”
“Rob’s comment proved to be a spark for a very important song for us,” says Tipton. “It was one of those lucky spontaneous things that sometimes just happen.”
If the song’s swaggering, chest-beating, nocturnal-themed lyric – ‘I’m getting hotter by the hour/Loaded, loaded’ – seemed to set up Halford as a bit of an all-conquering, love-’em-and-leave- ’em sex machine, then the singer has no complaints.
“Yeah,” he smiles when reminded. “It made me sound like Clint Eastwood from A Fistful Of Dollars, clutching a condom.”
Living After Midnight begins with a drum intro from the then newly arrived Dave Holland (formerly of Trapeze), and then it goes straight to the chorus.
“I really don’t know why it turned out like that,” Tipton admits. “Sometimes the simplest ideas just work out the best. Maybe that was in the back of our minds.”
“There’s a lot to be said for the very famous phrase that goes: ‘Don’t bore us, get to the chorus,’” says Halford. “In this instance, we took it pretty literally.”
Both agree that the vision of producer Tom Allom, who had been retained after the band’s live Unleashed In The East, was fundamental to the project’s success. In those pre-sampling days, Allom suggested the band raid the studio’s kitchen to rattle trays of cutlery as an enhancement of the ominous grind of Metal Gods. (He also recorded the sound of smashed milk bottles and a police siren for Priest’s more commercial-sounding Breaking The Law.)
“We used to make our own samples in those days, and Tom had such great ideas. I sometimes think that even we [the band] overlooked his importance,” Tipton offers. “He was such a diplomatic guy, and great at getting guitar and drum sounds. What an underrated producer.”
Like the hilarious video for Breaking The Law, in which Priest robbed a branch of Barclays Bank in London’s Wardour Street, armed with their Flying V guitars, and then made their getaway in an open-topped convertible, the video for Living After Midnight was a suitably ludicrous affair. Directed by Julien Temple and shot at Sheffield City Hall, it boasted Dave Holland playing an invisible drum kit.
“The air guitarists, and everybody piling onto a coach, those were early days of videos,” Tipton says of Priest’s comedic vent. “Although corny, I still think they were great.”
Although Living After Midnight didn’t chart in the US (it reached No.12 in the UK), the immediacy of it opened the door there for Judas Priest.
“It was absolutely pivotal in breaking the band in many parts of the world,” Halford says.
“Heavy metal is all about getting together with your mates, donning the gear, drinking a few beers and watching some great music,” adds Tipton. “And in the morning you go back to work, school, college or whatever. It’s therapeutic, nothing more and nothing less.”
Italian shoegazers TIGER! SHIT! TIGER! TIGER! have a name that sounds like if William Blake’s “The Tyger” got locked in a venue bathroom with a broken hand dryer and came out coughing up fuzz pedals. Stephen King also observed that in 2019, he humorously named Satan’s Almighty Penis as ‘today’s best rock group name” and awarded the runner-up to ‘Tiger! Shit! Tiger! Tiger!’. While not a traditional promotional blurb, it still seems to serve as the right kind of literary omen. The trio of Diego Masciotti, Giovanna Vedovati, and Nicola Vedovati has already dragged its analogue racket through SXSW, CMJ, and enough live rooms to make a sensible person ask whether the smoke machine needs a union rep.
With Glue, the new single from the band’s forthcoming albumDISSOLVE HERE, they turn the volume inward without tidying up the mess. Thankfully, no linen is audible here.
Glue crawls rather than charges, built on repetition, low-ceiling tension, and a guitar language that seems to have learned manners from DIIV and then spent the weekend with Sonic Youth’s Sister, coming home with bad posture and interesting stains. “that’s not me” and “spin around” circle the room like phrases someone keeps muttering after leaving a party too early, or too late, or perhaps after realizing the party was inside their skull all along. The performance feels primitive in the best sense: few pieces, no chrome, no studio perfume, just bass, drums, guitar, voice, and that lovely feeling of your identity slipping behind the couch.
The lyrics describe a dissociative spiral where identity loosens, perception blurs, and the body seems to sink through haze, light, and repetition. Desire for closeness collides with alienation, leaving the speaker caught in loops of confusion, fading self-recognition, and a need that feels both intimate and destabilizing.
“Glue functions as a raw, primitive document that transitions straight into the wall-of-sound production of our upcoming record,” says the band. “…We wanted to capture that specific, weightless headspace where identity begins to blur into the background, letting the song slowly dissolve into an extended, atmospheric instrumental outro.”
Recorded at VDSS Studio by Filippo Passamonti, DISSOLVE HERE points toward heavier down-tuned fuzz and larger walls of guitar, but Glue earns its place by pulling the frame closer. You can hear The Jesus and Mary Chain in the scuffed romance, The Veldt in the blurred devotional charge, and even a trace of James in the melodic lift that sneaks through the murk wearing a fake mustache.
By the time the instrumental coda stretches out, Glue feels less like a single than a little spell of disappearance, a band sanding itself down to a nerve before the larger album drops its full weight.
Hailing from the frozen lands of Ontario, Canada, Solarus offers a more complex and progressive variety of power metal. Of Sin and Ruin is their fourth album and they’ve got their sound down to a science. Expect the standard triumphant, soaring melodies and ethereal keyboard arrangements, but tempered with pounding drums, chugging guitar riffs, and even some growled vocals. It’s highly enjoyable if you have a tolerance for this kind of cheese.
For fans of extreme metal, it’s no surprise to see bands seclude themselves, giving us nothing until their next project drops. Sex Prisoner have been completely silent since their 2017 split EP with fellow powerviolence group Harm Done (who have since disbanded), leading fans to believe they were finished. 10 years since their debut album, Tannhäuser Gate, Sex Prisoner is back and just as quiet: no singles, no comments from the band, just a bunch of pre-orders popping up on merch sites. Their previous work brings hope of punishing powerviolence with droning bass and drum blasts like Uzi sprays. Vicious breakdowns that halt the 200-mile-per-hour pace will stomp our ribcages to the tune of disgust in humanity. There’s only the band’s history to set expectations, but their history has given us one of the most exciting discographies in modern powerviolence.
If you like your black metal to be unsettling, dissonant, and just slightly off-kilter, Mourir’s third album, Nous, Le Venin, should satisfy you. Black metal is known for being cold and arboreal, but that’s not what is on display here. Instead, it’s something more urban, though certainly not any less inhuman. The songs have grandiose and theatrical arrangements without being overly technical or obtuse. At times, the guitar riffs are twisted and thorny; elsewhere, they are straightforward and driving. Cloaking it all and bringing it together is a feeling of tension, darkness, and death.
Now this is some old-school black metal! Escumergamënt is an anonymous Swedish black metal group that may contain members of Swedish cult legends Setherial. Only one song is available for listening at time of writing, but it is a dense, icy torrent of second-wave style black metal. Miasma, tremolo-picked guitars? Check. Haunting keyboard pads? Check. Primitive production? Check. Embrace the darkness and let this into your soul.
“Negative Desire” is the sole track available preceding Cosmic Vertigo‘s release, but it shows Black Death Cult slightly demuddying their psychedelic blackened death metal. They’re more direct than they were on Devil’s Paradise, but still atonal. They weren’t going to ditch the latter quality nor their desire to disorient. After all, the record features a Uriah Heep cover and was mastered by Colin Marston. It has to be weird.
Cabinet’s sole member maintains snowmobile trails in a PistenBully as a full-time gig. It’s a lonely, cold, and punishing endeavour, much like Cabinet itself, which transposes death metal into music suitable for long treks in the Californian backcountry during the winter. So, it’s death metal cosplaying as ambient. Texture and mood overtake any riff or groove, with every moving piece being suffocated by fuzz. More interestingly, the song structures are there, they’ve just been overtaken by dust. Deracinated Into Soiled Reliquaries (Sarcophagus Odyssey) is, as such, more complex than its Mortician influence implies.
Not much these days has an organizing principle, but such a thing does not need to be complicated: songs need to sound like some kind of experience, real or imagined, and all their parts need to support that vision.
Horrifier combine early horror grindcore like Repulsion and Impetigo with more recent efforts such as Tenebro or Gwar, coming up with a musical take on the cinematic panic and paranoia of a good horror film.
Expect ripping first-five-fret riffs with bounding rhythms, tied together on a moment of not only suspension of disbelief, but suspension of normal life, colliding through rhythm and brief melodic hook to create a world of terror.
At some point, one is tempted by the hype, and has to check out the latest train-wreck from the movie industry. In this case, it is Citizen Vigilante, a Deathwish-style “delayed justice” flick.
It features MeToo-deplatformed actor Armie Hammer, grandson of Communist industrialist Armand Hammer, who is returning with a bang to his acting career by starring in the most deliberately provocative movie of our time.
The plot — in case you live under a rock and have missed the hype — involves a vigilante who, upon seeing migrants commit rapes and get a slap on the wrist from the justice system, goes on a deliciously bloody rampage.
“First the traitors, then the invaders,” might be the plot summary here, because Hammer’s vigilante makes it clear that his ultimate target is the judges and police who allowed this to happen.
He clears out the migrants as a matter of course, restoring balance to the universe, and that kind of thing. His actual motivation is to purge the weak, in a film that is both incoherent and startlingly on point.
Its peaks, following Gatsby, of course, is a scene of chicken between cars. Hammer points out that most people would rather die while following the rules than turn the steering wheel, breaking a rule, and avoiding death.
It is a powerful metaphor for the West not just in terms of migrants and diversity but how people avoid conflict and follow rules in order to preserve their bourgeois middle class existence.
Evoking High Noon as well as Dirty Harry, the film points out how the desire for comfort and respectability has neutered Europeans to the point where they allow others to become victims and ignore the underlying problem.
Moving past the obviously controversial topic of migrant rape gangs and the political system that ignores them, the core of this movie is about Europeans, UKers and USians regaining a sense of self-preservation.
Much of it makes little sense to me, such as lengthy scenes of armored vehicles driving around, but a great deal aims to explore the psychology of the American of European descent who leaves a military career to restore order.
The scenes feel like a high school production in many cases, but then hit on great insights as characters are forced to choose between ends (justice) over means (civil rights) and find themselves becoming outsider counter-revolutionaries.
There are baffling moments designed to provoke, much as one finds in Houellebecq and Celine, such as the lengthy interaction between Hammer and a prostitute, after which point he gives practical advice regarding mold growth.
But in the end, the movie makes its point. In each of us dwells both the ends-over-means warrior and the means-over-ends suburbanite, and for the sake of our souls more than even practical concerns, now is the time of choosing.
Check Shinedown’s vital signs in 2026, and everything suggests a band in rude health. The Florida alt.rockers have been out there killing it for a quarter of a century. They’re now set to release their eighth album – the cunningly titled EI8HT, loaded with 18 original songs – and surely about to boost their lifetime tally of 22 Billboard chart-topping singles. Contrast that, frontman Brent Smith says with a smile, with the doomy projections and media apathy of the band’s early days.
“Nothing was ever handed to us,” he says. “When we started in 2001, I thought to myself: ‘We’re going to be on MTV and the cover of Rolling Stone.’ That was not the case. Maybe they thought that would make me cower in a corner or give up. It did the opposite. I used it as fuel, man. My job starts when you tell me: ‘No.’”
If you don’t read between the lines (and there’s no pressure to do so; Shinedown have always been a band that are feasible to enjoy through your hair, feet and fists, with your brain as an optional extra), then EI8HT feels like another uncomplicated, escapist, chest-pounding triumph. The long-settled line-up of Smith, guitarist Zach Myers, bassist Eric Bass and drummer Barry Kerch have always been strong on hooks that hit a stadium’s back wall, and that knack is represented on incoming anthems like Dance, Kid, Dance and Burning Down The Disco.
“There’s something about what we do that resonates with people,” the frontman says of Shinedown’s mass appeal Stateside, underlined by record sales of more than 10 million. “I will never, for the life of me, necessarily understand why that is, but I don’t question it. I just hold on tight and ride.”
But the new record’s near-two-year genesis wasn’t necessarily joyous, he counters.
“There is an immense amount of emotional real estate on this album. There’s been a lot of loss in the band. Eric lost his dad and aunt. His wife lost her sister. I lost my granny, my mom. When loved ones pass away, our instinct is to say: ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’ But a song like Three Six Five is about how they may be physically gone but their spirit will never leave you. It’s not that they’re gone, they’re everywhere. They’ve transcended.”
Meanwhile, the singer adds that it was difficult to stop culture wars, actual wars and big tech dripping into his headspace (while staying discreet on his own political stripes).
“We’re in a situation right now where there’s a lot of people trying to flex their power,” he says. “But you’re never gonna outrun karma. You’re going to pay for it here. Or you’re going to pay for it in the next life. I know some people might look at that and be like: ‘Well what if there’s nothing after this?’ And I just say to them: ‘You’re not gonna get out that easy.’”
All of this context swirled around the band as they set to work in the barn studio on Bass’s South Carolina property.
“Eric is probably a bass player last, more like a Swiss Army knife,” Smith says proudly. “He’s mixed, produced and engineered the last three albums. It’s astonishing to watch this man work. You’re talking eighteen-hour days, no sleep, months at a time. He’s a mad scientist. You don’t know which Eric you’re gonna get on any given day.
“There’s a little bit of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The studio looks all nice and put together, but then you leave for twenty-four hours, come back, and it’s like a tornado hit it. He’s pulling out pedals, keyboards, stuff you didn’t even know he had. He’s searching for something, going down the rabbit hole…”
EI8HT doesn’t sound over-produced, though? Smith shakes his head.
“Everybody had to play through all the songs; we didn’t want cut ’n’ paste or computer surgery. It’s just gonna sound robotic. We might as well be an AI band if we do that. So we doubled down. When you open up the record case, there’s a stamp we created that says: ‘100% human – no AI used in the making of this record’. Y’know, like Rage Against The Machine wrote back in the day: ‘All sounds made by guitar, bass, drums and vocals’.”
It doesn’t take much of a nudge of Smith for him to let rip at Silicon Valley.
“Developers of AI in the music sphere think people are sheep, and they’re finding out they’re not. They’re like: ‘This is the way of the future and everybody’s gonna listen to robots.’ And it’s like: ‘Yeah, man, nobody likes it.’ AI music is a novelty at best. And I may get some hate for this. But I don’t care.
“Because here’s the reality: there is something about when you put human beings in a room and they start pushing air. You’re never gonna replace drums, bass, guitar, badass vocals and a killer song. And by the way, I need to remind people of something about AI: you can always go over to the wall and unplug it.”
Brent Smith (Image credit: Ebru Yildiz)
Rant over, he gets back to EI8HT.
“I guess you could say we were a bit Buddhist, philosophy-wise, on this record. Buddhists believe you should leave imperfection in art. That you’ve lost the humanity if you make it perfect.”
Shinedown are big on humanity. Powered by an eerie, electro-rock pulse with shades of Depeche Mode, Imposter finds Smith questioning why modern teenagers seek to numb themselves (“I’ve met so many young people over our career. You’ll be talking to a fourteen-year-old who’s addicted to drugs, y’know?”).
Machine Gun’s driving pop-punk gives a voice to his and Bass’s grandfathers in WWII. “They both had a similar story. They called out to the universe, like: ‘I’ll do my duty and complete the mission, but if you can get me out of this mess and back to the woman I love, I’ll be a good man.’ We wrote it from the position of what they were going through in the trenches. So that’s where that line ‘Instead of you, I’m holding a machine gun’ comes from. Both of them survived, and when they got home the first thing they did was marry their significant other, our grandmothers.”
Other songs seem to pull 48-year-old Smith himself back to a simpler time. On the edgy, cinematic Deep End, he explains: “I’m transported back to opening night at the movie theatre, Brandon Lee in The Crow [1994]”. The hazy, golden swirl of Young Again reconnects with his childhood as a “handful, a troublemaker, growing up in the eighties, before cell phones, when you could just take off and you were gone, man”
Eric Bass (2009), Barry Kerch (2012) and Zach Myers (2009) onstage (Image credit: Eric Bass, Zach Myers : Barry Brecheisen/WireImage | Barry Kerch: Chelsea Lauren/FilmMagic)
Smith’s Southern roots, meanwhile, are saluted subtly in the music.
“Searchlight is dipping a toe into country. That song reminded me of growing up in East Tennessee. I sang it with a different conviction to songs like Back To The Living, which is more soulful. I’m singing a bit more from my roots – R&B, Otis Redding, Billie Holiday, Al Green, Sam Cooke, Etta James…”
Perhaps. But as if to reaffirm their early alt.metal piss and vinegar, there’s also the seething Safe And Sound.
“Some comments are like: ‘I didn’t know they still had this in them.’ Which I find interesting,” Smith says of the fan response. “Some of them are like: ‘I thought Shinedown were a pop band.’ And then other people are like: ‘I thought they were more of a metal band’ Or: ‘I thought they were an alt. band.’ Here’s the reality of it: Shinedown is everyone’s band.”
Dizzy might prick up your ears too. The singer bills the wistful-slash-euphoric anthem as a salute to a lifelong comrade (“It’s about your best friend, your ride-or-die”). But lines like ‘I swear I didn’t smoke and I’m off the wine’ will remind long-term fans of Smith’s unravelling in the early post-millennium. He has said cocaine, alcohol and opioid painkiller OxyContin were all dark backdrops to 2003’s Leave A Whisper and 2005’s Us And Them.
“Why did it call to me?” he wonders out loud. “Because it felt good. It wasn’t about wanting to be inspired or be creative or anything. I did it because I was curious. And when I did it, I found: ‘Oh, this makes me feel good. I wonder what that will make me feel like.’”
Shinedown are such a tight unit. How did your bandmates deal with your addictions?
“They saved my life. Without question. They never judged me. I’ll never forget Barry looking at me at my lowest and him being like: ‘Dude, I’m not a cop. I’m not here to arrest you or take you in. I just don’t want to watch you die. Please, whatever I got to do, man, I’ll do it. Just don’t leave me. Don’t leave us. We have no idea why you’re torturing yourself like this, but please, you have to stop.’”
Smith credits his then-newborn son (now 18) for the decisive push towards sobriety. “I’d just turned thirty, and that’s when I realised it was no longer about me. Like, I’m no good to this child if I’m dead. We don’t know when it’s our time. I could have a freak accident, act of God, whatever. But I do have control of whether I’m gonna do that line, drink that bottle, smoke that rock. I do have a choice in regards to that. I can stop that.”
Smith piled on the weight when he kicked his habit (in an interview with the LA Times, he recalled his heart “falling on the floor” when, during a 2009 performance on Today, the show’s hosts likened his appearance to Meat Loaf). These days the singer looks sharp and battle-ready.
“I’ll be transparent,’ he says. “I had to change my lifestyle about a decade ago, because I just wasn’t going to be able to keep up with the way I wanted to be on stage. I did a lot of research about diet, nutrition, exercise, supplementation, all these different things where people are like: ‘Oh, it’s all hocus pocus.’ I just recently started doing yoga four days a week. Back in the day, people were like [rolls eyes]. But when you start getting older, the most crucial thing you need to be is flexible. You have to work that shit out, dude. You can’t be stagnant.”
Outwardly, Smith is a machine. But has he buried that troubled individual for good?
“Oh, he’s with me every single day,” he says. “I’m not talking about schizophrenia. But I am, and forever will be, an addict and an alcoholic. He’s in here [taps head]. He’s very, very far in the back of my subconscious. But there are days I wake up that he can get loud, and I have to tell him: ‘Not today, man.’ That’s the only thing in my life that I have to do one day at a time. I have to remember: ‘I didn’t do drugs today, I didn’t drink today. But I have no idea what I’ll do tomorrow.’ So it’s never like: ‘I’m good. I can forget about it.’ Because at any given moment he could pick the lock and get out of the cage.”
Right now, with a killer new album in the can and November’s UK arena dates testament to a band making steady inroads overseas, you’d bet on Smith’s Dr Jekyll winning out over his Mr Hyde.
“I’m not surprised we’ve made it to an eighth album, but I’m very grateful,” he says. “And there’s a statement I keep in the front of my mind. In my worst throes of addiction, I had a friend of mine tell me: ‘Dude, you focus on wanting to be this hardcore individual, on wanting to be punk-rock. But that other guy. He’s not trying to have fun with you, he’s trying to end you. And I’m telling you right now, man, when you’re clean, sober and locked in, that’s when you’re at your most dangerous.’”
