Today, the legendary Jefferson Starship release their first new material in 5 years. ‘Jetpack‘ has been a feature of the bands recent live performances and was first showcased while on tour this summer at London’s Wembley Arena. The explosive new single is already on its way to becoming a new fan favourite. Driving lead guitars […]
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Interviewed by Cat Finch
Southern thrashers Overpower chat with us at Bloodstock Festival.
We discuss their influences, their journey to Bloodstock, working with those lovely folk at Church Road Records, they tease new music and talk about the “Malevolence-effect” and the impact on young fans.
You can listen to the interview below, or jump over to any of the usual streaming services!
Youtube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Youtube Music
Check out all of our interviews on the usual podcast channels!
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Less than 24 hours after watching A.A. Williams, High On Fire, and the incredible Cult Of Luna delivering the majesty of Mariner at Arctangent, I find myself with Wishbone Ash and Clearwater Creedence Revival in the always impressive surroundings of Chepstow Castle, in the town that straddles England and Wales. It is my only visit in 2026 to the excellent Castell Roc summer season.
Words And Photography: Paul Hutchings
Spread over a month in August, each weekend sees an eclectic line-up fill the Cadw-managed venue. There is still some emotion hanging in the air as I arrive, as the iconic location saw The Bastard Sons pay tribute to their much-missed father, Phil, the night before. An evening that, by all accounts, was a touch tear-jerking at times.
Tonight though, I journey back through time to the late 1960s, as the evergreen Wishbone Ash bring a selection of songs from their extensive catalogue to the castle. Led by original member Andy Powell, this is the line-up that carries the official stamp.
It is a healthy crowd that gathers as the sun sets and Ash launch into their intro. Immediately, that classic twin guitar sound that is both distinctive and influential cuts through the still evening air.
It is not hard to see and hear why this band’s work was such an integral part of the rock scene back in the day. Their impact on music cannot be underestimated. Bands as diverse as Iron Maiden, Dream Theater, Metallica and Opeth cite them as major influences. Those bands who performed at Arctangent will also have roots that are deep in the era when Wishbone Ash ruled the world.
Tonight’s line-up is, of course, much changed but probably more stable. Alongside Powell, who is incredibly sprightly for a man of 76, Mark Abrahams provides much of the scintillating lead work. Abrahams is nearly a decade in and joins 30-year veteran bassist Bob Skeat whilst drummer Winston McGilvray is the newest arrival, joining this year and anchoring the band with his solid and controlled display.
It is the dual guitar work that thrills. Aided by the crystal-clear sound, Powell and Abraham cut into Blowing Free from Argus to huge applause. Many of the audience were no doubt teenagers when the seminal release arrived, and judging by the number populating the seating area, not all are in such good shape as the main man on stage.
Whilst I had read reports in advance that Powell’s voice was not so good these days, I did not experience any issues. Sure, it may not be as rich and dreamy as 1969, but harmonies were hit, and nothing screamed at me during the entire set. In fact, Powell and Skeat sounded good to me.
Powell has a genuinely likeable manner, and chatted easily between songs, with short stories littering the evening. It is the succulent playing that really grabs you, though, with Abraham’s work on the likes of Mountainside and Phoenix particularly impressive.
There is something quite spiritual about those double harmonies, and the likes of Warrior, The King Will Come and Error Of My Ways are drenched in beautifully rich guitar work.
When Powell introduces Phoenix, a song that dates back to the ’70s debut album, the crowd whoops in anticipation. It is the finale, a fine extended workout which Powell warns us about, but compelling in every aspect.
A further encore satisfies those wanting even more, before the band wish us goodnight and leave to a standing ovation. Those guitars in this setting make a fabulous evening all round.
If you want to warm up a crowd at a classic rock gig, then surely Clearwater Creedence Revival are your guys. I have seen the band, who capture the spirit of the ’60s and ’70s so well, before, and they really put on a show.
Obviously, they are a tribute, intent on keeping the memory of the great Southern rockers alive, and they do that with style and flair.
It helps that CCR’s catalogue is full of bangers. From Fortunate Son, Up Around The Bend and Run Through The Jungle, there is song after song that you know, even if you think you did not.
Some extended jams demonstrate the band’s quality, with a nice piece allowing each musician to spend time in the spotlight. By the time we get to Have You Ever Seen The Rain, it is party time in the crowd, although that is mainly a very light jig from side to side.
An inspired support slot, and one that works on every level.
“Sweet and timely caress”
No prizes for guessing what Sucking My Love is about. It has been suggested by members of Diamond Head that it’s actually about the music business but I think that’s a rubbish attempt to gloss over the fact that one of the NWOBHM’s prime creative forces wrote a big long song about getting a blowjob.
The centrepiece of Diamond Head’s classic 1980 album Lightning To The Nations (aka The White Album), Sucking My Love is Zeppelin-meets-UFO heavy rock. Brian Tatler’s pentatonic guitar riffs are ingeniously simple, timeless and unforgettable. The track has a wonderful dark atmosphere and, following a cool Maiden-esque quiet section (all harmonics and celestial percussion), builds to a guitar soloing climax akin to UFO’s Love To Love. But the star contribution comes from vocalist Sean Harris, a man with such a tremendously forceful and charismatic voice that he’s even able to imbue the word “tasty” with Percy Plant levels of mythic power.
It’s a magical, evocative track that transports me right to the NWOBHM era every time I listen to it. Although it wasn’t one of the band’s more forward-thinking compositions, Sucking My Love shows that Diamond Head had the rarefied ability, class, and grandeur to compete with metal’s old gods. Tasty.
Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine has revealed the solid advice a fellow heavy metal legend gave him during his cancer battle. Mustaine was diagnosed with throat cancer in February 2019, eventually being declared cancer-free the following October. Speaking exclusively in the new issue of Metal Hammer to promote his new book, In My Darkest Hour, the thrash metal hero reveals that none other than Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson gave him some inspiring words during his ordeal.
Dickinson himself was diagnosed with and later cleared from throat cancer a few years earlier, and offered Mustaine some useful thoughts on the matter. “Bruce had some fantastic stuff to say as a cancer survivor,” Dave tells Hammer. “There’s a big difference between someone saying, ‘You’re in my thoughts and prayers’, versus somebody who goes into detail about his treatment and tells you about the outcome. I needed hope, and he gave me it.”
Bruce’s advice? A simple but effective mantra: “surround yourself with good people…make sure you’re spending time with people who are upbeat and positive.”
Mustaine made his cancer diagnosis public soon after receiving it himself – “to let the people who are my support system know”, he explains – and it prompted an outpouring of well-wishes from many of his peers. Amongst the names to have sent him messages were Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, Kiss man Paul Stanley and even his former Metallica colleague James Hetfield.
“It wasn’t any more significant than the other people who gave their support to me,” Mustaine notes of the messages. “I’ve always looked at that stuff like one beggar giving another beggar a crust of bread. But I appreciate it, because I know how our time is measured out, and to take the time to stop and do something like that means a lot.”
Mustaine talks at length about his cancer battle in In My Darkest Hour, which hits shelves September 24 via Constable. Pick up the latest issue of Metal Hammer to read more from MegaDave, as well as exclusive new interviews with Motionless In White, Ghost, Five Finger Death Punch, Mastodon and more.
Saturday arrives, and the morning bathing options are either queuing up for 3-5 business days to take a shower, or deciding you don’t have all day to wait and instead opting for the lite version; baby wipes and prayers. A festival classic. Breakfast is continental – a selection of leftover barbecue food with a side of dust. There is so much dust. It’s impossible to avoid ingesting even a little bit completely. But no matter – everyone’s fuelled up and raring to go for a full day of tunes. Oh, and it’s absolutely roasting. SPF 50 is strongly advised.
“We’re from Ireland”, shouts vocalist and percussionist Daniel (‘Lango’) Lang, as if that wasn’t already clear from thick Dublin accents and the strong presence of the trad Irish folk music, which, along with heavy metal, makes up their distinct sound. This is a relatively new band, with their first EP only being released in 2018, but they’ve grafted hard over the past 8 years, with their current discography containing three albums, two EPs, and two features on Dropkick Murphys’ 2015 record ‘For the People’; though 2026’s ‘Pull Like a Dog’ makes up the bulk of today’s setlist. It’s 1pm and beers are flying, and the arena has filled up by the time they come on. No sight of people trickling in and out as is often the case with sets scheduled for earlier in the day. There’s a good reason for that: this set is the standout of the weekend, and the crowd is ready and willing to come and get weird. Everyone is dancing from the first second of the first note. It feels impossible not to. There are clear metal elements to this band’s sound; the guitar tones they use, and some pretty tasty riffs throughout, but this set is a bit of a curveball in comparison to everything else on the lineup. That’s in no way a bad thing – this performance fills you with a kind of energy that’s really hard to put into words. By way of an attempt, though; there’s someone in the middle of the circle pit dressed as a banana. Also, it’s not really a circle pit, everyone is just skipping in a circle. Some people have linked arms and are skipping in pairs. Lovely, really. Acoustic guitars and a cajon at a metal festival shouldn’t work, and yet here we are, jumping around with hands in the air for four lads from Dublin who used to be in an actual metal band before they swapped amps for wood and strings. Lango, Conor Dockery, Cathal McKenna, and Gary Regan turn the field into a hooley within thirty seconds, trad runs colliding with riffs that smack just as hard unplugged as anything with a Marshall stack behind it. It’s pure chaos laced with unbridled joy, and it’s the closest thing Bloodstock has to a session in the corner of a Dublin pub, if that pub also had several thousand people crowd-surfing in it.
Urne don’t so much play a set as build a slow-burning storm. Joe Nally, Angus Neyra and Richard Wiltshire’s sludge-thrash-prog hybrid is dense and unhurried, riffs stacking up like weather fronts before they finally break. Nally’s vocals sit somewhere between a growl and a lament, giving even the heaviest passages an odd, aching kind of melancholy, while Neyra’s guitar work twists through tempo changes that never feel showy for the sake of it. It’s a set for the patient, no easy hooks, no crowd-pleasing shortcuts, and there’s a stretch in the middle where it would be easy for a festival crowd’s attention to drift. It doesn’t, though. By the time the heaviest passages land, the tent’s gone quiet in the way it only does when a band’s earned real attention rather than demanded it, and there’s a small crowd near the front who look like they’ve just found something they’ll be obsessing over for months.
There’s a very obvious question hanging over the tent before Vended even plug in, and to their credit, they spend the whole set trying to answer it on their own terms, even though, yes – they sound exactly like early Slipknot, even down to the vocals – no prizes for guessing who Griffin Taylor learnt from. He prowls the stage like he’s got something to prove, which, fair enough, he probably has, while Simon Crahan pounds away behind him with a similar point to make. ‘Asylum’ lands early and sets the tone, all hard rock riffing and doom-y breakdowns, before ‘Nihilism’ whips the crowd into its most frantic state of the whole set. Guitarists Cole Espeland and Connor Grodzicki keep things tight throughout, and bassist Jeremiah Pugh anchors the low end with consistent weight. Whether all this is enough to shake off the shadow of the Iowa Nine is still up for debate, but nobody in this crowd looks like they care either way, they’re just here for the racket.
Slick, heavy, and precision-tooled, Northlane’s brand of progressive metalcore feels like it was built in a lab specifically for festival main stages, in the best way. Marcus Bridge switches from full-throat roar to soaring clean vocals without breaking stride, and when ‘Quantum Flux’ arrives, the whole tent seems to know every word, turning it into one giant, chest-thumping singalong. Jon Deiley, Josh Smith and Nic Pettersen layer in industrial textures that make the whole thing feel bigger than your average breakdown-and-blast-beat crowd-pleaser, and ‘Echo Chamber’ shows off just how far the band have pushed their sound into electronic territory without losing any of the heaviness. Polished doesn’t mean safe here; it means a band who know exactly what they’re doing.
There’s a lump in more than one throat as Nevermore take the stage for the first time in over a decade, and the first time ever without Warrel Dane, who died in 2017 and whose shoes new vocalist Berzan Önen has been handed the near-impossible task of filling. Somehow, though, it works; Jeff Loomis’s guitar lines are as serrated and technical as they’ve ever been, Van Williams still hits like a train behind the kit, and when ‘Enemies of Reality’ kicks in, Önen sings the old material with real reverence rather than imitation, clearly aware of exactly what this performance means to the people watching. New recruits Jack Cattoi and Semir Özerkan slot in like they’ve been there for years, and by the time ‘The River Dragon Has Come’ rolls around, the tent has gone from cautious curiosity to full-throated devotion. It’s a moving second life for one of prog metal’s most missed bands, and by the end there isn’t a dry eye in the tent.
Thrash royalty, and they know it. Formed by teenagers back in 1982 and still going strong more than forty years later, Rob Cavestany and co. play with a speed and precision that shame bands half their age. Mark Osegueda works the whole width of the stage like a man half his years, all wide-eyed energy and constant motion, and ‘Seemingly Endless Time’ proves the old material has lost none of its bite. Ted Aguilar and Cavestany trade off riffs with the kind of chemistry that only decades of playing together can build, while Will Carroll and Damien Sisson keep the rhythm section locked in tight even as ‘Thrown to the Wolves’ pushes the tempo into genuinely dizzying territory. The pit response to the old-school Bay Area riffing is a reminder that thrash this pure never really goes out of fashion, it just waits for the right festival to bring it back round.
Glasgow’s finest export a wall of sound that’s part groove, part melody, and entirely relentless. Scott Kennedy’s screams trade off with Steven Jones’s soaring cleans to anthemic effect, and opener ‘Violent Nature’ sets an suitably furious tone from the first note. Craig Gowans and Davie Provan lock in behind them while Ali Richardson drives it all forward from the kit with real precision, while ‘In Place of Your Halo’ draws one of the biggest reactions of the set, its surprise bagpipe breakdown sending the whole tent into a frenzy. Kennedy prowls the front of the stage and pulls the crowd into every chorus like he’s done this a thousand times before, which, at this point, he probably has. Funny to think this all started as a bunch of kids covering Lamb of God at a youth club; now they’re doing the genre just as much justice as their heroes, who happen to be headlining this very festival.
As Saturday draws to a close, we prepare ourselves for our busiest (and hottest) day so far to round off the weekend, after what will probably be an uncomfortably warm night’s sleep. But not before checking out the bin jousting, which is exactly what it sounds like. Can’t forget the bin jousting.
Have you ever seen a storm roll in over a lake? Even better, one rolling in over a lake at sunset? Seeing a wall of pouring drops appear on the other side of a body of water and watching it roll toward you is such a wonderful experience. Add in sunset colors that burst in new blends with the mix of moisture in the air and you’re really getting to something. You’ll experience a fascinating blend of nature’s violence and calm within a striking balance of brilliant light and potentially pitch-black dark. Hanternoz’s approach to writing black metal is much the same. In fact, my most recent listen to its third album provided the perfect soundtrack for seeing blue skies and sun across the street from my house while branches and plants bent eastward in the winds of a storm and raindrops splashed my windows.
While the overall album strives to help you find the glimmer of light through a violent cumulonimbus cloud, Hanternoz hasn’t forgotten the roots of their black metal. “La lessive des trépassés” doles out a killer Satyricon riff that will make you bang your head. The drums on “Le Diable de Quimper-Corentin” are absolutely on FIRE for the first half and much of the song proffers a Moonsorrow-style subdued jauntiness. “La peste à Limoges” slows things down to start, allowing the bass to bop along and drive the track, but then closes on hypnotic repetition that lets you fall into the trance of the storm. Hell, the closer “Quand j’ai tué le roi de la forêt” remembered that all of heavy metal started with the song “Black Sabbath” and lets the doom ooze into the opening. But, all along the way, there is always something pulling songs out of the murk toward the heavens. That doesn’t even mention the brief flute- and bagpipe-laden instrumental that is “Pe Trouz War an Douar.”
A Hed an Noz, a Noz, a Noz does a fantastic job of making its more sorrowful moments feel positive. “La lessive des trépassés” has some haunting, layered cleans that should feel ominous but instead come across like the whispers of your own ancestors trying to pass down key tales that will help you through the next leg of your journey. “Le diable de Quimper – Corentin” has a clean passage in the middle that yields to a somber but hopeful close. Despite opener “Sur le chemin des fées” creating a maelstrom that would make you nervous about the longevity of your shingles, it still shines through with a spirit of triumph.
Havukruunu feels triumphant because of its gallop, while a band like Black Fucking Cancer funnels hostility to its audience through instrumental violence. Hanternoz manages to package both together in a different way. The music feels triumphant without galloping Maidenisms. The drums and guitars are still violent in their blasting nature, but they do so without feeling hostile. The battle that’s being won is fighting through the murk to get back to where you want to be. There’s an aspirational nature to what’s put together.
So, when it smells like rain or your old-ass knee is aching from a pending storm, find a spot to post up, put your headphones on, and let Hanternoz wash over you as the rains do the same.
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