Protomartyr are back. Last year, the Detroit post-punk band celebrated 10 years of The Agent Intellect with a live LP and anniversary shows, but their last proper album was 2023’s Formal Growth In The Desert. They’re announcing its followup, Hotel Usona, today.
The post Protomartyr Announce New Album <em>Hotel Usona</em>: Hear “Sounds We Cannot Hear” appeared first on Stereogum.
Spiritbox ejected a fan from a recent show in Phoenix, Arizona for allegedly violent behaviour.
As the Canadian metalcore outfit played Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre last Wednesday (July 15), singer Courtney LaPlante paused the show before playing last year’s single Soft Spine to kick out some that she claimed was “hurting everybody”.
Footage of the encounter is now circulating online.
“Zev [Rose, drummer] is taller than us and he’s up on the kit, and he sees some fucker right now,” LaPlante says in the video (via The PRP).
“We’re not gonna play another song and this show is not gonna continue until we make sure everybody out there is safe. So I need you guys to be tattletales, who’s the fucking freak that’s hurting everybody? Point him out… Point him out. He went that way? Well guess what, fucker? We all saw you, and we know where you are. Your ass is gonna get kicked the fuck out.”
The singer then addresses one of the alleged victims of the unruly concertgoer.
“Hey are you OK, bud?” she asks. “I know that you didn’t mean to draw attention, I’m sorry to draw attention to you, but that’s fucked up, OK? This isn’t the damn gold medal karate match, OK? This is a rock’n’roll show. Alright, it looks like security’s got him. Let that be a lesson to anybody out there who fucks around tonight.
“Because our security, they’re very nice and they love you guys. But they have let me know that if they have to, they will baptise a motherfucker and they will tune you up. Because what’s most important, safety, right? So if anybody falls down, what are you going to do? You’re going to pick them up, OK?”
The Phoenix show was part of Spiritbox’s ongoing North American tour with Evanescence and Nova Twins. The shows continue tonight (July 22) at Cascades Amphitheater in Ridgefield, Washington. The band are also booked for a run of European shows which start in Glasgow, UK on September 12. Jinjer and Dying Wish will support.
Spiritbox released their latest album, Tsunami Sea, to positive reviews last year. Metal Hammer’s Rich Hobson gave it a near-perfect 4.5-star score and said that they’d become “a band who could contend with Bring Me The Horizon and Sleep Token as the next zeitgeist-setting metal act”.
LaPlante collaborated on a standalone single called End Of You with fellow vocalists Poppy and Evanescence’s Amy Lee last September. In a recent Hammer interview, Lee reflected on the experience and said, “Courtney and Poppy are both amazing and very different from each other.”
Canadian-Greek metal artist Katerina Nicole is steadily carving out her place in heavy music, shaping a sound where punishing metalcore collides with melodies that linger long after the final note. In the wake of the deeply personal “Ladybug,” she returns with “Black on White,” a fierce collaboration with Johnny Ciardullo that pushes that contrast even further. We spoke with the vocalist about the grief woven into her songwriting, her conscious decision to embrace the nu-metal label, and the barriers that continue to confront women making their way through the music industry.
Lucy
Hello Katerina xx No one reads the title “Ladybug” and expects a heavy, earth-shattering beatdown! What’s the story behind this gorgeous collision of delicate imagery and absolute brutality?
Katerina Nicole
Yeah, it’s a little unexpected! I have been grieving a loss in my life for a while now and I felt like I wanted to create a track around them that gave more life and honored their existence. I felt influences from my early pop punk days and thought that kind of energy could go really well! Some days are harder than others and there’s no timeline on grief. “Ladybug” represents the short but beautiful time that we have with someone. I was truly lucky to have them around when I did.
Lucy
A lot of musicians dodge genre tags like a trap, but you’re out here wearing “Nu-Metal” and “Metalcore” loud and proud on your social media bios! What made you want to claim those labels instead of leaving your music open for interpretation?
Katerina Nicole
I am inviting those genres into my world! I do come from EDM and rock, so it’s a new moment to let everyone know where I’m at. This is a very exciting time to be in the metal community!
Lucy
Whenever I’m working on new pieces for the magazine, I have to blast music to stay in the zone. Does that trick work for you as a musician? What kind of art, or which specific artists, do you turn to when you need to fuel your own writing sessions?
Katerina Nicole
I also do the same. I sing loudly at home or in my car, I dance, I write random current feelings and thoughts, and quickly if not eventually I come up with material to use!
Lucy
Picture this: the streaming algorithm works its magic and serves “Ladybug” to someone who has never heard your name. When the track ends, what is the very first thing you hope they understand about who you are?
Katerina Nicole
I believe I was put on this earth to share feelings with others. To bring together emotions and experience them. I am a vessel of vulnerability and story telling that seems to resonate with others well. It’s also very comforting for myself to not keep it inside. When I give it to the world, it’s a way of letting go of some stuff.
Lucy
What question do you absolutely hate being asked in interviews? (Hoping I haven’t already asked it… or worse, that it’s this exact question)
Katerina Nicole
I don’t really like small talk, I would much rather get into the hard stuff and dissect them so listeners can also leave with some perspective that might be valuable.
Lucy
Women in the arts have fought incredibly hard, from having to use male pen names centuries ago to fearlessly tackling intimate topics today. But looking at our community now, what barricades do you think still need to be smashed before we can finally say gender discrimination is dead in the scene?
Katerina Nicole
Currently as I’m transitioning from a solo female act to a full band, it feels like I’m taking a sledge hammer with me wherever I go. Doors don’t just open, unless you’re relentless on the pursuit. And that’s what I’m here to do. Just maybe it can get a little easier and more enjoyable in the process for the next artist.
Lucy
The ladybug has landed, so what comes next? Are you planning to drop more crushing singles on our heads, or are you secretly cooking up something massive behind the scenes? *cough* an album *cough*
Katerina Nicole
A new track is releasing JULY 31st! One that I’m really excited to have out in the middle of summer. Filmed all over Las Vegas with Dark Frame Productions, we really brought this song to new heights for my audience! I can’t wait!!!
Lucy
Thank you for your time! xx
The post “I am a vessel of vulnerability and story telling” – Interview with Katerina Nicole first appeared on FemMetal – Goddesses of Metal.
Last year, the world learned that Finn Wolfhard is making a Replacements biopic, which caused me and many aging music dorks to wonder: How is that going to work? Does the Replacements’ legendarily squalid run, a fascinating but frustrating tale of failure and self-sabotage, really lend itself to a medium as inherently glitzy as the cinema? Would fans even want to see the band’s story hammered into all the familiar plot beats? Could this young man possibly wolf hard enough to pull it off? He certainly says the right things.
The post Finn Wolfhard Gives Update On Replacements Biopic appeared first on Stereogum.
I wasn’t really looking for death
I was just looking for myself
Six months after the release of Christine Plays Viola’s 2026 album F.I.V.E. (Fear Increases Violent Emotions), the Italian darkwave and post-punk band returns to complete its story. Their latest single “At Last, I Found You” was recorded during the album sessions but deliberately held back, allowing the record’s emotional course to reach listeners before its final companion piece appeared.
“At Last, I Found You” begins with synthesizers sighing like brakes slowing a car on a wet road. A low drone hangs behind them until the bass establishes forward momentum, the drums lock into place, and an insistent guitar hook cuts through the gathering pressure. The song soon settles into the kind of danceable gothic rock Christine Plays Viola handle so well: immediate enough for the club, yet weighted with genuine psychic anguish.
During the verses, the instruments pull back around the dark, smoldering vocal while bass and drums continue to propel the song beneath faint synthesizers. When the refrain of “break me up, break me up” takes hold, the arrangement surges upward. The guitars broaden, the rhythm bears down, and the vocal rises from exhausted confession into a passionate cry. Direct, memorable, and emotionally severe, it stands among the band’s finest songs to date.
The song describes the urge to drive away as an act of self-erasure. After burying the keys to a box containing his dreams, vocalist Massimo Ciampani sings of driving into the night, although he is already convinced that some part of him has died. Cigarette ash, blood, chains, a ditch, and the void surround a man who can no longer recognize himself. Yet the apparent second person referred to in the title gradually assumes another identity. The “you” he has been seeking is his childhood self: the innocence and possibility he abandoned somewhere along the way.
The final admission—“I wasn’t really looking for death, I was just looking for myself”—recasts the song’s death drive as a desperate attempt at psychological recovery. By restoring the album’s full title in parentheses, “At Last, I Found You” brings the F.I.V.E. cycle back to its central concern: the point at which fear turns inward, distorts emotion, and threatens to destroy the person carrying it.
Guitarist and bandleader Fabrizio Giampietro explains:
“At Last, I Found You was always the most immediate and instinctive song we wrote during the F.I.V.E. sessions. We deliberately left it off the album because we wanted listeners to experience that record’s emotional arc without this song becoming its centre of gravity. Six months later, it felt like the right moment to finally share it.”
The accompanying video transfers that crisis to a rain-swept nocturnal drive. A leather-jacketed man grips the steering wheel as vacant commercial streets pass beneath violet, red, and electric-blue light. Rain crowds the windows, cigarette smoke fills the cabin, and the camera repeatedly glances toward the empty back seat, leaving a conspicuous space for the person invoked by the song’s title.
As the drive continues, the city begins losing its physical certainty. Light bends across the windshield, the road appears to warp, and black mist gathers around the car as the driver’s composure gives way to panic. His gestures become increasingly frantic while flashes of red and blue appear through the rain, suggesting either an approaching police confrontation or another fragment of his unraveling mind.
After stopping the car, he steps into the downpour and finds a boy in a blue raincoat waiting across the road. The child stands motionless, staring back at him with an expression that offers neither recognition nor judgment. It is the video’s clearest answer to the lyrics, yet the encounter never establishes whether the boy is a memory, a hallucination, a chance at salvation, or an image seen at the instant of death.
The street empties once again, and an overhead view shows the black mist closing around the abandoned car. The video then returns to the back seat, where a small toy car rests beneath the closing credits—the only physical trace of the childhood the driver has spent the night pursuing. He may have found the boy, but finding him and saving him remain two different acts.
Watch the video for “At Last, I Found You” below:
“At Last, I Found You (Fear Increases Violent Emotions)” is out now through Bandcamp, Spotify, and all major digital platforms. Christine Plays Viola will continue supporting F.I.V.E. with European appearances running from August through October, including dates in Poland, Spain, England, and Germany. Further performances are currently being confirmed.
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The post “Drag Me Into The Void” — Italian Goth Rockers Christine Plays Viola Take a Rain-Swept Drive in Video for “At Last, I Found You” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
Happy hump day, suckers! Smokey Goretooth is back again with a new “Do I Suck?,” MetalSucks’ version of “Am I The Asshole?” where we take real life horror stories and bring them to our readers to decide if the OP sucks for some bullshit they may or may not have done.
This week’s submission comes from a user named “swift_skipper3,” who’s wondering if they suck for doing something I’m sure we’ve all wanted to do before.
I was on one this weekend. My friends and I went to one of our favorite local dive bars, and something I really like about it is that usually the bartenders are playing their own music and take requests, but there’s one of those touchscreen digital jukebox things there, too. That part only ever sucks when non-regulars come in and put on whatever they want, which is how I ended up in this situation…
A group of youths came in there (they were probably in their early 20s, I am in my 30s), and all of us sitting belly up had never seen them before. The bartender even rolled their eyes, because they knew they were just gonna be annoying. It was obviously they had come from another bar, maybe even more than one, based on how they were acting, and once I saw one of them clock the jukebox I knew we were in trouble.
Not even 10 minutes went by before Taylor Swift was blasting over the speakers. She’s not at all what I (and most of the people who usually go to that bar) want to listen to after we’ve knocked a few back. I always get boilermakers, and at that point I had already had three or four, so I was feeling extra petty. We were on the fifth Taylor Swift song in a row when I decided I had enough.
What many people don’t realize is that if you pay extra, you can skip songs in the queue on the jukebox to play your picks first, and that’s exactly what I did. I was trying to think of what would categorically be the opposite of anything pop-like, and then I thought about one of my favorite Spotify playlists that’s just a grip of hard butt rock from the 90s and 2000s. Next thing I knew, I was loading that bitch up with all of the finest booty rock I could find — Adema, Five Finger Death Punch, Shinedown, and of course, Creed. I”m not even sure how many songs I picked, but I do remember the collective sigh of disappointment that came from the girls in that group, and it was the funniest thing to me at the time.
They thought maybe I had only skipped a couple of their songs, but after like five of my picks played, one of the girls got REALLY upset and starting going on about how much money she put in the jukebox because she really really wanted to listen to Taylor. She said she paid for 21 Taylor Swift songs. 21! There was no way I was going to stand for that, no matter how she wanted to listen to them.
Someone in her group caught me laughing about how upset she was, and came up to me and said how rude I was being because it wasn’t fair that her friend paid for stuff she wasn’t going to hear. I just shrugged my shoulders and took a sip of my beer, which I guess irritated this girl more since she called me an asshole and stormed back to her group. A few minutes later, the group left, and balance was restored again.
Do I really suck for doing this, though? I think it’s worse that girl thought that anyone in that establishment (most of us regulars are metalheads, skaters, punks, bikers, etc.) would want to listen to that much Taylor Swift in a row. Like, come on.
Well, there you have it, folks. Is swift_skipper3 really a sucky asshole for doing this? Personally, as a petty princess, I probably would’ve done the same thing.
The post Do I Suck For… Loading Up The TouchTunes At The Bar With Butt Rock? appeared first on MetalSucks.
Best known as the vocalist and one of two guitarists in Dutch post-metal quartet Gavran, Jamie Kobić will release his first album as Svjetlost this Friday. The seeds of the solo project, whose name translates to light in Bosnian, were planted two years ago when Kobić teamed up with his Gavran bandmates to release a split EP titled Ocean of Silence. The titular track hinted at the sparser, more solitary nature of the project. If Gavran’s side of the EP was an emotional roller coaster of cathartic peaks and heart-rending valleys, Svjetlost’s contribution (contrary to what the project’s name implied) sounded ritualistic and haunted by an internalized gloom screaming to be released.
Now, six months after the release of Gavran’s The One Who Propels, Kobić is ready to take his next step as a composer and performer with The Forever Silent. The record is noticeably darker and more personal than his work in Gavran, filled with bittersweet reflections on his Bosnian heritage. Kobić shares that one crucial source of inspiration was found in sevdah, a musical tradition intrinsically tied to the region’s tumultuous history. This isn’t to say that Kobić is here to make a saz-driven folk metal album, but rather that The Forever Silent’s sonic heaviness mirrors its emotional depth. Titanic sequences of downtuned riffs meet ascetic chants that induce a trancelike state in both performer and listener. Contemplative cascades of clean guitar explode into a field of golden petals as spring breathes life back into a wartorn landscape. The piercing cry of an owl echoes throughout the craggy mountain peaks, mournful yet alert, as night darkens the Dinarides beneath its shadowy wings.
Experience all of this and more through an exclusive early stream of The Forever Silent:
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Kobić shared this message regarding the album and its upcoming live debut:
After more than five years of listening and being inspired by the doom and stoner bands we all love, my first take on that sound is finally out in the open. It’s become a very personal record in which hopefully others can find many things that they’ll love: hypnotic passages, chords that seem to never end, gut-punching riffs, psychedelic atmospheres and a kind of warmth and melancholy you would find in the region where my roots lie. Next month I’ll premiere the album at the second edition of the Duister Collectief Festival in the Netherlands. I can’t wait to perform some of these tracks on stage.
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The Forever Silent releases this Friday, July 24th, via Shadow of Sorrow Records.
Demi Lovato’s catalog follows one of modern pop music’s most dramatic artistic evolutions, moving from Disney soundtracks and youthful pop rock to R&B, vulnerable ballads, hard-edged rock, dance-pop, collaborations, soundtrack recordings, and reinvented versions of career-defining hits. The songs below reveal the power, range, and emotional directness that have remained constant through every change in sound. Demi Lovato, an American singer, songwriter, and actor, began rising to fame as a child performer on the television series Barney & Friends. Born on August 20, 1992, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Lovato gained mainstream attention through the role of Mitchie Torres in the
The post Complete List Of Demi Lovato Songs From A to Z appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.