Last month, Jake Xerxes Fussell announced his new album The Old Beloved Path. He shared the lead single “Rock Island Line,” which was his take on the American traditional. Today, the folk singer-songwriter is back with “Boney” and “Boll Weevil.”
The post Jake Xerxes Fussell – “Boney” & “Boll Weevil” appeared first on Stereogum.
Interviewed by Cat Finch
Coventry Metal 2 The Masses Winners Meet Your Maker chat to us at Bloodstock Festival.
We discuss plans for their set, closing the New Blood stage, their journey through the competition to get to the festival, their message of hope, the Coventry metal scene, plans for the next twelve months and more!
You can listen to the interview below, or jump over to any of the usual streaming services!
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Interviewed by Cat Finch
Daisy and Jake of Alunah stop by at Bloodstock Festival.
We discuss the success of their Bloodstock show, Daisy’s induction into the band and how well they have gelled, the plague of phones at gigs, plans for new music, the changing Birmingham metal scene, Ticketmaster/Live Nation pricing fans out fo shows and so much more!
You can listen to the interview below, or jump over to any of the usual streaming services!
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Check out all of our interviews on the usual podcast channels!
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The post Interview: Alunah @ Bloodstock Festival appeared first on The Razor's Edge.
Her new album “The Dark” arrives later this week.
The post Chelsea Wolfe’s New Track “Seethe” Debuts With An Assist From Queens Of The Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen appeared first on Theprp.com.
W.A.S.P. is excited to announce the ‘1984 To Headless‘ 2026 U.S. and Canada Tour with KK’s Priest as very special guest. The tour kicks off on September 10th in CA and runs through October 31st. W.A.S.P. will be playing the hits from their first four albums. 1984 To Headless‘, the Fall 2026 North American Tour, […]
The post W.A.S.P. ‘1984 To Headless’ 2026 North America Tour with Special Guests KK’s Priest Kicks Off September 10th appeared first on ROCKPOSER DOT COM.
Frank Beard, the longtime drummer for ZZ Top and a member of the legendary Texas rock band for more than five decades, has died at the age of 77.
Beard was in hospice care at the time of his death and passed away at his ranch in Richmond, Texas, with family members by his side.
Beard joined guitarist Billy Gibbons and bassist Dusty Hill in ZZ Top in 1969, beginning one of the longest-running lineups in rock history. The trio remained intact until Hill’s death in 2021. Elwood Francis subsequently joined Gibbons and Beard, with ZZ Top continuing to tour throughout North America, Europe and South America.
Beard played a pivotal role in bringing ZZ Top’s classic lineup together. In late 1969, Gibbons was searching for a rhythm section when Beard suggested auditioning Hill. Beard and Hill had previously played together in the Dallas-based American Blues, as well as The Warlocks, Hustlers and Cellar Dwellers.
The three musicians met at Gibbons’ Houston home and jammed for approximately three hours.
“It was a blues in D, a shuffle,” recalls Gibbons, “and we just didn’t want to stop . . . and we didn’t for the next five or six decades.”
ZZ Top played its first show for a paying audience at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Beaumont, Texas, on February 10, 1970. The band went on to become one of the most successful American rock groups of its era, earning 11 gold albums, seven of which were certified platinum. The band’s 1983 album Eliminator achieved Diamond certification for sales of more than 10 million copies.
Frank Lee Beard was born June 11, 1949, in Frankston, Texas, and grew up in Irving, Texas, where he attended Irving High School. Inspired initially by The Beatles and later by blues music, Beard began playing drums as a teenager and eventually met Hill.
“When I was about fifteen I started to play [drums] and then I discovered all the blues joints in Dallas where you could hear a lot of great players like Freddie King,” Beard told Rock’s Backpages.
Beard and Hill also backed Texas blues musician Lightnin’ Hopkins at folk venues during their early years, further establishing Beard’s connection to the blues that would remain a central part of ZZ Top’s sound.
Beard struggled with addiction and substance abuse during the early part of his professional career. Following ZZ Top’s extended hiatus in the 1970s, he returned to the band sober. Beard married Debbie Meredith in 1982, and the couple had twin sons, Rory and Nico, in 1985.
Following Beard’s death, Gibbons reflected on his longtime bandmate’s contributions to ZZ Top.
“Today, Elwood and I lost a great friend and collaborator, and the world lost one of the most naturally innovative drummers and a great and true son of Texas. His signature backbeat was key to keeping ZZ on top. The band of which he was part for six decades is going to keep on keeping on as he had wished.”
Despite his last name, Beard was the one member of ZZ Top’s classic lineup who typically did not sport the long facial hair that became synonymous with Gibbons and Hill. Gibbons once joked, “Frank’s beard is on his driver’s license.”
Beard also had a characteristically understated explanation for the longevity of ZZ Top’s classic three-man lineup.
“First and foremost, I guess it’s because there’s only three of us, so there’s only two other guys to argue with,” Beard told Kerrang! journalist Sylvie Simmons.
His drumming became an essential element of a ZZ Top sound that remained immediately recognizable even as the band incorporated blues, rock, country, soul and electronic elements over the decades.
“If we played a soul song or a country song, whatever song we played, it would sound like ZZ Top. We’ve tried playing songs that don’t sound like ZZ Top,” Beard said.
During the 1980s, ZZ Top reached a new level of mainstream popularity through a series of music videos that became staples of MTV. Beard said those videos reflected the personalities and interests of the musicians behind the band.
“I always thought that the videos gave the public a glimpse into ZZ Top, a true insight into what the band was about: which is just three guys that have very guy interests — we like cars, we like girls and we like music.”
Beard spent more than 50 years behind the drum kit for ZZ Top, providing the steady backbeat behind a catalog that helped establish the band as one of the defining acts in blues rock and American rock and roll.
The post ZZ Top legend dies at 77 appeared first on Blues Rock Review.
Butcher Babies will release their new album Nightbloom on October 2 via Judge & Jury Records. Ten tracks, produced by Howard Benson — the man behind records for My Chemical Romance, Halestorm, Skillet and Daughtry — with the video for lead single “Blame It On The Wind” out now and already picking up traction at rock radio and on SiriusXM Octane. It’s the band’s first full studio album in three years, and the first written entirely as a single-vocalist band.
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This is the detail worth pausing on.
Benson isn’t a metal producer in the traditional sense. He’s a hit-maker — the guy labels call when they want a band’s biggest choruses to actually connect outside the genre. My Chemical Romance. Halestorm. Skillet. Daughtry. Three Days Grace. That’s a résumé built on turning heavy bands into radio bands without gutting them.
Hiring him is a statement of intent. Butcher Babies have spent fifteen years as a ferocious live act with a devoted underground following, and this is a swing at something bigger.
Joe Rickard, Neil Sanderson and guitarist Henry Flury co-produced, with Cameron Pierce Mizell and Evan McKeever adding production on “Songbird.”
Flury’s own framing: writing with purpose. Every part, every layer, every lyric crafted deliberately, nothing unimportant, everything in service of a single story. He calls it the most important work the band has ever done.
LIVE & LOUD: Stream the World’s Hardest Radio Station 24/7Here’s the bit nobody else covering this today will flag.
“Sincerity,” sitting at number two on the Nightbloom tracklist, isn’t new. We covered it back in November 2024 as the band’s first release following Carla Harvey’s departure — the song that proved the group could still hit at full force as a four-piece.
Two years later it’s landed on the album. Which tells you how long this record has been forming, and that the band has been deliberate rather than rushed about what makes the cut.
Shepherd has been unusually open about where these songs came from, and it’s worth taking her at her word rather than picking it apart.
Her account: a couple of years ago she found herself in a stretch of darkness she couldn’t shake — a cycle of self-doubt, while the people around her kept trying to remind her who she was. She wanted to see in herself what they saw. So she shut off social media and, for the first time in her life, started therapy.
That opened a door. Over the following year, memories and emotions she’d suppressed came flooding back, and she started writing to get them somewhere. Two decades of things she hadn’t processed — the end of a marriage, being ostracised by the Mormon church she grew up in while neighbours shamed her family for standing by her, the loss of a twenty-year friendship.
And then the part that gives the album its name: while reliving the worst of it, she started to bloom. Songs grew in the dark. Negative experiences turned into something that had a new place to live — moments she can look at now and think, I survived that.
Her summary is the best description of the record anyone’s going to write: it isn’t about the suffering, it’s about the survival. Not everything beautiful needs perfect sunshine to flourish, and sometimes the most meaningful parts of life start in the darkest seasons.
Whatever Nightbloom sounds like, that’s an unusually clear artistic thesis, and it’s a long way from where this band started.
Nightbloom is album number six, and it arrives after the biggest structural change in the band’s history.
The run so far: Goliath (2013), which charted at 112 on the Billboard 200 and number three on Heatseekers; Uncovered (2014); Take It Like A Man (2015); Lilith (2017); and the 2023 double album Eye For An Eye… / …’Til The World’s Blind.
Then in July 2024, co-founding vocalist Carla Harvey and the band parted ways after fifteen years. That ended the dual-vocal attack the band had been built on since 2010 and left Shepherd fronting alone. Harvey has since launched her own project The Violent Hour and become the frontwoman of Lords Of Acid — she came on the Loaded Radio Podcast last year to talk about both.
The current lineup is Shepherd on vocals, Henry Flury on guitar, Ricky Bonazza on bass and Dave Nickles on drums.
Two years on, this is the first full album that’s genuinely a product of the new configuration rather than a response to it.
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The touring hasn’t let up. Butcher Babies continue their 2026 world run with a US tour alongside Chad Gray of Mudvayne and Hellyeah, starting in late summer and running through the fall — Gray’s first solo touring venture, playing both Mudvayne and Hellyeah material.
They’re also on the bill at Louder Than Life in Louisville, September 17–20, alongside Iron Maiden, Tool, My Chemical Romance and Limp Bizkit. That follows their European and UK run with Infected Rain earlier this year.
Fifteen-plus years in, and the live schedule still reads like a band with something to prove.
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Nightbloom arrives October 2, 2026 via Judge & Jury Records. It’s the band’s sixth studio album and their first since the 2023 double album Eye For An Eye… / …’Til The World’s Blind.
Howard Benson, whose credits include My Chemical Romance, Halestorm, Skillet and Daughtry. Joe Rickard, Neil Sanderson and Butcher Babies guitarist Henry Flury served as co-producers, with Cameron Pierce Mizell and Evan McKeever providing additional production on the track “Songbird.”
Ten tracks: “Lost In Your Touch,” “Sincerity,” “Blame It On The Wind,” “Broken & Beautiful,” “Are You Waiting Up?,” “Black Clouds Over Georgia,” “Fever In My Neck,” “Songbird,” “Leaving California” and “Black Dove.”
Heidi Shepherd on vocals, Henry Flury on guitar, Ricky Bonazza on bass and Dave Nickles on drums. Co-founding vocalist Carla Harvey departed in July 2024 after fifteen years, ending the band’s long-running dual-vocal format. Harvey now fronts The Violent Hour and Lords Of Acid.
Heidi Shepherd has said the album grew out of a period when she stepped away from social media and began therapy, and that writing became the way she processed things she had suppressed for years. She describes the record as being about survival rather than suffering — what grew out of difficult seasons rather than the difficulty itself.
A hit-maker producer, a record built out of the hardest years of Heidi’s life, and a band six albums deep still swinging bigger. Where does Blame It On The Wind rank for you? Tell us in the comments. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.
The post Butcher Babies Announce New Album Nightbloom For October appeared first on Loaded Radio.
Interviewed by Cat Finch
Cork’s finest Following The Signs catch up with us at Bloodstock Festival.
We discuss what they have planned for their set on the EMP stage, delve into their sound, their journey to Bloodstock, what to expect from their live shows, the Cork metal scene and more!
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!
Youtube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Youtube Music
For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.
The post Interview: Following The Signs @ Bloodstock Festival appeared first on The Razor's Edge.