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The post Europe share video for new track “The Cult of Ignorance” first appeared on Sleaze Roxx.

The Rock Orchestra have performed to more than half a million fans worldwide and topped the official UK Rock And Metal albums chart. Now they are bringing their most ambitious production yet to arenas across the UK and Ireland this October. Arenas Of Fire promises fire, pyrotechnics, a full choir, a full orchestra, and reimaginings of some of the greatest rock and Metal songs ever written, and Nathan Reed, creative director and producer for The Rock Orchestra, has promised this is the most explosive version he has ever created.

Until the end of last year, performances had been to around 2,000 people. “Our first show, The Rock Orchestra By Candlelight, was great for creating that kind of haunting, ghostly atmosphere that is just under the surface of most rock and Metal songs and can really be brought forward in that environment.

But intimacy has its limits. What candlelight cannot conjure is raw, unleashed energy and that, Nathan says, is exactly what Arenas of Fire is built to deliver

“The thing that we weren’t able to bring to life quite so well in that environment was the energy and the high octane, the fire, for want of a better word, that lives within music. We’ve had a long relationship with the likes of the Fuel Girls performing with them over the last 10 years, and we thought we could really bring this to life in a whole different way by adding this pyro and a performance element to the show, and it just really works.”

This promises to be a spectacular symphonic mosh pit of an evening. The Metallica M72 World Tour featured 14 flame units per show. Arenas Of Fire use 20 per show. With 50 pyro items per show, 60 litres of flame fluid and over 120 cans of gas per show, you get a feeling of the scale of this production.

But for Nathan, the real challenge is not logistical. It is artistic. “Everything that we’re trying to do is elevate and embellish,” Nathan said. “We want to show the music in the best light that we possibly can, and everything is there to complement that. That is absolutely always our centrepiece, and we’re trying to creatively do things that bring out certain flavours or moments or sounds with that visual accompaniment.”

These are evenings that will be an emotional journey for the audience. If the show is designed to move people, then the order in which it does so matters enormously. The setlist, it turns out, is as carefully constructed as the arrangements themselves.

“Absolutely. We get a lot of tears in the show. There’s something about classical music and strings in particular that is just so emotional.

“What’s so amazing about a lot of the music that we play is just how incredibly well-written the original songs are. There are so many incredibly beautiful or sentimental or sad or angsty moments in there, reimagined in this more classical way. You really feel the emotional hit of them.

“Then that’s juxtaposed by that insane wall of sound and the absolute power of war horns on top of extremely distorted double bass, and cello riffs which complement each other. Because without the other, you don’t get to see the context of how beautiful the other thing or how powerful the other thing was.”

I love the description of war horns. Given that the fire and pyrotechnics are out of this world, health and safety on the stage must be a challenge; the amount of planning that goes into it has got to be immense. 

“Absolutely,” Nathan says. “Because this is an artistic endeavour in terms of the 360 degree, the wardrobe, the stage set, the pyro, it is like playing Tetris. Every inch of the stage is being used for something somewhere.

“That means we’ve got to be meticulous in terms of our planning and our safety and making sure the right people are in the right places at the right time, because inherently fire is dangerous.”

Behind the spectacle lies months of meticulous planning. But all that precision serves a singular creative vision, one Nathan describes in unmistakably cinematic terms. The recent release of Thunderstruck, featuring Daria Zaritskaya and Mia Asano, along with a video, perfectly illustrates his aim. The film has surpassed 430,000 views on YouTube in less than two weeks.

“In terms of cinematic, I think that video’s the thing that we’ve done that feels closest to like a little movie,” Nathan says. “It doesn’t really have an explicit narrative, but there’s some sense of what’s going on with the horse, the woods and the lightning. We worked with a CGI artist to get all of that in there.”

I was taken by the violin on top of the castle and all the fog. The violin solo is a goosebump moment. Thunderstruck is a beautiful watch, and with 42 musicians credited, that really emphasises the scale of the project.

“We try to be as ambitious for it as possible,” Nathan says. “Not least because we’re dealing with what we perceive to be the canon of rock and Metal, the most legendary, the most famous rock and Metal songs of all time, and that is a responsibility, if you’re gonna take that on.

“I have to give real credit to the original artists in the music, so you’ve gotta try and do it justice. This is a completely independent project that we promote ourselves, we release our own music, and we fund and create, edit and produce our own music videos. It’s not cheap to put it together.

“But as a passion project, as something that we just deeply love, we just wanna do it justice. It’s worth it. It hurts the pocket, but you can sit back at the end and go, yeah, OK, great.”

The Arena Of Fire evenings promise music from Metallica, The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, System Of A Down, Linkin Park, Motörhead and Iron Maiden, to name a few. Holding all of that together symphonically is no small feat.

“Growing up, I’ve been in Metal bands since I was 12 or 13 years old,” Nathan says. “I lived through what would have been the new Metal scene coming through, and that happened to a backdrop of Metallica who were huge at the time, Iron Maiden were still big, Guns N’ Roses were still really big.

“You had the likes of Linkin Park and System Of A Down and people like that coming through. Then, beyond that, the more emo era came out. When you’re covering rock and Metal, it quickly becomes apparent how expansive that is. In terms of expectations for the public at large coming and seeing The Rock orchestra, it’s genuinely very difficult to try and get something in there for everyone.

“So what we try to focus on is songs that we feel inspired by in terms of their potential to be symphonic. My Chemical Romance is a really good example of that. You might find some rock and Metal fans who are not huge fans of emo or that kind of style. Not everyone loves every subgenre of rock and Metal.

“But that song [Welcome To The Black Parade] symphonically is amazing to work with, and it’s just got so much potential and is such a popular song live. Whether people were big fans of that before they came into the room or not, it just really connects. It’s a challenge.”

Nothing Else Matters is maybe the most orchestra-ready Metal song ever written. Is that a blessing or a curse when arranging it? 

“It’s a really good question,” Nathan says. “Obviously, Symphony and Metallica predate what we did by God knows… decades and decades. To some extent, it makes it something that people can imagine before they go.

“When we’re looking at music that we can reimagine, we have a view that we really love the sense of sadness in this song, and we wanna bring that out more. Or we really love the power in this, and we wanna bring that out more. We’re trying to make sure that we can do something worthwhile.

“If we don’t feel that we can add something or bring something out in it, we would try to stay away from it. With Nothing Else Matters, although there was already a symphonic version of it that exists, it’s got so much emotional clout, that song.

“What we wanted to do was bring in the sopranos and have that lift that middle eight section, which is actually a very relaxed section in the original. It’s quite chilled. We built in this huge soaring soprano section in there just to really drench it in sad drama. That was our view on it. But in general, if something is already classical and symphonic, there has to be a good reason for us to take it on.”

Not every rock classic lends itself so willingly to the treatment. For every Nothing Else Matters, there are songs that resist the symphonic reimagining entirely, and Nathan has learned to recognise them quickly.

Many Red Hot Chili Peppers song are in major keys, which adds a level of difficulty. “What becomes quite apparent quite quickly is that songs that really depend on a certain vocal delivery from the original lead singer can make life quite difficult if you’re trying to arrange them symphonically,” Nathan says. “Actually, which song it was escapes me now, but we just listened to it, and we’re like, this just sounds so bloody happy.”

Talking to Nathan, you can sense the excitement and desire to bring out the emotion in the songs and pick the right instrumentation or voices to really push that through.

Is there a kind of cultural gap between classically trained orchestral musicians and the world of Heavy Metal? Is there ever any kind of tension?

“I wouldn’t say there’s tension,” Nathan says. “We have a phenomenal group of musicians that we work with, and that’s really taken us some time to build together with some of the most in-demand touring musicians out there on a classical level.

“There is a huge difference between being a classically trained musician who can come and sight-read and just play the notes on the page and one who has a really good understanding of the feel of the emotion of the original that they’re trying to improve on.

“We’re really lucky to have brilliant musical directors who are super-tuned into that. They’re massive fans of the original works and making sure that the way everything is played is correct.

“I would also say that certainly in the early days of The Rock Orchestra, some people who had a big classical CV, maybe their peers were looking down on their involvement. Then, over time, as it’s become such a huge thing, we’re constantly doing 150 to 200 shows a year and 350,000-ish guests a year, I think that view has changed. There’s some prudiness for sure.”

You feel there is a difference between standing there, playing the notes and actually feeling the notes and moving and interacting with the notes.

The musicians have found their common ground. But what about the people filling the seats? The audience The Rock Orchestra attracts is perhaps as unlikely a blend as the music itself.

“I do think it’s a mixture of people that love both,” Nathan says, “and actually, in a funny way, especially classic rock and some of the earlier Metal, I feel like that music is quite closely related to classical. Especially if you’re looking at Zeppelin, or even Guns N’ Roses and that linear song format where the melodies really evolve throughout the songs.

“Stairway To Heaven is a great example. Honestly, it’s quite classical. On the flip side of that, you have Gustav Holst, who created what you could argue was the first ever Metal track, Mars, The Bringer Of War. It’s heavy.

“But in terms of our audience, I would say that we’ve got a really broad appeal. I think it tends to be people who are definitely rock and Metal fans. I think the appeal The Rock Orchestra has is if you were an avid gig goer 10, 20, 30 years ago, you want to hear it reimagined in a slightly more highbrow way in a comfy chair.”

That broad appeal did not emerge overnight. To understand where The Rock Orchestra’s love of fire and spectacle truly comes from, you have to go back more than a decade and to a very different kind of show.

The Fuel Girls will feature again on this tour, and that relationship goes back over a decade to when Nathan created The Festival Of The Dead, a circus/cabaret/carnival in a standing environment.

“We would have huge Batalá drum sections, people on stilts, giant skull floats going through the audience, circus performers up on stage, and the Fuel Girls doing their pyro sections. We toured for eight years around the UK every Halloween. We played some awesome shows, but that was where my love of the performance side, the kind of circus skill performance side and especially fire came from.

“I think what quite a few people don’t know about The Rock Orchestra is that when I was first creating the show, it was as a Festival Of The Dead show. We were in COVID, and I had wanted to create a rock orchestra for a long time. Having come from a rock band where we had a cellist, I just felt that synergy.

“It was when everything was still socially distanced, and so we thought, right, OK, let’s create The Rock Orchestra and let’s do it as Festival Of The Dead’s Rock Orchestra. The theming, the skulls and the gothic vibe is all from there. We quickly realised that it was far more exciting and it had far more potential than Festival Of The Dead, and we just formalised it into its own thing.”

Nathan says they are working on a new EP, focusing on rock versions of classical songs, with plans underway for a Classics Volume 2 towards the end of 2027.

For now, the excitement is building to this two-hour spectacle combining a full orchestra, choir, iconic rock anthems and large-scale pyrotechnics.

For Nathan, his dream collaboration would be Serj Tankian from System Of A Down. “My selfish pick,” he smiles. “He’s a classically trained singer, and you can really tell in his voice he has amazing, operatic power and is one of the greatest Metal voices, in my opinion, of all time. I think there is so much fun that he would have in the show.”

Nathan promises a fiery night. Given 60 litres of flame fluid, a full orchestra, a choir and 20 flame units, that may be the understatement of the year. Arenas Of Fire do not do things by halves.

This is symphonic Metal on the grandest scale imaginable, and Nathan Reed is just getting started.

2026 UK Arena Tour Dates include Leeds, Liverpool, Bournemouth, Belfast, Dublin, Cardiff, Birmingham, London and Brighton. Tickets start from £38 and are available now via the official website.

The post The Rock Orchestra / Fire, Strings And Pyrotechnics: Inside Arenas Of Fire first appeared on MetalTalk – Heavy Metal News, Reviews and Interviews.

This is my house
I’m pretty sure
Or did I turn the wrong way at the corner store?

There are few things more quietly terrifying than realizing a place meant to hold us no longer seems to know us. A home can turn uncanny without changing shape: the same walls, the same rooms, the same door, and yet the air feels wrong. A party can become alien in an instant. A familiar street can suddenly feel like a wrong turn. Sometimes the most frightening estrangement is not from other people, but from our own certainty — that small internal rupture when memory, perception, and instinct stop agreeing with one another.

That uneasy threshold is where Berlin-based quartet Agatha is Dead! place their new single “Strangers.”  Taken from their forthcoming debut album Concrete, due out on September 11, the track is a study in dissociation, displacement, and the peculiar horror of feeling locked out of a life that should belong to you.

“Strangers” opens with a danceable drum beat and a thick, softly carried shadow-laced bass groove, quickly joined by a rubbery, reverbed guitar figure that glints like a melody half-remembered. It almost masquerades as a piano hook: bright, repetitive, and singable, but with enough coldness in its edges to keep the mood unsettled. There is a trace of the icy, Eastern European post-punk guitar language popularized by acts like Molchat Doma, but Agatha is Dead! bend that familiar vocabulary into something more elastic, melodic, and contemporary. The result is a sound stripped down to its essentials without feeling nostalgic for its own sake.

When the vocals enter, roughly half a minute in, they arrive controlled and rhythmic, carrying a poetic cadence with a sighing edge. Rather than pushing the song into melodrama, the performance tightens the tension: the melody becomes more insistent, the groove more infectious, and the chorus gradually takes on an anthemic charge. By the time the central cry of “strangers in my house” rises into view, the track has turned paranoia into a hook — something intimate, frightening, and strangely cathartic.

Lyrically, “Strangers” follows a narrator trying to re-enter what should be their own space, only to find every sign of belonging destabilized. The house is familiar, or at least it should be. The faces are not. The details have shifted. The mind keeps searching for a rational explanation — a wrong turn, a misplaced key, a simple mistake — but the deeper dread is that something has gone wrong in perception itself. The refrain’s fear of being “locked me out” lands less like a literal complaint than a plea to return to the self.

At around the 2:45 mark, the song shifts into a slower, eerier passage, letting the anguish breathe before the rhythm gathers itself again for the final stretch. It is here that the track’s sense of domestic unease becomes something larger: a fear of being made foreign in your own body, your own memory, your own home. And for anyone who has experienced tragedy and turmoil in their life, loss of continuity is one of the most unsettling things one can experience.

Listen to “Strangers” below:

Formed during the long winter of 2021, Agatha is Dead! began as a collaboration between Lilly and Noah, building songs in isolation before bringing them into the open. Drawing from the stark emotional landscape of Joy Division and the nocturnal melancholy of The Cure, the band’s sound merges restraint with intensity — a tension that has become central to their live presence. Joined by Joey Ramone Hansen on drums and Arthur on bass, the group quickly established itself within Berlin’s live circuit.

Since signing to Duchess Box Records in 2025, Agatha is Dead! have built a reputation for performances that feel both intimate and unsettling. Following showcase appearances at SXSW, the band returned to Berlin for a sold-out headline show at Lido, confirming a growing presence beyond the city’s underground. With Concrete on the horizon, they now move into a wider run of German and European dates, including Reeperbahn Festival and their largest headline show to date at SO36 in Berlin on 25 February 2027.

With “Strangers,” Agatha is Dead! step further into a world of dislocation and unease, where the familiar no longer offers comfort and what we once knew begins to blur.

Agatha is Dead! Tour Dates 2026

10 June — Wheels and Waves Festival, Biarritz
11 June — Kult, Mannheim
12 June — P8 Festival, Karlsruhe
13 June — About Pop Festival, Stuttgart
24 June — Bergfest, FluxBau, Berlin
27 June — Uferklänge Open Air, Haren (Ems)
18 July — Cool Kids Menu Festival, Berlin
7 August — Bergfunk Open Air, Königs Wusterhausen
11 September — Rough Trade Berlin
13 September — BLOW Festival, Frankfurt
16 September — Reeperbahn Festival, Hamburg
1–3 October — Waves Festival, Vienna
8 October — Cafe Glocksee, Hannover
9 October — Naumanns Tanzlokal, Leipzig
10 October — Nürnberg Pop @ Club Stereo
11 October — Engelsburg, Erfurt
13 October — Bumann & Sohn, Cologne
14 October — Schon Schön, Mainz
15 October — Substanz, Munich
16 October — B72, Vienna

Agatha is Dead! Tour Dates 2027

18 February — KFZ, Marburg
19 February — Lagerhaus, Bremen
20 February — Die Trompete, Bochum
21 February — Molotow, Hamburg
23 February — Franz K, Reutlingen
24 February — Groove Station, Dresden
25 February — SO36, Berlin

Follow Agatha is Dead!

• Instagram
• Website
• Spotify
• Apple Music

The post “They’ve Tried to Lock Me Out”— Berlin Post-Punk Outfit Agatha is Dead! Share Unsettling New Single “Strangers” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Posted on June 3rd 2026, 12:07p.m.

They may have bewildered some listeners in the 70s, but several leading lights of other genres happily confirm they were a massive influence

In a time where one side-eyes many an image or video online for fear of its having been created with generative AI, it’s bemusing when an artist actively markets themselves as robotic. Calling themselves a “real-fiction metal band,” centering the project on the transmissions of powerful, hyper-intelligent cyborgs, and initially appearing to have zero discoverable human presence on the internet, Polish act Eutanor might have gone a little too far with the gimmick. They are, as it turns out, so extremely far underground that neither Metal Archives, nor Bandcamp, nor any streaming service will offer you their music.¹ It was only once I started pasting Google-translated Polish into my search engine that I happened upon reviews and YouTube playlists of the band’s debut, Assembling Tomorrow. The mechanical concept explicitly informs the music’s sound—a self-described “funeral djent”—that every source emphasized being difficult to absorb. But is there more man or machine in Automatocrat?

Sources were not wrong: Automatocrat is no easy listening. Even the track titles are hard to process, being an ordinal series of numbers in rough magnitude of 1.7-1.85Bn. If funeral djent is intended to invoke a blend of syncopated, drop-tuned chugs and erratic rhythms with low, slow riffs and a morose vibe, then it’s somewhat apt since the prevailing pace is slow even as the structures are fickle. But Eutanor take cues from a spectrum of subgenres besides, leaning heavily at uneven intervals towards black metal (“1804068394”), sludge (“1731543705”), stoner (“1771078223”), electronica, brutal death, and grind (“1800748752”)². Whilst the rhythms and guitar patterns fluctuate a little in turn, the vocals sit almost entirely in some liminal space between what would be appropriate for any of these styles: a gravelly, drawn-out kind of rasp. Really, the main thing Automatocrat shares with the funereal is reverb, and with djent an experimental approach to groove. “Experimental” is probably the best descriptor for the music in general, but while innovation and complexity can make for fantastic metal, in Eutanor’s case, “experimental” is a euphemism.³

Automatocrat is mechanical only in its obstinacy in sounding as bad as possible. Well, that and the computer-generated female voice that appears at some point on every song to read out the number that names it.⁴ The latter would be funny if the surrounding music weren’t steadily sapping your will to live through a combination of muddled movements, messy execution, and migraine-inducing mixing. At its least offensive, the music could be considered monotonous, with flattened tremolo picking (“1804068394”), trudging doom-death (“1731543705”) or stoner-coded (“1771078223”) riffs accompanied by a basic beat. Even here, you can’t escape from the vocals, croaking—and sometimes, horrifyingly shout-speaking (“1731543705,” “1804068394”)—that scrape the insides of your skull like a rusty spoon. The reverb, which spares no expense in muddying the vocals, guitars, and cymbals alike, mocks you (“1735064161,” “1771078223”, “1804068394”). When you think it can’t get worse, Eutanor put down their metronome for a token exploration so uncoordinated and lacking in imagination it would be generous to call it a jam. Random snippets of electronica are chucked about for all of a second (“1735064161,” “1800748752”), drums have intermittent fits of failed syncopation (“1713721976,” “1804068394”), and guitar lines materialise disconnectedly only to be choked by their mediocre riff peers and endless resonance (“1731543705,” “1771078223”), or simply feint away from development (“1846444894”).

But the hardest thing to digest about Automatocrat may not be its confusing nature or meaningless attempts at experimentation, but how awful it sounds in general. The production is so bad it actually made me angry, because it suggests that Eutanor simply didn’t put much effort in. Just like the lifeless chaos that defines the music’s composition, the relentless forward crush of everything—except of course, the parts that might actually be interesting—and the fuzzy muck smothering the rise of layered guitars while sharpening vocals beyond potency implies a lack of care. There are some good ideas—a cool riff here (“1731543705”), a piece of rhythmic weirdness that works there (“1800748752”)—but they need to be properly audible, and given the room and the treatment to shine. Yes, Eutanor are small and probably low-budget, but this album sounds worse than low-fi and only compounds the structural and aesthetic problems with the music itself.

After my time with Automatocrat, I still can’t decipher the artistic intent behind it, let alone the person or persons responsible. Too boring to earn the label of “avant-garde,” too ugly and messy to be enjoyable, and too bad to feel like a sincere statement, I struggle to see an audience who would appreciate it. The lack of personality and imagination in Euatnor’s grating pretences to music is fitting for inhuman machinery, but its sloppiness feels all too human.

---

Rating: Unlistenable
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self-Release
Websites: Bandcamp | Official
Releases Worldwide: June 5th, 2026

The post Eutanor – Automatocrat Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

Knox is back once more with another track that bridges the gap between the start of the century now in sensational fashion.

Titled ‘Long Story Short’, it’s a song that shimmers with the sentiment of a tender moment in a teen movie released in 2003, but with plenty of modern day intent and intensity. Viciously catchy and brilliantly heartbroken, it is everything that makes Knox the storyteller and emotion merchant that they are. Readymade for every Summer breakdown for may have pencilled in, it’s another home run in a series of home runs.

They had this to say about tune, stating, ‘Long Story Short’ leans into that warm, radio-worn early 2000s rock sound. Gritty but melodic guitars, steady drums, and a vocal that sounds like it’s holding something back on purpose. It captures the quiet aftermath of a breakup where she’s already gone for good, but you refuse to unpack it, brushing it off with half-answers and silence. The chorus has a familiar, bittersweet hook while the verses feel like late-night drives, streetlights blurring past, and memories you won’t quite let yourself sit in. It’s about turning something heavy into a shrug and saying ‘long story short’ because the full version hurts too much to tell.”

Here you go:

It follows on from the ace ‘Go For Broke’, which was released earlier this year and sounds like this:

The post Knox Shares Nostalgic New Track ‘Long Story Short’ appeared first on Rock Sound.

Posted on June 3rd 2026, 11:34a.m.

In support of their newly announced studio album [album=207998], set to land in stores on July 31st through Everlasting Spew Records, Minnesota-based death metal purveyors Nothingness offer in listening the first single “Skull Evulsion”. The 9-piece outing was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Adam Tucker at Signaturetone Recording.
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US doomsters Castle Rat are pleased to announce a month-long headlining tour in North America. Direct support on the road will come from gothic rockers Unto Others. Opening act: Wraith Knight.
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