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Eight songs you need to hear right now, from Jack White, Stanley Simmons, Sevendust and more

Synthwave, sometimes referred to as outrun music, had a big moment in the 2010s, both in and outside of heavy music circles. A leading voice of the movement within the metal scene is Carpenter Brut. They debuted with the album Trilogy in 2015, which gained attention alongside Perturbator’s Dangerous Days as an essential release. Their followup, 2018’s Leather Teeth, shot them to even greater heights. Now, a decade after the synthwave movement’s heyday, they’re returned with their fourth full-length record, Leather Temple, bringing the ending of the Leather trilogy (which consists of Leather Teeth, Leather Terror, and Leather Temple). 

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Synthwave is already a genre that is hand-in-hand with retrofuturism, an artistic movement that desires to return to images of the future as depicted in earlier eras. Modern retrofuturism has been entrenched in the 1980s for more than a decade in all aspects of culture, from the popularity of Stranger Things to Darkthrone writing “I Am the Graves of the 80s” in 2010. Electric Light Orchestra penned “Ticket to the Moon,” a song about 80s nostalgia, in 1981 when the decade was only just beginning. 

Carpenter Brut takes the retrofuturist undertones already present in the style and makes them far more overt. Their vision of the future is not a bright, hopeful one, but something darker and dystopian. They intended Leather Temple to be the soundtrack to an imaginary film from the ‘80s depicting a future ruled by a despotic character called Iron Tusk. Appropriately, the album feels like Carpenter Brut’s most grandiose yet. It absolutely does a soundtrack’s job of creating a mood. The synthesizer arrangements are heavy, massive, and extremely flashy, like a vast, empty, abandoned warehouse playing home to a neon gothic rave. Deep growling saw-wave synthesizers provide the foundation for the more sparkling sounds to play on top of. Pieces such as “Iron Sanctuary” use these instrumentations to bring forth images of large, echoing industrial spaces and grimy, dust-filled skies, reminiscent of Blade Runner. Others tracks like “Tracks like “Start Your Engines” and “Speed or Perish” establish a breakneck pace with a glitz and glamor that conjures idealized images of sleek and powerful muscle cars of the 80s. 

Moments of hopes dot Leather Temple through its story, wherein its protagonist Bret Halford, a human-turned-cyborg, leads a revolution against the chains of the tyrant. For example, “Neon Requiem” offers a heroic motif, indicating when Halford is at his lowest point, finally begins to make progress in their struggle, again using one of the most iconic symbols of the ‘80s (neon) to do it. Meanwhile, the album’s denouement, “The End Complete”, closes things out on an uplifting and triumphant note, underscoring a victory for Halford. 

Overall, Leather Temple succeeds at being a soundtrack, which is both a strength and a weakness. It fits well into the soundscape while you fill in the images of its story. Each song works as a great mood piece for its intended part of the narrative. However, the flip side of that is that there aren’t as many hooks as one might like. It fades into the background and doesn’t have quite the same immediacy of previous Carpenter Brut albums. That’s not inherently bad, but it makes Leather Temple a little more difficult to dig your teeth into. Ultimately, Carpenter Brut are still one of the heavyweights of the synthwave genre, and perhaps even the top dog, given how some of their peers have fallen off in the last few years.

–Kevin Zecchel

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Leather Temple is available now.

Kreator/Carcass/Exodus/Nails 02 Academy Glasgow 29th March 2026 Review & Photography by Gavin Lowrey They say that things happen in threes, but tonight in Glasgow, it’s […]

The post Kreator/Carcass/Exodus/Nails – O2 Academy Glasgow 29th March 2026 appeared first on Metal-Rules.com.

Not the biggest. Not the loudest. The thirteen bands whose fingerprints are on everything that came after them.

Every list like this gets written the same way. Somebody pulls the thirteen bands with the highest streaming numbers, puts Killswitch Engage at the top so nobody argues, and calls it a day.

That’s not what this is.

This is a list about influence — which is a different question entirely, and a harder one. Plenty of enormous metalcore bands changed nothing. Plenty of bands you’ve barely heard of changed everything.

Which Metalcore Bands Defined Metalcore The Most?

Killswitch Engage built the blueprint that modern metalcore still runs on, but the genre was shaped across three decades by thirteen bands who each forced it somewhere it hadn’t been.

The Ranking Method

Three things, and nothing else:

• Genre impact — did they change what metalcore sounds like?
• Longevity — did they stay relevant when the sound moved?
• Influence — did other bands build off them?

Streaming numbers don’t appear anywhere in that. Neither does nostalgia, and neither does how much I personally like the records.

That’s why a couple of the biggest metalcore bands on earth aren’t here, and why one band that broke up in 2022 is.

TL;DR

• The origin: metalcore didn’t start with Killswitch Engage — it started in hardcore basements in the early nineties
• The blueprint: why Killswitch Engage remain the most influential band the genre has produced
• The disruptors: how Converge and Bring Me The Horizon broke the genre open from opposite directions
• The technicians: August Burns Red and Architects raising the musical ceiling
• The new blood: the one modern band whose influence is already undeniable
• The full ranking: all thirteen, worst to best, with the argument for each

Before The Blueprint: Where Metalcore Actually Came From

Nobody sat down in 1990 and invented metalcore. It leaked out of hardcore.

Integrity were putting genuinely metal riffs into hardcore songs on “Those Who Fear Tomorrow” in 1991. Earth Crisis hardened it into something militant and mechanical across the mid-nineties, and the breakdown as we understand it now — that dead-stop, half-time, everything-drops moment — largely traces back to what they were doing. Zao brought a darkness and a lyrical seriousness that the Christian side of the scene never quite shook off. Botch made it strange.

None of those four are in the thirteen below. That’s a defensible thing to be angry about, and I’d read your argument.

They’re not there because what they built was the runway. The bands below are the ones who took off from it.

Check This Out – The 13 Most Influential Christian Metalcore Bands (Only The Active & Unscandalized Kings)

13. Atreyu

Atreyu get dismissed a lot, and it’s lazy.

The harsh-verse, clean-chorus structure is so completely standard now that it’s easy to forget somebody had to make it work first. “The Curse” is one of the earliest records where that dynamic doesn’t sound like a compromise between two bands arguing — it sounds like a deliberate songwriting tool.

Every band that’s ever put a sung hook on top of a breakdown owes them something, whether they’d admit it or not.

They’re at thirteen because it’s one idea. But it’s an idea the entire genre still uses.

12 – All That Remains

“The Fall Of Ideals” did something specific and difficult: it got heavy music in front of people who weren’t looking for heavy music, without embarrassing itself.

“This Calling” was a gateway track for an entire generation. Kids who came to it through a video game soundtrack or a movie trailer ended up three albums deep in melodic death metal because of it.

Their musicianship came out of the Gothenburg school, which gave them credibility they could spend on accessibility. Plenty of bands have tried that trade since. Most of them just sound like they’re chasing radio.

11. Every Time I Die

Every Time I Die never really fit the genre they got filed under, and that’s precisely the point.

While everyone else was refining structure and tightening up, ETID went the other way — southern rock swagger, hardcore aggression, riffs that sound like they’re about to fall over. It shouldn’t work. It works.

Keith Buckley’s lyrics did as much as the music. Sharp, funny, genuinely literary in a scene that mostly wasn’t. He made it acceptable for a metalcore frontman to have a personality beyond screaming about betrayal.

You hear their influence in every band that prioritises feel over formula. “Radical” came out in 2021 and still sounded like nobody else.

10. Shadows Fall

Shadows Fall are the reason metal fans stopped rolling their eyes at metalcore.

Coming out of the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, they brought thrash and melodic death metal chops into a scene that was often getting dismissed as hardcore kids with distortion pedals. “The War Within” was the record that made the argument unanswerable — you could not listen to that and claim these guys couldn’t play.

That mattered more than it sounds. They opened a door between two audiences that had been ignoring each other.

9. Knocked Loose

The one band here whose influence is still being written, and I’ll say that up front.

But look at what’s actually happened. Metalcore spent the 2010s getting cleaner, glossier, more produced. Knocked Loose showed up sounding like a hardcore band that had been left outside in the rain, and dragged the whole genre back toward ugliness.

“A Tear In The Fabric Of Life” and “You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To” didn’t just do well — they changed what young bands are trying to sound like. Go and listen to anything heavy that’s come out of a garage since 2021. You can hear it.

They also did something nobody managed for a decade: they made metalcore genuinely, uncomfortably mainstream again without softening a single thing about it.

Ask me again in five years and this ranking might be too low.

8. As I Lay Dying

Musically, their influence is not in question. “Shadows Are Security” and “An Ocean Between Us” set the standard for melodic metalcore — the harmonized guitar leads, the riff structures, the production template. Half the bands in the 2000s were reverse-engineering those records.

The other part is not something we’re going to write around. In 2013, frontman Tim Lambesis was arrested for attempting to hire someone to murder his wife. He pleaded guilty and served time.

The music influenced the genre enormously. That’s a statement of fact and it’s why they’re on this list. What you do with that information is your business, and plenty of people we respect won’t play them anymore.

7. Underoath

Underoath made vulnerability part of the genre’s vocabulary.

“They’re Only Chasing Safety” split the fanbase in half in 2004. To a chunk of the hardcore crowd it read as a retreat. What it actually did was widen what metalcore was allowed to be about — the interplay between Spencer Chamberlain’s screams and Aaron Gillespie’s clean vocals became one of the most copied formulas in heavy music.

Then “Define The Great Line” proved it wasn’t a grab at accessibility. That record is dark, structurally strange, and genuinely difficult in places. It demonstrated that the genre could get more ambitious without getting softer.

Modern atmospheric metalcore is downstream of that album, and once you hear it you can’t unhear it.

6. Parkway Drive

Two bands in one, and both of them mattered.

The early Parkway Drive of “Killing With A Smile” and “Horizons” produced some of the most bludgeoning moments the genre has on record. If you came up in that era, those breakdowns are load-bearing memories.

Then they did the thing almost nobody manages. Instead of running the same play for twenty years, they went enormous — pyro, orchestras, arena-scaled songwriting. It could easily have been ridiculous. Instead it gave every metalcore band an answer to “what happens when you outgrow the clubs.”

Most bands break on that transition. Parkway Drive turned it into the second half of their career.

Check Out – The 13 Most Brutal Metal Breakdowns Ever Recorded (Ranked)

5. August Burns Red

August Burns Red raised the technical ceiling and then just stayed up there.

“Messengers” and “Constellations” are absurd records. The rhythmic complexity, the layered guitar work, the sheer refusal to repeat a section when they could write a new one — it forced other bands to get better or get exposed.

What’s remarkable is the consistency. They’ve never chased a trend, never had a reinvention album, never softened for radio. Twenty years of doing one thing at an extremely high level, and the respect they get in the genre is close to universal as a result.

4. Architects

Architects gave metalcore emotional weight it didn’t previously have access to.

“All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us” is a record about grief, collapse, and futility, and it doesn’t flinch. Made under circumstances that were genuinely devastating for the band, it landed on a scene that had mostly been writing about relationships and betrayal, and it reset expectations for what the genre could carry.

Musically they married crushing riffs to enormous, cinematic production — a combination that’s now so standard in modern metalcore it’s practically a preset.

They didn’t just evolve the sound. They deepened what it could be about.

3. Converge

Here’s the argument you’re going to have in the comments: are Converge metalcore?

Depending on who you ask they’re mathcore, chaotic hardcore, or a category with one band in it. Fine. But you cannot write an honest account of metalcore’s influence and leave out “Jane Doe.”

That record is a bomb crater. Released in 2001, it took hardcore’s aggression and metal’s technicality and put them through something violent and unstable, and heavy music has been picking through the debris ever since. Kurt Ballou then went on to produce a frankly ludicrous portion of the genre’s best records, which means his fingerprints are on bands who never even cite Converge as an influence.

The chaotic, off-kilter, deliberately-unpleasant end of modern metalcore — the stuff that sounds like it’s coming apart on purpose — starts here.

2. Bring Me The Horizon

Bring Me The Horizon didn’t evolve. They detonated the thing.

They started as a deathcore band that most of the scene actively disliked. Then across “There Is A Hell…” and “Sempiternal” they started pulling in electronics, pop structures and production ideas that had no business in a heavy band, and the genre’s boundaries broke.

It divided people, and it’s still dividing people. That’s the tell. Bands that change things always do.

What they proved is that a heavy band doesn’t have to stay in its lane to stay heavy — and the number of metalcore bands now writing genuine choruses, using synths without irony, and refusing to be one thing is enormous. All of that runs through Sheffield.

1. Killswitch Engage

Everything else on this list is a variation on what Killswitch Engage worked out first.

“Alive Or Just Breathing” solved the central problem of the genre: how do melody and aggression coexist without one of them feeling like a compromise? Before that record they mostly took turns. After it, they worked together.

“The End Of Heartache” then took that formula mainstream without diluting it, and Howard Jones’ performance on it is still one of the best vocal records heavy music has produced.

Two decades on, if you hear a metalcore song on the radio, in a game, in a trailer — it’s built on this. The harmonised leads, the clean chorus that actually soars, the breakdown that arrives when it’s earned.

If metalcore has a centre of gravity, it’s here. It hasn’t moved.

Loaded Radio Recommends – The 13 Metalcore Albums That Defined The Genre (And Still Haven’t Been Topped)

The Ones Who Nearly Made It

Cutting a list to thirteen means good bands lose. Unearth, Poison The Well, Bullet For My Valentine, Darkest Hour, Zao and The Devil Wears Prada were all in the conversation, and on a longer list several of them get in comfortably.

Bad Omens and Spiritbox will get asked about, so here’s the answer: both are excellent and both are enormous, but neither has yet changed how other bands write. Popularity and influence are different things. Check back in a few years.

If you want to hear how all of this actually sounds side by side, we run a lot of it in rotation — the Loaded Radio stream is free and running 24/7. We also talk about them on The Loaded Radio Podcast.

FAQ

Thirteen slots, and something you love had to lose. Tell us which one we got wrong.

More rankings from Loaded Radio

The post Best Metalcore Bands: The 13 That Actually Defined The Genre appeared first on Loaded Radio.

It’s somehow been six years since the “new” Strokes album The New Abnormal came out, and the band has been announced for a zillion festivals this year, including an appearance at Coachella this Saturday. So perhaps it was obvious a new LP was on the way. Today they’ve confirmed it.

The post The Strokes Announce New Album <em>Reality Awaits</em> appeared first on Stereogum.

Keenan shares how the four-star general once was supportive as he decided to leave the military to pursue a career in the arts. Continue reading…

Back in February, Boston metallic hardcore pioneers Converge released Love Is Not Enough, their first proper album in about nine years. It fucking rules. Last week, Converge announced plans to follow Love Is Not Enough almost immediately with Hum Of Hurt, their second new album of 2026. Judging by the title track, as well as past experience with this band, that album will almost certainly fucking rule, too. Converge are one of the few legacy acts where you want to hear the new songs when you go to the show, and they worked a bunch of new tracks into their setlist when they kicked off their latest tour at Cleveland’s House Of Blues last Thursday.

The post Watch Converge Debut New Songs Live At Cleveland Tour Opener appeared first on Stereogum.

Ronnie Romero has sung for some of the most demanding figures in hard rock — Ritchie Blackmore, Michael Schenker, Adrian Vandenberg — and come out of each chapter with something useful to say about the experience. He’s not a man who tends to shy away from direct answers. So when Chaoszine‘s Marko Syrjälä asked whether Romero would consider joining forces with Yngwie Malmsteen if the call came in, the response was about as clear as it gets.

“I wouldn’t think about it,” he said. “I wouldn’t wanna do it because of all the stories I’ve heard from people I’ve worked with who have worked with him. I’ve worked with people like the Johansson brothers — Jens and Anders — Jeff Scott Soto and Mark Boals. I know all those guys, and they’ve told me some stories, and I was, like, ‘I don’t know…’ So, when somebody asks me, ‘What if Yngwie calls you?’ I would say, ‘No.’ I’d hang up the phone.”

That said, Romero is careful to separate the man from the music. His entry point into Malmsteen‘s catalogue came through Swedish singer Mats Levén, and it left a mark. “The way I discovered Yngwie was actually when Mats Levén was in the band. The first Yngwie album I heard was the 1998 live album Live!!, and Mats was singing on it. Then I heard Facing the Animal, which is one of my favorites, together with The Seventh Sign. So yeah, if that ever happened, I’d choose just one song — and that would be ‘Facing the Animal’, for sure.”

When the interviewer mentioned that Levén is set to perform the entire Facing the Animal album in Japan in May, Romero didn’t hold back his admiration. “Yeah, he told me that, and that’s fantastic. He’s a great singer. As I said in a post the other day, he’s one of my heroes. Together with David Coverdale and later Ian Gillan, he was one of the first singers who really blew me away. I was, like, ‘How can this guy sing like that?’ On that live recording, he’s just killing it.”

Romero made his live debut with Rainbow in June 2016 after Blackmore selected him to front the reformed lineup. Beyond Rainbow, his CV includes Michael Schenker Group, Lords of Black, The Ferrymen, Elegant Weapons, Sunstorm, and Vandenberg — with whom he recorded the 2020 album 2020 before parting ways.

His most recent solo release is Backbone, put out via Frontiers Music Srl, produced by Romero himself and mixed and mastered by guitarist Jose Rubio Jimenez. It features contributions from former Europe guitarist Kee Marcello and songwriter Russ Ballard, who penned the track “Hideaway.”

Backbone followed Too Many Lies, Too Many Masters, his first solo album of original material, and two covers records: 2023’s Raised on Heavy Radio, which took on material from Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Accept, and Metallica with guests including Gus G., Chris Caffery, and Roland Grapow; and his debut Raised on Radio, which traced his roots through classic rock from Survivor, Bad Company, Foreigner, Queen, and Led Zeppelin.

The post RONNIE ROMERO Says He Would Never Work With YNGWIE MALMSTEEM If Asked: “No, I’d Hang Up The Phone” appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

(Gonzo makes another of his monthly appearances at NCS today, with reviews of four albums released in March 2026.) We’re only three months and some change into 2026, and I swear on Satan’s taint that I’ve already identified at least 3 new albums fighting for contention in my annual top 20 list. Dark and uncertain […]

The post GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, MARCH 2026 appeared first on NO CLEAN SINGING.

Metallica's No Repeat Weekend comes to an arena with Suicidal Tendencies and Spiritbox. Continue reading…