Category: news

Ex-Metallica bassist Jason Newsted covered Bob Seger’s Turn The Page with his Chophouse Band as their North American tour kicked off on Wednesday (July 1).

The group, where Newsted handles vocals and guitar, performed the 1972 track as part of a covers-heavy set at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Massachusetts. They also played tracks by Neil Young, Blue Öyster Cult, John Baez and more.

No Metallica original made the cut, but according to setlist wiki setlist.fm, the band jammed the bridge of Creeping Death during a musical rendition of Mark Twain’s poem The War Prayer. Turn The Page was also famously covered by Metallica during Newsted’s time in the band, making the tracklisting of 1998 covers project Garage, Inc..

Watch footage of Newsted’s live take below.

Newsted joined Metallica in late 1986 – shortly after the death of the band’s previous bassist Cliff Burton in a bus accident, aged 24 – and stayed in the lineup until early 2001. He played on four studio albums of original material, including 1991’s blockbuster Metallica, which made the metal giants a household name and has sold upwards of 30 million copies worldwide.

Newsted quit Metallica due to mounting personal and creative tensions within the group. He initially attributed the exit to “private and personal reasons and the physical damage I have done to myself over the years while playing the music that I love”.

In subsequent interviews, he elaborated that he was banned from pursuing outside musical projects by singer/guitarist James Hetfield.

During a 2001 Playboy interview, Hetfield reasoned, “When someone does a side project, it takes away from the strength of Metallica … Where would it end? Does he start touring with it? Does he sell shirts? Is it his band?”

But, two years later, the frontman admitted that he had been “choking” his longtime bass player.

“We were brothers,” he reflected, “and I was trying so hard to keep that that I was choking Jason … That’s how I was taught to control things: through intimidation and rage.”

In May, Newsted revealed that substance addiction also contributed to his departure.

He told YouTuber Dean Delray: “The reason I left Metallica is because I was a horrible addict. I was way up against myself, and if I didn’t get some kind of help, I was going to die. And so I just said, ‘You guys, can I have a minute? Please give me a minute.’ And they said, ‘No.’”

He also revealed that he had recently undergone treatment for throat cancer and been given the all-clear by doctors.

“May 8 of 2025, I underwent a procedure for throat cancer,” he remembered. “And so they took a bunch of shit outta here and then they went in with lasers this way and took a bunch of shit out. So the cavern inside my head is different than it was, but we got it early.”

The Chophouse Band, named after Newsted’s personal recording studio in San Francisco, will continue their North American tour at Mickey’s Black Box in Lititz, Pennsylvania tonight (July 3). From July 9, the band will support Blackberry Smoke on a string of US shows.

Meanwhile, Metallica are gearing up to play the last two shows of their three-year-long M72 world tour in London, UK tonight and on Sunday, July 5.

Gaerea’s singer was 16 years old when his best friend was killed. He’s carried the loss ever since. Telling the story is a little complicated because the Portuguese musician doesn’t want his own identity revealed, nor does he want the name of his friend made public. We’ll get into the whys of it shortly, but for now we’ll call the singer by his stage name, Alpha.

Alpha and his friend knew each other from school. They started their first group together, did their first home recordings together, had their first band photos taken together. All the first steps every would-be musician takes, they took them together. But Alpha’s friend was way more dedicated. By his own admission, Alpha himself was just along for the ride.

“I just wanted to smoke my first cigarettes, go out, shit like that,” says Alpha, speaking from his home near Porto via Zoom, unobscured by the striking, sigil-emblazoned mask-cum-headcovering he wears onstage and in photos. With his tied-back long hair, glasses and earnest demeanour, he looks less like a man who has made one of the most emotionally charged metal albums of the year and more like a barista in a moderately trendy coffee shop.

“My friend was actually the one that wanted to become a musician,” he continues. “He had plans for all of that. He had his whole life sorted. But that didn’t happen.”

According to Alpha, his friend had bipolar disorder and was severely depressed. “Also, he was mixing a lot of drugs and alcohol,” says Alpha.

Yet the end was still a shock, not least because of the sudden nature of it. Alpha and his friend had met up one evening. The singer bailed early, but his friend decided to carry on. The next morning, Alpha got a call. It was his friend’s brother.

“He told me he’d been run over on the highway by a truck,” says Alpha, solemnly. “He was trying to make it home after a very drunken night. I was 16, he was 17.”

The death of his best friend more than 15 years ago has shaped Gaerea’s new record, Loss. It uses that traumatic incident as a jumping-off point to explore absence, trauma, guilt and the ephemeral nature of life.

“The whole album is based around my friend who passed away,” says Alpha.

Yet for all its lyrical heaviness, Loss is an exhilarating listen and a bold step into the future. Where once Gaerea were a black metal band cloaked in dissonance and darkness, their sound has become bold and expansive, drawing on everything from nu metal to hip hop.

The new album may have a black hole at the heart of it, but the band that made it are anything but hollow. Like every budding extreme metal musician worth their weight in sulphur, Alpha was drawn to the dark side as kid by Beelzebub’s unholy emissaries on Earth: Linkin Park.

“They’re the band of my generation,” he says without embarrassment. “They made me want to pick up the guitar. Did I have baggy jeans? A little bit. Spiky hair, for sure.”

It wasn’t just Linkin Park who shaped his early musical tastes. Trivium and Parkway Drive were in the mix too. So were Bring Me The Horizon, though it was Alpha’s friend – the one who died so young – who really loved them.

“He looked exactly like Oli Sykes,” says Alpha. “I really didn’t like their deathcore phase, but he used to tell me, ‘Man, this band are gonna be so huge one day, you see.’ He was right, but he didn’t get to see them.”

Alpha’s entry point to black metal had been Norwegian C-listers Ragnarok – specifically the song Murder from their 2004 album Blackdoor Miracle. He dived deeper into the scene, pulled down by the aggression and transgression.

“You’re 15, you’re rebellious, you want to express yourself and fuck off your parents,” he says. “You start listening to the most aggressive, irreligious thing you can find. You want to be edgy, and that was edgy enough for me to dive into.”

Alpha vaguely remembers the band the two friends formed being called Devotion. “Very, very, very black metal, corpsepaint, everything,” he says. “We never released anything but we had some recordings we did in our rooms.”

Who knows where things might have gone had Alpha’s friend not been hit by a truck on the highway that night. Alpha dealt with the loss by throwing himself into music. He had a good support system around him, but at the same time he began to isolate himself from his other friends without really realising it.

“From that moment on, I just went full-focus on something I didn’t want to do before,” he says. “Before that, I didn’t want to become a musician, I barely played guitar. When this tragic thing happened, I just went full-on. When I started working on this new album, I realised that I lost so many people because of this. People that were important to me.”

He put together a new band. He remembers playing one early gig in a bar in the shopping mall where they rehearsed. He half-recalls a Bible being burnt onstage. It was youthful button-pushing rather than a concerted attempt to bring down Portugal’s Catholic church.

“When you’re young you do silly shit,” he says with a shrug. “You’re trying to be edgy, making a statement against nothing.”

He formed Gaerea a decade ago, largely as a vehicle to explore his feelings of being an outsider.

“I’m not communicative or outgoing or too social,” he says. “I like to stand in a corner and observe. I like to watch people. Rehearsing where we did [in the shopping mall], you would see all kinds of people and all kinds of shit – tourists, addicts, everyone. And it made me think about my place in the world – ‘Who am I? Does it really matter to be here?’”

Gaerea’s early releases were harsh and bleak, but there was an interesting concept swirling beneath the music. 2018’s debut album, Unsettling Whispers, introduced The Vortex Society, an imaginary world populated by a series of characters lost in an unwelcoming urban environment. Even Alpha admits it was a little on the nose: “Was it Porto? Yes, of course.”

Their third album, 2022’s Mirage, saw them starting to audibly edge beyond the boundaries of black metal into more expansive territories. 2024’s Coma took things further. Though maybe not as far as Alpha would have liked.

“We were very conservative with it,” he says. “We were afraid of too much change. We should have taken things further.”

Loss definitely delivers on that promise. It’s connected to the band Gaerea once were in the same way as the iPhone is connected to a couple of plastic cups connected by a piece of string: they’re broadly the same thing, but only just. Alpha admits that he was “starting to become a bit bored with a lot of things we were doing before”.

The result is an album that shoots high, piling on big melodies, clean vocals and the whisper-to-a-roar dynamics of modern metal. It’s hardly Linkin Park, but it’s definitely the work of someone who grew up listening to them. Yet the most interesting thing about Loss is the emotional charge it carries.

This is the sound of a someone finally confronting a moment that would shape anybody – the death of a best friend at a time when best friends are everything. ‘There’s a gap inside my mind / Where faces fade away,’ roars Alpha on Luminary, the album’s soaring opener.

“It’s a song about missing something, realising there’s something that isn’t there,” he says. “As much as you go through life and achieve things, you feel completely empty. The faces fading away – that’s people you see throughout your life.”

He talks about the imposter syndrome he felt while writing Loss, perhaps the result of a kind of guilt.

“On some parts of the album, I question myself: ‘Did I just steal this from somebody else?’”

It all comes to a head on the eight-minute Stardust, the album’s musical and emotional climax. The song cycles through bleak balladry, roaring anguish, even a whispered quasi-hip hop section, piling on the agony, despair and guilt. ‘Are you still with me when the world goes dark?’ howls Alpha on the track. ‘Are you still with me when I fall apart?’ The subject of the song is obvious.

“I’m basically talking to [my best friend],” says Alpha. “The whole album is about my regrets, things I could have done. You realise you’ve sacrificed so much and you’ve thrown so much away. You think: ‘Why did you sacrifice so much for one thing?’”

So, why did you sacrifice so much for this one thing? He shakes his head sadly. “I really don’t know.”

That desire to push forwards makes Gaerea one of the most fascinating metal bands at work right now. Ironically, the least interesting thing about them is their anonymity.

“When we started, I just didn’t care for people to know me,” he says. “I still don’t. I don’t care how musicians look. I don’t care if my favourite bands have long hair or they have some shit on their face. I don’t even care if a band changes musicians. As long as the music is there and the vision is there.”

The problem is that metal today is saturated with bozos in joke shop masks, hoping a wacky look will distract people from the averageness of their music. Gaerea may have beaten the rush, but they’ve become caught up in a cliché.

“There are some bands I see that I think are bullshit, just hopping on some bandwagon,” says Alpha. “And I know sometimes people say that about us: ‘Oh, just another masked band.’ But I think people have that bullshit sensor in them: ‘Man, there’s no authenticity to this.’”

What’s so important about being anonymous? People can Google who you are.

“There’s no band who is completely anonymous,” he concedes. “Two clicks and you’re there, including us.”

So why bother with the masks?

“Because I don’t see myself as interesting as a person. I see what my ideas can do for people, and that’s important. It’s not about, ‘That guy creates this thing.’ I’ve come to realise that when people don’t have a public figure to relate to, they kind of place themselves in the artist’s face to do that.”

Doesn’t wearing masks suggest a band who don’t have the confidence to let their music stand on its own?

“It’s the opposite,” he counters. “I don’t have to show my face for people to relate to the music. This is all about the music. Otherwise what else do we have? If the music is not good, it’s not going to work out.”

Will you ever take the masks off? “No, never,” he says simply.

Inevitably, Loss has provoked the ire of some extreme metal online gatekeepers, who insist their bands should be stuck in some kind of unholy arrested development. Alpha has seen the comments and remains admirably unconcerned.

“Every band goes through that phase,” he says. “We even got it when we released the first album. My favourite bands, I don’t love everything they do. But if people prefer the old albums, they can listen to them. They’re all out there.”

He holds up BMTH, who he dismissed as a callow teen, as a band showing how metal can change things up and push forwards.

“They can do a really crusty, grungy song, but then they can do one with trap beats or lo-fi remixes which are fucking amazing,” he says.

“That’s what I like about them. I don’t like every song they’ve done, but it’s the freedom. They just don’t fucking care.”

BMTH bring things back around to the inspiration behind Loss. They were the band his best friend said were going to be massive, but never got to see it happen. Alpha says he still thinks about the kids they were every day, and the absence that comes with it.

“I’ll forever miss him,” he says. “I would’ve loved him to be in my band. I used to feel guilty about what happened, things I said, things I could’ve done differently. But I’ve come to peace with it. I don’t feel guilty anymore. Things happen in a certain way, there is nothing anyone can do about it. It’s the only life we have.”

Loss is out now via Century Media. Gaerea play the UK in September.

Taylor Momsen’s name will always carry an association with Soundgarden. Her band, The Pretty Reckless, were chosen to support the Seattle grunge legends on their ill-fated 2017 North American tour, which was tragically cut short, 12 dates in, when Chris Cornell died by suicide on May 17, following a show at the Fox Theatre in Detroit.

Since then, Momsen’s ties with the surviving band members have only grown stronger. Momsen was one of the guest vocalists who fronted the band at the epic January 16, 2019 Cornell tribute concert I Am The Highway, held at The Forum in Inglewood, California. On the night, Momsen sang Badmotorfinger-era single Rusty Cage alongside Kim Thayil, Ben Shepherd and Matt Cameron, a performance that would be reprised when Soundgarden were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on November 8 last year. Thayil and Cameron guested on The Pretty Reckless’ 2021 album Death By Rock And Roll, on the song Only Love Can Save Me Now.

“Chris Cornell’s work speaks to me on a level that nothing else does,” Momsen says in a new interview with NME. “When something touches you that way, it’s hard to put into words just exactly why. There is just this connection, and it’s like it is speaking to you on a level that is so deep that it feels like a part of you. I’ve listened to his solo work and to Soundgarden so many times, but every time I listen to them, it evokes something different in me.

“There is the sheer amount of depth and sensitivity and aggression… [but] also, it’s so smart. It’s musically exquisite and complex — like this never-ending onion where you discover something new about it and about yourself every time you listen to it. I think that is so powerful and so fucking rare. It’s coming from a place that’s so deep and so powerful that it touches your soul.”

In the same interview, Momsen is asked for her thoughts on the as-yet-unreleased Soundgarden album that the surviving band members are currently at work on.

“Oh, man, I don’t think that’s my place to talk about,” the singer replied. “But what I will say though is that I love those guys. I’m so excited and proud of them and everything that they are doing, and just stay tuned.”

Of that album, guitarist Kim Thayil says, “It’s important for the legacy of Soundgarden, It’s important for the legacy of Chris Cornell. It is doing right by our collective work. It is doing right by our partner and friend.”