Category: news

They will return to the iconic Manhattan venue they've played many times before. Continue reading…

Just for perspective, the last time that Swedish melodic death metal legends Gates of Ishtar released new material (1998’s At Dusk and Forever), Decibel was just a glimmer in Editor-in-Chief Albert Mudrian’s eye. So, it is with great anticipation that we offer up their first single, the appropriately titled “Ghosts,” after nearly three decades. The reinvigorated lineup features original members Andreas Johansson (rhythm guitars), Tomas Jutenfäldt (rhythm/lead guitar) and Mikael Sandorf (vocals) joined by new bassist Markus Parkkilla and session/live drummer Fredrik Andersson on a track filled with classic, hummable melodic DM guitar lines informed by modern black metal. “Ghosts” brings the band’s late-’90s aesthetic into the new millennium with confidence and fury.

The drum and bass parts were for Murder the Light were recorded at the Humbucker Studios in Hagsätra, Sweden, in May 2026. Guitars and vocal parts were recorded in the next two months, June and July, at Fallen Studios. Production, mixing and mastering was handled by Robert Pehrson at Fallen Studios. It’s set for release on limited leather box set, gatefold vinyl, CD, cassette and digitally via The Circle Music on January 21, 2027. You can place your preorder here.

The band offered this enthusiastic statement regarding its return to the fray:

“We’re incredibly proud to finally present ‘Ghosts,’ the first single from our upcoming album Murder the Light. After all these years, it feels amazing to share new material with you again. [It’s] not a look back, but a continuation built on the same foundation and spirit that defined us then and still drives us now. The new material stays true to the sound and identity that shaped our earlier work. While reflecting the years that have passed and the experiences gained along the way, now nearly thirty years later, the fire still burns even brighter and more intensely than ever.”

The post Video Premiere: Gates of Ishtar – “Ghosts” appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

(On the 16th of this month our friend Ben Manzella attended a show by Neurosis and Terry Gross at The Fillmore in San Francisco, and we’re grateful for his evocative review of the performances that you’ll find below, and for his wonderful photos of the event.) I feel a bit suspended in time as I […]

The post TORN WIDE OPEN: NEUROSIS RETURNS TO THE BAY AREA appeared first on NO CLEAN SINGING.

🔥 Who Will Rise as This Week’s Champion on the MDR Battle Of The Bands? 🔥
And who will dominate next month as Band of the Month on Metal Devastation Radio?
Last month’s winners, ANOTHER DEMON, crushed the competition with a staggering 27,455,987 VOTES, claiming the title of Band of the Month on Metal Devastation Radio! You can check them out HERE !
This is the weekly championship edition of the Band Of The Month – Battle Of The Bands that we host every month on MDR!
How does it work?
Every Monday, we launch a new poll featuring bands that submit music each week on metaldevastationradio.com. Voting runs until Friday at 9PM EST .
Each Friday night , at the start of The Zach Moonshine Show , I’ll be spinning the Top Six weekly winners , and announcing the #1 band of the week live on air — getting thousands of listens on Mixcloud !
At the end of the month , all weekly votes are added up, and the band with the highest total votes becomes our Band of the Month !
Winning Band of the Month gets:
A featured post on our Facebook page, reaching thousands of fans
A front-page spotlight on metaldevastationradio.com , which pulls in hundreds of thousands of views every month
A free PR email blast from Metal Devastation PR, hitting 40,000+ contacts including labels, zines, stations, and more
Airplay every hour during general rotation
Tons of social media shares and exposure across our network
If you want the world to know who your band is, this is the easiest way to make it happen!
💥 Want in on the next battle?
Comment below with your band name and we’ll add you to next week’s poll — or email me at zach@metaldevastationradio.com with “Battle Submission” in the subject line.
Bands can compete as many times as they want , and if you enter multiple weeks in the same month, your votes combine toward the Band of the Month title!
👇 Click on the bands below to vote as many times as you like, or add your own! Poll closes Friday, October 30th at 9PM EST!




Who Will Rise as This Week’s Champion on the MDR Battle Of The Bands? 10/26/26 – 10/30/26

🔥 Who Will Rise as This Week’s Champion on the MDR Battle Of The Bands? 🔥
And who will dominate next month as Band of the Month on Metal Devastation Radio?
Last month’s winners, ANOTHER DEMON, crushed the competition with a staggering 27,455,987 VOTES, claiming the title of Band of the Month on Metal Devastation Radio! You can check them out HERE!
This is the weekly championship edition of the Band Of The Month – Battle Of The Bands that we host every month on MDR!
How does it work?
Every Monday, we launch a new poll featuring bands that submit music each week on metaldevastationradio.com. Voting runs until Friday at 9PM EST.
Each Friday night, at the start of The Zach Moonshine Show, I’ll be spinning the Top Six weekly winners, and announcing the #1 band of the week live on air — getting thousands of listens on Mixcloud!
At the end of the month, all weekly votes are added up, and the band with the highest total votes becomes our Band of the Month!
Winning Band of the Month gets:
A featured post on our Facebook page, reaching thousands of fans
A front-page spotlight on metaldevastationradio.com, which pulls in hundreds of thousands of views every month
A free PR email blast from Metal Devastation PR, hitting 40,000+ contacts including labels, zines, stations, and more
Airplay every hour during general rotation
Tons of social media shares and exposure across our network
If you want the world to know who your band is, this is the easiest way to make it happen!
💥 Want in on the next battle?
Comment below with your band name and we’ll add you to next week’s poll — or email me at zach@metaldevastationradio.com with “Battle Submission” in the subject line.
Bands can compete as many times as they want, and if you enter multiple weeks in the same month, your votes combine toward the Band of the Month title!
👇 Click on the bands below to vote as many times as you like, or add your own! Poll closes Friday, October 30th at 9PM EST!




Who Will Rise as This Week’s Champion on the MDR Battle Of The Bands? 10/26/26 – 10/30/26

Posted on October 26th 2026, 1:47pm

You might not get what they were expecting from the new Entheos album. With cofounder and multi-instrumentalist Navene Koperweis’ background in Animals as Leaders and Animosity, one could be forgiven for anticipating their Sumeriancore roots. That escalating cycle of deathcore bands looking to be more technical and brutal than the last. Empty on the Inside, Entheos’ latest record, dramatically subverts that expectation. Industrial, gothy vibes, buttressed by prog-rock sensibilities and energetic choruses, layer onto the techy deathcore skeleton that the band is known for.

“We never wanted to participate in this arms race of technicality,” vocalist Chaney Crabb says. “We feel like such outsiders compared to other, like, tech bands or even deathcore, really.”

…

…

Entheos’ technical mastery feels restrained on Empty on the Inside. Crabb’s account makes the shift sound less like a retreat from complexity than a commitment to instincts that were there all along. She points to “I Am the Void,” from 2023’s Time Will Take Us All, as an important step. “I was horrified to release it,” she says. Their manager asked whether she was proud of the song. If she was, the reaction didn’t fucking matter.

“Let’s stop dipping our toes in shit and let’s actually be the band that we want to be.”

“Golden Crown” makes that commitment stick. Its moody low-end intro gives way to a catchy nu-metal chorus that sounds more than a little Linkin Park-y. Even with more straightforward timing than we usually hear from Entheos, Koperweis’ ghost notes in the chorus and whirling fills reward closer listening, which you’ll do because the song gets stuck in your head pretty easily. The more restrained songwriting preserves his drumming’s personality without the steady barrage of older material.

Crabb’s expanded vocal approach similarly moves beyond the typical trappings of the genre. On “Hollow,” gravelly textures blur the harsh/clean divide, letting her pull off intense transitions into far more brutal voices. “Call My Name” balances techy death metal with a sharply hooked chorus that transitions into gutturals and squeals. Chester Bennington-like screamsinging passages flow into full-on death metal shrieks without sounding like a vocalist abruptly shifting gears. Certain parts sound like they could have been inspired directly by early Slipknot.

“I mean, I’m from Des Moines, Iowa,” Crabb says, mentioning influences including Otep and Mudvayne’s LD 50. The nu-metal roots are front and center, but she’s still learning from newer generations and the vocal olympics fad. “I was like, all right, let me learn some shit from these kids, you know?” she says. More melodic approaches also free her from fitting words into rigid syllabic patterns, opening up a wider vocabulary and different emotions. The hooks benefit from that room to breathe.

The collaboration has expanded, too. Guitarists Scott Carstairs of Fallujah and Michael Stancel of Allegaeon join the core duo, bringing more voices into the writing. Crabb describes Stancel writing industrial standout “Undone” overnight and showing it to the others the next day. “Yes, abso-fucking-lutely, this is going on the record,” Crabb says, adding that it helped replace two death metal songs they originally planned. 

That track’s industrial swells feel like the rising blood pressure of an anxious machine. Across the Mark Lewis-produced record, the electronics have a fuzzier, dirtier edge than Koperweis’ familiar polished clicks and swirls. The grittier treatment keeps the huge choruses from disappearing into the hyper-polished modern-metal finish these songs could have received. The hooks are immediate, but the surfaces retain some grit.

“Tomblight,” featuring The Contortionist’s Michael Lessard, motions towards radio-friendliness before dropping into a crushing deathcore breakdown. Lessard is a fitting guest for a band renegotiating its place on the prog/tech spectrum. Together with “Golden Crown” and “Undone,” it cements the middle of the album as the core of its stylistic pivot.

Forunately, there’s still plenty for the death metal heads. Carstairs’ expressive leads suit the moodier vibe of opener “Hell Is a Part of Me,” while the quick tech-death runs and solo in “Pale Faith” keep Entheos connected to modern prog metal’s flashier impulses. The latter might be the most brutal song on the record. Those restrained technical instincts make the moments where the band rightfully shows off slap harder.

Longtime collaborator and bassist Evan Brewer does feel conspicuously absent. He plays on the album, but there isn’t much room for the floaty, progged-out basslines that has made him a compelling presence on previous releases and in other bands like The Faceless. The production doesn’t lack for low-end weight; it just feels largely occupied by the synths.

Empty on the Inside is an excellent modern example of a band making a risky stylistic change and not completely fucking it up. The hooks sink deep, the industrial grit works, and the technical flourishes hit harder when they have room to breathe. Entheos sound increasingly comfortable being the band they say they’ve always wanted to be.

…

Empty on the Inside is available now via Metal Blade Records.

Recorded two weeks before Painstream, the first Blind Channel album with Niko Moilanen carrying every vocal, and ahead of the one European show the band have booked to come back with. Then a special guest segment with Tori Kravitz, the host of She’s With The Band.

This Blind Channel interview was recorded with the band’s sixth album, Painstream, two weeks out; it arrives this Friday, October 30, on Century Media, after what the band themselves described as twenty months of silence. Niko Moilanen is the main guest: the record, the break, singing a whole Blind Channel album alone for the first time, Joel Hokka’s exit, the Fermi Paradox, the Megadeth thing, Scary Noise, Eurovision, and the one Helsinki show on November 14 that has to carry the comeback.

Then a special guest segment with Tori Kravitz, publicist by day and host of Knotfest’s She’s With The Band, on both sides of the pitch. The full episode is on the player below.

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE NOW:

Niko Moilanen of Blind Channel joins Scott Penfold, followed by a special guest conversation with Tori Kravitz of She’s With The Band. Download the free Loaded Radio App on Apple iOS and Google Play and stream every episode of The Loaded Radio Podcast.

Twenty Months Of Silence, Two Weeks To Go

Blind Channel announced Painstream on August 5, 2026 with a statement that began “More than a year and a half. Twenty months. The silence wasn’t just a pause—it was a journey of learning,” and Scott opens by asking Niko what the feeling is with the record two weeks out, relief or nerves, and what the band learned in that silence that they couldn’t have learned on tour.

The timeline behind the question: the band announced an indefinite hiatus on October 7, 2024, played their last shows that December, and said nothing until August. The comeback statement put the learning first and the record second. “During that time, we grew and learned to listen,” it said. “Now we’re back hungrier than ever, with more to say than we’ve ever had before.” The conversation starts there, with what “learned to listen” means in practice for a band that spent a decade on the road, and whether twenty months away from a stage is something a touring musician can enjoy or only survive.

Painstream is twelve tracks: Messiah, Youthanasia, Stars We See, Into The Void, Types Of Killing, Revolution: Now, Me Versus Me, Scapegoat, Villain In Your Story, Diana, No Encores In A Swan Song, and Ache. The band released Diana and No Encores In A Swan Song as a double single on August 6, Stars We See on September 3, and Into The Void on October 1.

The First Blind Channel Album With One Voice

Joel Hokka left Blind Channel on April 26, 2025, citing sleep problems that had made touring impossible, and Painstream is the first record on which Niko sings everything; Scott asks how different that job is, and how a band grieves a member who left for a reason nobody can argue with while still keeping the thing going.

For twelve years Blind Channel were a two-vocalist band, and the trade between Niko and Joel was the sound. Joel’s statement when he left was unambiguous: “The past few years have pushed me to my limits, and ongoing sleep issues have made touring impossible. I’ve come to realize that the intensity of this lifestyle just doesn’t align with my health right now.” The band’s own statement said their “creative chemistry” had “naturally drifted in different directions,” that the decision “doesn’t affect our friendship and love,” and that Blind Channel would continue as five: Niko, Joonas Porko on guitar, Olli Matela on bass, Tommi Lalli on drums, and Aleksi Kaunisvesi on synths and samples.

That’s the context for the two hardest questions in the hour. There’s a practical one, about what it does to a singer’s night when the screams and the melodies are both his, and there’s an emotional one, about how you mourn a version of your band when there’s no villain and no fight, just a friend whose body said no. Niko also once told Chaoszine that “screaming live was easier than screaming in a studio or a rehearsal space,” and Scott asks whether that’s still true now that he’s carrying all of it.

Pain, Hope, And A Radio Signal From 1977

Painstream is built on a single idea, that pain is the one thing every human shares, and the band have said hope turns up somewhere inside it; Scott asks why that was the thing worth saying after twenty months off, which song is the turn, and how “Into The Void” got from the Fermi Paradox and the Wow! signal to a mosh part.

The band’s description of the album, from the announcement: “In a world overshadowed by uncertainty, conflict and division, there’s one thing we all share: pain. Instead of separating us, could pain actually unite us and remind us what it truly means to be human? We explore pain from personal experiences to societal structures and life’s biggest questions. Somewhere along the way, something unexpected begins to emerge: hope.” Where exactly the hope arrives is the question; the tracklist runs from Messiah to Ache, which is not the order you’d expect for a record that ends up hopeful.

Into The Void, the final single before the album, features Aaron Pauley of Of Mice & Men, and the band’s statement about it is the strangest press release of the year in the best way: “The song was inspired by the Fermi Paradox and the Wow! signal. If Earth really is the only place in the universe where life exists, we’re not exactly doing a great job of sustaining it. Aaron from Of Mice & Men jumped aboard for this one and made sure the moshpits will suck people in like black holes.” The Wow! signal, for the record, was a 72-second burst picked up by Ohio State’s Big Ear telescope in August 1977 and never heard again.

Youthanasia, Violent Pop, And The Megadeth Question

Track two of Painstream is called Youthanasia, which is also the title of a Megadeth album from 1994, and Scott asks the obvious: deliberate, or did nobody check? He also asks whether “violent pop,” the genre tag the band invented for themselves, still fits a record like this or has been outgrown.

The “violent pop” story, as Niko told it at SXSW in 2024, is that the band needed a short genre description to send to a local radio station with their demos and made one up: “So we came up with ‘violent pop,’ and the local radio station thought that it’s catchy.” A decade later it’s on tour posters. Whether it describes Painstream, which the band have said explores “new soundscapes and themes we discovered during our break,” is a fair question, and the kind a band either answers in two words or in ten minutes.

One Night In Helsinki, Then Tokyo And Osaka

Blind Channel’s only European show this autumn is Saturday, November 14 at the Black Box inside Helsinki Ice Hall, with Atlas supporting, followed four days later by Shibuya Club Quattro in Tokyo on November 18 and Umeda Club Quattro in Osaka on November 19; Scott asks how you build a set when you have one shot at a comeback, and what Japanese crowds do that Finnish ones don’t.

The Helsinki show was announced alongside the album and billed in the band’s own language as the only performance in Europe all autumn. That’s a deliberate choice: one night in the capital, two weeks after the record, and then a flight to Japan, where the band played their first show in 2024 and now headline two club dates. A proper European tour follows in February and March 2027, twenty-three dates from Hamburg to Cologne, with Sweden Rock in June. There are no North American dates on the books, which is worth noting for a band that has played more than eighty US shows since their first run in 2022, and something Scott raises.

Scary Noise, Red Middle Fingers, And The Most Blind Channel Thing Ever

Niko and Aleksi Kaunisvesi founded Scary Noise Records in September 2024, as Blind Channel were winding down, describing it as an independent Helsinki label with “no genre limitations”; Scott asks whether it was a backup plan or a release valve, and whether painting their middle fingers red at Eurovision 2021, because the EBU wouldn’t let them raise them, is still the most Blind Channel thing the band has ever done.

Scary Noise’s first release was Rock Band From Hell’s “Bloodmoon,” the week the label was announced. The Eurovision story is five years old and still the one people bring up first: Dark Side won Finland’s selection with 54 percent of the vote, finished sixth in Rotterdam with 301 points, and the band, told they couldn’t give the camera the finger, painted their middle fingers red so nobody could miss them. Niko’s line to Yle at the time: “If we are not allowed to show our middle fingers, then we can at least ensure that no one can miss it.” Whether anything since has topped that is the last question before Tori.

Special Guest: Tori Kravitz Of She’s With The Band

Tori Kravitz is a publicist at Atom Splitter PR, the host of Knotfest’s She’s With The Band, which passed its hundredth episode in June 2026, the creator of the live-production series Beyond The Breakdown, and the Warped Tour pit reporter of the 2015–2018 era who came back for the revival; Scott’s conversation with her is about what the job looks like from both ends of the email. And quite honestly she’s one of the genre’s most important voices today.

She’s With The Band launched on Knotfest in December 2022 with a simple brief: weekly conversations with women on stage, backstage and in the business of rock and metal. The guest list since reads like the best female-fronted metal bands right now crossed with the people who make those bands work: Lzzy Hale, Tatiana Shmayluk, Kittie, Lena Scissorhands, Meg Mills of Turnstile, Knocked Loose’s lighting director Taylar Glasgow, Spiritbox’s manager Rachel Hacken, vocal coach Melissa Cross, and Emma Boster of Dying Wish, who has also sat in this chair.

Alissa White-Gluz, whom Knotfest called the show’s most requested guest yet, finally appeared in March 2026, between Arch Enemy and Blue Medusa, and the clip that traveled was Alissa saying she has never Googled herself. Scott asks Tori whether the real thing was better or worse than the version she’d built up over years of asking, and whether she could resist the Google.

Both Sides Of The Pitch

Tori’s day job is sending the emails that end up in Scott’s inbox; her podcast job is being the person on the other end. Scott asks which side has taught her more, what a band or label does in a pitch that gets it deleted instantly, and whether, with music media hollowed out since she started, it has actually become harder or easier to get a band heard. He also asks the question every interviewer wants to ask another one: what nearly all of her guests say off the record that almost none of them say on it.

Beyond The Breakdown And Warped

Beyond The Breakdown is the opposite show: not the singer, the crew. It launched in May 2024 with Electric Callboy in Leeds and has since gone backstage with Knocked Loose, Jinjer, Underoath, Enter Shikari, Creeper and GWAR, interviewing lighting directors, stage managers, front-of-house engineers and guitar techs about what it takes to put a show on every night. Scott asks what fans most misunderstand about that.

Then Warped. Tori first went in 2010, at fifteen, won a fan vote to become Monster Energy’s pit reporter, and spent the 2015–2018 era filming daily videos from the ground. When the tour came back for its thirtieth anniversary she came back with it, and told NPR last summer, “I was literally the reporter in the pit every single day.”

The 2026 revival ends in Orlando on November 14 and 15 at Camping World Stadium, her hometown and the last Warped weekend of the year, with Jimmy Eat World, Taking Back Sunday, The Used and Thrice on the bill. It’s the same Saturday Blind Channel play Helsinki. Scott asks whether the revival was the same tour or just the same name, and what she wants from the weekend.

Flowers

Tori has described a lot of what she does as giving people their flowers, which is a phrase Mike Hranica said something similar about on this show earlier this year. Scott asks who in the scene is doing great work nobody has handed flowers to yet, whether she tried the Melissa Cross screaming lesson herself, and what she’d tell a 22-year-old who loves heavy music and wants her job that nobody told her.

She’s With The Band is on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Knotfest YouTube channel; Tori is @torikravitz on Instagram and X, and the show is @SWTBpod.

Listen To The Full Episode

The Niko Moilanen conversation and the Tori Kravitz segment are both on the player above, with every episode of The Loaded Radio Podcast on the free Loaded Radio app for Apple iOS and Google Play. If you missed last week’s episode with Dave Lombardo, or Kenny Hickey the week before, they’re there too. Painstream is out Friday.

TL;DR

• Blind Channel’s sixth album, Painstream, is out Friday, October 30 on Century Media, after a twenty-month silence the band called “a journey of learning”; it’s the first record with Niko Moilanen as the only vocalist following Joel Hokka’s April 2025 exit for health reasons.
• The album’s premise is that pain is the one thing all humans share and that hope emerges inside it; Into The Void, featuring Aaron Pauley of Of Mice & Men, was inspired by the Fermi Paradox and the 1977 Wow! signal. Track two is called Youthanasia.
• Blind Channel’s only European show this autumn is November 14 at the Black Box, Helsinki Ice Hall, followed by Tokyo (November 18) and Osaka (November 19); a 23-date European tour runs February–March 2027. No North American dates are announced.
• Niko and Aleksi Kaunisvesi founded Scary Noise Records in September 2024; the band finished sixth at Eurovision 2021 with Dark Side and painted their middle fingers red when they were told not to raise them.
• Special guest Tori Kravitz is an Atom Splitter publicist, host of Knotfest’s She’s With The Band (100+ episodes) and Beyond The Breakdown, and a Warped Tour pit reporter then and now; Warped’s final 2026 stop is Orlando, November 14–15.

FAQ

The full Blind Channel interview and the Tori Kravitz segment are on the player above. Download the free Loaded Radio App on Apple iOS and Google Play for every episode of The Loaded Radio Podcast, and follow Loaded Radio for clips from this one and next week’s guest.

The post Blind Channel’s Niko Moilanen On New Album Painstream Plus Tori Kravitz Of Knotfest’s She’s With The Band On The Loaded Radio Podcast appeared first on Loaded Radio.

As part of their ‘Gods Of Thunder’ world touring, British veterans Saxon have confirmed a new set of European headline shows in March, 2027.
Read more…

“Nadirflux”, the newest preview tune from Asgrauw‘s forthcoming LP release Solips (out on November 14), has surfaced online. Check it out.
Read more…