Mason chats with Dave Elkins and Zach Gehring from Mae about the legacy of The Everglow in celebration of its 20th anniversary. They chat about the writing and the recording process of The Everglow, its legacy, and new music you can expect from the band. Check out Mae, become a supporter of this podcast, and listen on Apple […]
Australian heavy music trailblazers Northlane have announced their seventh studio album, Anemoia, out everywhere October 30th via independent release. Furthermore, they’ve treated fans to their visceral new single “CUT_it,” out now. Anemoia’s second suffocating track “CUT_it” encapsulates the bone-weariness of total burnout. Driven by a low-end groove that bends and bows under the unrelenting weight of exhaustion, Marcus Bridge flexes a new menacing side of […]
Finnish death metal/grind duo GOATBURNER will release Time of Danger on October 9th, 2026, via Time To Kill Records.
Originally released across two separate EPs, Time of Danger brings together the band’s earliest and most essential material in a single release for the first time. The six-track collection unites the 2022 Danger EP and the 2018 Time to Burn EP, tracing the origins and evolution of GOATBURNER‘s unmistakable blend of old-school death metal, sludge and powerviolence.
The first single, “Brutal Awakening”, is available now:
Formed in 2017 by Jaakko “Spider” Forsman and Keijo “Kaos” Niinimaa (ROTTEN SOUND), GOATBURNER was created to channel a raw and uncompromising vision of extreme music built on crushing riffs, primitive grooves and relentless aggression. Working as a two-piece, the band has developed a massive wall of sound that defies expectations both in the studio and on stage.
Time of Danger documents the first chapter of the band’s journey. The A-side features the tracks originally released as the Danger EP in 2022, while the B-side revisits the band’s self-released 2018 debut Time to Burn. Newly mastered in 2026 by Keijo Niinimaa, the release presents these recordings as a cohesive work while preserving their raw intensity and underground spirit.
The cover artwork, painted by drummer Jaakko “Spider” Forsman, reflects the atmosphere of uncertainty, danger and death that defines both the release and the world surrounding it.
With members also known for their work in ROTTEN SOUND, RATFACE, MORBID EVILS, SKULMAGOT and PIKAKASSA, GOATBURNER have spent years relentlessly touring the European underground. Following a summer run with Delinquentes, the band will embark on the legendary Campaign For Musical Destruction Tour 2026, joining grindcore pioneers Napalm Death, death metal legends Master and rising force Brat for an extensive European run throughout November and December.
The tour will bring GOATBURNER‘s devastating two-piece wall of sound to more than twenty cities across the continent, including stops in Germany, Scandinavia, the Baltics, Eastern Europe, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
Campaign For Musical Destruction Tour 2026:
Napalm Death Master BRAT Goatburner
06.11 – Nürnberg, Germany – Löwensaal 07.11 – Flensburg, Germany – Roxy 08.11 – Copenhagen, Denmark – Pumpehuset 09.11 – Stockholm, Sweden – Kollektivet Livet 11.11 – Oslo, Norway – Vulkan 13.11 – Helsinki, Finland – Korjaamo 14.11 – Jyväskylä, Finland – Lutakko 15.11 – Tampere, Finland – Olympia 17.11 – Tallinn, Estonia – Paavli Kultuurivabrik 18.11 – Riga, Latvia – Spēlēt Concert Hall 19.11 – Vilnius, Lithuania – Loftas 20.11 – Kraków, Poland – Hype Park 21.11 – Jaroměř, Czech Republic – Nároďák Hudební Klub 24.11 – Bucharest, Romania 26.11 – Thessaloniki, Greece – WE 27.11 – Athens, Greece – Gagarin 205 28.11 – Sofia, Bulgaria – Studio Orfei 29.11 – Sofia, Bulgaria – Orfey Myuzik 01.12 – Ljubljana, Slovenia – Cvetličarna 02.12 – Bologna, Italy – Locomotiv Club 03.12 – Aarau, Switzerland – KIFF 04.12 – Lindau, Germany – Club Vaudeville 06.12 – Utrecht, Netherlands – TivoliVredenburg
Amyl and The Sniffers announce the impending release of a live album and film, but in classic Sniffers style, this is anything but a conventional live record. In April last year the band set up with a group of friends at the iconic El Coyote Mexican Restaurant in LA to film and record a one […]
Electric Callboy’s rise remains one of metal’s most fascinating transformations. Over the last few years, the Germans have gone from metalcore oddballs with a love of early 00s club anthems to Download main stage arrivals, collecting viral hits and collaborations with Babymetal along the way.
The catalyst was 2022’s Tekkno, an album that turned a novelty act into one of metal’s hottest properties. It leaves Tanzneid with a sizeable challenge: proving lightning can strike twice.
Fortunately, the album arrives with all the subtlety of an air horn, doubling down on everything that has carried Electric Callboy this far. The title track, translating to ‘dance envy’, erupts in a rush of electro trance hooks and brutal riffs like a brawl in a Berlin nightclub at 3am, but its secret weapon is a chorus so shamelessly infectious it could have been lifted from a forgotten Eurodance classic.
Hypercharged and Elevator Operator lean into EC’s gift for turning the sort of trance pop nonsense that once filled Ministry Of Sound compilations into bona fide festival anthems. Hypercharged opens with the cartoonish energy of Aqua’s Barbie Girl before slamming the accelerator through the floor and disappearing into a whirlwind of guitar riffs, clubland excess and clean-sung choruses.
Meanwhile, Elevator Operator is gloriously daft, pairing rubbery synths and rap metal bounce with a chorus that feels like a TikTok dance craze waiting to happen. It’s the sort of hook most bands would be embarrassed to write and most would kill to have.
And that’s the thing about Electric Callboy: beneath the breakdowns, strobes and Euro-silliness lies some genuinely elite songwriting. Even boyband pisstake The Way You Are and the breezy The Offspring collab Let The Good Times Roll reveal a knack for melody rarely found in metalcore. Babymetal prove equally at home on Ratatata, whose collision of kawaii metal and electronicore absurdity has already become one of the band’s defining songs, earning it Metal Hammer’s 2024 Song Of The Year crown.
Tanzneid isn’t all giant hooks, however. Heartclub is the album’s heaviest detour, trading EDM fun for blunt-force trauma, while Revery wraps its heaviness in the atmosphere of a dark fairytale. The Saviour and a cover of Sum 41’s Still Waiting keep the momentum high, while the remixes feel more like an afterparty.
If there’s a criticism, it’s that Tanzneid occasionally feels more like the culmination of an era than a fresh chapter. Much of its strongest material – including Ratatata, Elevator Operator and the title track – has been circulating for months or even years. Still, familiarity isn’t the same thing as fatigue. The closing remixes underline how deeply dance music remains embedded in Electric Callboy’s DNA, while the album as a whole feels like a celebration of everything they’ve become.
Tanzneid may not represent a dramatic reinvention, but it doesn’t need to. Few bands have spent the last five years turning irreverence into such a potent creative and commercial force. Electric Callboy once looked destined to become nothing but a joke. Instead, they’ve become one of modern metal’s biggest success stories.
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 416, August 2026. Order your copy now, with an exclusive Electric Callboy cover and numbered art print, via the Louder webstore.
Tanzneid is out on Friday (August 7) via Century Media. Electric Callboy tour Europe from January to March.
The career of Dream Theater can be divided into three distinct parts. Many hardliners consider the band’s initial years with Mike Portnoy on the drum stool as definitive, and such claims have solid grounding.
From the 1989 unveiling of a highly promising debut entitled When Dream And Day Unite, until September of 2010, when Portnoy dumbfounded his bandmates with the ill-received proposal of a five-year hiatus that would prompt his shocking exit from the group, Dream Theater forged a reputation as the chief progenitors of the genre known as progressive-metal.
With Portnoy, the North American-based quintet set bold new standards, and in much the same way as a very particular type of Van Halen fan refuses to acknowledge its Sammy Hagar-fronted line-up, many still choose to undervalue or even outright dismiss Dream Theater’s not inconsiderable achievements with Portnoy’s replacement, Mike Mangini (of Extreme, Steve Vai and Annihilator fame).
Frankly, it’s their loss. The introduction of the noted percussionist allowed Dream Theater not only to survive a potentially calamitous creative crisis but to reevaluate, reenergise and prosper.
Released in 2010, their debut with Mangini, A Dramatic Turn Of Events, generated a first-ever Grammy nomination. Although Dream Theater didn’t win the award, within two years they were shortlisted once again (losing out for a second time). The Mangini era lasted five albums, and 2016’s love-it-or-loathe-it The Astonishing was the biggest, boldest thing that they’d ever created – no small feat.
In 2024, to the delight of many, Portnoy returned, and the third part of the Dream Theater story began with a new collection of songs, Parasomnia. “My regret was not leaving the band,” said the drummer. “The regret is that it took so long to reunite. Now that we’re back together, it feels so natural, so good and so right. I just wish it had happened sooner.”
Dream Theater haven’t made a consistently poor album, but their debut is by far their weakest. Recorded three years after they formed, it suffers from three main drawbacks: a muddy production (by Rush associate Terry Date), relatively rudimentary songwriting and compositional skills (certainly compared to what came later), and the high-pitched yelps of original singer Charlie Dominci, who left the band soon afterwards.
In the plus column were future live favourites A Fortune In Lies and The Killing Hand, and the instrumental The Ytse Jam, all of which pointed towards future greatness.
Four albums in and Dream Theater were being devoured alive by the corporate machine. Their only studio album to feature Derek Sherinian on keyboards, the Kevin Shirley-produced Falling Into Infinity suffered from boardroom interference – they were forced by their label to write ‘radio friendly’ material with Desmond Child – almost to point of throwing in the towel.
The likes of New Millennium and Peruvian Skies are reminders that it’s not a bad record, but the arrival of Sherinian’s replacement Jordan Rudess was to prove hugely significant, and its failure only caused the suits to realise that a group such as Dream Theater were probably best left to their own devices after all.
With their first album for Roadrunner, the band once again elected to follow their instincts. After collaborating with an orchestra for their 20th anniversary show (released as the concert set Score), co-producers Petrucci and Portnoy sought to administer a modern twist to the band’s sound.
Bookended by the two-part epic In The Presence Of Enemies and The Ministry Of Lost Souls, its highlights include the Pantera-esque gallop of The Dark Eternal Night. But the most interesting track on the album is Repentance, which includes spoken-word confessions from Jon Anderson, Steven Wilson, Steve Vai and more.
Two albums into the Mike Mangini era and Dream Theater could be forgiven for wiping their collective brow. Less of a walking human hurricane than his predecessor, Mangini was proving a valuable addition to the band, and the quiet life (relatively speaking) seemed to suit them.
From its concise three-part instrumental opening track False Awakening Suite to John Petrucci’s Illumination Theory, a 22-minute beast that featured a string ensemble, their twelfth studio set brimmed with confidence. And like its self-titled predecessor, it also presented another Grammy nomination – something that had eluded them during the Portnoy days.
The group’s fourth post-Portnoy record introduced a new way of working. Responding to the overblown nature of The Astonishing, Dream Theater hired a barn in upstate New York, installed a studio and wrote Distance Over Time in 18 days flat. Its purposeful birthing process spawned a set of mostly shorter and harder-edged songs.
With just one track – the James LaBrie-penned At Wits End – threatening to tip the ten-minute mark, the results felt much more fresh and spontaneous. Thanks to the likes of Bar Stool Warrior and Pale Blue Dot, those numerous critics of The Astonishing felt as though they had their favourite band back again.
Dream Theater’s seventh album is their heaviest. Written and recorded in just three weeks, it reflected the less-than-happy memories of a summer tour they’d just finished with Queensrÿche. That experience at times coloured the sessions: in the lyrics of opener As I Am, guitarist John Petrucci recalled the apparently comical experience of Queensrÿche’s Mike Stone attempting to give him a guitar lesson.
Intentionally or otherwise, the album includes many of Petrucci’s finest solos, but the overall impression conveyed by the record is of unstoppable, if murky, power.
Perhaps responding to the oppressive, knee-buckling weight and density of predecessor Train Of Thought with what became their final major-label studio release, Dream Theater set out to replicate the vibe of another, far happier tour, spent in the company of the heroes of their youth, Yes.
Octavarium retained Dream Theater’s usual complexities but stepped back into more pastoral territory. Written on piano and guitar, and featuring several songs embellished by an orchestra, just two of its tracks went over the 10-minute mark – although the title track was almost 25 minutes long.
The last album recorded before Portnoy’s proposal of the hiatus which cost him his job, Black Clouds & Silver Linings is Dream Theater at their most song-based recording.
The mood veers towards the dark, and four of its six tracks clock in at between 12 and 19 minutes long, though there’s something timeless about each and every one of its tracks, especially The Count Of Tuscany, The Shattered Fortress and the Rush-flavoured The Best Of Times. The perfect entry point for those intrigued by Dream Theater’s appeal but intimidated by the scale of their universe.
Dream Theater’s second consecutive US Top 10 album, and their first to breach the UK Top 20, was the debut for new drummer Mike Mangini after a long and very public audition process.
Although the songs were in place when he arrived, Mangini brought a precision and technique that banished memories of his predecessor. Singer James LaBrie, who had begun to question Dream Theater’s reliance on heavy metal power, later suggested that with ADTOE the band found “a beautiful balance between progressive rock and metal”. And he was right.
Depending on the listener’s individual preference – Yes-style intricacy or nut-cracking à la Metallica? – A View From The Top Of The World might well be the best Dream Theater album of the post-Portnoy age. Okay, we placed The Astonishing above it, and of course that was a risky statement, but one made purely because this is a band that offers zero apologies for risk-taking.
A View From The Top Of The World is bookended by The Alien, a colossal tech-metal statement, and its title cut, 20 minutes of pummelling, multi-tempoed goodness, but coming after Distance Over Time it offers something for everybody, with a smidgen more emphasis on the progressive.
To even have a chance of matching the hype surrounding Mike Portnoy’s return to the band, Parasomnia needed to exceed expectations, and it did. Not only did the ‘old’ Dream Theater sound majestic, but they also sounded forward-thinking and celebratory.
Lead-off single Night Terror, which was added to the live set months before the album’s release, was among the best things the band had done. And while the years spent with Mangini at the kit tend to go unappreciated by some, the album heralded an unavoidable aura of regeneration.
Awake was the final album Dream Theater recorded with Kevin Moore, the band’s original keyboard player. And he went out on a high, with an album on which their mix of prog rock and heavy metal influences finally gelled. Equally importantly, the likes of Caught In A Web, The Mirror, Space-Dye Vest and The Silent Man showed the band’s songwriting found its feet in no uncertain terms.
It was released during the cold war of the grunge era, and reviews were less than glowing at the time, but hindsight has only served to enhance the importance of Awake in the group’s canon.
Spread over two discs, the second featuring the 42-minute title track, Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence was a bold and extravagant follow-up to Metropolis Pt 2.
Beginning with The Glass Prison, the first part of a suite of songs written by Portnoy about his recovery from alcoholism, it grapples with such lofty subjects as religion, death and stem cell research, over gargantuan slabs of guitar and keyboard interplay from John Petrucci and Jordan Rudess. The second part is once again concept-based, cataloguing six people plagued by various life-changing illnesses. Challenging in the very best sense of the term.
Think big. Think bigger. Think biggest. And then double it and add a zero or two, and you end up close to The Astonishing. Set in what the band described as “a retro-futurist post-apocalyptic dystopia ruled by medieval style feudalism”, the band’s 13th studio album topped anything they’d ever done before in terms of sheer scale and bombast.
With a bamboozling plot that lay somewhere between Star Wars and the Rush classic2112, The Astonishing was so sprawling that its two hours of music were spread across two discs. Dream Theater performed it live in its entirety, too, of course. Just as they bloody well should.
Dream Theater set up what they called an “inspiration corner” in the studio during the recording of their fifth album. Existing storyboard standards by Genesis, Marillion, Pink Floyd and others were used to channel ideas for their own debut concept album, which told the complex tale of a man who undergoes regressive hypnosis and discovers that in a previous life he was a woman murdered in the 1920s.
The record’s myriad twists and turns are at times macabre (Strange Déjà Vu, Fatal Tragedy) and uplifting (The Spirit Carries On, Finally Free) – and never less than compelling.
Dream Theater had to overcome a number of hurdles in order to create their second album, and their masterpiece. Recovering from the embarrassing failure of their debut album, When Dream And Day Unite, for the follow-up they brought in new singer James LaBrie and butted heads with their producer, David Prater, who drummer Mike Portnoy later called “one of my least favourite human beings on the planet”.
Despite all that, it’s difficult to fault Images And Words, which did far more than just enable Dream Theater to let in a vital chink of daylight. In fact its start-to-finish excellence served to open up a skylight to the cosmos.
Night Ranger are without a doubt one of the most recognizable names in melodic rock and AOR. Classic hits like “Sister Christian” and “When You Close Your Eyes” helped propel the band into rock’s spotlight during the mid-1980s. Although their most recent studio album, ATBPO, was released five years ago, Night Ranger have remained active. This time, they return with… Continue Reading →
Citizen have just announced a brand new single.
Amyl and The Sniffers announce the impending release of a live album and film, but in classic Sniffers style, this is anything but a conventional live record. In April last year the band set up with a group of friends at the iconic El Coyote Mexican Restaurant in LA to film and record a one […]
