Category: news

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The post SONS OF CULT Announce ‘Revenge’ appeared first on INFRARED MAGAZINE.

The final live sendoff for the heavy metal architects and the Prince Of Darkness.

The post All-Star Ozzy Osbourne & Black Sabbath Live Tribute ‘Back To The Beginning’ To Open In Theaters In October appeared first on Theprp.com.

Trivium is kicking off a new chapter, and it sounds like the band brought its nastiest riffs along for the ride. The Grammy-nominated foursome- Matthew K. Heafy on vocals and guitar, Corey Beaulieu on guitar, Paolo Gregoletto on bass, and Alex Rüdinger behind the kit- just dropped “Dead Inside Of Me,” and it’s a statement of intent.

“Dead Inside Of Me” is the first taste of the band’s upcoming eleventh studio album, its first new material since 2021’s In The Court Of The Dragon. Further album details are still under wraps for now.

What is available right now is proof that the Florida quartet hasn’t lost a step. “Dead Inside Of Me” leans hard into modern thrash riffing, guitar-forward power grooves and pummeling rhythms, wrapped around melodies sharp enough to cut. And naturally, given it’s Trivium, the solos are not in short supply.

Pavel Trebukhin directed the song’s official video, a grim descent into the darker corners of the human mind, which you can watch below.

“‘Dead Inside Of Me’ was a song that came together at the end of a long day of writing new music last summer. It started with a riff I’d had kicking around for five or six years called ‘Slam’, looping over a simple groove,” explains Gregoletto. “A lot of the most fun song ideas come from blending two contrasting ideas together. Take a death metal riff and play it like a stadium rock song. Let the screaming and singing weave together until they feel like one voice. Being able to explain the idea that simply as the song was coming together helped keep us laser-focused and on track to see the vision through to the end.”

He finishes, “The song was loosely inspired by the Japanese concept of honne and tatemae, the tension between your true inner feelings and the mask you present to the outside world to hide them.”

Trivium also has a run of dates lined up, launching Nov. 5 in St. Petersburg, Fla. and closing out Dec. 19 in Charlotte for a North American headline tour with In Flames, Orbit Culture, Fit For An Autopsy and Frozen Soul in support. It’s a loaded bill from top to bottom.

“This fall’s Trivium tour is a huge one for us,” the band said when the run was first announced earlier this year. “The lineup is stacked from top to bottom, and we’re honored to have special guests In Flames, who not only influenced our early years but continue to prove time and again why they’re one of the greatest metal bands of all time. With Orbit Culture, Fit For An Autopsy and Frozen Soul rounding out the bill, we can’t wait to get out there, kick off this next era of Trivium with Rudi behind the kit, and give you a taste of the new music we’ve been working on. We’ll see you soon!”

Trivium‘s track record backs up the hype. In The Court Of The Dragon, the band’s tenth album, landed to critical acclaim in 2021 and picked up coverage from mainstream outlets like The New York Times, NPR, Forbes, Billboard, TechCrunch and Kotaku, alongside genre stalwarts Guitar World, Revolver, Alternative Press and more. Go back to 2005, and there’s Ascendancy, still considered a genre landmark, which Kerrang! named its Album Of The Year, went gold in the U.K. and sold past 500,000 copies worldwide. Metal Hammer later slotted it into the Top 15 of its ranking of the 100 greatest metal albums of the 21st century.

That record set off a run of six straight Top 25 debuts on the Billboard Top 200 and five consecutive Top 3 debuts on the Top Hard Rock Albums chart, a streak that carried through to 2017’s The Sin And The Sentence, which pushed the band’s cumulative streams past a quarter billion. “Betrayer” picked up a Grammy Award nomination for Best Metal Performance along the way, and Decibel, Loudwire, Ultimate Guitar, MetalSucks and Metal Hammer were all in agreement, with the latter calling the band, “quite simply one of the best bands in modern metal.” 2020 brought What The Dead Men Say, produced by Trivium alongside Josh Wilbur, which debuted at No. 35 on the Billboard Top 200, No. 2 on the Top Current Albums chart, and No. 3 on both the Hard Rock Albums and Top Rock Albums charts. Over the years, Trivium has shared stages with Metallica, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden , and plenty more, and has played major festivals including Download, Bloodstock, and Knotfest. The band’s Struck Dead EP came out in fall 2025.

The post TRIVIUM Drops “Dead Inside Of Me”, First Taste Of Upcoming 11th Album appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

He spent "a lot of time planning out" the show, only to halt his work. Continue reading…

The Hellacopters have made it official: founding guitarist Dregen (born Andreas Tyrone Svensson) is out of the band for good, with his ongoing hand injury forcing the split.

The Hellacopters put out a statement Wednesday, Sept. 16, which Dregen also shared on his own social media. It reads, in full:

“As most of you know, Dregen hasn’t been playing with us for roughly three years now, due to his hand injury. All of us have been hoping that he would fully recover and return to the band at some point, but the tremendously sad fact is that the damage to his fingers is permanent. While he can still play some rhythm guitar most of our songs are just not doable anymore.

“As a founding member of the band, Dregen will always be a huge part of the family and he will continue to be with us in spirit. He has always had many cards up his sleeve and there is no doubt that he will pull out a few in the near future. LG Valeta, who has been filling in for him since the injury, will carry on with us going forward.”

Dregen co-founded The Hellacopters back in 1994 alongside Entombed drummer Nicke Andersson, at a time when Dregen was also holding down guitar duties in Backyard Babies. His last studio outing with The Hellacopters came on the band’s 1997 sophomore effort Payin’ The Dues, after which he stepped away to focus entirely on Backyard Babies.

The Hellacopters called it quits back in October 2007, closing out that chapter with Head Off, a covers collection that stood as the band’s seventh full-length. The breakup didn’t stick, though. Eight years on, the group got back together, kicking things off with a one-off slot at Sweden Rock Festival marking the 20th anniversary of debut album Supershitty To The Max!

Guitarist Robert “Strängen” Dahlqvist spent nearly a decade in The Hellacopters, joining in 1999 and sticking around until the band’s 2008 split. He died in February 2017 at 40.

Along the way, The Hellacopters picked up two gold certifications, took home a Swedish Grammy and a Kerrang!award, and have racked up hundreds of millions of streams.

The reunited lineup got back to studio work with Eyes Of Oblivion, released via Nuclear Blast in April 2022, their first collection of new material since Head Off. Less than three years later came Overdriver, out in January 2025.

Between those two records, The Hellacopters stayed busy on the road, sharing stages with Iron Maiden in Gothenburg in July 2022 and Ghost in Germany in June 2023, on top of their own headline dates across Europe. Feb. 16, 2024 brought a pair of reworked takes on 1999’s Grande Rock, packaged together as Grande Rock Revisited — one a remastered version of the original, the other a remixed and partially re-recorded companion imagining how the record might have sounded with Dregen still in the fold. Not long after, the band turned to new material, unveiling single “Stay With You” in May 2024 and pressing it as a limited seven-inch through Lightning Records.

Overdriver, The Hellacopters‘ ninth full-length, was tracked at Strawberry Studio & The Honk Palace and marked the first album the band handed entirely to guitarist/vocalist Nicke Andersson behind the boards.

The post THE HELLACOPTERS Permanently Part Ways With Founding Guitarist, DREGEN Due To Hand Injury appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

Horsepower! Horsepower! All this Polo on, I got Horsepower! Sorry. That’s not what this blog post is about. It’s just what I get stuck in my head whenever I see the word “Horsepower.” This particular blog post is about Charlotte Weinman, the Brooklyn-based indie rock musician who records under the name Horsepower. She doesn’t sound anything like 2 Chainz.

The post Horsepower Announces New EP <em>Happiest Day Of My Life</em>: Hear “Do you think you can live without dying every day?” appeared first on Stereogum.

(written by Islander) Today we again find ourselves in the favored position of premiering a song from an album by the long-running Czech death metal band Cutterred Flesh. We have done this twice before, for each of their two most recent albums before this newest one. The last time, three years ago, we praised “the […]

The post AN NCS PREMIERE: CUTTERRED FLESH — “THE LETTER U” appeared first on NO CLEAN SINGING.

Following the rapid sellout of London’s Royal Albert Hall, Dutch symphonic metal giants EPICA have announced The Symphonic Synergy European Tour. The exclusive production will bring the band together with a full orchestra and choir for 11 performances across 10 countries in autumn 2027. The tour will celebrate EPICA’s 25th anniversary with an expanded and […]

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The post INSTITUTE’s ‘Distort Yourself’ Returns To Physical Formats appeared first on INFRARED MAGAZINE.

Detroit veterans Sponge have a new single out today, “Self Inflicted Loss,” and it comes loaded with news the band’s fans have been bracing for: it’s the lead-off track from Recuerda Tu Muerte, Sponge‘s final studio album, due out October 2.

“Self Inflicted Loss” leans into the confessional, unflinching territory Sponge has built a career on, wrapped in a hazy, dark groove. “It’s a dark record, and I just go, ‘Y’know, why not?’” says Sponge lead vocalist Vinnie Dombroski.

For the single’s video, the band linked up with Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, the studio responsible for Robot Chicken, Titan Maximum and Buddy Thunderstruck. “The making of the music video for ‘Self Inflicted Loss’ was a groovy experience,” says creative producer Ciara Waggoner. “As fans of vintage toys, we decided to use 1970s Fisher-Price Adventure People action figures, which were modified by artist Randy Kono to resemble the band.”

Waggoner and her crew drew inspiration from Sponge‘s breakout album Rotting Piñata for the video’s concept, setting the story inside a grimy candy corn factory. Vinnie and company work the line until he takes a tumble into a vat of the stuff, a wink to the Rotting Piñata cover art, sending him spiraling into a warped candy corn fever dream. Getting there wasn’t quick work; the shoot ran eleven days, with the team aiming to animate roughly eleven seconds of stop-motion and downshooter clay footage per day. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot an Easter egg early on, too: the figure parked in front of the security monitors is the same Ponda Baba puppet that appeared in the Robot Chicken Star Wars special.

Sponge introduced itself to the world more than three decades ago with Vinnie asking: “Will I wake up, some dream I made up?” There’s nothing manufactured about what’s followed. Across 32 years, Dombroski and a rotating cast of bandmates have put out twelve studio albums and landed alt-rock staples like “Plowed,” “Molly (Sixteen Candles),” “Wax Ecstatic” and “Have You Seen Mary.” The band’s catalog holds up as a snapshot of mid-’90s alternative rock while somehow never sounding dated, driven by muscular guitar work and Dombroski‘s forceful, image-heavy lyrics.

Recuerda Tu Muerte (Remember Your Death) carries that same weight. The cover art features a photograph, shot by Sal Rodriguez, of a piece called “Abandon All Hope” created by Detroit-area artist Jon Dunivant of Theater Bizarre. The record follows a pair of 2024 releases, the covers set 1994 and the long-shelved third album Planet Girls, which had originally been slated to come out in 1999. Dombroski and guitarist Andy Patalan produced Recuerda Tu Muerte in Detroit, and the material reflects the frontman’s read on the world around him today, still built from the same “world of human wreckage” he sang about on “Plowed,” just filtered through three-plus decades of extra mileage.

“People used to say, ‘Well, you got your whole life to make your first record,’ and I’m like, ‘Nah, I’ve got my whole life to make my last one, too, right?’” Dombroski explains.

Calling the album Recuerda Tu Muerte was a deliberate choice, and Dombroski knows it reads dark, but darkness has never been unfamiliar territory for Sponge. The band grew out of the wreckage of Detroit industrial act Loudhouse, in which Dombroski played drums; that group put out one album in 1991 before its singer quit mid-recording of a second. The remaining members pushed forward under the name Electric Cattle Gods, until a venue owner told them the name wouldn’t fit on his marquee. Once Sponge signed to a major label, Dombroski says he was “a little surprised but not too surprised” when Rotting Piñata, produced in part by current bassist Tim Patalan, broke through alongside “Plowed” in 1994.

“I remember playing ‘Plowed’ the first time, before anything was going on, and we got a really good reaction and I thought, ‘Right, this one’s a keeper,’” Dombroski says. “It wasn’t like a typical radio song for the time. Back then AC/DC was still on the radio. [Led] Zeppelin. alt rock was brand new, and ‘Plowed’ seemed like it was a bit different for commercial radio. And I think people could hear it was coming from the right place. It was real. It was not a formula thing. The cool thing about this new record is there wasn’t a lot of monkeying around,” Dombroski notes. “There’s no Auto-Tune, there’s no beat detective, there’s no bullshit. Even the vocals on this thing are a couple of takes, maybe. It’s more about feel than perfection.”

The new album covers a wide range. “Lead Gods” is a punk-edged response to gun violence, “Lost Pilot” mourns late Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland, “Clearing All the Vultures Away” deals in psychedelic self-purging, and “Stealing Shadows” digs into thick, orchestrated sludge. On the lighter end, “Peckerwood” and “Beef Relief” bring some goofball relief to balance things out.

Ten tracks in, Recuerda Tu Muerte doesn’t sound like a band running out of gas. “It almost feels like we’ve got another shot, in a way,” Dombroski says. “It’s the willingness of the guys in the band to get in the van and do this. Everybody gets along real well; they’re talented guys and decent people and willing to get into the vehicle. A lot of bands don’t do it like that anymore, but we still are able and willing to do it.”

Credits:

Produced by Vin Dombroski and Andy Patalan
Recorded at ATP Studios and House Of Tone Studios
Engineered by Andy Patalan and James Simonson
Mixed by Andy Patalan
Mastered by Andy Patalan

Sponge formed in Detroit in 1992, built around vocalist Vinnie Dombroski, guitarists Mike Cross and Joey Mazzola, bassist Tim Cross and drummer Jimmy Paluzzi. A&R rep Pablo Mathiason got hooked on demo track “Neenah Menasha,” which landed the quintet a deal with The Work Group, a Columbia Records imprint, in fall 1993. The band’s debut, Rotting Piñata, arrived the following year and went platinum, spawning two top-10 singles and TV stops on The Jon Stewart Show and Late Night With David Letterman. The 1996 follow-up, Wax Ecstatic, brought a Rolling Stone “Song of the Year” nod for its title track, two more top-10 singles, and a guest vocal spot from Richard Butler of The Psychedelic Furs on “I Am Anastasia.” Thirty-plus years on, Sponge is still putting out music and touring hard for a loyal fan base.

Dombroski has remained the band’s singer and chief songwriter throughout, even as the rest of the lineup has shifted over the years. The current roster pairs Andy Patalan (guitar, vocals) with his brother Tim Patalan (bass), both of whom previously engineered and produced Sponge‘s first three records at their own studio, The Loft, in Saline, Michigan, which made their eventual addition to the band a natural fit. Kyle Neely rounds out the guitar section, and former Taproot drummer Dave Coughlin is the group’s newest member behind the kit.

Sponge‘s catalog includes seven charting singles, four of which cracked Billboard‘s Top 10: “Plowed” (No. 5, Alt Rock, 1994), “Molly (16 Candles)” (No. 3, Alt Rock, 1995), “Wax Ecstatic” (No. 10, Mainstream Rock, 1996) and “Have You Seen Mary” (No. 7, Mainstream Rock, 1997).

Sponge is:
Vinnie Dombroski / Vocals
Andy Patalan / Guitar
Kyle Neely / Guitar
Tim Patalan / Bass
Dave Coughlin / Drums

The post SPONGE Shares New Single “Self Inflicted Loss” From Their Upcoming Final Studio Album “Recuerda Tu Muerte” appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.