Look, I’m about to give you some further information, but it’s really not that important. Your main takeaway here is that Judiciary are back and that their new song is called motherfucking “Wall Of Skulls.” This is obviously great news. If you aren’t already banging your head to that song, you’re fucking up. Fix it.
The post Judiciary Announce New EP <em>Stalagmite Angels</em>: Hear “Wall Of Skulls” appeared first on Stereogum.
(written by Islander) As we sometimes do, we’re going to jump right into the Critical Defiance song we’re about to premiere and then come back and fill you in on the details. The name of the song is “Rivers of Blood“, and it’s the title track to this Chilean band’s fourth album, which is forthcoming […]
The post AN NCS PREMIERE: CRITICAL DEFIANCE — “RIVERS OF BLOOD” appeared first on NO CLEAN SINGING.
In 1972 Yes’ record label released their 8:29 song Roundabout as a 3:27 single without telling the band. At first they were horrified. Then it reached Number 13 in the US chart and went on to win a BMI songwriting award. Reflecting on his career to date after being named as Prog God 2016 at the Prog Awards, singer Jon Anderson said the Roundabout release was the best thing to happen to a band whose future was unclear at the time.
“I was in a dream world for 10 years – it was truly magical. I was learning about structure. I’d work out a thematic piece, then a new section, then how to come back to the first themes. Like classical music, but based on a new energy. Not just verse-chorus-verse-chorus, which was what I grew up with – and don’t get me wrong, I loved that – but something new and powerful in a different way.
Of course, it helped that I was working with Steve Howe, Rick Wakeman and Chris Squire – people who understood all this and made it possible. I was there in the middle of it all, throwing out ideas all the time – and I mean all the time. And I still tend to do that every single day! For me, the idea of progressive music is always there. It’s never stopped. It’s my life.
It’s your challenge to make music that’s an adventure, a musical journey. It’s not so much about the business any more. The last thing I think now is whether that’ll sound good on the radio. I mean, Roundabout was eight minutes long as we envisaged it, with its midsection. And that was like a template to all the Yes music that was coming.
Atlantic took out the scissors and cut it into a hit record… thankfully! We were shocked at first, but now I think it was a gift. I remember we were driving through Pennsylvania and it came on the radio, and none of us knew it had been edited. We all sat up and said: ‘Wait a minute! What’s going on?’ But of course it became a big breakthrough record for us, so thank you! Without that hit, Yes might not have stayed around very much longer.
Fragile had all these extended tracks – Heart Of The Sunrise, South Side Of The Sky – and the idea was to extend the music for live performance onstage. Our audiences then were willing to sit through 10 minutes of our music without a sound; you could hear a pin drop. We wanted to please and inspire them. They came to our shows to listen then, not to dance. It was a unique period for music.
So we were able to do even longer-form music like Close To The Edge and Tales From Topographic Oceans. Thirty years later we went on and those audiences were still there at the beginning of the 21st century. Yes survived!
The 80s was such a successful time – the 90125 album went Top 10 all around the known world. No matter where we went, there were 10,000 or 20,000 people going bananas! It was very exciting. Being up there onstage and the audience getting so energised meant we got more excited, and so it fed into each other.
But I’d say to the guys back then: ‘We mustn’t lose our momentum. Musically, we’ve got to be very, very good.’ I was quite the taskmaster, wanting us to be healthy and everything! Being on the road a long time can drain you; you can finish up being a wreck. But you’re always a musician, and my ongoing dream is to be always evolving as one. And that carried me forward into new pastures.
All the music you ever do, it’s like a stepping stone to a bigger, better, brighter state of consciousness. Everything is perception; it’s all about how you perceive things. Life is like the ocean – it goes up, it goes down.”
Linnea Siggelkow, the Artist To Watch alum known as Ellis, released her album No Place That Feels Like two years ago, and last year she dropped the one-off single “Little Kid.” But she’s been arguably even busier with her gig as a touring guitarist for Ethel Cain, whose Preacher’s Daughter also features Siggelkow’s playing. Today, she’s back in Ellis mode.
The post Ellis – “all that i’ve got” appeared first on Stereogum.
When Winter’s not busy being our VJ and interviewing Billy Corgan for us, she’s making beautiful shoegaze music. Her latest album was last year’s Adult Romantix, and earlier this month she unveiled a “mixtape version” of the closing track “hollow.” Now, the NYC artist is announcing the Romantix Mixtape EP and sharing a new version of the single “Without You” featuring Soccer Mommy.
The post Winter Announces New EP <em>Romantix Mixtape</em>: Hear “Without You” (Feat. Soccer Mommy) appeared first on Stereogum.
David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen are appearing together in public this Thursday, July 30 — their first joint appearance since Van Halen’s final concert at the Hollywood Bowl on October 4, 2015. The setting is not a stadium, an award show, or a reunion announcement. It’s TEDxFargo, in Fargo, North Dakota, where the two will sit down alongside artist Robert Vargas for what organizers are billing as three icons, one stage, one conversation.
STREAM THE METAL BREAKDOWN DAILY NOW:Nearly eleven years of silence between the two surviving pillars of Van Halen’s classic lineup — and it ends at a TED talk in North Dakota. Scott Penfold breaks down what this actually means, why Robert Vargas is the connective tissue, and whether anything bigger is coming, on today’s Metal Breakdown Daily. Download the free Loaded Radio App on Apple iOS and Google Play and take the show with you.
Some news you read twice. This one takes three passes.
TEDxFargo — a locally organized event running under license from TED — is staging a two-day program on July 29 and 30 at Brewhalla in Fargo, with the theme “CHARGE.” Alex Van Halen was announced as a speaker weeks ago, which was interesting enough on its own. Then on Monday, artist Robert Vargas posted to Instagram alongside TEDxFargo revealing that Diamond Dave is joining him and Alex on that stage.
Let’s kill the obvious question up front: they are not expected to perform. This is a conversation, not a gig. Nobody’s playing “Panama” in a Fargo brewery this week.
But if you think that makes this small, you haven’t been paying attention to the last decade of Van Halen history.
LIVE & LOUD: Stream the World’s Hardest Radio Station 24/7October 4, 2015. The Hollywood Bowl. That’s the last time David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen stood in the same room in front of the public. Nobody knew it was the end at the time, but that show closed the book on Van Halen as a live act. Eddie died in October 2020. Alex poured his grief into “Brothers,” his 2024 memoir and love letter to his younger brother. Dave went back to solo touring, retirement rumors, un-retirement, and the endless cycle of speculation about whether any version of this band could ever exist again.
And through all of it, the two of them — the singer and the drummer, the two men still standing from the lineup that changed hard rock — stayed apart.
Here’s the part other outlets are going to miss. Back in April 2025, when Alex was asked directly about his relationship with Dave, he didn’t take a shot. He said Dave was laying low, that he wasn’t holding Roth’s exit against him, that they were never here to hold anybody prisoner. And then he said the line that’s been sitting in our archive for over a year waiting for this exact week: he’s not the same guy — but if he called right now, Alex would answer the phone.
Somebody, somewhere, made a call.
The third man on that stage is the reason this works, and it’s worth understanding who he is before you write this off as a weird corporate booking.
Robert Vargas is the Los Angeles artist who painted the massive Eddie Van Halen mural at the Guitar Center in Hollywood in 2021, in the months after Eddie’s death. He told Variety at the time that Van Halen was his favorite band, his first concert, his first record — that it was never a hired-gun job for him, and that opening the process up so fans could be part of it mattered to him.
So this isn’t three names randomly stapled to a conference lineup. It’s a Van Halen fanatic who honored Eddie in paint, sitting between Eddie’s brother and Eddie’s original frontman. Whatever gets said on that stage Thursday, that’s the room.
There’s one more layer here. Earlier this month, Roth canceled all but one remaining date of his 2026 U.S. tour with no reason given, leaving only his August 7 Sturgis appearance standing. There were reports of empty seats at multiple June and July shows, which fueled speculation about ticket sales, though nobody in his camp has confirmed anything.
That’s a rough few weeks for a guy who came back swinging with a 30-date run announced back in January. And now he surfaces in Fargo, next to Alex Van Halen, for the first time in nearly eleven years.
Does that mean a reunion is coming? Slow down. Wolfgang has been open for years about the various “kitchen sink” reunion concepts that got floated and died, and this is a speaking engagement at a regional TED event, not a press conference at the Whisky.
But two guys who hadn’t shared a stage since 2015 are about to share one on Thursday. In heavy music, that’s how these things start.
Somebody will have it on YouTube within the hour. We’ll be watching.
The two will appear at TEDxFargo on Thursday, July 30, 2026 at Brewhalla in Fargo, North Dakota. The two-day TEDxFargo event runs July 29 and 30 under the theme “CHARGE” and operates under license from TED.
No. Neither is expected to perform. The appearance is billed as a conversation featuring Roth, Van Halen and artist Robert Vargas.
Their last joint public appearance was Van Halen’s final concert on October 4, 2015 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles — nearly 11 years ago.
Robert Vargas is a Los Angeles-based artist who painted a large mural of Eddie Van Halen at the Guitar Center in Hollywood in 2021. He has described Van Halen as his favorite band, his first concert and his first record, and invited fans to be part of the mural’s creation.
There has been no announcement of any Van Halen reunion. The TEDxFargo appearance is a scheduled speaking event, not a performance or a band announcement.
Van Halen faithful — after nearly eleven years apart, what do you actually want to hear Dave and Alex say to each other on that stage? Sound off in the comments, and follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.
The post David Lee Roth And Alex Van Halen To Share A Stage For The First Time In Nearly 11 Years appeared first on Loaded Radio.
Electro-metal party-starters and current Metal Hammer cover stars Electric Callboy have released their new single The Way You Are.
Accompanied by a music video that parodies 90s and 00s boyband clips, available to watch below, the German six-piece take the balladry you’d expect from acts such as Westlife and The Backstreet Boys, then turn it on its head into an outright deathcore rager.
The song is the eighth single to be taken from their upcoming seventh album (second since changing their name from Eskimo Callboy in 2022) Tanzneid. The album comes out on August 7.
The band say of their new song: “The Way You Are started with a pretty simple idea: what if the sweetest late-90s boy band love ballad suddenly turned into one of the heaviest songs we’ve ever written? We loved playing with that contrast, both musically and visually. The result is probably one of the most unexpected songs we’ve ever released, and definitely one of our favourites on Tanzneid.”
The build-up to Tanzneid started in 2024, when Electric Callboy released the single Ratatata in collaboration with three-piece J-metal idols Babymetal. Fellow singles Elevator Operator, Revery, Tanzneid and a cover of Sum 41’s Still Waiting followed in 2025, with Hypercharged and Let The Good Times Roll (featuring The Offspring) coming out earlier this year.
The band are currently making their way across Europe as part of the Tanzneid world tour and will play an ‘Electric Bassboy’ DJ set at Wacken Open Air in Wacken, Germany on Friday (July 29). On August 7, at their own festival Escalation Fest, they’ll put on an album release party featuring another DJ set at Huxley’s Neue Welt in Berlin. They’ll headline the festival the following day.
The tour will continue with Japanese and Australian shows from August to September, then return for another European leg from January to March. See details and get tickets via the Electric Callboy website.
Known for their high-energy, feel-good live shows, Electric Callboy were formed by vocalist/keyboardist Kevin Ratajczak in 2010. Second singer Nico Sallach joined the lineup in 2020. In the new Hammer, they talk about their history, including Sallach’s past throwing weekly house parties for all his friends.
“At its peak, we had 80 people in this tiny flat. People that we didn’t know were ringing the doorbell,” he says. “They treated our flat like shit. I wanted to go to bed, and there were drinks and liquids that I couldn’t identify all over my bed! Very good memories, even if it doesn’t sound like it.”
You can order the new issue now and have it delivered directly to your door.
Were you aware that Bernie Taupin has released multiple solo albums? Well, he has. Taupin is famous for being Elton John’s prime songwriting partner over the decades. They’ve got a fascinating dynamic where Taupin writes the lyrics and John writes the music, and their partnership has led Taupin to collect just about every songwriting prize there is. Outside of his work with John, Taupin also co-wrote big ’80s hits like Starship’s “We Built This City” and Heart’s “These Dreams.” Taupin’s solo career hasn’t gotten anywhere near as much attention as the songs that he has helped to write for other artists, but it exists. Now, after decades, Taupin is ready to bring it back with a new record.
The post Bernie Taupin Announces First Solo Album In Nearly 40 Years appeared first on Stereogum.
WARNING: The following post may contain spoilers about Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Do not read it if you wish to remain unspoiled.
The post Steve Lacy Seemingly Spoils <em>Spider-Man: Brand New Day</em> On Red Carpet Livestream appeared first on Stereogum.