Cherry Red [Release date : 25.09.26] The seventies have always been considered to be the hard rock and heavy metal years. Welsh band Budgie was at the epicentre. Their songs were covered by Soundgarden, Metallica, Van Halen and Iron Maiden. … Continue reading
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Upcoming Metal Releases: 9/13/26 – 9/19/26
–Dennis J. Seese
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–Lily O’Delia
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–Lily O’Delia
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–Colin Dempsey
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–Colin Dempsey
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–Aidan Sibley
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Before the world was known, streams fed rivers, not wallets, and clouds held rain, not data. There was a time when natural phenomena birthed myth and wonder, not funding opportunities dressed up as scientific studies. It is this era, when Homo sapiens still crawled, and magic yet breathed, that drives and inspires Wyrdstæf.1 Based in the United Kingdom, Wyrdstæf harkens back to an era of great change, when Paleolithic frosts gave way to Mesolithic mists. Channeling the Stone Age through modern instruments, Wyrdstæf invites you to return to the dawn of humankind and remember what was forgotten. Is debut LP Primordial Bloodlines a doorway to a bygone age, or is all this sound and fury for naught?
Primordial Bloodlines kicks off with a ceremonial invocation, “White Spring.” Urzhan’s fierce chants and Malang’s ritualistic drums sanctify the ground and stir the blood. Strings join in the last third, adding fuel to an already potent fire. Wyrdstæf’s theatrical sensibilities here strongly evoke the likes of Nytt Land, positioning the listener amidst the proceedings, enhancing immersion. Searing black metal in the veins of Wiegedood and Kampfar erupts from the flames in the form of “Great Migrations.” Shaman and Revenant unleash descending, frostbitten riffs and determined mid-paced marches, backed by hammering double bass and blast beats. After a slightly overlong ambient intro, “Hyperborean” treks further north, adding icy synths and atavistic shouts to an already vicious, blackened brew. If Wyrdstæf continued with this formula, Primordial Bloodlines would be a very strong debut offering.
Alas, that is not the case. Primordial Bloodlines’ two longest tracks—“Parhelion” and “Primordial Bloodlines”—bring things grinding to a halt. Similar to “White Spring,” “Parhelion” focuses on ritualistic ambience, but rather than placing the listener in the middle of the action, it sounds removed, like a field recording or a documentary. As a result, the first four minutes just feel like an egregiously long sample. Two additional passages round out the track’s nine-minute runtime, but none of the three sections seem strongly connected, giving “Parhelion” a Frankenstein-esque feel. “Primordial Bloodlines” shifts to a more cinematic, heavy metal sound. While it does have a more modern and accessible musical structure, it struggles under the weight of a nine-minute runtime, as well. The title track strives for culminating, emotional poignancy, but without strong prior material to support it, “Primordial Bloodlines” falls flat, feeling toothless and hollow.
These last two tracks drive notable pacing and momentum issues on Primordial Bloodlines, but that’s not my biggest gripe here. Ranging from black metal to grandiose heavy/post-metal and incorporating tribal ambience, both immersive and detached, shows Wyrdstæf to be quite talented and committed, but they’re terribly unfocused. The promo material hints at a loosely conceptual nature to the album, but had I not already known, I certainly wouldn’t have gleaned that from the music itself. Even allowing for the compositional flexibility of a concept album, Wyrdstæf doesn’t establish a baseline from which to branch out. Playing three or four separate styles across five tracks feels more like an ill-advised compilation than a cohesive album. Focusing on any one of these would have lent Primordial Bloodlines some much-needed stability.
Primordial Bloodlines started incredibly strong. “White Spring” and “Great Migrations” are both killer tracks that work well together. Red flags began to appear with “Hyperborean,” but its blackened fury was enough to sit through a questionable, sample-adjacent front half. It’s the back half of the album where Wyrdstæf really drops the ball. “Parhelion” feels aimless and nearly anthropological, and the overly ambitious title track fails to achieve its goal and ultimately feels like another waste of time. Combined, they cover more than half of Primordial Bloodlines’ 32-minute runtime. When Wyrdstæf hits, they really hit, but with precipitously diminishing returns past the 14-minute mark, Primordial Bloodlines fails as an album. If the band can settle on a singular compositional identity and use that as a base to incorporate other elements moving forward, there’s potential for a much more impressive offering. But as it stands, the most I’ll recommend is cutting out choice tracks for playlist fodder.
Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Apocalyptic Witchcraft Recordings
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram
Releases Worldwide: September 4th, 2026
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Jovin Webb joins the Blues Rock Show to discuss his new album, Son of a Sinner, his journey from American Idol to blues music, and why his memorable performance of “Whipping Post” became a game changer for his career. Webb shares his thoughts on the resurgence of blues music, and the challenges musicians face in the social media era.
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Lorna Shore’s members have changed more than almost any band at their level, and the version standing on stage in 2026 is not the one that made most of the records. Three vocalists in a decade. One of them fired five weeks before his own album came out. A fourth-choice touring stand-in who ended up with the most talked-about scream in modern metal.
By any reasonable measure this band should have folded in the winter of 2019. Instead they’re headlining Alexandra Palace.
I’ve been playing this band on the radio since Flesh Coffin, and I’ve watched the whole thing happen in something close to real time — the collapse, the scramble, and then the eighteen months where a New Jersey deathcore band became the biggest new name in heavy music. Here’s who’s actually in Lorna Shore now, everyone who came before, and how the hell they got here.
Permanent vocalist since June 2021, and the reason most people reading this have heard of the band at all.
Before Lorna Shore he’d been through Secrets Don’t Sleep, Flawed Saviour, A Wake in Providence, Monument of a Memory and Euclid — a run of bands that tells you he’d been grinding in the northeast scene for the better part of a decade without much to show for it. He was working freelance in the film industry alongside it.
He learned to scream at fourteen by copying records, and he’ll tell you himself that the high register came from imitating the vocalists in Enterprise Earth and Suicide Silence until he could do it too.
What he actually brings is range that shouldn’t be physically available to one person. The low end is a genuine gutturals-out death metal voice. The top end goes somewhere most vocalists can’t follow, and — this is the part that matters — he can move between them inside a single bar without the transition sounding like an edit.
Joined in 2010 and he is the actual centre of this band.
De Micco writes the music. Three vocalists have passed through and Lorna Shore still sounds like Lorna Shore, and the reason is that the compositional voice never changed hands. The orchestration, the tremolo-picked melodic runs, the way a breakdown arrives as a resolution rather than a gimmick — that’s him, and it was him on Flesh Coffin in 2017 exactly as it is now.
Every “Will Ramos is Lorna Shore” take gets this wrong. Ramos is the voice. De Micco is the band.
Joined December 2019 — which is to say he walked in during the single worst month in the band’s history, and stayed.
The other constant, and a long-serving member going back to the band’s early years. If De Micco is the architecture, Archey is the engine room — the blast sections on Pain Remains are relentless in a way that doesn’t read as technique showing off, which is much harder than it sounds.
Joined during the Pain Remains recording sessions in 2022, ending a bass chair that had been a revolving door for most of the band’s existence.
The original. Barber fronted Lorna Shore from the beginning through Psalms (2015) and Flesh Coffin (2017), and then in April 2018 he left to join Chelsea Grin.
That’s a clean, ordinary departure — a singer moving to a bigger band — and at the time it looked like the worst thing that could happen to Lorna Shore. In hindsight it’s barely a footnote.
McCreery replaced Barber in 2018 and recorded Immortal.
On 23 December 2019, Lorna Shore announced they had dismissed him. The dismissal followed allegations of abuse made publicly on social media by a former partner, after which further accusers came forward. The band did not issue a detailed statement beyond announcing that he was gone.
McCreery denies the allegations. In a public statement in June 2020 he said the accusations were “all lies and were fueled by my two exes due to being broken up with,” describing them as “completely overdramatized situations taken way out of context” driven by “bitterness, hatred and spite,” and saying all contact had been consensual.
There is no public record of the matter being tested in any legal forum. Both the allegations and the denial are on the record, and readers can weigh them.
He now fronts Immortal Disfigurement, the band he formed in 2021 with guitarist Josh Freeman — we covered that here.
See below, because how he got the job is the best part of the story.
This is the bit people don’t know, and it’s better than the version that gets repeated.
When McCreery was fired in December 2019, Lorna Shore had a European tour booked and an album about to come out. Ramos came in as a stand-in in March 2020 — not a new member, not an audition, a bloke covering the dates.
The band then did something unusual. Rather than announce him or quietly let it ride, they recorded three songs with him as a compatibility test. A trial run, to find out whether this actually worked before anybody committed to anything.
Those three songs became …And I Return to Nothingness.
One of them was “To the Hellfire.”
I can count on one hand the number of times a single track has rearranged a band’s entire future inside a week. That’s what that one did. It went to number 4 on Spotify’s Viral Chart — a deathcore song, on a viral chart, next to pop records — and Loudwire voted it 2021 Song of the Year.
And the reason is that fucking scream at the end. You know the one. It arrives about four minutes in and it does not sound like a human being producing a noise, it sounds like something being torn. The internet lost its mind, the reaction-video economy did the rest, and a band that had been quietly grinding for eleven years was suddenly the most-shared thing in heavy music.
June 2021: Ramos announced as permanent vocalist.
The trial worked out.
Strip away the vocalist drama and what you’ve got is a band held together by two people.
Adam De Micco has been writing this band’s music since 2010. Austin Archey has been behind the kit through every lineup. Between them they’ve carried Lorna Shore through an original singer leaving for a bigger band, a replacement singer being dismissed in disgrace, and a global pandemic that arrived the same month their emergency stand-in played his first show.
Most bands don’t survive one of those. This one took all three and came out the other side selling out rooms they’d never have been offered in 2018.
Check Out – Lorna Shore Albums: Complete Discography Ranked
Vocals
Tom Barber — 2009 to April 2018. Left for Chelsea Grin. CJ McCreery — 2018 to 23 December 2019.
Guitar
Jeff Moskovciak — co-founder. 2009 to sometime before 2012. Connor Deffley — 2018 to January 2019.
Bass
The bass chair between 2009 and 2017 went through Mike Flannery, Ray Meoni, Aaron Brown, Jeff Moskovciak, Scott Cooper and Gary Herrera, who departed in early 2017.
A note on those dates: individual tenures in that stretch are poorly documented and I’m not going to invent them. Lorna Shore spent their first seven years as a working New Jersey deathcore band with no press apparatus, and a lot of it simply wasn’t written down at the time. Where the record is thin, I’d rather say so.
Look down the right-hand column. That’s the whole argument.
Lorna Shore headlined a UK and European run in February 2026, and a North American tour opens on 17 April 2026 with Paleface Swiss and Signs of the Swarm in support.
For a band that in December 2019 had no singer, a cancelled Asian tour and an album they weren’t sure they could release, that’s about as complete a recovery as this genre has produced.
We Also Recommend – Deathcore Bands Ranked: The Top 13 That Still Define Heavy Music Right Now
Will Ramos (vocals), Adam De Micco (lead guitar), Andrew O’Connor (rhythm guitar), Austin Archey (drums) and Michael Yager (bass). The band formed in Warren County, New Jersey in 2009, and the only original-era constants are De Micco, who joined in 2010, and Archey. Founding vocalist Tom Barber left in April 2018.
Will Ramos. He first performed with the band as a touring stand-in in March 2020 and was announced as the permanent vocalist in June 2021.
Lorna Shore dismissed McCreery on 23 December 2019 following allegations of abuse made publicly by a former partner, after which further accusers came forward. McCreery denied the allegations in a statement in June 2020, calling them “all lies” and saying all contact had been consensual. The band did not comment beyond announcing the dismissal. Immortal, recorded with his vocals, was released 39 days later on 31 January 2020 — the band initially announced they would delay it, then reversed course and released it on the original date.
March 2020 as a touring stand-in, then permanently in June 2021. The band recorded a three-song EP with him first as a compatibility test — that EP became …And I Return to Nothingness, which contained “To the Hellfire.”
Adam De Micco, the band’s lead guitarist since 2010. He has been the principal songwriter across every lineup and all three vocalists, which is why Lorna Shore has sounded consistent through three different singers.
Three singers, one songwriter and a stand-in who turned into a phenomenon. Where do you land — is Pain Remains the peak, or does Immortal still hold up better than anyone admits? Settle it in the comments. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.
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