Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but a highly anticipated concert event had a completely fucked ticketing experience, leaving fans in the lurch. This time around, it was Metallica fans that got fucked when trying to grab tickets to the band’s upcoming Las Vegas residency at the Sphere. From jacked up online queues to third-party sellers hoovering up tickets to resell at a markup, things were bad enough that even Metallica themselves responded to the ticket demand and negative fan experience.
Despite the fact that the band expanded their initial plans from eight shows to a total of 24 dates stretching into 2027, fans were unable to cop tickets for themselves. In a statement released yesterday, the band said they were thankful for the immediately overwhelming response to the residency, but admitted that things didn’t go as well as planned.
“Wow! What a week. We are so appreciative and grateful to all of you for the incredible response to our upcoming Life Burns Faster residency at Sphere in Las Vegas. We are completely and utterly blown away and cannot believe that we will have 24 amazing nights on stage there, all thanks to you and a record-breaking week.
“At this point in time, we will not be adding additional shows, but we are hoping to offer more in the future.”
You read that right. Zero plans for more dates at the Sphere, but they’re “hoping” to add more in the future. Given the fact that they’re the biggest metal band on the planet, I’d venture to say there will be more Sphere dates.
In the same statement, Metallica admitted that the ticket-buying process was borked for many, promising that things will be different moving forward.
“We hear you loud and clear that the ticket-buying process was often frustrating and not always smooth. We’re working with our partners to improve this experience and offer some remedies for the next time around.”
The band then mentioned the next leg of their M72 World Tour, noting that there will be numerous chances across Europe this spring and summer to catch Metallica live. They also hinted at more live dates this year.
“We are looking forward to a very exciting 2026, starting off with seeing many of you in Europe this spring and summer as the M72 tour hits the road again in May. Before we know it, we’ll be exploring new frontiers along with fans from around the world in Las Vegas, and we can’t wait!”
Ready to unleash their highly anticipated sophomore album ‘Year Of The Snake‘ this Friday, March 13, 2026, The Gems strike with another new single! ‘Happy Water‘ is the album’s closer — and is one of the most explosive songs on it. The Swedish trio kicks the party off by serving pure rock’n’roll energy so addictive it’ll […]
Perth’s Vanta don’t treat melodic death metal like a nostalgia exercise. On their debut full-length Perpetual Selection (out March 13), the band lean into precision, atmosphere, and sheer velocity—but they’re just as concerned with meaning as they are with impact.
Today, we’re premiering the video for “Alchemy.”
If you come in expecting fantasy escapism, think again.
“We wanted Alchemy to feel like survival rather than fantasy,” says drummer Ferdi. “A reflection of chaos, brotherhood, and transformation in a world that feels increasingly hostile.”
Musically, the track hits hard and fast—razor-edged riffing colliding with blast-driven urgency and soaring melodic counterpoints. Fans of The Black Dahlia Murder and Inferi will recognize the technical snap, while the breakdown heft nods toward the metallic extremity of Winds of Plague. But VANTA’s strength lies in how they stitch those elements together—cinematic pacing wrapped around relentless forward motion.
Lyrically, “Alchemy” pulls imagery from Warhammer 40K—Space Marines, Tyranids, endless warfare—but what began as creative fuel quickly morphed into commentary.
“The marines represent unity and resilience in the face of annihilation,” Ferdi explains, “while the Tyranids embody the unpredictable, overwhelming forces that keep bearing down on everyday life. War, social collapse, exploitation. It all feels relentless.”
The video amplifies that tension. Rather than leaning into overt sci-fi aesthetics, it reframes the imagery into something disturbingly familiar. Authority figures fade into irrelevance. Institutions crumble. What remains is solidarity—the necessity of finding strength in each other when systems fail.
At its core, “Alchemy” is about transformation under pressure. Not the heroic kind. The unavoidable kind.
The band describe it as “kids growing up inside a post-apocalyptic reality—not a fictional one, but the one we’re already living in.” That urgency bleeds through every frame. There’s a sharpness to the performance and a clarity to the aggression; the chaos never feels unfocused.
Perpetual Selection positions VANTA as one of Australia’s most ambitious new heavy acts—balancing brutality with narrative intent, technical precision with emotional weight. “Alchemy” isn’t just a single. It’s a mission statement.
Watch the premiere of “Alchemy” below—and step into the fire.
There’s a specific kind of magic that happens when the sun starts to dip over a Dallas afternoon and the music takes hold. If you’ve been to a Twangville Sunday Social, you know exactly what we mean. If you haven’t? Well, April 19th is your chance to find out. All three of our featured artists […]
We are entering into a new Iceage. The Danish band, longtime purveyors of dark, dirty, glamorously bleak post-punk, have been absent from the spotlight for about half a decade now. We’ve been hearing a lot from frontman Elias Rønnenfelt, who’s kicked out three solo albums since 2024: Heavy Glory, Speak Daggers, and the Dean Blunt…
A.A. Williams has announced details of her third album, Solstice.
The follow-up to 2022’s stunning As The Moon Rests will arrive on June 5 via RPM, with a press release describing it as ‘intimate yet immense, delicate yet thunderous’.
And you can hear that already with newly-unveiled single Hold It Together below. A.A Williams explains that, “Silence exists where you long for answers, a bleak fragility that you daren’t disturb. Where beauty stood only the faintest glow remains, afraid of smothering it you shrink into a mould of your own making. Your edges dulled, your features disappearing, you put on that brave face not knowing whether you do it to protect others or yourself.
“You smile, you carry on, feeling everything, showing nothing.”
Former Megadeth bassist David Ellefson sat down with Argentine journalist and rock specialist Gustavo Olmedo on his podcast “Quemar Un Patrullero” for one of his more candid conversations yet — covering his complicated brotherhood with Dave Mustaine, the fallout over The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!, and why he has no interest in re-engaging the fight.
Ellefson spoke warmly about the moments of genuine closeness he shared with Mustaine after rejoining the band in 2010.
“When I went back to Megadeth in 2010, [Dave and I] were close — we were really close. I was helping him with some personal things. He became a good friend to me during that time. So there were periods of closeness as men, as brothers. And I found those opportunities were always the best when it was just Dave and me, when there wasn’t another person in the room. We didn’t have to sort of be on stage performing for anyone. It was just me and him being brothers, [at] Starbucks drinking coffee, whatever. And those moments were genuine, they were sincere, they were heartfelt,” Ellefson said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth)
That closeness, however, had its limits. When the band began work on what became The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!, Ellefson sensed the shift.
“[Dave] didn’t wanna use any of my music [for that record]. I could tell he resented me. He wanted me off that album. And I finally wrote a song [that was originally going to be included on it]. It was a ballad that I’ve kept, ’cause I had Kiko [Loureiro, then-Megadeth guitarist] play the guitar on it. And it was a very good song — I think an extremely good song that has a place somewhere. But it didn’t make the record.”
He went further, describing a specific collaboration that ended with his contributions stripped from the final product.
“Dave and I even had a really close moment. We were writing the lyrics for the song that became ‘Soldier On!’ He eventually took my lyrics off of it and then used the song without [my lyrical contributions]… He wrote the music — it was his song — but I was invited to write the lyrics for it, which I did. And he decided to call it ‘Soldier On!’ We collaborated from there, which I say, well, look, when Dave got fired from Metallica, at least they kept his words and his music and they paid him and gave him credit. Dave wasn’t so kind to me. He kicked me out, took my performances off the record, and took my lyrics and everything off the record. So I think I have a horse in that race when I speak about how properly Metallica handled things and how I think improperly things were handled on my behalf. ‘Cause I saw it; I lived it.”
For Ellefson, the real ending came years before his public dismissal. He considers the 2016 album Dystopia — and the Buenos Aires show in late 2017 — as his true farewell.
“My farewell with Megadeth was really in 2018. That was my farewell. That was my farewell tour. I feel like I played on the last great Megadeth record, which was [2016’s] Dystopia. Dave announced from the stage in Buenos Aires in November 2017, he said, ‘We’re gonna go home and start working on a new album.’ So I feel like that was kind of a good closure for me with Megadeth, which is why I’ve moved on and done so much other stuff. I don’t have bitterness in my heart. I almost feel like I was set free to not have to deal with that anymore. Whereas Dave had bitterness toward Metallica, I don’t have bitterness toward Dave or Megadeth. I really don’t.”
Ellefson also addressed his firing in May 2021, which came days after sexually explicit messages and video footage involving him were posted online. At the time, he denied any allegations of grooming and filed a police report in Scottsdale, Arizona, citing unlawful distribution of explicit imagery. He acknowledged exchanging messages with a Dutch woman he maintains was 19 at the time of their first virtual encounter, who recorded and shared footage without his knowledge.
His account of the phone call that ended his tenure in the band is blunt: “[The Megadeth camp] called me to fire me. And I told ’em, ‘Guys, there’s nothing here. There’s no reason to let me go. This is all just nonsense on the Internet. It’s all it is. It’s nothing at all. And I will maintain that position all along,’ and I have.”
“At some point, you could just keep going after people on the Internet and trolls and all this kind of shit. It’s endless. There is no Internet police, there’s no Internet human resources, where you can go and say, ‘Hey, this guy said this’ and ‘this person said this’, and da, da, da, because you should, because it’s highly defamatory. And defamation is when something harms your reputation, maybe even prevents you from getting more work. Those are real things. And the fact that it can happen on the Internet, which is kind of a fake place. It’s not even real. It’s kind of a fake place, yet that could somehow come over to your reality. I’m fortunate that the fanbase stood by me. They said, ‘Dude, that is bullshit. How dare you do that to Ellefson?’”
He also took issue with Mustaine‘s public statement at the time, which referenced “aspects of David‘s private life that he has kept to himself.”
“The statement that was put out, what Dave personally signed, was deflectionary, to kind of keep it away from him. And I said, ‘There’s nothing to keep away. There’s nothing here.’ I mean, my own legal team even said, ‘Hey, if you wanna open up on the Internet and blast that guy, you have our [blessing]’. And this is a top-level law firm in Phoenix, and they said, ‘We have never seen something so unconscionable’ as a legal word, meaning unconscious, not thinking, with no, basically, human heart. ‘You have our blessing.’
“There’s a Bible scripture. It says, ‘Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.’ And that’s where I went with it. I said, ‘I could tangle with this guy again, and I could fight with this guy as I did with the lawsuit,’ which I had every right to do, given what happened then. And Dave did not win the lawsuit. We settled out of court. That was another one. It was just another opportunity to try to kick me. And it’s, like, no, we settled out of court. And I ended up in a far better position than had I not done that, so I’m glad I went through that process, as horrible as it was.”
That 2004 lawsuit — in which Ellefson sought $18.5 million from Mustaine, alleging he was shortchanged on profits and denied ownership of Megadeth Inc. after the band dissolved in 2002 — was eventually dismissed, clearing the path for his return in 2010.
More recently, Mustaine told SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk” that a farewell tour reunion featuring all surviving former members was off the table “because of the behavior of one of the band members in the past.” Ellefson made clear he considers that a veiled shot at him — and he has no patience for it.
“To have it end where it did, and then [for Mustaine] even recently to say, ‘Oh, because of what one person did, I can’t bring anyone back.’ You know what? F*ck off. Just f*ck off. Who is that one person? It wasn’t me, ’cause I didn’t do anything that would prevent me from coming back at all. At all. And so this sort of deflectionary thing, to sort of get on some moral high ground, it’s, like, gimme a break. Really? And look, I had rock stars much bigger than Dave coming to my side and coming to my aid, standing by me, saying, ‘Man, just let me know if you need anything at all. That’s really fucked up.’ It’s fucked up about how I was handled being discarded. People saying, ‘I’m really disappointed that they chose business over brotherhood,’ ’cause at the end of the day, the brotherhood will always last beyond the business of owning a rock band — especially something we started and built together.”
Ellefson closed with a line that sums up where he stands: “So, with that said, at one level, again, I could call a lawyer, I could go back into defamation lawsuits, and I have every right to — trust me. But at the same time, there are two ways to win in tug of war. I either pull you over the line or I just drop the rope and let you fall on your ass. [Laughs] And that’s what I’ve chosen to do — drop the rope. Drop the rock.”
You’ll all have heard opener and title track ‘Reckless’ and if you’re a fan of the team up between Danny from Crazy Lixx and Chez’ take on 80’s Melodic Hard Rock then this is a release that is hard to fault. The title track itself is so cool it even gets away with an elongated sax solo, and not many could get away with that even back in the day (me I love a nice sax break).
The question is of course can it top 2022’s ‘Powerzone’? Well after repeated listens over a long hot weekend when we wore nothing but spandex and leg warmers I have to say it can… So after that rather fine opening ‘Personal Rock N’ Roll; sidles in nice and spirited, capturing the feel of Benatar and the sheen of Loverboy. It’s the sort of song that just underlines how uplifting 80’s style rock can be.
‘Night Of Passion’ has more of a disco beat and instantly more synth, it’s a song that initially loses me for a while, there’s plenty of dynamics but they’re a bit all over the place until the huge chorus. I do have to say that this one is a definite grower, and whilst definitely not one of my favorites here, even after repeated listens. It’s a little more Pop than I expected and probably the only one I can’t picture played live.
We’re back to rocking with : ‘Strip Me Down’ a real driving rocker that has a touch of Def Leppard in the lyrics, well if Joe was paid for maximum double-entendres amplified to 11. It’s a great overblown song and one you’ll definitely come rushing back to. There’s a bit of Cheap Trick in the mix and a wonderful relentlessness that works so well.
‘Tongue Of Love’ is a demi-ballad that if anything reaches too far, it’s slow and steady, chocked with funked up bass and brimming with solos. II’s very, very 80’s all leg warmers and lounging back on the front of a Jag with huge windswept hair absolutely mandatory. I do have to say that the keys here are wonderfully evocative. It’s the sort of song that feels like a completely guilty pleasure
Half way in, as they say, and sure we’ve had some cheese but the good news is that we’ve now raided the fridge, and all there was in the fridge was more cheese. Now as a cheese lover I’m over the moon…
Side 2, if you will, opens with the subtlety-titled catsuit stomper ‘Love Tornado’ it’s a song so madly OTT and 80’s that for a minute you find yourself thinking this is just the sort of song that led to us having to endure the 90’s. It’s the sort of fun that only happened pre-grunge. Sure the lyrics are wonderfully silly, but the thrust is inescapable. It’s the sort of title that when you look at the album cover of ‘Reckless’ you immediately wish they’d been brave (or crazy) enough to call it ‘Love Tornado’…
‘Bad Girl’ has a cracking opening and plenty of bluster with a nice familiar feeling and cracking chorus to this meat and potatoes rocker; whilst ‘Street Survivor’ on the other hand brings the tempo down and comes as a real standout AOR anthem which you could just imagine Sam Fox dueting with Cher on! Just the sort of song that would have been huge if we could step back in time.
The album closes out with another two bangers. ‘Too Dangerous’ is another favourite – a real Danny Rexon gem, remniscent of high energy Melodic Rockers like Danger Danger from back in the day, with my favourite hook an the album! We close album number three with ‘Bodyrock’ which doubles down – another real huge-chorused AOR gem. This is definitely a record that leaves the best till last. Those closers could be two of my favourites from Chez Kane so far!
Forget your cares, shut out the shit going on in the world today, and fall back into the comforting arms of an 80’s huge haired weekend!
The press for this one says: “Chez Kane is back with her third studio album, “Reckless” – an explosive blend of arena-ready hooks, slick guitar work, and unapologetic 80s-style swagger. Following the success of her first two records, Chez levels up with a collection that’s bigger in sound, richer in emotion, and packed with pure melodic firepower.” For me it’s her best yet – this should sound great live.
Turn it up loud till the dial falls off!
8.5 / 10
“Reckless” Tracklist:
1. Reckless | 2. Personal Rock N’ Roll | 3. Night Of Passion | 4. Strip Me Down | 5. Tongue Of Love | 6. Love Tornado | 7. Bad Girl | 8. Street Survivor | 9. Too Dangerous | 10. Bodyrock
Pix by Sarah Gilpin Photography APATE DREGG THE GLOOM IN THE CORNER KING 810