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The “A Huge Waste of Your Time and Money” tour landed in New York City

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Hypocrisy has canceled its planned North American run this month after encountering visa problems that prevented the Swedish death metal veterans from entering the country.

The Mass Hallucination tour was set to begin on August 10 in Toronto before wrapping up on August 23 in Los Angeles. Along with headlining dates, Hypocrisy was also scheduled to appear as support for Dimmu Borgir on selected shows.

The band addressed the cancellation in a statement shared on social media on Monday (August 3):

“Due to visa issues beyond our control, we won’t be able to make it to the North American tour.

“We’re devastated, and truly sorry — we did everything we could.

“We’re not giving up. We’ll keep working to make this right and get to you as soon as we can!

“Thank you for your patience, understanding, and support!

“If you have questions about refunds, please contact your original ticket seller.”

Hypocrisy‘s latest studio album, Worship, was recorded and mixed at Peter Tägtgren’s Abyss Studio AB in Sweden before being mastered by Svante Forsbäck at Chartmakers Audio Mastering. The album artwork, created by Blake Armstrong, reflects the long-running theme of humanity’s connection with extraterrestrial life.

Founded more than 30 years ago by Peter Tägtgren, Hypocrisy has released 12 studio albums while becoming one of Sweden’s defining death metal acts. After initially recording the band’s earliest demos on his own, Tägtgren secured a deal with Nuclear Blast and assembled a full lineup to bring the project to the stage.

Across its career, Hypocrisy has developed a recognizable sound built on crushing riffs, melodic hooks, aggressive drumming and atmospheric songwriting. The band’s catalog includes releases such as Penetralia, The Fourth Dimension, Abducted, Virus and Worship.

Alongside Peter Tägtgren, the current lineup features bassist Mikael Hedlund, who joined the band in 1991. Guitarist Thomas Elofsson has performed as a session member since 2013, while session drummer Henrik Axelsson came aboard in 2022.

The post Visa Issues Force HYPOCRISY To Cancel North American Tour appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

Video from Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grant Park has gone viral showing festival-goers passing a cardboard box containing a plastic bag of what appears to be urine through the crowd. Footage was captured by multiple Instagram accounts, with the plastic bag visibly hanging over the side of the box as it moved hand to hand.

The response online has been overwhelmingly negative, with fans calling it a serious breach of concert etiquette and a health risk to everyone it passed. Lollapalooza 2026 ran July 30 to August 2 and was headlined by Olivia Dean, Charli XCX, Tate McRae, Lorde, The xx and Smashing Pumpkins, with Turnstile, Yungblud, Wet Leg, Geese and The Story So Far also on the bill. It is the second festival bathroom incident to go viral in just over a week.

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We are going to talk about this like adults, which is more than can be said for the people involved.

What Actually Happened

Over the weekend at Lollapalooza in Grant Park, someone in the crowd decided they were not giving up their spot.

Rather than fight their way out to a portable toilet and fight their way back — the thing every festival-goer in history has grudgingly accepted as the cost of a good position — they relieved themselves into a plastic bag.

Then the bag went into a cardboard box. And the box went into the crowd.

Multiple Instagram accounts filmed it moving hand to hand, and in the footage the bag is visibly slumping over the side of the box. There is nothing between that bag and the people carrying it except a bit of cardboard and optimism.

The videos hit six figures of engagement within hours.

The Response Was Not Divided

There’s usually a contrarian take on these things. Not this time.

The overwhelming consensus across both posts was that this is unacceptable, and the arguments broke into a few clear groups.

The pragmatists pointed out the obvious solution that has worked for the entire history of live music: have a mate hold your spot. That’s it. That’s the whole system. It has never failed.

The veterans — and there were a lot of them — pointed out that people have been going to festivals for decades and somehow managed to walk to a toilet. Several noted they’ve been to dozens of festivals over twenty-plus years without this ever occurring to them as an option.

The exasperated ones just wanted to know what has changed. Is it a bathroom access problem? Is it the crowd density making it genuinely impossible to get out? Or is it simply that some people have decided the rules don’t apply to them?

And a fair few said the quiet part out loud: watching that clip cured any fear of missing out they had about not being there.

That last one should worry the festival more than the rest of it combined.

This Is Not An Isolated Incident, And That’s The Real Story

Here’s what most of the coverage is missing. This isn’t a one-off weird moment. It’s the latest entry in a genuinely alarming run.

Eight days ago we covered a Devilskin show in Dunedin, New Zealand where a fan defecated on the floor mid-set, triggering a chain reaction of vomiting, forcing the band to stop the show for cleanup, and leaving a wide empty circle in the pit that nobody would go near for the rest of the night. Police identified the man responsible. No charges were filed.

That piece noted something worth repeating now: a comparable incident happened at a Turnstile show in Santa Cruz back in 2021.

Turnstile played Lollapalooza this weekend.

Lollapalooza itself had a viral urination incident in 2024 as well, when a fan relieved herself in the pit and was reportedly ejected.

And it’s got to the point where artists are addressing it from the stage and in the press. Noah Kahan has publicly gone after his own audience over people defecating at his shows — joking that Congress needs to step in and mandate diapers, which is the kind of joke you only make when the underlying thing has genuinely happened more than once. Olivia Rodrigo has called fans out over hygiene at her shows too.

When multiple headline artists across completely different genres are independently begging their audiences to use a toilet, that’s not a series of coincidences. That’s a shift in how some people are behaving in crowds.

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What The Pit Figured Out A Long Time Ago

And here’s where it gets interesting for anyone reading this site.

Metal and hardcore crowds are, by any objective measure, the most physically chaotic audiences in music. Circle pits. Walls of death. Crowd surfing. Stage diving. People come out of those rooms bruised and happy.

And yet this stuff almost never happens there.

The reason isn’t that metal fans are better people. It’s that heavy music crowds developed an actual functioning social code, enforced by the crowd itself, decades ago. If somebody goes down, you pick them up. That rule is universal, non-negotiable, and every single person in the room knows it.

Corey Taylor articulated it publicly in the most serious possible context. Days after the Astroworld crowd surge killed nine people in 2021, he addressed it from the stage at Welcome To Rockville. His point was that the thing which makes this genre and this audience a family is that they look out for one another — and that anyone who’s ever been in a pit knows that when someone goes down, you get them straight back up.

That’s not sentiment. That’s an operating procedure, and it’s why a room full of people slamming into each other at speed is statistically safer than a static pop crowd of the same size.

We’ve written up the unwritten rules of pit etiquette before — consent matters, respect people who aren’t participating, pick up anyone who falls, know your limits. Nobody hands those rules out at the door. They get transmitted person to person, gig after gig, and newcomers absorb them within about one song.

Notice what’s missing from that list: any rule about bodily fluids. It’s never needed one. It’s covered by the general principle, which is that the person next to you is a human being and the room belongs to everybody.

Somewhere in the migration of festival culture from a subculture with its own norms to a mass-market event where a hundred thousand people show up for a photograph, that transmission chain broke. Turn up alone, know nobody, treat the crowd as scenery rather than as people, and there’s nothing left to stop you doing whatever’s most convenient.

A bag of urine going hand to hand through a crowd is just what that looks like at the extreme end.

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The Practical Bit

If you’re going to a festival this summer — and our 2026 metal festival guide has plenty of options — the solution here really is as simple as everybody in those comment sections said.

Go with people. Hold each other’s spots. Take turns. Hydrate, but be sensible about timing. And accept that if you want to be in the front third of a stadium-sized crowd, you’re going to lose your place occasionally, because that is the deal and always has been.

Festivals could help too. Grant Park had eight stages and a crowd in the tens of thousands. If getting to a toilet from the middle of a headline set genuinely takes forty minutes, that’s a design problem, not just an etiquette one — and some of that commentary asking whether this is a logistics failure is a fair question worth someone at Lollapalooza actually answering.

But none of that makes the bag okay.

Go find a toilet. Everybody else manages it.

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TL;DR

• What happened: video from Lollapalooza 2026 shows a cardboard box containing a plastic bag of apparent urine being passed hand to hand through the crowd
• Where: Grant Park, Chicago, during the festival’s July 30 – August 2 run
• The reaction: near-unanimous condemnation online, with most commenters pointing out the obvious alternative of having a friend hold your spot
• The pattern: it follows a Devilskin show in New Zealand eight days earlier where a fan defecated in the pit, a 2024 Lollapalooza urination incident, and public complaints from Noah Kahan and Olivia Rodrigo about hygiene at their own shows
• The metal connection: Turnstile played Lollapalooza this weekend; a comparable incident happened at one of their own shows in Santa Cruz in 2021
• Why it’s rare at heavy shows: metal and hardcore crowds run on a self-enforced code — pick people up, respect non-participants, look after the person next to you — that Corey Taylor publicly articulated after Astroworld
• Lollapalooza 2026 headliners: Olivia Dean, Charli XCX, Tate McRae, Lorde, The xx and Smashing Pumpkins, with Turnstile, Yungblud, Wet Leg, Geese and The Story So Far also playing

FAQ

Metal crowds throw each other around for two hours and still manage to pick up strangers off the floor. What’s the worst crowd behaviour you’ve ever witnessed at a show? Let us know in the comments.

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The post Lollapalooza Fans Passed A Bag Of Urine Through The Crowd, And Artists Are Now Publicly Begging People To Just Use The Bathroom appeared first on Loaded Radio.

Quite a diverse bill of bands we had here for a Thursday night at Slay in Glasgow, covering a range of metal’s broad genres and sub-genres. I didn’t see anyone complaining, though. A few days before the gig, vianova unfortunately had to pull out on doctor’s orders, which was a shame as, while I’m not … Continue reading Gig Review: Protest The Hero / Pupil Slicer – Slay, Glasgow (30th July 2026)

Stryper has released the official lyric video for “Ashes To Roses”, the latest single from the band’s upcoming studio album, Throne Of Thorns. The record, Stryper‘s 18th full-length effort, is scheduled for release on September 25 through Frontiers Music Srl.

Speaking about the new song, Stryper vocalist and guitarist Michael Sweet said: “”Ashes To Roses” is definitely a little different for us. It’s got a little bit more of a throwback/classic rock vibe, yet it’s got everything you would expect from Stryper. It’s going to appeal to all the people out there who have been wanting a good melodic rock ballad from the band. You asked, we listened!”

More than four decades into its career, Stryper continues to build on its legacy while staying true to the melodic metal sound that established the band. Throne Of Thorns adds another chapter to that history with a collection of new material aimed at both longtime followers and newer listeners.

Drummer Robert Sweet shared his thoughts on the upcoming release, saying: “Soon our new Stryper record will be out, and can you believe it? It’s album number 18! I really believe you’re all going to love it. Michael worked incredibly hard writing these songs and bringing everything together. Oz [Fox, Stryper guitarist], Perry [Richardson, Stryper bassist] and I also worked hard to make this what I feel is our best record yet. I’m confident that once you hear it, you’ll agree. Thank you all for your incredible loyalty and for continuing to support what we do.”

Throne Of Thorns follows a productive period for the band. In November 2025, Stryper issued its Christmas album, The Greatest Gift Of All, through Frontiers Music Srl. Michael Sweet also released his latest solo effort, The Master Plan, in April 2026.

Formed 43 years ago, Stryper took its name from Isaiah 53:5, which states: “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”

Over the years, Stryper has built its catalog with releases including To Hell With The Devil, Second Coming, No More Hell To Pay, Fallen, God Damn Evil, Even The Devil Believes and The Final Battle.

The post STRYPER Shares Lyric Video For “Ashes To Roses” From Upcoming Album “Throne Of Thorns” appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

That 8-date run will commence in late November.

The post King Parrot Announce Extensive ‘Off The Beaten Track’ Australian Tour appeared first on Theprp.com.

The former Eagles guitarist talks about the 'intense concentration' it takes to perform the song properly. Continue reading…

Album Review: Mephistofeles – Live In Europe

Reviewed by Matthew Williams

If you were one of the lucky people to see Argentinian trio Mephistofeles live last year in Europe, then I congratulate you. The most unassuming and humble of bands, who couldn’t quite believe the love and affection that was being shown to them on their first ever UK/European tour. The frontman mentioned that they were genuinely enjoying themselves whilst playing to a whole new audience and what this live release highlights is the talent of the band in it’s all glory as they mix their sets up with an amazing array of songs.

Most nights would have started with the epic that is “Satan Sex Ceremonies” and it gives you an insight into what they are all about and would have fired up the crowds watching as the trio exploded into life. From there on in, it was a case of either being mesmerised by the guitar skills of Rivers or the rumbling bass of Ismael Dimenza who combined effortlessly with drummer Luca Frizza, to create awesome rhythms that propelled the songs to insane levels.

What the shows demonstrated were a collection of songs that are good enough to grace any stage, listen to “Buried in Worms” or “Profanation” and you get a filthy guitar sound, huge bass notes and sleazy psychedelic doom that are a thing of beauty. I remember “Black Sunday” being a notable song that dark evening in Manchester, and they warmed the crowd when they hit that intro to “The Meaning of All Evil” which is a hugely impressive song to have in their repertoire.

They have that wonderful expansive sound in their armoury as well and get slow and low on “Curse of the Evil” and when I hear “Evil Beauty” once again, it reminds me of how they brought the heavy to a venue that has seen its fair share of heavy over the years. Their mix of tempos was one of the lasting impressions I had, whether it’s the fuzzed our craziness of “Frustrated” or the guitar wizardry and psychedelic passion of “Trash Lord” that engulfs you, they were ready to conquer and conquer they did.

One thing is for certain though, is that Mephistopheles are a band that you can’t afford to miss as their talents are up there with the best in the business and this live album demonstrates that perfectly.

For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.

The post Album Review: Mephistofeles – Live In Europe appeared first on The Razor's Edge.

Seems like an appropriate day to re-share this gem from Texas virtuoso David Garza. Honest words are like August thirdsThey just both come maybe once in a year

I think we’ve reached the point of exhaustion with artists talking about AI but not having anything novel or even coherent to say. In a recent interview with iHeartRadio at the Osheaga Festival, Empire Of The Sun’s Luke Steele was asked if he used AI, and he responded, “Of course!” Although his answer was enthusiastic, the conversation that followed quickly lost steam.

The post Empire Of The Sun Singer Says “Of Course” He Uses AI appeared first on Stereogum.