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Cypress Hill return with a new album and an alternative take on their distinctive sound. Is this new record ‘another one of them ol’ funky Cypress Hill things’?

The post Cypress Hill: Dios Bendiga – Album Review appeared first on Louder Than War.

The post Album Of The Week: This Is Lorelei <em>The Singer In My Band</em> appeared first on Stereogum.

(Comrade Aleks has brought us a very good interview with guitarist/vocalist Emilio from the Catalan death/doom metal band Bocc, whose new album Demolarium will be released in just a few days by Night Terrors Records.) While all members of the Barcelona trio Bocc had previously gravitated toward different sorts of extreme metal (some dabble in […]

The post AN NCS INTERVIEW: BOCC appeared first on NO CLEAN SINGING.

Are you getting excited about the new Drin album yet? Next week, the Drin, the subgenre-hopping, grimily grandiose Cincinnati underground rock unit, will release their new double album I Lost My Way For Centuries. The band has already shared the promising singles “Haven’t Lived It Yet” and “Prophets Of Doom,” and today they add a third. With its steadily pounding beat, well-placed tambourine, and flurries of horns and strings, “Cannery Action” makes me feel like I’m attending a psychedelic post-punk show at the end of the world. It’s scary and alluring in equal measure, and you can experience it yourself below.

The post The Drin – “Cannery Action” appeared first on Stereogum.

Canadian metalcore powerhouse, Spiritbox, dropped their new single "Mourning" today via Pale Chord/Rise Records, marking the band's first new material since 2025's chart-topping Tsunami Sea—and arriving with perfect timing just days before their European headline run kicks off.

"Mourning" leans into the atmospheric, dynamics-driven songwriting that's become Spiritbox's calling card. Courtney LaPlante's clean vocals anchor the track, moving from hushed, restrained verses into swelling, heavier payoffs as the arrangement builds around her. It's a quieter entry point than some of the band's recent work, but the trademark heaviness and contrast are still very much present underneath.

The accompanying music video, co-directed by guitarist Mike Stringer alongside Alex Bemis, marks a visible shift from the stark black-and-white visual language that defined the Tsunami Sea era. In its place: vivid outdoor landscapes, an eerie honeycomb-like structure, and a recurring hooded figure that keeps things appropriately unsettling.

The timing isn't a coincidence. Spiritbox launch their Tsunami Sea UK & European Tour with Jinjer and Dying Wish on September 12 in Glasgow, a run that includes the band's biggest UK headline show to date at London's OVO Arena Wembley. "Mourning" gives fans a new track to anticipate live before the trek even starts.

Tsunami Sea, released in March 2025, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's Top Hard Rock Albums chart and cracked the Billboard 200's top 30, further cementing Spiritbox's status as one of heavy music's most consistently forward-moving bands. The album's single "Soft Spine" also landed the group their third consecutive GRAMMY nomination for Best Metal Performance — a streak that's followed 2024's nod for "Jaded" and 2025's for "Cellar Door."

LaPlante hasn't exactly been sitting still between album cycles, either. She recently linked up with Bring Me the Horizon's Oli Sykes and producer Grabbitz for "If The Sun Burns Out Tonight," the official theme for the 2026 VALORANT Champions Tour, due out September 16. She also announced a signature vocal plugin with MixWave last month, built around the techniques behind her genre-defining vocal style.

Beyond the current European leg, Spiritbox's 2026 is stacked: the band joins Metallica for an intimate show at Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut on November 21, then closes out the year down under with three Good Things Festival dates across Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Between a surprise single, a GRAMMY-track record, and a run of increasingly high-profile stages, Spiritbox show no signs of slowing their ascent

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Deftones’ members in 2026 are Chino Moreno on vocals and guitar, Stephen Carpenter on guitar, Abe Cunningham on drums, Frank Delgado on keyboards and turntables, and Fred Sablan on bass. Three of those five have been there since 1988. One of them hasn’t left North America with the band in four years, and his own singer says he doesn’t know why. And the bass chair Sablan occupies is the heaviest seat in the band — because the man who built it never got to come back to it.

The current Deftones lineup

Chino Moreno — vocals, guitar

Founding member, 1988.

The voice, and the reason this band never got stuck in the era that produced them. Moreno can move from a whisper to a scream inside a bar and make it sound like the only reasonable thing to do, and he’s been doing it since he was a teenager in Sacramento.

He also plays guitar on record and increasingly live, which is a bigger deal than it sounds — the interplay between his parts and Carpenter’s is where a lot of the band’s tension actually lives. His side projects, ††† (Crosses) with Shaun Lopez and Palms with members of Isis, have been running alongside Deftones for years without ever diluting it.

Stephen Carpenter — guitar

Founding member, 1988.

Carpenter is the architect. That downtuned, thick, absolutely mountainous guitar sound is his, and it’s been imitated by a generation of bands who never got within a mile of it.

Put on Around the Fur and skip to “My Own Summer (Shove It).” Four seconds in, before Chino has said a word, that riff arrives and the whole room changes shape. It isn’t fast. It isn’t technical. It’s just enormous, and it moves like something with a body. That’s Carpenter, and it’s why the eight-string tone he moved to later became a whole subgenre’s starting point.

He is also the reason this page has a section below it that most outlets tiptoe around.

Abe Cunningham — drums

Founding member, 1988.

The most underrated drummer of that entire generation, and it isn’t close.

Cunningham doesn’t play metal drums. He plays with a jazz musician’s sense of space and a hardcore kid’s arms, and the result is a band that can sit dead still for eight bars and then detonate without a single fill telling you it’s coming. Listen to what he’s doing underneath “Digital Bath” — barely anything, and it’s the reason the song breathes.

He’s been there for every album, every era, every lineup change.

Frank Delgado — keyboards, turntables

Full member since 1999.

Delgado contributed to Adrenaline and Around the Fur as a guest before joining properly, and his full arrival coincides almost exactly with the band’s leap into White Pony — which is not a coincidence.

Everything atmospheric about modern Deftones runs through him. The washes, the samples, the texture that makes their records sound like they were recorded underwater in the best possible way. Remove Delgado from White Pony and you have a good heavy album. Leave him in and you have the record that changed what this band could be.

Fred Sablan — bass

Announced April 2022.

Sablan took the chair after Sergio Vega’s departure, and 2025’s Private Music is his studio debut with the band — he co-wrote it as well as playing on it, which is the part that matters. He wasn’t hired to reproduce someone else’s parts.

His background is broader than most people realise. He was Marilyn Manson’s bassist from July 2010 to June 2014, including Born Villain. He’s a founding member of the hardcore band Heavens Blade, and has played with Goon Moon, Chelsea Wolfe, Peter Hook and the Light, Marriages, 8mm and Kidneythieves.

That’s a résumé built on atmosphere and weight rather than technique for its own sake, which is exactly right for this band.

Where is Stephen Carpenter?

This is the question people actually type, so let’s answer it properly.

Stephen Carpenter has not performed with Deftones outside North America since 2022. He still plays US and Canadian dates — he was on stage in Vancouver for the Private Music tour opener — and he plays on every track of every album, including the newest one. He has not left the band and there is no indication he is going to.

He simply doesn’t fly to overseas shows.

What he has actually said

Two separate things are on the record, and most coverage collapses them into one. They shouldn’t be.

In 2020, on the Tin Foil Hat podcast, Carpenter made comments rejecting vaccines and asserting that the Earth is flat. He later told Rock Feed that he didn’t want to be in a foreign country where he might be required to take something he didn’t want. He stepped away from international touring in 2022, when travelling without vaccination was genuinely difficult.

In 2024, speaking to Rock Feed again, he said something that gets reported far less often: that he had already decided to stop touring internationally before the pandemic. He described longstanding anxiety around flying — that he used to fall asleep before takeoff as a coping mechanism, and eventually concluded he could either keep feeling that way every time, or stop doing it.

He was clear that it cost him something. In his words, he’s missing out on something he used to enjoy, and that was a tough thing to deal with. He also went out of his way to thank his bandmates for how they’d handled it — that they had his back.

What Chino says

In August 2025, Moreno was asked directly by Metal Hammer whether Carpenter had any plans to start flying again.

His answer: he doesn’t want to speak for him, and even if he could, he still doesn’t have an answer. Really he doesn’t. It’s still something he thinks Carpenter is figuring out. And if he does have an answer, Moreno said, it’d be great if one day he would share it.

Read that again. The singer of the band does not know why his founding guitarist won’t come on tour, and said so publicly, gently, in a national magazine.

Where I land on it

Two things are true at once and the internet is bad at holding both.

The 2020 comments were what they were, and Carpenter has never disowned them. Anyone who wants to hold that against him is entitled to.

But the anxiety he described in 2024 is a real thing that a lot of people live with, and it doesn’t become fake because the person describing it has said other things you disagree with. He gave a specific, plausible account of a specific problem, and he said it predated the pandemic. That deserves to be reported rather than skipped because it complicates a cleaner story.

What I’d say is this: Carpenter is a founding member who has appeared on every record this band has made, and there is no version of Deftones without those riffs. He’s also absent from stages in most of the world, indefinitely, with no explanation his own singer finds sufficient.

Both of those can sit next to each other. They currently do.

Who covers his parts

Lance Jackman and Shaun Lopez have both handled guitar duties on overseas dates. Lopez is a long-time Moreno collaborator — Far, and ††† (Crosses) with Chino — which makes him about as inside the tent as a stand-in can be.

Carpenter was also absent from a San Francisco show in front of 50,000 people headlined by System of a Down, which was the moment a lot of casual fans first noticed.

More on that — Deftones’ first set featuring Shaun Lopez on guitar, and our full breakdown of Carpenter’s touring situation.

The bass chair: Chi Cheng, Sergio Vega, Fred Sablan

Three men have held this position. It is not a normal band vacancy and it should not be written about like one.

Chi Cheng — 1988 to 2008

Cheng joined shortly after the band formed and played on the first five albums: Adrenaline, Around the Fur, White Pony, Deftones and Saturday Night Wrist.

His playing wasn’t flashy and was never meant to be. It carried weight. On the early records his bass isn’t underneath the songs, it’s holding them down, and you notice its absence far more than you ever noticed its presence.

On November 4, 2008, Cheng was a passenger in a car in Santa Clara, California, returning from his brother’s memorial service with his sister Mae. Their vehicle was struck by another travelling at around 60 miles per hour and flipped three times. Cheng was not wearing a seat belt and was ejected. Mae, who was belted and sustained minor injuries, held his head at the roadside until two off-duty paramedics stopped and intubated him — an intervention doctors later said kept him alive.

He never fully recovered. He remained in a coma, with periods of partial responsiveness — by 2010 he could move his hands, later his legs on command, and by 2012 he was able to return home. His mother Jeanne Marie kept fans updated through the One Love for Chi website throughout, and the band played benefit shows to help with the costs.

He died on April 13, 2013, of cardiac arrest. He was 42.

Moreno’s line about him has stayed with me since I first read it: since he was seventeen years old, he’d spent practically every day of his life with Chi.

Sergio Vega — 2009 to 2021

Vega, known for his work with Quicksand, stepped in after the accident and stayed for twelve years — Diamond Eyes, Koi No Yokan, Gore and Ohms.

That’s a very difficult job. He wasn’t replacing a man who’d quit; he was holding a chair for someone everyone hoped would come back, and then continuing to hold it after that hope ended. He did it with a good deal of grace, and the four records he played on include two of the band’s best.

He departed in 2021, citing contractual disagreements after more than a decade with the band.

Fred Sablan — 2022 to present

Sablan was announced in April 2022 and, three years on, is fully embedded — Private Music carries his co-writing credits, not just his playing.

He’s the third man to sit in that chair, and the first to make a record that’s genuinely his own rather than an inheritance.

Former members, in full

Chi Cheng — bass, backing vocals. 1988–2008. Died April 13, 2013. Sergio Vega — bass. 2009–2021.

That’s the complete list of departed members in nearly four decades, and it’s remarkably short. Deftones have had one line-up change that wasn’t a tragedy.

Note on touring musicians: Lance Jackman and Shaun Lopez have covered guitar on overseas dates since 2022. Neither is a member of the band.

Deftones lineup by album

Ten studio albums, three bassists, and the same three founders on every one.

Worth your time — every Deftones album ranked, and the bands worth trying if you’ve worn the catalogue out.

Eros: the album that leaked

For eighteen years this was the great unheard Deftones record. It isn’t any more.

Eros was begun in April 2008 as the follow-up to Saturday Night Wrist, with Chi Cheng on bass. When the accident happened in November, production stopped. In July 2009 the band announced they were shelving it indefinitely and starting fresh with Sergio Vega — that decision produced Diamond Eyes, and it’s the reason this band still exists.

At the point it was abandoned, only around six songs were finished. Moreno later estimated the instrumentals were 75 to 80 percent done and the lyrics roughly halfway.

Then in June 2026 it leaked. Eleven tracks from the sessions appeared on a message board, under what appear to be working titles: “Destiny,” “Brenda,” “Melanie,” “Smile,” “Margot,” “Candy,” “Sable,” “Electra,” “Trempest,” “Diamond” and “Briana.” Demos from the Ohms sessions surfaced at the same time, including an unreleased track called “Sensations.”

Only one of those songs had ever been public. “Smile” was officially released in 2014, on the first anniversary of Cheng’s death, and pulled from streaming services by the label shortly afterwards. It got its live debut five years later at the band’s own Dia de los Deftones festival in San Diego. Everything else on that leak had never been heard by anyone outside the band.

Moreno had told The Guardian in 2025 that it would most likely never see the light of day, because releasing it would mean going back to that period and resurrecting unfinished things. He added that “Dallas” was the only song anywhere near complete.

The fan reaction split cleanly and it’s a genuinely interesting argument. One side says respect the band’s wishes and don’t listen. The other says eighteen years of waiting earned them closure.

I understand both. I also think the second one is a rationalization — the band have said no, repeatedly, for eighteen years, and the reason they’ve said no is that the man playing bass on it never got to finish it. That isn’t a vault decision. It’s a grief decision.

But it’s out, a great many people have heard it, and pretending otherwise on a page like this would be dishonest.

TL;DR

• Current lineup: Chino Moreno (vocals, guitar), Stephen Carpenter (guitar), Abe Cunningham (drums), Frank Delgado (keyboards, turntables), Fred Sablan (bass).
• Founding members still in the band: Moreno, Carpenter and Cunningham, all from 1988.
• Fred Sablan was announced as bassist in April 2022 and made his studio debut on 2025’s Private Music, which he also co-wrote. He previously played bass for Marilyn Manson from 2010 to 2014.
• Stephen Carpenter has not played a show outside North America since 2022. He still plays US and Canadian dates and appears on every track of every album. Lance Jackman and Shaun Lopez cover his parts overseas.
• Chi Cheng, the original bassist, was catastrophically injured in a car accident on November 4, 2008 and died on April 13, 2013, aged 42.
• Sergio Vega held the bass chair from 2009 to 2021, departing over what he described as contractual disagreements.
• Most recent album: Private Music, released August 22, 2025.
• The shelved 2008 album Eros, recorded with Cheng, leaked online in June 2026 after eighteen years unreleased.

Deftones Members: Frequently Asked Questions

Three founders, thirty-eight years, ten albums and one empty chair that took a long time to fill. Where do you land on the Carpenter situation — and does an overseas Deftones show without him still count? Tell me below. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.

The post Deftones Members 2026: The Current Lineup appeared first on Loaded Radio.

As one of the earliest forms of mass transportation, the train forever changed the landscape of civilization, linking cities and communities across vast distances. It not only transformed travel but also became a powerful metaphor for life’s journey, momentum, and the unstoppable forces of change. In rock music, the imagery of the train has long symbolized energy, escape, and raw power, as shown in the scorching tracks featured in this list. This article explores ten electrifying rock songs with the word “train” in the title, focusing on legendary artists who embodied the spirit of hard-hitting, blues-based rock. While we include

The post 10 Scorching Rock Songs With The Word ‘Train’ In The Title appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Posted on September 8th 2026, 2:38pm

Next month, glaive and Tiffany Day will join forces a big North American tour. Even though he’s only 21 now, glaive has been in the hyperpop game for years, starting when he was a North Carolina teenager posting music online during the pandemic and leading to him becoming one of the first underground hyperpop artists to sign a major-label deal. Wichita native Tiffany Day’s self-released breakout Halo is one of our favorite albums of the year so far. Ahead of their tour, the two artists teamed up onstage in San Francisco last night, debuting a brand-new unreleased song together.

The post glaive Joins Tiffany Day To Debut New Song In San Francisco appeared first on Stereogum.

DevilDriver – Houe of Blues Anaheim – September 5, 2026

When DevilDriver’s frontman Dez Fafara recently described the band’s 2026 live show as “Insane, intense, visceral, high voltage”, I took him at his word.  Saturday night’s show at the House of Blues Anaheim was the last date of the Strike and Kill Tour, in support of the 2026 album of the same name, and DevilDriver were going to make sure the hometown show was memorable.  The House of Blues Anaheim hosts a lot of heavy bands, but none that I’ve seen have ever managed to get the fans moving more than DevilDriver on this night.  Dez doesn’t use his pulpit to ask the audience to mosh or crowd surf – he simply wills it to happen – the music does the rest, and people are powerless to resist. 

DevilDriver

Upon a Burning Body was originally in the lineup, but had to drop off the tour a week ago due to illness in the band.  While I was initially bummed they wouldn’t be playing, I knew that DevilDriver, coupled with opening bands Ov Sulfur and Cultus Black would make up for it, and that’s exactly what happened.

This is important music made by an important band, and their live show has always been a huge part of the appeal.  This was my first time seeing them since Dez’s two-year health hiatus, and I wasn’t sure what to expect – would the show live up to the hype?  The answer was a resounding yes – a constant ball of energy and flying hair, Dez was in great form and sounded amazing, having lost nothing in the downtime.  The rest of the band was similarly stellar, and seeing bassist and founding member Jon Miller back in the band and killing it made the performance even more memorable.  Alex Lee and Gabe Mangold traded impossible licks on guitar, while drummer Davier Ortega was a standout – somehow remaining in the pocket as he pulverized his kit song after song.

The crowd weren’t the only ones having fun – you could tell the entire band was having a good night on stage.  Smiles were infectious, and the crowd at the 1700 capacity House of Blues had the time of their lives.  It was impossible to take your eyes off Dez – he’s a born performer, and gave everything he had to the show.  From high-fiving crowd surfers as security was catching them in the pit, to constantly patrolling the stage and unleashing his powerful and unique vocal delivery seamlessly and without effort – the night was his.  I believe Saturday night’s reception by the fans in Anaheim assured him that even after two years away from the Los Angeles/Orange County area, he and the rest of the band had only gotten better.

DevilDriver is:

• Dez Fafara – Vocals
• Gabe Mangold – Guitar
• Alex Lee – Guitar
• Jon Miller – Bass
• Davier Ortega – Drums

Setlist:

1) Clouds Over California

2) Not All Who Wander Are Lost

3) I Could Care Less

4) Head on to Heartache (Let Them Rot)

5) Strike and Kill

6) Meet the Wretched

7) Swinging the Dead

8) Dig Your Own Grave

9) Dead in the Water

10) Hold Back the Day

11) Cry for Me Sky (Eulogy of the Scorned)

12) The Mountain

13) End of the Line

Ov Sulfur

Ov Sulfur are a blackened deathcore band from Las Vegas that formed during the height of the pandemic in 2020.  Vocalist Ricky Hoover looks like an NFL linebacker, and is equally capable of throttling you with his voice as well as his arms.  The audience was already in a frenzy before Ov Sulfur took the stage, but things ramped up as soon as the first notes hit the air.  These guys were great live, and their energy translated seamlessly into the crowd – a wall of death was requested and delivered, and the mosh pit was off the hook.  Ov Sulfur was the ideal complement to this bill, slotting in perfectly between Cultus Black and DevilDriver.

Ov Sulfur is:

• Ricky Hoover – Vocals
• Chase Wilson – Guitar
• Christian Becker – Guitar
• Ryan Rivard/Levi Xu – Drums

Cultus Black

While I knew what to expect from DevilDriver, I didn’t know anything about Cultus Black.  They emerged from the side of the stage in total darkness, and when the lights came up, four men in masks were standing behind their instruments, while vocalist L was painted white with black accents.  Their set was short, but beyond memorable – their percussionist/vocalist Z jumped off of everything in sight (risers, drums, the stage), went crowd surfing, got face to face with fans on the barricade, and generally tore the place up.  Nobody was conversing with their significant other, watching from the sidelines, or checking their watches wondering when the next band would go on – Cultus Black was no joke, and people were engaged – it was impossible not to be.  

Cultus Black is a great live band, and definitely someone to pay attention to – I’m sure being on this tour with DevilDriver brought them a lot of well-deserved attention, and I expect to see and hear a lot more from them going forward.  They certainly brought an amazing amount of energy to their early opening slot, and set the tone and expectations for the rest of the night.

Cultus Black is:

• L-237 – Vocals
• G-382 – Percussion/Vocals
• J-451 – Bass
• M-1335 – Guitar
• R-405 – Drums

Thanks for reading!

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