According to the statement, “both parties have met to resolve the matter professionally.”

The post Ill Niño & Ex-Guitarist Xander Raymond Charles Issue Joint Statement On Their Recent Split appeared first on Theprp.com.

This month, two very different explorations of pop-star life will come to multiplexes — the probable-trainwreck Michael Jackson biopic Michael and the David Lowery A24 psychological thriller Mother Mary. In the latter, Anne Hathaway plays the titular fictional singer, with Micaela Coel as an estranged friend. As the trailer makes clear, Mother Mary has a…

The post Anne Hathaway Shares FKA twigs-Written <em>Mother Mary</em> Song “My Mouth Is Lonely For You” appeared first on Stereogum.

To my surprise

The devil inside

Was nicer than I ever guessed 

Winnipeg seems like one of those towns where winter seeps into the walls, into your molars, into your view of other people, into the private little bargains you make with yourself when the day clocks out before supper. Stephen Levko Halas, recording as Tired Cossack, understands this with the kind of bone-deep familiarity – and authenticity. On ZIMA, his third full-length, he turns that climate into character. In Ukrainian, after all, Zima means “winter,” although those of us who lived through the 90s would be delighted to crack open the beverage version while this plays. This record comes at you with cold-wave severity, post-punk tension, grunge abrasion, shoegaze blur, and the occasional folk ghost from the old country, yet it never feels like a pile of tasteful influences arranged on a shelf for inspection. It feels lived in and bruised; like somebody took a busted transistor radio, a notebook full of romantic mistakes, a bag of bad habits, and a family history that still knows the names of mountains and sheep paths, then tossed them all into the snow and hit “record.”

ZIMA never pretends misery is noble, and it never powders over its own uglier moods. Tentacles opens the album in a fit of self-recrimination and social miscalculation, a song about getting class, desire, guilt, and silence tangled so badly you can barely tell whether the worst injury came from what was said or what got swallowed. The guitars have that rangy Daniel Ash sting, and then those No Wave sax blasts come barging in like some downtown delinquent kicking open the side door at a wake. There’s chanting too, odd and unsteady, which gives the song the queasy feel of a mind talking to itself in a mirror and losing the thread halfway through.

November 14 (featuring Zagublena) lands like a public breakdown staged at the edge of a political rally. The track lurches between panic, resentment, fatigue, and a kind of spiritual dry-heaving, while Zagublena’s presence gives it extra chill and extra cut. Her vocal has that Eastern European darkwave drag to it, like it’s pulling history behind it with a rope tied round the waist. Halas leans toward Kyiv-inflected moods, and here that affinity pays off in a song that feels split between the body and the screen, between sleepless nerves and the language of public collapse.

She Was takes a hard left into remembrance and nearly steals the record by being plainspoken at the exact moment when plain speech can knock you flat. Halas writes about friendship, grief, and the afterlife of small domestic rituals. You can hear traces of that scrappy ’90s catholic taste – Eels, Pixies, Southern Culture on the Skids – in the way the song carries its ache with a sideways grin and a little slouch in the shoulders. It remembers a person by the room they lit up, the cigarettes they held, the television they watched with you, and that is often how loss arrives in real life: through furniture, stains, kitchen chatter, and the sudden vacancy inside a once-ordinary hour.

Then comes Groceries, which turns a basic errand into a harrowing trip through dependency, craving, and the hateful absurdity of having to function when your head feels like a junk drawer full of snapped wires. The screaming splits the difference between Kurt Cobain and Black Francis, and the guitars scratch and scrape with that oversized, squealing Smashing Pumpkins kind of grandeur, as if each chord were trying to chew its way through drywall. Halas catches the humiliating scale of modern distress: how stepping outside for provisions can feel like a moral trial, a relapse trigger, and an indictment all at once.

Cab has a grubby little glow to it. There’s a trace of Forest for the Trees, a little early Beck, a bit of bedroom delirium opening into something wider and stranger, and the song uses that spaciousness well. Beneath the hooks sits a portrait of debt, depletion, and the kind of self-disgust that grows best in stale rooms under bad light.

Zima is one of the album’s finest gambles because it lets heritage in through the front door. Ukrainian language and folk imagery shift the atmosphere entirely, bringing courtship and highland memory into a record otherwise packed with urban nerves and modern damage. It is catchy in the most old-fashioned sense of the word, the kind of melody that seems to have been waiting around for years in the rafters until somebody finally gave it breath.

Heaven with Adam Soloway drifts into a dazed romantic haze somewhere between Lightning Seeds sweetness and My Bloody Valentine blur, though even there the song keeps a live wire under the skin.  Dexsomnia and Pines deepen the album’s nocturnal malaise, one dragging itself through chemical unease and resignation, the other seeking relief in pastoral retreat while suspecting every refuge comes with an expiration date. By Gran Turismo, Halas is staring into fluorescent vacancy, hearing engines and passing faces as if modern life were one long antiseptic hallway.

Listen to ZIMA below and order the album here.

Tired Cossack is genre-bending, although that phrase has become so overused it usually means somebody bought three distortion pedals and a Soviet synth plugin. Here, the blend makes emotional sense. The cold-wave elements carry alienation. The grunge side carries bodily disgust and blown-out feeling. The shoegaze smear gives memory its proper distance, and the Ukrainian folk current supplies bloodline, soil, and an older form of longing that indie rock usually doesn’t know what to do with. You hear a guy trying to make room for all of it at once: the family inheritance, the freezing city, the bad habits, the damaged friendships, the panic, the lust, the public noise, the private rot, the brief little jokes people tell to avoid going under.

That’s a big mess to carry into a record, which is precisely why ZIMA has such force. It sounds like a man arguing with weather, history, desire, and his own head in real time, and for forty-odd minutes, he wins often enough to make you believe there may yet be some crooked form of grace, after all.

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The post “Mountains of Grief, Life is a Game” — Winnipeg’s Tired Cossack Releases Wintry Post-Punk LP “Zima” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Metal lives and dies by atmosphere. You already know this. Your riffs could shake the earth, your drummer could split a kit in half, and your vocalist could summon actual demons. But if your stage looks like a high school talent show setup, something critical is missing.

You’re the real deal, and your stage design should reflect that. Moreover, the visual dimension of a metal show isn’t decoration. It’s war paint. It’s armor. It’s the difference between a crowd that watches and a crowd that surrenders.

Interested in seeing how you can produce an earth-shattering concert with just stage design? Let’s get into exactly how to jack up your concert’s visual appeal and turn your next show into something people are still talking about a decade later.

Focus on Lighting First

Before you drop a single dollar on pyro or video screens, get your lighting right. A tight, well-programmed light rig does more heavy lifting than almost anything else on stage, and we mean that.

The most important thing to focus on is contrast. Metal thrives in darkness punctuated by brutality. And by brutality, we mean sharp beams cutting through smoke, strobes synced to blast beats, and deep red and violet washes that make your guitarist look like he crawled out of a volcano.

Moving head lighting fixtures give you the most versatility for achieving this. Position them at upstage truss points and floor spots so you’re sculpting your performers from multiple angles simultaneously.

Don’t sleep on follow spots either. Even in smaller rooms, a single spot locked on your vocalist during a climactic breakdown communicates power and intent in a way that wash lighting simply cannot match.

Pair Light With Fog

You will also need haze and fog machines. Without aerial haze, your beams disappear into the ceiling, and all that dramatic lighting becomes flat. Keep a consistent haze layer rolling throughout the set, and let your lighting director use it as a canvas.

Drive Impact With Video Walls

Here’s where a lot of bands either level up or leave money on the table. They nail the lighting and give an epic performance, but it ends up falling flat because the visuals weren’t immersive enough (or people in the back couldn’t see a thing). A high-quality LED video wall transforms your stage from a performance space into an experience.

Imagine the wall playing custom visuals synced to your set, such as occult imagery, abstract horror, cascading skulls, or burning landscapes. This communicates your band’s identity and gets people really drawn into your performance. If you want to know how to pick an LED video wall, the best tip is to prioritize pixel pitch and brightness over sheer size. A smaller wall with tight pixel pitch and high nit

output looks dramatically better than a massive low-resolution panel covered in motion graphics. If a full video wall is outside your current budget, consider a modular setup with two flanking panels. You get the visual impact at a fraction of the cost, and the symmetry works perfectly with a traditional metal stage layout.

Use Pyrotechnics Like Punctuation

Flame bars, gerbs, confetti cannons, CO2 jets—pyro is the exclamation point at the end of a sentence. And like any punctuation mark, the impact depends entirely on restraint.

Nothing kills pyro faster than overuse. If you fire flame bars every 30 seconds, the crowd acclimates, and the effect evaporates. Save your biggest moments (like the outro of your heaviest track or the climax of your set closer) and then hit them. The gasp from a crowd that didn’t see it coming is worth more than any amount of continuous fire.

Safety Tip

Always hire a licensed pyrotechnician. This isn’t a cost-cutting area. Beyond the obvious safety considerations, a professional will work directly with your venue and program your effects to land exactly on the musical moment you need.

Tailor the Stage Design and Set Pieces

Your stage itself should be a character. Backdrops, risers, custom podiums, and articulated band logos are all elements that build the visual world surrounding your music. A lot of metal bands underinvest here because the budget conversation gets scary. But you don’t need a stadium budget to create a striking stage environment.

If you have one, start with your band’s logo. A custom-fabricated, back-lit band logo mounted at center stage costs less than you’d expect and anchors every single visual in your show. Add a textured or dark-themed backdrop behind your drummer, and suddenly the depth of your stage triples visually.

Riser configurations are another element to consider. Elevating your drummer even 2 to 3 feet creates natural visual hierarchy, making the kit the centerpiece it deserves to be. Stack your guitarists on secondary risers and your vocalist commands the deck below, and you’ve built a stage geography that reads dramatically even from the back of a venue.

Coordinate With All Event Staff and Vendors

All of this—lights, video, pyro, set design, and beyond—only reaches its full potential when it’s coordinated. For example, a slightly off-cue strobe light is better than no strobe at all, but come on! The impact won’t be nearly as awesome, and you’ve worked too hard to risk uncoordinated stage visuals. Your lighting director, video operator, and production manager need to rehearse your set the same way your band does.

We suggest that you build a production cue sheet. On it, you should map every major visual moment to a specific beat, bar, or lyric. Then walk your crew through it before doors open. The bands that look like synchronized visual machines aren’t lucky. They’re just prepared, and you can be too.

Bring It All Together

A great metal show is a total sensory environment. Your audience doesn’t separate the music from the lights from the visuals from the atmosphere. Rather, they experience it as one thing. Every element you sharpen reinforces every other element.

You now have a practical roadmap for jacking up your concert’s visual appeal. Start with lighting, invest in video intelligently, deploy pyro with intent, build a stage that tells your story, and coordinate everything obsessively. Do those things, and your shows will transform into something unbelievably amazing.

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Tommy Lee’s story is one of the wildest in rock history—but most people searching his name are looking for the basics first: his net worth, his age, who he’s married to, and how he became one of the most recognizable drummers on the planet.

Here’s the quick snapshot before we get into the details.

Who Is Tommy Lee And What Should You Know Right Away?

Tommy Lee is the drummer for Mötley Crüe, known for his decades-long career, high-profile relationships, and a net worth estimated in the tens of millions.

TL;DR:

Tommy Lee is best known as the drummer for Mötley Crüe, but his influence goes far beyond the band. With a career spanning over 40 years, multiple marriages including Pamela Anderson, ventures into electronic music, and constant cultural relevance, he remains one of rock’s most recognizable and talked-about figures. His net worth, personal life, and unpredictable career moves continue to drive massive search interest.

Quick Facts:

• Full Name: Thomas Lee Bass
• Age: Born October 3, 1962
• Band: Mötley Crüe
• Net Worth: Estimated $70–$80 million
• Wife: Brittany Furlan
• Years Active: 1981–present

What Keeps Tommy Lee Relevant Decades Later

Tommy Lee never needed social media to stay visible—he was already doing it before the internet turned attention into currency.

There’s a reason his name still pulls massive search traffic. It’s not just the music. It’s the chaos, the headlines, the relationships, and the fact that he’s never tried to disappear between album cycles like most artists from his era.

A lot of rock stars burn out, fade out, or become nostalgia acts. Tommy Lee did something different—he stayed part of the conversation, whether people liked it or not.

That’s what makes this list worth digging into.

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The Man, The Myth, The Mayhem: 13 Shocking Tommy Lee Facts

1. He Has a Surprising Heritage

He’s not just a California rocker. Tommy Lee was born Thomas Lee Bass on October 3, 1962, in Athens, Greece. His father was an American U.S. Army sergeant, and his mother, Vassiliki “Voula” Papadimitriou, was a 1957 Miss Greece beauty contest contestant. The family moved to California when he was just one year old.

2. He Was a High School Dropout

Tommy received his first drum kit as a teenager and quickly became obsessed. His influences were aMt. Rushmore of drumming: John Bonham (Led Zeppelin), Alex Van Halen, and Terry Bozzio. He ultimately dropped out of high school to join his first L.A. club band, Suite 19, before co-founding Mötley Crüe with Nikki Sixx in 1981.

3. He Was an Early Reality TV Star

Long before the Kardashians, Tommy was inviting cameras into his life. In 2004, he starred in the NBC reality show Tommy Lee Goes To College. He followed that up in 2008 with Battleground Earth, an eco-friendly competition show he co-hosted with rapper Ludacris.

4. He’s an Animal Rights Activist

This one shocks most people. Tommy Lee is a dedicated animal rights supporter and a vocal advocate for PETA. In 2010, he wrote a scathing letter to the president of SeaWorld, protesting the treatment of Tilikum the orca and condemning the park’s methods.

5. He Drummed for The Smashing Pumpkins

Proving his versatility, Tommy lent his signature drumming style to The Smashing Pumpkins‘ 2014 album, Monuments To An Elegy. It was a move no one saw coming and proved his skills reached far beyond the ’80s glam metal scene.

6. He Famously Married Pamela Anderson in 4 Days

His personal life has always been headline-worthy. His most notorious marriage was to Pamela Anderson from 1995 to 1998, which famously began just four days after they met. This, of course, led to the infamous leaked videotape, which was later dramatized in the 2022 series Pam & Tommy.

7. He Is a Pioneer in Electronic Dance Music (EDM)

Tommy‘s musical tastes don’t stop at rock. He formed the electronic-laced rap-metal band Methods of Mayhem and has toured the world for years as an EDM DJ under the name “Electro Mayhem.” He even performed with Deadmau5 on his 2011 tour.

8. His Son Once Knocked Him Unconscious

Tommy‘s relationship with his two sons (from his marriage to Anderson), Brandon and Dylan, has been complicated. In 2018, a physical altercation between Tommy and Brandon made headlines, reportedly leaving Tommy unconscious. The two have since publicly reconciled.

9. He Played Keyboards for Deftones

In a true “hidden gem” moment, Tommy showed his range by playing keyboards with Deftones at a 2009 benefit show for their late bassist, Chi Cheng.

10. His Wildest Studio Story is on a Nine Inch Nails Album

During the recording of Nine Inch Nails‘ The Downward Spiral, Tommy brought adult film performers to the studio as a “birthday present.” He later recounted that the sounds of one performer were accidentally recorded by studio mics, which Trent Reznor then reversed and used at the beginning of the track “Big Man With a Gun.”

11. He Has His Own Autobiography

In 2005, Tommy released his autobiography, Tommyland. It was released concurrently with his second solo album, Tommyland: The Ride, which served as the book’s official “soundtrack.”

12. He Joined OnlyFans in 2022

In a move that surprised no one, Tommy Lee brought his career full circle by launching an OnlyFans account. He announced it at a Mötley Crüe show in Las Vegas, solidifying his status as the king of shock value and public self-expression.

13. He’s Had Several Public Fights with Other Rock Stars

Tommy‘s temper is as legendary as his drumming. He’s been involved in widely publicized physical altercations with his own bandmate Vince Neil, Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose, and Kid Rock.

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Tommy Lee: FAQ

Q1: What is Tommy Lee’s real name? A1: His birth name is Thomas Lee Bass.

Q2: Who is Tommy Lee married to now? A2: Tommy Lee is currently married to social media personality and former Vine star Brittany Furlan, whom he wed in 2019.

Q3: What is Tommy Lee’s net worth? A3: Tommy Lee‘s net worth is estimated to be around $70 million, thanks to his decades with Mötley Crüe, his solo music, and his reality TV ventures.

Q4: What bands has Tommy Lee been in? A4: Besides Mötley Crüe, Tommy founded Methods of Mayhem and has released several solo albums. He also briefly played with the L.A. band Suite 19 before Mötley Crüe formed.

Q5: Has Tommy Lee written any books? A5: Yes, his autobiography, Tommyland, was released in 2005.

Band Bio: Mötley Crüe

Mötley Crüe is one of the most iconic and notorious heavy metal bands in history. Formed in Los Angeles in 1981, the band’s classic lineup consists of bassist Nikki Sixx, drummer Tommy Lee, lead singer Vince Neil, and guitarist Mick Mars.

They defined the 1980s glam metal scene with their hard-hitting anthems, outrageous stage shows, and debauched lifestyles. Their discography includes seminal, multi-platinum albums like Shout At The Devil (1983), Girls, Girls, Girls (1987), and their masterpiece, Dr. Feelgood (1989). After a “farewell” tour in 2015, the band famously tore up their “cessation of touring” agreement and reunited in 2019 for a massive, record-breaking stadium tour, cementing their legacy as undisputed rock legends.

The post Tommy Lee Net Worth, Age, Wife And 13 Facts About The Mötley Crüe Drummer appeared first on Loaded Radio.

The post Edgar Allan Poe Merch: Gothic Prints & Dark Apparel Explained appeared first on Edgar Allan Poets – Noir Rock Band.

Ascending UK hard rockers Burning Circus have just released their engrossing new single, “Rodeo”. Check out the video for the track here. With the band on the rise, we asked them to exclusively give us the five songs that have greatly influenced their sound: ● Alex Danko Jones – “We Sweat Blood” “We Sweat Blood” … Continue reading Exclusive: Burning Circus tell us their influences

From losing his father at an early age to transforming metal with Sepultura and Soulfly, Max Cavalera looks back on a life on the front lines of metal

From losing his father at an early age to transforming metal with Sepultura and Soulfly, Max Cavalera looks back on a life on the front lines of metal

(written by Islander) For people of a certain age and living in a certain time, melodic death metal opened a magical musical portal. Principally originating in Sweden, it eventually led enormous numbers of listeners around the globe (including this writer) into new worlds. Other portals forged of metal were opening at the same time, and […]

The post AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VANIR — “WYRD” appeared first on NO CLEAN SINGING.