Live Review: Tuk Smith & The Restless Hearts – KK’s Steel Mill, Wolverhampton
23rd July 2026 Support: Tender Vendetta, Blanco Negra Words & Photos: Tim Finch
Thursday nights are not usually reserved for unfiltered rock and roll, but those good people at KK’s Steel Mill had other ideas, with Georgia’s Tuk Smith & The Restless Hearts bringing their brand of swaggering, high-energy rock to Wolverhampton, backed by support from Blanco Negra and Tender Vendetta. It’s an occasion for KK’s big room tonight, purely as the Lounge is otherwise occupied, but the huge stage gave each band the chance to really strut their stuff.
Blanco Negra had the task of getting the crowd moving early, and they wasted little time in doing exactly that. The Black Country three piece opened with the punchy ‘Wild and Crazy’, immediately establishing their upbeat hard rock credentials before rolling into ‘(You Set My) Heart on Fire’
The middle of the set kept the momentum high. Sunshine Girl’ brought a welcome melodic lift, while ‘Nothing’s Going To Stop Me Now’ delivered the kind of feel-good anthem that had heads nodding throughout the venue. Closing with the recently released ‘Hard Cold Lover’, Blanco Negra left a lasting impression adding a pink twist to their impressive sound.. While many in attendance had arrived for Tuk Smith, Blanco Negra ensured they earned plenty of new admirers.
With only six songs to make an impression, Tender Vendetta wasted no time getting down to business. Opening with ‘Kamikaze Love’, the Wolverhampton outfit immediately injected a shot of energy into KK’s Steel Mill, delivering a set packed with attitude. They may have been one of two support acts for Tuk Smith, but they approached the evening like it was their own headline show.
The momentum continued through ‘Daisy Chain’ and the brooding ‘Drown’, their performance tight throughout. A spirited cover of The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ proved to be a smart choice, taking the classic and giving it a heavier, dirtier punch that fitted naturally alongside their own material.
Closing with ‘I’ll Do Me’ and ‘Life’s A Bitch’, Tender Vendetta finished on a high, leaving the audience warmed up and fully engaged ahead of the night’s main event. Their stage presence continues to grow with every performance, and the chemistry between the band members is becoming increasingly apparent, a band destined for bigger things.
KK’s Steel Mill is built for rock’n’roll, and Tuk Smith & The Restless Hearts arrived in Wolverhampton with to make the venue feel like home. Tuk wasted no time in delivering exactly that, stepping out with the confidence of a frontman who knows how to command a room and a band that clearly understands the power of a great live show.
From the opening moments they played with a raw, relentless energy. The set moved between swaggering rockers and more melodic moments without ever losing momentum, with Smith throwing himself into every song. There was banter between tracks, Tuk happy to return to Wolverhampton, even joking with one attendee “didn’t I dance with you last time? Didn’t you grab my ass?”
Tuk Smith has a clear affection for the classic ingredients of rock music, but the songs never felt like exercises in nostalgia. There was a sense of urgency running through the entire set, with the band sounding hungry and determined. The Restless Hearts brought the muscle, Smith brought the charisma, and together they created a set that was as much about connection as it was volume.
It’s Eleven Records is pleased to present SURALIN’s sixth release,“EVERY DAY SLICES ME,” which wi be released on vinyl on September 11, 2026, via It’s Eleven Records and distributed by CARGO RECORDS. “After 17 years as a band, Suralin is releasing their first 7-inch. Timely, one might cynically
Look, I’ll freely admit that I listen to and love some truly pretentious death metal. Hell, I ranked Ingurgitating Oblivion’s last album as my seventh favorite in 2024, and that album has its head so far up its ass that it popped back out of its neckhole while shrinking its spine into a Jimothy monster. The world, however, requires balance. I need music that’s barely graduated elementary school as much as I need the PhDs in my life. Minneapolis’ Nothingness is here to say “fuck school!” and beat you with a textbook rather than read it.
Release date: July 31, 2026. Everlasting Spew.
Album number three, Godslaughter, kicks into gear with a sub-two-minute beater that opens with a slightly more ignorance-tinged version of a mid-tempo riff that Cannibal Corpse would gladly wield with murderous glee. That’s largely the name of the game here: simpler riffs that flit and fly from breakdown chugs to grinding crushers with straightforward drumming and a delightfully rowdy vocal performance.
“Skull Evulsion” is our most primitive effort that spends most of its time going at a relatively feral speed and sports a fantastic echoing BLEGH right when you need it. “Trenchant Glunch” starts with a stuttering beatdown before firing off some wonderfully violent and layered tremolos supported by potent blasts, along with a breakdown that has a rather delightful bit of a bounce to it. The aptly titled “Incredible Violence” marches through your ears with a militant start but unloads the album’s best strut-savy riff around the one-minute mark. “Umbral Spear” spends a few second being fancy with a synth, but that small moment of breathing room makes churning guitar work all the more impactful when it returns. The guest lead on that track is also a nice touch.
Truly, vocalist Barclay Olson is the star of the show. He consistently switches up what he’s doing add a lot of flavor to each song. He has some strong bellow and raspy highs, but he gets downright vomitous at times. The layered vocal outro on “Incredible Violence” sounds like someone falling into a hellvoid; He’ll intentionally reduce enunciation to get these gnarly sounds like he’s choking on his own vomit; and my favorite moment is late on “Trenchant Glunch” when it sounds like someone is shoving a wad of cotton balls down his throat like this Godzilla gif:
Where Nothingness struggles a bit is trying to reach beyond their strengths. Three of these nine tracks float around the seven-minute mark. Closer “Novus Hegemonikon” is the best of the three. It opens with some bongos and wooden frog instrument sounds to set the stage that we’re shifting toward the end. From there, the song effectively builds on itself and continues to bring some new, but not outlandish or ill-fitting elements and ideas into the fold. The practice of a slightly longer closer that tries some new things is a well-practiced approach across metal and works quite well here. “Vanquishing Providence” and “Divine Irresponsibility,” on the other hand, don’t work quite so well, in no small part because they are sat right next to each other in the middle of the album. Neither song is offensive on its own, but they have similar tempo swings and neither one really comes across like a particularly cohesive song that justifies its length; they each feel like some cool parts sewn together and that makes the middle of the album drag a little bit. Godslaughter is not ruined by this, but the experience is dampened a bit.
I guess what I would say is, there’s no need for these boys to be reaching for an associate’s degree when crafting their next album. Sure, audit a few classes and weave in those learnings a bit here and there with songs like the closer, but Nothingess is most impactful when they’re tearing up high school diplomas and smooshing faces into goo on the playground to make their album art.
Tori Amos was born in Newton, North Carolina, during a stop on her family’s move from Washington, D.C., and grew up in Baltimore and Silver Spring, Maryland, where her father served as a Methodist minister. A musical prodigy who could reproduce music after hearing it, she entered the preparatory division of the Peabody Institute at age five. She lost her scholarship at eleven after resisting the school’s emphasis on reading classical music, and by thirteen she was performing in piano bars around Washington, D.C., with her father acting as her chaperone. Demo tapes sent to record labels eventually led to
Rating: 9 / 10 Stars FIREFLAME is: Mr. Big Fire (vocals), FireRay (guitar/leader), Fire.J (guitar), Connie Flames (bass), and Show. G. Flame (drums) REVIEW – There is a difference between simply playing heavy metal and […]
Prior this Friday’s official release of their new studio album Ataraxia, the Swedes Allt have released a music video for the last new single called “Avalon”. Read more…
Metallica’s landmark debut album Kill ’Em All was ground zero for the thrash metal scene, but they weren’t hanging around for anybody. Their second album, Ride The Lightning, was released just a year and two days later, on July 27, 1984.
That record instantly opened up a gulf between Metallica and the rest of the burgeoning thrash pack. Sure, it had the energy, power and vodka-fuelled velocity of its predecessor, but it also had the kind of ideas, ambition and confidence that the competition couldn’t even dream of. Metallica may have laid down the markers for this new scene, but it was clear that there was way more to them than just thrash metal.
More than 40 years on, Ride The Lightning stands as the band’s first true step to greatness. Here, drummer Lars Ulrich and guitarist Kirk Hammett talk us through the tracks that opened up the next chapter in the thrash metal story and pointed the way towards Metallica’s glorious future.
Fight Fire With Fire
After the youthful thrash of Kill ’Em All, the opening track of Ride The Lightning was the most startling thing Metallica had recorded yet: a gentle intro gives way to a relentless sonic assault that was even faster than anything on the debut. The sound of band who knew the future would be theirs.
Kirk: The main riff was around on the Kill ’Em All tour. I remember hearing it on a riff tape, so the seeds were around even then. The acoustic intro was something that Cliff [Burton, bass] would play on the acoustic guitar all the time – and I mean all the fucking time (laughs). We weren’t trying to provoke anybody with that intro – it was a natural thing. I didn’t see any limitations to what we wanted to do. The possibilities were sky high. And you have to understand, we were creating our own playing field here. We were going to places that no one else had gone before, and we were happy going there. It made sense to try weird new things out – why not?
Ride The Lightning
Kirk’s slicing guitar intro ushers in a stone-cold classic Metalli-riff in this tale of a death row inmate facing the long walk to the electric chair. The first of many Metallica songs to tackle the big topics: death, claustrophobia and the inescapable hand of fate.
Lars:Ride The Lightning is a song about being trapped in a situation you can’t get out of. Big Brother, The Man, fear and manipulation. Those sort of things became the lyrical tentpoles over the next couple of records.
Kirk: I was the one who spotted the phrase ‘ride the lightning’. It was when we were recording the first album, when we were staying the house of this guy named Gary Zefting. I was reading the book The Stand by Stephen King, waiting to do my parts, and I read that phrase. It stuck in my head, so I wrote it down and told James. He was, like, ‘Whoah, cool…’
For Whom The Bell Tolls
In which Metallica showed they were capable of more than just heads-down thrashing: a sweeping mini-epic that was loosely inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel of the same name. That immortal intro is actually built around a Cliff Burton bass part…
Lars: We often use For Whom The Bell Tolls as a reference point for chasing simplicity. Which we never seem to be able to do any more (laughs).
Kirk: That was a key song for us. Again, that intro was a Cliff thing – he’d play it all the time, and the rest of us would stiffen up and go, ‘What the heck was that?’ That was completely his own creation – it’s just this weird chromatic thing, the note choice. It’s just highly unconventional even to this day. Did anyone ask us to make the intro shorter? No, we were all 100 per cent committed to every single note, every single beat.
Fade To Black
The album’s big left-turn – a brooding semi-acoustic ballad. At the time, thrash purists screamed “sell-out!”
Lars: Everybody seemed to be caught off-guard by the fact we’d done it. We surprised everyone but ourselves. You can hear that the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal inspired the first record. But if you step back further than that, you get to Deep Purple’s Child In Time and Judas Priest’s Beyond The Realms Of Death, even Stairway To Heaven – those big, brooding, epic songs. That kind of song was always in the background for us – we knew in our hearts that was part of the Metallica sound, but we just didn’t have the skill or finesse to tackle it on Kill ’Em All. By the time Cliff and Kirk had come onboard, we felt we had the ability to go down that path.
Why did people react to it the way they did at the time?
Lars: Probably because there was a group of people who had a different view of what Metallica was – that we were a lot more of a one-dimensional entity. Often I feel like there’s two Metallicas. There’s the Metallica I live and breathe every day, and then there’s the Metallica I read about. Those are often two contradictory thing. The things that people get caught off-guard about are completely normal in my mind, but maybe we don’t do a good enough job of explaining them.
Trapped Under Ice
Like the title track, it featured ideas Kirk Hammett brought along from his old band, Exodus – in this case the riff in the verse is based around that band’s then-unreleased song Impaler.
Kirk: They came from songs I had written, music I had written. I consider them my parts. I didn’t feel guilty about that, but I did feel guilty about leaving the band I started in high school. I’ve known [Exodus drummer] Tom Hunting since I was 16 years old, I’ve known [Exodus guitarist] Gary Holt since I was 17. We’re all close to this day, but there was a lot of guilt there for a while. A little bit of remorse. But I really felt that Metallica was my calling. I felt more comfortable playing in Metallica than I ever did in Exodus, so go figure.
Escape
Metallica’s attempt to write a hit single. Nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests.
Lars: It’s become this folklore that I hate Escape. It’s not true! It was the last song that was written for the Ride The Lightning sessions, and it was purposely kept a little shorter than the other songs. We thought of it in the spirit of Iron Maiden’s Run To the Hill or Judas Priest’s Living After Midnight – dare I use the words ‘radio songs’? So instead of turning it into an eight-minute Seek And Destroy type of thing, we kept it on the short side. Then it got a bad rap, and I don’t know why. I don’t have a particular problem with it, but it never became a live staple like the other songs on the record. It just goes to show that you’re better off not trying to do things on purpose.
Metallica in 1985. From left: Cliff Burton, Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett. (Image credit: Ross Marino/Getty Images)
Creeping Death
Long before Enter Sandman, Metallica’s signature song was this quasi-biblical epic, complete with the immortal ‘Die by my hand!’ refrain. A staple of the band’s live set for the last three decades.
Lars: Musically it was one of those songs that came quickly, and then became its own thing just as quickly. Lyrically, when I was a kid I was obsessed with the movie The Ten Commandments, with Charlton Heston. We didn’t have a VCR, so James and I went down to Cliff’s parents house with The Ten Commandments, and we sat and watched the movie. There’s a scene where Moses goes back to try and get his people out of Egypt, and when the Pharaoh reneges on that, the firstborn must die. Then this fog appears out of the moon and comes down and starts creeping across the ground, smoke machine-style, and everybody who’s caught in it falls over and dies on the spot. That’s where the words ‘Creeping Death’ come from. If you watch The Ten Commandments and read the lyrics, there’s definitely a… how can I put this… similarity.
The Call Of Ktulu
The album’s grand finale picked up where Kill ’Em All’s Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth) left off: an epic instrumental that showcased the supreme confidence of a band who had truly found themselves.
Kirk: That’s another song I remember hearing on the Kill ’Em All tour. Was their any resistance to playing something as complex as this? No. We were getting better as musicians, getting better playing with each other. I think the infusion of new blood, Cliff and I, probably helped. It was inspiring for the other two guys. Everyone had respect for each other, we were moving forward, we could see it happening in front of our eyes. It was a time of discovery. We were doing things that sounded like they came from us. On a real gut level, we knew what was right for us and we knew what wasn’t, what was working and what wasn’t.
