Linkin Park teamed up with America’s Got Talent winner Nene Royal for a performance of 2024 single The Emptiness Machine during the results show of the US talent competition last night.
16-year-old Royal performed with the Diamond-selling nu metal icons shortly before being named as the winner of this year’s series at the end of the show. She also joined The Warning onstage and jammed the Mexican alt-rockers’ song Kerosene. Watch both performances below.
Royal, the first Thai woman to ever win America’s Got Talent, became a fan-favourite through the series thanks to her vocal and guitar covers of such rock and heavy metal acts as The Cranberries, Soundgarden and Muse. Her winning performance took place at the grand final on Tuesday, when she covered The White Stripes’ signature track Seven Nation Army.
Linkin Park’s appearance precedes the theatrical release of their new documentary/concert film, Unshatter, next week. Directed by band member Joe Hahn, the film follows the band’s return from their extended hiatus, which began shortly after lead singer Chester Bennington died in July 2017, aged 41. It features archival recordings, clips from the sessions for their 2024 comeback album, From Zero, and footage from a show in São Paulo, Brazil on their 2024 tour.
From Zero was released on November 15, 2024, and was the band’s first album to feature Emily Armstrong, who replaced Bennington, and drummer Colin Brittain, replacing co-founder Rob Bourdon. The album topped charts worldwide and has already sold more than 1,600,000 units or equivalent.
In June, Linkin Park became the first band with a female vocalist to headline Download at Donington Race Track, the largest rock and heavy metal festival in the UK. Vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Mike Shinoda responded to the distinction during a BBC interview that weekend.
“So, I’ll start with the fact that I don’t feel like I should be answering the question, that Emily should be answering, so I went and asked her, because she can’t be here right now,” he said.
“I asked her and she said: ‘If it wasn’t us, it would’ve just been someone else, because there are so many great female-fronted bands.’ But, she’s so grateful, she wanted you guys to know, she’s so grateful that she is the one and that she’ll remember it forever.”
The band have no future live shows announced at time of publication.
(written by Islander) Everlasting Spew Records has made yet another astounding discovery, which it will share with listeners who are eager for music that’s off the usual beaten paths and capable of making deep emotional impressions. This time the discovery concerns a Portuguese black metal trio who call themselves Chants, and their debut album Echoes, […]
Julia Jacklin is changing her mind. There’s power in that. When I spoke with the Melbourne-based musician about her last album Pre Pleasure, in 2022, she imagined that her future self might approach music with more calculation. “Maybe when I have a bit more time, I’ll come in with real intentions. But at the moment, whatever happens is what the record is,” she told me. When we reconnect over a quick Zoom chat during release week for its follow-up, The Gem, Jacklin feels differently. She’s not seeking more control; she’s learning to let it go. In making The Gem, she embraced the chaos of her process and, in doing so, arrived at something that feels unmistakably her own.
We Came As Romans have released “Born From Nothing”, the first brand new song from their upcoming album All Is Beautiful… Because We’re Doomed: Circularity. Pre-orders for the album open Friday, September 25, ahead of its release on November 6 via Sharptone Records.
Taking the life, death and rebirth cycle at the heart of the band’s 2025 album, Circularity now explores the liminal space between its final breath and its next beginning. Four brand new songs follow the self out of physical life, through the afterlife and towards rebirth, while six existing tracks have been rebuilt through collaborations featuring Make Them Suffer, Currents, After The Burial, Heavensgate, Rory Rodriguez of Dayseeker, Ladrones, Headwreckand Bury Tomorrow.
Speaking on the upcoming album, We Came As Romans share: “Circularity isn’t just a deluxe edition with more songs. It’s a bigger version of the album that brings it back to where it started. Each original song was the call, and each collaboration became the response, turning what was a straight line into a loop. We sent these songs out into the world, they connected us with people who have become part of our lives, and they came back to us changed, carrying another voice. The features aren’t guests so much as our circle: the people, places, and influences that were always part of this story, now visible in the tracklist. What you create doesn’t stay yours. It travels, it changes, and it returns different.
The new songs explore the other side of that circle: what we carry forward, what we have to leave behind, and what it costs to keep repeating the past. “Born From Nothing” sits at the center of that. It’s about being trapped in the same cycles and realizing that constantly moving isn’t the same as moving forward. Sometimes it’s easier to stay in motion than to be still long enough to face your past, your mistakes, or the ways you’ve stood in your own way. The song captures that moment of surrender, when you stop circling who you used to be and ask for the chance to begin again. To me, Circularity completes the cycle while also starting a new one.”
Within Circularity, four brand new songs explore the space between death and rebirth. “When Everything Is Still”, “Dead Silent” Featuring Make Them Suffer, “Born From Nothing” and “Speak to Exist” now appear at the front of the tracklist, forming the passage between the closing “Because We’re Doomed” And “All Is Beautiful…” within the original album’s circular structure. Each collaborator on the six reimagined tracks was invited to rework the song in question, taking the collection far beyond the usual ‘guest features’. The result is a collection of companion songs to the originals that feature a brand-new chorus on “b2tm O” courtesy of Bury Tomorrow and flamenco guitar on “culture wound O” which has also now been recorded completely in Spanish, following Dave Stephens becoming fluent so he could communicate with his wife’s Colombian family.
Across its new passage and reimagined collaborations, All Is Beautiful… Because We’re Doomed: Circularity creates a further phase in album’s cycle that the listener must travel through. Death creates stillness. Stillness creates clarity. Clarity creates choice. From that choice, life becomes possible again.
We Came As Romans will spend the fall on the road across North America, including dates with Wage War, Varials, Cane Hill, and The Funeral Portrait, alongside appearances at Four Chord Festival, Furnace Fest and, in 2027, on the Emo’s Not Dead Cruise. Tickets and current information are available here.
The other day, I got a Facebook message from the Philadelphia band New Dawn Fades. They wanted to share their debut album with me, which was released back in March of this year. I know I must have my ego in check, because I am still astounded by the fact that bands would want to share their music with me, as if somehow my opinion on it is important.
I am not naive. I know I am a really good writer and wrote a whole book on the underground stoner/doom scene and, I am not sure if I have even plugged my own book here?
Sonic Seducer – Sunil Singh
Jeff Woods is a Canadian music icon. He has interviewed the likes of Jimmy Page and David Bowie. But, at the end of the day, I am just an obsessive fan of heavy music, which always overrides any potential to start thinking about myself in any other way. Jeff Woods is my inspiration for that. Tons of knowledge and tons of humility.
So, through that lens of musical obsession, I gave this unsolicited album a listen.
First of all, as with my last album review, the debut album by Mothertomb, I loved the album cover. Band name in the upper left-hand corner, single-word album title at the bottom, and the rest of the space just sheer apocalyptic beauty.
New Dawn Fades – Lores – Out Now
While the band’s name comes from the Joy Division song, already giving me cool vibes about the band, my brain went to something far more obscure. Warrior Soul, one of my favourite bands of all time, had a song called Shine Like It on their criminally overlooked album Salutations From The Ghetto Nation, which was released in 1992.
One of the final lyrics is “…the new age begins at dawn.”
How appropriate, as the band feverishly mines everything dark and cool from that decade. And their band name is more than appropriate, as that “new age” that Kory Clarke trumpeted like a clarion call of revolution did not just fade in the ’90s. It literally blew up.
But in the aftermath, it was not only the early days of the stoner/doom scene, but a legacy of alternative/grunge that would need decades to sift through and organically reference.
Enter New Dawn Fades.
A great way to start is by referencing a line from a review by Steve Howe, who writes for Outlaws Of The Sun. “Lores is an absolute high-octane barrage of killer riffs. Listening to it, you’d swear it was a curated ‘GREATEST HITS’ compilation rather than an inaugural record.”
That is exactly how I felt listening to song after song after song. But it is important to dig deep into the alchemy that is going on, because it is easy to reach for that catalogue of greatness and either fall flat or get tagged with being a clone of an era.
The first song, Villains Come To Light, begins with the charm of some high school kids thrashing away in their garage trying to piss off their neighbours. The song quickly settles into a cocktail of Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, already giving hints that the band is capable of taking trippy detours.
Peak 1992 arrives in the next song, Meet Me At Sundown, which has Danzig nods, but still commands the vocal delivery that opened the album.
Just two songs in, there is no surprise where New Dawn Fades find their core influences, but what they do with them is unpredictable. It feels like the band wants to literally push the great music of the ’90s into feeling contemporary and vital.
Souls arrives with familiar doom energy and groove, mixing in some sinister atmosphere. But two minutes into the song, there is this wonderful galloping energy of mid-’70s Sabbath. Everything eventually settles back into the signature dirge/doom that opened this song. There are moments of musical precision, but the song knows itself well, and fuzz wins the day here.
Around this moment, I realise I am feeling a lot of the energy/groove/attitude in this Mindfunk song. It is from their second album Dropped, released in 1993. The title refers to them being dropped by their label Epic prior to recording this album, which has gone on to be one of the cult classics of the ’90s.
The rest of the album carries, unknowingly, the aura of that album. Goddess had more of a spiritual/airy feel. Lores clearly is more earthy/desert sand aplenty. But there is a binding confidence, swagger, and songwriting looseness that connects these two albums, more than 30 years apart.
Almost every band in the scene has some Sabbath influence tattooed into their music. The ’90s were one of the most explosive periods in rock history, with many bands like Warrior Soul and Mindfunk falling through the cracks.
Lores is a scholarly romp through that period, but there is enough modern dust and sand to make the album feel contemporary and complete.
The bar keeps getting raised for debut albums in the scene. New Dawn Fades is another band that has cleared that bar.
Audrey Hobert is an American singer-songwriter born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles. Before launching her own recording career, she studied screenwriting at New York University and worked in television, including as a staff writer on the Nickelodeon series The Really Loud House. Music eventually became the center of her creative life, helped by a long friendship with singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams. Hobert brought the same sharp eye for dialogue and character that shaped her screenwriting into conversational pop songs built around humor, embarrassment, romance, and self-awareness. Hobert first became widely known as a songwriter through her work
The Baltimore-born, New York-based artist serpentwithfeet continues to explore R&B tradition through the lens of queer sexuality, a rich basis for a fascinating career. After releasing the 2024 album Grip and its 2025 companion piece Grip Sequel, serpentwithfeet is coming back with a new EP called Sentinel. Its title track, co-produced with Brandon Juhan and Rahm, takes serpentwithfeet back to his gospel roots, combining lost and pleading vocals with murky, IDM-adjacent programming. Here’s what the artist says about it:
The trailer for the upcoming concert film ‘OZZY & BLACK SABBATH: Back To The Beginning’ has been revealed, and you can already tell it’s going to be an emotional watch.
The film, documenting Black Sabbath’s last ever show and Ozzy Osbourne’s last live appearance before his passing 17 days later, is set to be shown in cinemas across the world on October 28.
And based on the trailer, professionally shot footage of not just the band’s performance but of every other band that turned out and gave their all on the day, it is going to demonstrate just what a spectacle it was. A once in a lifetime event that will can, and never should, be replicated. Two hours and thirty-five minutes of metal royalty in action.
The full list of performances featured in the film are as follows:
Ozzy Osbourne
I Don’t Know
Mastodon
Supernaut
Rival Sons
Electric Funeral
Anthrax
Into the Void
Halestorm
Perry Mason
Tool
Hand Of Doom
Ozzy Osbourne
Mr Crowley
Tom Morello’s All Stars ft David Draiman, Jake E. Lee, David Ellefson, Mike Bordin, Adam Wakeman
Shot in the Dark
Tom Morello’s All Stars ft Whitfield Crane, Scott Ian, Nuno Bettencourt, Frank Bello, II (Sleep Token), Adam Wakeman
Believer
Tom Morello’s All Stars ft YUNGBLUD, Nuno Bettencourt, Frank Bello, II (Sleep Token), Adam Wakeman
Changes
Lamb of God
Children of the Grave
Alice In Chains
Fairies Wear Boots
Gojira
Under the Sun
Pantera
Electric Funeral
Slayer
Wicked World
Ozzy Osbourne
Suicide Solution
Tom Morello’s All Stars ft Travis Barker, Danny Carey, Chad Smith, Tom Morello, Nuno Bettencourt, Rudy Sarzo
Symptom Of The Universe
Tom Morello’s All Stars ft Billy Corgan, Tom Morello, K.K. Downing, Adam Jones, Rudy Sarzo, Danny Carey
Snowblind
Tom Morello’s All Stars ft Sammy Hagar, Nuno Bettencourt, Adam Wakeman, Rudy Sarzo, Chad Smith, Vernon Reid
Flying High Again
Tom Morello’s All Stars ft Papa V Perpetua, Vernon Reid, Nuno Bettencourt, Adam Wakeman, Rudy Sarzo, Travis Barker
Bark At The Moon
Tom Morello’s All Stars ft Steven Tyler, Ronnie Wood, Nuno Bettencourt, Tom Morello, Andrew Watt, Rudy Sarzo, Travis Barker
The Train Kept A-Rollin’
Tom Morello’s All Stars ft Steven Tyler, Nuno Bettencourt, Tom Morello, Andrew Watt, Rudy Sarzo, Chad Smith
Walk This Way
Guns ‘N’ Roses
Never Say Die
Metallica
Hole In The Sky
Ozzy Osbourne
Crazy Train
Black Sabbath
War Pigs
Black Sabbath
N.I.B.
Black Sabbath
Iron Man
Black Sabbath
Paranoid
Ozzy Osbourne
Mama I’m Coming Home
Have a watch for yourself below:
You can also book your tickets for your local showings and find out where they are, right now too. Find out more right here.
Sebadoh are celebrating 30 years of their sixth album Harmacy. The indie rockers announced an anniversary edition today, and an alternate version of the track “Beauty Of The Ride” is out now.
