Today, Belgian razorgrind band Leng Tch’e are releasing their first single in nearly a decade. "Hammered into Collapse" sets the tone for their upcoming two-song EP, which includes another new song in "Voided." You can check out a video for the title track below. The two-song EP Hammered into Collapse comes out on all digital platforms October 23, … Read More/Discuss on Metal Underground.com
Macklemore has been in the news a lot lately. The onetime pop-rap hitmaker was among the first mainstream figures to protest against Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine and to loudly and accurately use the word “genocide” to describe it. Macklemore was booked as an opener on Ed Sheeran’s current stadium tour, but Sheeran dropped him at the behest of stadium owner Robert Kraft. Famously, this led to every other opener on that tour, as well as Sheeran’s own backing band, quitting the tour in solidarity. Sheeran said that he’s “not complicit,” then cried about it onstage. Meanwhile, Macklemore continues to take actual action.
Evanescence have announced that they will be releasing a special expanded edition of their 2006 sophomore album ‘The Open Door’.
‘The Open Door’ was released on September 25, 2006 and found the band building on the immense success of their debut ‘Fallen’ in some style. Grandiose in scale and sound, it focused in on the elements of the band that made them such a sensation and enhanced them tenfold. More unforgiving, more hard-hitting and more orchestrally bold.
The remastered and expanded release will arrive on November 06 via Craft Recordings and be available on 2-LP, CD, and digital, and feature four bonus tracks. They are If You Don’t Mind’, ‘Together Again’, ‘The Last Song I’m Wasting On You’ and a previously unreleased demo of ‘Good Enough’.
Vocalist Amy Lee had this to say about the release:
“The Open Door was such an important time for me, pushing boundaries and feeding my desire to experiment and grow. I wanted to connect on a deeper level, and fought for a future for the music I loved. It was beyond worth it. The fact that it resonates with so many people 20 years later means so much to me.”
The full tracklisting looks like this:
1. Sweet Sacrifice 2. Call Me When You’re Sober 3. Weight of the World 4. Lithium 5. Cloud Nine 6. Snow White Queen 7. Lacrymosa 8. Like You 9. Lose Control 10. The Only One 11. Your Star 12. All That I’m Living For 13. Good Enough 14. If You Don’t Mind 15. Together Again 16. The Last Song I’m Wasting On You 17. Good Enough (Demo Version)
The band released their latest album ‘Sanctuary’ earlier this year.
Bullet For My Valentine will release their new album, Social Apocalypse, on March 19th, 2027, via Spinefarm. The announcement arrives with a towering new single by the same name. “Social Apocalypse” is the band’s first new song in four years; on the title track, Matt Tuck rages against “the end of the world as we know it”, when “all hope has faded”.
Thematically, Social Apocalypse combines the bare-faced lyrical introspection of people weathered and worn by the modern world with wide-eyed observations on a planet that feels as if it is coming off the rails at every turn. “Everything in life is changing at such a rapid pace, and it is hard to find a great deal of positivity when you look at events in the world,” Tuck says. “People are being pitted against each other. The world is full of conflict instead of unity. As a father, I look at what the world is like for younger people, and how completely different it is now.”
Working once more with producer Carl Bown, a veteran of four Bullet albums, alongside work with Sleep Token, While She Sleeps, Malevolence and more, each new album track was diligently scrutinised, constructed and polished to its immaculate final form. “Carl doesn’t let you settle,” Tuck notes. “He is always ready to speak up, push and challenge you to be the best version of you.”
There are two collaborations on Social Apocalypse, a rarity for Bullet that brings thrilling new dynamics to the record, with Against The Current vocalist Chrissy Costanza stepping in to duet on “In The Absence Of You” and a hair-raising vocal turn from Lorna Shore’s Will Ramos on “I Don’t Trust Tomorrow”.
A very special limited white-label first pressing of Social Apocalypse is available for pre-order exclusive via Ceremony of Roses, for 72 hrs only. For digital listeners, you can now pre-save the album here.
Then, on September 28th, a full range of offerings go on pre-sale, including standard and deluxe vinyl variants and a signed version of the CD. Head to bulletformyvalentine.com for more information.
Matt Tuck describes the creation of every Bullet For My Valentine album as a “journey”. Each, the frontman attests, is about capturing the essence of a moment in time; a freeze-frame snapshot of its creators and the world around them. Nothing forced, nothing scripted, nothing disingenuous. Such purity of creation is a methodology that has led to Bullet For My Valentine establishing themselves as one of Britain’s all-time most celebrated rock and metal exports.
The culmination of experiences and achievements is writ large across Social Apocalypse, their eighth full-length album, which comprises a lifetime’s learnings and inspirations and definitively captures every facet of the Bullet For My Valentine sound in masterfully-honed results. Reminiscent of the band’s storied past without ever being repetitive of it, it’s with a steely-eyed determination to break new ground that the beloved hallmarks of Bullet For My Valentine past and present are now refocused and reenergised for the future.
Bullet For My Valentine have today announced their biggest tour yet; taking in arenas all over the UK & Europe. Having sold-out The O2 arena, London, last year as part of their co-headline run with Trivium, they are now returning as the sole headline act.
Pendulum will perform as very special guest across all shows, with Dark Devine appearing as openers. Tickets go on-sale Wednesday 30th September at 9am here.
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
