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Just like the Kevin Bacon game, try to get to the Melvins within six steps. 

For example: 

Napalm Death → Melvins

(Amateur Hour considering they did an album together)

Frank Sinatra → Bono → U2 → Brian Eno → David Bowie → Pat Smear → Melvins

(Now that is advanced. What’s next? Cannibal Corpse? Iron Maiden? Foo Fighters? Taylor Swift?)

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An unsuspecting tourist walked past a security guard to ask what was happening at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Oregon on August 10. Thinking the guy was expecting news of a salsa lesson or an advanced hemp yarn knitting bonanza, the guard said, “Well, the band got a special dispensation from the city to go ten decibels over the regular limit tonight.” Safe to assume the tourist has never heard of Melvins.

To those outside of metal, the legacy Melvins have built may not be obvious. Having never been a stadium-filling band, they are not a household name. But to those who pay attention, the band is hard to avoid. And most of that has not only to do with longevity, but a willingness to evolve without chasing trends. As Buzz Osborne asserts in the documentary Colossus of Destiny, “I’m trying to make a living and remain true to what I believed in the beginning. And… mission accomplished.”

This is an attitude one can afford if stadiums are not the goal. Not that there is anything wrong with stadiums, but Melvins have said they would rather fill a 2,000-capacity venue than play a half-filled arena. What matters the most is the music and how it hits the audience. Not how the audience hears the music, but how they are hit. One must be willing to take the punch.

It is that devotion to low-end, drop-D tuning, and larger kick drums that forms the bedrock of grunge, with roots in both metal and punk. As the years went by, Melvins started torturing time signatures and linear songwriting to blow past any conventions in their way.

Returning to the August 10th show in Portland, what was immediately obvious in the thunderous opener “Digging the Ditch” is that the addition of the second drummer, Coady Willis, has brought the sonic level to new heights. Many bands have tried it, but Melvins have incorporated the dual drum idea to thrust more air off the stage. Dale Crover and Coady Willis are locked in at all times and the payoff is huge.

And, in true Melvins fashion, the third song of the set would confound many. “Sway,” from the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, might seem like an odd choice for the bosses of bottom end, but Buzz has long declared his admiration for ‘70s era Stones. Of course, it was quite a bit heavier than Mick and Keith. 

But if any in Portland that night had doubts about whether the sound ordinance exception was warranted, the version of “A History of Bad Men” probably annoyed the crap out of anyone trying to buy close at the nearby Nordstroms. 

The closer was one of the most anticipated songs of the set; “Honey Bucket” from the three-album era when they were signed to Atlantic Records. It is probably their most well-known, with its minute-long intro that asks what if Rush had a few too many mezcals and broke into a chainsaw store. And then it settles into a straightforward rock groove that ends, in true punk fashion, less than two minutes later.

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For an encore, Trevor Dunn of Tomahawk (and a ton of other acts) came out to play bass on perhaps the heaviest of all Melvins songs, “Night Goat.” That’s right, two drummers and two bass players. God only knows what would happen with a second guitar player. Don’t count out the possibility, as the Melvins bench is pretty deep with top-notch players willing to contribute. 

With this in mind, collaborations thrive. Not just a song or two live, or playing a similar bill, but cooperative work, as with Napalm Death on Savage Imperial Death March. That album was a true collaboration, to the point that Buzz occasionally forgets who played bass and guitar on which songs. Ultimately, what ends up on the record is what matters. This leads to the most important talent for lasting as long as they have in this business.

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With a career as long as theirs, the skill of being down-to-earth is as important as riffs and volume. Melvins are popular in musical circles not only for sonic influence but for being some of the nicest guys in rock. Bump into a Melvin on the street and he will be polite and friendly. If any bridges have been burned in the last forty years, it wasn’t the guys in this band with the matches.

Continuing this trajectory, pay attention to Gatta Morta, the new collaboration with members of Butthole Surfers, Big Business, and Mr. Phylzzz. While it smells like Melvins, it is not Buzz simply telling other musicians what to play. He is known for being accepting of all ideas. 

As this tour has wrapped up, it is a good time to reflect on a band that has been sledgehammering music in different directions since 1986—and to breathe easy knowing that the next thirty years promise more of the same.

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Posted on August 27th 2026, 3:11pm

Website [Release date 01.09.26] I’m always very excited when I hear of an album that is not just made for pleasing the musical mainframe, but from a place of education and awareness of situations that many may not know is happening … Continue reading →

The post Album review: THOSE MADE BROKEN – A Door You Can Never Close appeared first on Get Ready to ROCK!.

You’ll be food for a hawk if you live like a lamb
the hours decay like a corpse in the sand
eternity calls and we’re singing for the damned 

There are records that announce their mortality with violins and candlelight, and then there are records that sound as if somebody has kicked open the crypt door. 1919’s Last Dance of the Departed, their first studio release since 2021 and first 7” since 1983, belongs to the latter breed: hard bass, serrated guitar, drums with the discipline of factory machinery, and Rio Goldhammer singing as though the end of civilization has inconvenienced him personally.

1919’s Bradford roots place them among the original wave of groups that pushed post-punk into darker territory during the early 1980s. Bands like Bauhaus and the Virgin Prunes were contemporaries in establishing what would later be called “goth”, working in parallel from different cities with a related vocabulary of skeletal guitars, theatrical dread, physical rhythm, and damaged religious imagery. On Last Dance of the Departed, 1919 carries that vocabulary forward with the blunt force of musicians who have spent years dragging these songs through clubs rather than preserving them behind glass. Ding Archer’s bass gives the track a heavy, stalking center, the guitar cuts across it in cold diagonal strokes, and the drums maintain a martial insistence that makes mortality feel strangely danceable.

Last Dance of the Departed stares directly at extinction: brother killing brother, wages exchanged for useless possessions, gods who may have stopped answering the telephone, and the ridiculous persistence of hope. Goldhammer delivers these ideas with enough bite to prevent the song from collapsing into gothic sermonizing. There is black humour buried in the fatalism, the sort that develops when you have been around long enough to know death is coming so you may as well crank up the amp to give him a proper fanfare.

The production leaves plenty of exposed bone. Guitar, bass, and percussion occupy their own hostile corners, colliding without becoming muddy, while Goldhammer rides above the racket with a voice closer to a public warning than a conventional rock performance.

The video, directed by Goldhammer, pushes that idea into the flesh. Live footage flashes through a band still throwing itself at the stage after decades marked by departures and death. Members have been lost along the way, and the song carries that knowledge without converting grief into museum-piece reverence. These musicians still look dangerous because they remain committed to movement, volume, friction, and the communal absurdity of standing in a room together while the clock keeps chewing through time and space.

Watch the video for Last Dance of the Departed below:

For a band whose early history includes Cry Wolf, Machine, and two Peel sessions, 1919 sounds remarkably uninterested in reenacting 1983. Their post-punk remains angular and severe, but age has thickened the music’s sense of consequence. Last Dance of the Departed knows the party ends, knows the gods may be absent, knows the body goes back to ash, and still finds enough electricity in that knowledge to keep the dead dancing.

1919’s Last Dance of the Departed and its B-side Satellite Man are available on black and limited-edition green 7″ Vinyl. Order here.

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The post UK Post-Punk Outfit 1919 Shares Video for “Last Dance of The Departed” — First New 7-inch Since 1983 Announced! appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Ignacia Fernández, vocalist of Chilean melodic death metal band Decessus, performed at the Miss World 2026 talent competition in Vietnam this week — and she didn’t pick a safe ballad. She sang “The Hollow Descent,” a song by her own band, on a pageant stage in front of an international audience. Footage is circulating now. It’s also the second time she’s done exactly this, and the overall Miss World winner isn’t announced until next week.

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Scott Penfold covers the Miss World performance on today’s Metal Breakdown Daily — what she actually sang, how the talent round went, and the two things she’s done this year that make this a lot less surprising than it looks. Download the free Loaded Radio App on Apple iOS and Google Play and get it every weekday morning.

What she did

The talent round at Miss World is not, historically, where you go looking for melodic death metal.

Fernández chose “The Hollow Descent” — a Decessus track, her own band’s material, not a cover and not a softened arrangement. She brought it to the stage in Vietnam and performed it in front of the panel, the other contestants and an international broadcast audience.

She didn’t take the talent prize. That went to Miss World England’s Grace Richardson, for a rendition of “Over The Rainbow.”

Which is, if we’re honest, the funniest possible outcome. Death metal lost to The Wizard Of Oz.

Fernández’s response afterwards was completely gracious. She called it a moment she’ll never forget, said getting to bring metal to the Miss World stage and share a part of who she is through music was an incredible experience, and described every contestant in the talent competition as extraordinary. She congratulated England on the win and thanked the organisation and the other contestants for cheering her on.

No sour grapes, no positioning herself as the outsider who got robbed. Just somebody who got to do the thing she wanted to do on the biggest stage available.

The overall Miss World winner is announced next week.

This is the second time

Here’s the detail that reframes the whole story: she’s done this before, and it worked.

In November 2025, Fernández won Miss World Chile — and she won it after performing a Decessus song during the semi-finals. That’s the performance that got her to Vietnam in the first place.

So this wasn’t a stunt or a one-off flourish. She built an entire pageant run on the back of death metal, took the national title with it, and then went to the world stage and did it again rather than switching to something safer once the audience got bigger.

That’s a genuinely unusual amount of conviction. The pressure to pick “Over The Rainbow” at that level must be enormous.

She’s had a hell of a year regardless

Two things most coverage of this will miss entirely.

Decessus signed with BLKIIBLK on August 5. That’s the same label that put out Megadeth’s final self-titled album this year — the record that debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. For a Chilean melodeath band, that is a serious home, and it happened three weeks before this performance.

She guested on a Kamelot single. In July, Fernández appeared on “Ashen World,” a track from the symphonic metal veterans’ new album Dark Asylum, which lands this week via Napalm Records. Kamelot have been operating at the top of that genre for three decades and they don’t hand guest spots out casually.

So the framing of “pageant contestant who also sings metal” has it backwards. She’s the vocalist of a signed band with a Kamelot credit who happens to also be competing at Miss World.

Decessus have spent the year on the festival circuit alongside all of it.

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Why this matters more than it looks

There’s a lazy version of this story that treats the whole thing as a novelty — look at the beauty queen who screams.

Here’s the better read.

Melodic death metal is a genre with roots in Gothenburg in the early nineties, built by bands like In Flames, At The Gates and Dark Tranquillity, and for most of its life it has been almost entirely invisible to anyone outside it. The essential melodeath canon is one of the great underappreciated bodies of work in heavy music.

And this week a woman sang one of its songs to a global pageant audience who mostly had no idea the genre existed.

That’s not a punchline. That’s heavy music turning up in rooms it never used to reach, which is the defining story of this decade — Sleep Token at No. 1, Gojira at the Olympics, deathcore on daytime radio, and now this.

She didn’t win the talent round. She still got extreme vocals onto Miss World.

Good on her.

TL;DR

• What happened: Ignacia Fernández, vocalist of Chilean melodic death metal band Decessus, performed her band’s song “The Hollow Descent” at the Miss World 2026 talent competition in Vietnam.
• The result: she didn’t win the talent round. Miss World England’s Grace Richardson took it with “Over The Rainbow.” The overall winner is announced next week.
• Her response: entirely gracious — she called it a moment she’ll never forget and congratulated England on the win.
• It’s not the first time: she won Miss World Chile in November 2025 after performing a Decessus song in the semi-finals.
• Her year so far: Decessus signed with BLKIIBLK on August 5, and she guested on Kamelot’s single “Ashen World” in July.
• The band: Decessus have been touring metal festivals throughout 2026.

FAQ

She could have sung anything and she picked her own death metal song. Twice. Should she have taken the talent prize? Tell us below. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.

The post Ignacia Fernández Took Death Metal To The Miss World Stage And Refused To Play It Safe appeared first on Loaded Radio.

Posted on August 27th 2026, 2:53pm

What happens when you mix Deep Purple with a late-night donaire shop run? You get Edmonton hard rock outfit Famous Strangers. The band sat down […]

The post Famous Strangers Interview: Deep Purple, Donaire Shops, & Edmonton Hard Rock appeared first on Metal-Rules.com.