The New Hampshire producer Maya Bouldry-Morrison has been crafting house tracks under the name Octo Octa since 2011, and she’ll release her new album Sigils For Survival this spring. The LP is Octo Octa’s first since 2019’s Resonant Body, and it marks a full decade since she came out as transgender. She drew a sigil…
The post Octo Octa Announces New Album <em>Sigils For Survival</em>: Hear “Survival Groove” appeared first on Stereogum.
Two years ago, Billy Morrison—the British guitarist, singer, and songwriter, primarily known as Billy Idol’s rhythm guitar player for the past 17 years alongside lead guitarist Steve Stevens—released The Morrison Project via TLG/ZOID/Virgin Music Group. It marked his third solo album (and first since 2015) and produced the #1 Active Rock Song (Mediabase) in America: “Crack Cocaine” featuring Ozzy Osbourne and Steve Stevens and co-written by all three artists. A deluxe edition of the album followed in 2025 and bonus track, “Gods Of Rock and Roll (Orchestral)”—another seismic collaboration with Osbourne and Stevens—landed in the Active Rock Top Ten (Mediabase).
Morrison will build on that success with his upcoming album Hollow, out sometime in August via TLG/ZOID/Virgin Music Group. The album will launch with the March 27 release of its first single and video “Becoming” which was written by Morrison, Sully Erna (Godsmack) and Brett Scallions; it features Erna on lead vocals and Grammy Award-winner Nuno Bettencourt (Extreme) on lead guitar.
Hollow will follow the success of 2024’s The Morrison Project format with 12 songs, half sung by Morrison and half sung by a handful of Morrison‘s friends. Guests include Dexter Holland, Marilyn Manson, Chuck D, B Real, Duff McKagan, Steve Stevens, DMC, and the above-mentioned Sully Erna and Nuno Bettencourt, among others. “Forgive Me,” “The Tailor,” “No Suspects,” “Another Day,” “Leave No Trace,” and “Becoming” are among the song titles.
“The last album was so much fun and such a creative experience for me that I got the band back together for a follow up record,” says Billy. It’s on the same label (TLG/ZOID/Virgin Music Group), with the same crew (Barry Pointer mixing the record, Dave Donnelly mastering and all art and photography by Jane Stuart) and I’m excited to share this body of work with the world.” He adds: “The guests on this record are at the core of the collaborative spirit that I try to put in the center of these records. Every single person I worked with stepped up, brought their A game and helped me produce an album that crosses genres, features some really diverse songwriting, and yet has a truly cohesive, and powerful sound. Ultimately, I am just grateful to everyone involved for allowing me to do this again.”
The post BILLY MORRISON’S Solo Album “Hollow” Features MARILYN MANSON, SULLY ERNA, NUNO BETTENCOURT And DEXTER HOLLAND, Lead Single “Becoming” Arrives March 27 appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.
The heaviest breakdowns in metal are the moments a song stops being a song and becomes a physical event: the tempo halves, the guitars drop to the lowest string, and a room full of people who were standing still a second ago aren’t. This list ranks 25 of them, from Earth Crisis in 1993 to Knocked Loose in 2023, across hardcore, metalcore, deathcore, groove metal and djent. Lorna Shore, Slaughter To Prevail and Knocked Loose are all in the top six, and none of them is No. 1, because the breakdown every one of them learned from was written in 1990.
The rules: one breakdown per song, studio versions only, and the ranking weighs the drop itself (how hard the tempo and tuning fall), what it does to a crowd, and how much the song would lose without it. Mosh calls count. Pig squeals count. A great riff played slowly does not count unless it arrives as a drop. The list is personal, the argument is in the comments, and the embeds are right there so you can check our work.
A breakdown in metal is a section where the song drops to a slower tempo, usually half-time, and the guitars and drums lock into a simple, heavy, syncopated rhythm, often on open low strings, designed to make a crowd move; it comes from 1980s hardcore and was absorbed by metalcore and deathcore, where it became the genre’s signature.
The word is borrowed from funk and soul, where the breakdown was the part of the song where everything dropped out but the rhythm section. Hardcore bands in New York and Boston in the mid-1980s used the same idea to make the pit go: half the speed, double the weight. Earth Crisis and Hatebreed made it the whole point in the 1990s, Pantera gave it a groove-metal passport, and by the mid-2000s the deathcore bands had turned it into an event, with mosh calls, pick scrapes, blast-beat run-ups and a drop that could clear a room. What separates a breakdown from a slow riff is intent: a breakdown exists to be felt in the chest first and heard second.
The heaviest breakdown in metal is the closing section of Pantera’s “Domination,” from Cowboys From Hell (1990): the moment Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul drop the song to half-time and grind it into the ground, which is the template every deathcore breakdown of the last twenty years is built on.
The modern challengers are all here: Lorna Shore’s “To The Hellfire,” which broke the internet in 2021; Slaughter To Prevail’s “Baba Yaga”; Meshuggah’s “Demiurge”; Knocked Loose’s “Deep In The Willow.” Each of them does something Pantera’s doesn’t. None of them would exist without it. If you want the lineage in one listen, play No. 17, No. 1 and No. 2 in that order: 1993, 1990, 2021.
Buster Odeholm’s Swedish project is the house that downtempo built, and “Abyssal Mouth,” released as a standalone single in 2017 and later the center of Abyssal (2019, Unique Leader), is the sound of a breakdown slowed past the point where most bands would call it a riff. The drop in the back half doesn’t hit so much as settle on you. Odeholm wrote, played and produced the whole thing himself, which explains why every element lands on the same beat.
Emmure get laughed at and Emmure get copied, usually by the same people. “Solar Flare Homicide,” the single from Speaker Of The Dead (2011, Victory), produced by Joey Sturgis, is the purest version of the Frankie Palmeri formula: one note, a chug pattern you could set a clock to, and a drop near the end built to be filmed from the pit. The album debuted at No. 68 on the Billboard 200, which is a lot of people pretending they don’t like this.
Track one of Rareform (2008, Sumerian), and the song that put polyrhythmic breakdowns on the metalcore map before “djent” was a word anyone said out loud. Justin Lowe’s production puts the eight-strings right in your face, and the breakdown in the song’s back half stacks a stuttering, off-grid pattern over a pulse you can still stomp to. That balance, mathematically strange but physically obvious, is the whole After The Burial trick, and this is where it started.
The gut-drop in “Boneyards” arrives around 1:50, which is the one timestamp on this list a professional outlet has actually printed, and the song earns it. Horizons (2007), produced by Adam Dutkiewicz of Killswitch Engage, is the record that made Parkway Drive the biggest metalcore band in the Southern Hemisphere, and this is its darkest three minutes. Speed, then a wall.
Messengers (2007, Solid State) is the August Burns Red album that defined technical metalcore for a decade, and “Composure” is its calling card: a song that keeps threatening to break down and then, when it finally does, makes you wait a beat longer than you expect. Matt Greiner’s drumming is the reason it works. Co-produced by the band with Tue Madsen, who also produced the Suicide Silence record at No. 9.
The song that invented MySpace deathcore, or at least the song MySpace deathcore was invented around. The Doom EP (2005, King Of The Monsters; reissued by Metal Blade in 2006) was six songs long, and “Entombment Of A Machine” was the one with the breakdown and the pig squeal everybody tried to do in their bedroom. The band’s first video, their first viral moment, and a drop that still sounds like a garage door coming down.
Dead In My Arms (2007, This City Is Burning Records), produced by Zeuss, is Carnifex before Carnifex were a big band, and “Lie To My Face” is three minutes of San Diego deathcore with one job. The breakdown that closes it is slow, dry and mean, the kind that makes a room go quiet for a bar before it goes the other way. The band re-recorded it with Oceano’s Adam Warren for its fifteenth anniversary in 2022; the original is the one that matters.
Montreal’s finest, two vocalists, and a breakdown they used to close their sets with before the 2010 hiatus. “MVP,” the first single from Day Of Mourning (2009, Century Media), is a deathcore song built like a hockey fight: blast beats, a stop, a stare, and then the drop, with Alex Erian and Steve Marois trading over it. It’s the band’s best breakdown by their own fans’ reckoning, and the one that gets the biggest roar when they play it now.
The origin point. The title track of the Firestorm EP (1993, Victory) is six and a half minutes of Syracuse straight-edge hardcore that, around the four-minute mark, drops into a breakdown so heavy and so slow that half the bands on this list are still chasing it. Refused covered it. Maximumrocknroll called it one of the best hardcore singles of the decade. If you want to know where the deathcore breakdown comes from, this is the answer, and it’s thirty-three years old.
Four minutes of mathcore chaos that resolve, in the final minute, into a brick-wall groove so simple it feels like a joke, which is exactly why it works. Calculating Infinity (1999, Relapse) rewired what heavy music could do rhythmically, and this breakdown is the moment the band let the audience catch up. Will Putney, who went on to produce half the deathcore records of the 2010s, has said people came to Dillinger shows just for this part. Rolling Stone put the song on its 100 greatest metal songs list; it belongs there for the last sixty seconds alone.
The video is three guitarists headbanging in sync to the closing breakdown, and that’s the song. The title track of This Is Exile (2008, Metal Blade) is Knoxville deathcore at its most tectonic: a low-tuned, off-time groove at the end that feels less like a riff than a floor giving way, with Phil Bozeman’s vocals on top like a threat. Eighteen years on, it still sounds like the production template every band in the genre is using.
Hull, England’s Black Tongue codified downtempo deathcore, and “Second Death,” from the self-released concept album Nadir (2018), is the slowest thing on this list. The drop is a funeral march: stomping drums, guitars tuned to the floor, and Alex Teyen’s vocals coming from somewhere under it. This is the breakdown as burial. Nothing else here sounds like it, which is why it’s here.
The most-covered breakdown of the 2010s, and the one every bedroom vocalist used to test a new microphone. “Recreant,” from Desolation Of Eden (2010, Artery), produced by Tim Lambesis, was a re-recording of a 2008 EP track, and the back-half drop, with the mosh call that every deathcore fan can recite, became bigger than the band. Will Ramos and Nik Nocturnal covered it in 2022. Alex Koehler’s original is still the one.
The opener and first single from Ashes Of The Wake (2004, Epic), the Lamb Of God album that went Gold and put groove metal on American rock radio for a second time. The breakdown here isn’t a drop so much as a tightening: Chris Adler’s drums and Mark Morton’s riff lock into a stomp while Randy Blythe barks over it like a fourth percussion instrument. Produced by Machine. It’s the most-played song in their set for a reason.
The breakdown as sermon. “I Will Be Heard,” the lead single from Perseverance (2002, Universal), produced by Matt Hyde, is Jamey Jasta’s manifesto delivered over a drop so simple a child could play it and so heavy nobody else has matched it. MTV banned the video. The song ended up on the xXx soundtrack anyway and the album sold a quarter of a million copies. Hatebreed’s new album arrives in November; this is the song it has to live up to.
Two and a half minutes of build, whale song and all, before the riff arrives, and when it does it’s the heaviest groove Gojira have ever recorded. “Flying Whales,” from the self-produced From Mars To Sirius (2005), is the band’s signature song and Rolling Stone’s No. 70 greatest metal song of all time, and the drop at the end of the intro is a breakdown in everything but name: half-time, low end, Mario Duplantier’s precision, and Joe Duplantier’s pick scrapes borrowed from Morbid Angel. He says he’d never seen a whale when he wrote it.
Two minutes and fifteen seconds, and most of the second half is breakdown. “Unanswered,” from The Cleansing (2007, Century Media), produced by Tue Madsen, is the song that made Suicide Silence the first deathcore band to crack the Billboard 200 (No. 94, on 7,250 copies in a week), and the drop, with Mitch Lucker’s low-to-high switch over it, is the genre’s founding document in miniature. The band tours North America next month behind a new album pitched as a return to exactly this era.
Before the arenas, before the pop songs, Bring Me The Horizon were a deathcore band from Sheffield, and “Pray For Plagues,” from Count Your Blessings (2006), is the proof. Chugging guitars, Oli Sykes at his most feral, and a tempo drop near the end that’s gloriously messy, the sound of a band that hadn’t learned restraint and didn’t want to. Sykes reportedly can’t stand the song now and the band almost never plays it. The pit disagrees.
The lead single from Hate (2012, Halfcut; Nuclear Blast reissue 2013), produced by Will Putney, and the song that got an extreme metal album into Australia’s top 40 for the first time. The breakdown is the last thirty seconds: a drum fill that’s become its own meme, a mosh call Kerrang ranked among the fifteen greatest ever, and a drop that sounds like the floor of the venue being removed. CJ McMahon has left and returned twice since; the song outlasts everyone who sings it.
“Knocked Loose, mother[expletive]!” Bryan Garris’s callout, right before the drop, went viral the day the song appeared without warning in June 2023 as half of the Upon Loss double single on Pure Noise, produced by Drew Fulk. The breakdown that follows is pure impact: no melody, no build, just the hardest hardcore band in America hitting the lowest note they can find. Note the embed is the double video; Deep In The Willow ends at 3:35, and you’ll know when.
The lead single from Pain Remains (2022, Century Media), debuted live two weeks before it came out, and the proof that “To The Hellfire” wasn’t a fluke. Josh Schroeder’s production puts an orchestra behind the guitars, and the breakdown in the back half is apocalyptic in the literal sense: everything the band has, at once, with Will Ramos doing things with his throat that we’ve tried to explain before. Pain Remains went top ten in Germany and Austria on the strength of it.
The breakdown as geometry. “Demiurge,” from Koloss (2012, Nuclear Blast), the band’s highest-charting album at No. 17 on the Billboard 200, builds, stops dead, and then drops into a groove so mathematically inevitable it feels like it was always there. Metal Hammer called it worthy of the Louvre, and they weren’t joking. Every djent band on earth has tried to write this. Mårten Hagström wrote it once.
The lead single from Kostolom (2021, Sumerian), one of the most-praised metal songs of that year, and a breakdown with a theatrical build that most film composers would envy: a creeping riff, Alex Terrible’s mask doing half the work, and a drop with the biggest guitar sound on this list. Slaughter To Prevail have had a complicated few years since; the song hasn’t aged a day.
The breakdown that broke the internet. Five minutes into a six-minute song from the …And I Return To Nothingness EP (2021, Century Media), Will Ramos stops singing and starts making sounds no human had made on a record before, and the band drops out from under him. He recorded it in one take. It hit No. 1 on the iTunes metal chart, swept the year-end lists, launched a thousand reaction videos, and made Lorna Shore the biggest deathcore band in the world inside a month. It is the most important breakdown of the 2020s. It is not No. 1.
Still the blueprint. The final minute and a half of “Domination,” from Cowboys From Hell (1990, Atco), produced by Terry Date, is where the thrash drops away and Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul grind the song into half-time, slower, lower, heavier, until the whole thing collapses under its own weight. Phil Anselmo has said they kept the raw first take. Every deathcore breakdown of the last twenty years, every mosh call, every drop on this list, is a descendant of those ninety seconds. Lorna Shore made the loudest breakdown. Pantera made the one that taught everyone else what a breakdown was for.
The 2000s supply twelve of the 25 breakdowns on this list, the 2010s six, the 2020s four and the 1990s three, which tracks the genre’s history: hardcore invented it, Pantera legitimized it, the MySpace deathcore boom industrialized it, and the current generation turned it into a spectator sport.
Three of the four 2020s entries are in the top six, which says something about how far the production arms race has pushed the drop, and the fact that none of them is No. 1 says something about what production can’t buy. If this list sent you deeper, the best deathcore albums ranked, the 13 bands that define deathcore and the metalcore guide are the next three pages. Which breakdown would you put at No. 1? Tell us in the comments.
A breakdown is a section of a metal or hardcore song where the tempo drops, usually to half-time, and the guitars, bass and drums lock into a simple, heavy, syncopated rhythm, often on the lowest open strings. It originated in 1980s hardcore punk as a device to make the crowd mosh, was adopted by metalcore and deathcore in the 2000s, and is now the defining feature of both genres.
On this list, the closing section of Pantera’s “Domination,” from Cowboys From Hell (1990), ranks first: the half-time groove Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul drop into in the song’s final minute and a half is the template for the modern breakdown. Lorna Shore’s “To The Hellfire” (2021) is second and is the most influential breakdown of the 2020s.
No single band did. The half-time “mosh part” developed in New York and Boston hardcore in the mid-1980s, with bands such as Cro-Mags, Agnostic Front and Leeway; Earth Crisis’s “Firestorm” (1993) and Hatebreed’s work in the late 1990s made it the centerpiece of the song, and Pantera’s groove metal carried the idea into mainstream metal. Deathcore bands of the mid-2000s, including Job For A Cowboy and Suicide Silence, turned it into the genre’s main event.
A breakdown is any half-time heavy section within a song. Beatdown is a hardcore subgenre, associated with bands like Bulldoze and Xibalba, built almost entirely from slow, heavy, breakdown-style riffs played with a hip-hop-influenced swagger. Every beatdown song is built on breakdowns; most breakdowns are not beatdown.
Deathcore and metalcore use breakdowns most heavily, followed by hardcore and beatdown hardcore, where the device originated. Groove metal (Pantera, Lamb Of God), djent (Meshuggah, After The Burial) and downtempo deathcore (Black Tongue, Humanity’s Last Breath) also build songs around them, while traditional heavy metal, thrash and black metal generally do not.
The post The 25 Heaviest Breakdowns In Metal, Ranked Worst To Best appeared first on Loaded Radio.
The ever-busy Mike Patton is cropping up in yet another little project, as it was announced earlier today that he’ll have a guest vocal part on French post-punk artist Jehnny Beth’s next single “Look At Me”. The track is coming out this Friday, so we’ll know more than the little instrumental snippet shared on the announcement post.
All we know now is that Patton’s involved, it’s coming at the end of the week, and that it was written and produced by Beth’s partner, Johnny Hostile.
Patton, who’s been in the news lately for both the announcement that Tomahawk’s reuniting for a tour and the fact that he felt the end of Faith No More was an unspoken truth. You can guess which one people were most stoked about.
If you’d like to catch Patton live with Tomahawk, you can do so at the dates listed below.
“A Huge Waste of Your Time and Money” 2026 U.S. Tour dates:
July 18 Nashville, TN Brooklyn Bowl
July 20 Austin, TX Emo’s
July 21 Dallas, TX Granada Theater
July 23 New Orleans, LA House of Blues
July 24 Atlanta, GA Buckhead Theatre
July 26 Washington, DC 9:30 Club
July 27 Philadelphia, PA Union Transfer
July 28 Brooklyn, NY Brooklyn Steel
July 30 Boston, MA House of Blues
July 31 Buffalo, NY Electric City
August 1 Cleveland, OH House of Blues
August 3 Detroit, MI The Fillmore
August 4 Chicago, IL The Riviera Theatre
August 5 Minneapolis, MN First Avenue
August 7 Denver, CO Ogden Theatre
August 8 Salt Lake City, UT The Union Event Center
August 10 Portland, OR Pioneer Courthouse Square
August 11 Seattle, WA The Showbox
August 12 Seattle, WA The Showbox
August 14 San Francisco, CA The Warfield
August 15 Los Angeles, CA The Belasco
The post Mike Patton Featured on New Jehnny Beth Single “Look At Me” appeared first on MetalSucks.
Right now, it appears that Compton club-music traveler Channel Tres is on a mission to pay tribute to all the best clubby R&B tracks of the early ’90s. I sincerely support him in this endeavor. A few months ago, Channel Tres released his take on the En Vogue classic “Free Your Mind.” Today, he drops…
The post Channel Tres – “Medicine” appeared first on Stereogum.
Fear Factory’s first LP with singer Milo Silvestro promises a conceptual journey through AI, dystopia, and the band’s signature futuristic metal.
The post DINO CAZARES Details The Upcoming FEAR FACTORY Album: "Humanity In Fragments, AI Dominates" appeared first on Metal Injection.
Rising from the ashes of Las Vegas Deathfest, the inaugural extreme metal festival brings 25 bands, freakshows, firebreathers, and unrelenting riffs.
The post Vegas Un Alive Festival 2026 Announces Lineup Featuring DECREPIT BIRTH, THE CONVALESCENCE, CASKET ROBBERY & More appeared first on Metal Injection.