Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds entered the stage to the sound of a heavy descending guitar riff like something out of a doom metal track. Then the disco ball turned on, and Sturgill Simpson started playing a smoky blues guitar solo over jazz chords. The introduction then resolved in the funky syncopated groove of “Venus,” which was soon graced by the hearty twang of Simpson’s voice, country to the bone. The sequence worked well as an overture for a night when Simpson and his band would roam all over the stylistic map.
The parking lot gave us fair warning. Before we reached MIDFLORIDA Credit Union Amphitheatre on October 3, the tailgates and parties made it clear that Treaty Oak Revival’s Tampa crowd had started without us.
Traffic took most of Belmont’s set. We caught the final few songs, enough for their pop-punk punch and Midwest emo feel to catch us off guard. On this bill, it worked. Inside, the party was just getting started.
80 ACRES came next. We knew Dylan Marlowe as a singer-songwriter, but his band, 80 ACRES, was new to us. The country-pop hooks landed immediately, with enough guitar grit to connect their set to the headliner. The crowd was into it. So were we.
“Mess We Made” (feat Treaty Oak Revival) made the strongest impression. Catchy enough to follow you out of the venue, it explained why the song has become a calling card for the group.
Then Treaty Oak Revival opened with “Port A,” and the night shifted into another gear.
“West Texas Degenerate,” “No Vacancy,” and “Wrong Place Wrong Time” were favorites, but who were we kidding? They knew what this crowd wanted. The set kept delivering it.
Then came “Boomtown.”
The song had arrived with baggage. Recent incidents involving thrown chairs and other hard objects prompted the band to publicly tell fans to stop. Tampa took precautions. Chair rentals were unavailable, and trash-can lids had been removed.
But the beer showers? Those were coming.
Sam Canty explained the West Texas meaning behind “Boomtown,” and the crowd erupted. Beer went airborne, breaking into spray above the audience.
We had never seen so many $20 beers become weather.
It was ridiculous. It was expensive. It was a spectacle.
“Leaving Hell” closed the night, and we walked out wanting another round of songs, smelling like somebody else’s bar tab.
Belmont’s pop-punk edge, 80 ACRES’ country-pop hooks, and Treaty Oak Revival’s rougher attack made for an eclectic bill with a crowd to match. The parking lot had promised a rowdy night.
In the documentary, co-directed by Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn, Lee and Lifeson with four of their late drummer’s musical ‘brothers’ – Stewart Copeland from The Police, Danny Carey from Tool, Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Gavin Harrison of Porcupine Tree and King Crimson – to revisit some of Rush’s classic songs, Working Man, Tom Sawyer, New World Man and 2112: Overture among them. The experience is clearly an emotional and thrilling one for all involved. In fact, in the epilogue for the film – which is currently streaming on Canada’s CBC Gem platform – lifelong friends Lee and Lifeson state that playing their music once more served as a catalyst for Rush returning to the road with new live drummer Anika Nilles for the Fifty Something tour.
“It felt special, it felt like an honour, playing with those drummers,” Lee says. “Alex and I had been afraid of our own music. We had put our music in a box, and left it as a relic of the past. And by playing them, we realised that we have 50 years and a body of music that is still alive.”
Lifeson adds that, for him revisiting Rush’s music was “inspiring”, and helped kickstart conversations about the duo going back out on tour.
“A big part of the motivation was celebrating the music, celebrating Neil” he says, while acknowledging that replacing Peart was always going to be an “impossible task”.
“Anika is coming into this alien world,” says Lifeson. “She wasn’t really a fan of our music, so there was alot of spooling up she needed to do.”
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Lee adds that bringing Nilles into the group helped give him a whole new appreciation of Neil Peart’s artistry.
“We were learning what Anika was learning,” he says. “We were realizing how different Neil’s feel is from other styles of play. So through Anika’s experiences, we were understanding Neil’s composition better and better. And sometimes Anika would write me and say, “What time is this part in?” And I would go, “Fuck, I don’t know!” So I would go back and listen to it, and I would count it out. And I realized that we wrote parts as musical passages, and we would do a weird musical passage in an odd time signature, but we wouldn’t need to count what that time signature was, ’cause we would just glue a bunch of phrases together and we knew it intrinsically. We knew it inherently… So it was a re-education for me.”
Today, heavy rock group The Violent Hour announced their highly anticipated debut album, Pretty Girls Do Ugly Things. Set for release on January 22, 2027, the project is a culmination of frontwoman Carla Harvey’s journey thus far. Across 11 tracks that blend the grit of old-school rock ‘n’ roll, the soul of indie and alternative, and just the right dose of heavy metal, the album traces themes of survival, transformation, and the darker parts of being human. “‘Pretty Girls Do Ugly Things’ isn’t just about girl power women behaving badly,” Harvey says. “It’s almost the thesis for the whole record: good people can do ugly things, beautiful things can come from ugly places, and sometimes you have to get a little ugly to survive.”
Alongside the announcement, The Violent Hour unleashed the single + video, “Already Dead,” an infectious alt-rock track that captures the darkness of hitting rock bottom and insisting the only direction left is up.
First premiered via Ladygunn,“Already Dead” is about surviving the kind of pain that leaves you numb. When you’ve already been burned, betrayed, broken, and dragged through hell, there comes a point when you realize there isn’t much further you can fall. And that realization can be incredibly freeing. The song takes that darkness and turns it into something positive…a declaration that if you’ve already hit rock bottom, the only direction left is up. It’s about letting go of the things that broke you, finding your strength again, and realizing it’s never too late to start over. You can’t kill what’s already dead.
Carla Harvey explains, “‘Already Dead’ is about reaching a point where someone has put you through so much that they can’t hurt you anymore. There’s nothing left for them to take, and that can become its own kind of power.”
The accompanying music video directed by Vicente Cordero takes place in a morgue (fitting for Harvey, who is a former embalmer). What begins on an autopsy table quickly turns into a celebration of refusing to stay down. Death is just a minor complication…a tiny setback that results in a video that’s part horror movie, part dance party, and all rock ’n’ roll.
There are easier ways to start a band than having an existential crisis, locking yourself in a room with legendary drummer and multi-instrumentalist Charlie Benante (Anthrax, Pantera), and writing the record you’ve been threatening to make your entire life. But Carla Harvey has never been particularly interested in doing things the easy way.
She’s been a mortician, embalmer, grief specialist, comic book creator, author, actress, internationally touring musician, and professional collector of wonderfully questionable objects. So, naturally, her next move was The Violent Hour.
Born and raised in Detroit, Harvey grew up with one foot in art and the other in music, playing in bands at night while working whatever jobs paid the bills and plotting an escape to Hollywood. It delivered exactly the kind of beautifully weird life she was looking for: acting gigs, bands, dive bars, heartbreak, bad decisions, great stories and eventually a 15-year run co-fronting Butcher Babies on stages around the world.
But Carla has always had another life running parallel to rock & roll. Fascinated by death since childhood, she went back to school for Mortuary Science, graduated valedictorian, became a licensed funeral director and embalmer, worked in funeral service and hospice, and ultimately earned a Master of Science in Thanatology. She founded a grief-support initiative for musicians, artists and other people who might feel more comfortable discussing mortality in a backstage hallway than a beige therapist’s office. In other words, she can scream in your face and grief-coach you through the aftermath.
After leaving Butcher Babies, Carla found herself staring down the question every artist eventually faces: What would I make if I had absolutely nothing left to prove? The answer was The Violent Hour. Carla began writing with her partner Charlie Benante, and something clicked immediately. The songs came quickly: big, dirty, vulnerable, melodic, pissed-off and alive. Instead of chasing what she had already done, Carla found herself reconnecting with the things that made her fall in love with music in the first place: the danger of rock & roll, the sneer of punk, the hooks of the records she grew up worshipping and the beautifully unhinged spirit of the ’90s Riot Grrrl movement.
Then she built the band she wished she could have seen when she was a kid. The Violent Hour’s live incarnation brings Carla together with lead guitarist Kiana De León, drummer Sasha De León, bassist Jewel Steele and rhythm guitarist Allie Kaye: five women making loud, feral rock music without sanding off the edges. The result lives somewhere between metal, punk, hard rock and the questionable part of Hollywood after midnight: crushing riffs, massive choruses, sex, humor, vulnerability, anger and enough swagger to make the whole thing dangerous.
And underneath all of it is Carla. The blue-collar Detroit kid. The mortician. The comic-book nerd. The grief scholar who can talk about death anxiety in the afternoon and climb onto a festival stage that night. The rock lifer who has released six albums with a seventh on its way, written comic books and a novel, toured the world, started over, and somehow still gets excited by the possibility of making something she hasn’t made before.
The Violent Hour isn’t Carla Harvey trying to recreate her past. It’s what happens when all of her strange lives finally end up in the same room.
Pretty Girls Do Ugly Things Tracklist: 1. You Only Live Twice 2. Already Dead 3. Sick Ones 4. Black Mud Honey 5. Screenager 6. Nice Girls 7. Sex and Cigarettes 8. Other Side Of You 9. Hell Or Hollywood 10. Pretty Girls Do Ugly Things 11. The Violent Hour
Last year comedy legend Steve Martin teamed with his fellow banjo player Alison Brown on an album called Safe, Sensible And Sane. They’re continuing to work together, and today they’ve brought some more bluegrass titans into their midst to cover… Lil Nas X?
In the years since I started my photography and review journey, combining it with my love for music of all genres, I have captured a lot of musicians of many talents. I always knew it would take me down the list of unforgettable shows. Mongolian titans The HU returned to take the stage in Belfast … Continue reading Gig Review: The HU / SKÁLD – The Telegraph, Belfast (5th October 2026)
Wednesday night, Rosalía was a guest on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. Within the first couple of minutes in their chat, Fallon brought up that U2’s forthcoming album Carnaval de Luz includes a song about the Spanish pop star, “The Mirror Maker (Rosalía).”
At the end of this month, Elena Tonra who leads the indie-folk trio Daughter, is dropping a new album under another project Ex:Re, titled Save As. She’s already released the lead track “Radio Station,” and earlier this week, she shared the follow-up single “Sleep.”
Rose Carleo Band are getting down and dirty with the release of Dirt Bound (Radio Edit), featuring Pontus Snibb, of Swedish hard rockers Bonafide out today Friday, October 9. Originally recorded by Bonafide, Dirt Bound gets the Rose Carleo Band treatment – a gritty, hard-driving take, loaded with blues-rock swagger, big guitars and Rose Carleo’s […]
Rose Carleo Band are getting down and dirty with the release of Dirt Bound (Radio Edit), featuring Pontus Snibb, of Swedish hard rockers Bonafide out today Friday, October 9. Originally recorded by Bonafide, Dirt Bound gets the Rose Carleo Band treatment – a gritty, hard-driving take, loaded with blues-rock swagger, big guitars and Rose Carleo’s […]