Welsh ragga Metal band Skindred have released the video for their new single Big Em Up, taken from their No. 1 album You Got This. Arriving ahead of World Mental Health Day on 10 October, the song carries a direct message of support for people dealing with mental health conditions, anxiety and depression: check on the people around you, lift them up when they are struggling and bring some positivity back into their day.
“It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by life and everything it throws at you, from your gas bill to a family tragedy or people just being negative and your timeline filling up with hate and negativity on social media,” Skindred singer Benji Webbe said. “Big Em Up is a simple message for everyone to check on their friends and to pick ’em up and to try and encourage some positivity back into the world.
“It’s a message me and my brothers in Skindred try and share in the music we play, so all we ask is for our fans and listeners to enjoy the single and to also share that message of positivity too. Please check on those around you. Big Em Up!!”
The band begin their upcoming UK and Ireland You Got This tour at Nottingham’s Rock City on 23 October. The run includes a special Night of The Living Dred Halloween show at London’s Alexandra Palace on 31 October, with Alien Ant Farm and Spineshank as support.
Skindred have also confirmed that £1 from every ticket sold for the Alexandra Palace show will be donated to music charity Metal For Good, which supports projects including work focused on mental health, wellbeing and unlocking potential.
Welsh ragga Metal legends Skindred have announced a major UK and Ireland headline tour in support of their new album You Got This.
Widely regarded as one of the best
Event Details
Welsh ragga Metal legends Skindred have announced a major UK and Ireland headline tour in support of their new album You Got This.
Widely regarded as one of the best live bands on the planet, Skindred are set to bring their explosive energy to Nottingham, Birmingham, Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow. The tour will also feature a special Halloween show at London’s Alexandra Palace.
The tour follows the success of their latest single Can I Get A, which premiered on BBC 6Music and was named Track of the Week on Virgin Radio. The band continue to fuse Heavy riffs with dancehall rhythms, delivering their signature high-energy sound.
Welsh ragga Metal legends Skindred have announced a major UK and Ireland headline tour in support of their new album You Got This.
Widely regarded as one of the best
Event Details
Welsh ragga Metal legends Skindred have announced a major UK and Ireland headline tour in support of their new album You Got This.
Widely regarded as one of the best live bands on the planet, Skindred are set to bring their explosive energy to Nottingham, Birmingham, Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow. The tour will also feature a special Halloween show at London’s Alexandra Palace.
The tour follows the success of their latest single Can I Get A, which premiered on BBC 6Music and was named Track of the Week on Virgin Radio. The band continue to fuse Heavy riffs with dancehall rhythms, delivering their signature high-energy sound.
Welsh ragga Metal legends Skindred have announced a major UK and Ireland headline tour in support of their new album You Got This.
Widely regarded as one of the best
Event Details
Welsh ragga Metal legends Skindred have announced a major UK and Ireland headline tour in support of their new album You Got This.
Widely regarded as one of the best live bands on the planet, Skindred are set to bring their explosive energy to Nottingham, Birmingham, Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow. The tour will also feature a special Halloween show at London’s Alexandra Palace.
The tour follows the success of their latest single Can I Get A, which premiered on BBC 6Music and was named Track of the Week on Virgin Radio. The band continue to fuse Heavy riffs with dancehall rhythms, delivering their signature high-energy sound.
Welsh ragga Metal legends Skindred have announced a major UK and Ireland headline tour in support of their new album You Got This.
Widely regarded as one of the best
Event Details
Welsh ragga Metal legends Skindred have announced a major UK and Ireland headline tour in support of their new album You Got This.
Widely regarded as one of the best live bands on the planet, Skindred are set to bring their explosive energy to Nottingham, Birmingham, Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow. The tour will also feature a special Halloween show at London’s Alexandra Palace.
The tour follows the success of their latest single Can I Get A, which premiered on BBC 6Music and was named Track of the Week on Virgin Radio. The band continue to fuse Heavy riffs with dancehall rhythms, delivering their signature high-energy sound.
Welsh ragga Metal legends Skindred have announced a major UK and Ireland headline tour in support of their new album You Got This.
Widely regarded as one of the best
Event Details
Welsh ragga Metal legends Skindred have announced a major UK and Ireland headline tour in support of their new album You Got This.
Widely regarded as one of the best live bands on the planet, Skindred are set to bring their explosive energy to Nottingham, Birmingham, Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow. The tour will also feature a special Halloween show at London’s Alexandra Palace.
The tour follows the success of their latest single Can I Get A, which premiered on BBC 6Music and was named Track of the Week on Virgin Radio. The band continue to fuse Heavy riffs with dancehall rhythms, delivering their signature high-energy sound.
Welsh ragga Metal legends Skindred have announced a major UK and Ireland headline tour in support of their new album You Got This.
Widely regarded as one of the best
Event Details
Welsh ragga Metal legends Skindred have announced a major UK and Ireland headline tour in support of their new album You Got This.
Widely regarded as one of the best live bands on the planet, Skindred are set to bring their explosive energy to Nottingham, Birmingham, Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow. The tour will also feature a special Halloween show at London’s Alexandra Palace.
The tour follows the success of their latest single Can I Get A, which premiered on BBC 6Music and was named Track of the Week on Virgin Radio. The band continue to fuse Heavy riffs with dancehall rhythms, delivering their signature high-energy sound.
You Got This was also nominated last month as a contender for the Welsh Music Prize. The album is available from Earache Records at earache.com/skindred and from record stores.
Norwegian stonerpunk power trio Bokassa have announced their fifth album, Anomalies, due for release on 12 March 2027, and unleashed the new single Cop Out. The band have also confirmed headline dates across Norway, the UK and Europe for spring 2027.
Cop Out sees Bokassa leaning into their metallic hardcore roots with a ferocious, no-nonsense approach. The track takes aim at everything from protest songs with lyrics broad enough to suit every side to bands that have stayed around long past their natural end.
“It’s about quitting while you’re ahead,” Vocalist Jørn Kaarstad said, “before you become something you despise. Before you start doing expensive VIP Meet & Greets, before you write lyrics that are just empty buzz words, before you start doing Tik Tok-dance videos to sell more tickets. I don’t wanna spend my time coming up with new ways to get views on social media, when I know that there are still different pizzas out there I haven’t tried yet.”
The single arrives alongside the announcement of Anomalies, the follow-up to 2024’s All Out Of Dreams. Produced by two-time Grammy winner Adrian Bushby, whose credits include Foo Fighters, Muse and The Darkness, and mastered by George Perks, who has worked with Enter Shikari and Skindred, the album reflects Bokassa’s refusal to settle into one genre.
Across the record, the trio move through groove Metal, desert rock, scandirock, Death Metal, hardcore punk, hard rock and powerpop while keeping the sound rooted in their own brand of stonerpunk. Kaarstad also stretches his vocal range from clean singing and hardcore screams to low death Metal growls.
Kaarstad says the album title fits a band that has always existed outside the usual boxes. “We’ve never really fit in with anyone. So we kinda just evolved into our own little entity. It’s become a ‘those who get it get it’ kinda thing and I’ve seen fans bond at shows over their shared love of our band, which is really cool.”
The record’s lyrical themes range from coups and defectors to the possibility of the world ending and leprechauns. The new single follows the more mellow, stoner rock-leaning Doesn’t Matter If You Love It Here, underlining the range Bokassa are bringing to Anomalies.
Reflecting on the band’s unlikely rise, Kaarstad says, “We didn’t have a booking agency, label, manager or any contacts and suddenly we were playing the world’s biggest stages. The way the music industry works in Norway, or the rest of the world for that matter, we shouldn’t have had a chance. So as far as I’m concerned we’ve always been an anomaly.”
Bokassa release music through their own Kings of Stonerpunk Records. Since their 2017 debut Divide & Conquer, they have toured with artists including Metallica, Clutch, Lagwagon, Therapy?, Zebrahead, Mastodon, Baroness and Judas Priest. They have also appeared at festivals including Wacken, Hellfest, Download, Rockfest, Øya, Stavern and Tons of Rock.
Bokassa 2027 Norway Dates
12 March – Bergen, Kulturhuset I
13 March – Tromsø, Blårock
20 March – Oslo, Rockefeller
2 April – Kristiansand, Kafé Krank
3 April – Stavanger, Folken
9 April – Trondheim, Byscenen
Bokassa 2027 UK Dates
April
The Cobblestones, Bridgwater71 Eastover, Bridgwater TA6 5AP
Norwegian stonerpunk power trio Bokassa have announced their fifth album, Anomalies, due for release on 12 March 2027, and unleashed the new single Cop Out. The band have also confirmed
Event Details
Norwegian stonerpunk power trio Bokassa have announced their fifth album, Anomalies, due for release on 12 March 2027, and unleashed the new single Cop Out. The band have also confirmed headline dates across Norway, the UK and Europe for spring 2027.
Norwegian stonerpunk power trio Bokassa have announced their fifth album, Anomalies, due for release on 12 March 2027, and unleashed the new single Cop Out. The band have also confirmed
Event Details
Norwegian stonerpunk power trio Bokassa have announced their fifth album, Anomalies, due for release on 12 March 2027, and unleashed the new single Cop Out. The band have also confirmed headline dates across Norway, the UK and Europe for spring 2027.
Norwegian stonerpunk power trio Bokassa have announced their fifth album, Anomalies, due for release on 12 March 2027, and unleashed the new single Cop Out. The band have also confirmed
Event Details
Norwegian stonerpunk power trio Bokassa have announced their fifth album, Anomalies, due for release on 12 March 2027, and unleashed the new single Cop Out. The band have also confirmed headline dates across Norway, the UK and Europe for spring 2027.
Norwegian stonerpunk power trio Bokassa have announced their fifth album, Anomalies, due for release on 12 March 2027, and unleashed the new single Cop Out. The band have also confirmed
Event Details
Norwegian stonerpunk power trio Bokassa have announced their fifth album, Anomalies, due for release on 12 March 2027, and unleashed the new single Cop Out. The band have also confirmed headline dates across Norway, the UK and Europe for spring 2027.
Norwegian stonerpunk power trio Bokassa have announced their fifth album, Anomalies, due for release on 12 March 2027, and unleashed the new single Cop Out. The band have also confirmed
Event Details
Norwegian stonerpunk power trio Bokassa have announced their fifth album, Anomalies, due for release on 12 March 2027, and unleashed the new single Cop Out. The band have also confirmed headline dates across Norway, the UK and Europe for spring 2027.
Tigertailz join Little Angels for the final night of their November UK tour at London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town on Sunday 29th November Little Angels have announced that legendary Welsh glam rockers Tigertailz will join them and Luke Morley for the final night of their highly anticipated Big Bad & Back UK Tour, taking place at […]
Being yourself has become a surprisingly laborious business. The photograph needs editing, the opinion needs prompting, and loneliness must be presented to resemble an enviable evening. A social media profile offers the freedom to create the person we wish we were, then puts that person to work around the clock. Before long, algorithmic approval starts behaving like a drug, desire becomes a recurring payment, and the supposedly liberated individual is checking in with the platform every few minutes. The mask has developed an excellent social life, but its owner could probably use some company.
Berlin’s XTR HUMAN, the long-running project of musician Johannes Stabel, turns that predicament into a forceful EBM workout on “Fake,” shared ahead of its October 9 release through Wie Ein Gott Records. The first release in a new series, the single was recorded at Infinite Power Studios in Los Angeles, with Matia Simovich handling production and mixing. Its entirely analog construction puts the emphasis on force, repetition, and the persuasive pull of an electronic beat.
“Fake” opens with a metallic bass synth line that gives its EBM groove a distinctly funky gait. There is plenty of force in the repetition, though the low end knows how to move its hips. Stabel’s vocals land with a slap, a club-driven Neue Deutsche Welle drawl carrying the rhythmic confidence and insolent phrasing of hip-hop. He makes each phrase feel physically involved in the beat, pushing the groove forward with a delivery that sounds thoroughly pleased with its own bad intentions.
The synth melody brings to mind the peculiar electronic funk of Fad Gadget’s “Lady Shave,” while the track’s muscular structure shares more with the disciplined body music of fellow Mute artists DAF and Nitzer Ebb. Simovich’s production keeps those elements sharply defined: the bass has weight, the rhythm has room to work, and the melody provides enough mischief to make the machinery feel dangerously inviting.
That invitation is central to the song’s themes. “Fake” confronts digital isolation, manufactured identities, and the ease with which desire becomes dependency. Profiles turn into disguises; the pursuit of recognition keeps the person behind them performing. The track’s repeated patterns give that cycle a bodily form, suggesting the exhausting business of moving constantly while getting nowhere. Stabel makes the predicament sound seductive, which is precisely how such arrangements secure our cooperation in the first place.
Listen to “Fake” below:
“Fake” is out October 9, 2026 via Wie Ein Gott Records. Find the single here on release day. Alongside Simovich’s production and mixing, the recording credits include assistant engineers Coleman Ketchem and Grover Greenberg, with mastering by Bonati Mastering.
Johannes Stabel began XTR HUMAN in 2012, developing a project whose early coldwave and post-punk interests have expanded into industrial electronics, techno, and EBM. His rich vocal delivery gives those harder rhythms a recognizable personality, drawing together German-language phrasing, new wave melody, and the propulsion of body music. Albums such as G.O.L.D in 2021 and Schrank in 2024 established a catalogue equally interested in dancefloor movement and social criticism. Earlier this year, the Rave God EP brought ’90s rave energy into that combination, including a remix by Houses of Heaven.
Stabel’s international live history includes Wave-Gotik-Treffen and Absolution Festival, alongside appearances with artists including Die Selektion, Qual, Lebanon Hanover, and She Past Away. This month’s shows include a return to Los Angeles for Substance at The Belasco, followed by Berlin’s Unterwelt Festival on Halloween.
BEX has returned with fairies, her first new music in nearly a year and the opening track from the six-song concept EP Away with the Fairies, due in February 2027. Released on 25 September 2026, fairies is a ’90s grunge-soaked song drawn from BEX’s own lived experience. The track sets direct, exposing lyrics against a melancholic, floating instrumental as BEX addresses manipulation, assault and the process of reclaiming her voice.
The title comes from the Irish and Scottish expression “away with the fairies”, often used to describe someone lost in a daydream. BEX connects that image with a fairy drawing her grandmother gave her as a child, which she later had tattooed on her leg.
Away With The Fairies
The wider EP follows six stages of the same story: manipulation and assault, reclaiming power, reaching a low point, the conflicted feelings around wanting an abuser gone, acceptance and the fight to get free.
BEX wrote and recorded the project with Steven Battelle, Sam Cramer and Josh Paine. It was produced by Sam Cramer and mixed and mastered by Pieter Rietkerk.
“fairies was born out of pain,” BEX says. “It is the most heartbreaking song I have ever written. It exposes my story to every degree, to the point I don’t need to explain it – fairies speaks for itself.”
She adds that the time away from music gave her space to heal and regain perspective before sharing the song publicly.
“What the hell happened to BEX? You might be wondering what happened to that stinky red-haired punk you all fell in love with, the one who played shows every week, released riff after riff after riff and wasn’t afraid to try.
“The industry got to me. The highs got so high that I couldn’t live through the lows. My day-to-day was consumed with this obsession to be the best, to be the biggest, to achieve everything. I forgot how to live. This all came at a time of brutal grievance. I had just escaped a manipulative, abusive relationship. It was the perfect time to refind myself and lose my obsessive, controlling nature.
“fairies was born out of pain. It is the most heartbreaking song I have ever written. It exposes my story to every degree, to the point I do not need to explain it. fairies speaks for itself. There’s no consent when someone is asleep.
“I wrote fairies at the start of my time off. She has been sitting on my soundcloud for over a year. The truth is, I had to heal. I had to deal with the pain. I had to grieve before I had the strength to unleash my baby into the world. I am ok now. I have battled through the worst of it, so now I want to share, I want to help others, I want to fully escape.
“I have travelled, I have fallen out of love with music, I have embraced silence, I have conquered the noise. I have laughed, cried and screamed. I have refound old hobbies. I have taken up new ones. I have grown. I am ready to let you in. I am ready to share the start of my pain.
“Take fairies for what it is, a love letter to the one I hate. They go hand in hand, take my hand, buckle up, get ready for the ride of your life.
“I would hate for anyone to relate to this EP. In an ideal world, I’d drop these six tracks, and everyone would go, ‘What is she talking about?’
“But in reality, that won’t happen, and for that I’m sorry. I hope you can find comfort in knowing you’re not alone. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and you’re stronger than you think.”
About BEX
BEX is a UK nu-punk artist whose music combines riff-Heavy pop-punk and grunge. She has been named in the NME 100 and Kerrang!’s Sound of 2025, and has appeared at Download, Boomtown and Rebellion. She is also the founder of The SCUM Club fan community. You fan find out more about fairies at https://xelon.ffm.to/fairies.
Catch BEX at her headline show on 15 November 2026 at the Boileroom, Guildford. You can also join BEXMAS, Downstairs at The Dome, on 10 December 2026.
Acclaimed Canadian Southern soul and roots rock band Bywater Call announces partnership with Volume.com to offer a free livestream of their upcoming show ‘Live From Market Hall‘ in Peterborough, Ontario, on Friday October 9th, 2026. The concert will stream for free – here. It will stream as a live broadcast at 8pm EST (1am GMT) and […]
Traumatomy have released another new single, called “Entropic Obliteration”. The track serves as the second advance single from the slamming brutal death metal band’s fourth album, Ascension Of The Ineffable, which is due out October 30th through Gore House Productions. Both singles are available for streaming below. Read more…
Polish death/thrash metal outfit Dieth have entered a new chapter in the band’s history with a new record deal, a revamped line-up and their upcoming second studio album. Read more…
