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The long-awaited album also features Phil Anselmo dueting with King Diamond. Continue reading…

Down Announce ‘Volume V’ for November 20th

American heavy metal icons DOWN will unleash their long-awaited new studio album, Volume V, on November 20th via Nuclear Blast Records!

DOWN was never just a band. It’s a brotherhood rooted in childhood friendships that have endured for decades. It’s an homage to the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. It’s music meant for anybody who has ever headbanged, played air guitar, or worn a weathered tour t-shirt like armor. For over three decades, the quintet  – Philip H. Anselmo, Pepper Keenan, Kirk Windstein, Jimmy Bower, and Pat Bruders – have quietly built a legacy like no other. When these individuals congregate, magic ensues, conjured by earthquaking grooves, bellowing straight from the soul, and riffing loud enough to awaken an ancient deity.

This autumn, DOWN begins another chapter with Volume V.

“We were all excited about this,” smiles Anselmo. “There was a sense of lightness in the air. Everyone’s attitude was positive. There was more focus than ever. It just felt fresh again. Each one of us was individually striving for something, and I believe we achieved what we wanted to achieve. The record is a journey. It’s classic DOWN, but it’s also unique.”

“Everybody played their asses off, wrote great riffs, and Philip is singing amazing,” adds Windstein. “There’s so much electricity when we get together. To me, it’s the same vibe as our debut NOLA, but we’ve got another 35 years of experience as songwriters.”

“The five of us are from the same era, grew up together, and accomplished a lot on our own,” Keenan observes. “We all sounded different, but we’re still from the same 20-block radius. As far as what makes DOWN special, we knew one another before any of us had done anything. There’s history.”

DOWN’s bond runs deep. The guys initially crossed paths as teens in various local bands throughout New Orleans. Over the years, each musician went off and made a name for himself with Anselmo notably fronting Pantera, Keenan holding down guitar and vocals for Corrosion Of Conformity, Windstein leading Crowbar, and Bower slinging guitar in Eyehategod.

Two writing sessions yielded the bulk of material on Volume V. Upholding a tradition dating back to Down II, the members retreated to Anselmo’s home studio and their de facto clubhouse, Nodferatu’s Lair. Songs originated on the spot as they jammed face-to-face. Throughout 2025, the music naturally took shape. Keenan and Windstein chose to simultaneously record guitar together, giving the album a timeless punch.

The album opens with a blistering barnburner ‘The Myth.’ It sets the tone with a powerhouse vocal, pummeling rhythms, and precise down-picking. Then, there’s ‘Merciful Fate‘ featuring King Diamond. It reaches an apex with a vocal duel between Anselmo and King Diamond and fret-burning solos executed at a breakneck pace of 120bpm. King’s wife Livia Zita even blesses the track with dark accents of her own. Closer ‘Twice-Told Tales‘ caps the trip off with a heavy and hypnotic denouement. “It’s a conglomerate of tight riffs and blues rock mixed with the diligence of classic metal,” Anselmo reveals. “It’s an important song to us. I could feel Ozzy Osbourne’s influence on me in the strangest way.”

Lead single, ‘Blood Oath,’ is anchored by an alternately hard-hitting and hummable riff, culminating on a clarion call chorus. With a sly tip of the hat to their stomping grounds, it practically bleeds old gold, black, and white. “Anybody who’s from New Orleans is going to get a kick out of the references to the city,” grins Anselmo. “Musically, it’s got a big hook. It’s a DOWN song, but it takes a turn.”

“You’ll know it’s DOWN right off the fucking bat,” adds Keenan. “It’s heavy in its attack.”

DOWN – VOLUME V || TRACKLIST

01. The Myth
02. Merciful Fate
03. Turn Out The Light
04. The Message
05. Causeway Grief
06. Blood Oath
07. They Walk The Night
08. They Came From Dust
09. Ozz
10. Twice-Told Tales

DOWN is amid their North American headlining tour with support provided by Helmet and Spirit In The Room. The Strap It Down tour commenced in Atlanta, Georgia on August 15th and will close in Shakopee, Minnesota on September 4th with a special performance as direct support to Slayer. The journey also includes slots on the 2026 installment of Zakk Wylde’s Berzerkus Festival featuring Lamb Of God, Black Label Society, and others on August 28th in Scranton, Pennsylvania and August 29th in Wantagh, New York.

Limited DOWN VIP ticketless packages are available now, featuring a soundcheck experience, meet & greet, photo opportunity, signed poster, and exclusive merch item. Visit down-nola.com/tour to secure yours.

In October, DOWN will perform at both Aftershock and Sick New World Texas. In December the band will headline day two (December 5th) of this year’s edition of the Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest Denver. The appearance marks the band’s first Denver appearance in over twelve years!

Tickets for all shows are on sale now. See confirmed dates below.

DOWN w/ Helmet, Spirit In The Room [remaining dates]:
19/08/2026 House Of Blues – Cleveland, OH
20/08/2026 Stage AE – Pittsburgh, PA
22/08/2026 Royal Oak Music Theatre – Royal Oak, MI
23/08/2026 HISTORY – Toronto, ON
25/08/2026 MTELUS – Montreal, QC
26/08/2026 The Palladium – Worcester, MA
28/08/2026 The Pavilion @ Montage Mountain – Scranton, PA ** Berzerkus Fest w/ Lamb Of God, Black Label Society, more…
29/08/2026 Northwell @ Jones Beach Theater – Wantagh, NY ** Berzerkus Fest w/ Lamb Of God, Black Label Society, more…
30/08/2026 The Fillmore Silver Spring – Silver Spring, MD
01/09/2026 Bogart’s – Cincinnati, OH
02/09/2026 Ramova Theatre – Chicago, IL
04/09/2026 Mystic Lake Amphitheater – Shakopee, MN ** w/ Slayer, Suicidal Tendencies, Hatebreed

 ** No Helmet, Spirit In The Room

US Festival Dates:
03/10/2026 Aftershock – Sacramento, CA
24/10/2026 Sick New World Texas – Fort Worth, TX
05/12/2026 Decibel Metal And Beer Fest – Denver, C

For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.

The post Down Announce ‘Volume V’ for November 20th appeared first on The Razor's Edge.

MTV released the nominee list for the 2026 Video Music Awards this week, and Best Rock isn’t on it. Not a shortened category, not a merged one — gone. Best Alternative survives, with Fred Durst nominated for his collaboration with MGK. Twelve months ago the same network staged a full-production tribute to Ozzy Osbourne on that stage, weeks after he died. This year there’s no category he could have been nominated in.

STREAM THE METAL BREAKDOWN DAILY NOW:

Scott Penfold gets into the MTV decision on today’s Metal Breakdown Daily — what’s actually been cut, why the Ozzy timing makes it so much worse, and what 25 years inside commercial rock radio taught him about how formats get quietly euthanised. Download the free Loaded Radio App on Apple iOS and Google Play and get it every weekday morning.

What’s actually missing

Let’s be precise, because precision is what makes this indefensible.

The 2026 VMA nominee list, announced this week and reported by Lambgoat, contains no Best Rock category. It hasn’t been renamed. It hasn’t been folded into something else. It simply isn’t there.

Best Alternative is still standing. The nominees: Geese, MGK and Fred Durst for “FIX UR FACE,” Noah Kahan, Olivia Rodrigo, SOMBR, Tame Impala and twenty one pilots.

So the closest thing to guitar music at this year’s VMAs is Fred Durst guesting on somebody else’s track, filed under Alternative.

The ceremony airs live from Los Angeles on September 27.

The Ozzy problem

Here’s the part that should stick in your throat.

Last year’s VMAs featured a major tribute to Ozzy Osbourne. Yungblud, members of Aerosmith and Extreme, a full production segment, broadcast to the world weeks after his death. MTV stood on that stage and honoured the man who — with Black Sabbath — effectively invented the entire genre.

Twelve months later, they’ve deleted the category he’d have belonged in.

You can hold both of those in your head at once, but only if you understand what the tribute actually was. It wasn’t a commitment to rock music. It was a segment. Ozzy’s death was an enormous cultural moment with guaranteed ratings, and MTV booked it the way you’d book any guaranteed ratings moment.

Then the moment passed, the numbers came in, and the category that represents the living version of that music got quietly removed from a list.

That’s the whole story of rock’s relationship with mainstream American media in one twelve-month cycle. Your history is content. Your present is a scheduling problem.

In fairness: the category was already a joke

I want to be honest about this, because it complicates the outrage in a way that’s worth sitting with.

Best Rock last year went to Coldplay. Over Linkin Park. Over Evanescence.

So it’s not as though MTV was carefully stewarding a meaningful award and then tragically lost it. They’d already hollowed it out. A category that hands a rock award to Coldplay while Linkin Park are on the ballot isn’t measuring rock music — it’s measuring which act on the list gets played in a supermarket.

Which raises a genuinely uncomfortable question: is a fake category better than no category?

I think it is, and here’s why. The category being there meant a nominations conversation happened. It meant somebody at that network had to look at a list of rock artists once a year. It meant a band could get a placement that mattered to their label. Even a compromised seat at the table is a seat.

Now there’s no table.

We Recommend – Ranking the 13 Ozzy Osbourne Solo Songs That Built a Heavy Metal Throne

This isn’t an isolated decision

The context makes it worse, not better.

At the end of 2025, MTV shut down five more music-based channels. Before that, in 2024, the network scrubbed thirty years of its digital archive — news, interviews, artist profiles, the lot. Decades of primary-source documentation about how popular music actually happened, deleted.

That archive contained a genuine historical record of the era when MTV and rock built each other. The nu metal explosion happened on that network. The nineties metal landscape was shaped by which videos got played in which rotation slot. Headbangers Ball was a genuine cultural institution.

All of that is gone from their own servers. Dropping a trophy category is barely a footnote next to it.

MTV stopped being a music company a long time ago. This week is just the paperwork catching up.

Check Out – The Ultimate Ranking: The Top 13 Jake E. Lee Era Ozzy Osbourne Songs

Meanwhile, in the actual world

And here’s the bit that should keep your blood pressure down.

Next month, Louder Than Life takes over Louisville for four days with nearly two hundred bands — Iron Maiden, Tool, My Chemical Romance and Limp Bizkit headlining, and a crowd that runs into six figures. Pantera are playing their only US show of the year on that bill.

The 2026 festival season overall is the healthiest it’s been in a decade. Sleep Token are headlining stadiums. Ghost debuted at number one. Megadeth’s final album topped the Billboard 200 in January — the first chart-topper of their career, on album seventeen.

Rock and metal are not struggling. They’re just not doing it on television anymore, because television stopped being where this music lives around the same time MTV stopped playing videos.

The VMAs need rock more than rock needs the VMAs. That was true ten years ago too. The difference is that now they’ve said it out loud.

That’s also, frankly, why outlets like this one exist — human-curated, run by people who actually listen, rather than a network deciding once a year whether we’re worth a category.

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TL;DR

• What happened: the Best Rock category is absent from MTV’s 2026 VMA nominee list, announced this week.
• What survived: Best Alternative, whose nominees include Fred Durst with MGK for “FIX UR FACE,” alongside Geese, Noah Kahan, Olivia Rodrigo, SOMBR, Tame Impala and twenty one pilots.
• The timing: it comes a year after MTV staged a major Ozzy Osbourne tribute at the 2025 VMAs featuring Yungblud and members of Aerosmith and Extreme.
• The awkward context: last year’s Best Rock award went to Coldplay, beating Linkin Park and Evanescence.
• The wider pattern: MTV shut five more music channels at the end of 2025 and wiped thirty years of digital archive in 2024.
• When: the 2026 VMAs air live from Los Angeles on September 27.

FAQ

They gave Ozzy a tribute segment and then deleted the category he built. Is this the insult it looks like, or did rock stop needing MTV years ago? Have it out in the comments. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.

The post MTV Just Deleted Rock From The VMAs One Year After Honoring Ozzy Osbourne appeared first on Loaded Radio.

NOLA heavy metal supergroup Down (Pantera, Crowbar, Corrosion of Conformity, Eyehategod and more) return with Volume V, their first proper new studio album in nearly two decades! And Decibel is proud to offer our own exclusive edition of this new double-LP on Orange and Black Galaxy color vinyl with special embossed gatefold cover limited to just 300 copies courtesy of the fine folks at Nuclear Blast.

For over three decades, Philip H. Anselmo, Pepper Keenan, Kirk Windstein, Jimmy Bower, and Pat Bruders have quietly built a metal legacy like no other. And when they get together, magic ensues conjured by earthquaking grooves, bellowing straight from the soul, and riffing loud enough to awaken an ancient deity.

Don’t get lost in the smoke. Pre-order your copy of Volume V now!

The post Pre-Order DOWN’s New Album ‘Volume V’ on Decibel-Exclusive Orange and Black Galaxy Vinyl! LIMITED TO 300! appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

Demon Hunter, the Christian metal band from Seattle, are suing Netflix over their hugely successful film KPop Demon Hunters, claiming that their copyright has been infringed.

The Washington state group, who have been touring for 25 years and released 12 studio albums, argue that Netflix’s plan for a global concert tour celebrating their most-watched original title on the streaming platform, along with the movie and merchandise, means there is “almost complete overlap” with what they offer, which has led to trademark infringement, unfair competition, and brand confusion.

KPop Demon Hunters is a 2025 animated film about a KPop trio, Huntrix, who have double lives as demon hunters, as you may have guessed. Netflix won Best Animated Film and Best Original Song for Golden at the 2026 Golden Globes and Oscars. The video for the song has 1.6 billion views on YouTube.

Complex website reports that the band, via their company Hyde Lane, filed a trademark lawsuit in the Central District of California against Netflix, Netflix Studios, and live events promoter AEG Presents yesterday, (August 18).

The lawsuit states, “The brand that Hyde Lane has carefully built over the course of the past quarter century now faces an existential crisis, thereby necessitating the filing of this action and the granting of the requested relief from this Court.”

As part of their filing, Hyde Lane included an email from someone who spent $500 on tickets to a Demon Hunter concert in Albany, New York, mistakenly believing that they’d be taking their children to a KPop Demon Hunters show.

The band argue that Netflix and AEG are “massive companies that jealously guard and enforce their own intellectual property rights wilfully disregarding the rights of others in pursuit of profits.”

Demon Hunter are asking that the court order Netflix to stop using the KPop Demon Hunters name for recorded music, live shows and merchandise, and to award unspecified damages.

Demon Hunter, whose most recent album, There Was a Light Here, was released last year, have almost 350,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, while the KPop Demon Hunters cast have 27 million monthly listeners on the platform.

First Published: September 2016. It is nice to see a band you like put in all the hard graft required to succeed as a Metal band in the modern world and get the rewards for it. The Holographic Principle, is the seventh studio album in the sixteen-year history of Epica. They have done all the touring, played the little clubs, opened festivals and gone through the inevitable line-up changes to grow into the band they are now.

Of course, just working hard and touring constantly is not going to cut it on its own. You also have to be good, or no amount of shows will make up for it. Fortunately, this particular band of Dutch symphonic Metallers are not just one of the top bands in the female-fronted Metal world but a cracking live band who can live with anyone on a stage. In addition, the current line-up has the chemistry to be a real creative tour de force.

2014’s The Quantum Enigma saw them at the top of their game, a set of quality songs as heavy and brutal sounding as they have ever been, yet with that flair for melody and matched to a big concept based on quantum physics. I was not kidding about the creativity part either, as they filled the CD to its seventy-five-minute capacity and still had five very good songs left over to be released as bonus tracks.

Now, after two more years of touring, press work and all the rest, it is time for the follow-up, and it seems they have done the business again.

Once again there is a high-end theme around the songs here. The Holographic Principle is a phrase referring to a theory that the world is a hologram. As guitarist/vocalist Mark Jansen says, “Nowadays you can put on a virtual reality mask, and you’ll find yourself in a different world. It’s not perfect yet, but in a few years the techniques will be so good that you won’t be able to tell if it’s our ‘real’ world or the virtual reality world. At that point, people might realise that the world we’re living in now is perhaps also a virtual reality of a higher reality.”

As more entertainment experiences become connected and digital, fans should also take practical steps to protect their devices online, whether that means updating security settings or using a VPN for iPhone when accessing content on public Wi-Fi networks.

Their iconic singer Simone Simons asks, “Is this world a hologram? Are there multiple realities? Inside our mind and in our dreams we can create entire worlds, and the parallels with virtual reality are obvious. Besides the music, the lyrics have taken a big role as well. We don’t just offer great songs. We offer food for thought!”

So for those of you who like to delve into the lyrics of a song and try to work out what is going on, there is plenty here to get your brain working overtime.

Musically, the album also continues where The Quantum Enigma left off. Widely regarded as the heaviest album they had made up to that point, producer Joost van den Broek took modern technology and added a brutal edge to their sound that Jansen admitted he had always wanted the band to have.

Starting with what will inevitably be the intro tape for the live shows in Eidola, the first ‘proper’ track Edge Of The Blade starts fast and heavy and has all those typical Epica elements of heavy riffing guitars, keyboard hooks, choirs, Arien van Weesenbeek’s amazing mix of power and precision on drums and of course Simone Simons’ epic soprano vocals backed by Jansen’s trademark grunts.

That is a lot to have going on, and given that they have enough budget now to use real choirs and classical sections in the studio, I think Jacob Hansen has done an amazing job of mixing it all together coherently. The thing about Epica, though, is that among all those complex arrangements and time changes and musicianship and everything else, it is a truly memorable song. It is not just style here. There is real musical substance.

My initial reaction to the album was that it maybe was not quite at the level of its predecessor, which I loved, but after living with it for a few days, my opinion is gradually changing. Maybe there is just so much going on that it takes time to get your head around it, or maybe I am just slow.

Whatever, now I find parts like the chanting chorus sections of Universal Death Squad, the huge riffs of A Phantasmic Parade, or the operatic Metal intro to The Cosmic Algorithm running through my head on a regular basis.

While this is absolutely an album which lays out Epica’s credentials as a Metal band, they have not forgotten that they have the capacity to create music of a fragile beauty too. Once Upon A Nightmare has some lovely atmospheric orchestration wrapped around Simone’s voice at its most tender, while the album closer, The Holographic Principle-A Profound Understanding Of Reality, is an eleven-minute epic which moves through some terrific melodic sections and even lets the guitars switch into tender mode at times. We even get some sitar thrown into the eastern-tinged Dancing In A Hurricane.

Apparently there are six songs which did not make the album but will be released in due course. I hope these are released together in a special edition and not scattered around as individual bonus tracks.

With album launch shows at their own Epic Metal Fests in the Netherlands and Brazil, headline arena shows booked in Europe, and 2 million-plus Facebook likes, there is absolutely no doubt that Epica are a band on the way up the ladder of Metal fame. I think that success is richly deserved, and with The Holographic Principle they more than back that up with another very high-quality bunch of songs. Essential listening for anyone with the slightest interest in symphonic Metal of any kind.

The Holographic Principle was released through Nuclear Blast on 30 September 2016 and would go on to be elected the 10th best Symphonic Metal album of all time by Metal Hammer in 2021.

The post Archive: The Rise Of Epica Continues With The Holographic Principle first appeared on MetalTalk – Heavy Metal News, Reviews and Interviews.

(written by Islander) The Swedish group Teratum rose up from the ashes of the band Beastiality in 2024, and the next year they viciously announced themselves with a two-song promo tape made available in extremely small quantities. They are now following that with a debut EP named Ordnance of Spiritual Warfare, which will be widely […]

The post AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TERATUM — “ORDNANCE OF SPIRITUAL WARFARE” appeared first on NO CLEAN SINGING.

Album Review: The Night Eternal – Cold Velvet

Reviewed by Rich Sargeant

Forming in Germany in 2018 The Night Eternal are preparing to celebrate the release of the band’s third LP ‘Cold Velvet’ on 21st August. Following on from 2023’s ‘Fatale’ the band has rubber stamped their signature blend of punchy classic heavy metal with moody, gothic-laden riffs.

While The Night Eternal will inevitably draw comparisons to other acts attempting to fill the rather large Peter Steele shaped void Type O Negative left in the gothic metal scene such as Unto Others, ‘Cold Velvet’ is a bold step in securing The Night Eternal’s place in that conversation. Opener ‘Where the World Ends’ does what this band do best and really sets the tone for the rest if the album: melancholic, sweeping leads, a driving NWOBHM-esque rhythm section all backed up by front man Ricardo Baum’s stand-out baritone vocals and clean sections that wouldn’t be amiss in one of those “80’s nighttime driving” Tik-Tok reels.

Next is the anthemic Eurydice (Don’t Look Away) which looks destined to become a mainstay of setlists for a long time with an insanely catchy ear worm of a chorus, this track really ramps up the old NWOBHM vibe – think earlier Iron Maiden or Angel Witch if they had chucked a bit of Bauhaus in for good measure.

The next real standout track entering the B-side – one of the albums singles ‘The Veins of Time’ lets vocalist Ricardo Baum really push the envelope in his delivery style in a way the band haven’t explored much until now, the chorus is delivered in starkly higher register than nearly everything else on the album – while not quite reaching Halford levels of glass-shattering shriek the contrast is enough to grab the attention.

The closing three tracks The Watcher of the Burning Veil, Shape of Sorrow and Dance on Crimson Ground again show the bands ability to switch gears – none of these tracks would look out of place on any of Iron Maiden’s “proggier” outings such as Seventh Son of a Seventh Son or Brave New World.

Overall, Cold Velvet carries on where Fatale finished off, its doubtful The Night Eternal will convert anyone that has already written them off but this is their best release yet and shows a band that has stepped up musically and is ready to stake a claim as one of Europe’s best upcoming bands.

For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.

The post Album Review: The Night Eternal – Cold Velvet appeared first on The Razor's Edge.

Taken from their upcoming tenth studio album, ‘In The Shadow Of Your Shadow’

Source

San-Fran indie-rock power-poppers Pardoner released their Peace Loving People album on the longstanding Bar/None label in 2023, and they followed it with the Paranoid In Hell EP in 2024. Two years later, their next LP is ready to rock.

The post Pardoner Announce New Album <em>Target Practice</em>: Hear “Twisted” appeared first on Stereogum.