(written by Islander) It’s so nice to begin a new week at NCS by installing a piece of hellishly eye-catching cover art at the top of the page. We have an intricate layout of skull-headed abominations that seem to be feeding on their own intestines, plus spikes, tendrils, and a ghastly glowing light that signifies […]
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www.carlaglover.com [Release date 02.10.26] Attention all lovers of old American or traditional Americana music – this album is for you. Make a mark in your diary, it’s out Oct 2. Written by Si Khan and featuring 10 different vocalists, including … Continue reading
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For the vast majority of his career, drill originator Chief Keef has been effectively banned from performing in his Chicago hometown. Again and again, Chicago authorities made his planned appearances impossible. Even a 2015 hologram performance in nearby Indiana was shut down after one song. On Saturday night, Chief Keef was slated to play his first proper Chicago headlining show in well over a decade. It didn’t happen.
The post Chief Keef Postpones Long-Awaited Chicago Return Minutes Before Show, Blames “Racist” Pilot appeared first on Stereogum.
Being the Gob of metal, I keep my claw on the pulse of my industry, but when I read that one of the most popular genres amongst the younger generation wasn’t new music but NU music. I was GOBSMACKED. Can this be? Is nu-metal new… again? New Nu?
Well, they do say everything is cyclical, which I never was a believer in, that is, until earlier this week when I was walking to get my morning slurpee, and I saw a teenage boy wearing Jnco jeans. I screamed, “2001 called, they want their comically-flarred pants back,” and then he struck me with his chain wallet, almost breaking my puka necklace! Soon another kid entered, looking like he’d been spit out of Thrasher Magazine, and I grabbed him by his frosted tips and demanded answers: “What’s going on? Who do you work for?!” The boy said two things that shook me to my core: first, he insisted they were merely fans of “classic rock.” I thought, classic rock? Like, The Beatles? Zeppelin? The other British guys with bad haircuts and even worse teeth? The boy looked me in my yellow and red eye and said, “No, unc! I mean, Korn! Limp Bizkit! The classics!”
What?!? Naturally I fainted.
Later I came to, and two police officers stood over me. Apparently I missed the second thing that boy was going to tell me, which was “You just assaulted a minor, I’m calling the cops!” I spent the night in the slammer, but I was about to turn the tables; I was going to go from inmate to detective. For I was on a quest to get to the bottom of this. Can something so old become new? Or even worse, NU?! I was well aware that people = shit. In fact, I was so mad I could break stuff; I knew I had been blind, but this was loco; it felt like my last resort; I’m talking suffocation, no breathing! The toxicity of our city, our city, was going to prove one thing… in the end… it doesn’t even matter.
I knew I had to head into the belly of the beast; I had to go to the Nu-metal mecca. I went to my local mall and walked my hump straight into HOT TOPIC… OK, I may have stopped to get an Auntie Anne’s pretzel and an Orange Julius first, but then I made my way over to the HT. To my surprise, it was packed. They almost sold out of thick leather bracelets and Chevelle shirts for Gob’s sake! How did this happen? In the era of cringe, you’d think this young generation would not be able to overlook the countless music videos that took place in a tunnel with a fish lens, or every guitarist asking, “How low can I put my strap before my guitar is just lying on the ground?” Or the countless masks, face paint, and gimmicks that nu metal offered in abundance. Or how about how there was always at least one white boy in every band with the thinnest, dirtiest-looking dreadlocks you’ve ever seen? Or what’s it called when a dude only has half the goatee, like the lower part? Just a thick patch of hair on just the chin, but nowhere else? A mistake, I’d call it! Yet, none of that has deterred the youth. Dare I say, it has enticed them!
The genre has had such a resurgence that now these kids are starting bands and mimicking the music we once thought was dead. Resurrected it like a zombie, a Rob Zombie! It got me thinking… why did this genre garner so much hate from the metal world in the first place? How did one of the most inclusive genres turn its back on its agro step-brother? Was it because it got so commercialized it was featured on TRL next to fuggin Britney Spears? Was it cause the ravenous alpha males destroyed Woodstock 99 with their agro aggression towards wood? Or was it the constant pulling from the pool of hip-hop, giving us the horrors of birthing a slew of new white rappers who also couldn’t resist screaming “GO!” right as the breakdown begins? Revisiting this, I think it’s probably all the above… but are we forgetting all the good genre has brought? Maybe it’s time to push it, time to let the bodies hit the floor, time to click, then click, then boom! Nu-metal is truly the genre that allowed us to enjoy the wild breakdowns of metal, mixed with the nasal, vaguely southern-sounding vocals of grunge. It bridged that gap. It Matthew’s bridge’d that gap… and John Otto… and many others… took us there. And ya know what? Thank Gob they did.
Maybe instead of making fun of them… we should thank them.
Maybe instead of living in the past, we should yearn to live in the future.
Maybe instead of holding on to the old, we should embrace… the NU.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I just started my Atkins diet, so I’m gonna pound a Monster Energy drink before hitting the Rainforest cafe and cruising in my ride that Xhibiti just pimped… as they say, gotta keep it rollin’ baby!
The post MONDAYSUCKS With JOHN GOBLIKON: The Biggest Recession Indicator Is the Nu-Metal Resurgence appeared first on MetalSucks.
KScope [Release date 18.09.26] Festival favourites Ozric Tentacles formed at the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1983 and have kept a solid fanbase ever since. They released a number of cassette only albums during the 80s, releasing their first full album … Continue reading
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John Carpenter has told Metal Hammer that he’d “totally direct a music video for Metallica” if they asked him. The man who made Halloween, The Thing, Escape From New York and Big Trouble In Little China is 78, hasn’t directed a feature film since 2010, and got into Metallica because his kids played him “Enter Sandman.” He’s never seen them live. And the offer arrives about two weeks before Metallica open a Las Vegas residency built entirely around visuals.
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Carpenter’s route into Metallica is the same as a lot of people’s parents, only in reverse.
His kids played him the Black Album.
His words on it: they all loved it when it came out. That album is just fantastic. And then — and they are, right?
He went on: they were just this huge band, but he loved that album for introducing him to them. And then the admission — he’s never actually seen them live.
Then the line that makes this a story: “I’d totally direct a music video for Metallica if they asked, though.”
LIVE & LOUD: Stream the World’s Hardest Radio Station 24/7Here’s the context that turns a nice quote into news.
John Carpenter has not directed a feature film since The Ward in 2010. Sixteen years.
He hasn’t been idle — he executive produced David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween and both of its sequels, and he’s composed continuously. But the director’s chair has been empty for a decade and a half.
So this isn’t a filmmaker looking for work. It’s a man who stopped doing the thing he’s famous for, saying he’d do it again for one specific band.
And he’s not a director who’d treat a music video as a lesser format. Carpenter composed the scores for fifteen of his eighteen feature films. He’s been releasing standalone albums since 2015 with his son Cody Carpenter and his godson, composer Daniel Davies — and his latest, Cathedral, came out in August via Sacred Bones and was explicitly metal-inspired.
His description of what he wanted from that record: it’s all about making the music work. Somewhat different-sounding stuff, done with the same desire in mind — put this thing on and imagine you’re watching a movie.
A man who makes albums that are designed to feel like films, offering to make a film for a band. That’s a better fit than most director-band pairings ever get.
The other thing nobody’s mentioning: he’s already done this once.
Carpenter composed the opening credits score for Studio 666, the 2022 horror-comedy starring the Foo Fighters. A rock band made a horror film, and the person they got to set the tone at the top of it was John Carpenter.
So the idea of Carpenter and a major rock act in the same room isn’t hypothetical. It’s happened, it worked, and he enjoyed it enough to be volunteering for more.
Now the part that makes this genuinely interesting rather than merely charming.
Metallica begin a residency at The Sphere in Las Vegas on October 1. It runs through to March 13.
If you haven’t seen footage from that venue: The Sphere is a 16K wraparound screen wrapped around an audience. It is the single most visually ambitious performance space ever constructed, and it doesn’t really work as a normal gig. Every act who’s played it has had to design something specifically for it, because the production is the show.
So Metallica are about to mount the most visually demanding undertaking of a forty-five-year career. They’ve just come off the three-year M72 world tour. And the most influential visual stylist in the history of horror cinema has publicly put his hand up, unprompted, in the same fortnight.
Nobody is suggesting Carpenter is about to be handed The Sphere. But if there was ever a month where Metallica happened to be thinking hard about images, it’s this one, and one of the few living directors whose visual signature is instantly recognisable from a single frame just volunteered.
Somebody in that organization should read this interview.
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Worth thinking about for a second, because the answer isn’t the obvious one.
People hear “horror director” and imagine gore. Carpenter has never really worked that way. What he does is dread — wide, static compositions, negative space, something in the frame that shouldn’t be there, and a camera that refuses to cut away when you want it to. Halloween is terrifying because of what it declines to show you. The Thing works because of how long it holds.
Match that against Metallica’s catalogue and the fits are obvious. “Enter Sandman” is a song about a child’s nightmare. “One” is already one of the darkest videos ever put on MTV. “The Thing That Should Not Be” is literally Lovecraft, and The Thing is the best Lovecraftian film ever made by someone adapting something else.
The band have historically been very good at handing their visuals to real filmmakers rather than video directors. That’s how they ended up with some of the most durable images in the whole history of heavy music.
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The rest of the interview is worth reading on its own, because he’s unexpectedly generous about the state of things.
On rock music still existing: still alive and still here — like me! Then the qualifier — it may be a bit less transcendent and popular than it was, but it still speaks to people like it spoke to him all those years ago.
And then this, which is the best thing in the whole piece:
Music as an art form is probably the greatest thing humanity ever created. It transcends language, going from country to country, across the world. Someone in Bangladesh can hear an American song and still love it.
That’s a 78-year-old man who has spent fifty years being told he’s a horror director, saying the thing he actually believes is that music is the highest achievement of the species.
Given how many of the best film soundtracks ever assembled came out of heavy music, he might be onto something.
Carpenter released Cathedral in August via Sacred Bones, with a tie-in graphic novel. He’s still composing, still recording with Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies, and still hasn’t directed a feature since 2010.
Metallica have completed the three-year M72 world tour and open at The Sphere on October 1, running to March 13. Their last album was 72 Seasons in 2023.
Forty-five years in for one of them, fifty for the other, and they’ve somehow never worked together.
He says yes. Speaking to Metal Hammer, the Halloween and The Thing director said he’d “totally direct a music video for Metallica if they asked,” adding that he’s a fan of the band and rates their 1991 self-titled album as “fantastic.” No approach from Metallica has been reported.
His children introduced him to the band via “Enter Sandman” from the 1991 self-titled Black Album. He has said the whole family loved it at the time, and that the album is what introduced him to Metallica — though he has never seen them perform live.
The Ward, released in 2010. He has since executive produced David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween and its two sequels, and has continued composing — including the opening credits score for the 2022 Foo Fighters horror-comedy Studio 666 — but has not directed a feature in sixteen years.
Yes. He composed the scores for fifteen of his eighteen feature films, and has released standalone studio albums since 2015 alongside his son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies. His most recent, Cathedral, came out in August 2026 via Sacred Bones and was described as metal-inspired.
October 1, 2026, running through to March 13 at the Sphere in Las Vegas. It follows the completion of the band’s three-year M72 world tour.
A man who stopped directing sixteen years ago, volunteering for one band — two weeks before that band opens a residency built entirely around images. Which Metallica song would you hand him? Tell me below. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.
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