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Veiled in mystique, Nihil Admiral proves elusive as details about them dance outside my reach. Lacking a traditional landing page on socials or the Archives,¹ I’m forced to draw conclusions and inferences without the comfort of cross-reference materials I usually take for granted. I’m not flying completely blind, though, as Nihil Admiral’s promo materials mention that this Trondheim, Norway troupe features members from Misotheist, Corroder, Goat the Head, and others. While no specific band members are mentioned in the press kit, the Bandcamp page for single “Life’s Lower Phase” offers a few names, though it’s unclear whether they’re all full-time members of Nihil Admiral’s debut. Regardless, involvement doesn’t necessarily beget quality, so let’s dive in and test how sharp The Axes, the Flesh Hooks and the Spits really are.

From the gritty production to the grainy, snowbound album art, The Axes could only be raw black metal. And as you might expect from a name like Nihil Admiral, the atmosphere is rife with lawlessness and wiolence. Given the raw aesthetic the band perpetuates, Nihil Admiral recalls early Darkthrone and Satyricon seen through the lens of Paysage d’Hiver. Misotheist supplies another suitable reference point, as The Axes’ furiously driving compositions remind me of the most aggressive moments in Misotheist’s discography, even if Nihil Admiral’s song lengths better map to crossover thrash. Given the high regard these inspirations engender, it should be no surprise that from moment to moment Nihil Admiral delivers wonderfully wicked black metal.

Rime-ridden, icy fury whips at each track on The Axes, defining the black metal onslaught permeating Nihil Admiral’s debut. Rabid tremolos fill scant runtimes along with manic blast beats and coarse, deathly roars (“The Axes, the Flesh Hooks, and the Spits”), which submit a welcome contrast against the requisite blackened rasps.² Nearly every track launches its assault with frenzied riffs and an ugly barrage of snare ‘n’ kick abuse, and Nihil Admiral does it convincingly. “Stare” begins with a thrashy lick guaranteed to get heads banging while a scorching guitar gallops past with Hellrippering speed and riffcraft. Conversely, penultimate track “Southern Cross” enters with a slower, synth-forward build before loosing the tempestuous fury Nihil Admiral commands so well. Over eight lean tracks, The Axes, the Flesh Hooks and the Spits slash and skewer with keen edges.

However, despite the murderous precision of Nihil Admiral’s instruments, The Axes leaves more impression than impact. The band sounds properly pissed off, but I struggle to remember any of The Axes’ songs besides the back half of “The Eye of Logic,” and that’s only because of its similarity to Ramin Djawadi’s Game of Thrones title sequence. Otherwise, The Axes, the Flesh Hooks and the Spits’ meager runtime passes by in a scathing yet fleeting flurry. And speaking of the runtime, Nihil Admiral’s twenty-five minutes aren’t enough to satisfy. I usually applaud a less-is-moar approach, but given that The Axes doesn’t do enough to develop their arrangements, such a concise runtime suggests a lack of ideas that would have been better off marinating rather than serving half-baked. Closing track “Its Own Beyond” provides an apt example, where horns subtlety support guitar trems as they blur into an exciting mixture before the song just… ends. Potential abounds, and refining the songwriting to intentionally mold tension would have gone a long way towards delivering a more effective conclusion to The Axes, and applied across the album would have manifested a better experience altogether.

Though I’m left disappointed by Nihil Admiral’s debut, I’m excited by their potential. Captivating second-wave worship lives here, with glimmers of originality shimmering through the cracks. Unfortunately, the album is held back by an abrupt duration that doesn’t allow tracks to mature into their best possible forms. The Axes, the Flesh Hooks and the Spits doesn’t shy away from remorseless music subscribed to nihilism, but neither do these deadly implements hook me with their blackened burs. Even though The Axes miss their mark, with more deliberate songwriting I’m confident that next time Nihil Admiral wrests the reins of chaos, they can seize listeners with an experience worthy of their rank.

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Rating: Disappointing
DR: 10 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Rekviem
Websites: Bandcamp³
Releases Worldwide: August 14th, 2026

The post Nihil Admiral – The Axes, the Flesh Hooks and the Spits Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

Tony Iommi has told Classic Rock that producer Andrew Watt approached him in the early 2020s offering to make a final Black Sabbath album with all four original members — Ozzy, Geezer, Bill Ward and Iommi himself. It would have been the follow-up to 2013’s 13, the first Sabbath album in 35 years and the only US number one of their career, which Bill Ward never played on.

Iommi turned it down. Three years later Ozzy said the one thing he regretted about 13 was that Ward wasn’t on it. Ozzy died in July 2025, which means the album Watt was offering can now never exist.

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What Iommi actually said

The offer came from Andrew Watt — the producer who made Ozzy’s final two solo albums, 2020’s Ordinary Man and 2022’s Patient Number 9, and who has since worked with the Rolling Stones and Pearl Jam.

Iommi’s account, to Classic Rock: he’d met Watt when he was producing Ozzy. Watt was very keen, and a bit too excited.

Then the reasons.

“He also didn’t know what it was like working with the original Sabbath, working with Bill.”

And: they’d already done 13, and he didn’t like the idea of now here’s another album.

That’s it. No acrimony, no falling out. A man who’d been through the process once deciding he didn’t want to go through it again, from a producer who — in Iommi’s reading — didn’t understand what he was volunteering for.

The quote that changes everything

Here’s what almost nobody covering this today is going to put next to it.

In 2022, Ozzy was asked by Stereogum whether he felt good about where 13 left things. His answer was not kind.

He said no, not really — that he didn’t get a charge from the album, that Rick Rubin was a good friend but he was just singing, that it was like stepping back in time but not to a glorious period. That Geezer did a lot of the lyric writing, which he’s very good at. That it wasn’t an earth-shattering experience.

And then this:

“The only thing I really regret, to be honest, is that Bill Ward didn’t play on the album. It wasn’t really a Black Sabbath album.”

He went further. He said he wasn’t ruling out that one day they might all go in a room and come up with the perfect Black Sabbath album — and that 13 wasn’t recorded the way Sabbath recorded records, that they’d gone back past the point where the band took charge, to when someone else had full control. Which, he said, they’d never done from Vol. 4 onwards.

Andrew Watt was offering exactly the album Ozzy described. Original lineup. Bill Ward included. From the producer Ozzy had just made two records with and clearly trusted.

And one of Iommi’s stated reasons for declining was Bill — the precise thing Ozzy said he regretted.

I’m not suggesting Iommi was wrong. He’d lived through the 2012 contract collapse and he knew what the room was like in a way none of us do. But the shape of it is hard to look at: the one man who could have said yes said no, and the singer who wanted it most never got told there was an offer on the table at all, as far as any of this reporting suggests.

Why Bill Ward wasn’t on 13

The context that makes the whole thing make sense.

Ward was initially on board for the 2011 reunion of the original lineup. In early 2012 he stepped away, describing what he’d been offered as an “unsignable contract” that did not reflect his contributions to the band. In May 2012 he formally announced he was declining both the scheduled dates and the album sessions.

So 13 — the first Black Sabbath album in 35 years to feature Ozzy, Iommi and Geezer Butler — was made without its drummer. Brad Wilk of Rage Against the Machine played on the record. Tommy Clufetos, Ozzy’s regular touring drummer, handled the live shows.

And Rubin’s first suggestion for the chair was something else entirely: Ginger Baker of Cream.

Iommi’s reaction, to Rolling Stone: “I thought, ‘Bloody hell?’ I just couldn’t see that.”

Wilk got the job instead.

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What 13 actually achieved

Worth stating clearly, because it complicates the “it wasn’t really a Black Sabbath album” verdict.

It went to number one on the Billboard 200 in June 2013 — the first US number one album of Black Sabbath’s entire career. Forty-three years, and the reunion record is the one that did it.

It also entered the UK chart at number one. The last time Sabbath had topped the UK chart before that was October 1970, with Paranoid — a gap of forty-three years there too.

Commercially it’s the most successful thing they ever released. Ozzy’s own verdict on it was that he didn’t get a charge from it. Both of those are true at once, which is fairly typical of this band.

Where it sits against the rest of the catalogue is a separate argument, and we’ve ranked every Black Sabbath album here.

The Rick Rubin stories are extraordinary

The reason Iommi wasn’t keen to go again is scattered across a decade of interviews, and it’s the funniest material in this whole story.

Rubin’s opening instruction was to forget they were a heavy metal band. Geezer’s account, to SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation: Rubin played them their first album and told them to cast their minds back to when there was no such thing as heavy metal, and pretend this was the follow-up to that. Geezer’s verdict — a ridiculous thing to think.

On what Rubin actually did: Geezer said he still doesn’t know. It was “yeah, that’s good,” “no, don’t do that,” and when you asked why, “just don’t do it.”

On the vocals: Geezer said Ozzy went nuts one day after doing about ten different takes with Rubin saying each time that it was great but to do another one. Ozzy’s response — if it’s great, why am I doing another one? — and then he lost it.

On the amps, and this is the best of it. Rubin wanted Iommi to use 1968 amplifiers. Iommi told SPIN he pointed out that was fifty years ago and his had blown up long since. He arrived at the studio to find twenty different vintage amps waiting. Rubin said they were vintage. Iommi said that doesn’t mean they sound good, they’re just old. He tried all of them and liked none of them.

And the summary line, also to SPIN, when asked what he’d learned from working with Rubin: “Yeah, I learned how to lie on the couch with a mic in my hand and say ‘Next!’”

Read all that back and “I didn’t like the idea of: now here’s another album” starts to sound less like reluctance and more like a man who’d done his time.

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The follow-up that was already half-written

The other detail worth knowing: there were songs.

In 2014, Geezer said they had four tracks left over from the 13 sessions, and that maybe they’d fill in another four or five and put out a second album — if it was right. Not for the sake of it, not for the money. But maybe.

Ozzy, around the same time, told Abu Dhabi’s The National that if they had another album in them he’d do it, though he hadn’t discussed it with the others and his solo career was going well. His line: time is not on my side any more.

By 2015 he was more guarded, telling NOLA.com he didn’t want to say there was going to be another album because he didn’t want to be asked a year later what happened to it.

Then the farewell tour was announced instead, launching in early 2016, and Ozzy confirmed the record had been scrapped. His reasoning was pure showbusiness: an album would take three or four years, and if they made one and it went to number two, people would say it was over. “There’s only one more place you can go after No. 1 and that’s No. 2.”

So the material existed. The appetite existed, on Ozzy’s side at least. And when Andrew Watt turned up offering to finish the job with the full original lineup, the answer was no.

How it actually ended

The original lineup of Black Sabbath — Iommi, Osbourne, Ward and Butler — played together for the last time at Back To The Beginning, a charity show at Villa Park in Birmingham on July 5, 2025. All four of them, in their own city, for the first time in twenty years.

Ozzy died seventeen days later, on July 22, 2025. He suffered a heart attack at his family home near Chalfont St. Giles in Buckinghamshire and was airlifted to Harefield Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He was 76.

Which means the last thing the four of them did together was a concert rather than a record — and given what they built, and what the four of them started in Birmingham in 1968, there are worse endings.

But there was an album on offer, and now there isn’t.

TL;DR

• Tony Iommi has revealed to Classic Rock that producer Andrew Watt offered to make a final Black Sabbath album with the original lineup in the early 2020s.
• Iommi turned it down. His reasons: Watt was “a bit too excited,” didn’t understand what working with the original Sabbath and with Bill Ward was actually like, and they’d already done 13.
• Watt produced Ozzy’s final two solo albums, 2020’s Ordinary Man and 2022’s Patient Number 9.
• Bill Ward didn’t play on 13 — he withdrew in early 2012 over what he called an “unsignable contract.” Brad Wilk of Rage Against the Machine drummed on the record instead, after Rick Rubin first suggested Ginger Baker.
• 13 was Black Sabbath’s only US number one album, and their first UK number one since Paranoid in October 1970.
• In 2022 Ozzy said his one regret about 13 was that Ward wasn’t on it, and that it “wasn’t really a Black Sabbath album” — while leaving the door open to making “the perfect Black Sabbath album” one day.
• The original four played together for the last time at Back To The Beginning in Birmingham on July 5, 2025. Ozzy died on July 22.

FAQ

An album with all four of them was on the table, and the one man who could have said yes said no. Would you have wanted it, or is Back To The Beginning the better ending? 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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Glenn Hughes had it all in the 1970s and then came very close to throwing everything away in the 1980s.

Plucked from livewire rockers Trapeze to join Deep Purple’s Mk III in 1973, bassist/vocalist Hughes and fellow new boy David Coverdale helped revitalise Purple after the departure of original singer Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover. Hughes made three brilliant albums with the band – 1974’s Burn and Stormbringer, plus 1975’s Come Taste The Band. But at the same time, he had fallen into serious drug addiction.

“When anyone has success, there will be people around offering them stuff – jewellery, watches, girls, drugs,” Hughes tells Classic Rock. “When I joined Purple I was given all kinds of drugs, pills, things like that. I’d flush them down the toilet or just leave them in my pocket and not do anything with them.

“After about six months in Purple, I started to go: ‘What is this stuff about, cocaine?’ One night, I found something in my pocket. I was alone in my room, and I sniffed some of it. I went: ‘Oh, this is fun. This is making me happy’. Slowly but surely I started becoming addicted. I thought: ‘I’m young, isn’t everybody snorting cocaine off of strippers’ bums?’”

After Purple’s split in 1976, Hughes’ addiction worsened. By the 1980s, he was in a bad way, strung out on cocaine and, later, crack. His lifestyle took precedence over music – he managed one album with guitarist Pat Thrall under the name Hughes/Thrall, collaborated with Irish guitarist Gary Moore on the latter’s 1985 album Run For Cover and briefly joined Black Sabbath for 1986’s Seventh Star.

“Music was getting in the way of me getting high,” Hughes tells Classic Rock. “Getting high was the main thing for me. I tried to stop but I couldn’t. I was in trouble.”

If things were bad for Hughes musically, personally they were disastrous – and potentially fatal. His drug intake was wreaking serious damage to his body, and he came close to dying after setting fire to his kitchen with a fryer.

By the end of the 1980s, the future looked bleak for this one-time superstar. But salvation was around the corner in an unlikely form.

Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were a pair of maverick electronic musicians who had notched up a UK Number 1 hit with their novelty 1988 Doctor Who-themed single Doctorin’ The Tardis, released under the name The Timelords.

By 1991, the pair were operating under the handle The KLF, and had pivoted towards more serious forms of electronic music. They were looking for someone to sing on an updated version of a trance song they’d released a few years earlier titled What Time Is Love?.

The powerful new version, renamed America: What Time Is Love?, reinvented the original as a full-on techno-rock anthem featuring a sample of the riff from Motörhead’s Ace Of Spades. The result sounded like Satan’s own spin class. All they needed was someone with a screaming voice to match the song’s beefed up sound. Enter Glenn Hughes.

“We were originally supposed to be doing the song with Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses, but he never turned up to the session,” The KLF’s Bill Drummond tod Joel McIver, co-author of Hughes’ 2011 autobiography Deep Purple And Beyond: Scenes From The Life Of A Rock Star. “I can’t remember who the fuck suggested Glenn, but as soon as they did I said, ‘What, that guy who I saw fronting Trapeze in 1971? Great idea!’”

“We got a call from someone in the KLF’s camp – they were looking for me or Roger Daltrey to sing What Time Is Love?,” Hughes tells Classic Rock. “I went down to the studio to meet the two KLF guys, and within an hour I’d sung what you hear on the song.”

Drummond was impressed by Hughes’ professionalism. “When he came in I assumed he’d be jaded and I wondered if he’d take the piss, because we’d worked with people who’d given us all kinds of attitude – but as soon as he went into the vocal booth, he was absolutely and utterly stunning,” he told McIver. “He was so full of energy.”

Little did Drummond know that Hughes was still in the grip of his bad habits. “I don’t think they knew anything about my drug addiction in the studio,”’ the singer tells Classic Rock. “I never showed up high. But I figured: ‘Holy shit, this could be my pathway to a different career – something strange but wonderful. Maybe this is the opportunity for me to take a look at my addiction.’”

Irrespective of the state he was in, the finished song was the perfect collision between techno and rock, with Hughes giving it his all on the song’s chorus and offering up some ecstatic screams. It was accompanied by a lavish video, filmed at London’s Pinewood Studios, which found Hughes and the extended KLF collective on a Viking-style boat being lashed by rain and stormy waves.

“They asked me to be in the video,” recalls Hughes. “I wasn’t drinking or on drugs that day, which was probably a good thing cos it was really hard work. But I was in a bad way.”

“He was brilliant and not at all fragile, because the video shoot was an ordeal, with tons of cold water flying everywhere and everyone getting soaked,” The KLF’s Jimmy Cauty told Joel McIver. “You can’t be fragile in that situation.”

America: What Time Is Love? was released as a single in the UK in February 1992 and reached No.4. The singer was credited as ‘The Voice Of Rock’ – a sobriquet he’d embrace in subsequent years. It was the most successful thing Hughes had been in since the days of Deep Purple. But more importantly, recording the song convinced him that it was time to clean up.

“I very obviously knew that I had a problem,” Hughes tells Classic Rock. “People were so pissed off with me, but they were praying for me. I decided when I got home to see if I needed to go into the Betty Ford Centre.”

Hughes did indeed check into the Betty Ford Clinic in January 1992, though not before he suffered a heart attack on Christmas Day after one last crack binge. Nor did sobriety take straight away. Hughes says he had “four or five relapses” before kicking alcohol and drugs once and for all in 1997.

While the success of America: What Time Is Love? didn’t lead directly to Hughes getting clean, he credits it with setting him on the path to sobriety.

“Working with the guys in The KLF was an incredible opportunity for me to get noticed again after being out of the picture for so long,” he says. “It gave me confidence. I owe them a lot.”

The Swedish formation Lifelover has recently confirmed a string of European headline shows as well as two festival appearances (Samhain Festival and Tyrant Fest) in October and November.
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When I was in high school, there was a girl who would constantly follow me around and talk to me like I was her boyfriend. I had no idea who she was, except that she was following me. It got pretty uncomfortable. That was my first experience with a stalker. Eventually she stopped, but for a while it was pretty annoying. That experience those memories, is what kind of fueled the thought for putting together an article like this. # 10 – Night Prowler – AC/DC AC/DC closed their 1979 album Highway to Hell with the slow, menacing “Night Prowler.”

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Album Review: Anthrax – Cursum Perficio

Reviewed by Dan Barnes

I’m going to guess that most people reading this will not need an introduction to New York thrash legends, Anthrax, so I’ll cut the preamble. Save to say that it’s more than twenty-years since the ‘Classic’ line-up reunited and a decade since the last album, For All Kings. Anticipation is high after this ten-year gap and album number twelve, Cursum Perficio, comes with a considerable weight of expectation on its shoulder.

The Latin title translates roughly to ‘my journey has come to an end’, a playful title that suggests this might be Anthrax’s last record, but that notion is scorched by the band themselves, who are quick to offer the alternative explanation that all Anthrax roads have led here, and listening to Cursum Perrficio front-to-back, it’s a title that makes perfect sense.

In May the band released the first single, It’s For the Kids, which found Anthrax going back to those glorious thrashing days of the Eighties; sharp buzzsaw riffs, courtesy of Scott Ian and a former Shadows Fall six-stringer, Jonathan Donais, ultra-catchy bouncing chorus and Joey’s familiar barks make you want to grab your Bermudas and forget the last forty-years have happened. Companion this is NYC’93, a love-letter to the hey-days of their hometown’s Hardcore scene. More razor-sharp lines and urban influence make this a classic Anthrax-thrasher, with its message unity it acts as a time machine back to the first two records. The teenager in you will love this, but I’m reminded of the t-shirt which bears the warning “Heart says pit, knees say sit”. Sage advice.

Of course, as the band’s legacy grew and developed over time, so did their sound, and the record reflects this through Watch It Go’s fierce galloping and bouncing riffs that allow Joey Belladonna to express his ire and rage at the current state of America. My Victory is some classic latter-era ‘thrax, and T.O.M.B. turns the heavy groove way up high, revels in the perfect sync of Messrs Ian and Donias, all enabled by Charlie and Frank’s sure rhythmic foundations.

The album opens with the brief intro of Persistence of Memory – a play on 1990’s Persistence of Time, perhaps? – and goes into The Long Goodbye. Coming to Cursum Perifico after It’s For the Kids, and this track will knock you off kilter a little; it’s dark and serious, in the vein of the Persistence album, maintains the band’s signature sound but in a more mature way. It’s still filled with big, solid chugs and massive percussion, but has melodic, introspective bridges and wouldn’t be out of place on a Bush-era record. It was only as the song came to an end that I wondered whether there was some consideration of dementia or Alzheimer’s at work here: they are, after all, referred to at times as the long goodbye.

Most recent single, Everybody’s Got a Plan, goes for a retro-sound and embraces it Rock n’ Roll heart, small guitar fills feel quite playful at times, and go a long way to make the heavier moments even heavier. This is another track were Anthrax’s party-band image is challenged through righteous indignation at the genocide on the streets, in the lyric: “the sharpest knives in the hands of children.”

Infectious has a creeping bass line from Frank and goes for a slower and doomier feel. This is no longer Anthrax being metal thrashing mad, but mature and small-p political. Lyrics mention Captain Trips – the biological disease, engineered in a lab, that wipes out the global population in Stephen King’s The Stand. Among the Living has already used this King monster tome as a point of reference, but here it seems to have a more-real world and less fantastical meaning. Couple that with mention of Rorschach tests and the lyric “tell me what you see” and it’s not difficult to join a few dots.

As a disclaimer, the interpretation of the lyrics of both Everybody’s Got a Plan and Infectious are entirely my own and are not based on any opinion from elsewhere.

The two longest songs on offer are the second single, The Edge of Perfection and the title track itself, both running above six-minutes and both showing exactly what the creative engine of Anthrax is capable. Edge… opens with mellow guitars before giving ground to some of the most aggressive music Cursum Perficio contains. I kind you not, but the early sections would not be out of place on an Emperor record, yet that’s just the beginning. Charlie shows his worth here keeping the plethora of sounds and styles cohesive and running smoothly. It’s vast and edgy, schizophrenic you may say, but it never loses focus on its large range of ideas. The title-track seems to take the fatalistic idea of its translation and construct a mature contemplation of the nature of existence.

Heavy stuff indeed, but topics that only a band like Anthrax could successfully deliver.

Scott is reported to have said that in the same way Fistful of Metal and Spreading the Disease had to be made in order to be able to write Among the Living, so Cursum Perficio is the natural evolution from Worship Music and For All Kings. He went on to compare this new record to that 1987 classic.

Don’t come to Cursum Perficio expecting Among part II, rather it’s a mature album made by a respected legacy band that isn’t trying to recreate their glory days, instead they are creating the music they are artists have naturally evolved to make.

I know a few huge Anthrax fans who are chopping at the bit to get their hands on this record, and I can safely say Cursum Perficio ranks among the band’s most accomplished works. Looking forward to hearing what they think.

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He describes his former bandmate as "quite an angry person." Continue reading…