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Texas-based progressive metalcore band Fervence will release their new full-length album, Constructs, on October 16 through Metal Blade Records. The recently signed quintet have also shared a music video for the album’s lead single, Zenith. Drawing inspiration from bands including Deftones, Architects and Silent Planet, Fervence combine ethereal melodies and atmospheric textures with crushing aggression. […]

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NECROCENE Unleash Crushing Title Track “Scumocracy” Ahead of Debut Album

Italian death metal outfit Necrocene have unleashed the title track from their highly anticipated debut album, Scumocracy , premiering the song exclusively through NoCleanSinging .com . The album is set for international release on September 18, 2026 , via Personal Records .
“Scumocracy” is the second track to emerge from the album, following the previously released “Ordinary Enemy,” and serves as a fitting introduction to Necrocene’s bleak, uncompromising vision of death metal.
There is a crushing weight bearing down on the world, an unrestrained cycle of destruction that increasingly breeds indifference. Necrocene take that bleak reality and transform it into something brutally physical. Their very name and the concept behind Scumocracy twist geological terminology into a grim political statement about the unstoppable, death-driven momentum of modern capitalism.
Musically, that philosophy translates into death metal stripped of unnecessary ornamentation. Necrocene reject the polished, hyper-technical approach that has become common within modern extreme metal, instead embracing a deliberately primitive, abrasive sound firmly rooted in the genre’s foundational years.
Following their well-received 2024 Detrimental Paratomy EP , Scumocracy digs deep into the late-’80s and early-’90s Florida death metal tradition, evoking the raw atmosphere and crushing character associated with the legendary Morrisound Studios era. Sharp, vicious riffs collide with uncalculated drumming and harsh, primitive vocals, creating a sound that recalls the early work of Obituary, Death, and Cancer without simply attempting to recreate the past.
The members of Necrocene bring years of experience from Italy’s underground punk and metal scenes, and those counter-cultural roots are all over the album. Rather than chasing trends, the band focuses on heaviness, atmosphere, and attitude.
Scumocracy moves between sudden tempo changes and agonizingly heavy, cadenced downtempo passages, giving the album a sense of constant forward momentum while maintaining its deliberately filthy old-school character. Its lyrical and conceptual themes explore social decay, technological obsolescence, and a civilization seemingly racing toward its own self-inflicted end.
In other words, this is death metal with something rotten at its core, and Necrocene aren’t interested in putting a fresh coat of paint over it.
Listen to “Scumocracy”

The brand-new title track “Scumocracy” is streaming exclusively through NoCleanSinging.com , while the previously revealed “Ordinary Enemy” is available through Personal Records’ Bandcamp.
Scumocracy arrives internationally on September 18, 2026 , via Personal Records.
Scumocracy Tracklisting



(Threshold)
Ordinary Enemy
Tempestarii
Scale of Grey
Scumocracy
(Stillpoint)
Human Lithification
Concrete Petrichor
Weapons of the Damned
The Lust of Us

More Information

Follow Necrocene on Facebook for news, updates, and further information surrounding Scumocracy and the band’s upcoming activities. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100091964531943

Naming your band How Strange It Is must be some kind of indie-rock sleeper cell activation, but the Portland combo is playing it coy by not naming their debut album To Be Anything At All. Instead, the record is called There Is No Evil, and judging by how successfully lead single “Slime” applied a shoegaze exterior to plucky Shins-meets-AnCo pop-rock, it’s going to be worth hearing. We get another preview today in the form of “Tough Luck,” which is sort of a Sparklehorse song for the Alex G era. It’s good, so listen below.

The post How Strange It Is – “Tough Luck” appeared first on Stereogum.

Surely you remember Bimbo, the sibling duo who recently signed to the illustrious indie institution Exploding In Sound and caught our attention with the announcement of their debut album The Bimbonacci Sequence, whose title has earned many compliments from Stereogum commenters (and other people, probably). Of course that would mean nothing if the lead single, “Chewing Glass,” was bad, but lucky for us it was a true eccentric banger. Now they’re back with another weird one. This one’s called “Things Keep Getting Worse,” and it’s about how things keep getting worse, and it ends with Gretchen McKenzie yelling “THINGS JUST KEEP GETTING WORSE!” over and over, and it’s awesome. Watch the Mark Bennett-directed music video below.

The post Bimbo – “Things Keep Getting Worse” appeared first on Stereogum.

Colombian melodic black/death metal band Eshtadur have released their new single, August’s Burdens. The track is the second preview of the band’s fifth studio album, In Darkness All Shadows Gone, which will arrive on October 2 through Rockshots Records. While the first single, Into The Woods, introduced the beginning of The Crow’s spiritual journey, August’s […]

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Hear a track from L’Rain and the song our critic wishes Phoebe Bridgers had made her lead single.

Concluding in Sparta’s hometown.

The post Sparta Announce November U.S. Tour With Public Opinion appeared first on Theprp.com.

JOHN MITCHELL, guitarist, singer-songwriter and producer known for his work with It Bites, Frost*, Arena and Asia, has released “Show The Way,” the new single from his forthcoming Lonely Robot album, An Ending. The single is now available on all major streaming platforms. An Ending will be released on September 11th, 2026, via White Knight Records, on CD and limited-edition coloured double vinyl, and is available to pre-order now: www.lonelyrobot.co.uk

“Show The Way” offers the first real taste of the final chapter in the Lonely Robot story. Across five albums, Mitchell has followed an astronaut stranded in space, unable to return home, gazing down at the pale blue dot of Earth and asking the questions that have shaped the whole project: what are we, why do we behave as we do, and what does it mean to be human? An Ending brings that journey to a close.

Mitchell comments, “Show The Way is a call to arms. There’s so much incompetence and gaslighting in the world right now, and I wanted to write something that pushed back against that. We can’t afford to sit idly by while Rome burns.”

He continues, “I like songs that work as anthems, and this is one of them. It’s about finding a way out of the trouble we’re in, holding on to our humanity and appreciating what we have.”

John Mitchell – Vocals, guitars, bass guitar, keyboards.
Craig Blundell (Frost*, Steve Hackett, Steven Wilson) – Drums
Jez Fielder – Additional Guitar on The River and Rearview

Track List
This World Window
Show The Way
Back To The Middle
In Ocean Light
Ad Astra
Where In The World
Twin Suns
The River
Rearview
Bending Light
The Iron Sea
Oblique
Synthetic (Bonus track – vinyl only)

The post John Mitchell shares new Lonely Robot single “Show The Way” from new album ‘An Ending’ appeared first on The Prog Report.

Italian death metal band Necrocene have premiered their new song, Scumocracy, exclusively through No Clean Singing. The title track is the second preview of the band’s debut album of the same name, which will be released internationally on September 18 through Personal Records. Formed by musicians with roots in Italy’s underground punk and metal scenes, […]

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Here’s the problem with finding bands like Sleep Token: there aren’t any. Not really. Nobody else is running djent riffs, R&B vocal phrasing, gospel harmony, piano ballads and a fictional deity through the same machine and getting away with it. But that’s the trick — Sleep Token isn’t one sound, it’s about five sounds welded together, and once you break it into parts there’s a whole world of bands nailing one piece each. Some of these will scratch the itch immediately. A couple get closer than most fans expect.

What you’re actually chasing

Before the list, it’s worth naming what people mean when they say they want more Sleep Token. It’s usually one of five things.

The dynamics. Whisper-quiet piano into a wall of downtuned guitar with no warning. The voice. Vessel sings like an R&B artist who wandered into a metal band — falsetto, runs, actual soul phrasing. The atmosphere. Everything drenched in reverb and space. The heaviness. When it drops, it genuinely drops. The mystery. Masks, lore, no interviews, a world you have to piece together yourself.

Almost nobody does all five. Everyone below does at least one properly.

The closest matches

1. Bad Omens

If you only take one recommendation off this page, take this one. Noah Sebastian sings in the same register Vessel does and uses the same trick — R&B melody and falsetto laid over metalcore architecture, with electronic production doing half the emotional work. THE DEATH OF PEACE OF MIND is the album Sleep Token fans reach for first, and “Just Pretend” is the crossover moment that made the whole scene pay attention.

The two bands even toured together before either was enormous. That’s not a coincidence — they’re solving the same problem from slightly different angles.

2. Spiritbox

The beauty-and-brutality swing, executed by one of the best vocalists in modern heavy music. Courtney LaPlante moves from ethereal clean singing to a genuinely frightening scream inside a single bar, which is exactly the whiplash Sleep Token built their reputation on.

Spiritbox are heavier and more technical, with less R&B in the DNA. But “Constance” and “Circle With Me” hit the same emotional pressure points, and if you love the moment a Sleep Token song turns, this is where to go next.

3. Loathe

The deep cut that Sleep Token fans fall hardest for. I Let It In And It Took Everything is shoegaze, Deftones worship and crushing modern metal in one record, and it does the quiet-to-devastating transition better than almost anything else this decade.

“Two-Way Mirror” is the entry point. It sounds like nothing else on this list and everything Sleep Token fans want.

4. Thornhill

Australian, sultry, and criminally underrated outside the scene. Jacob Charlton croons over grooving, atmospheric riffs in a way that lands squarely in Sleep Token territory — heavy music with genuine swagger and sex in it rather than just aggression.

Heroine is the record. “Casanova” is the song.

5. Invent Animate

Ambient post-metalcore with Marcus Vik’s ethereal cleans floating over enormous low-end. Greyview and Heavener are built on the same architecture as a Sleep Token record: space, patience, then impact.

If you love the atmosphere more than the riffs, start here.

For the voice

6. Dayseeker

Rory Rodriguez has one of the most affecting clean voices in heavy music, and Dark Sun is essentially an emotional gut-punch with breakdowns attached. Less genre-blending than Sleep Token, more concentrated heartbreak.

7. Sleep Theory

The newest band on this list and the most direct sonic descendant. Memphis-based, R&B phrasing woven straight into modern metal, and Cullen Moore’s voice carries real soul. Paper Hearts arrived and immediately got filed under “for Sleep Token fans,” which is both a compliment and a burden.

8. Bilmuri

Genre chaos with saxophone, country guitar, worship-song hooks and breakdowns, all somehow coherent. Johnny Franck refuses to pick a lane the same way Sleep Token refuses to, and if what you love is the sheer unpredictability, this is your band.

9. Poppy

Pop and metal in the same body, switching between them mid-song without apology. Poppy’s willingness to put a bubblegum chorus next to a blast beat is the closest anyone comes to Sleep Token’s structural nerve.

10. Bring Me The Horizon

The band that made pop-metal architecture respectable, and arguably the reason Sleep Token’s crossover was possible at all. POST HUMAN: NeX GEn is stuffed with electronic production, huge hooks and genuine heaviness. They’re touring North America and they remain the biggest band operating in this space.

For the atmosphere and the prog

11. Leprous

Einar Solberg’s voice is the reason to be here — a genuinely astonishing instrument, deployed over Norwegian art-prog that builds and releases tension the way Sleep Token do. Aphelion and Melodies Of Atonement are both entry points.

Not heavy in the breakdown sense. Devastating in every other sense.

12. VOLA

Danish, and the best-kept secret in this lane. Djent riffs underneath synth-pop melodies and airy clean vocals, which on paper sounds like a mess and in practice is gorgeous. Witness and Friend Of A Phantom deliver the exact heavy-meets-melodic balance Sleep Token fans want.

13. TesseracT

Daniel Tompkins sings over ambient djent with a clarity and restraint that makes the heavy parts land harder. Sonder is the record to start with — atmospheric, patient, crushing when it needs to be.

14. Karnivool

Sound Awake is one of the great atmospheric prog records and it’s twenty years old. Australian, cinematic, built on dynamics rather than aggression. Older than most of this list and still ahead of it.

15. Caligula’s Horse

Warm, melodic Australian prog with Jim Grey’s clean vocals carrying enormous emotional weight. Rise Radiant and Charcoal Grace are both worth your time if the songwriting is what pulls you rather than the heaviness.

16. Periphery

The band that built the djent framework everyone on this list borrows from, with Spencer Sotelo’s range doing the melodic lifting. More technical and less atmospheric than Sleep Token, but the guitar language is shared.

The Deftones lineage

17. Deftones

The root of the whole thing. Every band on this page owes something to White Pony — the marriage of crushing heaviness and genuine sensuality, Chino Moreno’s croon-to-scream, the willingness to be beautiful. If you somehow haven’t gone deep here, do that before anything else on the list, and then read our full guide to bands like Deftones, because the overlap with this page is significant.

18. Holding Absence

Welsh, emotionally enormous, and built on Lucas Woodland’s ability to sound like he means every word. The Noble Art Of Self Destruction is post-hardcore with the cinematic sweep Sleep Token fans respond to.

19. Silent Planet

Spiritual and philosophical lyricism over dynamic, atmospheric metalcore. Garrett Russell writes at a level almost nobody in this genre operates at, and SUPERBLOOM balances the beauty and the violence properly.

20. Currents

Emotional metalcore with an unusually good grasp of when to pull back. The Way It Ends and Death Ω Depression both use quiet space as a weapon, which is the core Sleep Token move.

21. Novelists

French, melodic, and criminally under-listened outside Europe. Clean-driven modern metal with the same emphasis on melody over brutality.

For the theatre and the mystery

22. Ghost

Different sound, identical instinct. Tobias Forge built an entire fictional world — rotating anonymous frontmen, ongoing lore, visual reinvention every album cycle — and made it inseparable from the music. If what hooked you on Sleep Token was the mythology as much as the riffs, this is the other band doing it properly. Our full Ghost discography ranked is the place to start.

23. Zeal & Ardor

The most genuinely radical band on this list. Manuel Gagneux fuses American spirituals and gospel with black metal, which sounds like a thought experiment and works like a religious experience. The gospel element is the specific link — that same choral, hymnal quality that runs through Sleep Token’s biggest moments.

24. Health

Industrial, electronic, and heavy in a way that has nothing to do with guitars. If what you love is the production and the texture rather than the riffs, Health scratch that itch, and their collaboration record DISCO4 shows how far the approach stretches.

25. Motionless In White

Theatrical, gothic and enormous, with a decade of building a visual world around the music. Less subtle than Sleep Token, more fun about it, and they’re back in Europe next year if you want to see it live.

Where to start, depending on what you want

If you want the closest thing to a Sleep Token record — Bad Omens, then Loathe. If you want the voice — Sleep Theory, then Leprous. If you want the heaviness — Spiritbox, then Currents. If you want the atmosphere — Invent Animate, then VOLA. If you want the mystery and the world-building — Ghost, then Zeal & Ardor.

And if you’re working backwards through Sleep Token’s own catalogue first, our full ranking of their albums is the place to do it.

The full list

The closest matches: Bad Omens · Spiritbox · Loathe · Thornhill · Invent Animate For the voice: Dayseeker · Sleep Theory · Bilmuri · Poppy · Bring Me The Horizon For the atmosphere and prog: Leprous · VOLA · TesseracT · Karnivool · Caligula’s Horse · Periphery The Deftones lineage: Deftones · Holding Absence · Silent Planet · Currents · Novelists For the theatre and mystery: Ghost · Zeal & Ardor · Health · Motionless In White

TL;DR

• Nothing sounds exactly like Sleep Token — the band runs djent, R&B, gospel, ambient and piano balladry through one machine. What works is matching individual elements.
• Closest overall: Bad Omens. Same vocal register, same R&B-over-metalcore approach, and the two bands toured together early.
• Best for the vocal: Sleep Theory — the most direct sonic descendant, with genuine R&B phrasing in modern metal.
• Best deep cut: Loathe. I Let It In And It Took Everything does the quiet-to-devastating turn better than almost anything this decade.
• Best for the mythology: Ghost, and Zeal & Ardor for the gospel element specifically.
• The root of it all: Deftones. Every band here owes something to White Pony.

FAQ

Twenty-five bands, and we know we’ve missed somebody. Who’s the one you’d add for Sleep Token fans? Drop it in the comments and settle it. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.

The post Bands Like Sleep Token: 25 Artists To Hear Next appeared first on Loaded Radio.