As bassist for Angel in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Felix Robinson helped shape the cult group’s pop-meets-heavy-meets-glam image, appearing on 1978’s White Hot, 1979’s Sinful, and the live album, 1980’s Without a Net. After Angel’s ugly end, Robinson landed on his feet, picking up studio work and eventually helping to found White Lion. Like Angel, White Lion featured great musicianship and had huge promise, but Robinson didn’t stick around. Robinson provided bass and more to White Lions’ debut, 1986’s Fight to Survive, and left to pursue a career in production and sound work. In the years since, he’s
Although Calgary isn’t exactly a hotbed for death metal, the city hosts a healthy mix of metal acts. Hazzerd, Mares of Thrace, and Riot City call the Canadian city home, as does death metal troupe Cultist. Formed in 2015, the band recorded debut full-length Manic Despair in 2020. It took over a year to release the album, which finally hit shelves in early 2022. Four later, the Cowtown collective returns with follow-up Spiritual Atrophy, primed with half-an-hour of vintage death metal vitriol to proselytize you into brain-bludgeoned bondage. Does Cultist slip you some spiritual healing, or will Spiritual Atrophy have you asking for the Kool-Aid?
Fans of Manic Despair will quickly recognize that Spiritual Atrophy marks a new chapter in Cultist’s sound. Bassist/vocalist Vanessa Grossberndt and drummer Jim Petigo have been consistent fixtures in the band’s lineup over the last six years, but there’s been a revolving door for guitarists since Brodie Wylie left the band in 2021.1 Whether by design or just a byproduct of altered chemistry, Spiritual Atrophy forsakes the arcane mystique of Manic Despair and instead adopts a more straightforward attack, focusing on riffs and repetition over mood and tension. Where Cultist’s debut leans toward Incantation or Autopsy, Spiritual Atrophy more closely echoes the likes of Morbid Angel and Immolation. Even the album art recalls Unholy Cult with Harnessing Ruin’s color palette. Despite using a similar bag of tricks as legendary DM stalwarts, though, Cultist’s latest feels more like a retread of what you’ve heard before rather than constructing a fresh take upon proven elements.
Where the rhythm section shaped Cultist’s identity on Manic Despair, Spiritual Atrophy sacrifices drum ‘n’ bass thunder for the almighty riff. New guitarist Betzi Poitras hews leaden earworms with razor-sharp riffing, and in isolation poses a promising new direction. Comprehensively, though, her barbed cuts bleed out the magic that defined Manic Despair. This alone isn’t damning, as the urge to reinvent and evolve is as natural as Steel’s back hair. Unfortunately, the replacement magic manifests as a finely-crafted routine we’ve seen countless times before, and fails to maintain intrigue as Cultist’s hand dips into the careworn, upturned top hat time and again. Grossberndt‘s bass still rumbles and bounces with occasional spotlights (“Phenomena”), and her gutturals get augmented with contributions from Poitras and Petigo, broadening the vocal diversity. Although I prefer Grossberndt‘s deeper, most unhinged growls,2 I appreciate the expanded range. Meanwhile, Petigo’s drumming maintains the blast-beaten fury from the debut, but his progressive flourishes have dwindled, and the overall drum presence is too far back in the mix. It’s a shame, because Petigo’s contributions were previously a cornerstone of Cultist’s atmosphere, and Spiritual Atrophy suffers from his diminished role.
Listening to Spiritual Atrophy can be a frustrating experience, not just because of the step backwards in originality, but the missteps outweigh what Cultist does so well. In a vacuum, individual moments on Spiritual Atrophy burn with a corrosive glow. The central riff from “Reality Shaper” could be a lost cut from Domination or Close to a World Below, but over four-and-a-half minutes, the pointed, serpentine lick is filed to a nub through repetition. This over-dependence on the same or similar riffs (“Neophyte,” “Spiritual Atrophy”) kills momentum throughout, making active listens feel much longer than thirty minutes. Spiritual Atrophy’s two instrumentals also undercut the listening experience, with intro piece “Divination Whispers” building to a moment that never arrives. Interlude “Perversion of Survival” does the same, alluring with its promising, sci-fi oriented forty seconds, only to be jettisoned for a tune that’s entirely agnostic to the lead-in. The instrumentals are solid on their own, and don’t necessarily belong on the cutting room floor—I only wish they’d been integrated with more consideration.
Though I’m left disappointed with Cultist’s latest offering, promise lurks around Spiritual Atropy’s corners. Frantic, off-kilter riffs, tortured vocals, and bursts of scathing venom supply the building blocks for nasty death metal magic. If Cultist can refine their songwriting and add more depth to their soundscape, their next LP could convert the masses.
Roman Candle have shared the details of their long-awaited debut album, their first body of work for Sumerian Records.
The album is set to be titled ‘Unadulterated’ and will be unleashed on April 24.
The artwork looks a lot like this:
Whilst the tracklisting is a bit more like this, with some absolutely sensational song names
1. Blasphemous Act 2. This Band Has Led Me To Places I Wouldn’t Go With A Gun 3. Can We Watch Something Happy? 4. Lady Lazarus 5. Bite Harder Than You Bleed 6. I Can’t Stop Winning 7. Fire In The Night Sky Forever 8. My Silence Costs More Than You Can Afford 9. Nothing Is Original 10. On Second Thought Maybe Gaslighting Is Real 11. For Once My Hands Are Still 12. How To Be Considered When You’re Not In The Room
The band have also shared another taste of the record, following on from the release of ‘Bite Harder Than You Bleed’ and ‘Can We Watch Something Happy?’
That comes in the form of ‘Blasphemous Act’, a sensationally atmospheric and blood-curdlingly brash assault on the senses. A dizzying blend of razor-sharp riffs and banshee howls, it shows off the band at their most brilliantly crushing and creative.
Vocalist Piper Ferrari had this to say about the track and what it represents for her:
“‘Blasphemous Act’ was the last song we wrote for the record, and it hit with such ferocity that it forced its way onto the album in the eleventh hour. The name came from a Magic: The Gathering card, but the song took on a life of its own — this unhinged, teeth-bared spiral of obsession and retribution. Lines like ‘your neck in my teeth is all that I need’ and ‘karma is owed, paid in full’ captured a darker, more primal side of the band that we didn’t even know we were still capable of tapping into. By the time it explodes into that repeated ‘run for your life’ refrain, it felt clear: the record wouldn’t be complete without this song.”
Were there to be a Hall Of Fame for the architects of thrash metal, Gary Holt would be among its first wave of inductees. As the only ever-present member of Exodus, his extravagant talents as a guitarist, both rhythm and lead, helped push (very) loud music far past the boundaries established by Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and (even) Venom. When the group’s founder, Kirk Hammett, left to join Metallica in 1983, it was Gary who amassed most of the writing credits on his group’s pivotal first album Bonded By Blood, from 1985.
More than four decades on, this week, Exodus release Goliath, their hulking and typically unrestrained new album (the quintet’s 13th full-length release). While rarely less than compelling, in the four decades that followed, the guitarist’s career has sometimes sailed on choppy waters. In a band that have recruited, and dispensed with, more players than the Harlem Globetrotters, the traditional pitfalls of drugs and unwise living have at times stalled momentum and clouded their thinking.
In the 21st century, though, the mission is clear: age be damned, Exodus gnash and thrash with an intensity that rivals even their feral younger selves. As if this weren’t quite enough, since 2011, the guitarist has also played with Slayer in place of the late Jeff Hanneman.
With Goliath hovering into view, then, Kerrang! caught up with the 61-year-old at his home an hour north of Sacramento, in California, to talk about his life in metal…
Can you remember the first time you heard the term thrash metal? “I can’t recall the first time it was called thrash metal. My guess would be that it was taken from Metallica’s [song] Whiplash – you know, ’thrashing all around’ – but that’s just my stab at it. Because when we first started people called it speed metal, but that was a term for bands that were kind of fast but not real fast, kind of what we’d now call mid-tempo. They weren’t breakneck.”
The early Bay Area scene of which you were a part was incredibly fruitful. It also seemed to come together very quickly. Was that by accident or design? “I don’t know. Exodus was founded in ’79, so technically we’re a ’70s band, but I wasn’t there for that. We were just a bunch of kids from the East Bay inner cities playing cover songs. But we had discovered Iron Maiden, and we were playing half that [debut] album at parties and people thought they were originals because no-one knew who they were yet. But the band was covering songs off the first Def Leppard album, Scorpions songs and stuff like that, and then we had originals. But we were an outcast in the backyard party scene because we were so much more metal than all the other bands in the East Bay.”
It isn’t widely known that Kirk Hammett actually founded the band… “Kirk and Tom [Hunting, drummer] in the De Anza High School music room [in Richmond, California], actually, which was also the Alma Mater to Les Claypool [from Primus]. The first time I ever laid eyes on Kirk Hammett was when they came and played Richmond High music room and I was friends with the guitar player who was let go [Tim Agnello], and I eventually became his replacement. And that was also the first time I saw a guitar player who wasn’t onstage at a concert but was right in front of me. It was pretty fucking awesome, you know? It made me think that I could do that too.”
How sharp were your skills at that time? “I didn’t play guitar at all.”
So, not very sharp. “No. But the first time Kirk and I ever hung out, we went to see Ted Nugent and the Scorpions together [at Cow Palace] and we hit it off immediately. At his house, before leaving for the concert, he was the first person to play Uli Jon Roth era Scorpions for me. It’s because of [1976 Scorps album] Virgin Killer that I have a whammy bar in basically every song I’ve ever played. We became super friends right away. He was the one who asked me if I wanted to learn the guitar and he taught me a few chords and riffs. Six months later I joined the band.”
Were the formative Exodus shows at clubs such as The Stone and Ruthie’s Inn as wild as legend would have it? “Well, it became wild later. The original shows were awesome and were wilder than most bands’ shows. But while Metallica was off conquering the world, Exodus were conquering the Bay Area. Basically, the whole thing crossed over into the punk scene and so we had punks come to our shows, metalheads going to punk shows, and our little entourage of friends – the Slay Team – were the ringleaders of the whole thing. But it was at Ruthie’s that the whole thing became insane. I’d be up there playing guitar in the middle of a fistfight, with one guy throwing punches at another guy on the other side of me while I tried to play a solo.”
Your debut album, Bonded By Blood, became, and remains, a classic of the thrash movement… “Yeah. But it wasn’t easy. After the album was finished its release was delayed by a year, which probably hurt us. Recording it, though, was fucking lunacy. We sequestered ourselves at Prairie Sun Studios in Cotati, California. They have cabins there, so we lived there, and we just fucking raged. We raged on instruments during the day and at night we just partied – we were animals. The funny story is that when we did 2003’s Tempo Of The Damned album, which is the only other time we returned to the studio, the owner was worried about us coming back. He told me that we’d left a trail of destruction that had to be admired. But then the second time he told me that we left the place cleaner than we’d found it.”
Your singer, the late Paul Baloff, left the band before second album Pleasures Of The Flesh. Was he just too combustible a personality to be around full time? “He was pretty combustible. Looking back now, under the lens of hindsight, you’d do things differently. You think, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have fired Paul.’ But while we were becoming messes, Paul was an even bigger mess. He was having a hard time with the material we were writing, and his life was in a state of disorder. Because when we met Paul, he had a trust fund from his parents when they passed, and he burned through that and ended up living at our rehearsal room. I’m a guy who never tries to think about ‘what if?‘s because you’re on the path you’re on, but he was combustible as hell, and super-volatile, and his life was not together. He didn’t even have a home. So do I have some regret over his leaving? Yes, I do… But his life ended with him as one of my best friends, which I’m proud of.”
You had a fondness for crank, a form of speed, which is a pretty blue-collar drug. How did you get into, and out of, that? “We got into it in the early ’80s. We’d get a bag of crank and everybody would do some bumps so we could keep drinking longer. We’d party and rage. In the ’90s we started smoking it, which meant I could consume 10 times as much. But I remember the first time I smoked it, my first words were, ‘I could get used to this’ – and I fucking got used to it. I got really used to it, which is the point where it becomes a real danger. In the ’90s we got into the crank they called ‘shards’ where it was so pure it looked like pieces of broken glass. It was no longer a bag of yellow powdery shit that stunk. But we did a tour in Europe where we smuggled over a big bag which we then consumed in the first two days and we were dope sick the rest of the tour. But then I gradually started feeling human again and every day that passed I felt like I was coming back. And then when I got home I had a huge rock of speed hidden in the rehearsal room and I traded it for a ride home. And that was the last time I held [that stuff] in my hand.”
And you’ve never looked back? “I’ve never looked back.”
Exodus signed for Capitol Records for whom you released two albums, Impact Is Imminent and Force Of Habit, that weren’t your best. Do you consider that a squandered opportunity? “I wouldn’t say ‘squandered‘, because the music climate had changed. I don’t think it mattered what album we made, Capitol wouldn’t have cared. Impact Is Imminent has flaws, but it’s also become a super-popular album [with our fans]. And it laid the blueprint for all modern Exodus. Force Of Habit would be a great album if it had some editing. The label never had any input in what we did, but if we’d cut the fat off it, it would have been better. But it’s a good album. People think it’s not fast, but it’s still faster than what Metallica or anyone else was doing at that time. It just didn’t start with a fast song, which makes people think it’s not fast. But the demos we did for the album were better than the album. They’re raw and super-nasty.”
In the 21st century, you deputised for the now-late Jeff Hanneman. Is that a gig to which you were born? “Only Jeff was born to it. If I was born to anything it was to keep his seat warm until he could return, which unfortunately never happened [Jeff died in 2013]. My time in Slayer was awesome. Of course, I got to see a little bit how the other half live, and they treated me like family from the jump, which they still do. I had one job in that band which was just to go out and shred. I get to play the ‘guitar hero’ role because there’s a lot of solos in Slayer – a lot – especially on Jeff’s side of things. Back when it started, I thought it would only be a couple of tours, but it turned out to be almost 10 full years and now it’s the occasional show. In fact, we have two coming up this year. But we’ll see how it goes [for the future]. I think it’s a year-to-year thing. Coming back, I think the two most important things were: A) Are we going to be good? and B) Are we going to enjoy it? And we were killer. We had fun, too. Everybody was there for the right reasons.”
What challenges does a professional musician face today that they didn’t in the 20th century? “Well, I have a side hustle. I sell Kardashian-based merch [Gary wears a T‑shirt onstage bearing the words ‘Kill The Kardashians’] and if I’m home I’m the one stuffing every fucking T‑shirt [into a package] because it’s extra fucking income. We’re travelling T‑shirt salesman, like most bands are. It’s not an issue of ‘poor me’, but you’re doing really good if your [tour] guarantees pay for everything and the merchandise money is yours. That’s the case for us, but a lot of bands are dependent on shirts to put gas in the tank. And the costs are high. We ride in a [tour] bus because I’m 61, I’m not getting in a fucking van. I need to get horizontal, I like naps. Then there’s the crew and flights and all that shit. It adds up. But I’m really lucky. I’m a working musician who makes a living doing that. And I’m not alone. I have a ton of friends in bigger bands than me who have tons of side hustles.”
At last, we reach Goliath, Exodus’s new album. Please tell us all about it. “It’s fucking enormous. We’re super-proud of this album. We knew we were making something super-special when we recorded it. I mean, I love all our albums, they’re like children, but I’ll put our run from Tempo Of The Damned [from 2004] up to now against anything. Every album has been insane. On this record it was the biggest collaborative effort we’ve ever done, and we were on such a creative explosion that Lee [Altus, guitarist] said, ‘Let’s do two albums at once, we have the material and it’s all insane.’ But we came up just slightly short. We have eight done for the next album, though, and only need two more to finish the next one. We’ll probably write 10 more… But we knew we were making something special on this album.”
In closing, how have Exodus avoided the trap of running out of creative steam? “Exodus lives and thrives on having the biggest chip on our shoulders. We’re paranoid, everybody’s fucking out to get us, everyone’s the enemy – so we go out there and we destroy. But we’re out to prove ourselves. Maybe some of that is because of lost time due to drugs and bad decisions and bad behaviour that makes us feel that we have ground to make up. Because we started this shit, you know? Why should I let somebody else take all the attention?”
False Reality have shared a new version of one of the highlights of their 2025 album ‘FADED INTENTIONS’, and brought in a new voice to make it even bigger and bolder.
The song in question is ‘Sonder’, a track that slows down the band’s usually vicious sound, showing off their knack for penning a soaring rock song as much as a hardcore rager. Emotional, thoughtful and dense, the addition of ZAND as a guest vocalist takes the sentiment to a completely new level. Between their gorgeous croons and vocalist Rachel Rigby’s caustic howls, it’s a stunning collaboration that demonstrates just how exhilarating British heavy and alternative music is right now.
Have a listen for yourself below:
‘FADED INTENTIONS’ is out now via Hassle. Here is the scorching ‘REALITY SLIPS’:
The band are due to hit the road, taking the record around the UK next month alongside Overpower. Here are all the dates you need to know:
APRIL
01 – PLYMOUTH The Underground 02 – BRISTOL Exchange Basement 03 – BIRKENHEAD Future Yard 04 – GLASGOW Garage Attic 09 – LONDON Downstairs At The Dome 10 – CARDIFF Club Ifor Bach 12 – MANCHESTER Yes (Pink Room)
Although Calgary isn’t exactly a hotbed for death metal, the city hosts a healthy mix of metal acts. Hazzerd, Mares of Thrace, and Riot City call the Canadian city home, as does death metal troupe Cultist. Formed in 2015, the band recorded debut full-length Manic Despair in 2020. It took over a year to release the album, which finally hit shelves in early 2022. Four later, the Cowtown collective returns with follow-up Spiritual Atrophy, primed with half-an-hour of vintage death metal vitriol to proselytize you into brain-bludgeoned bondage. Does Cultist slip you some spiritual healing, or will Spiritual Atrophy have you asking for the Kool-Aid?
