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K.Flay has returned with a fresh new track that further shows off her unique sound and outlook on the world.

The track is called ‘Ants’, and is alternative music at its most affirming and abrasively catchy. A marching beat, a caustic bassline and a sass-filled and heavy-hearted vocal display, it is a singular vision delivered with gusto and gravitas.

K.Flay had this to say about the tune and what it represents in the wider picture:

“‘Ants is about the destructive nature of power. It’s an expression of the disillusionment I feel when I look out at the world right now, when I see what corporations and governments and billionaires are doing. It’s also an expression of my own sense of culpability. Because I wear boots. I kill ants. So there are levels to this power, this loss. And as humans, we all have to decide — whether consciously or not — how much we’re willing to destroy.”

The track arrives hot on the heels of her latest project, ‘SPECIAL FEELINGS’, a collaboration with 2XT, which was released back in May.

Here is ‘ALL IN’ from that record:

K.Flay is currently out on the road supporting Evanescence alongside Poppy. Here are the UK dates where you will be able to catch them:

SEPTEMBER

08 – LEEDS First Direct Arena
10 – MANCHESTER Co-op Live
11 – BIRMINGHAM Utilita Arena
13 – LONDON The O2

The post K.Flay Shares Gritty New Track ‘Ants’ appeared first on Rock Sound.

Every genre has its fans, but metal has something different. Critics have spent decades dismissing it as a niche taste for the aggressive and the alienated, and yet the people who fall into it rarely fall back out. The bands that built their following in the 1980s still sell out venues. The teenager who bought his first Sabbath record in 1973 is probably still listening. That kind of loyalty doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen to many genres. So what exactly is metal doing that pop, rock, and virtually every other format can’t replicate?

An Outsider’s Read on an Unusually Engaged Audience

Tvrtko Horvat has spent his career in the casino and iGaming industry, watching how people commit to structured, knowledge-intensive leisure activities. From that professional vantage point, he finds the metal fanbase striking for reasons that have nothing to do with the music itself.

What Horvat notices is the combination of decades-long loyalty and the depth of engagement metal listeners bring to the genre. Fans don’t just listen. They track lineup changes, argue over discographies, parse the differences between subgenres most outsiders have never heard of. That level of knowledge-driven participation is something he monitors in his own industry. In the Croatian market, for instance, HRK serves as one example of an online gaming platform drawing on an audience that similarly demands a high level of structured, informed engagement. The parallel he draws isn’t about entertainment categories sharing demographics so much as it’s about what happens when a platform or genre earns genuine commitment rather than casual attention.

“When fans know a band’s catalog better than the band’s own management, that’s not enthusiasm — that’s a different kind of relationship entirely. That’s the kind of engagement that sustains things for decades.”

Horvat sees metal fandom as an outlier in popular culture precisely because that relationship is so consistent across generations.

Where the Tribal Identity Came From

Heavy metal emerged as a distinct genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with Black Sabbath widely credited as one of its founding forces. The early sound was heavy and dark, built on distorted guitar and a sense of weight that felt genuinely alien to mainstream radio. That outsider quality was part of the appeal from the beginning. Metal fans weren’t just listening to something different. They were affiliating with something that announced itself as different.

The visual language reinforced this. Band t-shirts, back patches, studded leather, hand-painted logos — metal developed an iconography that functions as visible community membership. You can identify a metal fan at a distance. That’s not accidental. It’s a signaling system, the kind that builds in-group cohesion faster than music alone can manage.

What’s counterintuitive is that the splintering of the genre into subgenres didn’t weaken this. Thrash, death, black, doom, power metal — each developed its own sound, aesthetic, and dedicated following. Fans didn’t fracture away from metal when the genre subdivided. They layered their identities. A person might be a death metal fan first, a metal fan second, and both positions feel meaningful and distinct. That layering gives metal fandom an unusual density of attachment that broader, more homogeneous genres can’t produce.

What Research Finds When It Looks Closely at Metal Fans

The cultural stereotype of the metal fan, the sullen misfit drawn to violent imagery, doesn’t survive much scrutiny once music psychology enters the room. Research has consistently found that heavy metal listeners tend to score high on openness to experience, a personality trait associated with intellectual curiosity, creativity, and a willingness to engage with complex or uncomfortable ideas. The music attracts the curious, not just the angry.

The cathartic function of the genre helps explain the loyalty. Metal regularly explores darkness, mortality, rebellion, and emotional extremity in ways that most popular music avoids entirely. For fans, this isn’t off-putting. It’s the point. The music creates a space to process emotions that everyday life doesn’t accommodate easily. Anger, grief, alienation — these are given form and, crucially, given community. You’re not sitting alone with difficult feelings. You’re surrounded by thousands of people who chose the same space.

Here’s what consistently surprises outsiders when they encounter the research: listening to aggressive music like heavy metal can actually have a calming or mood-regulating effect for many fans. It doesn’t stoke aggression. It dissipates it. The music meets the emotional state rather than amplifying it, and fans walk away settled rather than wound up. That mechanism, repeated over years and across live shows, builds a relationship with the genre that’s hard to walk away from.

Built in the Body, Not Just the Ears

One of the things that separates metal from most music cultures is how physical the experience is. Moshing, headbanging, crowd surfing — these aren’t peripheral features of a metal concert. They’re the point of attending. The music demands a bodily response, and the communal nature of that response turns individual listeners into active participants in something shared.

That physical participation does something to group identity that passive listening can’t. When you’ve been in a mosh pit with a few hundred strangers, there’s a kind of trust and solidarity that gets established quickly. Metal crowds are frequently described, by sociologists and fans alike, as surprisingly welcoming to newcomers. The aggressive exterior is not the social reality. People look out for each other. If someone falls, they’re pulled back up. The physicality is participatory, not predatory.

The DIY ethos running through metal culture reinforces this. Many of the genre’s defining bands built their audiences through independent labels, self-funded recording, and relentless touring with little mainstream support. Fans know this history. They’re aware that the band driving six hours in a van to play a bar in their city is doing so because the music demands it, not because a marketing budget demanded it. That awareness creates a different kind of bond than fandom built around chart-driven promotion.

The Metal Pilgrimage and the Culture That Outlasts Every Trend

Wacken Open Air, held each year in a small village in northern Germany, is one of the clearest illustrations of what metal fandom becomes at full expression. Fans travel from dozens of countries to a rural location that offers no other reason to visit, arriving with the kind of encyclopedic knowledge of bands and setlists that makes every performance a shared exercise in collective memory. This isn’t a festival for casual attendees. It’s a pilgrimage, and the people making it have often been making it for years.

That encyclopedic knowledge is itself a binding mechanism. When you know a band’s full catalog, their lineup history, and the specific argument about whether their third or fourth album represents their best work, you’re not just a listener. You’re a participant in an ongoing communal conversation. Metal fandom runs on that conversation. It’s what fills the space between records and between tours.

Metal outlasts trends because it was never built around them. The culture rests on community, shared knowledge, and physical ritual rather than radio airplay or streaming algorithms. Fans were there before the metrics existed to measure them, and they’ll be there when the metrics change again. If you’re in it, you already know this. The genre doesn’t ask for casual attention, and in return, it gives back something that most music cultures simply can’t match.

The post Heavy Metal Fandom Is One of the Most Loyal Cultures in Music appeared first on Loaded Radio.

The road to successful festival development is littered with car crashes. For every Bloodstock and Damnation, there are many Manorfests and Temples scattered along the way. Now in its third year, Hella Rock Festival proves again that if you build it, they will come. 

Hella Rock Festival

HMV Empire, Coventry – 4/5 September 2026

Words And Photography: Paul Hutchings

The build-up to this festival was not easy. But drive, determination and pragmatism from the small team led by James Pilling proved that it can be done. James, organiser/promoter and basically everything else, is the engine behind an event that has mushroomed in an organic way to the size it is this year. 

Last year, James and I talked about the future for the festival. He had the 400-capacity venue sorted. But behind the curtain, stage left, lurked an 800-1,000-capacity arena, and it was begging for a rock event that could fill the room.

James is sensible, picking his line-up to pull in punters from across the UK and beyond. Phil Campbell And The Bastard Sons were the headline outfit. Ideally placed to pack out the room, the combination of the Motörhead icon and his sons with a packed undercard seemed ideal. 

He dealt with the controversy about Tailgunner quickly and decisively. They were gone from the bill the moment social media blew up. No blame, no comment, merely a response that said no thanks. The festival comes first.

And then the world shifted on its axis. Phil Campbell, dead at 64. For everyone who loves the power of one of the most incredible bands in the world, this was a devastating blow. For his family, heartbreaking. And yet, the boys, Dane, Tyla and Todd, together with Julian Jenkins from 2025’s Hella Rocks alumni Fury, have regrouped. This time around, it is to pay tribute to their father and to the man known to many as Wizzo. 

James, a huge Motörhead fan, is clear in his aim. This festival, his third, is a celebration of the Welsh Wanker, and the fans have responded, pushing the event close to sell out. The venue is gloriously decked out with PCATBS banners. Videos of the great man play on the big screen. Behind the main bar, the music plays, and on the second stage for all day Saturday, Phil’s golden flying V, his amps, pedalboard and paraphernalia are arranged in a way that allows fans to take a minute. 

As a reward for early purchases, we get No Sleep ‘Til Hella Rocks. The Friday night before the main event, four bands entertain. Those with Saturday tickets get free entrance. It is capped at 200, and there are probably 130 in the room for most of the evening. This was a cracking start to the weekend. 

The Paul Austin Band kick things off with a slightly more bluesy feel than the other bands on the bill. They kick into the first of many Motörhead songs that will be played over the weekend.

It is actually a cover of HeadGirl’s Please Don’t Touch which gets the right response from the audience. This is the kind of band you want in the pub on a Friday night. Good feels, good musicianship and just the start required. 

Midlands-based Cherry B are next. They have a swagger, a drummer with the face of a cherub, and plenty of energy and drive. An entertaining enough set, their classic rock is generic but inoffensive.

Unlike the power of Bang Bang Firecracker, the Stoke-on-Trent trio makes sure that ears are ringing with a blistering set of rage and headbanging tunes that increase the heat.

It is a strong performance, with the inclusion of We’re The Bastards an unexpected curveball. They were here at the inaugural event three years ago and show why they are deservedly back again.

Putting in a double shift, headliners King Kraken play 100% whether it’s on the stage at Stonedead or a pub in Putney. They go large, playing their debut album in full before finishing with three Motörhead classics.

Another band who were here in 2024, the quartet are almost unrecognisable since then. A slimmed-down outfit is lean and hungry and sounds bigger and better. Waiting For The Snake, The Game and Hellraiser certainly go down well, and although there are a few errors, it is a great performance to close the precursor to the main event. 

Saturday is a full day of music and kicks off at lunchtime with Wälker. The four-piece from the Midlands bring their spirited classic rock style with an easy confidence. Perfect for easing into the day with a pint, they are worthy of their place on the bill.

They are followed by Coventry’s Suns Of Rest whose alternative style brings a refreshing contrast to the line-up. Described as a blend of shoegaze, post-rock and grunge, they are a band more suited to the likes of Arctangent than Stonedead or Steelhouse.

Plenty of shimmering melodies to absorb, it is a welcome opportunity to close the eyes and drift through their atmospheric soundscapes. Certainly, floating my boat in many ways, this was a set to treasure. 

South Wales is always represented at Hella Rock And Beth Blade And The Beautiful Disasters are a staple on the scene. Hard rocking for sure, but some of the band’s music has a much deeper meaning.

A strong, iconic figure, Beth leads from the front, although it is very much a collective in front of us, with her band highly energetic. It is a feisty and enjoyable set that gets arms aloft and huge applause. I have crossed paths with this band sporadically over the years. They never disappoint and today is no exception. 

Silveroller’s vintage vibes work incredibly well. The mid-afternoon slot gets all flamboyant as the five-piece bring their mix of ’70s hard rock and psychedelia to the festival.

A captivating watch with the songs to match, it is hard not to get immersed in a set that flies by. Singer Jonnie Hodson is the main visual stimulation, although it is the lush organ playing that also hits the spot. 

Following on from their headline set the night before, King Kraken change their set list completely. It is evidence of their confidence, and a 45-minute set with more recent tracks from March Of The Gods as well as a smattering of new tunes including the forthcoming Shadows Fall single.

The bigger stage suits them, and Mark O’Donaghue continues to impress as a frontman, now comfortable dominating the bigger stage.

As evening settles in, and the fans start to get their all-day drinking buzz, what is needed is some high-impact energetic chaos and that duly arrives in the form of Crobot.

The Pennsylvania quartet hit the stage with power, and in Brandon Yeagley, they seem to have summoned up a cross between Iggy Pop and Barney Greenway. They go at it from the off, and it is fair to say they put in one of the day’s most incendiary sets.

I am exhausted just watching them race around the stage. Catch them with King Kraken on a short UK tour this week.

2026 has been quite the year for Dan Byrne. His triumphant Steelhouse Festival sets merely one highlight alongside the success of his debut album.

Tonight he has a revised line-up including Oli Brown on guitar. A seasoned pro these days, Brown looks like he is really enjoying his time playing without the frontman responsibilities. He is also a decent six-stringer, in a more subtle way than Glenn Quinn.

There may not be quite the riff-heavy power, but Byrne is now a fine frontman. His voice is one of the best around, and he is confident and assured. His special guest set works on every level, and for those new to him, it is a treat from start to finish. 

Of course, this day has built to this moment. Throughout the day the number of Motörhead shirts swells in the venue. By 9.00pm, the room is very healthily populated.

The decision to cap tickets slightly below capacity makes it a bit more comfortable for fans to move around during the day, without detracting from the atmosphere for one minute. 

If there is a place where our ancestors look down, then surely Phil Campbell was wearing the proudest smile there tonight. It may not be the first show Phil Campbell’s Bastard Sons have played, but it may well have been amongst the best.

A snorting 75 minutes sees a mix of Motörhead and PCATBS songs delivered with passion. Todd Campbell takes the lead work with style, whilst his brothers remain a tightly locked unit.

Julian Jenkins continues to be the perfect fit upfront, and for the old school, a sneaky Persian Risk track takes us back to those pre- Motörhead days.

The first hour flies by, and suddenly the whole day is ending. Heroes, Killed By Death and a rampaging Motörhead finish things off.

It has been emotional.

The day has been incredibly well run, and the hospitality fantastic. As a tribute to Phil Campbell, well, let’s just say the great man would have approved. There can be no bigger accolade.

Until 2027. Thank you, Hella Rock.

Hella Rock Festival will be back at the HMV Empire in Coventry from 3-4 September 2027. Early bird tickets are available at t247.co/3887.

The post Hella Rock Festival 2026 – A Triumphant And Emotional Tribute To Phil Campbell first appeared on MetalTalk – Heavy Metal News, Reviews and Interviews.

There have been quite a few DEEP PURPLE tribute albums released over the past few decades, but not enough for a band of such enormous influence, and most of those records underperformed anyway. This may change on November 13th with … Continue reading →

The post Members Of RAINBOW, URIAH HEEP And WHITESNAKE Join DEEP PURPLE Tribute appeared first on DMME.net.

Fronted by the fierce rockmommy Chrissie Hynde, The Pretenders are one of the most iconic bands in history. Rockmommy ranks their ten best songs.

The post My Top 10 Favorite Songs by The Pretenders, Ranked appeared first on Rockmommy.com.

It’s been two years since Oslo’s The Northern Belle put out an album — 2024’s Bats in the Attic — and the follow-up, Even Cowgirls Get Sad, arrives August 21. For this latest release, Andreassen brought together some talented friends from across the Norwegian Americana community. The music is easy-going, anchored by the crystalline voice […]

Westside Cowboy have announced that they will be playing their biggest ever headline shows in early 2027.

The band may be about to hit the road for a tour across Europe and the UK next month, but they are already putting in the groundwork for 2027 being even bigger with this trio of appearances.

Here is where they will be playing:

MARCH 2027

23 – GLASGOW Barrowland Ballroom
24 – MANCHESTER Victoria Warehouse
25 – LONDON Brixton Academy

Tickets will be on general sale from September 10.

The announcement comes off the back of the band’s debut album ‘It Goes On’ dropping last month.

Westside Cowboy had this to say about the record:

“Put simply, we wanted to make an album for our younger selves, one that reminds us of all the bodies of work that made us fall in love with music. We wanted the music to be instant, concise, and honest to us as people today. There will be plenty of time in the future for the sprawling triple album with horns and string sections but for now, it’s young music made by some young(ish) people. We want to make songs that are lean and imperfect. We’re really proud of it and we hope that you enjoy it.”

And here is ‘Pin Up Boys’ which can be found on it:

And if you’re lucky, this is where you can check out the band this year before next year’s massive shows:

OCTOBER

24 – DUBLIN Whelan’s, Dublin
28 – NIJMEGEN Doornroosje
29 – AMSTERDAM Paradiso THT
30 – COLOGNE Helios37

NOVEMBER

01 – AARHUS Voxhall
02 – OSLO John Dee
03 – STOCKHOLM Debaser
05 – COPENHAGEN Lille Vega
06 – BERLIN Lido
07 – PRAGUE Bike Jesus
09 – MILAN Arci Bellezza
10 – ZURICH Exil
12 – BRUSSELS Botanique (Museum)
13 – PARIS Petit Bain
14 – LILLE Aeronef
24 – GLASGOW St Lukes
25 – NEWCASTLE NUSU
26 – SHEFFIELD Crookes Social Club
27 – LEEDS Irish Centre
29 – BIRMINGHAM XOYO
30 – SOUTHAMPTON 1865

DECEMBER

01 – BIRMINGHAM Chalk, Brighton
02 – LONDON O2 Forum Kentish Town
04 – BRISTOL Electric Bristol
05 – MANCHESTER Albert Hall

The post Westside Cowboy Announce 2027 UK Headline Shows appeared first on Rock Sound.

Famously, in August 2020, Bon Jovi were the last band to play the ‘old’ Wembley Stadium, the one which hosted Live Aid, the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final, and every global superstar from Bruce Springsteen to Madonna in the 1980s. But when Jon Bon Jovi returned to England’s national stadium in the summer of 2019, it seemed highly likely that the next much-loved institution soon set to crumble into dust would be his band. That night, the New Jersey hard rockers didn’t sound great at all, the problem, sad to say, very obviously being their frontman’s voice. And although it clearly stung when I told him so to his face five years later, the superstar singer took the criticism with commendable good grace.

“Yes, it wasn’t like it was in 2000 or 1995,” he admitted. “Or any of the other times I played in that building. I knew that. I won’t argue with you.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with,” he said, looking genuinely upset. “Imagine knowing it’s not working right, and you can’t figure out why. It was tough… It was fucking tough.”

Tonight though, that gleaming million-dollar smile is back on Jon Bon Jovi’s face, and it’d take a heart of stone not to feel pleased for the man. Not least when, in an acknowledgement of the fans who stood loyally behind him while he recovered from major vocal cord surgery in 2022, his band open the first of their three sold-out shows back at the national stadium with a powerful cover of Lennon and McCartney’s With a Little Help From My Friends.

By his own admission, Jon Bon Jovi is feeling “caffeinated” tonight and looks like a man who’s shifted a huge weight off his shoulders. At one point, he tells the 90,000-strong crowd he’s going to take us back to 1986 song-wise, and jokes that his “pants are a little tighter” than then. But if he wanted to guarantee a home run tonight, JBJ could have absolutely stacked his band’s setlist on their first stadium run in seven years with selections from Slippery When Wet and New Jersey, and to his credit, he doesn’t take that easy option. Granted there are seven songs from that era written in black type on the 22-song setlist at his feet, but the multi-generational crowd also get songs from five of the ten albums the band have released this century. And if it’s true that, say, Legendary isn’t met with the same whoops of joy as You Give Love A Bad Name, then neither is it a cue for thousands to hit the bars.

If tonight isn’t peak Bon Jovi, it’s still a brilliantly staged, slickly produced, state-of-the-art stadium rock show, delivered by a band in full control. It’s hard not to escape the feeling that Jon Bon Jovi needed this tour, that he felt that he had something to prove tonight, and was seeking some personal validation and redemption. Well, he got it, and when 90,000 voices help him over the finish line on Always, it’s clearly an emotional moment for the man. Don’t imagine that all superstar rockers are happy to dial in mediocre performances as they hit the twilight of their career, this still means something to Jon Bon Jovi, and tonight, it’s only the demons of the past which feel irrelevant.

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“Everything will be fine,” Raygun Busch tells us at the end of Who Loves the Sun. “The sun will continue to shine.” It is the kind of reassurance we hear from the institutions that gaslight us: a phrase uttered as cities flood, the wages stagnate, the endless feed refreshes, and another disaster slides beneath our thumb. Chat Pile‘s third full-length is about that practiced numbness—the small acts of compliance and self-erasure that make a slow-motion apocalypse feel like ordinary life. By the time the record closes, Raygun’s platitudes illustrate a world where the sun will continue to shine, but how much of us—how much of our personhood—will remain to see it?

…

…

Chat Pile have never sounded more confident in their sludge-lined brand of noise rock than here, simultaneously their mellowest, moodiest, most vitriolic, and most vicious. Where Cool World explicitly confronted the more overt state-sponsored and interpersonal violence, Who Loves the Sun looks at the subtler harm inflicted by the modern quotidian. It also benefits from immediately following In the Earth Again, the band’s collaboration with Hayden Pedigo, whose fingerpicking style has left an impression on L. Manhole’s playing. More uneasy melodic textures now interrupt the riffs that slam like Godzilla raiding the Rust Belt.

Clanging anvil-strike chords land across muscular blacksmith rhythms, but the band has become more deliberate about when to swing the hammer. Stin’s filthy, Korn-esque bass tone and Cap’n Ron’s tight, unshowy pocket provide the record with a poured concrete foundation even at its most disorienting turns. Chord modulations and tonal shifts on “Shrine” evoke the dissociation many of us rely on to survive, while choruses like the one on “Intruder” linger like a parasite after the record ends. Raygun’s vocals contort between unhinged high screams, wounded wails, and dissociated spoken repetition in his signature monotone drawl. This is Chat Pile’s most melodically legible songwriting to date, but it carries enough sludge to defy any accusations of mainstreaming.

Climate collapse, degraded labor, and digital submission all populate the same poisoned thematic environment. On opener “Creature,” cities disappear under water, ash, and dust. “Deep Blue” finds landfills creeping into homes as we wade further into a blue-light sea of screens to drown. “PEN I S MALL” makes the soul-crushing indignity of hourly labor painfully specific, its grubby folk storytelling featuring a cast of sketchballs and cretins getting high and jerking off at work matches its dissonant, step-by-step trudge. On Who Loves the Sun, the apocalypse is not a mushroom cloud or a plague but ten thousand tiny cuts delivered on an Amazon Prime schedule.

A recurring vocabulary of skulls, shrines, ghosts, and intruders gives the record a haunted internal logic without forcing it into concept-album territory. The skull speaks on “Creature,” becomes a teacher in the collapsed trust and empty ritual of “Shrine,” then finally enters the feed on “Influence.” 

It’s on that track that Chat Pile’s ability to make songs sound like their lyrical themes is sharpest. Over combustion-engine-motivated grooves that feel mechanical and toxic-smelling, Raygun describes scrolling past screaming and raising the threshold for what can still disturb us. His “rough beast replies” nods to W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” but the monster at the heart of Who Loves the Sun is no longer slouching toward some distant birth. It is already here, responding to and manipulating us in a horrific feedback loop: the more horror we consume and discard, the more inhuman the system serving it back becomes.

Beyond the screen, these themes find intimate means of expression on tracks like “Family Funeral,” a contemporary sludgy retelling of Medea. The poisoned gown and coronet, the dying bride and father, the murdered sons, and the chariot of the sun make this less a literary Easter egg hunt than an ancient story shown, again, to be timeless. “And though it hurts me / I needed to hurt you” distills one of the Who Loves the Sun’s central cycles: hurt answering hurt, passed down to people who had no part in causing it.

When “October All the Time” promises that everything will be fine, its indie-rock moodiness offers one final mask rather than relief. The unholy signs and shrines remain lodged in the listener’s mind. A dog barks, the sun keeps shining, and the world continues pretending it is not ending. Or it finally gives up caring.

…

Who Loves the Sun is available now via The Flenser.

Thirty years have passed since Az éj szeme, one of the defining albums of NEVERGREEN’s career, was released in 1996. The band is celebrating the anniversary of this heavy, dark-hued record with a newly remastered edition. The album returns on September 11 as a red-and-black marbled LP and a digipak CD, with the latter also […]

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