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How Strange It Is release their second album There Is No Evil next month, and it’s going to be a treat. The Portland band reeled us in with the shoegazey pop-rock chaos of “Slime,” which posed a compelling contrast to its whispery, Sparklehorse-indebted followup single “Tough Luck.” Now, we get the sly, engrossing “Holladay Park,” which, despite being under two minutes, contains seismic levels of catharsis in its huge chorus, with guitars that come crashing in hard enough to knock you off your feet. Dive in below.

The post How Strange It Is – “Holladay Park” appeared first on Stereogum.

Signs Of The Swarm’s first full-fledged headlining run of the regions.

The post Signs Of The Swarm, Ten56., Oceans Ate Alaska & Face Yourself Reveal European/UK Tour appeared first on Theprp.com.

‘The Northern Chaos Tour’ has newly been announced.

The post Mammoth To Join Theory Of A Deadman On March 2027 Canadian Tour appeared first on Theprp.com.

“Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business” has also been pushed back to a November release.

The post The Mars Volta Launch “Reina Tormenta” & “Enlazan Las Tinieblas” Live Performances From “Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business” appeared first on Theprp.com.

Wu-Tang’s farewell tour kicked off last month, and it’s not without drama, specifically with the openers Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. The ’90s rap legends have been taking the stage without Layzie Bone and Bizzy Bone, and both addressed the situation in new videos.

The post Bone Thugs-No-Harmony: Krayzie Bone Explains Layzie Bone’s Exclusion From Tour, Bizzy Bone Responds To Haters Hoping He Goes Broke appeared first on Stereogum.

Something wicked this way comes in the form of Second in the Spheres, the debut album from Poland’s Massteron. Taking their main inspiration from ’90s black/death metal, Massteron feel like the real deal, imbuing their music with energy and authenticity often missing in bands inspired by specific times or scenes. You can hear exactly that on their new track, “Achronon,” which is streaming below.

Speaking to Decibel, Massteron said this about “Achronon:”

We unveil our new track, ‘Achronon,’ a time-bending opus taken from our upcoming album, Second in the Spheres. Through crushing astral hymns of anti-locality, we invoke archaic energies of ungodly splendour buried beneath the skin of reality. Let the Vortex open.”

Second in the Spheres is out September 4.

The post Track Premiere: Massteron – ‘Achronon’ appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

Pantera have confirmed The Great NOLA Trendkill, a two-day festival at the Lakefront Arena in New Orleans on November 20 and 21. Ten bands, almost all of them from the city or the scene it produced: Pantera, Down, Black Label Society, Corrosion Of Conformity, Power Trip, Crowbar, Eyehategod, Pig Destroyer, Rade and Herakleion. It’s partnered with Phil Anselmo’s Housecore Horror Festival, which returns as part of the weekend. Presale is live now with the password NOLA, and general tickets go on sale Friday, September 11 at 10am CST.

STREAM THE METAL BREAKDOWN DAILY NOW:

Scott Penfold covers the Great NOLA Trendkill announcement on today’s Metal Breakdown Daily — the full lineup, the ticket details, and the reason the same five men are playing ten of the twenty slots. Download the free Loaded Radio App on Apple iOS and Google Play and get it every weekday morning.

The details

What: The Great NOLA Trendkill When: November 20 and 21, 2026 Where: Lakefront Arena, New Orleans, Louisiana Presale: live now, password NOLA General onsale: Friday, September 11, 10:00am CST

The full lineup

Pantera Down Black Label Society Corrosion Of Conformity Power Trip Crowbar Eyehategod Pig Destroyer Rade Herakleion

Yesterday’s rumoured lineup had nine names. The official one has ten, and the addition is Black Label Society — which is the detail worth pausing on.

Five men, ten slots

Map the personnel and this stops looking like a festival bill and starts looking like a family tree.

Phil Anselmo plays twice — Pantera and Down. Zakk Wylde plays twice — Pantera, where he’s been the guitarist since the 2022 reunion, and his own Black Label Society. Kirk Windstein plays twice — Crowbar and Down. Pepper Keenan plays twice — Corrosion Of Conformity and Down. Jimmy Bower plays twice — Down and Eyehategod.

That’s five people covering ten of the twenty band appearances across the weekend.

You could look at that and call it thin booking. I’d argue the opposite. This is what the New Orleans metal scene actually is — a small number of musicians who have been in each other’s bands for thirty-five years, in a city small enough that everyone ended up in everyone else’s projects.

Down isn’t a supergroup in the marketing sense. It’s what happens when the people from Pantera, Crowbar, Corrosion Of Conformity and Eyehategod all live within twenty minutes of each other and get bored.

No other city on Earth could put this weekend together, and that’s the whole point of it.

The name is not nostalgia

The Great Southern Trendkill came out in 1996. It’s Pantera’s penultimate album and the one most people skip when they’re arguing about the catalogue.

It’s also the record made while the band was coming apart.

Anselmo recorded his vocals alone in New Orleans, at Trent Reznor’s Nothing Studios, while the rest of Pantera worked in Texas. That physical separation — the singer in one state, the band in another — is audible on the record and it’s the reason the album sounds the way it does. It’s the most unpleasant thing they ever released, and it was made by four men who had stopped being able to occupy the same room.

Thirty years on, he’s named a festival after it, put it in New Orleans, and filled it with the scene that raised him.

That’s not a band cashing a nostalgia cheque. That’s a man taking the worst period of his life and putting his hometown around it.

The Housecore Horror connection

The part most coverage will skip.

The festival has partnered with Housecore Horror Festival, Anselmo’s own horror event, which returns this year as part of the weekend. Alongside the music there’ll be Housecore Records specialties, horror industry personalities and artists.

Anselmo’s own framing: being back in New Orleans with a package of bands and events like this is a dream come true, and beyond Pantera and Down there are great NOLA and national bands, Housecore material, horror people, talented artists and more. He asked people to come down to his hometown and have a blast for the entire weekend.

That’s what separates this from a two-day bill in an arena. Housecore Horror has always been a genuine horror festival with films and guests rather than a marketing hook, and folding it into a metal weekend gives people a reason to be there when the bands aren’t playing.

We Also Recommend – The 13 Greatest Frontmen In Heavy Metal History, Ranked

The bands worth arriving early for

Eyehategod are the reason half the acts on this bill sound the way they do. Sludge came out of New Orleans and they were the ones who made it unbearable in the best sense — the slowest, filthiest, most genuinely unpleasant band in any of the extreme corners of this genre.

Crowbar are the other half of that answer. Kirk Windstein has been making the heaviest, saddest riffs in America since 1989 and has never once been given enough credit for it.

Corrosion Of Conformity with Pepper Keenan is the Deliverance and Wiseblood configuration — the one people actually want.

Power Trip are the outlier and the one that will surprise people. The Texas crossover band lost frontman Riley Gale in 2020 and returned with a new vocalist. On a bill this Southern, they’re the youngest and most direct thing on it.

Pig Destroyer are grindcore on an arena bill, which shouldn’t work and is exactly the sort of decision that makes a lineup interesting.

Rade and Herakleion are the two names most people won’t know. Given who booked this, that’s a reason to turn up early rather than a reason to skip them.

Check Out – 13 Metal Albums Turning 40 In 2026, Including The One MTV Turned Into Its News Theme Song

Where Pantera are now

Worth stating plainly for anyone who hasn’t followed the reunion.

The band returned in 2022 with Phil Anselmo and Rex Brown joined by Zakk Wylde on guitar and Charlie Benante of Anthrax on drums, following the deaths of Dimebag Darrell in 2004 and Vinnie Paul in 2018.

Four years on, the argument about whether it should exist has largely burnt itself out, and what’s left is a band playing the songs to people who never got to hear them live. This festival is the most ambitious thing they’ve done since coming back — not a support slot, not a festival appearance, but their own two-day event in the city that made half the bill.

If you’re planning the rest of the year, our touring guide has the wider picture.

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TL;DR

• The Great NOLA Trendkill takes place November 20 and 21, 2026 at the Lakefront Arena in New Orleans.
• The lineup: Pantera, Down, Black Label Society, Corrosion Of Conformity, Power Trip, Crowbar, Eyehategod, Pig Destroyer, Rade and Herakleion.
• Black Label Society were not in the rumoured lineup that circulated the day before, which puts Zakk Wylde on the bill twice.
• Five musicians cover ten of the twenty slots — Anselmo, Wylde, Kirk Windstein, Pepper Keenan and Jimmy Bower all play in two bands each.
• It’s partnered with Housecore Horror Festival, Phil Anselmo’s horror event, which returns as part of the weekend alongside Housecore Records material and horror industry guests.
• Presale is live now with the password NOLA. General tickets go on sale Friday, September 11 at 10:00am CST.
• The name references The Great Southern Trendkill, Pantera’s 1996 album, recorded while Anselmo tracked vocals alone in New Orleans and the rest of the band worked in Texas.

FAQ

Ten bands, two days, and five men doing half the work. Which set are you actually there for? Tell me below. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.

The post Pantera, Down And Black Label Society Confirmed For The Great NOLA Trendkill appeared first on Loaded Radio.

Korn’s Ray Luzier also took part.

The post Watch: Sevendust’s Morgan Rose Took On The Devil Wears Prada For Drumeo’s ‘For The First Time’ Series appeared first on Theprp.com.

Jim Root has confirmed that Slipknot are tracking their eighth studio album. Posts from the guitarist — including an Instagram story and the hashtag “#newrecord” — make clear sessions are in progress on the follow-up to 2022’s The End, So Far. It’s the first Slipknot record without Sid Wilson, the first with drummer Eloy Casagrande, and the first they’ll make with no record label attached to them for the first time since 1998.

STREAM THE METAL BREAKDOWN DAILY NOW:

Scott Penfold covers the latest hard rock and metal news on today’s Metal Breakdown Daily. Download the free Loaded Radio App on Apple iOS and Google Play and get it every weekday morning.

What Root confirmed

Not much in words, and quite a lot in context.

Root shared posts including an Instagram story making clear that tracking remains underway, tagged #newrecord. That’s it — no title, no date, no single.

But it lines up with what we already knew. In July, it emerged that the band had amassed around fifty song ideas and brought in producer Matt Wallace for the record.

Fifty ideas is a lot. For context, The End, So Far has thirteen tracks on it. Whatever this album ends up being, it’s being carved out of a very large pile rather than assembled from whatever they had.

The producer choice is the first surprise

Matt Wallace is best known for Faith No More.

He produced The Real Thing and Angel Dust — the second of which is one of the strangest, most genuinely inventive heavy albums ever made, a record that refused every expectation set by the one before it and got better for it. He’s also worked with Mushroomhead, so the masked-band territory isn’t new to him.

What he isn’t is a modern metal producer. Slipknot could have gone to any of the names currently defining how heavy records sound in 2026. They went to the man who made Angel Dust.

That’s a choice with a direction in it. Whether it’s the right one, we’ll find out — but a band eight albums deep hiring the guy who helped another band make their weirdest record is not the decision of a group planning to repeat themselves.

The thing nobody’s mentioning

Here’s what makes this genuinely uncertain, and it goes further than Sid.

Sid Wilson left in August 2026 after twenty-nine years — ThePRP characterises it as an ousting, and no reason was given publicly by either party. Our full coverage of the departure is here, and he’s since resurfaced in the studio with his own label.

But Craig Jones left in 2023.

Those two men were the sampler and the turntablist. In 1999, that was the entire point. Nine people on stage, two of them producing sound that had nothing to do with guitars, and the resulting density is what made the debut album feel genuinely overwhelming in a way nothing else did that year.

Go back to “(sic)” or “Eyeless” and listen to what’s happening around the riffs. The samples, the scratching, the layer of unpleasant noise sitting on top of everything. Take that away and you have a very good metal band. Leave it in and you have Slipknot.

Both of the people responsible are now gone.

That’s not a criticism of the band and it doesn’t mean the record will be worse. It does mean this is the first time in Slipknot’s history that the thing which made them structurally different from every other band has to be rebuilt from scratch by people who didn’t originally do it.

I’d be far more interested in an interview about that than about the tracklist.

We Recommend – Heaviest Slipknot Songs, Ranked

And they don’t have a label

The other detail buried at the bottom of the reporting.

Slipknot completed their contract with Roadrunner Records when they released The End, So Far in 2022. They signed with Roadrunner in 1998. That’s twenty-eight years and seven albums, and it’s over.

How this record comes out is currently unknown.

For a band at their level that’s a genuine decision rather than a formality. Self-release gives them everything and costs them the machine. A new deal gets the machine back and costs them the freedom. There’s a middle option — a distribution partnership, the sort of thing Megadeth just used for their final album via Mustaine’s own imprint — that’s increasingly where bands of this size end up.

Whatever they pick will tell you more about the next decade of this band than the album will.

Check Out – Slipknot Albums Ranked: The Complete Discography

What we know so far

• Producer: Matt Wallace
• Song ideas: roughly fifty as of July
• Status: tracking in progress, confirmed by Jim Root
• Album number: eight
• Label: none announced
• Title, release date, singles: nothing

Where the band stands

The lineup that’s making this record is not the one that made the last one.

Eloy Casagrande joined in early 2024, replacing Jay Weinberg. This is his first Slipknot studio album, and given he came from Sepultura, he’s the most technically accomplished drummer they’ve ever had.

Sid Wilson and Craig Jones are gone. Chris Fehn departed in 2019. Joey Jordison left in 2013 and died in 2021. Paul Gray died in 2010.

Corey Taylor, Shawn Crahan, Mick Thomson and Jim Root remain. Our full current lineup breakdown has the picture, the complete departure history is here, and we’ve looked separately at why this band turns over more than almost any other.

This year also finally saw Look Outside Your Window, the experimental side record recorded during the Vol. 3 sessions and shelved for nearly two decades.

Album eight is coming into a band that looks quite different from the one on most of the records we’ve ranked.

TL;DR

• Jim Root has confirmed tracking is underway on Slipknot’s eighth studio album, via Instagram posts tagged #newrecord.
• Producer: Matt Wallace, best known for Faith No More’s The Real Thing and Angel Dust, plus Mushroomhead.
• The band had around fifty song ideas as of July 2026.
• First album without Sid Wilson, who left in August 2026 after twenty-nine years — and also the first without Craig Jones, who departed in 2023. Both handled the samples and turntables.
• First album with Eloy Casagrande, who joined in 2024.
• No label. Slipknot completed their Roadrunner contract with 2022’s The End, So Far and how this record will be released is unknown.
• No title, date or singles announced.

FAQ

Fifty song ideas, the man who produced Angel Dust, and no label. Album eight is the biggest unknown Slipknot have faced in twenty years — what do you want it to sound like? Tell me below. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.

The post Jim Root Confirms Slipknot Is Working On Their First Album Without Sid Wilson appeared first on Loaded Radio.

A decision apparently not made lightly.

The post Kill The Lights Drop Off As I Lay Dying’s November U.S. Tour, Cite “Unforeseen Financial Circumstances” appeared first on Theprp.com.