HaloRipper is set to make an impact with a relentless blend of crushing metalcore, soaring melodies, and emotionally charged songwriting. Fusing bone-breaking breakdowns, cinematic atmospheres, and unforgettable hooks, the band delivers a sound that is both brutally heavy and deeply personal. Drawing inspiration from the intensity of modern metal while forging its own identity, HaloRipper […]
New Orleans guitarist, singer and songwriter Eric Johanson returns October 16 with The Open Bayou, the first release on his own Levee Ward Records. The album pushes Johanson’s blues roots into heavier, more psychedelic territory: fuzz, slide guitar, hypnotic grooves and dreamlike detours. Recorded with his touring power trio lineup, Johanson self-produced the record and […]
It would have been easy for the Ronnie Radke story to end in 2008.
Escape the Fate had gone from the Las Vegas scene to Epitaph Records, Radke had become one of the recognizable voices of the mid-2000s post-hardcore boom, and Dying Is Your Latest Fashion had given the band the kind of debut that usually opens a door to something bigger.
Then the door slammed shut. Radke lost the band he helped create, went to prison and watched Escape the Fate continue with another singer.
What happened after that is the what makes this guy so interesting. Radke started building another band before he was even free. Falling in Reverse eventually became far bigger than a consolation prize, moving from Warped Tour-era post-hardcore into rap, metal, pop, country collaborations and enormous cinematic singles.
By 2026, Radke was 42, Falling in Reverse had spent more than a decade near the center of modern heavy music, and his newest single had somehow put Corey Taylor and Serj Tankian on the same track for the first time.
The road between those two points includes prison, addiction, fatherhood, public feuds, tattoos, relationships, reinvention and one of the stranger second acts in modern rock.
Who Is Ronnie Radke?
Ronald Joseph Radke was born on December 15, 1983, in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is a singer, songwriter, rapper and producer best known as the frontman of Falling in Reverse and the original vocalist of Escape the Fate.
Music arrived early. In a 2012 Loudwire interview, Radke recalled becoming serious about singing around age 15 after a skateboarding injury gave him time to focus on music. His tastes were never especially loyal to one genre. Pop, punk, metal, hip-hop and electronic music would eventually turn up inside the same Falling in Reverse catalog.
That instinct was already visible before Falling in Reverse existed.
Radke spent his teenage years playing in bands around Las Vegas before helping form Escape the Fate.
The group emerged during a particularly fertile period for the city. The Killers and Panic! at the Disco had already helped direct record-label attention toward Las Vegas, and Escape the Fate arrived with a much heavier interpretation of the local boom.
Epitaph Records signed the band, and the early lineup released the EP There Is No Sympathy for the Dead before following it with Dying Is Your Latest Fashion in 2006.
The record became inseparable from the version of Escape the Fate that featured Radke. Songs including Situations and Not Good Enough for Truth in Cliche helped establish a mix of post-hardcore aggression, theatrical melody and pop instincts that would later become even more pronounced in Falling in Reverse.
Radke later told Loudwire that he had wanted Escape the Fate to experiment more heavily with synthesizers and other sounds. Falling in Reverse eventually became the place where he could pursue those ideas without having to win an internal argument first.
Before that could happen, his career collapsed.
The 2006 Fight That Changed Everything
In May 2006, Radke was involved in a confrontation in Las Vegas that ended with 18-year-old Michael Cook being fatally shot by another participant.
The distinction is important. Radke did not fire the fatal shot. Las Vegas Weekly reported that he was present during the fight but was never accused of firing a gun.
Radke later pleaded guilty to battery with substantial bodily harm. In January 2008, he received five years of probation, was ordered to enter a drug treatment program and was ordered to pay restitution.
His legal problems did not end there.
Radke violated the terms of probation and was taken into custody in June 2008. The violation sent him to High Desert State Prison in Nevada, where he ultimately spent more than two years.
By then, Escape the Fate had moved on.
Prison Cost Him Escape the Fate
Escape the Fate replaced Radke with former Blessthefall vocalist Craig Mabbitt.
For Radke, prison therefore came with two losses at once. His freedom disappeared, and so did the band that had carried him from Las Vegas clubs to an international audience.
The split became ugly in public. Radke and members of Escape the Fate traded insults, and the rivalry became part of the mythology surrounding both bands.
There was also a more practical problem. Radke could not record, tour or control what was happening outside.
He could, however, write.
In a 2012 interview with the Dallas Observer, Radke said he wrote the songs that became the first Falling in Reverse album during his incarceration. He was also contacting musicians outside prison and planning what would come next.
For most musicians, prison would represent the interruption between two careers. In this case, it became the strange workshop where the second career started.
Falling in Reverse Began Before Ronnie Radke Was Free
The early project was initially known as From Behind These Walls. The name eventually changed to Falling in Reverse.
Radke was released from prison in December 2010 and wasted little time returning to music. He told the Dallas Observer that he was back in a recording studio roughly a month after getting out.
Falling in Reverse released The Drug in Me Is You through Epitaph in July 2011.
The debut did not sound like a man quietly attempting to rebuild his reputation. It was loud, theatrical and deeply tied to the life Radke had just lived. Prison, addiction, self-destruction and anger all became part of the writing.
Radke called the record autobiographical in interviews from that period. The connection was literal in places. Some musical ideas had existed only in his head during prison because he did not have a band or studio available to play them.
The gamble worked. Falling in Reverse had an audience almost immediately, including old Escape the Fate fans who had waited for Radke to return.
Escape the Fate and Falling in Reverse Eventually Shared a Stage
Falling in Reverse and Escape the Fate toured together in 2014 on the Bury the Hatchet Tour.
For several years, the relationship between Radke and Escape the Fate looked impossible to repair.
Then came the appropriately named Bury the Hatchet Tour.
Falling in Reverse and Escape the Fate announced the joint run in late 2013 and toured together in 2014. Craig Mabbitt told Loudwire that Radke had contacted him about making the tour happen and that both singers recognized how much the feud had divided fans.
The reconciliation gave the Escape the Fate chapter a conclusion that nobody would have predicted during the prison years.
Radke had also reached a point where returning to his old band was no longer necessary. Falling in Reverse had become a career of its own.
Falling in Reverse Kept Changing Instead of Repeating the Debut
The easiest route after The Drug in Me Is You would have been to keep remaking it.
Radke went in another direction.
Fashionably Late arrived in 2013 with more obvious rap and electronic influences. Just Like You followed in 2015. Coming Home in 2017 pulled the sound toward a more atmospheric form of rock.
Then Radke changed the release strategy as well.
Instead of treating albums as the only major event, Falling in Reverse increasingly built individual songs as enormous releases of their own. Expensive videos, dramatic rearrangements and abrupt genre changes became part of the identity.
Popular Monster became a major turning point. Epitaph says the track became the first Falling in Reverse song to reach No. 1 on rock radio and later earned multi-platinum certification in the United States.
Watch the World Burn pushed the formula further, moving from rapid-fire rap into orchestral tension and metal breakdowns. It also became the first Falling in Reverse song to reach the Billboard Hot 100, according to Epitaph.
The 2024 album Popular Monster gathered many of the major singles from that period into the first full-length Falling in Reverse release in seven years.
By then, calling the group simply post-hardcore no longer explained very much.
Joseph Put Ronnie Radke Between Corey Taylor and Serj Tankian
September 2026 produced one of the strangest milestones of the career.
Falling in Reverse released Joseph, named after the middle name of Ronald Joseph Radke.
The track features Slipknot vocalist Corey Taylor and System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian. According to the official Falling in Reverse release, both appear on the song, marking the first recorded collaboration between Taylor and Tankian.
The pairing also connects Radke with two different generations of heavy music history. Taylor came from the masked chaos of Slipknot. Tankian helped turn System of a Down into one of the defining alternative metal bands of the 2000s, a history we also cover in our look at alternative metal bands that shaped the modern era.
Joseph is less surprising when viewed against the previous few years of Falling in Reverse. Jelly Roll appeared on All My Life. HARDY joined All My Women. Marilyn Manson appeared on God Is a Weapon. Radke had gradually turned major guest appearances into part of the Falling in Reverse playbook.
Even so, getting Taylor and Tankian onto the same song was a new kind of flex.
Wife and Relationship History
Searches for a Ronnie Radke wife are common, but Radke has not publicly announced a marriage as of September 2026.
One of the most public relationships of his adult life was with professional wrestler Saraya, formerly known in WWE as Paige. The pair began dating in 2018 and remained together for roughly six years.
Radke confirmed the breakup in early 2025. According to NME, he said they had separated months earlier and remained friends after ending the relationship.
Radke was later publicly linked with Canadian musician Dana Dentata. Reporting during 2025 identified Dentata as his girlfriend, and she also received a writing credit on All My Women. Public speculation about their relationship status appeared again in 2026, but neither artist provided a clear marriage announcement.
So the short answer to the wife question is simple. There is no publicly confirmed Ronnie Radke wife.
Radke has one daughter, Willow Grace, with former partner Crissy Henderson.
Willow was born in June 2013.
Fatherhood arrived during the early rise of Falling in Reverse, and Radke spoke unusually openly about the change at the time. In an interview with Loudwire, he said becoming a father had forced him to rethink the impulsive reactions that had defined earlier parts of his life.
That detail gives the timeline an interesting split. The first Falling in Reverse album was written by a man coming directly out of prison. By the second album era, Radke was also learning how to be a parent.
He has generally kept Willow away from the center of his public music career, which also means there is far less reliable information about her than celebrity-search pages sometimes suggest.
Tattoos Became Their Own Reinvention
For longtime fans, the visual difference between early Ronnie Radke and the current version is impossible to miss.
His arms, neck and hands were once covered in colorful individual pieces. Large areas were later covered with heavy black ink, creating the blackout look now closely associated with him.
The change feels dramatic, but Radke had been joking about disliking his old tattoos long before the blackout work appeared.
During a 2012 Loudwire interview, he was asked which tattoo he regretted. His answer was essentially all of them.
He then ran through some of the mistakes with a sense of humor. One octopus had only six tentacles. Another tattoo contained a spelling error. A prison-related piece turned his incarceration into a dark joke by describing the period from 2008 to 2010 as a vacation.
Years later, the large blackout work removed much of that visual history in one move.
The tattoos now function almost like the music. Radke rarely keeps an old version of himself around simply because fans recognize it.
Ronnie Radke Net Worth
Celebrity Net Worth estimates Ronnie Radke’s fortune at about $14 million, but the figure has not been independently confirmed.
Radke has never released a verified personal balance sheet, so every online Ronnie Radke net worth figure is an estimate.
Celebrity Net Worth currently estimates his fortune at about $14 million. The figure has not been independently confirmed by Radke.
There is at least a clear business case for substantial wealth. Falling in Reverse has accumulated major streaming numbers, high-charting releases, extensive touring income and a large direct-to-fan merchandise operation. Radke also writes and produces, giving him revenue sources outside a standard frontman salary.
Public reports have also connected him with expensive Los Angeles real estate, but an exact personal fortune remains impossible to verify from public information alone.
The Songs That Marked His Career
A career this stylistically restless is difficult to summarize with one song. A handful of tracks explain the major turns more clearly than a simple greatest-hits list.
Situations captures the early Escape the Fate era and the voice that first made Radke famous.
The Drug in Me Is You introduced Falling in Reverse and tied the new band directly to his prison-era writing.
Popular Monster turned genre collision into a major commercial breakthrough.
Voices in My Head pushed modern metal production and rap phrasing even closer together.
Watch the World Burn showed how far Radke could stretch a Falling in Reverse song without abandoning heaviness.
All My Life brought Jelly Roll into a country-rock detour and became another major radio success.
Ronald leaned hard into extreme metal and featured Tech N9ne and Alex Terrible.
Joseph brought Corey Taylor and Serj Tankian together on the same recording for the first time.
Controversy Has Never Stayed Far Away
Radke has remained a polarizing figure long after the events that sent him to prison.
Arguments with other musicians, social-media fights and legal disputes have repeatedly followed the music. One of the most public recent cases involved Brittany Furlan, the wife of Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee.
The dispute began after Furlan said she had communicated online with someone she believed to be Radke. Radke denied being the person behind those messages and said she had been communicating with an impersonator.
Both sides made competing harassment allegations. In March 2026, a court granted Furlan a civil harassment restraining order against Radke, according to NME.
The episode is another example of a pattern that has followed Radke through much of his public life. His music career and his online persona rarely remain separate for long.
Radke has faced repeated public disputes, social media conflicts and legal controversies throughout his career.
Last Words
The obvious version of the Ronnie Radke story is a comeback story. It is also more complicated than that.
He did not simply return from prison and reclaim the career he lost. Escape the Fate continued without him, so he had to build another one.
Falling in Reverse then changed enough times that even the comeback version of Radke became outdated. The 2011 frontman behind The Drug in Me Is You does not sound much like the artist rapping through Watch the World Burn, working with Jelly Roll, or placing Corey Taylor and Serj Tankian inside Joseph.
Some listeners have followed every change. Others have spent years arguing with him, about him or against him. Radke has rarely inspired indifference.
The unusual part is the scale of the second act.
Prison removed him from Escape the Fate at the exact point when his first band was building momentum. More than 15 years after his release, Falling in Reverse is not living on nostalgia for that era. The biggest songs of the career arrived much later.
For Ronnie Radke, losing the first band did not end the story. It created the conditions for a much stranger one.
You’d probably expect the crowd for a band with “a considerable amount of songs about death” to be a miserable bunch, but far from it. The Troxy’s packed with jovial city types slamming pints, a surprising touch of Friday night normality in the little bubble of sensitivity and emotional honesty that Death Cab For Cutie create around them. It’s the first night of two in the capital on their ‘I Built You A Tower’ World Tour, and somehow, in the midst of their songs of loss and grief, they conjure a communal warmth that unites us.
One of the evening’s many idiosyncrasies – and we’re not including the fact that Troxy insist on keeping half the house lights on – is the fact that ‘I Built You A Tower’ doesn’t feature that heavily in their setlist. ‘Riptides’ makes for an elegantly lo-fi ease in to the evening, and the catchy moodiness of ‘Punching Flowers’ reveals the darkness that was lurking in the background of their latest releases, but ‘I Built You A Tower (a)’ shows exactly why they’re not solely focusing on the new record. With its swift, candy floss-light bridges, it fits satisfyingly in between the dismissed omens of ‘Black Sun’ and the nostalgic crash of ‘Company Calls’s like a Jenga block. That’s the whole point of tonight: we’re celebrating the coming together of the puzzle pieces that Death Cab For Cutie have been crafting for decades.
“We don’t have hits, but we do have classics,” jokes frontman Ben Gibbard, and these are the songs where the magic lies. Acoustic, with each note like a candle lit in memory, ‘I Will Follow You Into The Dark’, is breathtaking. “How do you guys feel about audience participation?” he giggles halfway through, but the song’s spell never breaks and as we chorus, the warmth of familiarity and friendships that cross oceans sweep over us. Each bitter line of ‘Pep Talk’ feels like its preserved in amber as we sway and reverently hum along, and the tender storytelling of ‘Stone Over Water’ weaves and flows through disaster and rebuilding. The devotion in the air during ‘Soul Meets Body’ is tangibly magnetic, and carries so much individual meaning to so many in the crowd. As a band, they’re incredibly aware of themselves and how each single chord shift can affect us, and they carry that weight like its a privilege. When they dip a toe into improvisation, such as the post punk breakdown that boosts ‘Grapevine Fires’, they do so with glee, like they’re presenting us with a treat as much as they are revealing an ambitious and experimental side to themselves which we rarely see on record.
When Death Cab go happy, they do so with style and aplomb. The squeals of excitement that accompany ‘Cath…’ make for a fairground atmosphere that complements the rock angle they accentuate live, and ‘Crooked Teeth’ sparkles with festival revival energy. ‘Here To Forever’ is all vibrancy and dynamism on the home stretch, elastic hope and dreams stretched taut that we bounce along. This is a show with so many moments where you want to break the illusion for a second, to look around the room and really focus on the band, just to preserve each memory in your mind to carry it with you like a photograph in your wallet. The upbeat songs fly past, but carry just as much emotional resonance as the songs of longing and despair, and it’s testament to how much Death Cab For Cutie refuse to be pigeonholed as “that band that writes sad songs”.
Tonight flows quickly, and Death Cab For Cutie manage to stack up decades of songs with no distractions from their mission to present the best of themselves in the order that they’ve possibly been building to since day one. Most of the crowd will be back tomorrow for their second show, but there’s a beauty in knowing that you can only experience an arrangement of songs laden with emotion that glow like molten gold once. Maybe tonight isn’t unique, but a band like Death Cab For Cutie who can inspire so much faith and love across wastelands of emotion surely must be.
The Temperance Movement have released their new single, “Silverlight Blues,” the latest preview of the band’s forthcoming studio album, New Promise Land Incorporated, out October 9 via Earache Records.
“Silverlight Blues” follows previously released singles “Eat You Alive” and “Always Been Love.” The accompanying video sees the band return to Fish Factory Studios, where their self-titled debut album was recorded.
New Promise Land Incorporated marks The Temperance Movement’s first collection of all-new material in eight years. The album was recorded in April 2026 and produced and mixed by Ethan Johns, whose credits include Kings of Leon, Laura Marling and Ray LaMontagne.
The new record was captured with an emphasis on live-to-tape performances and features the blues, rock and soul influences that have defined the band’s sound. The track listing includes “Shadows,” “Mongrels,” “Saving Grace” and the previously released singles.
The album follows an extended hiatus for The Temperance Movement, whose 2018 album A Deeper Cut reached No. 6 on the UK Albums Chart.
The band returned to the stage in 2025 with a UK and European comeback tour that included a sold-out performance at London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town. They continued touring in 2026 with festival appearances including Steelhouse Festival, Maid of Stone Festival, Azkena Rock Festival, Notodden Blues Festival and Rootsy Summer Fest.
The Temperance Movement will support New Promise Land Incorporated with a 21-date UK and European headline tour following the album’s release.
UK HEADLINE DATES
November 15 – Birmingham, O2 Institute Birmingham November 16 – Southampton, 1865 November 17 – Manchester, O2 Ritz November 19 – Glasgow, Barrowland Ballroom November 21 – Dundee, LiveHouse Dundee November 23 – Newcastle, Newcastle University Students’ Union November 25 – Nottingham, Rock City November 26 – Leeds, Stylus November 29 – Bristol, Electric Bristol November 30 – Norwich, The Waterfront Studio December 1 – London, O2 Forum Kentish Town
Slipknot guitarist Jim Root has offered a juicy update on the band’s upcoming album via social media, warning fans that it’s going to “hurt some feelings”.
The 54-year-old, who joined the masked nu metal megastars as they were recording their breakthrough 1999 self-titled debut album, posted a video of his guitar pedalboard to Instagram on Monday (September 28). “We’re about to get real busy,” he teased.
Replying to comments on the post, Root spilled more details, saying, “[One] very important thing for us at this time is to not ‘repeat’ ourselves. It’s gonna hurt some feelings. We’re really experimenting with different approaches.”
He urges people not to expect another Slipknot or Iowa, their chart-topping 2001 second album, explaining that “we’ve been there”.
“The vibe feels honest and true to me,” he continues. “It’s uneasy and reminds me of recording in the earlier days. I’m not saying that means it will translate to the type of music we’re creating or the sound/production of it. The early records had the vibe. You can’t miss that with Ross [Robison, Slipknot and Iowa producer].”
Root adds that some of Slipknot’s more recent material has been “over-produced” – something he intends not to repeat on their next release: “Not necessarily the ‘best’ sounding one. The most exciting sounding… liveliest etc. We did track on the floor live with Eloy [Casagrande, drums]. We hadn’t done that in a long time for various reasons. Everything is analogue and played. All the pieces that need to be there are there.”
The guitarist also replies to a fan who offers a pretty harsh critique of Slipknot’s last album, 2022’s The End, So Far. “Please don’t make another The End, So Far,” the fan writes. “We need this to be heavy and not Stone Sour,” referring to Root and singer Corey Taylor’s former melodic rock project. Root simply responds, “Agreed.”
Root has been critical of The End, So Far in the past. Talking to MusicRadar days before the album’s release, he lamented the fact that the band didn’t do pre-production, and said that more preparation would have resulted in “a better product”.
“Directors will say constantly that they never finish a movie, they just abandon them!” he added. “I feel like, more than anything with this record, we had to abandon it and move on from it.”
Slipknot are recording their new album, their eighth overall, with former Faith No More producer Matt Wallace. It will be their first via their own label, (sic)est Records. They released the single Arsenal earlier this month, but Root revealed shortly afterwards that the track will not appear on the new album.
On Monday, Slipknot announced extensive touring for 2027, kicking off with a show at Wembley Stadium on July 3, their only European date all year. The announcement of Marilyn Manson as main support for the Wembley and South American dates proved controversial, as Manson has faced multiple misconduct allegations in recent years. A lawsuit by his former assistant Ashley Walters accusing him of verbal, physical and psychological abuse has been granted a trial date in November. Manson denies any wrongdoing.
The sixth studio album from Valley Of The Sun is The Blacklight Sessions.
Valley Of The Sun started out on the banks of the Ohio River in 2010, or thereabouts. I first heard them a few years ago and immediately jumped on the bandwagon. They have released five earlier studio albums, recently Quintessence (2024), and one that really got to me, The Chariot (2022). This new one, though, The Blacklight Sessions, is their best so far. The band is Ryan Ferrier (guitar, vocals), Chris Sweeney (bass), and Johnny Kathman (drums).
The six-song set starts off cranked up with “The Whiskey Elf.” The first time I heard it I thought immediately this has to be my favorite on the album. The riff is a killer, and it continues to innovate even early on. The lead guitar wails and slays before we ever hear any vocals. Indeed, we never do hear vocals on this song – it is an instrumental juggernaut. The first singing pops up on “Low Not Slow,” and it is a gritty groove. Fast and charging, the momentum is relentless. “The Long Song” is that and a whole lot more. This one starts slow and rumbles on for more than ten minutes, as advertised. Two and a half minutes in the music rips a hole in reality and makes its own new thing. The song is stunning.
Side two starts out with “A Greater Meaning,” a crackling radio song with sharp riffery and earnest vocals. “Mountain” goes long form with a quiet start and a loud booming center. “No Hope” brings us to the end. Another long piece, it has ponderous moments and passages of doom that resonate with your inner self. This is the best album I have heard all year. Drop everything and listen to it now. The Blacklight Sessions gets our highest recommendation.
The Blacklight Sessions is out on Friday, October 2nd from Heavy Psych Sounds Records. Listen and buy at the links below.
Keo are currently on track for their first Number One album, with the band’s debut ‘Put A Smile On For Me’ topping the midweek chart.
The Official Charts Company have reported that the band are currently in the No.1 position midweek, with Nothing But Thieves sitting at No.2 with their latest album ‘Stray Dogs’.
If things stay as they are, the London-based four-piece are set to take their debut album straight to Number 1, which is a truly remarkable feat.
The album includes the singles ‘That’s Me’, ‘Pistol’ and ‘Bird On The Wire’.
Find out where ‘Put A Smile On For Me’ finishes in the UK album chart when it is revealed in full this Friday (October 02).
HaloRipper is set to make an impact with a relentless blend of crushing metalcore, soaring melodies, and emotionally charged songwriting. Fusing bone-breaking breakdowns, cinematic atmospheres, and unforgettable hooks, the band delivers a sound that is both brutally heavy and deeply personal. Drawing inspiration from the intensity of modern metal while forging its own identity, HaloRipper […]
New Orleans guitarist, singer and songwriter Eric Johanson returns October 16 with The Open Bayou, the first release on his own Levee Ward Records. The album pushes Johanson’s blues roots into heavier, more psychedelic territory: fuzz, slide guitar, hypnotic grooves and dreamlike detours. Recorded with his touring power trio lineup, Johanson self-produced the record and […]
