For fifteen years now, Alter Bridge have been masterfully bridging the gap between hard rock and heavy metal. Of the five albums they have made so far, at least three...

For many, Opeth used to be the pinnacle of progressive metal. After stunning the musical world with a series of exemplary albums combining the best of both progressive and death...

For those of you who were around during to original rise of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM), Sacrilege may be a familiar name. The band first surfaced...

Using music as a medium for raging against the status quo is hardly a new concept. You can almost trace human injustice through the music produced at the time. Recent...

(Words: Rachel Sandford) Starting off a rainy last day of the weekend for me was Underoath. These guys are well known as one of the original and best post-hardcore/metalcore bands...

(Words: Rachel Sandford) I got my symphonic metal fix from Epica on the Saturday. This set, although slow at times, was a wild ride. The keyboard player Coen Janssen is...

Download Festival 2019. Drownload. Brownload. Downpour. Such nicknames and hashtags were flying around social media before the music had even begun, along with scare stories of people giving up and...

I’ll admit that I only really started paying attention to Motionless in White (MIW) when they released their third album, Reincarnate. I was never really into the emo-goth-horror vibe that...

So, this week I’m looking at something a bit different. Club Majesty is not the type of album that I ever expected to be released via Nuclear Blast Records (and...

Much like their appetite for supersized meals, the American hunger for fat and heavy hard rock tunes is not one that is easily satisfied. Yet not all meals are created...

Fast guitar players are a dime a dozen these days. The more ‘shred’ albums that are released the more difficult in becomes to impress and gain a significant amount of...

How you define metalcore is something that can be argued about for days. The greats of the genre (Trivium, Killswitch Engage, Parkway Drive etc) fuse hardcore punk, thrash and melodic...

Emerging from the remnants of various 00s metal bands, Nine Shrines first began getting attention with 2017s debut EP, Misery. Fast forward a couple of years and their debut full...

Death Blooms- You Are Filth If an insane amount of live energy and an un-relentingly aggressive vocal performance is what you are after, then look no further than Death Blooms....

Alien Weaponry – Tū Words by David Steed Every now and again a band comes along with an idea that is so good it makes you wonder why no one...

Dissociation- The Dillinger Escape Plan Words by Matthew Brooks Dissociation is TDEP's final album. It would be easy to read into this when analysing the lyrics on this album, but...

Ghost- Meloria     After the huge amounts of critical acclaim and press coverage given to 2018s Prequelle, many are tired of reading about Ghost. If you take a step...

Babymetal - Babymetal      Babymetal brought another crazy subgenre of metal into the spotlight: Kawaii Metal. Whilst the J-pop vocals and “Idol” style of show the girls put on,...

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Bullet for my Valentine – The Poison Words by David Steed There aren’t many bands who can claim to have sold out the Brixton Academy on the back of their...

A well-established disadvantage of the internet, and particularly social media, is that it gives anyone and everyone a voice and an open public platform. Conversely, it is also its biggest...

Limp Bizkit - Significant Other    Now unfairly derided by many as a novelty and a joke, Limp Bizkit were once one of the biggest bands on the planet, and...

Metallica- Metallica   https://www.facebook.com/Metallica/   Commonly referred to as the ‘black album’, Metallica is one of the albums that really brought the metal to the masses. Metallica had .Already shown...

1987 In 1987, one of the first bands of the grunge movement, Alice In Chains, formed. Their contemporaries would eventually end up killing off glam metal in the eyes of...

I first saw The Raven Age at Download Festival 2016. The biblical quantities of rain that fell that weekend meant that bands on the smaller and, more importantly, indoor stages...

It all seemed to be going on in the 70s. In 1976,The Eagles released Hotel California, Thin Lizzy brought out Jailbreak and a man called Steve Jobs founded a certain company called Apple Computers. Unbeknownst...

It is no accident that While She Sleeps are one of the most important bands in the UK metal scene right now. Their dedication to their music, and their fans...

When you have a back catalogue as large as In Flames it is inevitable that new releases are going to be compared to past work. That said, I long ago...

With Dream Theaters last album, The Astonishing, they achieved the, ahem, astonishing feat of making fans finally stop arguing about a certain ex-drummer. Not through any unifying love of a...

Politics and music. These are two subjects that can incite a range of both rational and irrational emotions and opinions in just about everyone. They are also two subjects that...

Whatever your thoughts on Europe happen to be, there is no denying that they do power metal with an amount of flair that other parts of the world rarely match....

Odds are if you’re reading this then it is unlikely that I need to explain to you who Mastodon are. One of the most revered bands in experimental metal is...

Evergrey, for those not already in the know, are one of Sweden’s most prominent progressive metal exports. Never one to conform to typical music industry confinements, they regularly release singles...

With the growing success of bands like Greta Van Fleet and The Struts, plus the record-breaking Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, powerful radio rock is once again having a moment. Danish...

Hounds of Perdition is the second album from Finnish band Wolfhorde. The group have never been able to settle on a line-up for a live setting, so have limited themselves...

Fallen is the second EP from Hungarian band Gods of the Fallen. Their debut effort, Limitations, showed a range of influences, from nu-metal to death metal, melodic to thrash and...

Falling, Faster is the second EP to come from melodic rock trio Stand Alone, coming two years after their debut Nothing is Forgotten. Based in West Yorkshire, the band consists...

Nita Strauss is somewhat of an oddity in the music world. She is one of the most sought-after tutors for guitar clinics worldwide; she has toured the globe with acts...

While many of the Midlands metal community were in Birmingham to watch the almighty Slayer, over at The Robin 2 in Bilston, US funk rock legends Dan Reed Network were...

When thinking of Switzerland, things like banks, neutrality and mountainous scenery tend to spring to mind long before heavy metal music. Five musicians from the town of Brugg aim to...

If the band name and album title didn’t make it obvious enough, Holy Shire are a symphonic/power metal band with heavy fantasy themes. The Legendary Shepherds of the Forest is...

If you’re like me, then you would agree that Floor Jansen is the best thing that has happened to symphonic metal band Nightwish since Mr Holopainen (keyboards) received his first...

For many, the idea of filling your Sunday evening with two hours of live space-prog-rock might seem a bit daunting. But this is the stuff Coheed & Cambria fans live...

Anyone who knows AFM Records generally knows what they’re going to get with one of their releases. While sticking to a genre you know and producing bands of a pretty...

I dare say there are very few people who have embraced the joys of classic heavy metal with as much fervour as the Spanish. They have a plethora of home-grown...

I would love to know how the name Chasing Dragons came about, because it sounds suspiciously like the result of one of those metal-band-name generators that used to do the...

Rust for Blue is the third EP from French post-grunge group Dirty Raven. Described in their press release as ‘heavier, darker’ and ‘more personal’ than their previous offerings, the EP...

I always become apprehensive when I hear the word ‘progressive’ bandied around in relation to newer metal bands. In its traditional format, progressive music leans towards complex arrangements, instrumentation and...

Cauldron. The name, the logo, the artwork….. everything is styled towards a retro horror aesthetic, and in a gloriously unsubtle manner. The Canadian group are described, by some, as part...

Burn Forever is the debut EP from the diverse conglomerate that is Lowlives. You would be hard pressed to find a group with a larger range of backgrounds, at least...

I’m ashamed to admit that, despite being aware of them and their formidable live reputation, I had never given any significant listening time to Massive Wagons until I saw them at...

Somewhere just south of Ebbw Vale there is an unassuming farmers field atop a mountain. For most of the year it is just another part of picturesque Welsh landscape, but,...

In the Old Testament it is said to have rained continuously for forty days and forty nights. Now, while Steelhouse Festival was only a weekend affair, the sheer volume of...

The weather was kind enough to limit itself to a mild drizzle on the opening night, but it was on Saturday that it really decided to let loose with rain...

We arrived on Friday to ominous grey clouds brewing on the horizon. Not that this deterred the hardcore fans who headed straight over to the stage to see the band...

Many will be familiar with Graham Bonnet as the man who replaced Ronnie James Dio in Rainbow in the late 70s. The man in charge of the band, Ritchie Blackmore,...

Crown of Apathy is the debut album from American singer and multi-instrumentalist Mick Blankenship. Writing and recording all aspects of your debut album can be challenging, but Blankenship also has...

Ah the riff. That timeless musical motif that has inspired thousands to pick up a guitar of their own and try to hammer out Smoke On The Water or Paranoid....

Mark Tremonti, for any who are unaware, is one of the most creative, ingenious and inspiring guitar players in modern metal (yes, I am a fan). Having decided that the...

Vendetta Red is not a name I had heard before last week. It turns out that Quinceañera is their first full length album since 2005, which made me feel a...