Graspop Metal Meeting, one of the most acclaimed metal festivals in the world has finalized more names for their 2024 new lineup. Final headliner Alice Cooper has joined the bill with 83 other bands for year 27! Bruce Dickinson, Corey Taylor, Deep Purple, Electric Callboy and Megadeth as part of 130+ other bands. The fest takes place from Thursday 20 June through Sunday 23 June 2024 at Graspop Metal Meeting in Dessel, Belgium. Tickets go on sale this Saturday, November 25th at the link below.
Download Festival, the greatest rock and metal festival of all time, returns for its 21st edition, reborn and recharged in 2024 as DLXXI. Announced today are headliners Queens Of The Stone Age, Fall Out Boy and Avenged Sevenfold, as well as over 70 more huge names from the rock world. This year’s festival will take place on 14-16 June 2024 at the spiritual home of rock in Donington Park, Leicestershire. General tickets are onsale at 9pm on Thursday 9 November at the link below.
Say what you will about Deathcore, but that goddamn subgenre refuses to die or give an inch. More power to it, I say. While it may not have reached the commercial heights of its sister subgenre, Metalcore, one could argue that that the former has been just as active as the latter.
The Juno Awards, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy Awards, were held this past weekend, with the ‘Opening Night Awards’ ceremony, which was held at Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto on Saturday (May 14th, 2022), and the main ceremony for broadcast on May 15th, 2022. In an upset, Archspire won “Heavy Music Album of The Year” for their stellar album Bleed The Future which released via Season of Mist in 2021. The Technical Death Metal band won against a crowded field of great nominees, including Spiritbox, Danko Jones, The Agonist, and Brand of Sacrifice. The broadcast was hosted by Simu Liu, star of the box-office smash Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. This was the first in-person Juno ceremony in three years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Congrats Archspire! Continue reading
Modern Death Metal leaders Thy Art Is Murder and After The Burial will team up for a co-headline tour. their “Back From The Gulag Tour” embarks on May 10th in Sacramento and will make stops in Atlanta, Toronto, and Chicago prior to concluding in Portland, Oregon on June 18th. Joining the bands for the 32-date trek are Direct support will come from Currents and Brand of Sacrifice. General admission tickets are on sale now!
Massive music festivals are commonplace now, but they were far and few between fifty years ago. They are hard to produce well, but can be great moments in time for fans and musical artists. For every Lollapalooza, Wacken, and Ozzfest, we have Altamont, Woodstock 1999, and Fyre Fest as well. No festival sets out to fail or do harm and hurt the trust of fans, but sometimes that happens. Blue Ridge Rock Fest, as it turns out, became a perfect storm of too many fans, too small a town, to support those fans. Purpose Driven events had put on severa
Say what you will about Deathcore, it is nothing if not persistent. Not that the idea of mixing Death Metal and Hardcore is a new one (i.e., Suffocation) but when the term deathcore is applied today it recalls the halcyon years between 2007 and 2012 when a young man’s worth was determined by his throat tattoo, the size of his gauges and his MySpace networking skills. If you had a pig squeal, a breakdown and a dream it seemed like you too could be handed an Earache Records deal. But when did that dream end? Well, according to Lorna Shore’s …And I Return to Nothingness (Century Media) it didn’t.Continue reading
Quickly shaping up to be the biggest music festival in the USA this year, Blue Ridge Rock festival has announced their full line-up of 180 bands. Headlining the massive 4 day festival are Five Finger Death Punch, Rob Zombie, Shinedown, Breaking Benjamin, and Limp Bizkit. There is a special club warm up show which includes headliner Ludacris, T-Pain, and Lil Jon. Also on tap: the Hellzapoppin Circus Sideshow Revue, a vaudeville freak show of wonder by Hellzapoppin’s Ringleader and Producer, Mr. Bryce “The Govna” Graves. In addition, excitingly, the festival will be hosted by Steve-O (MTV’s Jackass); and special guest Lou Brutus (SiriusXM). The fest takes place September 9th – 12th at Blue Ridge Amphitheater, a long-awaited large-scale concert venue in Southwest Virginia. Tickets are on sale now at the link below and here is the full lineup:
Father forgive me because we have to talk about Brand of Sacrifice’s Lifeblood (Blood Blast Distribution). Listen, I really wanted to enjoy Lifeblood as we need to build up new stars in heavy music, but this simply isn’t it chief. Maybe if we stripped the many layers of triggered drums, modulated vocals, unimportant guest appearances and waves of synths we could find something worth working with. But as it stands, I cannot sanction this buffoonery.
Canadian deathcore band Brand of Sacrifice has released “Altered Eyes”, the final new track to be unleashed before the release of their highly anticipated new album, Lifeblood (out March 5th via Blood Blast Distribution). Much like the previous three singles released from ‘Lifeblood’ have collectively clocked up over 2 million global streams, “Altered Eyes” is also a banger! Check out this cool animated video right now!