One of the biggest heavy music festivals in the world takes place starting today at Download Festival UK 2018 lifts off! With headliners like Ozzy Osbourne, Guns N Roses, and Avenged Sevenfold, one might be hard-pressed to find a better top of the bill in 2018. Ghost Cult brings you the day by day can’t miss bands in our preview below! Continue reading
Hailing from what is fast becoming the new metal hotbed of the UK, Southampton, come post-hardcore quintet I, The Mapmaker with their self-released E.P. Searching. Seeing that this was produced by Lewis Johns (Employed To Serve, Rolo Tomassi etc) I was already intrigued as to what the band would have to offer and knew that wasn’t going to be a generic by numbers band.Continue reading
Download Festival 2018 has made another major announcement, adding 21 bands and WWE NXT Live! Wrestling to the line-up. Added to the bill are Avatar, Andrew W.K., Bad Religion, CKY, Nothing More, Black Foxxes, Hell Is For Heroes and many more. WWE will bring an immersive NXT show starring Aleister Black, Adam Cole, Velveteen Dream, Ricochet, Nikki Cross, Shayna Baszler, Kairi Sane, The Undisputed Era and more. Continue reading
The British Metal scene has well and truly been spoilt for choice when it comes to exciting and hugely important releases in recent years. Whether it being in the case of killer new bands causing waves on their first full release such as Venom Prison or The King Is Blind or follow-ups that build massively on the previous potential such as Employed To Serve or Architects with All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us (Epitaph), British Metal has shown its greatest period of abundance for quite some time. Continue reading
Taking over The Netherlands this weekend, Complexity Fest brings together the best in deathcore, death metal, progressive and other kinds of extreme music under one roof kicks off tonight. Running at the venerable Patronaat hall in Haarlem, NL, Complexity Fest features Carnifex, The Faceless, Oceano, Sikth, John Frum, Aversions Crown, Dodecahedrone, Blanck Mass, Dodheimsgard, Vola, Three Trapped Tigers, and many more. Tickets are on sale now at the link below.Continue reading
Back again with my old friends at Holy Roar Records, and this time it is the début from Cologne’s Giver. Here we have a band of real talent willing to go beyond the usual restraints of the genre; Where The Cycle Breaks is not just another Hardcore album.Continue reading
Already looking stacked with a huge lineup, Download Festival 2018 added 65 more bands today, including Volbeat, Baroness, The Bronx, Hatebreed, Greta Van Fleet, Cradle of Filth, Black Stone Cherry and many more. Download takes place August 8-10 at Donington Park. Full band list and ticket links below. Continue reading
As the dust begins to settle on what will undoubtedly go down in a history as a fine year for heavy and progressive music, the Ghost Cult crew present our favourite albums of 2017. While a year with only a couple of genuine life-changing, genre redefiners, nevertheless 2017 has seen an absolute plethora of very, very high quality releases. With over 400 albums reviewed this year, at an average of 7.5/10, there was a deep pool of quality releases selected and dissected throughout the year. A genuinely democratic inner sanctum here, we now present Part 1 of an official Ghost Cult Album of the Year (2017) run down that s truly representative of Ghost Cult, our writers, and our musical position as a site. Please share your thoughts and comments on the music we collectively love, as we countdown from 50 through to 26…Continue reading
Following a few excessively raw and highly abrasive EPs, the UK’s Employed To Serve turned a few heads in 2015 with the release of their hungry—nay, starving and salivating—debut full-length Greyer Than You Remember. Now, with The Warmth Of A Dying Sun (both Holy Roar), they are poised to turn quite a few more.Continue reading
Atmosphere was the key word at Damnation Festival and back over on the Eyesore Merchandise Stage as Portuguese act Sinistro unleashed a sonic tour-de-force. Though a relatively new act its members hold combined decades of performance experience, and there was something of the avant-garde about this set. Vocalist Patricia Andrade was as forceful in her dancing as she was elegant in her singing, and to top it off she was the beneficiary of carefully arranged lighting that ensured she was almost floodlit while her band mates moved behind and around her in relative shadow. Continue reading