Most bands pride themselves on a personal connection with their fans, but no-one can be closer to their supporters than the Bouncing Souls. During the dark and tedious pandemic years, the band started a Patreon, and the top tier reward for subscribers: a custom song written just for them. “We’ve written so many songs from our own experiences but this time we really stepped outside of that,” said vocalist Greg Attonito. The result is a profoundly hopeful record captures something intangible about the zeitgeist after the pandemic, at turns lonely and universally personal. The ..read more

We all knew that Fat Mike wasn’t going to spend his time off after his run as NOFX’s frontman doing sudoku and baking banana bread. Before the band even ended their farewell tour, Fat Mike had already teamed up with hip hip artist Ceschi Ramos and Get Dead’s vocalist Sam King to form Codefendants, pioneers of new sub-genre ‘crimewave’ and creators of “the best aural sex of your life” (according to Mike). Punk has always been a neighbour to Hip-Hop and Codefendants have metaphorically hopped the fence to create an emotionally honest record overflowing with defiance and rage. It’s ..read more

When Ricky Hoover – he of Suffokate and extreme earlobe fame – revealed the logo for his new band Ov Sulfur, the reaction from across the deathcore scene was rabid. A sold out (and upgraded) debut show at the Freemont Country Club in their native Las Vegas preceded the band’s 2021 EP ‘Oblivion’ and their fanbase was growing fast.  Now, with ‘The Burden Ov Faith’, Hoover continues his career-long quest to bring down religion as a whole and delivers a demonic sermon with the ominous intensity of a blazing church. ‘Stained In Rot’ lays the band’s intentions bare – a speeding cavalcade of inf ..read more

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Tonight’s line-up at the Hammersmith Apollo is testament to the power of a dedicated fan base. The three bands playing this evening emerged onto the scene at the turn of the millennium, and it’s clear from the already busy floor that the vast majority of the audience have stuck with them for the past couple of decades. Opening proceedings tonight are My Vitriol, who kick things off with their own brand of melancholy shoegaze. With a stage shrouded in darkness for a lot of the set, the mic stand covered in fairly lights is often the only clearly visible point, the moody lighting reflecting the ..read more

Beyond Extinction are on something of a tear of late. Having played Bloodstock Festival, toured with the likes of Cancer Bats, Osiah and Viscera, and now gearing up to release their second EP, ‘Nothing More Wretched’, with their very own headline tour across the length and breadth of the UK, It seems impossible that their oldest member is just 22 years of age. But alas, there must be something in the Essex water, because the deathcore quartet have done all of this as an independent, self-managed band – and this is just the beginning. ‘Eyes Of God Look Down Upon Me’ was released as the lead sin ..read more

Imagine the scene, you’re struggling to find a hook to hang your review on, it seems hopeless, but then, you take a swig of a sparkling beverage; it tastes pretty good, it has an unusual flavour, it’s quite refreshing, and then you discover the container is 100% recycle. It’s a perfect metaphor for World Gone Cold, a new band made up from members of P.O.D., Demon Hunter, Disciple, The Letter Black and Attack Attack! – they’re new, exciting and, while it’s a bit of an overstatement to call them a supergroup, there’s a certain pedigree here and their self-titled EP isn’t just empty calories. May ..read more

There’s something timeless about Pop Evil which is really very appealing. If we told you that they were contemporaries of Linkin Park in their baggy-trousered heyday, you might well believe it based on their sound alone. But this seventh outing for the Michigan group, the latest in a series of powerful, chunky metal records with electro lightning crackling round the edges, is a gutsy album for this moment right now. Packing a punch and letting the vocals soar is the magic formula that’s flung singles ‘Eye of the Storm’ and ‘Paranoid (Crash & Burn)’ to the top of the Billboard chart and und ..read more

Ever since their humble beginnings almost two decades ago, Periphery have been pushing, bending, stretching and smashing genre boundaries into a sound that is musically technical and seriously crushing, but also bright, colourful and at times, eclectic. As time progressed, that cocktail ended up being given a name – djent. From the penning of that term onwards, alongside other artists like Textures and Tesseract, the band have been regarded as pioneers of djent. But their newest album, their highly anticipated fifth full length, is called ‘Djent Is Not A Genre’. I beg your pardon? If djent doe ..read more

By now, it’s commonplace for Manchester Orchestra not to be a routine band. Ever since 2017’s ‘A Black Mile to the Surface’, frontman Andy Hull, lead guitarist Robert McDowell, bassist Andy Prince and drummer Tim Very, have branched out from their indie rock roots. ‘The Million Masks of God‘ from 2021 neatly honed in on Hull and McDowell’s narrative songwriting ability. This time round, Manchester Orchestra have teamed up with filmmaker Isaac Deitz on a film project titled ‘The Valley of Vision’. While the visual aspect sees Deitz embrace the use of 3D-computed radiography technology, it’s lef ..read more