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2 weeks ago | 
kerrang.com | Steve Beebee
It turns out that a change is as good as a rest. For Mark Morton, the 52-year-old guitarist in eternal metal champs Lamb Of God, there’s clearly more to life than massive riffs and sludgy heft, great though he is at those things. Last year’s purgative biography, tellingly titled Desolation: A Heavy Metal Memoir revealed some of the challenges, physical and mental, that Mark has found a way to survive.
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3 weeks ago | 
kerrang.com | Steve Beebee
If you exercise, safely but relentlessly, lifting ever heavier weights, you’re going to gain muscle mass. While BRKN LOVE still aren’t quite the world conquering goliaths they have the potential to be, everything about this third album is bigger, stronger and just generally more buff than anything they’ve done before. Bizarrely, the exercise that made the difference for frontman Justin Benlolo – a hulk of man to start with it should be noted – was a journey to Charleston in South Carolina.
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1 month ago | 
kerrang.com | Steve Beebee
Rightly or wrongly, our limitless online world enables us to access sounds as varied and unpredictable as Donald Trump soundbytes, making true uniqueness hard to find. Indian metallers Bloodywood sensationally achieved this by mating metal with their native culture, and so it is with Alien Weaponry. The best of this third album again feeds from the outfit’s Māori ancestry, the diminishing use of native tongue and traditional music cleverly revived and reformed into metal.
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1 month ago | 
kerrang.com | Steve Beebee
On Kismat, meaning 'destiny', singer Jayant Bhadula emotes the song's extensive melodic parts as if his family depends on it, while Dhadak ('heartbeat') is all quirky melodies and huge group chants. Like the title track's irresistible charge, it's powered along by both Karan Katiyar’s heavyweight guitar and Sarthak’s rib-rattling dhol.
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1 month ago | 
flipboard.com | Steve Beebee
7 hours agoA software engineer at Meta (formerly Facebook) was fired by the organization for allegedly sharing discreet workplace information with his spouse. The former Meta staff was bound to receive a handsome bonus on the very day of his termination. The techie named Riley Berton took to LinkedIn and …
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1 month ago | 
kerrang.com | Steve Beebee
Oh sure, you’ll listen to the first four tracks and be ensnared by their addictive lure, the storytelling and melodic power encouraging repeat plays, but you’ll be worrying that the one thing missing is a really ‘obvious’ punk-ish anthem. Then a riotous glitter bomb called Kunce happens; then the even better Blue Moon Over Brinkburn, a vengeful V-sign to his old school, happens. That’s how you write a punk metal classic.
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1 month ago | 
kerrang.com | Steve Beebee
Whether he likes it or not, Dave Lombardo will always be most famous as the drummer that co-founded Slayer, playing with hand-breaking ferocity on no fewer than nine of their albums. This project, however, in which he is partnered by his wife Paula – a svelte-voiced singer and innovative songwriter – could hardly be more different. Venamoris make low-laid, heft-free music that thrives on ambience rather than volume. While sombre, it’s about as far from former thrashing grounds as can be imagined.
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2 months ago | 
kerrang.com | Steve Beebee
February 17, 2025Words:Steve BeebeePhotos:Cunene“It turns heads, that’s for sure!”Cristina Scabbia shakes her head and laughs. She’s talking about the video for I Wish You Were Dead, Lacuna Coil’s latest release from their brand new 10th album, Sleepless Empire. The three-minute film features dancing (“That’s a Lacuna Coil first!”), birthday cake and a glass coffin – the latter segues interestingly into the band’s previous video, for Gravity.
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2 months ago | 
kerrang.com | Steve Beebee
Before putting yourself back together, you tend to spend some time peering back into the ruins, at the distance travelled. This sense of emergence, from both personal loss and of frustration with an impersonal, social media-driven world, seems to have informed Sleepless Empire. Lacuna Coil are a band that has constantly developed rather than transformed.
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2 months ago | 
kerrang.com | Steve Beebee
That day, January 12, 2021, was not a happy one. To the shock of just about everyone, Nightwish’s longtime bassist and co-vocalist Marko Hietala announced he was leaving the Finnish symphonic metal juggernaut. What made it particularly sad was the main reason – his mental health. The fact that a man as smart, wise-cracking and apparently confident as Marko could be suffering in this way was a wake-up call that we should assume nothing about anyone we know.
