Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2023 i Metal Hammer UK

ALMOST FIVE YEARS ago, Tesseract released Sonder and stepped away from the tech-metal scene that had long been their home. A broader, more instantly catchy and straightforward album, it showed a real maturity and evolution to their songwriting, opening the door to an appeal beyond the scene that spawned them. Sets at Download, Bloodstock and ArcTanGent, as well as support slots with everyone from Dream Theater to Trivium and Megadeth showed they were aiming to pull in as many new fans as possible. With a new album on the horizon, we spoke to vocalist Dan Tompkins and bassist Amos Williams about where they’re going next. Sonder was a massive leap for you guys. How much further are you going this time? Amos: “We’re way over the hill! We’ll never deny…

MIRRORING THE FROZEN, sacred landscapes of their home in Iceland, Kælan Mikla are simultaneously bewitching and brutal. The band’s name has similarly glacial origins, and comes from the Icelandic translation of ‘The Lady Of The Cold’, a winter spirit who appears in Moomins. “If you look into her eyes, you freeze to death,” explains synth player Sólveig Matthildur Kristjánsdóttir. “The character is like a children’s femme fatale, and we relate to that a lot.” Growing up in an isolated country, Kælan Mikla often had only nature and the fairytales and folklore of their homeland to turn to for inspiration, singing stories in their native tongue about wishing stones and cunning elves, among other magical entities. “We just played in the countryside, heard stories and sang songs,” Sólveig says. “I always…

IN SHORT SOUNDS LIKE: Floridian death metal that’s armed with razor-sharp hooks FOR FANS OF: Cannibal Corpse, Autopsy, Obituary LISTEN TO: Rise From The Grave GOOGLE ‘UNDEATH’ AND you’ll get a host of headlines declaring the same thing: that this band are making death metal fun again. “We’ve never tried to posture as a tough band, because we’re not,” lead singer Alex Jones tells us. “We’re a bunch of fucking dorks.” The geekery shines through on their second album, It’s Time… To Rise From The Grave. Its songs combine relentless drums and low-fretboard tremolo picking with hummable yet roaring hooks. This is metal you’d mosh and scream along to at the dingiest dive bar. “I love Autopsy, Bolt Thrower and Cannibal Corpse so much that I’d never tell you, ‘Don’t listen…

10 THINGS WE WANT FROM BABYMETAL IN 2023 It’s a brand-new year, with a brand-new slate of blockbusting albums due to drop over the next 12 months. From returning heroes to the faces of the future, here’s why you should get excited AN EXPLANATION “Only the Fox God knows” is a phrase both beloved and dreaded in Babymetal fandom – amaddening tease for things to come. When the band went on hiatus in 2021, they left the cryptic message “What lies ahead beyond the end of the stairway to becoming a Living Legend is something only the Fox God knows.” What does it mean? Well, we haven’t got a clue! Presumably it ties in to The Other One’s concept, but it’s all a mystery right now. MASSIVE PRODUCTION At this…

Within Temptation capped off 2022 with some of the most spectacular live shows in the band’s history, bringing out the kind of stage production that would make Iron Maiden proud. Now their sights are set on finishing their as-yet untitled eighth studio album – and as vocalist Sharon den Adel tells Hammer, their ambitions have only grown after their recent experiences. “It’s about 85% done,” Sharon says. “We want to take the time to go over the songs, change some bits and maybe get a bit experimental. The songs that we’ve written are already very different to what we’ve done before, so…” One thing we know for sure is that the five singles the band have released thus far aren’t part of their vision for what comes next. “Originally we…

Body Count have been more transparent than most in the build-up to their eighth album. The rap metal iconoclasts first announced in June 2021 that writing on Merciless was already underway. Then they confirmed in February 2022 that they had entered the studio. Now, frontman Ice-T tells Hammer that the band are “about halfway through” recording their new music with longtime producer Will Putney, and hope to have it out by the summer. “We’re nine songs in, and we’re gonna put 15 on the album,” he says. “It hasn’t been the easiest album to record, simply because we’re coming off the heels of [2020’s] Carnivore. It was a great, award-winning record and we never got to perform it. Playing songs on the road is usually what inspires your next album,…

Say what you will about Norwegian black metal warhorses Immortal, but you know exactly what you’re getting. “It’s an Immortal album with all the ingredients you would expect, from fast tracks to epic long tracks,” says vocalist/guitarist Demonaz of the band’s upcoming 10th album, War Against All. “It traces back to the style of the first albums. It’s got just the right biting guitar sound and the exact Blashyrkhian mood.” Still, some things have changed. Demonaz is now the sole official member of Immortal, after he and longtime drummer Horgh became embroiled in a lawsuit over the band’s name (co-founder Abbath left in 2015). War Against All’s eight songs were recorded with Gaahls Wyrd’s Kevin ‘Spektre’ Kvåle on drums and Enslaved guitarist Ice Dale on bass. Thankfully, the legal chaos…

The explosive, emotional maelstrom at the heart of Imha Tarikat is a double-edged sword. On one hand, its rawnerve intensity helped put the band on the extreme metal underground’s radar, their propulsive and chaotic BM resulting in anarchic shows where glass could fly and blood spray at any minute. On the other, the emotional and mental toll it took appeared to be killing bandleader Kerem Yilmaz. “Things were turbulent,” he concedes. “It feels good to finally have our new album out, like the conclusion for a certain part of my life. The first album [2019’s Kara Ihlas] was about understanding my struggle with depression. [2020’s] Sternenberster was about getting lost in pure madness, so Hearts Unchained… is about living through these experiences and learning. A moment of clarity after everything…

onas Renkse was an outdoorsy child who started playing football and handball at age seven. He was, by his own admission, pretty good. But by age 14, metal had taken over. “The music thing felt so enormous compared to the sports,” he remembers. “It was a totally different universe and it devoured me.” It’s been 30 years since Jonas and co-founding guitarist Anders Nyström released Katatonia’s debut album, Dance Of December Souls. The band’s sound has progressively softened from the harsh death metal that emulated their heroes in Morbid Angel to stately gothic metal, and they’ve constructed their own universe – asort of Swedish version of Gotham, a gloomy cityscape populated by ominous birds, a place to contemplate themes of death, despair, heartache, and – whisper it – sometimes hope.…

NUCLEAR BLAST WHEN AN ALREADY established band decides to release a self-titled album, it feels like a statement. In the case of Beyond The Black’s fifth full-length, the German symphonic metal stars are definitively telling us: this is who we are now. Exploring the folk-metal aspects of their sound far more on the stomping Reincarnation and album standout Dancing In The Dark – which incorporates what sounds like throat singing and an urgent, percussive heartbeat – they’ve also stripped away some of the subgenre’s OTT trappings, focusing more on punchy melodies. And at just 10 tracks, Beyond The Black is markedly shorter than the band’s previous albums, and filler-free. Opener Is There Anybody Out There? is a straightforward metal track that nevertheless grabs you with its immediacy and vividly evokes…

FOR 20 YEARS, Epica have been flying the flag for bombastic, extravagant symphonic metal, with the visuals and ambition to match. Their new collaborative EP, The Alchemy Project – featuring the likes of Myrkur, Fleshgod Apocalypse and members of Soilwork and Kamelot – is possibly their most ambitious work to date. We put your questions to singer Simone Simons on what it was like working with Uriah Heep, playing shows in Mayan ruins and that time she (almost) joined a black metal band. Wikipedia says you joined a black metal band for a cup of coffee before you became a member of Epica. If true, what was that band like? How was your corpsepaint game? Matt Mills, Twitter “Wikipedia is wrong! I never joined a black metal band. I was…

LOVE HIM OR loathe him, there’s no denying Robb Flynn has overcome a lot in his journey to the upper echelons of heavy metal. Even before the Machine Head frontman got raked over the coals for nu metal flirtation The Burning Red, he had endured substance abuse, violence and even death threats. So with a new line-up and 2022’s Of Kingdom And Crown proving yet again that Machine Head are metal’s most unkillable band, we thought it high time to find out just how Robb keeps triumphing over all… APPRECIATE WHAT YOU’VE GOT “Looking back, I feel like my dad did a good job. By all definitions we were living in a white trash neighbourhood, but he’d always tell me we were rich – rich in love, family, health… We…

SCOWL ARE THE most exciting new hardcore band going. With just two EPs and a debut – complete with atypical, cartoonish sleeve art – the Californians have taken their scene-smashing sound around the world, their stage-breaking live shows even seeing them open for Limp Bizkit at Madison Square Garden. A monumental achievement, but not one they ever planned for. “I’ve never played in a band before,” confesses vocalist Kat Moss. “Malachi [Greene, guitar] learned guitar just to write Scowl songs. When we started we just wanted to play local shows… opening for Limp Bizkit was never in the conversation!” What Scowl lacked in technical proficiency, they “made up for in creativity”. Bloodhound, the 90-second opener of debut album How Flowers Grow, charges forward with wild abandon, propelled by Kat’s confrontational…

IN FLAMES Foregone: Mailorder Edition Vinyl Box Set NUCLEAR BLAST £77 MELODIC METALLERS IN Flames need absolutely no introduction, and for their 14th album they’ve put together a suitably lavish special edition. Limited to just 1,000 copies, this box set sees new album Foregone splashed across two striking picture discs, alongside a CD version of the album, a sticker and a 28-page booklet. Perhaps most noteworthy of all, though, is the inclusion of an honest-to-god pocketwatch. It’s quaint but also rather fetching, and will make a dashing if slightly eccentric addition to any metalhead’s wardrobe. Plus, of course, you can use it to count down the years ’til the band’s next release, or the far shorter intervals between people moaning online that the album’s too heavy, not heavy enough, too…

It’s coming up to seven years since Avenged Sevenfold released their last album, 2016’s The Stage. That record saw the Huntington Beach band entirely upending their own formula, from the eight-minute, prog metal-adjacent title track to the over-arching sci-fi-themed concept, complete with saxophones and a cameo from space boffin Neil deGrasse Tyson, to the fact that the whole album was suddenly dropped without any prior warning. Progress on the much-anticipated follow-up may be slow, but at least the band have been transparent about it this time around. Not that taking more than six years to make it was part of the original plan. At the end of 2017, singer M Shadows told Billboard that they intended to get back in the studio as soon as they could. “We’re really excited…

After nearly 15 years in the game, and with their sixth album, 2020’s Cannibal, proving to be their most successful yet, maybe it’s about time Southampton metalcore crew Bury Tomorrow shed their underdog status. Singer Dani Winter-Bates certainly thinks so. “It’s almost insulting at this point,” he laughs. “We’re a big band now. We play big venues and a lot of people listen to our band; we reject being called ‘underdogs’ now. It’s patronising.” This may well be the year Bury Tomorrow rid themselves of the tag forever. New album The Seventh Sun drops in March, and Dani believes it’s the best of their career. “It’s been pretty magical actually,” he says. “We’re a metal band, and we’re always going to be a metal band, but in the past we…

This is the In Flames we love!” “This song feels like they’re waving to their older fans saying, ‘We haven’t forgotten about you.’” “After a dozen long years I can finally pick up a new In Flames album.” These, plus thousands more comments of relief and adulation, await when you look up In Flames’ blistering State Of Slow Decay on YouTube. The lead single from the Gothenburg five-piece’s impending 14th album, Foregone, was the first wholly melodeath music they’d released in 22 years. It also marked the ceasefire in the war between the band and their oldest fans, who for the same span of time had craved completely different things. In the early 2000s, In Flames ditched the growls and guitar harmonies of the genre they’d helped define, replacing them…

AMONG THE RAFT of Nordic folk acts to have emerged in Wardruna and Heilung’s wake, Skáld are the most curiously overlooked. Curious because they’re actually massive: half a million monthly Spotify listeners, playing 3,500-capacity venues and album sales through the turfed roof. And yet you can sense they’re not taken as seriously as, or by, their more earnest contemporaries. Ever since their debut album, 2019’s Vikings Chant, there’s been a whiff of opportunism hanging over them – not so much because they hail from the non-Scandic region of Gaul, but perhaps down to their early promo pics looking like a Heathen fashion shoot, some overly obvious plundering of their dual overlords, and their tendency to stray from the Poetic Edda to reinterpret arguably non-canon sources such as Björk and The…

SSE WEMBLEY ARENA, LONDON IT’S A GOOD night to be a fan of Finnish metal. Eccentric purveyors of disco-metal TURMION KÄTILÖT are on fine form and smash the language barrier by affably clowning about while they rip through danceable songs from the upcoming Omen X, closing with the industrial-flavoured Sikiö. Continuing the party vibe are the flamboyant power metallers BEAST IN BLACK, who, from the very first strains of opener Blade Runner, pepper their performance with choreographed guitar-lift moves, synchronised headbanging and timed jumps. It’s a bit OTT, but songs like the gloriously silly One Night In Tokyo do a great job of loosening fans up for the main event. And what an event it is when NIGHTWISH make their return to the Wembley stage, nearly a year later than…

‘TIM BURTON DIRECTS The Addams Family’ is such a no-brainer that we’re amazed it took this long for something to materialise. Like many fans who flocked to Netflix for TV show Wednesday, we were delighted to see his take ticked all the necessary boxes for gothic magic. With a stellar cast of Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia, Luis Guzmán as Gomez, Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester and rising star Jenna Ortega in the titular role of Wednesday Addams, Burton crafted an engaging murder-mystery-type series set in a Hogwartslike private school for ‘outcasts’ called Nevermore Academy. Additional cast members included Gwendoline Christie (as principal Larissa Weems) and Christina Ricci (who played Wednesday in the 90s movies, as teacher Marilyn Thornhill). The show was a massive hit, challenging other Netflix behemoths Stranger Things…

IN SHORT SOUNDS LIKE: Tempestuous atmospheric black metal featuring Amazonian rhythms, progressive rock and Brazilian jungle genies FOR FANS OF: Yellow Eyes, Krallice, Bathory LISTEN TO: Maresia “NATURE PROVIDES THE truth I need to live on – it sustains me, mentally and physically,” says Bruno Augusto Ribeiro. The two albums that the black metal vocalist has made with countryman Caio Lemos as Vauruvã place this life-saving ethos at their pulverising core. The Blakean gateways to the mythical realms of the imagination are Vauruvã’s escape from the brutalities of an informationsaturated and pollutant-intoxicated age, a malaise exacerbated by the destruction wrought by Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s ex-president, on their country. Multi-instrumentalist Caio sees the need for a musical sanctuary as critical. “I’m an inveterate pessimist, or maybe a frustrated optimist,” he explains.…

It’s a gloomy November evening in London and inside the crystalline bowels of the Universal Music tower there are dark goings-on under a winter moon. An arcane gathering of power brokers, decision makers and tastemakers has convened to hear the first, dulcet tones of a new record in its entirety – alyrical and melodious exsanguination called Neon Noir. Less an album, the subject of tonight’s attention is more like a swan song played in reverse or a departed loved one’s voice heard in the wind. We’ll get to that. There are no robes here, such vestigial ornaments long since done away with to provide anonymity on public transportation, but the importance of these proceedings is in no way diminished. This is how the music industry in all its mysterious dealings…

Metallica didn’t just surprise the world when they announced their 11th album, 72 Seasons, at the end of November. They surprised themselves too, at least in terms of managing to keep a lid on it. “We’ve been tight-fucking-lipped about it,” drummer Lars Ulrich told DJ Howard Stern. “We thought for sure this thing would leak! It hasn’t fucking leaked!” But now the cat is out of the bag. The news that their first album since 2016 will be out on April 14 was accompanied by a new song, Lux Æterna, a three-anda-half-minute blast of unexpectedly old-school metal that calls back to the sound of their debut album, Kill ’Em All, and throws in the odd lyrical reference to formative Metallica inspiration Diamond Head along the way. In fact, nostalgia seems…

Sabaton bassist Pär Sundström has cooked up some ambitious and epic concepts for his band over the years, but the decision to tour with Japanese superstars Babymetal under the banner The Tour To End All Tours is a stroke of metal genius. “I can’t wait to see what they’re gonna do,” says Pär. “They’ve been hidden away for a while working on new music, so you know it’s going to be pretty special and I’m sure they’ll kick ass every night.” It’s not the first time the two bands have played together, with the Swedes supporting the Japanese band in 2018, while Sabs’ singer Joakim Brodén appeared on the Babymetal song Oh! Majinai on Metal Galaxy. Could this mutual admiration extend beyond a tour and into a full-blown collaboration? “There’s…

IMMORTAL: PRESS. IN THIS MOMENT: PRESS/JEREMY SAFFER Featuring collaborations with Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale and The Pretty Reckless’s Taylor Momsen, and boasting a future Grammynominated single in The In-Between, In This Moment’s seventh album, Mother, was all set to kick the LA band to the next level. Except it was released in March 2020 and… well, we all know what happened next. “It got sucked into the void,” says guitarist Chris Howorth of the lousy, pandemic-related timing. “We never got to tour it.” Chris and singer Maria Brink tell Hammer that the frustration they felt at that situation has been poured into the songs they’re writing for Mother’s as-yet-untitled follow-up, which is due for release later this year. “Chris has been sending some very innovative, exciting music,” says Maria. “There hasn’t…

WHILE MOST HEAVY music can be traced back to one seminal root or another, Katatonia’s sound has always seemed to magically materialise, fully formed, bereft of cliché, and owing nothing to anything but the gentle grip of darkness. The key can be found in the seemingly intuitive songwriting of founder members Anders Nyström and Jonas Renkse: irrespective of which of them is wielding the pen, their songs consistently defy the usual rules. Intricate riffs intertwine in wild, alien ways; huge melodies erupt from unexpected points in tangled, tempestuous rhythms; colossal emotional crescendos transform into moments of breathtaking fragility and restraint. Whether by fortune, design or a mixture of the two, Katatonia have long been one of the most authentically progressive and unique bands around. As a result, expectations around a…

THREE YEARS. THAT’S how long the faithful have waited for this moment. The Internet lost its shit when Within Temptation and Evanescence – two bands who have blazed parallel paths, emerging in the early 00s to become figureheads for their respective scenes – announced their Worlds Collide tour back in late 2019. After four postponements, there’s a sense the fans who have shown up in their droves for early doors still can’t quite believe tonight’s show is actually happening. Up first, though, Nashville’s VERIDIA are a well-pitched opener who veer between alt rock and anthemic pop sensibilities. Vocalist Deena Jakoub has a penchant for theatrics that goes down well as she spins across the stage between blazing orange wings, but it’s when Evanescence’s Amy Lee turns up to play piano…

THE ROUNDHOUSE TURNS into Hades tonight as Powerwolf perform in an avalanche of flames and pyrotechnics on a level not seen since Rammstein. It’s a lot to live up to for support act WARKINGS, but they don’t disappoint with their warrior shtick. Opening with a thundering The Last Battle and Spartacus, complete with crowd chants, they get straight into the job of entertaining. It doesn’t really matter that harsh vocalist Secil Sen, aka Morgana le Fay, makes a guest appearance, because the real flair comes from born-to-do-this frontman Georg Neuhauser, of Serenity fame. The final note-hold on Fight – asong peeled from the Italian protest anthem Bella Ciao – is a breathtaking marker of the singer’s superlative vocal work, proving to be the set smasher. Warkings are the perfect warm-up…