Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2023 i Metal Hammer UK

Future PLC, 121 - 141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London, W2 6JR Web: www.metalhammer.com Letters: metalhammer@futurenet.com Editorial Editor Eleanor Goodman eleanor.goodman@futurenet.com Production Editor Vanessa Thorpe vanessa.thorpe@futurenet.com Reviews Editor Jonathan Selzer jonathan.selzer@futurenet.com Art Editor Louise Brock louise.brock@futurenet.com Associate Editor Dave Everley dave.everley@futurenet.com Staff Writer Rich Hobson rich.hobson@futurenet.com Content Director – Music Scott Rowley Contributors Steve Appleford, Robert Arellano, Oliver Badin, Adam Brennan, Richard Chamberlain, Chris Chantler, Alec Chillingworth, Joe Daly, Hywel Davies, Remfry Dedman, Alex Deller, Jerry Ewing, Paris Fawcett, Spencer Grady, Stephen Hill, Emma Johnston, Tyler Damara Kelly, Hannah May Kilroy, Dom Lawson, Elliot Leaver, Dannii Leivers, Dave Ling, Clay Marshall, Will Marshall, Sophie Maughan, Edwin McFee, Joel McIver, Matt Mills, Mörat, Catherine Morris, Tom O’Boyle, Alastair Riddell, Liz Scarlett, Rosie Esther Solomon, Kevin Stewart-Panko, Paul Travers, James Weaver, Christina Wenig,…

GHOST FRONTMAN TOBIAS Forge might have crafted a rich mythology around his band and their procession of Satanic papal figures, but he can’t predict how the fandom will engage with it. In May, a group of devotees took their passion to the next level by hosting their own tribute event in Derbyshire’s Peak District. In a cave named The Devil’s Arse. Dubbed Masquerade Ball: Ritual In A Cave, the celebration kicked off with a meet and greet, fans keen to pose for pics even with surrogate Ghouls and a pastiche Papa. It also included live music from horrorrockers Ward XVI – who filled their set with Alice Cooper-style theatrics, blood, gore and disembowelment – and Ghost tribute band Popestars. The whole thing was compered by a cosplaying drag king named…

HAMMERS ARE IMPORTANT in metal. That much should be obvious from the name of this magazine. For Amon Amarth, the hammer is a symbol of utmost importance, and no live show would be complete without the sight of frontman Johan Hegg brandishing a hefty replica of Thor’s own weapon of war. This occurs at the start of Twilight Of The Thunder God, the opening and title track of Amon Amarth’s seventh album, released in 2008. These days, Amon Amarth are ubiquitous and beloved in the metal scene, but prior to their global conquest the Swedes spent a solid decade touring relentlessly, honing their sound and building upon their trademark Viking imagery. Twilight… may have been the eventual breakthrough that the band deserved, but the real transitional moment came one album…

“IN THE BEGINNING, we had a problem with legitimacy,” says Skáld founder and producer Christophe Voisin-Boisvinet. It’s a curious position he and his ever-changing entourage have found themselves in: racking up nearly a quarter of a million sales of their first two albums and more than 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, yet almost entirely overlooked by the pagan folk scene to which they ostensibly belong. “We weren’t really taken that seriously as French people playing this music,” Christophe explains. “We’d signed to a subsidiary of Universal, so some people thought we were a bit opportunistic, and we’ve needed some time to prove that we are absolutely sincere.” Whether or not Skáld’s latest album, Huldufólk – recorded in a converted 11th-century troglodyte chapel – convinces the doubters, it’s guaranteed to make…

MOTÖRHEAD PLAY ROCK’N’ROLL. So while they weren’t an obvious choice of band to play a jazz festival – although to be fair neither were The Chemical Brothers, Beastie Boys nor Placebo, playing the same year – none of the band’s numerous live albums were going to find Lemmy anywhere other than in his element. Live At The Montreux Jazz Festival still finds the trio at the height of their powers: from a short but expansive Stay Clean running thrilling, greasy leads all over the Auditorium Stravinski, through to a fuel-injected Over The Top, to the inevitable closers Ace Of Spaces and Overkill no doubt leaving chins unscratched and heads fully banged. In for a penny, this Ultimate Bundle not only features the career-spanning set on double vinyl and CD with…

System Of A Down had released just one radio single, the jazzy post-hardcore oddity Sugar, when they flew to Europe in October 1998 to open for Slayer on tour. Having already supported them in the States, System guitarist Daron Malakian had developed a strategy for getting the thrash giants’ impatient fans to pay attention. “I figured out that the best way of dealing with them was to challenge them a little bit,” he told me for the 2014 book Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History Of Metal. “I’d encouraged them to heckle us, and if they weren’t yelling, ‘SLAYERRRR!’ by the middle of our show, I’d call them a bunch of pussies. I wanted to give them a bit of a hard time before they gave us a hard…

''I am so hungry!” laments Voice Of Baceprot bassist Widi. Leaning on her shoulder, drummer Sitti looks like she has no energy left to comment. Only singer Marsya keeps her cool, taking a few selfies with her phone. It’s the middle of Ramadan, and 30 minutes before Iftar, when the girls will be able to break their fast. Here in Jakarta, Indonesia, it falls at around 6pm. We’re sitting in a tiny coffee shop, inside a quiet suburban housing complex, and Ghost’s Ritual is playing at a low volume from an unseen speaker. The members of Voice Of Baceprot, sitting side-by-side in their black hijab, black t-shirts and black trousers, look like millions of other cheerful women in their early 20s in Jakarta. However, they’re the only ones who have…

NO ONE WOULD have blamed Dave Grohl if he’d called time on the Foo Fighters last year. The sudden, shocking death of drummer Taylor Hawkins – aman Dave called “my best friend” – in March 2022 was the kind of body blow many people would struggle to recover from. The loss of the singer’s mother, Virginia, a few months later only compounded his personal agony. Yet the fact that he’s elected to continue the band shouldn’t really be that unexpected. Foo Fighters themselves were partly Dave Grohl’s attempt to find a light in the darkness of the aftermath of Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain’s death. But unlike the Foos’ shiny, breezy, ultimately optimistic self-titled 1995 debut, their 11th album, But Here We Are, is 48 minutes of raw, bruised intensity. BUT…

TRENT REZNOR IS WORKING ON A TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES SOUNDTRACK Mutant Mayhem will feature music from Trent and longtime collaborator Atticus Ross. Cowabunga, dude! TINA TURNER HAS PASSED AWAY The pioneering rock’n’roll icon was 83. Rock and metal stars, including Geezer Butler and Tobias Forge, paid tribute to her online. SOMEBODY BUILT A MASSIVE IRON MAIDEN TOILET The 6ft x 6ft foot design is based on the Powerslave cover. Poo-werslave? FOO FIGHTERS HAVE A NEW DRUMMER Dave Grohl and co. have recruited Vandals sticksman John Freese. DAVID DRAIMAN HAD A TUMOUR IN HIS ARM REMOVED Thankfully, it was benign. COREY TAYLOR NAMED DOWNLOAD “THE DADDY” OF FESTIVALS And he’s vowed to come back in 2024. Presumably not with Slipknot, although that Vol. 3 20th anniversary is looming… FIVE FINGER…

IN SHORT SOUNDS LIKE: Gnashing, untameable deathcore that dares to bite back FOR FANS OF: Slaughter To Prevail, Brand of Sacrifice, Spite LISTEN TO: Cut Off The Head “WHEN DEATHCORE FIRST started, death metal and hardcore were oil and water,” reflects To The Grave vocalist Dane Evans. “It was ahead of its time, ahead of everyone’s taste. We want to capture that feeling, subvert the expectations.” In keeping with that spirit, the Aussie hard-hitters are twisting deathcore into something far more experimental and vital, and new album Director’s Cuts is a chainsaw-wielding horrorshow of brutal breakdowns and antagonistic vocals. While tracks foam at the mouth, their guttural sound contains a more compassionate message than one might expect from a band of their intensity: they are addressing what they see as…

Bruce Dickinson is excitedly waving a bow and arrow around in the bowels of Prague’s O2 Arena. As he’s doing it, he’s explaining the mechanics of the big, fuck-off machine-gun he’s going to aim at a 10-foot cyborg live onstage in about an hour’s time. “It’s just making sure the band don’t forget to move,” he says nonchalantly, outlining his tactical approach to ensuring he doesn’t blow his bandmates to smithereens later. If he had anything to do with it, the cyborg would be even more OTT than it is. “I originally said, ‘Can we have flames coming out of it?’” he says, grinning. “But they said no!” We’re standing in a corridor deep within this 20,000- capacity venue, where Maiden are about to play the second date on their…

The weatherman has advised we dress for the 90s today – by which he means that temperatures will be nudging a scorching 95˚F (35˚C), and we should all be liberally coated in sunblock and wearing white. Unless, of course, you are one of an estimated 85,000 people attending the highly anticipated Sick New World festival at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds, in which case, black from head to toe is the order of the day. With the Festival Grounds located at the far end of the Vegas strip, there’s a long walk in the heat, a dark swarm of people converging on the site from every direction, and long lines to get in. Still, the view’s impressive, with the famous Circus Circus Hotel & Casino looming large. It was here,…

Somewhere in The Vatican is a butt plug with Lord Of The Lost frontman Chris Harms’s face on it. He knows this because he sent it. “We sell them as ‘paperweights’ because you can’t sell sex toys without a different kind of merch store,” explains Chris. “But we didn’t sell them to the Pope – we sent them. I wanted the guys in The Vatican to – pun intended – open up. We sent them with tracking numbers and insurance. We know they got there, we just don’t know what happened with them.” Lord Of The Lost are very much the kind of band you’d expect to send sex toys to the home of the Catholic Church. The German band’s industrial/goth metal hybrid sound and flamboyant, fetish-adjacent imagery is designed…

EVILE The Unknown NAPALM Resilient thrashers venture into unmapped terrain 2021’S HELL UNLEASHED album saw Huddersfield’s hardy quartet overcome another hurdle in their tempestuous career, with returning lead guitarist Ol Drake replacing his brother Matt on vocal duties. After demonstrating that they could keep pace with their thrash revival peers, with some of their most venomous numbers to date, Evile approach their 20th anniversary with a striking change of pace on the suitably monikered The Unknown. While the snap of Sleepless Eyes, the gang vocals and nefarious march of Out Of Sight and defiance of closer Balance Of Time see them drawing on their wizened experience to craft formidable Bay Area-influenced anthems, those tracks are the exception to the rule on album number six. From the opening title track onwards,…

TICKETS FOR SLEEP Token’s Wembley Arena show sold out in less than 10 minutes, according to the band. The masked metallers, pictured here during their last London date at Hammersmith Apollo in January, will play the iconic venue on Saturday December 16 in support of third album Take Me Back To Eden. “All ten thousand tickets for the Wembley Ritual have been swiftly and feverishly depleted within ten minutes of general release today,” the band wrote on Twitter on June 2. “Your dedication is noted, and appreciated. Come December, we shall gather. Worship.” At the start of the year, Sleep Token had 280,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, but the release of single Chokehold on January 5 kickstarted a wave of interest that has seen that number grow to more than…

ELECTRIC CALLBOY ARE pioneers of ‘dance metal’, meshing EDM and metalcore together to create something that sounds like you put a bunch of metalheads in a bottle, gave them Monster Energy, and shook it all up. They started out in 2010 as ‘Eskimo Callboy’ but rebranded in 2020, replacing original vocalist Sebastian ‘Sushi’ Biesler with Nico Sallach, changing their name, and removing offensive songs from their streaming platforms to be more inclusive. During the pandemic, they became a viral sensation thanks to their insidiously catchy tunes and ludicrous videos (garish workout gear, anyone? Dodgy bowl haircuts?). Hammer sat down with Nico and co-vocalist Kevin Ratajczak to ask them your burning questions – which, surprisingly, didn’t include ‘What the fuck is going on?’. What’s it like touring in Electric Callboy? Andi…

A DECLINING ECONOMY, the proliferation of fake news, the climate change emergency – it’s fair to say this generation has inherited its fair share of challenges, and nowhere is that more apparent than on Congratulations, the second full-length album from Denmark-based hardcore bruisers, Eyes. Opening with Generation L (the ‘L’ stands for ‘Loser’) and barely letting up across 30 minutes and 10 tracks, Congratulations derives its title from the rise of self-aggrandising conspiracy theorists. Frontman Victor Kaas became interested in the subject after watching 2007 documentary Zeitgeist: The Movie. “I always thought it was tragic that people would subscribe to conspiracy theories, but it was also a huge source of entertainment to read these outlandish worldviews,” he says from a studio in Copenhagen. “They used to be on the fringes…

IN SHORT SOUNDS LIKE: Second-wave Norwegian black metal scoring a cyberpunk thriller FOR FANS OF: Emperor, Thorns, Dimmu Borgir LISTEN TO: Aeons SOMETIMES YOU’VE JUST got to call a spade a spade. Ivo Henzi’s new band, Nighted, sound like Emperor watching a very popular Netflix series. “The synthwave, when you watch Stranger Things? It draws you in,” he says. “Just the atmospheric aura.” Ivo’s not an Eddie Munson wannabe, though. Since 2003, the Swiss multiinstrumentalist has manoeuvred through black metal with his solo project, Forest Of Fog. He also spent more than a decade on guitar with folk metallers Eluveitie, before departing alongside two other members in 2016. “I was playing the same music for 12 years,” he says. “It’s gonna get tiring.” The ex-Eluveiteam built a new band, Cellar…

In early 2021, worrying news began to filter out of the Tower Of London. According to centuries-old legend, at least six ravens must be kept at the tower or the kingdom will fall. But the so-called ‘Queen’ raven, a bird named Merlina, had vanished, bringing the total down to seven and setting off alarm bells with those who believe in such myths. Not everyone was unhappy about this potentially ruinous situation. For British metallers The Raven Age, the prospect of the monarchy and its subjects falling into ruin was less a disaster in waiting, more a source of inspiration. “The idea of the ravens leaving the tower is something that’s embedded pretty deep in our heritage, history and mythology as a country,” says The Raven Age guitarist George Harris, sitting…

Something strange has been happening over the past few years. The British metal scene, once a scrappy assemblage of bands perpetually existing in the shadow of their more talked-about contemporaries from across the Atlantic, has transformed into something vital, innovative and genuinely exciting. It’s not like the UK hasn’t produced its share of iconic bands over the years, from Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden to the likes of Carcass, Cradle Of Filth and Bring Me The Horizon. There have been plenty of pivotal scenes, too: NWOBHM, grindcore, the ongoing UK hardcore movement and countless others. But what’s happening now feels different. A generation of British bands with individual voices and distinct identities is emerging and coalescing into something bigger. Individually, these artists have little in common beyond shared…

Justin Broadrick was 15 years old when he first changed the landscape of heavy metal. A social misfit inspired by anarcho-punks Crass and the sonic terrorism of industrial originators Throbbing Gristle, he was conscripted into Napalm Death as guitarist in 1985. He appeared on the first side of their 1987 debut album, Scum, a record that helped lay down the template for grindcore, and has remained a lodestone for adrenaline-fuelled agitators ever since. “Ninety-five per cent of the A-side of Scum was my music,” he says. “I was sitting in my bedroom in a council estate in Birmingham, writing riff after riff after riff. I was a weird machine. If I think back to it, it was always this endless river of sound. I have to stop myself from creating.…

FRIDAY The home for those who worship The Riff, and all the far-flung places it can take you to, a sold-out Desertfest once again finds its community of longhairs, denim warriors and the facially hirsute hitting Camden in search of the next sonic high. Day one’s early-comers find KUROKUMA are a bottomless chasm of repetitive sludgy soundscapes. Riffs reverberate around the Black Heart, often seeming directionless, yet always mesmeric. Bedouin-masked trio WYATT E. take desert rock into the Tatooine wastes at the Powerhaus, drawing you through a drone reverie whose Middle Eastern scales and rolling rhythms culminate in robotic chants that feel like scriptures from alien overlords. At the Black Heart, seething post-BM couples with medieval-tinged violin melodies to devastatingly beautiful effect, as DAWN RAY’D serve up vitally modern subject…