Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2025 i Metal Hammer UK

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In 2011, Ozzy Osbourne wrote a not-entirely-serious advice column called Dr Ozzy for UK broadsheet The Sunday Times. In one column, he revealed what he hoped his funeral would look like. “I want to make sure it’s a celebration, not a mopefest,” he wrote. “I’d also like some pranks: maybe the sound of knocking inside the coffin.” Fourteen years later, Metal Hammer is on the way to his hometown of Birmingham with the sad task of witnessing his actual funeral. It’s Wednesday, July 30, 2025 – eight days since Ozzy died at the age of 76, surrounded by his family, and 25 days after his farewell show, the all-star Back To The Beginning concert held at local football stadium Villa Park. Today, Ozzy will make his final trip to the…

Just over a decade ago, Amy Love and Georgia South found themselves in field in the middle of Wales, playing to a flock of sheep. The two friends had formed Nova Twins a year or so before, and had decided to take an impromptu songwriting getaway. Armed with nothing but a battery-powered practice amp and a truckload of dreams, they’d already come up with the beginnings of the song that would become their first single and early musical manifesto, the brash punk anthem Bad Bitches. Even at that early stage, it ignited a fire in them, so the two of them decided to perform it to the only available audience… which happened to consist of some slightly baffled sheep. “Playing to these sheep, we were like, ‘Hello, Glastonbury!’” Georgia recalls,…

It’s midsummer in Brixton, and the sun is beating down mercilessly. The pungent odour of butchers’ shops and fishmongers adds to an oppressive miasma as Hammer trails breathlessly behind four figures clad in black. Wearing leather jackets, denim jeans and boots, they’re dressed for winter rather than a blistering London heatwave. But they are Overthrust, Botswana’s death metal cowboys, and it’ll take more than this to stop them looking cool as fuck. “It’s a bit warm,” vocalist Vulture Thrust – real name Tshomarelo Mosaka – concedes, when we sit down at music venue Club Cheek, following the photoshoot you see on these pages. He admits it’s a point of pride that the band maintain their image, even when the sun is doing its level best to charbroil the planet. It’s…

Blackbraid III SELF-RELEASED First Nation black metallers storm into a higher plane COMING OFF TWO acclaimed records in under two years, Blackbraid III arrives with weighty expectations, and rather than retreat into formula, it throws open the gates. Helmed by multi-instrumentalist Sgah’gahsowáh, Blackbraid stand at the forefront of the USBM scene, infusing the style’s pulverising force with the spirit of Indigenous storytelling. Their latest is a more ambitious record than anything that’s come before, threading in elements of thrash, classic metal, and even swathes of psychedelia to create something more cinematic, immersive and emotionally resonant. Tracks like Wardrums At Dawn On The Day Of My Death and Tears Of The Dawn remain rooted in blastbeats and scorched-earth shrieks, along with soaring leads and dynamic tempo shifts that captivate with a…

Giants & Monsters REIGNING PHOENIX Power metal mainstays make themselves whole HELLOWEEN’S APPROPRIATELY SELF-TITLED 2021 album was a dazzling debut for the seven-piece, doublefrontman ‘Pumpkins United’ line-up, following the 2017 return of vocalist Michael Kiske and guitarist Kai Hansen – an unprecedented fusion of old and new that has held firm ever since. You can hear why in the music. The last LP was a highenergy thrill-ride with a profound emotional pull, sure enough, but it was largely an above-average Andi Deris-era Helloween record with some Kiske vocal add-ons and a magnificent Hansen closer. After four more years of touring, bonding, sharing and creating, Giants & Monsters rectifies its predecessor’s few flaws, with far more fully collaborative songwriting and vocal contributions shared out more equitably. Deris and Kiske’s vocal lines wrap…

Parasites & Butterflies MARSHALL London’s irrepressible rap rock duo fight their way out of the dark CHAOS AND BEAUTY – those are words Amy Love and Georgia South have repeated like a mantra around the release of the third Nova Twins album, Parasites & Butterflies. By their own admission, it’s a record that was born out of darkness, for even amid the crashing lows that inevitably accompany the highs of success, deadlines wait for no one. The album is a response to the intense pressure that follows the whirlwind of early success, with a focus on the impact on the girls’ mental health that sees them wearing their hearts on their sleeves. From the frenetic, shimmering Glory all the way to the darkly sweet Black Roses, the emotional arc of…

ON JULY 22, 2025, Ozzy Osbourne left the planet. The man born John Michael Osbourne would become one of heavy metal’s founding fathers, fronting Black Sabbath after posting the ad ‘Ozzy Zig needs gig – has own PA.’ Even when fired from the band in 1979, he proved capable of a miraculous solo career, and also rejoined in 1997. “I’m a fucking fighter – I’ll fight through the fucking thing,” he told Hammer in 2023, discussing his frustration at being forced off the road by medical issues in 2019. “I want to get back and be able to do a gig, man.” He got his wish on July 5, 2025. Following an all-star line-up of bands, including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Halestorm, Slayer and more, Ozzy reunited with the other…

HAD PLANS GONE as originally intended, no one would have ever heard Idle Heirs’ Life Is Violence. The album was just something that Sean Ingram, vocalist for mid-90s progressive metalcore/mathcore pioneers Coalesce, and producer/musician Josh Barber (Norma Jean) wanted to make after years of talking about working together. And it was just going to be for them. A “personal exercise” in creativity, says Sean. “It was for us,” he says. “It wasn’t written with a thick skin in mind.” Yet, it’s that bare vulnerability that makes Life Is Violence so dynamic, a burst of intensity with such emotional resonance. Idle Heirs’ debut album surges with elements of hardcore, metalcore and post-metal, but it’s never one note. It has peaks and valleys, moments of softness where Sean sings (“I was trying…

Everyone who watched Ozzy Osbourne play his last show, at Villa Park in his hometown of Birmingham on Saturday, July 5, has their own vivid memory of it. “As soon as he hit the stage, everything changed,” says Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor, whose band had opened the Back To The Beginning gig eight hours earlier. “As long as he sat there, it didn’t matter if he didn’t sing a note, because everyone was doing it for him. It was a beautiful thing to be a part of, everyone weeping and hugging. The Mr. Crowley intro came on and everybody was just done.” For Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe, it was just as emotional. “Everybody around me crying, that’s my strongest memory,” says Randy. “I remember [US festival promoter] Danny Wimmer…

"Have you heard of the word ‘baddiecore’?” Confusion clouds Chino Moreno’s face as he processes our question. The Deftones frontman is sitting in his garden in Portland, Oregon, on a sunny Friday morning, and we might as well be asking him if he’s heard about aliens landing. “What is it called? Bodycore?” “Baddiecore. Like, B-A-D-D-I-E-CORE.” “No, I’ve not…” We’ve been talking about how Deftones are bigger now than they’ve ever been, thanks to a popularity boom on TikTok. Since January 2022, the hashtag #deftones has had eight billion views. Videos featuring Change (In The House Of Flies), Mascara, Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away), Sextape and My Own Summer (Shove It) have been viewed a calculatorbusting 12 billion times. This surge of interest from Gen Z has translated to ticket…

The bone-splintering sonic exorcism of Prison Of Flesh, the latest song to be released from Lorna Shore’s upcoming fifth album, I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me, is a scorching amalgam of brutal death metal, orchestral black metal, tribal industrial and jolting, shuddering deathcore – a nightmarish seven-minute-long rollercoaster ride on rotting rails in a carnival of unflinching punishment. Even though the song has nothing to do with serial killings or other graphic atrocities, Lorna Shore have chosen to promote Prison Of Flesh with a horror-themed video about a woman whose mind unravels like yarn, making her more delusional and violent by the blastbeat, inevitably threatening her and her son’s survival. “All I remember saying when I saw the treatment was, ‘OK, just as long as it’s gory’,” says Adam…

WHAT ABOUT OVERTHRUST IN PARTICULAR EXCITED YOU?  Iggor: “I got sent them on Bandcamp and immediately loved it. There’s a certain naivety that I love – they don’t overthink things and It reminds me of the first albums Sepultura put out. It’s music as a necessity rather than a commodity.” HOW DID METAL SPREAD IN BRAZIL? “It was mostly through tape trading – you would get a tape through, trade that with friends, and through that discover this whole new scene. Sometimes you’d get a tape that’d been dubbed 200 times so it sounded like shit, the quality getting lower and lower with each copy until it sounded evil. It was actually disappointing sometimes to hear the original! Someone dubbed the Slayer Haunting The Chapel EP for us, and did…

Private Music REPRISE / WARNER Sacramento’s atmospheric metal standard bearers hit a new critical mass DEFTONES HAVE ALWAYS been a massive deal in the world of metal, but the huge increase in popularity the band have experienced in the last half a decade comes as something of a shock. Be it through the re-emergence of nu metal’s popularity, the rise of similarly ‘sensitive’ artists such as Sleep Token and Bad Omens, or TikTok… er… thirst traps, the Sacramento collective have arguably never been hotter than they are right now. “IT’S THEIR MOST ESSENTIAL ALBUM IN A LONG TIME” Devoted fans of the band consider them to be consistency personified, but in 2025, even those records that fair-weather fans/outsiders perceived as missteps – 2006’s Saturday Night Wrist and 2016’s Gore -…

The Blue Nowhere INSIDEOUT North Carolina’s prog metal voyagers set sail at cruise speed “FUCK OFF, I’M full” was a measured response to Between The Buried And Me’s last album, Colors II. The 78-minute opus was a maximalist ode to music’s malleability, sardining death metal, salsa, bluegrass, metalcore, Crash Bandicoot samples and more inside a prog metal tin. As a thematic sequel to their 2007 breakthrough, Colors, it worked. As a standalone, it excelled. Sure, it was a lot, but each unhinged element pushed, pulled, complemented the next. Sarcastically described by vocalist Tommy Rogers as ‘“heavy yacht rock”, it helped BTBAM squeeze one of their famed concepts through when they thought they were out of steam. Four years later, yacht rock’s nebulous traits are no longer a throwaway joke. They…

Primeval: Obsession // Detachment EARACHE Nu core leaders expand the chaos on album number three SOME OF THE bands involved in the nu core explosion of recent years have been content to throw in a few lurching Korn-esque riffs and leave it at that. Tallah certainly have an unhealthy reverence for Bakersfield’s OG sceneleaders that bleeds through the seven-string shenanigans and vocal histrionics. They remain nu metal revivalists at heart, but over the course of their first two albums they’ve increasingly let their own sense of manic invention shine through – a process that continues here. Following a chanted intro, opener proper What We Know is a standard downtuned lurch. Augmented is more of the same, but with more of the sort of elements that System Of A Down guitarist…

“OH BOY, AM I tired. My brain hasn’t woken up yet, let’s hope I do OK with these,” says an exhausted Jesse Leach. Having just kicked off a US tour with his band Killswitch Engage, Jesse is feeling the strain. This is a legend of metalcore, a man who’s done more than most to fly the flag for hardcore, metal and punk rock since KSE released their classic breakthrough album, Alive Or Just Breathing, in 2002. But just because he’s an icon and he’s suffering from early tour fatigue, it doesn’t mean you’re going to go easy on him… The Holy Diver cover is legendary at this point, but if Killswitch were to record a cover of a hardcore song, what song/band would it be? rudgyrudge, Instagram “Maybe Injustice System…

ANARCHIST ANTHEMS COME in many forms. Whether you’re fired up by the rap-metal wrath of Rage Against The Machine, Chumbawamba’s eccentric daze of anarcho-punk, or the loutish cries of the Sex Pistols, the ethos remains the same – a snarling resentment of the establishment, and a longing for change. In 2005, Swedish melodeath unit Arch Enemy would unleash their own revolutionary call to arms, Nemesis. While rumblings of political fury can be traced all the way back to the band’s formation in 1995, the turn of the millennium would see Arch Enemy firmly anointing themselves as outspoken (arch) enemies of the state. The shift would come with the arrival of self-proclaimed green, liberal anarchist Angela Gossow, whose ‘fuck the system’ attitude bled into every guttural wail on 2001’s Wages Of…

SLUNG SHOULDN’T EXIST. What began as a solo songwriting venture by Brighton-based bassist/producer Vlad Matveikov – and a Rolodex of collaborators – accidentally unleashed one of the UK’s most emotionally resonant, genre-fluid new bands. Vocalist Katie Oldham was raw after the collapse of her previous doom-pop group Sit Down, and still stinging from a missed chance to join the live band of Slow Club’s Self-Esteem in her 20s, feeling her future was uncertain. Encouraged by Vlad and aided by vocal sessions with Will Gardner (ex-Black Peaks), she stepped into the project unaware of how far things would go. “I think Vlad is the core of everything,” she reflects. “We didn’t know it was going to become Slung, but we all wanted a taste of whatever this was.” From the outset,…

MORBID ANGEL VOLUME 2 – DELUXE VINYL BOX SET EARACHE £175 EARACHE’S SECOND EPIC Morbid Angel box set promises to be a formula fatal to your bank account, and one that will turn your overdraft into an abomination of desolation. Jokes aside, this whopping six-LP box set from the Floridian death metal legends is tasty. It covers singer/bassist Steve Tucker’s initial run with the band, which lasted from 1998’s classic Formulas Fatal To The Flesh and ended with 2003’s Heretic, while also lobbing in the band’s outlier demo LP, their Juvenilia live set from 1989’s Grindcrusher tour and, for the first time on vinyl, the Love Of Lava bonus tracks from the OG Formulas… release. Three separate colour variations are available, and the first 500 copies from the 1,000-edition pressing include…

“There won’t ever be another like him. Geezer, Bill and myself have lost our brother.” Tony Iommi, via Instagram “We had some great fun. 4 kids from Astonwho’d have thought, eh?” Geezer Butler, via X “Where will I find you now? In the memories, our unspoken embraces, our missed phone calls, no, you’re forever in my heart.” Bill Ward, via X “He taught us how to play in the big leagues while at the same time being warm, welcoming, engaging, and all around brilliant.” Metallica, via Instagram “Ozzy, you will never leave us – your music is eternal. God blesses you now more than ever after you blessed us all through your magnificent life.” Judas Priest, via Instagram “God bless you, Ozzy Osbourne.”  Tom Morello “To go out with what’s…

One of the most unexpected peace treaties of the 21st century was signed in 2016. On one side of the table was the current line-up of Helloween – co-founding guitarist Michael Weikath and bassist Markus Grosskopf, plus second guitarist Sascha Gerstner, drummer Daniel Löble and longtime singer Andi Deris. On the other side of the table were former Helloween guitarist Kai Hansen and singer Michael Kiske. The latter duo had been part of the band that recorded 1987’s epic Keeper Of The Seven Keys: Part I and its equally magnificent 1988 sequel, Keeper Of The Seven Keys: Part II, two bona fide power metal landmarks that briefly threatened to turn these pumpkin-fixated Germans into the new Iron Maiden. Even a few years earlier this situation would have been unthinkable. Acrimony…

I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me CENTURY MEDIA Deathcore scene-stealers continue their own, tumultuous route to the top ARGUABLY THE BIGGEST deathcore act in the world right now, Lorna Shore have transcended their scene’s core fanbase and divisive reputation. There was always something special about the New Jersey aggressors, even releases such as 2017’s Flesh Coffin showcasing their symphonic scope and unapologetic technicality. But it was the full-time addition of frontman Will Ramos in 2021, with his ear-splitting roars, squeals and screams upfront, that truly set them on the fast-track to stardom. As it stands, Lorna Shore seem to be on the road to arena-sized success. After their first song with Will, To The Hellfire, went viral in 2021 – followed up by acclaimed album Pain Remains the following…

Kill All Idols METAL BLADE Black thrash diehards let the evil speak for itself DESASTER WERE ALWAYS one of the nastiest and most unrelenting bands to follow in the Teutonic footsteps of Kreator, Destruction and Sodom. Formed on the banks of the Rhine in the late 80s, they defied the trends of the following decade with brutally blackened albums like A Touch Of Medieval Darkness and Hellfire’s Dominion, before becoming even heavier in the 21st century. In recent times, Desaster have appeared hellbent on being the most destructive band in thrash. 2016’s The Oath Of An Iron Ritual and 2021’s Churches Without Saints were both as heavy as it gets, with a big-budget, maximalist sound that skilfully mirrored the war-torn, blasphemous chaos of the band’s imagery and lyrics. Four years on,…

Life On The Moon DEATHWISH Cult hardcore punks return from the wilds and ring the changes IT’S BEEN 12 years since cult Iowan punks Modern Life is War released a fulllength album. Those long-time fans waiting expectantly for another slice of classic MLIW might want to temper any expectations they have before pressing play on this, their fifth record. The band have been relatively experimental in the past, but they’ve never strayed as far from the much-loved, careering hardcore punk formula of their classic 2005 album Witness as they do here. A collection of songs inspired by feelings of loss, grief and emotionally struggling with one’s sense of purpose, there is a hell of a lot to unpack on Life On The Moon, summed up by frontman Jeffrey Eaton’s pained…

VILLA PARK, BIRMINGHAM The Prince Of Darkness and the godfathers of metal host an unforgettable farewell HOW OFTEN DO you get to celebrate the birth of an entire genre? Today is the mother of all parties, as fans and bands gather in Sabbath’s hometown of Aston for Back To The Beginning: an all-day tribute to Ozzy Osbourne and the band that invented heavy metal, as they take their final bow. Hollywood star, metalhead and event compere Jason Momoa knows what’s up: “Today we are gonna make this the most epic day in the history of heavy metal,” he tells the crowd at Villa Park football stadium. “So let’s tear this motherfucker down!” Across eight hours, there are performances from two star-studded supergroups and 12 legendary bands – Mastodon, Rival Sons,…