Show Notes
Tracks from Warning, Holding Absence, Health and more head up the week's music, and we announce our first massive band special for 2026.
Releases: Bilmuri - Kinda Hard Lord of the Lost - Opvs Noir Vol. 3 Truckfighters - Masterflow As Everything Unfolds - DID YOU ASK TO BE SET FREE? Tigercub - Nets to Catch the Wave Love Rarely - Pain Travels Bodysnatcher - Hell is Here, Hell is Home Metal Church - Dead to Rights Spirit Adrift - Infinite Illumination The Melvins with Napalm Death - Savage Imperial Death March Immolation - Descent Archspire - Too Fast to Die Vomitory - Death Throes Uada - Interwoven Blush Puppy - Here You Dream Melechesh - Sentinels of Shamash Cissné - Awake Children Under the Moon JK Flesh / Monrella - Shouting the Odds
More from That's Not Metal
We've got a reviews bag full of mavericks and outsiders making some big crazy choices and marching to their own drum with their records this month as we look at albums from Haywire, unpeople, New World Man, Wolves in the Throne Room, Noctule, Godflesh, Smoulder, & Bombstrap.
There's big surprise releases from Deafheaven and Power Trip, major Nightwish and Judas Priest line-up shifts, a tremendous festival announcement from Fortress, live shows from Joyce Manor, Blaze Bayley, and Khemmis, but no one wants to talk about any of it because the world's up in arms about James Hetfield.
Nails tear through the UK, Trivium unveil their Eastern darkness-inspired new album, and Aerosmith plot their own Back to the Beginning style party.
We've arrived at our annual Damnation Festival preview Album Club pack as we pull out Cult of Luna's 21st century post-metal benchmark Somewhere Along the Highway, Walls of Jericho's 00s metallic hardcore smackdown The American Dream, the 2010s sludgy powerviolence of Weekend Nachos' Worthless (featuring "Pat Patterson" and "Troe Johman"), and The Berzerker's Aussie gabber death metal Dissimulate.
It's real highs and lows in the news for rock music this week, with incredibly exciting reveals from Disfear and Repugnant, the 2027 line-up announcements from Slam Dunk and ArcTanGent, but also the news of Enter Shikari's incoming hiatus and the mountain-moving loss of Venom's Cronos, the forefather of extreme metal without whom our world is unthinkable.