After being forced to leave its home in Serbia amid political, security and financial threats over its support for students, EXIT is returning to its iconic Petrovaradin Fortress, with a special edition planned for 2027 ahead of its full-scale comeback in 2028.
Following the historic election victory of Serbia’s student-led movement for freedom and justice, which ended more than a decade of political dominance by Aleksandar Vučić’s ruling party, EXIT Festival has officially announced its return to Serbia.
Founded in 2000 as a student movement fighting for democracy and peace, EXIT grew into one of Europe’s leading music festivals and a global symbol of unity and positive social impact.
Twenty-six years later, history came full circle when EXIT publicly supported a new generation of Serbian students protesting for freedom, justice and accountability. Following intense political, security and financial pressures, the festival was unable to hold its traditional edition at Petrovaradin Fortress in 2026.
Throughout this period, EXIT remained one of the most vocal supporters of the student movement, publicly expressing its support through its own social media platforms and a range of other initiatives, despite facing severe threats and pressure, including the detention of the festival founder Dušan Kovačević’s brother this May, on the eve of one of the largest student protests in Serbia.
“Last year, when a new student movement emerged to fight for freedom and justice, we simply had to stand with them and uphold the very values EXIT was built on, even if it meant sacrificing everything we had spent our lives building. Now, thanks to the courage and perseverance of Serbia’s students, freedom has returned to our country. And after taking EXIT’s spirit around the world, we are finally coming home!” said Dušan Kovačević, Founder and CEO of EXIT Festival.
Pictured: EXIT Founder and CEO, Dušan Kovačević
In an emotional Instagram post, the festival shared the news with its fans, confirming that the original plan had been a full-scale return in 2028, given the 18 months of preparation required, but that the response from fans changed that. “We always said that EXIT would return when freedom returned to our country, and thanks to the courage, determination, and incredible perseverance of Serbian students, that moment has finally arrived,” the post read. “You simply can’t wait that long, and neither can we! So, while EXIT’s grand comeback is scheduled for 2028, we’re already coming together at the Fortress next July to celebrate FREEDOM, UNITY, and LOVE.”
The announcement also fulfils a symbolic promise made this July, when EXIT and Novi Sad students gathered at Petrovaradin Fortress during the days the festival would traditionally have taken place. EXIT raised a banner reading “STUDENTS ARE WINNING”, while the students hung another beside it declaring “NEXT YEAR AT THE FORTRESS”.
Although everyone believed freedom would eventually return, nobody knew whether it would happen soon enough to make those words a reality. Today, they finally have their answer. During its year away from Serbia, EXIT expanded internationally, delivering eight events across six countries, including Montenegro and Croatia to Malta and Spain, culminating in the historic Starlight Festival at the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, which brought together over 40,000 visitors from 114 countries in October 2026.
After taking its spirit around the world, EXIT is now preparing for its most emotional homecoming yet.
Further details about the special 2027 edition, including the concept, lineup, dates and ticket sales, will be announced soon byEXIT
German hard rock veterans Jaded Heart share today the new single “We Come Alive”, along with a lyric video, the second extract of their upcoming new studio album “Toxic”, out on January 15, 2027, via Frontiers Music Srl.
The band said: “We Come Alive” is a straight-ahead melodic hardrock track, driven by powerful guitars and a catchy sing-along chorus. The lyrics were written by Johan Fahlberg, while Peter Östros once again teamed up with Magnus Henriksson from Eclipse to write the music. Compared to our first single, “One By One”, “We Come Alive” has a more aggressive groove and a little more shred in the guitar solo, adding extra edge and attitude without losing the melodic core. Just like “One By One”, we feel that “We Come Alive” perfectly represents what our upcoming album Toxic is all about: melodic hard rock. Nothing more, nothing less!”
After more than four years, Jaded Heart are back with a brand-new full-length album, a powerful new chapter. “Toxic” delivers everything fans have come to expect from Jaded Heart, while keeping the songwriting fresh and focused: direct, powerful hard rock songs, massive choruses, memorable melodies and a rock-solid production that gives every track the impact it deserves.
The band stated: “With “Toxic”, we have brought together everything that we feel represents Jaded Heart: strong melodies, heavy guitar riffs, powerful vocals and the unmistakable energy of classic hard rock. From the first song to the last, the album is driven by memorable hooks and a strong balance between melody and heaviness. The album features the songs “One By One”, “We Come Alive” and “Hell Driver”, each showing a different side of “Toxic” while sharing the same strong melodic foundation that runs throughout the album.”
“The title track, “Toxic”, adds another powerful dimension to the album, combining hard-hitting guitars with the melodic approach that has always been an important part of our sound. We also wanted to look back at our own history with a brand-new acoustic version of “Remembering”, originally released on our 2016 album “Guilty By Design”. This new arrangement gives the song a completely different atmosphere and allows us to show a more intimate side of Jaded Heart”, they continued.
“Toxic” is our first full-length album in more than four years, and we are extremely proud of what we have created. It is an album packed with strong songs, powerful performances, heavy guitars and the unmistakable melodies that have always been at the heart of Jaded Heart. We are very excited to finally share “Toxic” with you. Jaded Heart is back!”
From the opening notes to the final song, the album showcases a band that knows exactly how to write great hard rock without overcomplicating things. Big guitars, strong vocals, infectious hooks and an energetic performance come together to create a record that feels immediate, authentic and built for both the stage and the speakers.
With Toxic, Jaded Heart prove that experience and passion are a powerful combination. This is the sound of a great band returning to the spotlight with some of their strongest material yet.
“Toxic” Tracklist:
1. We Come Alive 2. One By One 3. Helldriver 4. Toxic 5. Black Angel 6. Dogs Of War 7. Shadows Awaken 8. Remembering (Acoustic) 9. Face The Day 10. Broken Glass Sunrise
Line Up: Johan Fahlberg – Vocals Michael “Mülli” Müller – Bass, Backing Vocals Peter Östros – Guitars, Backing Vocals Bodo Stricker – Drums
Sweden’s sleaze/metal stalwarts Confess are thrilled to reveal a new single, “The Curse”, along with an official music video, arriving just in time for Halloween and out now via Frontiers Music Srl.
Embracing a darker atmosphere while retaining the explosive energy that has become their trademark, “The Curse” delivers the band’s signature blend of heavy riffs, infectious melodies, and raw sleaze-metal attitude.
Vocalist John Elliot commented: “With Halloween just around the corner, we figured it was the perfect time to unleash something a little darker. ‘The Curse’ has that haunting atmosphere mixed with the raw energy and attitude that defines Confess.”
The new single follows the release of Confess’ fourth studio album, “Metalmorphosis”, which marked a bold evolution in their sound, showcasing some of their most ambitious and accomplished songwriting to date. Combining powerful riffs, arena-ready choruses, and a new level of dynamics, the album further cemented the band’s reputation as one of the exciting forces in modern sleaze metal.
Fronted by John Elliot, whose commanding vocals have also been showcased with the legendary Crashdiet, Confess feature Samuel Samael on drums, Ludwig Nordlander and Asser Hakala on guitars, and Lucky on bass.
Since their formation in Stockholm, Confess have built a reputation for their uncompromising approach to hard rock and sleaze metal, combining memorable hooks, powerful performances, and a rebellious rock ‘n’ roll spirit.
With “The Curse”, the band continue to build on the momentum of “Metalmorphosis”, delivering another dose of hard-hitting, melodic rock with attitude, this time with a haunting twist perfectly suited to the Halloween season.
Line Up: John Elliot – Vocals Samuel Samael – Drums Ludwig Nordlander – Guitars Asser Hakala – Guitars Lucky – Bass
Band photo by Kalle Salo — Artcover painted by S3nsku
The wait is over! “Taste of Blood” is officially here, bringing a more horror-inspired side of Demonessa out just in time for Halloween. The release features two previously unreleased songs written during the same period as their debut album, “Wild ‘N’ Loud”. As an added treat, the release also includes a shortened version of “Till Death Do Us Part”, the opening track of “Wild ‘N’ Loud”. With the minute-long acoustic intro removed, you can get straight to the heavy metal mayhem.
The music video for “Taste of Blood” was filmed entirely in Tampere, with the vampire storyline shot in the forest near Kaupinoja beach and the band’s performance scenes filmed in Rusko, close to the band’s rehearsal place. The idea was to create a classic low-budget, ’80s-inspired horror movie wrapped around a heavy metal performance, with the vampire’s story unfolding between shots of the band. Some extra props, including the idea of a suitably scary microphone stand, were discussed along the way, but in the end the band stuck to more traditional stage outfits.
The performance footage also follows the visual progression of the story. At the beginning, when the story takes place in the dead of the night, the band also appears in dull, grey tones, but as the vampire’s night comes to an end and the sun begins to rise, the performance scenes take on warmer, orange lighting to match. The song’s story was interesting enough to inspire a film adaptation of its own, making it a natural choice for the video. A lot of the full story was left out so that the band can get more screentime, but maybe in the future the full story video will be available too.
As with everything Demonessa does, the production was largely a DIY effort, with the band handling practically everything themselves. The two actors, Fiona Fyhr and Sakari Mattila, came from different parts of Finland to take part in the shoot, while Kalle Salo filmed the band’s performance as well as performed as the photographer at the beginning of the film.
Filming did, however, lead to a few unexpected public appearances. While Sakari laid on the ground covered in homemade fake blood, with John standing over him holding a pair of scissors, passing walkers and joggers repeatedly stopped to check whether someone needed emergency assistance.
More on Demonessa: Demonessa is a heavy metal band from Tampere, Finland, carving its path with pure power and attitude. Formed in 2019, the band combines the explosive force of 80’s heavy metal with the spectacle of glam metal creating an experience that must be witnessed live.
Line-up: S3nsku – Vocals John Creweholm – Guitars Hugo M. Raze – Guitars Peet von Rowanskerry – Bass Jerry Iron – Drums
Today, the two-time Fonogram winner Thy Catafalque is releasing the third single single from its quietly expansive thirteenth album, XIII: Sárga erdő. “Cseremisz” is a folk song that never existed, built from traditional Hungarian instruments, a choir and familiar faces.
“In English, ‘Cseremisz means Cheremis”, explains Thy Catafalque visionary Tamás Kátai. “They are a Finno-Ugric people living along the river Volga in Russia. They are an ethnic minority in Mari El Republic and because of the Finno-Urgic roots they are relatives to Hungarian people. We have learned about them in primary school, and they have always been a very distant and mystical people to me.
“This song is a fictitious folk song from that region that could be connected to recent historical events as well”, Kátai continues. “We have some traditional instruments like citera and koboz here with accordion and a male choir together with Bálint Bokodi on vocals.”
On XIII: Sárga erdő (Yellow Forest), Kátai wanders through an old, half-remembered time from a quietly expansive direction. Thy Catafalque’s new album features more than 30 collaborators, including a 20-person choir and, for the first time in the project’s history, a live drummer. However, the folk and classical elements that flooded 2024’s XII: A gyönyörű álmok ezután jönnek are handled here with a lighter touch. Just as a forest doesn’t explain its colors, the album turns inside you, until you look up to discover that you’re somewhere new.
“Cseremisz” moves across the steppe at night. A steppe-gull soars over the plain. The narrator is the wolf in the reeds and the fox in the meadow. A heart beats “like hooves on the steppe”, while a black ship drifts down the Volga with its soldiers asleep aboard. Only the pounding of hooves is awake in the dark, a headlong flight that somehow feels beautiful. The song closes on a line it repeats and does not soften: “A halál mögöttem száll, utolér” (“Death flies behind me, and overtakes”).
“Cseremisz” features the Male Choir of Tiszaföldvár, Bálint Bokodi on vocals, Anikó Barna on citera and koboz, Dmitry Karev on accordion, Dario Cei on flute and Árpád Szenti on drums.
Yellow forests don’t stay yellow for long. That’s the image Tamás Kátai keeps returning to when he talks about THY CATAFALQUE‘s thirteenth album, Sárga erdő—a title that translates plainly and then unfolds into something less settled the longer you sit with it. There’s no single story running through the record’s twelve tracks, Kátai says, only a feeling: wandering through a forest built from old time, half-remembered and already turning colour. It’s the quietest premise he’s worked from in years, and perhaps even the most honest one yet.
Thy Catafalque began in Makó, in southeastern Hungary, in 1998, when Kátai and a bandmate named János Juhász put together a black metal project with no intention of ever playing it live. The name itself—catafalque, the platform that holds a coffin during a funeral rite—told you where the mood was headed before a single note was even heard. A year later, Sublunary Tragedies arrived through the Budapest label KaOtic Productions, tremolo-picked and grim in the way most things were grim in that corner of European metal at the time, though even then the seams were showing: this was never going to stay inside the genre’s lines.
It didn’t. Microcosmos followed in 2001, restless in ways the debut hadn’t dared to be, and when KaOtic folded, Kátai self-released 2004’s Tűnő Idő Tárlat rather than wait for another label to catch up to him. These were the years the project figured out what it actually was—not black metal with detours, but something closer to a single songwriter’s imagination refusing to be filed under anything.
Signing to the avant-garde label Epidemie Records in 2009 gave that imagination its first real audience. Róka Hasa Rádió became Thy Catafalque’s breakout, and it introduced a voice that would keep returning across the decades since: Attila Bakos, whose clean vocals still surface on Kátai’s records fifteen-plus years later, most recently on XII. But the real hinge point came in 2011, with Rengeteg—the first album Kátai wrote and recorded entirely alone, and his first for Season of Mist. From here on, Thy Catafalque wasn’t a band in any conventional sense. It was Kátai’s vision, executed with the help of whoever he needed to bring it to life, a model that would eventually mean twenty, thirty, sometimes three-dozen collaborators on a single record.
Sgùrr, Meta and Geometria carried that model through the back half of the 2010s, each one pushing the genre-hopping further—prog, electronica, jazz, Hungarian folk, all folded into records that critics increasingly struggled to categorize and increasingly stopped trying to. By the time Naiv arrived in 2020, Thy Catafalque had become something like Hungary’s most singular musical export, a reputation the country’s own industry made official the following year: Vadak, released in 2021, won the Fonogram Award—the Hungarian equivalent of a Grammy—for Best Hard Rock/Metal Album. That same year, something else changed. Thy Catafalque, for the first time in over two decades of existing purely as a studio project, played live—a single performance at the Fekete Zaj festival with twenty-six musicians onstage, later released as the concert album Mezolit. The project that had never intended to leave the studio had just proven it could fill a stage.
It’s kept proving that formula ever since. Alföld, in 2023, brought Thy Catafalque a second Fonogram win and a return to the heavier, more grounded sound of the project’s earliest years. XII: A gyönyörű álmok ezután jönnek followed in 2024, Kátai’s first album made with an outside producer—Gábor Vári, a longtime live collaborator who stepped behind the desk and helped shape a record New Noise called a five-star “celebration of the powers of music.” Thy Catafalque spent 2025 making its debut at Hellfest, Rockstadt Extreme and Alcatraz, and playing its first-ever shows in Latin America. A second European headline tour, opening at Budapest’s Dürer Kert in March 2026, has carried that momentum straight into the new album cycle.
Sárga erdő, out this autumn via Season of Mist, was recorded across various locations and at Miracle Sound Szeged with Gábor Vári again handling engineering, mixing and mastering. It marks another first for the project: real drums, played rather than programmed, for the first time in Thy Catafalque’s history. Thirty-four musicians and vocalists appear across the record, along with a twenty-voice male choir, but the folk and classical textures that flooded XII—sitar, kamancheh, zither, strings—are handled with a lighter touch here, chosen with more precision for the moments that call for them. There’s no unifying story across the twelve tracks, only that same felt sense of wandering through old, half-remembered time. A forest doesn’t explain its colours—it just keeps turning them, until you look up and you’re standing somewhere new.
Line-up: Tamás Kátai — Guitar, Bass, Keyboards & Vocals
Production Credits: Recorded in various locations and Miracle Sound Szeged, Szeged, Hungary. Produced by Tamás Kátai; Sound Engineer, Mixing & Mastering by Gábor Vári (Miracle Sound Szeged).
Sweet Suicide is the new single from 200 STAB WOUNDS. The latest bruiser comes by way of the band’s punishing Lowest Form full-length, set for release on February 19th, 2027 through Metal Blade Records.
Rooted in the same old-school brutality that has defined them from the beginning, Lowest Form delivers leaner arrangements, stronger dynamics and a broader sense of atmosphere without sacrificing an ounce of intensity. The riffs hit harder because they’re given room to breathe, the pacing shifts naturally between explosive violence and simmering tension and every song carries its own distinct identity while serving the momentum of the record as a whole. The result is an album that feels unmistakably rooted in classic death metal while showcasing a band whose songwriting has reached a new level of focus and sophistication.
Sweet Suicide delivers one of the album’s most devastating moments. The band comments, “This song is about anger, despair, confusion, and conquering your own demons. Whether it’s your own, or trying to help someone get through theirs. This song is probably one of the heaviest on the record and discusses what is sometimes an even heavier topic. Enjoy at your own risk!“
200 STAB WOUNDS‘ Sweet Suicide video was produced by NOWHERE2RUN, the production company of Code Orange‘s Jami Morgan and Eric Balderose.
Stream 200 STAB WOUNDS‘ previously released single, Pangs Of Conscience, HERE
Since their arrival, 200 STAB WOUNDS has established themselves as one of the most exciting forces in modern death metal through relentless touring, a powerful live presence, and an unwavering dedication to crafting songs as memorable as they are punishing. With Lowest Form, Steve Buhl (vocals, guitars), Raymond Macdonald (guitars), Todd Thompson (bass), and Owen Pooley (drums) build upon that foundation with their strongest collection of songs yet, balancing relentless aggression with more dynamic pacing, memorable arrangements and a heightened sense of tension that rewards repeat listens.
Lowest Form was produced, mixed, and mastered by Arthur Rizk (Power Trip, Cavalera), features artwork by James Bousema (Municipal Waste, Frozen Soul), and finds the band sharpening their signature blend of brutal death metal, massive riffs, and unforgettable hooks through more confident, dynamic songwriting.
THE ROCK ALCHEMIST – Italian Rock Band from Turin with a strong sonic identity that blends modern rock with progressive, hard, alternative, and pop elements!
Kimmo Kuusniemi’s SARCOFAGUS return with a Historic 2010 Concert Video Premiere on YouTube! Click image to watch the video
