The heavy metal visionaries collectively known as AVATAR — vocalist Johannes Eckerström, guitarists Jonas Jarlsby and Tim Öhrström, bassist Henrik Sandelin, and drummer John Alfredsson — have finally unleashed their latest masterwork Don’t Go in the Forest. Listen and get the album HERE.
Regarding the album, Eckerström has explained, “The secret ingredient is that we still feel like we’re just getting started. Don’t Go In The Forest is an album filled to the brim with stuff we’ve never done before. It’s all songs and concepts we haven’t been close to touch until now. The mind is wild and we have lost ourselves in the darkest woods, filled with memories, and fantasies. Forbidden thoughts that must be spoken.”
Watch the video for title track:
He furthered, “It would have been impossible to make this album at any other time than now. That’s all we ever wanted, and I think you’ll find it’s all you ever wanted too.”
Avatar’s growth and momentum has only accelerated in recent years. There’s the critically acclaimed, 2023-released album Dance Devil Dance, which included their first #1 at Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay, “The Dirt I’m Buried In.” There have been scores of sold-out headline shows across the globe, and an actual fossil named after them. The list goes on and on.
Avatar will spend the foreseeable future (if not forever) on the road. See below for a complete rundown of the band’s planned tour activity for the next two years. Avatar shows no signs of pausing to take a breath in their quest for absolute world domination — much less stopping. Check all tour dates HERE.
The New Flesh is a Polish electronic music duo from Opole. The band is fronted by vocalist Diana Sawicka, with Fabian Filiks (Doctor Visor, Zørormr) on synthesizers. Sawicka writes the lyrics while Filiks is responsible for the music and production of the recordings.
The band’s name refers to a concept from David Cronenberg‘s film “Videodrome” about the blending of the human body with media and technology.
The New Flesh‘s music centers on themes of identity, humanity, and love in a world where technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous and integrated into our lives.
Watch the video to the song “Don’t Make Me Wait“:
LINE-UP:
Diana Sawicka – vocal, lyrics Fabian Filiks – music, production
Active rock powerhouse OUTLIER return with their explosive new single, “Crown,” now available on all major streaming platforms. The track features a guest performance from Joey Varela of VRSTY, adding an intense vocal edge to the band’s signature sound.
Accompanying the release is the official music video, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Tom Flynn — known for his work with Ice Nine Kills, Lamb of God, and All That Remains — delivering a powerful visual that perfectly captures the song’s raw emotion and energy.
Speaking about the new release, Joey Arena shared:
“I would consider ‘Crown’ to be the most melodic song in all of the Outlier arsenal. I went this route because I felt that it was a matter of time that we not only had one but it reflect the emotion behind the lyrics. ‘Crown’ is about not only bearing your cross but also the bearing of others. Any ‘leader’, parent, business owner, coach, etc. knows the heaviness of the position and responsibility of the title. When laying the foundation of Outlier, I had often questioned my ability to do this on my own. I sometimes felt that I was biting off more than I can chew. Looking back on it since day one, it comes with its praise and its hatred but I welcome both.”
“Normally, my music videos never actually portray my intentions behind writing the song, but I found it relatable in this case. AI music is already at our door and it’s completely removed the soul behind what makes writing it special. I’m seeing people share these clips online and it’s telling where we are as a society. As musicians, we have a responsibility and owe it to ourselves to speak out against it for art takes talent and to roll over bell up on this matter is to stand for nothing. I refuse to do just that.”
“Mid process of writing “Crown”, I could not help but think how much better the song would be with my good friend, Joey Varela’s voice over it. There’s a swagger to the verse and it only felt right that he was a part of it. Aside from being a fan of his, it also comes down to vibe. The mutual fans that we share, they know the two Joey’s. Consider us, “The Two Corey’s” (Corey Haim, Corey Feldman) of the 2020’s. The bromance is real haha.”
The single’s powerful production comes courtesy of Ricky Armellino (Ice Nine Kills, Hawk), with co-production by Justin DeBlieck (ex-Motionless in White), mixing by Chris Dawson, and mastering by Mike Kalajian.
The track serves as a preview of the band’s highly anticipated upcoming album, Screamiere, set for release in March 2026.
Honing in on a modern sound while consistently setting themselves apart from the mainstream, Outlier prides themselves in creating exemplary rock and metal music backed by a rapidly growing fanbase. Outlier has earned over 8 million on demand streams across DSP platforms as well as more than 6 million views of user generated content on YouTube alone. In addition to their loyal fan base, the band has caught attention through achieving features in major media outlets such as Revolver, Loudwire, Alternative Press, Decibel and ABC News.
Continually hitting the Billboard charts, Outlier has been able to spread their sound nationwide through constant spins on FM radio and months of regular rotation on SiriusXM Octane– launching them into the forefront of their genre. Outlier has had 6 singles featured on SiriusXM Octane; “Who We Are”, “Buried Me Alive”, “Blame The Dead”, “Living Dead”, “Heartless” and their latest, “Dead Man Running”, winning the hearts of satellite radio listeners across the country and emphasizes the bands ability to stay creative while maintaining an ever-growing fanbase.
Anticipation is building for the release of NORNES’ debut album “Thou Hast Done Nothing”, set to be released on November 28, 2025 via Sleeping Church Records. After unveiling the official album teaser recently, the band now presents their first official single “Oneness”, introducing listeners to their unique blend of atmospheric doom and crushing intensity.
A lyric video accompanies the song and can be viewed here:
Since forming in 2017, NORNES have put the French doom underground on notice with their crushing and melancholic fusion of doom and death metal. From the brooding weight of their 2018 debut EP “Vanity” to the introspective depths of 2020’s “Threads” (Sleeping Church Records), the band has continually evolved while staying true to the sorrowful essence of the genre.
With “Thou Hast Done Nothing“, NORNES take a bold step forward. Recorded at Heldscalla Studio and mastered at Drudenhaus, the album features five sprawling, grief-soaked tracks that delve into existential despair and emotional desolation. It is a slow-burning descent into melancholy, echoing a world teetering on collapse.
Tracklist:
Never Ending Failure
A Rose to The Sword
Our Love of Absurd
Perceptions in Grey
Oneness
“Thou Hast Done Nothing” – a release that resonates with sorrow, power, and unrelenting atmosphere – drops November 28 via Sleeping Church Records.
NORNES is: Rom – guitars/vocals Adrien – guitars/vocals Noé – Drums Ju – bass/vocals
Chicago metal legends Aftermath are celebrating 40 years of musical chaos with the release of a brand-new visualizer/lyric video for their classic track “Eyes of Tomorrow.” The song, which originally appeared as the title track of their groundbreaking debut album, gets a powerful new visual treatment in honor of the band’s four-decade legacy.
Formed on October 31, 1985, Aftermath helped define and push the boundaries of the thrash and crossover scenes with their ferocious speed, technical precision, and thought-provoking lyrics. Now, four decades later, they’re commemorating this milestone by revisiting the song that captured the essence of their early vision—looking forward to the future while reflecting on their past.
The new “Eyes of Tomorrow” visualizer/lyric video was created by Dimitris Patelis, the same visionary artist behind the original Eyes of Tomorrow album artwork, bringing the legacy full circle with stunning visuals that connect the band’s past and present.
Frontman Kyriakos “Charlie” Tsiolis shares, “There are so many crazy stories in the annals of music history, from overnight success to horrible breakups and tremendous comebacks. Our story may rival all of them. Maybe forming on Halloween was a curse HAHA. We were fortunate enough to be at the beginning of crossover thrash and then technical progressive thrash. Unfortunately, we released our debut album in 1994, the lowest point of thrash metal. We formed as a 4 piece, then became a 5 piece and went back to a 4 piece. We had more bass players than Spinal Tap had drummers, we sued Dr. Dre, broke up and reformed 25 years later. It’s actually a miracle to be finishing up our 4th album after these 40 years of chaos. Looking back, we wouldn’t change a thing.”
Currently the band is in the studio putting the finishing touches on their 4th studio album.
The band states, “We are excited to be back in the studio. We can’t wait for everyone to hear this album. It’s heavy, it’s catchy, and in typical Aftermath fashion it sounds totally different from our previous albums.”
The new album is being recorded at Electrowerks Recording, with engineering and mixing by Chuck Macak. Additional details, including the album title, tracklist, and release date, will be announced in the coming months.
Critical praise for the album
“One of those overlooked albums… it’s just brilliant and completely stands out in the crowd.”—Encyclopaedia Metallum. This quote highlights the album’s brilliance and status as an underappreciated gem in the technical thrash genre.
“The longer tunes sound epic and not just long for the sake of being long.”—Sputnikmusic. A review notes the atmospheric, epic feel of longer tracks like “Change of Mood,” praising their purposeful structure and engagement.
“Eyes of Tomorrow has a unique atmosphere and steel balls with just the right amount of almost punk-like aggression mixed with meaningful technicality.”—Sputnikmusic. This review captures the album’s rare blend of raw aggression and intelligent, technical musicianship.
“Technical and progressive, this album showcases some pretty new ideas and influences.”—Encyclopaedia Metallum. This speaks to the album’s innovative sound, which incorporated diverse influences like jazz into a thrash framework.
“It was down to Aftermath to carry technical/progressive thrash into the mid 90’s!”—Worship Metal. This quote emphasizes the band’s critical role in keeping the technical thrash scene alive during a period when many of its contemporaries had faded.
“This is technical/progressive thrash incarnate.”—Worship Metal. The review captures how the album fully embodies the creative spirit of the technical thrash subgenre.
WATCH the latest episode of Rock N’ Roll True Stories featuring our legal battle against Dr. Dre:
Chicago based Aftermath, fronted by Kyriakos “Charlie” Tsiolis, formed in October 1985 when Charlie and his schoolmate Steve Sacco (Guitar) got together. This early incarnation with Adam (Bass) and Ray Schmidt (Drums) released their first demo in 1986 featuring “Sentenced to Death”, “Revenge”, “Shotgun” and “The Aftermath”.
In 1987, they unleashed their second demo entitled Killing the Future featuring the tracks “When Will You Die”, “Going No Place”, “Chaos”, “Meltdown” and “War for Freedom”. The band pursued a mind-blowing speed and technical brand of thrash that soon set them apart from the pack and in the process made them a pioneering crossover thrash band.
The tracks “War for Freedom” & “When Will You Die” were both featured on the British Metal Forces magazine_compilation LP Demolition: Scream Your Brains Out in 1988. Their appearance on the Metal Forces compilation further expanded the band’s international appeal.
By 1988, the band’s musical direction was changing, and Adam’s raw and simple bass lines would soon be replaced with complex and technical bass parts handled at first by John Lovette. Ironically, John never played bass on any Aftermath recording and was not even a bass player. He wanted to join the band so badly, however, that he came to the audition with a friend’s bass he had just started to play. The speed and complex playing he displayed were like nothing the members had ever seen before on bass. He landed the gig that day. When the band decided it was time to add a second guitarist, Lovette told his bandmates of his desire to switch to guitar and for the first time he came clean he was a guitar player pretending to be a bass player all along. His bass playing was surpassed by his guitar skills and the band found its second guitar player, but unfortunately the search for a bass player was forced to resume. Luckily, the search (for the time being, anyway) ended with Danny Vega. His warm and precise playing was the perfect complement to the guitar playing of Lovette and Sacco and worked amazingly well with Schmidt’s powerful drumming. With Lovette handling most of the song writing duties, Aftermath was about to make an unbelievable musical change.
By 1989, that change brought on by Lovette’s writing and the band’s musical tastes and stylings had slowed and matured as evidenced by the release of the underground classic demo Words That Echo Fear. Danny Vega was replaced on bass by Chris Waldron. The band went onto to become a trailblazing progressive/technical thrash band in the years that followed.
In 1990, based on the huge international success of the Words that Echo Fear demo, the metal label RoadRacer Records (a subsidiary of Roadrunner Records) approached the band for a demo deal, which resulted in a live four track demo featuring the songs “Eyes of Tomorrow”, “Afraid Of Time”, “The Act Of Unspoken Wisdom” and “Reflecting Pictures”. Negotiations eventually broke down and Aftermath signed to New York’s Big Chief Records. The label’s collapse halfway through the recording sessions led to a long delay in finishing the record. While the band struggled to pay the studio bill, the album the band started to record in 1990 would not see the light of day for four years. The experience left the band reeling and forced them to issue the album under their own imprint with the help of their manager through Zoid Recordings in 1994. Four long years had passed since the initial recordings for the record Eyes of Tomorrow and the scene had dramatically changed.
The album was subsequently re-released on Thermometer Sound Surface / Zoid and released yet again four years (1998) later on Black Lotus Records in a re-mastered version.
Quite famously, Aftermath, in a notable court case Tsiolis v. Interscope. Records. Inc., 946 F.Supp. 1344, 1349 (N.D.III. 1996) sued high-profile millionaire rapper DR. DRE over the ownership of the Aftermath name. The Rapper tried to buy the name for $50,000, which the band rejected. The band sued him. As part of the settlement, Interscope Records signed the band. To the label’s surprise, the band delivered a record under the moniker Mother God Moviestar. Its eponymous Electro-Metal debut was released in March 1998. The case has been studied in law schools around the US related to the issue of trademark dilution.
Aftermath has continued to receive critical acclaim as one of the major influences in the genre. The band was featured on pages 9 and 10 of Gary Sharpe-Young’s A – Z of Thrash Metal, available on Cherry Red Books. Aftermath is also given an entire feature section in Alexandros Anesiadis’ 2019 book Crossover the Edge: Where Hardcore, Punk, and Metal Collide.
Twenty-five years after its formation, Aftermath’s music made its return in 2011 with the release of the Box Set 25 YEARS OF CHAOS on Area Death Productions and the vinyl When Will You Die on F.O.A.D. The reemergence of one of the most original thrash bands ever continued in 2014 with their decision to reunite for several concerts in 2015.
Coming off their first show in 20 years at Ragnarokkr Metal Apocalypse in their hometown of Chicago, the band ripped the stage apart at Headbanger’s Open Air in Hamburg, Germany that summer. In the Fall of 2015, the reunion continued with the reissue of Eyes of Tomorrow. With an expanded booklet and remastered by Paul Logus (Pantera, Steel Panther), Shadow Kingdom Records released the band’s debut along with bonus material. Following this release was the Killing the Future reissue on Divebomb Records. Once again Paul Logus remastered the tracks from their original source and created a wall of sound in the process. Killing the Future, along with the expanded booklet and bonus tracks from the band’s 1986 first demo completed the celebration of the band’s 30th anniversary.
In 2017, the band started writing the material for their new album. There is Something Wrong is an 11-song opus recorded by Chuck Macak. mastered by Ted Jensen and released through Ingrooves by Zoid Entertainment and The Label Group. A concept record in the truest sense of the word, the album features a mix of old-school crossover thrash and technical/progressive metal and is a commentary on what is wrong with the world today. A calling out of the masses to wake up and know the real enemy. The music is urgent, and the lyrics challenge the listener to seek the truth. Aftermath went back to its early days and revived its crossover thrash stylings on several songs, but those are only samples of what the listeners have in store for them once they put on their headphones and listen to There is Something Wrong in its entirety.
In 2020, Aftermath released a re-imagined version of the John Lennon classic, “Give Peace a Chance”. The song was remixed and remastered for the new album and included on the record because of the message.
“John Lennon’s urgent call for peace in Give Peace a Chance is more important today than ever, and our call for peace with this cover is the perfect message to follow up our previous album. We released a dark concept album with a bleak message and felt it was important to follow that up with something positive. The visuals in the video are as important as the lyrics in a way. We live in a visual world today and this video needed to get out the message of HOPE. Having a young girl be the focus of the video was our way of getting that across. Seeing only positive acts when she puts on Lennon’s famous glasses was the perfect visual metaphor. Lennon’s message is transmitted not only through his lyrics but also through the perspective created by his unique lenses” says the band.
The video was directed by critically acclaimed video director Steven Nathan in New York City.
Aftermath unleashed their highly awaited masterpiece, No Time to Waste, through Zoid Entertainment/TLG/INgrooves on March 17, 2023. This release stands as the triumphant conclusion to a powerful trilogy, representing a notable departure from the somber tones of its predecessor.
In an exclusive statement, Kyriakos “Charlie” Tsiolis shared, “We take immense pride in this album, a culmination of a trilogy that commenced with our debut. Crafted during a challenging era in contemporary history, ‘No Time to Waste’ emerges as an anthem of hope. In contrast to our previous dark conceptual endeavor, we’ve refined this record. The ten tracks within are both weighty and charged, delivering a potent metal experience coupled with a profound message – that collectively, we can overcome, but time is of the essence.”
AFTERMATH is: Kyriakos “Charlie” Tsiolis – Vocals Steve Sacco – Guitar Ray Schmidt – Drums George Lagis – Bass
Meet NIGHT TERROR…the supergroup rising from the newly energized ashes of Seven Witches, and the brainchild of acclaimed guitarist, Jack Frost. Frost, who besides being the face of Seven Witches, is best known for playing & touring with national acts such as Aldo Nova, Savatage, Joey Belladonna, Lizzy Borden and many others, put together this monster all-star band of who’s who in metal today. The line-up consists of vocal legend Jason McMaster of Dangerous Toys & Watchtower, drum icon Karl Wilcox of Diamond Head, TANK & Brothers In Arms, bassist extraordinaire, Dennis Hayes of Iced Earth & Seven Witches, and also esteemed special guest on keys, Eric Ragno of Londen.
Night Terror’s debut album Return Of The Witches will bring you back to the era of the famed Seven Witches, PassageTo The Other Side record, with its screaming Halford-like vocals & riffs of pure, unapologetic metal at its finest. That combined with killer thunderous drums and sick bass runs, will take you on a journey to those past days of the early 80’s, and the rise of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Frost’s mission in putting together this newest project with some of the industry’s most quintessential players, was not to reinvent the wheel…but rather to resurrect it. As he states, “Night Terror is very special to me. Up from the ashes of Seven Witches. I wanted to do more in that power metal vein. And having the opportunity to work with Jason was a magical moment. He’s one of the greatest voices of that classic NWOBHM. And my boys Dennis and Karl just brought it. This EP is true classic Metal. Horns Up!”
Watch “Remedy Is In The Poison” Video:
McMaster continues, “This collection of tunes was an honor to put together with these guys. Jack’s guitar playing is taking my brain, and my guts to places in my subconscious. These places are where I float around and create melodies and topics for lyrics. I feel we are keeping a style of breathing. If you like Dio, Sabbath, UFO, and NWOBHM, this could be satisfaction.” The first single and video “Remedy Is In The Poison” is out on Halloween with the full album dropping in early December. There are a limited number of autographed bundles signed by the entire band, so don’t miss out on owning a piece of this soon to be classic NWOBHM release.
Kimmo Kuusniemi’s ASA unveil the long-overdue release of "Collective Failure" + first music video for title-track! Check it out and stay tuned for more news! Click image to watch the video
Kimmo Kuusniemi’s SARCOFAGUS return with a Historic 2010 Concert Video Premiere on YouTube! Click image to watch the video
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Visionary artist KIMMO KUUSNIEMI's ANCIENT STREAMING ASSEMBLY (ASA) have released “Aurora Nuclearis”, a powerful 12-minute audiovisual experience, dedicated to the Late Keyboardist Esa Kotilainen. - Click image to watch the video
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