Megadeth's career has been marked by plenty of monumental achievements, and high among those many triumphs is 1992's Countdown to Extinction. The band's fifth full-length album, it stands as the band's topmost charting record — it debuted on the Billboard 200 at No. 2 — as well as their best-selling effort, certified double Platinum for more than two million units moved. It also spawned one of their best-known songs, and certainly their biggest single — the menacing but also incredibly melodic, "Symphony of Destruction."

Released on July 14th, 1992, Megadeth's Countdown to Extinction album came at a pivotal moment in the band's career. The thrash pioneers, led by former Metallica man Dave Mustaine, debuted in 1985 with the ferociously raw Killing is My Business… And Business is Good! By their fourth album, 1990's landmark Rust in Peace, they were arguably the most combustible and chops-crazed speed-metal unit around, seemingly without peer in their fiery mix of technical skill and tight-as-nails songwriting.

Rust in Peace, which had featured the debut of Megadeth's classic Nineties lineup — Mustaine, stalwart bassist David Ellefson, virtuosic guitarist Marty Friedman and drummer Nick Menza — became their first platinum-selling record, and the band started packing arenas across the U.S. and Europe on the 1990-1991 Clash of the Titans tour, co-headlined by Slayer. After Metallica hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts with their self-titled 1991 effort, Mustaine sensed that the time was ripe for Megadeth to make a similar bid for mainstream glory.

The result was Countdown to Extinction, which filtered Megadeth's trademark thrash aggression and insane instrumental acrobatics through a sharper-focused and more radio-friendly lens. The riffs were more immediate, the choruses catchier and the arrangements more direct and hard-hitting. The songs themselves were also more varied, from the straightforward hard rock of "Symphony of Destruction" and "Skin o' My Teeth," to the lush melodicism of "Foreclosure of a Dream" and the title track, to the jagged thrash-'n'-roll of "Sweating Bullets" and "Ashes in Your Mouth." Lyrically, Mustaine and Co. dug into plenty of hot-topic subject matter: the Gulf War ("Architecture of Aggression"), economic upheaval ("Foreclosure of a Dream," which featured a sound bite of President George Bush's famous "Read my lips" quip), political chicanery ("Symphony of Destruction) and the evils of canned animal hunts ("Countdown to Extinction"), among others.

Mustaine has called Countdown "a turning point" for Megadeth, and indeed it was. "With Countdown to Extinction, Megadeth went from being a flavor of the month to a bona fide supergroup," the singer wrote in his 2010 autobiography, Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir. "The album sold half a million copies very quickly, then a million, and it just … kept … going."

Today, its legacy is not only cemented, but also continues to grow. In 2012, Megadeth released a deluxe reissue of the effort to mark its 20th anniversary, and a corresponding tour saw them playing the entire album in concert, marking the first live performances of tracks like "Architecture of Aggression," "Psychotron" and "Captive Honour." What's more, the sound of Countdown to Extinction can be heard reverberating in the music of myriad modern-day metal titans like Avenged Sevenfold (compare their 2013 song "Heretic" to "Symphony of Destruction," for starters).

"I knew we had a record that could alter the landscape of heavy metal," Mustaine wrote in his book, and in small but noticeable ways, with Countdown, Megadeth did just that. Here are 10 things you might not know about the band's classic fifth LP.

1. Countdown to Extinction was the first album the notoriously addiction-prone Dave Mustaine made "stone sober"
Rust in Peace is often thought to be the record where Megadeth kicked their myriad addictions. But in reality, Dave Mustaine didn't truly embrace clean living until Countdown to Extinction, as he explained to Guitar School in 1993. "When we recorded Killing is My Business... And Business is Good!," he said, "I was doing pot, coke, and heroin. For Peace Sells... But Who's Buying?, it was speed, coke, and heroin. So Far, So Good... So What? was me on heroin and freebase. I was addicted to cigarettes for Rust in Peace. But our new album, Countdown to Extinction, is me pure. I was stone sober."

2. The album was recorded smack in the middle of the 1992 L.A. riots
Megadeth began tracking Countdown to Extinction at The Enterprise studios in Burbank, California, on January 6th, 1992. They were still there four months later when the Los Angeles Riots, set off in the wake of the acquittal of four LAPD officers accused in the beating of Rodney King, shook the city. The riots, which lasted six days and resulted in 63 deaths and more than 2,000 injuries, not only altered the environment around the studio — Mustaine reported seeing tanks and national guardsmen lining the streets — it also affected the band's actual working process. "A curfew was put in place, which meant suddenly I was working banker's hours, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.," the singer recounted in Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir. "Not so good for making a record, a process that typically involves nearly round-the-clock devotion."

3. "Sweating Bullets" was written about a crazy person … but that crazy person was not Dave Mustaine
Given its classic opening couplet, "Hello me/It's me again," as well as the fact that the song is matched with an iconic video featuring a plethora of Dave Mustaines, "Sweating Bullets" is commonly thought to be about Mustaine himself. And in interviews at the time of its release, the singer even said as much. But as Mustaine more recently revealed, "Sweating Bullets" was actually written about a "crazy friend" of his then girlfriend (and later wife), Pam. "They would go to parties all the time," he told Rolling Stone earlier this year. "Her friend would freak out and get in the car and drive off and then I'd get a call from my wife and she'd say, 'Eh, she left me again,' and I'd have to get in the car and come get her. And you think it'd be the other way around having a rock-star boyfriend, at the time, that he'd be calling you to come and get him. So I wrote 'Sweating Bullets' about her friend."

4. The song also inspired a particularly potent cocktail
Pantera's Dimebag Darrell was no stranger to enjoying a good drink or three (nor was he a stranger to Megadeth, whom he almost joined a few years before Countdown). And for many years, Dime's beverage of choice was his own personal concoction, the Black Tooth Grin, the name of which came from a lyric in "Sweating Bullets." Recalled Mustaine to Billboard, "There's a line … which goes, 'Some day you, too, will know my pain/And smile its black tooth grin.' And [Pantera] ended up making a drink called 'Black Tooth Grin,' which was evidently a glass full of Jack Daniels and a splash of Coke, instead of vice versa." Dime's love for the reverse Jack and Coke was so deep that he eventually had the name permanently inked on his body. Said Mustaine, "I remember when we were in Amsterdam and he came up to me in the hallway going, 'Dave! Dave! Look, man! Look at my new tattoo — it's a Black Tooth Grin!'"

5. Countdown to Extinction was kept out of the top spot on the Billboard 200 by Miley Cyrus' dad
Just a year after Metallica topped the charts with the Black Album, Mustaine was gunning for his own No. 1 record with Countdown. And he would have gotten it … had it not for Billy Ray Cyrus, whose "Achy Breaky Heart" was causing a line-dancing sensation across America, and whose debut album, Some Gave All, was firmly ensconced in the top slot. Instead, Megadeth album sales had to settle for No. 2. "When I saw the results," Mustaine told the A.V. Club in 2011, "I was mad. I wasn't sitting back and going, 'Yep, it's good to be two.' I wanted that No. 1 spot, and we were fighting for it, and the bummer was the guy we were fighting with. It was Billy Ray Cyrus, 'Achy Breaky Heart.' And all those fat fuckin' housewives in the Midwest, and this guy with this funny haircut, and that song, it just resonated with the American people and people bought into it, and there was no shaking it."

6. Megadeth didn't want Countdown to be merely great — they wanted it to be perfect
Rust in Peace presented Megadeth as a band that played thrash metal with unmatched precision. But Mustaine's fixation on technical and sonic exactitude was pushed to even more extreme ends on Countdown to Extinction, resulting in some unusual recording techniques. "When we had the guitars patched into strobe tuners, we'd bend up until where the tuner would stop dead if we were doing any solos with bends in them," Mustaine told ARTISTdirect.com in 2012. "It was crazy stuff like that." Added Marty Friedman, writing on MartyFriedman.com: "[Countdown] was an unbelievably difficult album to make. [Producer] Max Norman, Dave Mustaine and myself are all uncompromising perfectionists and when you get the three of us together in the studio doing guitars, it turns into a 'let's make it even more perfect' competition. At the end of the day, the record was damn near perfect, but making it was tedious and painstaking." 

7. The album's success caused Marty Friedman to take a flying leap.
Mustaine and Ellefson collaborated on the lyrics to the sinewy hard rocker "High Speed Dirt," which took its title from a phrase for what happens when a sky diver's parachute fails to deploy, resulting in the unfortunate jumper hitting the ground at high velocity and potentially causing death. A skydiving enthusiast (he demonstrated his skills on a memorable 1992 episode of MTV's Headbangers Ball), Mustaine had remarked in an interview that year that parachuting had "replaced a lot of the addictive feelings I used to have." He added that Marty Friedman remained the only member of the band who had yet to complete a jump, but that the guitarist pledged that "when the album goes platinum, he'll do it." As Friedman later wrote on his website, "The damn thing went double platinum!!" And so he fulfilled his promise. "When I hit the ground, I remember saying that I wanted to do it again," the guitarist reported of the experience, "but after about a day or so I realized that once was enough."

8. The Ellefson family farm inspired the words to "Foreclosure of a Dream"
David Ellefson was the primary writer behind the lyrics to "Foreclosure of a Dream," which addressed the impact of Reagan-era agricultural policies on family farms. The bassist, whose parents had had their farm in Minnesota foreclosed upon, told Songfacts.com, "It was speaking specifically about the hardships that the farmers were having, that started when I left home in 1983 when I went to California. So it was a three-year time when we saw Farm Aid and really the implosion of the farming community that was largely based on Ronald Reagan's policies." The song's title, meanwhile, had come years earlier. "[It] was a title that we saw back in 1986 when Dave [Mustaine] and I went back to my mom and dad's farm in Minnesota," Ellefson explained. "And we saw on TV, there was a title that said 'Foreclosure of a Dream' or 'Foreclosure of the Dream' — something like that." He continued, "Fast-forward to 1991, we're writing what would become Countdown to Extinction, and Dave says, 'Let's use that title.'"

9. Megadeth's 1993 tour was briefly interrupted when Dave Mustaine required treatment at a rehabilitation facility
Mustaine may have been sober when Megadeth began recording Countdown, but as the band got deeper into their tour in support of the album, he was, as he recounted in his autobiography, "well on my way to becoming a mess." In time, Mustaine began drinking again, and soon cultivated a daily Valium habit. A Japanese tour in the spring of 1993 was cancelled when Mustaine entered a rehab facility in Arizona, where he underwent seven weeks of intensive impatient treatment and counseling. After the band resumed the Countdown tour, Megadeth's management instituted a strict policy that required the band members to pledge to abstain from all drugs and alcohol on the road, as well as sign a confidentiality clause forbidding any discussion of events that occurred on tour or in the studio. It was, Mustaine explained in his autobiography, "extreme measures to deal with an extreme problem."

10. Countdown to Extinction gave Megadeth their biggest hit … and also led to an identity crisis.
Countdown to Extinction's mainstream success, combined with changing trends in hard rock and heavy metal in the Nineties, led to several years where Megadeth found themselves somewhat adrift. "It basically started after Countdown to Extinction where the logo changed, our look changed," Mustaine told Bonfire Shows in 2016. "We were supposed to start growing facial hair, [and were told], 'Take the points off your 'M' letter on your logo, get rid of your mascot and stuff.'"

Mustaine continued, "You've gotta remember, Countdown came in at No. 2. So we thought, Wow! This feels great. Now we're starting to get some direction. This is how you'll be great. You listen to people who have some credibility. And we did, but it didn't work. So it took a little while for us to sort stuff out and for me to figure out where it is that we went off-roading, so to speak. And I think we're there right now. We're happy. Everybody's jamming."

As Arch Enemy prepare to drop their new album, Will to Power, on September 8th via Century Media Records, the melodic death metal group have released their rendition of "The Leader (of the Fuckin' Assholes)." Stream their version of this venomous 62-second track — which was originally recorded by Swedish hardcore punk rockers the Shitlickers in 1982 — below.

Will to Power was co-produced by guitarist Michael Amott and drummer Daniel Erlandsson and mixed and mastered by Jens Bogren (Opeth, At the Gates, Dimmu Borgir).

The new album is also the first to feature guitarist Jeff Loomis (ex-Nevermore). The axman joined Arch Enemy in 2014 after the band parted ways with Nick Cordle. Amott said of Loomis, "Jeff is one of the best guitar players in the metal world in my opinion, as well as being a long time friend. I look forward to tearing it up on stages around the world together."

By the time guitarist Domenic Romeo joined long-running hardcore band Integrity in 2015, it wasn't a surprise that founding vocalist / mainman Dwid Hellion would choose the A389 Recordings honcho to help with their next album. But that definitely was in neither's mind when they first became acquainted. Romeo and Hellion's first interactions occurred back in the mid '90s via some emerging, futuristic "mail without a stamp" technology. Romeo was so stoked about Integrity that he tracked down Hellion's e-mail, and began pestering the musician with questions.

"Dom would write to me and ask me questions and I wasn't sure how to take it," Hellion recalls. "I wasn't so interested in talking to some kid who wanted to discuss my records, but eventually he wore me down."

Romeo's persistence ultimately paid off, and their talks lead to a lasting friendship, collaboration across A389 and their collective recorded output, and a partnership that would last decades, culminating in Dom's addition to Integrity.

So how exactly did Domenic Romeo transition from Integrity fanboy to becoming an integral part of the legendary band? Below, Dom details his musical growth and discusses his contributions to Integrity's new LP Howling, for the Nightmare Shall Consume, which is out this Friday, July 14, via Relapse Records. 

REVOLVER How did you meet Dwid Hellion?
DOMENIC ROMEO When I was in my late teens, I used to ride my bike across town to my buddy's house because he had the internet. Victory Records had this Real Audio player that would let you preview the band's songs, and I remember not really being impressed with any of the bands except like Bloodlet and a few others. But when I heard Integrity, I was floored — It was like nothing I had ever heard before. The song "Systems Overload" was in there and it had these huge riffs and the singer sounded like he swallowed glass. It was the hardest thing I had ever heard.

So me and my friends would save our money from the week, and head to the city on the weekend and blow our paychecks on buying records. I remember seeing Systems Overload at that time, getting it back home and being blown away. We just thought "there are solos on everything" — sort of like if your house is infested with roaches, you just keep finding solos. [Laughs] It was awesome, some of the coolest shit I had ever heard.

It totally changed my life. At the time, I was in this band called Day of Mourning and it totally shaped what I wanted to do with that band. I was a kid that was into horror movies and metal, not gym shorts and youth crew, so Integrity just spoke to me. I was too weird for the metal scene and too weird for the hardcore scene. Integrity was the voice. Even now, that's Integrity's key demographic.

Anyway, [1996's] Humanity Is the Devil came out and I looked through the liner notes and there was an email address in there. I remember sending an email, which I didn't even know how to use at the time, just knew it was like a "letter without mailing it." I would bike to my friend's house, 30 minute ride each way, just to email him everyday. I was just punishing him, question after question, punishing him with questions about the band. I was from Canada, so I didn't know about the band pre-Systems Overload material because those records weren't as widely distributed. So when I did find out about the earlier stuff and traded videos and tapes with others, I just absolutely punished him. He was a complete dick to me for a little while [Laughs] but I think he realized that I wasn't just trying to punish him, but that I was really excited. We hit it off eventually and he sang on a Day of Mourning record. Then from there, our friendship went on. He would go on to do a lot of stuff for A389, recorded and design-related.

It's funny because the way that you speak about Integrity is similar to the way that Phish fans or Grateful Dead fans are. Trading all of the videos and tapes, just incessant on owning everything.
Absolutely. It's a really special thing. It's been a part of my life for decades now whether that is doing their records or doing shows or just plain punishing Dwid.

From what I understand, you did a brief stint with Integrity in the early '00s?
So they came through on the To Die For tour and one of their guitar players quit, so I offered to play. I learned all the songs and bought a plane ticket to move to Cleveland. Unfortunately, my father was really ill at the time and it was getting really bad, so I had to leave the band. It broke my heart, but family first.

Eventually Pulling Teeth came around, and it was my main outlet. He was a big help with that and with A389 Records in general, with visuals, merch, layouts and guest vocals … he pops up on several LPs in some shape or form.

In 2007 you also played with him, correct? At an A389 Anniversary Bash.
Yes, we called it the Blackest Curse. Basically, it was my birthday and I asked Dwid to play the bash with a backing band. He said sure, but we couldn't call it Integrity. It was basically when Dwid was between different eras of the band. Pulling Teeth ended up being the backing band, which is kind of funny because it's a pretty similar lineup years later.

We've talked everyday for decades, so when the opening came again, I offered to play. Eventually I told him that if he wanted to do this, I'd love to write a record. By the time it happened, I hadn't been playing guitar in years because I had kids. I got together with Joshy [Brettell] from Ilsa, after playing a short stint with them live, and eventually write riffs to send to Dwid. He liked them and we ended up with 20+ songs that eventually was pruned down to make the album.

So let's step back a little, because you also ran A389 Recordings, which is responsible for several Integrity releases. How did it feel going from being that nerd on the bike to being the bossman of sorts?
It was such a huge accomplishment for me. Such a milestone. Before that A389 dabbled in this and that, and I'm proud of all my releases, but that was so important to me. Such an iconic record, A389-23, the Walpurgisnacht EP. From there it was just easy to do — we're pretty efficient when we work together.

During your time with A389, what record do you think you are most proud of releasing? Something that you didn't have any say in as a musician.
That's a tough one. So many great ones. Well I think there are two ways to look at it. I'm so proud to have released bands like Full of Hell, Young and In the Way, Nothing, Xibalba, Noisem, Iron Reagan, so many great young bands. These bands have gone on to do some incredible things, but it all started with A389. That said, I'm also really proud to do a record by Eyehategod. What a true "what the fuck" moment.

What is your favorite Integrity record? Why?
Seasons in the Size of Days, hands down. It's just perfect. It has a colder tone. The production is better. Integrity always had that perfect fusion of metal and hardcore, but Seasons leans more toward metal. This really nailed in a darkness, with the artwork and photography and everything. It's a mood. When I put that record on, I feel like I'm in some dark basement, in a castle or something.

So going from fan to collaborator with Dwid, when the time came did you have any trepidation about joining the band?
I was a little nervous because it's big shoes to fill, plus I hadn't been playing in a few years. I figured that the worst-case scenario was I could try and write some songs and nothing would come of it. No big deal. The ideas just came though, and things started producing themselves in layers and fast. The entire record felt like a stream of consciousness, almost like it wrote itself. It's pretty weird.

We all have our records that we go back to constantly. Do you feel like you go back to Integrity less now that you are part of the band?
You would think that, it's just a weird thing … it's still my favorite band. All of the Integrity albums are still on my iPod. It's fun for me, still. Integrity is such a massive and varying body of work that has had so many people contributing bits to it, that it's just like a quilt. I'm honored to add my little part to the quilt. The story just keeps going. It's awesome.

Going into the new Integrity LP, it had been six years-plus since you had actually recorded an LP, Funerary by Pulling Teeth. In that time you had kids, were hyper-focused on the label, and went through a lot of changes. Did you have your guitar by your side that entire time?
No. And I just really didn't have time to play, so I sort of stopped playing for a while. But my second kid really liked to hear me play, so that kind of got me back into playing. Then once I decided that I would play with Integrity in 2015, I sort of focused and started to get back into it.

Old Integrity influence is all over this new LP, yet there are other influences that rear their head — everything from Iron Maiden to Randy Uchida to Pulling Teeth, obviously. What was in rotation in the months leading up to this record?
When it comes to how I approached this record, I didn't want to rewrite the past, but I also wanted to honor it. The thing with Relapse is we knew we were going to reach another audience, so I wanted them to know the band's history while moving forward at the same time.

As far as what I was listening to in the time leading up to the record … honestly, I tried not to listen to anything. I didn't want to pollute it. I listened to a lot of weird Armando Sciascia and Alessandro Alessandroni, as well as a lot of jazz. I needed music that was going to clear my head out and leave it a blank slate, nothing that would latch on. Sort of like a purge. I got in the zone from that.

It's funny you mention Iron Maiden, because that was the first concert I ever went to. They are one of my all-time favorites. Integrity is my favorite though, since I first heard them. I think that some of the guitar parts on Seasons and some of Humanity, I'm more in sync with that on Howling.

I will disagree with you on the fact that ambient music is a purge. I do think that if there are a few things that ambient music is very good for ­— slow-burn pacing and dynamics. Lots of crescendos and drama.
Absolutely. It's cinematic, and you really have to invest the time to reap the reward. I dabble in every genre of music, as far as being a listener. There is something of merit to everything. For a while when I was doing the A389 distro, I would have all these noise records and would have a hard time describing them. Then one weekend I got really into noise music and realized the rewards of those records are the fact that the more you listen, the different layers of things you hear. That's pretty much what we did with the Integrity record too in that repeat listening reaps rewards.

Did you have any other goals for the record in approach or aesthetic?
I think one goal that we had came from Dwid's and my love for Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, particularly how when you listen to Led Zeppelin IV, there isn't a single other song on that record that sounds anywhere near "Black Dog." Every song sounded different, but it still sounded like Zeppelin on every song. That was the angle we kind of decided on, every song should be different but every song should sound like Integrity. I just wanted to try different things and still keep it in the Integrity world.

So once you went back into writing again, do you think that writing riffs was easier for you because of that time away?
Yeah. I think that time caused them to subconsciously build up in my head. Every band I've ever been in, I've thought of a riff while walking down the street and have recorded it into a tape recorder or my phone. So I feel like I ignored that part of my brain for years and then once I tapped back in, it all kind of started spewing out again.

The funny thing is my entire career I've always said to myself, "God, I hope this riff doesn't sound too much like Integrity." Now I don't have to worry about that.

In early 2014, James Kurdziel put the first single from U.K. duo Royal Blood into rotation on Buffalo, New York, rock station The Edge, where he serves as program director. That track, "Out of the Black," was instantly reactive. "Immediately the phone calls come in — 'What was that?'" Kurdziel remembers. "What was interesting was: a lot of times when we get those curiosity calls, it's people saying, 'What was that song you played that kind of sounded like Kings of Leon or Smashing Pumpkins?' You didn't get a lot of that with Royal Blood. This was: 'What was that? I don't know what it sounds like, I just know I like it.'"

So it's been for Royal Blood — an English twosome featuring Mike Kerr on bass and vocals and Ben Thatcher on drums — who will touch down stateside this fall in support of their second LP, How Did We Get So Dark?, and play major American venues as the opener for Queens of the Stone Age.

When the duo released their debut album in 2014, they incited the kind of mainstream fervor that has rarely flared for new rock bands in the last decade. The pair quickly racked up populist milestones — Royal Blood went No. 1 in the U.K., and spawned three top five entries on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Songs chart in the U.S. — as well as praise from some of rock's biggest names, new and old: Foo Fighters took them on tour, while Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page described their output as "music of tremendous quality." 

This was a remarkable turn of events for Kerr and Thatcher, who have known each other since the two were teens in South England and have been gigging in a series of going-nowhere-loudly bands for longer than that. Thatcher almost abandoned band life completely — "You'd travel up to Glasgow to play to three people, and they were the bar staff," he lamented in 2015 — but agreed to record with Kerr again after the bassist returned from a sojourn in Australia.

The two write incisive songs, occasionally swiping from the heavy-bore ebb and flow of 1970s blues rock but mostly conjuring a crystalline, brisk, no-frills smack primed for filling arenas with bodies in motion. They love lurching shifts that allow them to move suddenly from chugging and sludgy to vroom-ing and needle-nosed.

Kerr's bass, to everyone's delight, also serves up a guitar sound, pulling double duty as bludgeoning rhythm instrument and a source of squalling leads. "If you get him to play guitar, he just sounds like Jimi Hendrix; if you play it on bass, it sounds like Royal Blood," explains Jolyon Thomas, who co-produced the duo's new album. Few overdubs are added in the studio: Kerr mostly plays songs all the way through on a three-quarter sized bass with two guitar amps, a bass amp and a selection of pedals. "You get a lot more energy out of a smaller thing," Thomas notes, referring to Kerr's choice of instrument.

Add to that Thatcher's drumming: busy, hammering, authoritative. "It isn't all about the bass; there are big beats on there," Thomas says. "Big fills and big drum moments: you know it's coming; you anticipate it; everyone locks in together."

Though listeners took to Royal Blood's music in droves — the duo's first album was the fastest-selling rock debut in the U.K. since Noel Gallagher came out with his High Flying Birds project — Kerr remains modest when assessing his group's impact. The relative scarcity of mainstream rock acts, he reasons, "was working in our favor." "We came along at the right time, certainly in the U.K., as something new and exciting," he continues. "That has happened at different points in the past and will happen at different points in the future."

The band was catapulted into the whirlwind that boosts buzzy acts, touring furiously for two and a half years behind just ten tracks. "They're songs that we love, but we debuted a new one at Reading Festival in 2015 ["Hook, Line and Sinker"] and we were beyond happy to be playing something new," says Kerr. "We weren't ever expecting things to happen so quickly and so fast," he adds.

This set up Royal Blood, like many groups before it, for a second-album letdown. The routine that created the original batch of ear-perking songs had been destroyed by the churn of the next-big-thing machine. And total life upheaval was compounded by the pressure of people like Jimmy Page predicting "they're going to take rock into a new realm."

Aware of this potential pitfall, the duo moved cautiously when they started making How Did We Get So Dark?, trying sessions in England, Nashville and Los Angeles before hitting the studio in Brussels with approximately 50 song ideas. "It probably took a bit longer than we thought or were planning it to take," says Kerr. "But I think it was all the better for it. We needed a bit of a time out."

They recruited Thomas — who has credits on records by M83 and Daughter, and was assisting U2 with new music in 2015 — to help them make small alterations to their sound on How Did We Get So Dark? "We wanted to progress," Kerr says, but not end up making "a kind of weird reggae record." On multiple songs, he serves as his own backing chorus for the first time, stacking harmonies that add a lighthearted call-and-response element to the jarring riffs.

Originally, Royal Blood brought in backup singers with a background in soul and gospel to handle the harmonies, but according to Kerr, "it wasn't quite right."

"We thought about other singers and other textures," acknowledges Thomas, "but [Royal Blood's] just two guys, and as soon you move it away from that, it loses its character. It's like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — there's a dynamic there, and they play off each other. If you took Jagger away, Richards would be really rough; if you took Richards away, Jagger would be really annoying. It's the same with them."

The other adjustments Royal Blood make to their sound on How Did We Get So Dark? are more subtle. Occasionally the pair augments their ascetic drum and bass setup with a keyboard — a Fender Rhodes bass, according to Thomas, in keeping with the duo's bass-heavy sound. Two collaborators also helped out with songwriting: John Barrett from Bass Drum of Death is credited on two songs, and Patrik Berger, better known for his high-flying forays in the pop songwriting world (Robyn's "Dancing on My Own," Charli XCX's "Boom Clap"), added to album closer "Sleep."

In sum, these changes all add a bright patina to Royal Blood's whomping, cinderblock-dense core. The contrast between sheen and tooth-shaking sound is made more extreme by Kerr's morose vocals, which often dwell on imploding relationships — including his own, which fell apart following the success of Royal Blood — and their aftermath. The records opens "on a sinking ship with a heavy heart." "How did I become a lookalike of someone you used to love?" Kerr wonders. Little has changed on album closer "Sleep," which finds the singer in a jealous frenzy: "I just can't help myself/ Thinking you're with someone else/ Sick to the bone/ I don't wanna sleep." Kerr is not one for parsing lyrics, though he allows that "Sleep" appears to have struck a nerve: "From the minimal feedback I've seen online, it seems to have resonated with a few people."

Royal Blood have managed to achieve an increasingly rare balance, making heavy rock that is palatable to the mainstream. "There's a lack of riff-based music at modern day alternative radio," explains Ross Mahoney, Program Director for Las Vegas' X107.5 "You either go to the left and play a lot of Foster the People or pop stuff, or you go to the right and play more of the Breaking Benjamin or Three Days Grace stuff. [Royal Blood] walk that line." This puts them in a small group of bands — Mahoney also points to Highly Suspect and Deftones — that bring some weight to today's Alternative Rock airwaves. "It sounds so good cutting through," he adds.

Royal Blood's single "Lights Out" reached 1.4 million listeners through radio last week, according to Nielsen Soundscan. Once again, Kurdziel is seeing that the duo's single is causing The Edge's listeners to break their daily routine, call into the station and beg for more information on the band. "Almost the same thing happened [as it did when they released their first album]: you put the song on, and you get the calls, 'What was that?'" Kurdziel says. "You tell people it's the new Royal Blood. They go, 'Oh! Cool!'"

This year, Danny Wimmer Presents, the Los Angeles-based festival production and promotion company behind Rock on the Range, Monster Energy Aftershock Festival and other major rock events, launched their new video series "What Drives You?" As its title suggests, the franchise compiles interviews with noteworthy musicians about their sources of inspiration and motivation, presented alongside live footage from recent DWP-presented shows. Following March's inaugural installment featuring Korn's Jonathan Davis, DWP is back with another short video, this time starring Slipknot/Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor. Check it out below.

"What drives me?" Taylor ponders in the clip's opening seconds, answering the question with a query of his own: "What fucking doesn't drive me?" He then goes on to list some of his biggest motivators: his love for music, his struggles with personal demons, his duty to fuel the crowd ("the mob," to borrow Taylor's phrasing), and an insatiable desire to make art. "It's that need in me to create," he explains. "It's that need in me to explain. It's that need in me to reach out, react, empathize and have people reciprocate that feeling: to understand it, to relate, so you don't feel as alone." Taylor's interview is interspersed with scenes of his performance with Stone Sour at Las Vegas' T-Mobile Arena earlier this month (July 1).

Yesterday, Taylor announced the second-annual Ozzfest Meets Knotfest: a weekend-long merger of Ozzy Osbourne and Slipknot's respective festivals set to take place November 4-5, in San Bernadino, CA. The Iowa legends (who curated Knotfest, per usual) are not scheduled to perform; Instead, Taylor will hit the stage with Stone Sour, who released their sixth album Hydrograd last month. Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Prophets of Rage, Testament, Children of Bodom are just a few of the 40 bands slated to play the tag-team weekender.

Mastodon dropped by 'Conan' for an awesome performance of their single, "Show Yourself." Check out the video below.

The Atlanta-based outfit's 'Conan' appearance follows their European tour behind their latest album, Emperor of Sand. Mastodon also recently confirmed another run of North American dates with Eagles of Death Metal and Russian Circles for the fall, as well as a September benefit concert in Chicago, to support suicide prevention initiatives and mental health education. After that, they'll head to the U.K. for even more shows. Check here for a full list of dates.

In an interview with Revolver earlier this year, Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor discussed "Show Yourself" at length, revealing that the song almost didn't make Emperor of Sand's final track listing. "I kind of was not wanting to even put 'Show Yourself' in there at first," he explained. "I was not really into it. I liked it, but I thought it was too catchy and too easy–but then when I saw the scope of everything I realized there was a lot of density on the record. Every song had six or eight working parts, so 'Show Yourself' is like a nice breather from the rest of it."

It's well-known amongst Ministry fans that the band's 1992 breakthrough album Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs, which came out on July 14th, 1992, was created in a whirlwind of drug-fueled turbulence, outrageous debauchery and multiple brushes with death.

At the time, it seemed highly (with an emphasis on high) unlikely that frontman Al Jourgensen would still be alive by the end of the album tour, which included a legendary slot on Lollapalooza 1992 that also featured Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine, Ice Cube and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Defying the odds, Jourgensen and his bandmates — guitarists Mike Scaccia and Louis Svitek, bassist Paul Barker, drummer Bill Rieflin — not only lived through the tour, but Barker and Svitek lasted until 2003's Animositisomina before quitting the band due to irreconcilable differences.

But no matter how dysfunctional the relationship eventually got between Jourgensen and Barker, the two managed to set aside enough of their differences over a two year period between 1991 and 1992 to create and record their breakthrough fifth record Psalm 69. While the album is most commonly called Psalm 69, the full title was Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs. The latter part of the name came from a line from Aleister Crowley and was a reference to the "69" sex position (succeed was a pun for "suck seed"). And the only actual text that appeared on the album artwork was  ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ, which is Greek for "Head 69." 

The album became Ministry's most popular release, spawning the singles "Jesus Built My Hotrod," "N.W.O." and "Just One Fix" and going platinum in December 1995. Ironically, the band's label Sire/Warner Bros. were initially convinced the album was a failure and struggled with Ministry during the entire creation of the record, even though they reluctantly agreed to double the initial $750,000 advance for the release.

When I was working with Jourgensen to compile his memoir — Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen — the band's frontman documented, in unflinching detail, the chaos and decadence that went down during the creation of Psalm 69 (as well as the dozens of other episodes of conflict, mayhem and creativity that have occurred over the rest of the band's career).

Here, we present seven of the most outrageous incidents of the Psalm era: 

Psalm 1: Drugs, Drugs, Drugs
By the time Ministry were done touring for their 1989 album The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, Jourgensen, his ex-wife Patty and guitarist Mike Scaccia were all nursing voracious drug habits. "I was shooting up, smoking crack and drinking Bushmills laced with acid," Jourgensen says. "And it was a cycle that I'd repeat 10 times a day, at least."

The addictions cost the band about $1,000 a day, which they happily paid for with their $750,000 advance from Sire/ Warner Bros. for the follow-up to The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste. At the time, Jourgensen was fed up with the protocol of the music industry and felt he had fallen into a creative rut. 

"What I was doing wasn't art anymore," he says. "It wasn't fun. It was procedure. Since I wasn't enjoying what I used to love I decided to rebel harder than ever and push the limits to their utmost extremes. Mikey and I were shooting speedballs, blending smack and coke in the same syringe so you don't nod off and you don't get wired. And then we'd sit around and record walls of white noise for hours on end."

Psalm 2: Al Jourgensen and Gibby Haynes' Build a "Hotrod"
One day when the Butthole Surfers were in Chicago — where Ministry were working on the record — Jourgensen invited frontman Gibby Haynes to come to Wax Trax Studios to collaborate.

"Gibby came in absolutely shitfaced," Jourgensen says. "He couldn't even walk. We set him up with a stool, gave him a microphone and a fifth of Jack and played this thrashy, redneck rock track we were fucking around with. Gibby babbled this incoherent nonsense, knocked over the whiskey and fell off the stool. We propped him back up again and tried again. 'Bing, bang, dingy, dong, wah, wah, ling, a bong!' He slurred shit like that for a while then — crash! — back on the floor. We went on like that for take after take and got nothing but gibberish with a few discernible words, like 'baby,' 'gun,' 'trailer park,' 'around' and 'why, why, why!' Finally, Gibby passed out and it was up to me to turn all that babbling into a track.

"It was like pulling a diamond ring out of a septic tank," Jourgensen adds. "I edited the song on my two-track at home and I spliced so much tape to make his gobbledy-gook sound like words. Even in my fucked up state, I had the rock-steady hands to conduct delicate brain surgery. I cut tape all night long and three weeks later it started sounding pretty good. I added these samples about drag racing, put in these crazy backwards effects, racecar sounds, a thrash beat [guitarist] Mikey [Scaccia's] riff. Mikey added these wild blues solos, then I added the nonsense spoken word intro to go along with Gibby's moronic lyrics."

When Ministry's record label started getting anxious and pressuring Jourgensen about what he and his bandmates were doing with their $750,000 advance, he delivered his collaboration with Haynes — now christened "Jesus Built My Hotrod" — because that's all he had.

"They hated me to the point of viciousness," Jourgensen says. "They had given me all this money and this was all I had to show for it. They became hell-bent on my destruction. I got this phone call: 'We gave you $750,000 and you send this nonsense back to us. What are we supposed to do with this?' They hated it. I was like, 'Well, either double down or not, man. Cut us loose now if you want. I don't care.' So they took the bait and doubled down, which was cool because we actually got the record company to pay us $1.5 million to make this fucking record!"

Psalm 3: Run-in with Rollins
When Lollapalooza came to Chicago in 1991 on the first year of the festival, Jourgensen went to check out his former roadie Trent Reznor's band. The Rollins Band were opening the main stage that year and when Jourgensen went backstage to congratulate Reznor he bumped into muscle-bound vocalist and media celebrity Henry Rollins, whose band was sharing a bus with Nine Inch Nails. 

"Rollins looks at me and says, 'Get out of here, you piece of shit. I hate junkies,' " Jourgensen recalls. "I know Henry Rollins is supposed to be this he-man who lifts weights, takes off his shirt and shows his muscles offstage, but I didn't know if the guy could fight or not, and frankly, I didn't care," Ministry's frontman explains. Determined to defend himself regardless of the cost he sprung into action. "I didn't even think about what I was doing. I just took a giant swing at him a caught him with a right hook to the jaw," Jourgensen says. "His eyes widened with surprise and he went down and then a bunch of guys split us up. He didn't even get a shot in and he never came after me or bothered me again. 

Psalm 4: The Junkies Versus the Book Club
While Jourgensen, his wife, Scaccia and possibly other members of Ministry's entourage were battling crippling drug habits, bassist Paul Barker, drummer, Bill Rieflin and vocalist Chris Connelly — drug-free individuals who Jourgensen nicknamed "the book club" — began to take more control over the day-to-day activities of the band, even though Jourgensen insists he and Scaccia were still responsible for the bulk of the usable creative output.

"I was a mess, but thank God for Mikey," Jourgensen says. "He was wasted all the time, but still productive. And the success of 'Jesus Built My Hotrod' gave Mikey a second wind. He came up with all the riffs for "N.W.O." "Just One Fix" and other thrash-based riffs. I just added my production and some movie samples to make it cool. But Barker saw this as his opportunity to take over. Ministry started getting out of my hands as my baby the more Barker took over. It became corporate and then I became more rebellious than ever when it came to my own self-destruction. I felt cornered now. I had all these people running my life and I was taken over. Ministry was taken over for a few years by the book club. And that's OK; it needed to be because I was useless. I was completely whacked out of my mind on drugs so I figured I'd put it to the guy that's not whacked out of his mind on drugs and put it in his charge, and that would be Barker. For about three years he assumed the main identity of Ministry and did all the interviews and promotion because I was unable to walk from mixing board to the front door without falling down. Seriously, that was my downward spiral."

Psalm 5: Chased Out of Chicago
It takes a lot for a band to be drummed out of town by the Chicago industrial rock community, but that's exactly what happened to Ministry while they were working on Psalm 69 at Chicago Trax. Jourgensen and Co. were doing the best they could to be productive considering some of the main members of the band were incapacitated by chronic narcotic use. But Jourgensen's out-of-control drug habit wasn't what got him ostracized by the locals. In a way, Jourgensen's exile was inevitable. It wasn't just the vast quantities of substances he was doing that turned people against him it was the debauchery that was happening at Chicago Trax while he was nodded off that sealed his fate.

"It didn't have anything to do with me," he insists. "A doorman would tell a girl, 'If you give me an extra $1,000, I'll let you in there all night and you just go right up to Al and give him a blowjob. He's the one in the bubble chair.' People were overdosing in front of me or swallowing their tongues. I'd be all junked out, trying to rationally deal with this shit: stabbings, thefts, all kinds of mayhem. Then somebody died, but not on my watch." 

Someone threw a heroin birthday party for Jourgensen and two of the attendees were Jourgensen's tattoo artist Guy Aitchison and his friend Lorri Jackson, a local poet. While Aitchison was still hanging out Jackson left the party with a heroin dealer and overdosed. "I got fuckin' blamed for it," Jourgensen gripes. "I had nothing to do with it. She showed up at my place, met this guy, left with him and shot up with him and died in his house, not my house. But the press attacked me, everyone was giving me the evil eye, the cops were watching me. The heat was on. I literally got drummed out of Chicago and I'll never forgive the people who treated me like a serial killer after this girl died."

Psalm 6: The Book Club Moves the Junkies to a More Productive Location
Pressured to leave Chicago, Barker convinced Jourgensen and the rest of team Ministry to relocate to Shade Tree Studio in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Barker's aim was to get Jourgensen away from his Chicago drug buddies and into a healthier, more productive environment. But he miscalculated Jourgensen and Scaccia's willpower.

"Barker was too stupid to find a place more than 90 miles away," Jourgensen says. "So me and Mikey just wound up driving the 90 miles twice a week to hook up with our dealers, jonesing all the way there and risking getting arrested on the way back. We had a couple of close shaves with the law, where we were pulled over and we hid our stash behind the ashtray, popped the vents out, put our stuff in there and clicked it back in just  as the cops came up to us with a flashlight." 

The Wisconsin studio was owned by Cheap Trick, whose guitarist Rick Nielsen later became one of Jourgensen's close friends. But being outside of Chicago and in an unfamiliar location just emphasized the cavernous gulf that had developed between Ministry's two main men.

"We weren't a unified team anymore by any stretch of the imagination," Jourgensen says. "Me and Mikey were in one camp. Barker, Atkins and Connelly were in another camp. But the funny thing is that we were the scumbags, yet we were the ones coming up with all the fucking songs. They treated us like shit and tried to give us a schedule to follow. It was like, 'Hurry up, we're off schedule.' I was like, 'Schedule? What Schedule? We're wasted, I'll work tomorrow.' That was the beginning of the big split in the band. We were all fucked up and they were all freaked out because we were the creative force of the band and, hey, if the junkies didn't produce, they didn't eat."

Psalm 7: Al Jourgensen and William Burroughs Join Forces for a "Fix"
For the song "Just One Fix," Jourgensen included audio from speeches and readings given by legendary writer and junky William S. Burroughs. When Ministry finished the album and their label were seeking clearances for the samples, they had a problem. No one seemed to be able to clear the Burroughs samples. Wary of a lawsuit, the label tried in vain to reach Burroughs' camp, which delayed the release of Psalm 69 by two months. When Burroughs' manager James Grauerholz read an article in which Jourgensen explained the delay he became incensed and tracked down Ministry's frontman. "He called me and said, 'Nobody asked us for sample clearance. We never said you can't use that stuff. As a matter of fact, why don't you come to Lawrence, Kansas where Bill lives and we'll do new stuff.' "

Thrilled with the idea, the band, representatives from Ministry's label and management and a video crew headed to Burroughs' home to record new audio and shoot a video. Everyone arrived on time except Jourgensen. He was three days late. "There were a couple reasons I kept Bill waiting," he explains. "First, I had to finish up a Revolting Cocks mix that I was already late doing because we had been working on Psalm 69."

More problematic to Jourgensen were the travel plans that had been booked for him. He was scheduled to fly out on the 23rd, but he refused to take a plane because he was superstitious about traveling on that day. So Jourgensen compromised and agreed to travel by car with a friend from Chicago.

"We stopped off in Kansas City, knowing we didn't have enough dope to last us our trip," Jourgensen says. "We figured Bill would probably want some. We went to this ghetto neighborhood and drove around looking for someone on a corner or something.  We got chased out by the cops because we were two white guys in this ghetto area — it was pretty obvious what we were trying to do. So we said, 'Fuck it. Let's just go to Bill's house.' We drive down to Bill's, knock on his door and he answers. The first thing he says is 'Are ya holding?' He didn't even say hello.  Then he said, 'I can smell a junkie a mile away.' We only had enough to keep ourselves from getting sick. So I was like, 'No,' and he slammed the door in our face."

Figuring the key to admission at the Burroughs estate was smack, Jourgensen drove 35 miles back to Kansas City and cruised the ghettos again. This time he found a kid on a street corner who sold him $800 worth of heroin. Pleased with his success, Jourgensen headed back to Burroughs' house.

"We knocked, he opens the door and is like, 'Oh, it's you again.' He knew he had to do a video with us for 'Just One Fix.' He had already agreed to it. We were like 'No, no, no. It's different this time. We scored. We're holding.' He says, 'Come on in.' We go into Bill's living room and right away he goes to the bedroom. Bill was like a giddy little kid because his manager James usually prevented him from using. He was strictly on this methadone program. He wasn't shooting and he hated coke. So James would keep him on the straight and narrow. But James had the flu and Bill was taking advantage of this – kind of like daddy's away so I will play. We go to shoot up and he brings out this, like, Pulp Fiction 1950s' leather belt with 1950s' needles – really old school. It was comical. We had our little normal needles and he had this elaborate setup. We all shoot up and pass out for a while. I still haven't said anything to this guy and he hasn't said anything to me. Then I wake up and I see a letter from the White House — the fucking White House — on his table, unopened. I was like 'Bill, you got a letter from the White House.' He is like 'Eh, so what? It's junk mail.' I said, 'Are you going to open it?' He said, 'No.' I asked if I could open it. He said, 'Whatever you want to do.' So I open it and it is a letter from Bill Clinton saying he wanted Bill to come do spoken word at the White House. I was pretty impressed by that. I was telling him that and Bill says, 'Who's the president now?' He didn't even know it. He didn't know it was Clinton. Not a fucking clue. And he didn't give a shit. When I read him the letter he was like, 'I never heard of Bill Clinton.' He said he wouldn't go and he never did." 

Uninterested in contemporary politics, Burroughs spoke at length about his garden, griping about the raccoons that were destroying his petunias. "He said he would try to shoot the animals with a pellet gun but they always got away. He wasn't allowed to own a real gun because he accidentally shot his wife back in the 1950s. So he was trying to kill these raccoons, but the pellet gun didn't fire fast enough. I said to him, 'Bill, you're on the methadone program, right?' And he said, 'Yeah, so what?' And I said, 'Well, why don't you put out methadone wafers for the Raccoons to eat. That way, maybe it'll slow them down enough so you can get them with your pellet gun.' "

That was pretty much the end of the conversation, so Jourgensen and his friend headed to the hotel to meet up with the band and video crew. The next day they showed up at the location for the "Just One Fix" video shoot and Burroughs wasn't there yet. Four hours later he arrived with a broad smile on his face.

"William Burroughs was the grumpiest bastard I had ever met," Jourgensen says. "He never seemed happy about anything. But he was in a great mood from the moment he walked in. He comes up to me and he says, 'You're an astute young man. Your idea was magnificent. I shot two stoned raccoons today!' Right away, I was on Bill's friend list and it was a short list. And all because he took my suggestion of feeding these raccoons methadone wafers so he could slow them down and shoot them. Up until the time of his death, he would call me about once a week and we'd talk. But the real reason for his call was to bitch at me for doing coke. His exact quote was, 'Why would a person do a drug that keeps you up all night twitching? Stick to heroin, kid.' "

Born Ronald James Padavona in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the man who would become Dio developed a love of music at a young age, honing his unique singing voice through a combination of opera study (especially the work of tenor Mario Lanza) and the breathing techniques he'd picked up playing the trumpet. Dio broke into the heavy metal consciousness in the late '60s and early '70s through his work with the Electric Elves, and later Rainbow, his baroque-flavored heavy metal band with Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore.

In 1979, he left the project and enlisted as Black Sabbath's vocalist, replacing fired frontman Ozzy Osbourne. He and the band recorded three albums together before parting ways at the end of the '80s, paving the way for Dio's eponymous band, and later Heaven and Hell, a group with current and former Black Sabbath members. Following a battle with stomach cancer, Dio died on May 16, 2010, at the age of 67.

Between his free-wheeling victory yell – the quintissential "Heavy Metal Scream" – his popularization of the now-ubiquitous gesture known as the devil horns and his cadre of kick-ass albums, Dio bequeathed the metal world some of its greatest treasures. More importantly, he helped popularize the genre as a form of deathly, riff-filled dramaturgy: opera at its most aggressive and caustic, a titanic heart to match his bandmates' hulking instrumentals. Black Sabbath's October 17, 1980 performance at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, in Hempstead, New York being one of the greatest testaments to Dio's strength as a frontman and a force of nature (It's chronicled on the 1981 tour movie Black and Blue), we're celebrating Dio's birthday with a trip down memory lane. Watch him lead Sabbath in a performance of the self-titled track from 1980's Heaven and Hell above.

Last year, Ozzy Osbourne and Slipknot joined forces for Ozzfest Meets Knotfest, a historic two-day event that combined the artists' respective metal festivals into one Godzilla-sized weekender attended by an estimated 75,000 people. Today, the legends have announced the festival's return. Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Prophets of Rage and Deftones are but a handful of the 40-plus bands playing the second-annual Ozzfest Meets Knotfest. The music and camping festival will be held November 4-5 on the Glen Helen Ampitheater & Festival Grounds in San Bernadino, California. Tickets will go on sale July 14 on Ozzfest and Knotfest's websites. Check out the full lineup in the poster below.

Osbourne's headlining set at Ozzfest Meets Knotfest marks his first solo appearance in the Los Angeles area in over six years. The Black Sabbath frontman will be joined by guitarist Zakk Wylde, keyboardist Adam Wakeman, bassist Rob Nicholson and drummer Tommy Clufetos. Prophets of Rage, Deftones, Children of Bodom, Baroness, High On Fire and Orange Goblin will also perform during the Ozzfest portion of the festival on Saturday.

In a departure from last year's Ozzfest Meets Knotfest program, Slipknot will not be performing during their self-curated Knotfest portion; Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson will headline in their stead. Nevertheless, the Iowa band will be well represented, with a performance by frontman Corey Taylor's side band Stone Sour. "Knotfest was never supposed to be exclusively about Slipknot," he said of this year's installment. "It was always about the things that fueled the spirit of Slipknot: music, art, passion, insanity and the tribes that give it power — so it would make sense for Knotfest to carry on these ideas, even without Slipknot."

Slipknot's co-founding percussionist, Michael "Clown" Crahan, concludes: "It's that incredible time again, where Ozzfest and Knotfest meet up to bring all music fans together for two days of rock & roll." To fans, he offers the following instructions: "Let's not forget the beautiful culture we are involved in and the history that is being written."

Marilyn Manson is preparing to release his tenth album Heaven Upside Down sometime later this year. He's set to hit the road in Europe later on this month, beginning with the Budapest Park Open Air festival in Budapest, Hungary on July 12. Today, Manson has expanded that trek even further: He's just announced the tour's North American leg. The outing kicks off September 27 in Silver Spring, MD, and will conclude in late October, with back-to-back shows at Las Vegas' House of Blues; A few weeks later, Manson will embark for another round of dates in Europe and the U.K. Check out his full itinerary below.

For the most part, Manson has kept mum on details regarding Heaven Upside Down, which was originally expected to come out in February before being pushed back to this summer, and later, fall. Last November, he released a NSFW video for new single "SAY10" (also the LP's working title at the time); The grim clip finds Manson ripping pages out of a Bible and beheading a suited man who strongly resembles Donald Trump.

Speaking with Dazed last year, Manson described his follow-up to 2015's The Pale Emperor LP as "a combination of Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals in feeling," adding: "It's by far the most thematic and over-complicated thing that I've done. In a way, it's deceptively delightful to strangers – It's like the old saying, that the devil's greatest secret is that people don't believe he exists."

Jul. 20 – Budapest, Hungary – Budapest Park Open Air
Jul. 21 – Katowice, Poland – Metal Hammer Festival
Jul. 22 – Dresden, Germany – Junge Garde
Jul. 24 – Tolmin, Slovenia – Metaldays 2017
Jul. 25 – Rome, Italy – Rock In Roma
Jul. 26 – Verona, Italy – Villafranca Castle
Jul. 28 – Oulu, Finland – Qstock 2017
Jul. 31 – Moscow, Russia – Stadium Live
Aug. 02 – Kiev, Ukraine – Sport Palace
Aug. 04 – Wacken, Germany – Wacken Open Air
Aug. 05 – Utrecht, Netherlands – Tivolivredenberg – Ronda
Aug. 06 – Lokeren, Belgium – Lokerse Festival
Aug. 10 – Avenches, Switzerland – Festival Rock Oz'Arenes
Aug. 12 – Landerneau, France – Fete Du Bruit
Sep. 27 - Silver Spring, MD - The Fillmore Silver Spring
Sep. 29 - Pittsburgh, PA - Stage AE
Sep. 30 - New York, NY - Hammerstein Ballroom
Oct. 02 - Boston, MA - House of Blues - Boston
Oct. 03 - Huntington, NY - The Paramount
Oct. 05 - Toronto, ON - Rebel
Oct. 08 - Columbus, OH - Express Live!
Oct. 10 - Chicago, IL - Riviera Theatre
Oct. 11 - Milwaukee, WI - Eagles Ballroom
Oct. 17 - Tulsa, OK - Brady Theater
Oct. 19 - Denver, CO - Fillmore Auditorium
Oct. 20 - Salt Lake City, UT - The Complex
Oct. 23 - Oakland, CA - Fox Theater
Oct. 27-28 - Las Vegas, NV - House of Blues
Nov. 14 – Stockholm, Sweden – Annexet
Nov. 15 – Elsingnore, Denmark – Hal 14
Nov. 16 – Hamburg, Germany – Sporthalle
Nov. 18 – Munich, Germany – Zenith
Nov. 19 – Prague, Czech Republic – TIP Sport Arena
Nov. 20 – Vienna, Austria – Gasometer
Nov. 22 – Turin, Italy – Pala Alpitour
Nov. 23 – Zurich, Switzerland – Samsung Hall
Nov. 25 – Berlin, Germany – Velodrom – UFO
Nov. 27 – Paris, France – Accor Hotels Arena
Nov. 28 – Eindhoven, Netherlands – Klokgebouw
Nov. 28 – Dusseldorf, Germany – Mitsubishi Electric Halle
Dec. 01 – Nancy, France – Le Zenith
Dec. 02 – Brussels, Belgium – Forest National
Dec. 04 – Manchester, UK – O2 Apollo
Dec. 05 – Glasgow, UK – O2 Academy
Dec. 06 – Wolverhampton, UK – Civic Hall
Dec. 08 – Newport, UK – Newport Centre
Dec. 09 – London, UK – SSE Wembley Arena