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Beer-loving metalheads, rejoice! Iron Maiden and Robinsons Brewery are teaming up to unleash Hallowed, a Belgian-style ale set to hit shelves in October. Clocking in at six percent ABV, the limited-edition brew, which will be available for four months only, comes in a 330 ml bottle adorned with artwork of the legendary band's mascot, Eddie, who's dressed like a monk (a nod to Belgium's long history of monastic breweries.) A list of participating vendors will be revealed "in due course," according to Robinson's website.
Hallowed is the latest in a string of collaborations between the legendary band and the British beer purveyors: It arrives in the wake of the Trooper — which has sold 15 million bottles over the past four years — the Trooper 666, and the Red N' Black. According to Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, the beer's Belgian yeast sets it apart from the rest of the band's previous concoctions. "I'm a big fan of Belgian beers, so I jumped at the chance to brew my own," he says. "While I get very excited about experimenting with new formulas and ingredients, the thing about Belgian beer is that it's as much a way of life as it is a drink."
Robinsons' head brewer, Martyn Weeks, says Hallowed drinkers are in for a treat. "Belgian yeast yields a very distinct taste and presentation," he explains. "You can sniff out a Belgian beer simply from its aromas: fruity, spicy and earthy. Belgian yeasts withstand higher alcohol levels, they attenuate well and create an array of phenolics and esters…put simply, this means more flavor."
Iron Maiden are currently wrapping up their world tour behind 2015's album The Book of Souls. Eddie's keeping busy, too: He's set to appear in a new Iron Maiden comic book, to be published in this month's issue of sci-fi/fantasy magazine Heavy Metal.
Pantera frontman Phil Anselmo celebrates his 49th birthday today, June 30. Before fronting one of the most successful bands in history, forming Down or Superjoint Ritual, or stirring up controversy, Anselmo was just another talented teenager, screaming his heart out at local metal shows in his native New Orleans, Louisiana. That all changed in 1986, when Pantera discovered – and promptly recruited – Anselmo, then 19, as their lead singer. It was a wise move: resultant classics such as 1988's Power Metal, 1990's Cowboys From Hell and 1992's Vulgar Display of Power derive much of their staying power from his explosive performances. Following Pantera's 2001 dissolution, Anselmo shifted his creative focus to his longtime sludge side projects Superjoint Ritual and Down, released a solo album and formed the black metal supergroup Scour alongside members of Pig Destroyer, Cattle Decapitation and others.
To celebrate Anselmo's birthday, we're revisiting one of Pantera's most legendary performances: their set at Moscow's Monsters of Rock, the first outdoor rock festival ever held in the former Soviet Union. On September 28, 1991, the Texans took the stage before half a million fans for a set as hellish as it was historic. One of Pantera's finest moments was their furious take on "Cowboys From Hell," the alpha and omega of their wicked chemistry, so awesome as to warrant its place in Guitar Hero and Rock Band games alike. Watch below.
"We didn't decide to try to play anything, these are the songs that happened when we started jamming, and I love this band because there are no egos involved. Our goal is to make the best music possible, period. I love it when those guys contribute with melodies, and I've even helped with some of the arrangements. Because we all think alike, our lyrics deal with the issues of the day, and that makes for better songs."
The band will release their debut album, Up in Arms, on July 14 via Metal Blade Records. In anticipation, the band has teamed up with Revolver to premiere their new song, "Manic." Check it out below.
Joseph says of the track, "I listened on my iPhone while I was in the gym training, left immediately, went home and wrote the lyrics. It's that kind of a feeling. Lyrically, it's about people mistaking kindness for weakness. Big fucking mistake."
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Danzig have announced a short tour with Corrosion of Conformity ahead of their appearance at Riot Fest 2017, where they'll perform their seminal album Danzig III: How the Gods Kill in its entirety to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary. The seven-show trek, which begins September 7 in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, includes stop-offs in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Detroit, among other cities. Danzig and company haven't elaborated on whether September's outing will be part of their How The Gods Kill anniversary festivities, or just another lap behind last month's album Black Laden Crown. For now, all we can do is speculate, and check out the itinerary below.
Speaking with Revolver last month, Danzig offered fans a taste of what to expect from their How The Gods Kill tribute shows, and detailed his personal connection to the classic album. "We still do a track or two [from that album] in our regular set," he explained, "but this time we're gonna do five or six songs from it. That album is a personal favorite of mine. It was the first Danzig record to crack the Top 20 on Billboard; It was also the first record of ours that I produced, and it broke us massively over in Europe; It was a really good record that people responded positively to." He also plans to bring back old props from the band's original tour behind the record: "If you're coming to the show, we're gonna have the gigantic gargoyles," he revealed, "and I think I have the old backdrop, too."
Sept. 7 – Hampton Beach, NH – Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom
Sept. 8 – Philadelphia, PA – Electric Factory
Sept. 9 – Montclair, NJ – The Wellmont Theater
Sept. 11 – Huntington, NY – The Paramount
Sept. 12 – Lewiston, NY – Artpark Amphitheater
Sept. 14 – Cleveland, OH – The Agora Theatre
Sept. 15 – Detroit, MI – The Fillmore Detroit
On February 4, Black Sabbath took the stage at the Genting Arena, in their hometown of Birmingham, England, to play the final concert of their 81-show farewell tour, appropriately titled "The End." Now, their epic curtain call is coming to theaters around the world for one night only on September 28, in the form of a new documentary: Black Sabbath: The End of The End.
Directed by Dick Curruthers, Black Sabbath: The End of The End offers an up-close and personal look at the historic two-hour set from the band's own perspective. In addition to pro-shot footage of the entire show, the documentary features never-before-seen studio performances of several songs that didn't make it onto the setlist, plus reflections from Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, and Geezer Butler. A list of participating theaters can be found on the film's official website. If you can't find a screening near you, don't fret; Potential viewers can request screenings here.
"To bring it all back home after all these years was pretty special," the band said in a statement to the press. "It was so hard to say goodbye to the fans, who've been incredibly loyal to us through the years. We never dreamed in the early days that we'd be here 49 years later doing our last show on our home turf."
In related news, today marks the grand opening of Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward's Reverb shop. As previously reported, the co-founder's selling a wide array of cymbals, drum kits, and drum heads, among other rare gear. Browse the offerings here.
Folk metal composer Amalie Bruun — who performs as Myrkur — is gearing up to release her sophomore album Mareridt, the follow-up to 2015's M, on September 15 via Relapse. Today, she's shared "Måneblôt," the record's haunting debut single. Like the album writ large, the song, which portrays a nightmarish universe of pagan sun worshippers and feminine power, was produced by Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O))), Boris). Listen below, and pre-order the album here.
Recorded between Copenhagen and Seattle, Mareridt (which is the Danish word for "nightmare") finds Bruun pushing the boundaries of her instrumentally rich, thematically dense songcraft, by way of a cadre of unorthodox instruments: violin, mandola, nyckelharpa (a type of key harp which dates back to ancient Sweden) and Kulning (a Scandinavian herding call that also dates back to antiquity). The 11-track album also includes a collaboration with Chelsea Wolfe, who's also got an album on the way. (Wolfe's latest, Hiss Spun, arrives a week after Mareridt.)
"I wanted to make an album that I always needed to exist but never did," the multi-instrumentalist said of the forthcoming release. Bruun wrote the album amidst a period of intense suffering, dogged by night terrors, sleep paralysis and lingering trauma. "You know how they say that when you have been through trauma or abuse, you tend to recreate the situation in an attempt to take ownership of it?" she asked. "I think I was doing that. I was trying to solve things [in my nightmares] that I could not solve in real life — things I could not run away from." The resultant product, she added, is "very connected to [my] true self, without an ego or persona."
Shortly after dropping Mareridt, Myrkur will embark on a headlining European tour, with support from Icelandic post-metal outfit Sólstafir. In the interim, Bruun's playing a smattering of European summer festival dates, as well as two North American shows. Find her full itinerary below.
Jul. 21 – Katowice, PL - Metal Hammer Festival
Jul. 22 – Sheffield, UK - Tramlines Festival
Aug. 17 – Brooklyn, NY - Saint Vitus
Aug. 18 – Las Vegas, NV - Psycho Las Vegas
Oct. 26 – Stockholm, SE - Close-Up Baten Cruise
Nov. 04 – Leeds, UK - Damnation Festival
Nov. 17 - London, UK - Heaven #
Nov. 18 - Leeuwarden, NL - Neushoorn #
Nov. 19 - Lille, FR - Maison Folie Beaulieu #
Nov. 20 - Paris, FR - Alhambra #
Nov. 21 - Rennes, FR - Antipode MJC #
Nov. 23 - Bilbao, ES - Santana27 #
Nov. 24 - Madrid, ES - Caracol #
Nov. 25 - Barcelona, ES - Razzmatazz2 #
Nov. 27 - Milan, IT - Circolo Magnolia #
Nov. 29 - Munich, DE - Theaterfabrik #
Nov. 30 - Salzburg, AT - Rockhouse #
Dec. 01 - Bologna, IT - Locomotiv #
Dec. 07 - Budapest, HU - A38 #
Dec. 08 - Vienna, AT - Arena #
Dec. 11 - Prague, CZ - Roxy #
Dec. 12 - Berlin DE - Heimathafen #
Dec. 13 - Cologne, DE - Kantine #
Dec. 15 - Rotterdam, NL - maasSilo #
Dec. 16 - Brussels, BE - VK #
Dec. 18 - Copenhagen, DK - Pumpehuset #
Dec. 20 - Stockholm, SE - Debaser Strand #
# - w/ Solstafir
We're gearing up for a massive relaunch of Revolver magazine and its website this fall. In the meantime, though, we thought it would make sense to bookend these crazy 16 years of Revolver by giving it a Viking funeral. So, for this issue, we've collected some of the best stories, photos, illustrations and covers, dating back to the very beginning of "the World's Loudest Rock Magazine," and we asked some of our favorite writers, photographers, illustrators and musicians to look back with us.
Below is a preview of what's in the June/July 2017 issue. Pick up the new mag on newsstands July 4th or at the Revolver Online Store.
Five decades of metal mayhem with Motörhead's main man
SYSTEM OF A DOWN
SOAD return with not one but two albums packed with politically charged thinking man's metal
LAMB OF GOD
Three days navigating the treacherous waters of Slipknot's Subliminal Verses tour with LOG
HURRICANE KATRINA AND THE NOLA UNDERGROUND
Eyehategod's Jimmy Bower and Soilent Green's Ben Falgoust help us assess the damage
TOOL
If you think the world's biggest cult band plans to adapt to modern times, you've got another thing coming
HAIL TO THE KINGS
Avenged Sevenfold's M. Shadows gains audience with Metallica's James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich
MARILYN MANSON AND SLAYER
Welcome to the most controversial tour of the summer, or the first real sign of the imminent apocalypse
COREY TAYLOR
The Slipknot and Stone Sour singer will never let his dark past get the best of him
NEUROSIS
How these spiritual-metal titans have won an almost-religious following while refusing to compromise their DIY ethos
METAL MILITIA
An all-access oral history of the American thrash explosion ... and implosion
THE REAL THINGS
Dillinger Escape Plan's Greg Puciato and Ben Weinman throw down with Mike Patton
BLACK SABBATH
They have always been metal's iron men. But they never had to prove like they did in 2013.
THE BEST REVOLVER COVERS
A look back at some of our favorite covers from the past decade and a half — with a little help from our friends
This past weekend, Earache Records descended upon Somerset, England, to give Glastonbury attendees a healthy dose of metal with the Earache Express, the festival's first-ever stage devoted entirely to heavy music. From Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror to the Dead Kennedys and Ho99o9, the temporary venue – fashioned from an old London Underground train car – honored musical brutality in all its forms. Singaporean grindcore outfit (and Earache signees) Wormrot headlined the Express on Saturday, June 24, and today, they've uploaded their entire 40-minute, career-spanning set in full. What the band lacked in square footage, they made up for with volume, turning an otherwise ordinary trolley into a temple of noise. Wormrot's set was also an historic one that marked the first performance by a Singaporean band in the festival's 46-year history. Watch below.
Wormrot's train take over arrives in the wake of last year's excellent album Voices, as well as their first North American tour in years, which wrapped up earlier this month.
Are you a comics fan? Do you dig Iron Maiden? If you answered "Yes" to either of those questions, you're in luck: The legendary metal group are getting their very own comic book, Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast. The epic tale, set to appear in next month's issue of sci-fi/fantasy comic magazine Heavy Metal, follows the band's beloved mascot Eddie as he journeys through a series of terrifying worlds inspired by Iron Maiden's discography. Check out some scans from the upcoming comic book below via Nerdist.
Detailing the upcoming comic book to Nerdist, Heavy Metal offered the following synopsis: "Eddie's immortal soul is shattered and strewn across the cosmos. Now, Eddie must journey across space and time to battle the twisted legions of The Beast, seek out the lost shards of his soul, and bring order to the realms." Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast was written by Llexi Leon and Ian Edginton, with art from Kevin J. West; It's inspired by Iron Maiden's mobile video game of the same name, which the band unleashed last year.
"As a lifelong fan of Iron Maiden, it is a privilege to publish the first comic giving a narrative to their iconic mascot, Eddie," Heavy Metal's Jeff Krelitz told Nerdist of the project. "When we discussed the potential of coming together on this project, it was immediately clear that there was no better home for Iron Maiden than Heavy Metal. Heavy Metal's nearly half-century-long history of either working with or launching the careers of only the most accomplished artists continues here with the amazing team Iron Maiden has working on this series."
