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We've got good news and bad news, Tool fans. First, the good news: According to bassist Justin Chancellor, the prog-metal stalwarts' new album is 90% done! Now. for the bad news: Tool's definition of "done" is very different from everyone else's.

In a recent interview on "The Joe Rogan Experience," Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan revealed that the band's long-awaited 10,000 Days follow-up is still a long ways out, a delay he attributed to the band's meticulous songwriting approach. "Nothing is tracked yet, nothing is completely finished," he said. "There's a couple songs that I think are finished now; I can start working on those, but nothing is actually recorded."

Keenan continued, "My desire to move forward: 'Go go go, get things done!' I'm always butting heads with the guys in the band to get those things done, and it's just not their process. It took me a while to go, 'This is not personal, this is just the way that they have to do it. And I have to respect it, and I have to take my time and let them take their time.'" 

The frontman went on to explain that, while he and his bandmates have indeed been hard at work on new material, their constantly fluctuating creative process has prevented them from nailing down the songs themselves. "If this thing is done done done, and I can start writing words and music on it, great. But I've had instances where I've started to write stuff, and by the time I actually got it around and back, and actually listening and whatever, the song had gone in a completely different direction," he said. "So everything that was written melody-wise or lyric-wise was completely irrelevant now, and I have to start over." In other words, don't rush them.

Keenan continued, "I mean, I can sit there in that room, and be with them in that room, but their process is so tedious and so Rain Man, that I just can't, I just start fucking folding in on myself. I'll be right back, I've got to go take five years to plant a vineyard, because you'll still be right where you were when I left. But it's a great thing, what they're doing is wonderful. I completely back what they're doing. There's no other way for them to do it. For me, I can move much more quickly if you will let me help you. I've written a few songs. In fact, I was involved in many of them, the ones that we've done, so we can do that. But I think this is what they need to do. I'm OK with it. You got to get a little friction in there, so I have to come in and puff my chest out a bit and be aggressive: 'Let's move it, guys.' That worked for a minute, and we definitely made traction, but if I were to do that every day, it would just become a part of the friction, more friction instead of getting anything done."

So there you have it. Like they said on Twitter earlier this year, the band has no plans to drop an album in 2017. The same goes for A Perfect Circle, who also have a long-awaited full length on horizon, not to mention a North American tour planned for the fall.
 

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.

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

Last Monday night, July 3, Gary Meskil, the frontman and bassist of New York crossover thrash outfit Pro-Pain, was the victim of a robbery and near-fatal group assault while on tour with the band in Brussels, Belgium. According to an account of the incident posted to the Pro-Pain Facebook page, Meskil's assailants robbed the musician of his cash, credit card and passport before assaulting him, striking his head with an ice-pick. He is currently in a Belgian hospital recovering from his injuries, which include severe head trauma, multiple fractures to the face and jaw and significant blood loss. Brussels police have identified several suspects in the attack and have confiscated at least one weapon, according to local reports.

One week later, Meskil's condition has stabilized, his loved ones say. While he's currently "resting comfortably," the bandleader will require surgery for his wounds. Meskil offered his account of the attack to Het Nieuwsblad's Tom De Smet, subsequently published by Blabbermouth:

"Last Monday, I went out with Adam [Phillips, Pro-Pain guitarist] in Brussels. Adam returned to the hotel in the Stalingradlaan in the center of Brussels, and I went for a beer in a bar nearby, around midnight. At the table next to me, there were some young guys and we started talking. It was all very friendly. Just a nice chat. After a while, I went to the bartender to pay my bill. When I returned, two of the guys I had talked to bumped into me. Then I realized that they took my wallet. I confronted them and they start hitting me. They got help from four others. They used an ice pick to hit me on the head. They kept on kicking me after I had fallen to the ground. They robbed me of a lot of money: the fees of several shows. I lost eighty percent of my blood. The doctors said that I was lucky to make it. They even had to remove glass from my eyes, because they kicked the glasses I was wearing. My jaw is broken, and I will need multiple surgeries. I don't know when I will be able to sing again. It can take weeks, possibly even months."

In the wake of last week's attack, two members of Meskil's family have set up a GoFundMe drive to cover $20,000 in medical and dental expenses not covered by the musician's insurance. Those who contribute to the fund, which has raised over $11,000 as of today, will be listed in the credits for Pro-Pain's next album. "We appreciate your kindness and generosity at this difficult time," Lisa and Gary Jr. said in the campaign description. Click here to pitch in.

Best wishes for a successful, speedy recovery, Gary!

French sludge/doom outfit Monarch have a new full-length on the way. Never Forever, the follow-up to 2014's Sabbracadaver LP (and 2015's covers EP Sacrifice Your Parents, Satan Wants You To), arrives September 22 via Profound Lore. As evidenced by the haunting first single "Song to the Void," the band's latest album finds them tempering an already infernal racket with churning, turgid dream pop. Bandleader Emilie Bresson's eerie vocals remain foreboding and shadow-steeped, and they possess an ethereal, delicate quality heretofore unexplored in Monarch's broader body of work, more reminiscent of Chelsea Wolfe than Noothgrush.

The same can be said for the song's surrealistic, stop-motion video, which doubles as an album trailer. The black-and-white visual mixes the cheery with the morbid, juxtaposing images of fields and butterflies with dark rituals and creepy ruins. To further illustrate the schism, Bresson starts off the video clutching a balloon, and ends up holding a noose. Check it out below.

"It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" fans are undoubtedly familiar with the Dayman, a hero born from the deranged, spray-paint clouded mind of one Charlie Kelly. Legend has it that the Dayman (who may or may not be Kelly himself) developed some strange and remarkable powers, as a result of a strange (and very problematic) encounter with the Nightman, his archnemesis. One day, Kelly decided to turn the story into a song; Together with his drinking buddy Dennis Reynolds, the two formed a band called Electric Dream Machine and took the legend to the big stage.

The audience at Paddy's Pub came away from the performance relatively unmoved – there was a fair bit of heckling, due in no small part to the duo's ridiculous outfits – but YouTuber and "Always Sunny" fan Brian Nichols walked away with knowledge of "Dayman"'s true power: with its good-versus-evil storyline and über-dramatic arrangement, the song's as cvlt as it gets. Naturally, then, he's adapted Electric Dream Machine's classic into a Trivium-esque banger. Check out the "Dayman" metal cover below. Charlie would be proud.

Here's the original performance, in all its glory:

River Black are a new band helmed by four old masters from the East Coast. Vocalist Mike Olender, guitarist John Adubato and drummer Dave Witte previously played in Burnt By The Sun, a critically-acclaimed, sorely-missed metalcore outfit from New Jersey who shared stages with the likes of Mastodon and Dillinger Escape Plan before parting ways 2009. They're joined by Brett Bamberger, best known as the bassist for Boston crossover-thrash outfit Revocation. River Black (whose name pays homage to Burnt by the Sun's final record Heart of Darkness, and by extension, Joseph Conrad's novel of the same name) are set to release their eponymous debut album tomorrow, July 7, via Southern Lord. No need to wait until then to listen to it, though: Today, the band are streaming the 12-track effort in its entirety. Check out River Black below, and pre-order it here.

In an interview with Revolver last month, Witte cast aside any lingering characterizations of River Black as his former band with a new name: "We didn't want it to be Burnt by the Sun," he insisted – and characterized the self-titled's sonics as "a little darker, a little heavier, with less emphasis on speed and more on grooves, impact, and heaviness." In addition to old-school barnstormers like "Boat" and "Sink", River Black includes "Haunt," a collaboration with Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor (the band's longtime friend, as well as one of their biggest admirers).

Surprisingly for a band with an album on the way, River Black have no current plans to tour behind the album. "The days of going out, hopping in a cargo van, and grinding it out show to show are pretty much over," Olender told Revolver, adding, "We have the ability to choose what we want to do, because none of us need to do this band. We're doing it because we want to do it."