Photo Credit: Julia Jackson Irish musician and songwriter Hozier (full name: Andrew John Hozier-Byrne) didn’t quite score the same success on his last release, Wasteland, Baby! (2019) as he had achieved with his enormously successful self-titled 2014 debut album (or his debut single “Take Me to Church”). But continuing his apparent practice of taking several… Read more
Photo Credit: Guadalupe Bustos Eight albums and fifteen years removed from their debut, The Maine have arrived at their self-titled era – traditionally a marker of a band at their most accomplished and confident. The Maine, however, does not necessarily register as a towering magnum opus when compared to the band’s previous efforts. What it… Read more
Photo Credit: Acacia Evans For all the success that pop-punk has had in the charts in recent years – the genre’s standard-bearers generally haven’t fared so well. Green Day’s most recent full-length Father of All… was received poorly by fans and critics alike, as was Blink-182’s confused 2019 statement Nine. Even the genre’s most consistently… Read more
Photo Credit: Reuben Bastienne-Lewis Long-running, off-and-on multi-platinum (in the U.K.) London Britpop band Blur returns with their first album of all-new material in eight years. Despite the title, The Ballad of Darren is not a concept album (longtime frontman Damon Albarn more than takes care of that approach with his other major project, the Gorillaz)…. Read more
While groups like Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age continue to fill arenas all over the world, there are also some really interesting newcomers that might be able to shake things up. Here are ten alternative rock bands that you should be listening to in 2023! #10. Foo Fighters Photo Credit: Danny Clinch… Read more
Photo Credit: Beth Garrabrant Taylor Swift wrote her third album entirely on her own. This was partly a result of Swift getting her “best ideas at 3 am in Arkansas,” as she would tell Songwriter Universe, but it also served as a rebuttal to critics and other commentators who had previously doubted teenage Swift’s creative… Read more
Photo Credit: Andreas Neumann “I love animals so much,” Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme recently told NME. “They just do exactly what they’re supposed to. They fight to the bitter end, even with a broken leg.” On their eighth – and first post-pandemic – record titled In Times New Roman…, the band… Read more
Photo Credit: Danny Clinch We should begin by asking the obvious question: “Who’s playing drums?” After all, the Foo Fighters did experience the death of longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins last year, who not only appeared on the band’s last eight studio albums but emerged as the very heart of the band. So much so, that… Read more
Photo Credit: Kameron Pollock California, Metalcore quintet Avenged Sevenfold has never been one to shy away from the dramatic. It’s evident even in their many morbid album covers and song titles (“Shepherd of Fire,” “Burn It Down”, “Beast and the Harlot”). On the band’s eighth studio album, Life Is But a Dream…, they really do turn the… Read more
Photo Credit: Pamela Littky On Darkfighter, their (hopefully) lucky seventh album, Rival Sons continue to present themselves musically as the offspring of both ’70s arena bands like Bad Company and Grand Funk Railroad and ’90s alternative rock artists like Soundgarden and Rage Against the Machine. What comes of their effort works, for the most part. Rival Sons… Read more