Quite often, people are often mislead by the allure of the creative industries.  Especially in the rock and metal world.  Often pictured by late nights, debauchery, and excessive substance misuse.  Even if you’re just a journo writing reviews, the expectation is to become enveloped by excess. 

Rock Monsters Daughtry pull together both Shock to the System EPs and throw in some live renditions for a package that is not to be missed.

Some albums announce a band’s intentions and some documents what they had already become. Earth Rocker, Clutch’s tenth studio album, released in March 2013, belongs to neither category cleanly — it is something rarer:

With this being album number four there are some things you know without doubt what will be included. Huge riffs and amazing solos are a given but with Louder than Fate we get Jared spreading his songwriting wings with some new sounds and a whole host of emotion.

Evergrey do not do quiet exits. Over three decades and fourteen studio albums before this one, the Gothenburg veterans have built something rare: a back catalogue that accumulates weight the further you travel through it, each record adding another layer to an emotional architecture that few of their peers have matched.

Some bands earn a legacy and spend the remainder of their career managing it carefully. Evanescence have never operated that way.

Released on June 12th this year, Rachel Bolan has created his first solo record.  Under the cleverly thought through name, BOLAN, the 4-decade Skid Row’er see’s Mr Bolan play through 11 tracks of punk, grit, grime and even a little 80’s power rock.  He’s not alone either. 

Devin Townsend does not make small promises. Over the course of a career that has stretched across four decades, nearly thirty studio records, multiple bands, and more genre permutations than most musicians accumulate in several lifetimes, he has built a reputation for ambition that occasionally borders on the reckless.

Floridian arena-fillers Shinedown are survivors, the band of four brothers often standing side by side facing a hurricane.

It is very unusual that a band revisits an album so soon and especially one as loved as "The House Beyond the Fires". With only two years between that album and this reinvention you wonder that maybe it is too soon but as you will find very quickly this one works so well.

The scorching vocalist from H.E.A.T and Skid Row bursts out on his own with this stunning solo album.

When The Age Of Entitlement dropped back in 2019, I said it was one of the finest British thrash comebacks of the modern era, and I stand by every single word.

Can it really be two years since the fantastic Promised Land was released and burst into the top 20 of the UK charts? Well, it is and now here we are with latest album Cruel Intentions and the band could be looking at a top 10 release this time as this is what a Classic Rock album is all about.

Forty years since Slayer dropped one of the most important records in the history of heavy metal, and Metal Blade Records have absolutely done it justice with this 40th anniversary edition of Hell Awaits.

Elegant Weapons sophomore release does that and then some! It is titled “Evolution” as a nod to the progress the band has made in songwriting, lyrics and direction, plus a change in rhythm section personnel.

With their name bizarrely inspired by a brand of insecticide, Atlanta heavy hitters Sevendust are one of the few bands on the scene to manage to keep a stable line up for over thirty years, the band of brothers bonded by music and blood.