Received rock wisdom teaches us that punk and prog are sworn enemies. But by the early-to-mid-2000s, genres that seemed worlds apart in the late Seventies had started to creep closer together. The Mars Volta’s psychedelic 2002 post-hardcore fever dream De-Loused in the Comatorium suggested a wondrous hybrid; further underground, a …
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Until last month, Sasha Boole spent his days writing more of the ruminative folk-rock songs he’d been releasing in his native Ukraine for about a decade, with titles like “Waiting for the Doom” and “Music to Watch the World Dying.” But these days, his focus is elsewhere — on, he …
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Meshuggah are about to head out on their first tour in close to three years, and drummer Tomas Haake has a lot on his mind. He and his bandmates are hard at work designing a new stage set-up, adjusting to changes within their road crew, and plotting out intensive rehearsals, …
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Death metal started out in the mid-Eighties as a mad sprint: a scrappy cohort of underground acts each looking to push the limits of speed and shock value. But for many in that first generation, it’s turned out to be a marathon. Of the bands that helped to cement the …
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Mikael Åkerfeldt, leader of celebrated Swedish prog-rock outfit Opeth, looks back on the moment he became a metal fan, the time he partied with Abba’s very own Dancing Queen, a song that made him cry, what made him lose faith in contemporary metal, and more in the latest installment of …
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