✴ Metal Punk HardCore ✴

Sortilege - Metamorphose Photo credit: Amazon. The actual product may vary. Sortilege - Larmes De Heros Photo credit: Amazon. The actual product may vary. If you are a vinyl collector with a weakness for 1980s heavy metal, there is a good chance that you have already discovered the name Sortilège. If you haven't, well... you may be about to discover one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of French heavy metal. For international collectors, Sortilège is still far less well known than Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Accept or Manowar. But that relative obscurity is also part of the attraction. Finding an original French pressing of a great Sortilège album can feel like discovering a small piece of heavy metal history that somehow escaped the mainstream. I have original copies of the classic Sortilège albums in my own collection, and this article comes from that collector's perspective. I don't sell those original copies. They stay in my persona...

Motionless In White - Decades Photo credit: Amazon. The actual product may vary. Motionless In White Decades: Two Decades of Stubborn Survival Twenty years. That’s two decades of eyeliner, industrial-sized riffs, and the kind of middle-finger stubbornness that most bands trade in for a mortgage by their second record. Motionless In White Decades isn’t just an album title, it’s a line scratched in the dirt. Released on July 17, 2026, it marks twenty years of a war that began in the grey, working-class grimness of Scranton, PA. This band didn’t get a silver spoon; they built this legacy out of festival mud, genre snobbery, and a famously broken-down van in a snowstorm that left them sleeping on rest-stop floors. From those frozen Pennsylvania nights in 2006 to becoming international festival headliners, Decades is a fucking declaration of survival. It’s the sound of a band that didn't just survive the "critics' darlings" cycle, they outlasted it. Evolution...

Slift - Fantasia Photo credit: Amazon. The actual product may vary. Crank your amplifiers to eleven and brace for impact: Toulouse's ferocious power trio SLIFT has returned to obliterate your speakers with their fourth studio album, Fantasia . Following the space-faring monolithic double LP Ummon in 2020 and 2024’s sprawling sci-fi juggernaut Ilion , the French heavyweights hit back via Sub Pop Records. Stripping away the excess filler, the new release Slift Fantasia arrives as an unyielding, 50-minute wrecking ball of pure sonic fury and political urgency. The Genesis: From Cosmic Marathons to Lean Precision Formed in 2016 by brothers Jean Fossat (guitar, synths, vocals) and Rémi Fossat (bass), alongside childhood brother-in-arms Canek Flores on drums, SLIFT spent ten years forging a reputation as an unstoppable sonic hurricane. From their early garage-stoner days on La Planète Inexplorée to their legendary viral KEXP session recorded at Trans Musicales, the trio...

All Them Witches - House Of Mirrors Photo credit: Amazon. The actual product may vary. Forget the sterile, over-polished drivel clogging mainstream rock radio. With House Of Mirrors , the Nashville power-four unleash a roaring, sonic sledgehammer that obliterates expectations and resets the heavy psych landscape. Six years after the suffocating darkness of Nothing As The Ideal (2020) and the sprawling experimentation of Baker's Dozen (2022), the band returns with a seventh full-length studio album that is raw, organic, and heavy as molten lead. Album Breakdown & Blueprint Released on May 29, 2026, via BMG, this record marks a monumental shift in the band's trajectory—their first full-length album in over a decade not issued through New West Records. Here is the raw anatomy of the beast: Attribute Details Artist All Them Witches (Official website) Album Title House Of Mirrors ...

Bouncing Souls - Born To Be Photo credit: Amazon. The actual product may vary. The Bouncing Souls Born To Be doesn't knock on the door. It kicks it off the hinges. Ten tracks. Twenty-five minutes. Zero filler. This is the sound of a band that's been doing this since the early '90s and still refuses to phone it in. Released independently on June 26, 2026, Born To Be is proof that punk rock doesn't need a major label babysitter to hit hard. Greg Attonito, Pete Steinkopf, Bryan Kienlen, and George Rebelo went into Memory Music Studios with Will Yip behind the board and came out swinging. No corporate polish. No watered-down streaming bait. Just riffs, sweat, and a fist in the air. Why Bouncing Souls Born To Be Hits Different Let's get real for a second. Punk bands from the New Jersey scene either fade out or they evolve into something worth caring about. The Bouncing Souls chose the second path. Born To Be isn't a nostalgia trip. It's not...

Dimmu Borgir - Grand Serpent Rising Photo credit: Amazon. The actual product may vary. Waiting eight years for a new Dimmu Borgir album after the overstuffed Eonian left a lot of extreme metal fans feeling pretty anxious. When you’ve been the scene's favorite punching bag for thirty years, a decade-long silence usually means you've either run out of ideas or you're having an identity crisis. The pressure on a legacy act like this to either reinvent the wheel or call it quits is brutal. Dropping Grand Serpent Rising on May 22, 2026, through Nuclear Blast turned out to be a massive, polarizing surprise. This isn't a band running on empty. Shagrath and Silenoz—the last original men standing—clocked in a massive 69-minute epic that feels alive, almost like a biological mutation rather than a shiny studio product. By looking back at their second-wave roots while diving into weird, esoteric territory, they are trying to prove that a 30-year-old metal institution c...

Akiavel - SCELESTVS Image credit: Amazon. Actual product may vary. If you prefer your music predictable, safe, and lukewarm, close this tab immediately. Toulon-based melodic death metal powerhouse Akiavel is back to fracture your eardrums and shatter your expectations. With their highly anticipated EP, Akiavel Scelestvs , the band isn't just releasing new music; they are unleashing a visceral, cinematic storm of unadulterated extremity. This release marks a terrifyingly brilliant evolution for a band that has already conquered major European festival stages like Hellfest and Motocultor. The Malicious Concept: Female Urban Legends & Emancipation While Akiavel's previous full-length records like InVictus focused heavily on true crime and real-world atrocities, Akiavel Scelestvs plunges headfirst into the pitch-black abyss of folklore. The thematic spine of this EP retraces and sets to music several bone-chilling urban legends where the central protagonists ar...