Blog: Thrash Hits

Power Trip Manifest Decimation Southern Lord 10 June 2013 by Raziq Rauf It was just in April that Invisible Oranges announced that re-thrash is dead. It was a big statement seeing as the thrash revival has thrown up such names as Municipal Waste and Havoc in its time as the gumby's best friend. While it's certainly accurate to point at Entombed-core being the metalhead's most favourable mode of headbanging these days, that guy clearly hadn't heard [...]

Ronseal headline does what it says on the tin - it's been confirmed today that Hevy 2013 won't be festival in the camping-outside-stages-in-a-fi eld way at all, but rather will take the form of a series of gigs taking place in and around London. After the kerfuffle over Hevy 2013 losing the Port Lympne Wild Animal Park site a few months ago , the organisers of Hevy Festival stressed that they had a new site lined up that they couldn't announce for contractual reasons. This seemed a bit cheeky to [...]

We were talking about Iron Maiden headlining the Saturday evening of Download Festival 2013 and we were all at odds over what the best Maiden album was. Obviously, with 15 (fifteen!) studio albums in their arsenal, there are a lot of different styles to choose from, not even considering the variation in quality. We figured we'd ask our resident Maiden fan what his favourite was. From the era of record shops [ read his wicked article on long-gone Soho dive, Shades ], Tony Hampton's a lot older than the rest of us, so he actually remembers (pretty much, [...]

letlive. popped up at the tail end of 2010 with their third album, Fake History. It blew the socks off a lot of people. We interviewed Jason a couple of years ago via email and he sent us back some of the most hilariously ridiculous answers we'd ever seen. This time, there was no hiding behind a keyboard for him. Last night, the internet was awash with the slightly unwieldy hashtag #theblackestbeautiful . There were enigmatic photos posted from the likes of Every Time I Die and Pierce The Veil as well as friends, family and [...]

The Black Dahlia Murder Everblack Metal Blade 10 June 2013 by Rob McAuslan Have wallies stopped calling The Black Dahlia Murder a "metalcore" band yet? As cases of mistaken genre identity go, this is one of the sillier ones. How many slabs of scathingly-vicious, speaker-ruiningly heavy death metal do you need to release before people look past [...]

You want to win a copy of HIM's latest album, Tears On Tape, don't you? Well, take a photo of yourself in some HIM merch (any HIM merch) and post it on Twitter and/or Instagram. Make sure you tag it with #ThrashHIM so we can find it and you're already following our Twitter and Instagram , right? We reviewed Tears On Tape in April and gave it a devilish 666/6 , but likened HIM to Savage Garden. It totally makes sense. [...]

There's this weird position that  Fucked Up  occupy in the monder punk-rock pantheon, with their fans falling somewhere between that of punks who've graduated from entry-level nonsense, and hipsters looking for just a tiny taste of hardcore judos to declare as one of their own. When the band played their own show here in London - co-headlined by Titus Andronicus and supported by Metz - we sent  Ollie Connors  along to see how that middle ground is working out for them. 6 things we learned watching Fucked Up in [...]

Shining One One One Indie Recordings 03 June 2013 by David Keevill For a band with big enough brass tacks to coin their own genre , Shining’s latest release One One One sidles past your ear drums so carefully that it doesn’t even whisper the idea of perforation. Their latest record seems [...]

Bloody hell, this year is flying by - in less than two weeks time, Download Festival 2013 is kicking off over at Donington Park. And that means it's time we dropped our Download Festival 2013 Slaylist. We've got some big plans for our festival coverage this year, but we're keeping them under wraps until nearer the festival itself. Until then, gorge yourselves on out MAMMOTH Download Festival 2013 Slaylist, featuring tracks from damn near every band on the bill that we could find of Spotify. [...]

Just in case Black Metal versions of One Direction and Friends and the chance to buy heavy metal-styled pop t-shirts wasn't enough, you can buy patches for your undoubtedly cut-off denim jacket now. Yep, there are Madonna, Lady Gaga, Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Carly Rae Jepsen's names written as if they were a Black Metal logo. It's been done before , of course, but what's different about this collection is that they're all printed [...]

The Michael Jordan of being a wanker was back slam dunkin' it this week as Jared Leto performed a flashmob three-song 'gig' in London's Soho Square with his band, 30 Seconds To Mars. Anyone who's been to Soho's sex shop alleys will know that Jared will have felt right at home amongst all the other fake cocks. 30STD carefully waited til everyone was on half term so that mums and dads could bring their impressionable youngsters to worship at the temple of a 41-year-old man who considers letting a young fan sleep in his bed a 'prize' [...]

Kylesa Ultraviolet Season of Mist 27 May 2013 by Tom Dare It's interesting that two of the most notable alumni of that Georgia sludge scene – Baroness and Mastodon – have moved a little away from their more crushing roots in recent years, and had success by doing so. Another distinguished graduate, Kylesa , have found [...]

Tom Morello is 49 years old today. Well done, Tom! Please stop playing as The Nightwatchman and get back together with Zack and the boys to make a new Rage Against The Machine album before it's too late, yeah? Joking aside, since it  is  Tom's birthday, we figured we ought to revisit his band's most high-profile UK success - the time that an internet campaign got their breakthrough hit,  'Killing In The Name', to the UK Christmas Number 1 spot in the UK singles chart. And all because of [...]

Evile Skull Earache Records 27 May 2013 by Rob McAuslan So, "nu-thrash" is dead then? It seems so and not before time really - as a notorious grump and long-time thrasher myself, the majority of the latter-day neon-and-bandanas "party thrash" contingent got right on my norks. More of a pastiche that missed pretty much the entire point of the [...]

Those Finnish widdlers of all things guitar, Children of Bodom , have a new studio album coming out next month. It's their eighth LP. Eighth! It's called  Halo Of Blood , and they're pretty damn pleased with it. So much so that they sent us a video of frontman/guitarist Alexi Laiho and bassist/backing vocalist Henkka Seppälä telling us what their favourite individual tracks from the album are. -- Watch Thrash Hits TV: Children of Bodom's Alexi Laiho & Henkka Seppälä pick their favourite tracks from Halo Of Blood: [...]

There are so many regular features about what sick tattoos bands have got and what awesome trainers they're wearing, but what about their haircare regime? How do they get their hair looking so cool? HOW? You were thinking it, so we asked it. What shampoo do you use, Wes Borland of Limp Bizkit? "I use a shampoo called Pert Plus that is a shampoo-conditioner in one so it makes it real easy to get that whole hair washing thing out of the way quickly." [...]

The James Cleaver Quintet Mechanical Young Hassle Records 17 June 2013 by Gavin Lloyd Assuming the UK rock scene was the frozen aisle in your local supermarket (which I'm going to), the likes of You Me At Six and Lower Than Atlantis would be the pizzas, you know what you're getting but still plenty of people [...]

This was meant to be a phone interview with The Dillinger Escape Plan but Greg Puciato didn't manage to make the connection - that is what we assume to be the connection problems - so we've had to do this via email. There appears to have been a bit of a sense of humour transplant with the first question, but this is an email interview and Greg is an interesting man so it's still ok. We know first-hand that he doesn't mind spouting nonsense face-to-face, so it;s cool. To be fair, we could've put more effort into writing down more [...]

Y'know how people are always failing to get the pun in the name 'Thrash Hits'? It happens all the time. You'd think after five long years of doing this, people would've caught on to the fact that it's a play on words on Smash Hits , and a recognition that we (in part) try to channel their simultaneous irreverence and love for their subject matter, albeit from a metal perspective. And that we're not   exclusively a website about thrash metal. Sometimes though, you have to give the idiots what [...]

TesseracT Altered State Century Media 27 May 2013 By Ruth Booth When doom-mongers spoke of the world's end in 2012, TesseracT may have felt a tiny bit paranoid. Their lauded debut One had seen them branded standard-bearers of UK Djent, but a cancelled major tour, and the departure of their second vocalist in 12 months left TesseracT struggling to tread water. That they reached the end of the year with both new album [...]