Metal Edge Presents
Highlights
HOW ROSS ROBINSON BOTTLED TEENAGE FIRE ON XCOMM'S 'TIME TO BURN'
The producer behind Korn and Slipknot signed a band of Venice teenagers to his own label and called the sessions "daycare." Ross Robinson breaks down XCOMM's debut Time to Burn, the youngest, rawest record of his career.
MASTODON SHARE “YOUR GHOST AGAIN,” ANNOUNCE POISONOUS WEAPONS TOUR WITH DEAFHEAVEN AND ALCEST
Photo: Clay Patrick McBride Mastodon released "Your Ghost Again" this morning, their first new music since founding guitarist Brent Hinds died last August. Hours later the band announced The Poisonous Weapons Tour, a 27-date fall headlining run with Deafheaven and Alcest. In a video posted to their Instagram, the band’s three founding members walked through what the song is and why they chose it to go first. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Mastodon (@mastodonrocks) Brann Dailor traced it to being back in a familiar place without the person who used to fill it. He kept seeing Hinds “out of the corner of my eye,” he said, in the spot where he always stood with a guitar, his mind catching at a presence that was no longer there. Bill Kelliher put the choice more plainly. The band wanted to lead with “a song that sounds like Mastodon,” he said, one that holds everything they do, and he stopped short of going deeper because too much of it is personal. Patrik Berger, who has worked with Taylor Swift and Robyn, produced the track with Converge’s Kurt Ballou, and it leads a ninth album the band has already finished. Troy Sanders wrote his part of the song “all about Brent, and for Brent,” he said, shaping the bridge around a couple of lines of gratitude for everything Hinds gave him and the years they spent onstage together. That gratitude doubles as the band’s first real public reckoning with the loss. Dailor admitted they had never properly addressed Hinds’ death, that they simply couldn’t, and that he is “still unpacking it,” hoping the song lands for fans carrying their own grief. Hinds had been gone from the lineup for months before he died. He and the band parted ways in March 2025 after 25 years together, a split they called mutual and left mostly unexplained. YouTuber and session player Ben Eller covered a festival set in the Dominican Republic days later, but the touring chair soon went to Nick Johnston, a Canadian fusion guitarist whose playing runs cleaner and more exploratory than Hinds’ country-warped leads. Johnston has been onstage with Kelliher, Sanders and Dailor across Europe this spring, and Kelliher has confirmed that he wrote and recorded parts for the new record. Hinds died in a motorcycle accident in August, roughly five months after the split. The tour carries all of that into the fall. It runs 27 dates, starting September 16 in Orlando and wrapping October 24 in Dallas, with the Brooklyn stop landing September 24. Deafheaven and Alcest ride along for the full run, a support bill pulled from the center of blackgaze, the corner of heavy music where shoegaze’s wash of guitar meets black metal’s blast and shriek. Deafheaven earned that slot on the strength of Lonely People with Power, the 2025 album we loved, which pulled them back toward the ferocity of their early work after the clean-sung detour of Infinite Granite. George Clarke spends most of it screaming again, and the band built some of its sharpest songs around him. Alcest, the French project that helped invent the style in the first place, brings more melody and atmosphere than most metal tours bother to carry. General go on sale Friday, June 5 at 10 a.m. local time. MASTODON TOUR DATES: 9/16 – Orlando, FL – Hard Rock Live9/18 – Asheville, NC – Asheville Yards9/19 – Pittsburgh, PA – Stage AE9/20 – Louisville, KY – Louder Than Life Festival9/22 – Philadelphia, PA – Franklin Music Hall9/23 – Boston, MA – House of Blues9/24 – Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Paramount9/25 – Washington, DC – The Anthem9/27 – Montreal, QC – MTELUS9/28 – Toronto, ON – Rebel9/29 – Buffalo, NY – Buffalo RiverWorks10/1 – Detroit, MI – Fillmore Detroit10/2 – Chicago, IL – Riviera Theatre10/3 – Minneapolis, MN – Palace Theatre10/6 – Salt Lake City, UT – The Complex10/7 – Boise, ID – Revolution Concert House & Event Center10/9 – Oakland, CA – Fox Theater10/10 – Los Angeles, CA – Hollywood Palladium10/11 – San Diego, CA – The Sound10/14 – Denver, CO – Fillmore Auditorium10/16 – Des Moines, IA – Val Air Ballroom10/17 – St. Louis, MO – The Pageant10/18 – Memphis, TN – Satellite Music Hall10/20 – Cleveland, OH – The Agora10/21 – Greensboro, NC – Piedmont Hall10/22 – Atlanta, GA – The Eastern10/24 – Dallas, TX – Sick New World Dallas Festival
GRETA VAN FLEET END THREE-YEAR SILENCE WITH NEW SINGLE "PLAY YOUR GAMES": FIRST LISTEN
Photo: Dimitry Mak A few nights ago, Greta Van Fleet played the Bowery Ballroom. Not Madison Square Garden, not the Barclays Center — the Bowery, a room that holds maybe 500 people on a generous night, tucked onto a block of lower Manhattan that still smells faintly of a different era of New York. The show sold out instantly. When they did, it became immediately clear that whatever Greta Van Fleet did during their time away from the spotlight, they didn't spend it getting soft. Josh Kiszka prowled the stage like a man who'd been keeping something bottled up for years. The Kiszka brothers — Josh, Jake, and Sam — and drummer Danny Wagner hit the room with the kind of kinetic force that makes you realize how much the band's sheer physical presence had been missing. They debuted two new tracks that night: the crushing "Tear It Down" and what is now, officially, their first single back, "Play Your Games." Both songs hit like a declaration. The crowd barely had time to register what they were hearing before they were already screaming it back. "Play Your Games," out today via Republic Records, is the official first move of that declaration — and the band's first new music since 2023's Starcatcher. Recorded in Tennessee with producer Mike Elizondo, who has worked with everyone from Fiona Apple to Turnstile, the track pulls from one of the oldest demos in the band's archives, and you can feel exactly how long it's been living inside them. It charges forward on pure instinct, all swagger and barely-controlled chaos, recalling the years the band spent playing small clubs in Saginaw, Michigan before the world caught up with them. "The flagship of that song is irreverence," guitarist Jake Kiszka said in press materials for the release. "It's this beautiful nature of seizing a moment." There is something almost autobiographical about that framing — a band that spent years being told what they were, what they sounded like, who they reminded people of, now arriving with a song that seems deliberately unconcerned with any of that. It's the sound of a band done apologizing. It's also a welcome answer to a brief stretch of fan anxiety. When Greta Van Fleet first teased the single this spring with social posts branded "Thanks for the wild ride," a significant chunk of the fanbase panicked, reading the phrase as a goodbye. "Play Your Games" makes the actual intent clear: this isn't a farewell. It's a starting gun. A music video directed by Nikola Crnobrnja accompanies the release, expanding the visual world the band appears to be constructing around this new era. Based on what we witnessed at the Bowery — the coiled energy, the two new songs that felt built to fill much bigger rooms than the one they were in — that world is shaping up to be something worth paying close attention to. Greta Van Fleet are back. And they clearly came back with something to prove.
