You may know about our love/obsession with most things Icelandic so it may not be a surprise to see a new band from Reykjavik featured here. This is MUCK, they play intelligent, discordant hardcore and it’s fantastic.

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Devin Townsend Project
Z²
InsideOut Music
27 October 2014

by Ruth Booth

Since Devin Townsend returned to music four years ago, we’ve seen nearly all sides of his diverse output reimagined and revitalised under his “Devin Townsend Project” moniker. All except one that is – Ziltoid The Omniscient, titular star of Townsend’s 2007 record and the musician’s malevolent alien alter-ego. Seven years on, we finally have Z² – the spiritual follow-up to ZTO’s screed on creativity and caffeine addiction – but with a difference this time.

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It seems we’ve become the go-to heavy metal guys for the BBC Radio 1 Review Show. That’s kind of cool, isn’t it? We think we can get away with saying that as we’ve been asked back for the fifth time tonight, where our Deputy Editor Hugh Platt will join host Edith Bowman and fellow guest Angel Haze in talking about a whole load of fresh new music. You can listen in online using your web browser, via your digital TV (it’s on Freeview channel 700, or thereabouts) or by tuning your old fashioned analogue radio to 97-99FM at 9pm GMT. If you want to join in, just tweet in using the hashtag #r1review and give Hugh some encouragement/abuse. We’re happy with either.

Valient Himself’s Rocknowledgy – the brilliant and now Thrash Hits-sponsored music podcast from the Valient Thorr frontman – is back with a new episode. You should download it now because it’s absolutely killer.

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Skeletonwitch are releasing their fifth album, Serpents Unleashed on 28 October 2013 via Prosthetic Records. The newsworthy part of this rare-on-Thrash-Hits news story is that you can stream that album right here. That is good news, FYI.

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We thought we’d be able to get Hallowe’en out of the way first, but real Christmas is obviously more important than Goth Christmas in the grand scheme of things.

Luckily, Slayer have released a range of sunglasses via Arnette, just in time for Christmas and Attila have done… something else.

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The global housing market is not doing well but Iron Maiden bassists need to sell their mansions. That’s a fact. Sadly for Steve Harris, he has had to play the game and drop almost one million pounds from the asking price of his eight-bedroom mansion in Essex.

He was selling the mansion for £6,750,000 a year ago, but that price has dropped by £0.9m to ‘just’ £5,850,000. Poor Steve.

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It’s usually when being dragged around the Swedish homeware caverns by our inevitably better halves for hours on end. Ignoring the meticulously laid out showrooms, we’ve instead preferred to dream of cheap meatballs, cheap hotdogs and the possibility of wheeling a lot of awesome stuff that we can build towards our shit cars – anything to get out – and, at some point, we’ve all asked ourselves the question: “IKEA or Death?” The thing is, we’ve never asked it in this context.

Some fine individuals from marketing company, Gatesman + Dave have made a fun game called IKEA OR DEATH where you have to guess whether a name is an item from IKEA or whether it’s a metal band. It’s fun. It’s a game. It’s a play on words. Let’s not get too emotional about a lot of the bands being black metal bands.

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Yes, the one-off London Christmas gigs are being foisted upon us already. The first one through the gates is the SGR Artist Management Christmas Feast on 19 December 2013 at The Borderline and isn’t the flyer a mighty fine piece of work?

From the ridiculous to the downright self-effacing in its descriptions, it’s a flyer as rich and enticing as any Toby carvery and with The Hell, Palm Reader, Feed The Rhino, TRC and the eponymous Gallows bassist in town, The Crobar is going to be one hell of a beautiful mess that evening.

Buy tickets here and then come hang in the Crobar with us after. Messy Christmas?

We’re very pleased to bring you an exclusive stream of ‘Sleepwalk’ – our favourite track from MINE’s forthcoming EP, Disappear. It’s being released via the mighty Holy Roar Records and that should be enough reason for you to check it out. Check it the heck out.

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