Video Drop Tuesday: Deathcore, Nu-Metal Nostalgia, and Protest Riffs Flood the US Metal Feed
Some weeks the metal news cycle hands you one big story. This week it handed us a stack of them, and almost all point back to the same idea: American heavy music is still figuring out how to be seen. Between a pile of new music videos, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame grievance that refuses to die, and a horror anthology that let a Swedish rock star direct a segment about sound itself, the throughline is clear — visibility, legacy, and who gets to control the narrative around heavy music in 2026.
The Video Drop Deluge
Let's start with the obvious: it was a heavy day for music videos. Nu-metal-adjacent rockers From Ashes To New put out a clip for "Love Me," pulled from the deluxe edition of "Reflections" that's landing in November — proof that even established radio-rock acts are leaning on expanded reissues to keep momentum between album cycles. Meanwhile SIFYN, the project featuring former Veil of Maya personnel, unveiled "Sew Me Up," a video the band says was "newly unencrypted," a framing that plays into the tech-paranoia aesthetic a lot of modern djent and progressive metalcore acts have leaned into over the past few years.
Then there's Sicksense, dropping "Seller's Remorse" ahead of their "Funerals" EP, which arrives this Friday — a quick turnaround that shows how compressed release cycles have become. Bands aren't waiting weeks between single and video anymore; they're stacking them right up against the release date to keep algorithmic momentum from stalling out.
California deathcore stalwarts Suicide Silence also joined the parade with a Nathan Karma Cox-directed video for "Make Your Exit," the latest cut from their upcoming album "Graceless," due November 20 via Century Media. Deathcore has had a rough decade of critical dismissal, but bands like Suicide Silence have kept the genre's commercial engine running, and their continued relevance says something about how durable that mid-2000s sound has proven to be. If you're tracking the genre's current health, it's worth putting deathcore acts like Texas outfit A Wake in Providence on your radar too — the sound clearly still has teeth in the US underground.
Morello, Kneecap, and the Politics That Never Left Metal
Tom Morello dropped a video for "Unconquered" featuring Irish rap trio Kneecap, timed with his new solo album "Everyone Gets Everything They Want." It's a pairing that makes total sense once you remember Morello's entire career has been built on the collision of riffs and resistance. Kneecap have become one of the most talked-about acts in punk-adjacent politics over the past year, and Morello linking arms with them is a reminder that the guitarist has never really left the protest-music lane he carved out with Rage Against the Machine.
That same week, Rise Against frontman Tim McIlrath sat down with Good Charlotte's Joel Madden on the "Artist Friendly" podcast and talked candidly about how his band builds activism directly into its songwriting. His quote cuts right to the point:
"We're trying to alienate people all the time. It's just sort of baked into what we do."
It's a blunt, almost defiant statement in an era when a lot of bands are actively trying to avoid alienating anyone. Between Morello's Kneecap collaboration and McIlrath's comments, there's a clear thread running through American heavy music right now: political friction isn't a bug, it's the point. For crossover thrash and hardcore-adjacent bands working similar territory in the US underground — acts in the vein of Vulgar Display — that unapologetic stance is worth studying.
Horror and Metal Keep Finding Each Other
Shudder released the trailer for "V/H/S/MIXTAPE," the ninth entry in the found-footage horror anthology franchise, and this one comes with a genuine metal pedigree: Ghost frontman Tobias Forge contributed a segment built around the idea that music and sound themselves become the source of terror. It's a clever hook, and it continues a long tradition of metal musicians crossing over into horror filmmaking rather than just scoring trailers for it.
That horror-metal overlap has deep roots in the American scene — it's basically the entire aesthetic that horror punk acts like Wednesday 13 have built careers on. Forge stepping behind the camera for a found-footage anthology feels like a natural extension of Ghost's theatrical, ritualistic stage presence, and it's exactly the kind of crossover that keeps metal culturally relevant to audiences who might never buy a ticket to a club show.
The Hall of Fame Argument Nobody's Settling
Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French used a new interview with The Mistress Carrie Podcast to reignite a conversation that never really goes away: why isn't Twisted Sister in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? French argued the institution claims to prioritize influence and career impact over pure commercial numbers, yet a band that helped define the visual and sonic language of 80s metal for a mainstream American audience remains on the outside looking in. He didn't mince words:
"We don't get the respect we should get."
It's a familiar complaint from that generation of American metal, and it lands harder given how much of the current concert economy still runs on 80s metal bands. Between Motörhead's "Orgasmatron" getting a 40th-anniversary remix from longtime producer Cameron Webb (out November 6 via BMG) and the trailer drop for "Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back to the Beginning," the concert film capturing Ozzy's final live performance, the industry keeps proving that catalog and legacy content from that era is still enormously bankable — even while the institutions meant to formally recognize that legacy drag their feet. If you're building out a personal list of the best metal albums of all time, "Orgasmatron" belongs on it regardless of what any hall of fame decides, and the same goes for the NWOTHM-leaning revivalists currently keeping that sound alive stateside, like Necromancer.
Underground Supergroups and the Weight of Longevity
Satanic Planet — the project pairing Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves with Dave Lombardo of Slayer, Misfits, Mr. Bungle, and Dead Cross fame, alongside Luke Henshaw and Justin Pearson of The Locust — shared "Church Burning," a single from their upcoming album "Dead Deities." It's exactly the kind of extreme-adjacent supergroup that thrives in the American underground: a mix of pedigreed drumming, provocateur theatrics, and noise-rock lineage that wouldn't work anywhere else.
Meanwhile Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg sat down for a long-form interview reflecting on 17 years in the industry, including candid discussion of the mental toll of playing in a band as intense as Slipknot since he was 23 years old. It's a rare moment of a working metal musician talking openly about the psychological cost of longevity in this genre, and it pairs uncomfortably well with the news that Rose Tattoo's Angry Anderson gave one of his final interviews just days before suffering a cardiac arrest that ended his farewell tour. Heavy music demands a lot from the people who make it, physically and mentally, and both stories are worth sitting with.
Gear Talk and What's Next
On a lighter note, Metal Injection made the case this week for HEAVYS, a headphone brand built specifically with metal listeners in mind — a small but notable sign that the gear industry is finally recognizing metalheads as a dedicated market rather than an afterthought bolted onto general audio marketing.
Between video drops, protest anthems, horror crossovers, and a hall of fame fight that shows no signs of resolving, the American metal scene remains as scrappy and self-sufficient as ever. If you're chasing new metal bands 2026 has to offer or trying to map out metal bands touring 2026, the underground is where that story is actually being written — bands like DevilDriver keep proving that groove and melodic death metal still pack rooms across the country. Check upcoming shows near you, and if your band belongs in this conversation, submit your band to get on our radar.