Maiden Storms New Jersey, All Shall Perish Rises From Hibernation, and Richard Patrick Goes Industrial Again
Tour season kicked into full throttle this week as one of the biggest packages in recent memory rolled into the Garden State, underground death metal veterans broke a fifteen-year silence with a second single in the same month, and a Filter legend proved industrial rock still has teeth. Add in a hardcore band's major-label jump, a Slipknot frontman going acoustic in Las Vegas, and the usual dose of MetalSucks absurdity, and you've got a snapshot of exactly where American heavy music stands heading into the back half of the year.
Maiden, Anthrax, and Megadeth Turn New Jersey Into Ground Zero
Iron Maiden's Run For Your Lives World Tour officially kicked off its U.S. leg in New Jersey, and the bill reads like a wish list assembled by every metalhead who came of age on cassette tapes and battle jackets: Maiden, Anthrax, and Megadeth sharing a single stage on a single night. It's the kind of lineup that reminds younger fans why the phrase "80s metal bands" still moves tickets in 2025 — these are acts whose influence runs through virtually every subgenre covered on this site, from thrash to power metal to the technical death metal scattered across our index.
For a regional outlet like ours, nights like this matter beyond the nostalgia factor. They're a reminder that arena-level metal touring is alive and well in the States, and that the appetite for legacy acts hasn't cooled even as new bands crowd the underground. If you're tracking which stops are left on this run or building out your fall concert calendar, our upcoming shows listings are the place to start plotting your route.
All Shall Perish Breaks a 15-Year Drought — Twice
Speaking of legacy acts still delivering the goods: Northern California extreme metal outfit All Shall Perish dropped "Led To Slaughter," their second new single in a matter of weeks, following "Be As Kings, Be As Gods" earlier in the month. That's two songs in one month after a decade and a half of studio silence, and both were tracked with producer Zack Ohren, the same guy behind recent work from Machine Head and progressive death metal outfit Fallujah.
There's something worth sitting with here: a band that helped define West Coast deathcore and technical death metal in the 2000s is re-emerging not with a nostalgia lap but with actual new material, produced by someone actively shaping the sound of current extreme metal. It's a blueprint other dormant bands could learn from — don't just reunite for the festival circuit, show up with songs. For fans of the Bay Area's brutal death metal underground, it's also worth checking in on acts like Leg, who've been carrying that same unrelenting, low-tuned aggression into the current scene.
Richard Patrick Goes Back to His Industrial Roots
Filter frontman and former Nine Inch Nails member Richard Patrick has a new project, and it's exactly as heavy as longtime fans hoped. A Place To Kill, his collaboration with There Is No Us vocalist and photographer Jim Louvau, released the single and music video for "Keep My Name Out Of Your Mouth," pulled from the upcoming APTK2 EP. The track leans hard into the cold, mechanical aggression that made Patrick's name in the '90s industrial boom, and it's a good sign for a subgenre that's been quietly building momentum in the American underground for a couple of years now.
Industrial metal doesn't get the headline space that death metal or metalcore commands, but Patrick's pedigree — NIN, Filter, decades of chart success — gives A Place To Kill a level of visibility most new industrial projects never see. Worth keeping an eye on as the full EP rolls out.
Haywire Signs to Roadrunner as Hardcore's Business Side Keeps Shifting
Hardcore band Haywire announced a signing to Roadrunner Records along with a new LP and video, following a Sound & Fury appearance where they reportedly threw cash into the crowd. The record was produced by Citizen's Mat Kerekes and mixed by Twitching Tongues/God's Hate's Taylor Young, whose own band God's Hate surprised everyone with an unannounced Sound & Fury set and a surprise EP drop of its own.
This is the kind of cross-pollination that keeps American hardcore vital — bands producing and mixing for each other, surprise drops replacing traditional rollout campaigns, and a major label like Roadrunner still willing to bet on a hardcore act in an era when streaming numbers dominate every A&R conversation. It's a good moment to shine a light on the DIY and crust-adjacent corners of our own index that operate on that same surprise-release, no-frills energy — bands like Atrament, who blend black metal and crust punk in a way that owes a real debt to hardcore's ethos even if the genre tags differ.
Corey Taylor Goes Intimate in Vegas
Slipknot's Corey Taylor announced an "intimate show" at Fremont Country Club in Las Vegas next month, continuing a run of stripped-down solo appearances that started with an acoustic set at HorrorHound Weekend earlier this year. For an artist whose day job involves masks, pyro, and stadium-sized aggression, these smaller acoustic outings offer a different kind of value — a reminder that the songwriting under all that metalcore and nu-metal machinery still holds up when it's just a voice and a guitar.
It's also a smart moves-in-2026 signal for touring economics: as festival costs balloon and arena runs get harder to book profitably, intimate club shows are becoming a reliable revenue stream for artists at every level, from arena headliners like Taylor down to unsigned bands grinding out regional club dates.
The Business of Staying Alive (MetalSucks Does It Again)
On the lighter side of the news cycle, MetalSucks' Johnny Spreadsheets returned with another entry in his "Net Worthless" column, this time exploring the finer points of monetizing bodily fluids as a band-funding strategy. Absurd? Sure. But underneath the joke is a real conversation the entire underground has been having for years: how does a band actually stay financially afloat between reissues, mixing bills, and van repairs? It's the same question hanging over every unsigned thrash, death metal, or doom act putting out a self-funded EP this year.
Elsewhere, Nekrogoblikon's John Goblikon marked the band's 20th anniversary with a look back at how the whole goblin-core project got started, and MetalSucks' new "Do I Suck?" column tackled the eternal question of bootlegging your own father-in-law's merch. Silly on the surface, but these columns capture something real about the current scene — a mix of DIY hustle, gallows humor, and genuine community that keeps smaller bands moving forward even when the industry math doesn't add up.
Where the Underground Fits In
None of this happens in a vacuum. Every headline above — from arena-scale nostalgia tours to hardcore signings to a band monetizing whatever they can to keep the lights on — connects back to the regional scenes that make up the backbone of American metal. Thrash and metalcore hybrid acts like As King are working the same DIY playbook that Haywire and God's Hate used before their bigger breaks, while thrash outfits like Hate keep the riff-driven, no-nonsense tradition that Megadeth and Anthrax built decades ago alive at the club level.
If there's a throughline in this week's news, it's that the gap between legacy acts and the underground keeps shrinking — producers cross over between scenes, surprise EPs replace traditional rollouts, and bands from every corner of the American metal map are finding new ways to reach fans. Whether you're chasing the best metal albums of all time on a legacy tour bill or hunting down new metal bands 2026 has to offer at a basement show, the U.S. metal scene remains one of the most active and interconnected ecosystems in heavy music.
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