Hollywood Goes Full Horns-Up: Ozzy Tributes, Hot Topic's New Stage, and a Week of Metal Blade Signings Shake the US Scene
Los Angeles spent most of this week doing what Los Angeles does best: turning grief, nostalgia, and commerce into one glittering purple-carpet spectacle. But underneath the premieres and the retail-store livestreams, there's a lot happening across the US metal scene that deserves a closer look — from heritage rockers plotting comebacks to a Metal Blade signing that has Killswitch Engage fans losing their minds.
The Purple Carpet and the Hot Topic Stage
Jack and Sharon Osbourne hosted the official world premiere of Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back To The Beginning on October 14 at The Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, and the video recap circulating this week is a reminder of just how deep Ozzy's shadow still falls over American heavy music. Musicians from across generations showed up to honor the band that, as one recent retrospective put it, settled the "who invented heavy metal" argument the moment the title track of the first Black Sabbath record dropped its opening riff. That lineage runs straight through every death metal, doom, and black metal band grinding away in basements and DIY venues across this country right now — including acts like American black metal and death metal outfit Ara, whose crushing, atmospheric approach owes an obvious debt to that original Birmingham blueprint even as it pushes the sound somewhere colder and more extreme.
Meanwhile, a few miles away, Hot Topic opened its new "Hot Topic Live" performance series inside a custom-built studio at its Hollywood flagship, with Pierce The Veil christening the stage. It's a social-first format designed to feel like an intimate club show, and whatever you think of a mall-rock chain launching a content studio, it's another signal that the infrastructure around American heavy music keeps mutating — bands need stages wherever they can find them, whether that's a 500-cap room, a livestream rig, or a retail storefront repurposed as a soundstage.
Godsmack's Sully Erna Says New Music Is Coming — Eventually
On the legacy-rock front, Godsmack frontman Sully Erna confirmed on The Mistress Carrie Podcast that new material from the band will "happen at some point next year," following up 2023's Lighting Up The Sky. Erna admitted he's genuinely curious where the songwriting will take the band at this stage of their career, which is a refreshingly honest answer from a guy who's been doing this since the Clinton administration. Godsmack has always occupied a strange middle ground in the US heavy music conversation — too radio-friendly for the tr00 crowd, too heavy for classic rock stations — but their staying power says something about how durable a well-built groove-metal riff can be. Expect more details as 2026 rolls on, and keep an eye on upcoming shows listings once a cycle actually kicks off.
Metal Blade Lands Burn Eternal — And Killswitch Fans Are Already Losing It
The bigger underground story of the week might be Burn Eternal, the new project from Howard Jones (ex-Killswitch Engage vocalist) and Adam D. (Killswitch Engage guitarist), who have officially signed to Metal Blade Records and teased new music on the way. Details are thin, but the pairing alone is enough to light up metalcore forums across the country. Jones and Dutkiewicz were responsible for some of the most important melodic metalcore records to come out of the Northeast scene in the 2000s, and whatever Burn Eternal turns into, it's a reminder that the connective tissue between that era's scene and today's US metalcore and deathcore underground — bands like Boundaries, grinding through their own brand of death metal-inflected metallic hardcore — never really disappeared. It just kept mutating into new lineups and new label deals.
Lita Ford, Frontiers, and the 80s Metal Pipeline
Speaking of veterans refusing to slow down: Lita Ford has officially signed to Frontiers Music Srl, with her new single "Dracula" dropping next week as the first taste of her follow-up to 2012's Living Like A Runaway, once again produced by guitarist Gary Hoey. Ford remains one of the most important guitarists to come out of the Los Angeles scene, and her continued output is a good reminder for anyone compiling lists of the best metal albums of all time or debating the greatest 80s metal bands that the Runaways-to-solo-career pipeline produced more than nostalgia acts — it produced a genuine guitar hero who's still writing new riffs in her sixties.
That same heritage energy shows up in the newly confirmed lineup for Rock 'N' Roll Fantasy Camp's "Metalmania IV," running March 11–14, 2027, which will feature Black Sabbath's Geezer Butler, Queensrÿche's Geoff Tate, Dokken's George Lynch, and drummer Tommy Aldridge. It's a fantasy-camp format, sure, but having four musicians of that caliber in one room for four days is the kind of hands-on access to the US metal scene's history that no documentary or box set can replicate. Nicko McBrain's new autobiography Hello Boys And Girls!, arriving October 22 via Harper Nonfiction, and his accompanying spoken-word tour, round out a week that's unusually heavy on metal elder statesmen cashing in decades of road stories in book and classroom form.
Hardcore and Crossover Keep the Floor Moving
On the more aggressive end of the spectrum, Ho99o9 have teamed up with Slay Squad on the new single "War Bait," released just ahead of their North American tour together — a pairing that makes total sense given both acts' shared appetite for chaos, noise, and genre-blending hardcore energy. It's the kind of tour that should put American hardcore and crossover venues through their paces this cycle, and it sits comfortably alongside the ongoing US crossover thrash resurgence carried by bands like Corrosion of Conformity, whose sludge-and-thrash DNA helped build the template this generation of hardcore-adjacent bands is still drawing from.
Overseas, French hardcore band Headbussa dropped their new track "Manhunt" ahead of their debut full-length Survival Measures, out November 13 on Daze Records. It's not a domestic release, but it's worth flagging for anyone tracking the crust punk and raw hardcore underground — a genre corner of the index that's packed with bands and criminally under-covered. If you're running a crust or raw hardcore project in the States and want eyes on your next release, this is exactly the kind of underground momentum worth riding; hit up submit your band and get on our radar.
Get-Well Wishes for Noodles
Less celebratory news: The Offspring guitarist Kevin "Noodles" Wasserman announced he's stepping away from live performances to deal with what he described as a "sudden and fairly serious health issue." Noodles didn't share specifics, and the statement was understandably brief, but it's a gut-punch for a band that's been a fixture of American punk and alt-rock festivals for three decades. The wider punk and heavy music community has already started sending support online, and we'll be watching for updates as The Offspring figures out their touring plans for the rest of the cycle.
Vault Tracks, Anniversaries, and a 2027 Comeback
Soilwork quietly released a previously unheard single, "Night Whispers & Shining Lights," pulled from the band's vault — a nice surprise for melodic death metal fans who thought they'd heard everything from that era of the catalog. Lacuna Coil, meanwhile, celebrated the 20th anniversary of 2006's Karmacode with a double single: a redux of "Fragile" (now "Fragile XX") and an electronic-tinged remix of "I Wish You Were Dead" courtesy of producer Swarm. Both releases are a reminder that gothic and melodic metal's mid-2000s peak still has commercial life left in it.
And in a move that'll matter more to European touring circuits than American ones, Swedish gothic/doom veterans Lake of Tears announced their return to live performances in 2027 — their first run of shows in years. It won't directly affect US stages, but expect festival booking chatter to pick up as the announcement ripples outward; bands building their metal bands touring 2026 and 2027 schedules are clearly already thinking several cycles ahead.
Looking Ahead
Between Metal Blade's new signing, Frontiers landing Lita Ford, and a steady stream of anniversary reissues, the back half of 2025 is shaping up to be less about brand-new breakout acts and more about the industry doubling down on proven heritage. That doesn't mean the underground is quiet — far from it. Death metal, black metal, and crossover thrash scenes across the States continue to churn out new metal bands 2026 watchers should be tracking, and plenty of them are sitting in our index right now waiting to be discovered. If you're one of them, don't wait for a label to find you — submit your band and check upcoming shows near you before the next wave of touring announcements locks in.