Papa Roach

Papa Roach is an American rock band hailing all the way from Vacaville, California, USA. The band is an enormous success, gaining in fame since their start back in 1993. To date they have sold more than 20 million albums worldwide.

Gojira

It has always been hard to put a tag on GOJIRA, one of France’s most extreme bands the country’s musical pallet has ever known. But then again, the band has never really sought out such a tag, instead letting the music do the talking, preferring introspection and intelligence over preconceived notions and preexisting tags. Ever since the 1996 formation in town of Bayonne in the southwest of France, GOJIRA has been an ever-evolving experiment in extreme metal ultimately built upon a worldly, ever-conscious outlook with roots firmly-planted both in the hippie movement and an environmentally-conscious, new age mentality. This time, with The Way of All Flesh, GOJIRA harnesses a spiritual consciousness as well, but still culminates in a sound wholly heavy.

Originally dubbed Godzilla, after the scaly, green film star with an equally huge reputation as the newfound band’s sound, the brothers Duplantier – guitarist/vocalist Joe and drummer Mario – and fellow Frenchmen Jean Michel Labadie on bass and Christian Andreu on guitar, quickly released several demos, ultimately changing the band’s name and independently releasing the first GOJIRA album, Terra Incognita, in 2001, offering up a brief glimpse into the giant GOJIRA would eventually become through persistent hard work and years of toiling in the metal underground.

After the 2003 release of the band’s follow-up, The Link, throughout Europe and the subsequent live DVD release the next year, of the aptly-titled The Link Alive, 2005 brought the release of From Mars To Sirius, the band’s breakthrough release, garnering high praise and a North American release through Prosthetic Records in 2006. Fans of not only heavy, extreme music took notice, but so did the intellectual world, thanks to Sirius’ thoughtful and expansive inner examination of the world at hand and the consequences of humanity’s struggle to coexist without harm. The metal world was amused and amazed: much of it hadn’t yet seen an equally intelligent and pummelingly heavy release that was as expansive and open as it was dense and concise.

Following the immense praise of From Mars To Sirius and recurring trips across the Atlantic for North American touring alongside the likes of Lamb of God, Children of Bodom, and Behemoth among others, GOJIRA established its stranglehold on the extreme metal spectrum with a linguist’s touch, a lyricist’s finesse, and a crushingly heavy live show that left audiences astounded, establishing the band’s live performance as a spot-on recreation of the band’s increasingly adept and intelligent studio output.

While 2007 wrapped with GOJIRA again touring North America on the Radio Rebellion Tour alongside Behemoth to the best reaction yet, the dawn of 2008 saw a nearly 10 month wait for while the band assembled The Way of All Flesh, one of the year’s most anticipated records. This time revolving around the undeniable dilemma of a mortal demise, GOJIRA’s soundtrack to the situation seems fitting. Shifting ever-so-slightly from the eco-friendly orchestra of impending doom on From Mars To Sirius to the band’s new message of the equally uncontrollable inevitability of death, The Way of All Flesh melds the open and airy progressive passages GOJIRA has become famous for with the sonically dense sounds and bludgeoningly heavy rhythms that makes the band an equally intelligent force as it is unmatchably heavy.

Featuring a guest vocal spot on “Adoration For None” from Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe – one of GOJIRA’s most vocal supporters from their first moment making an impression in the Americas – and the now familiar Morbid Angel-isms of The Way Of All Flesh’s title track join the angular riffing more akin to Meshuggah on “Esoteric Surgery” and the epic, artful plodding of the nearly 10-minute “The Art of Dying,” showing that GOJIRA have indeed opened a new bag of tricks for The Way Of All Flesh, while not abandoning the sound that first showed a massive promise of potential on Sirius.

“It’s more inventive than From Mars To Sirius and at the same time more straight to the point,” GOJIRA frontman Joe Duplantier says of The Way of All Flesh. “The whole album is about death, death is like a step on the path of the soul. The mystery surrounding this phenomenon is just so inspiring, and death is the most common thing on earth.”

“This album is also a ‘requiem’ for our planet,” Duplantier continues. “We don't want to be negative or cynical about the fate of humanity, but the situation on Earth is growing critical, and the way humans behave is so catastrophic that we really need to express our exasperation about it. It's not fear, but anger. But we still believe that consciousness can make a difference and that we can change things as human beings.”

Poppy

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Set It Off

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Story of the Year

Formed in St. Louis, Missouri, Story of the Year have fallen into the category of ‘emo’ with some of the earlier lyrical content, but they have achieved major label success with their debut album “Page Avenue” which has since been certified Gold by the RIAA.

Jinjer

‼️ OUT NOW: SOMEONE‘S DAUGHTER ‼️

Magnolia Park

MAGNOLIA PARK have never been ones to settle for subtlety. Since forming in 2018, the Orlando, Florida-based quintet have, over and over again, proven themselves to be one of the most exciting and forward-thinking groups in the underground, spinning a chameleonic, genre-spanning sound that incorporates punk, rock, pop, hip-hop and metalcore into a dizzying, multisensory experience.

Blazing onto the scene with an insatiable social media work ethic and prolific musical output, their popular Halloween mixtapes, multi-part Eater EP series and full-length debut, Baku’s Revenge, cemented them not only as a playlist and For You Page favorite for millions of listeners around the world, but a must-see live act on tour with Simple Plan, Sum 41, A Day To Remember and the inaugural Summer School tour (where they served as a headliner), as well as major festivals like Reading and Leeds, When We Were Young, Sonic Temple and Welcome To Rockville.

Now, Magnolia Park – vocalist Joshua Roberts, guitarists Tristan Torres and Freddie Criales, drummer Joe Horsham and bassist Vincent Ernst – are set to unleash their most ambitious effort yet: VAMP (Epitaph Records), a neo-gothic concept album rich in world-building and gripping storytelling. Culling influence from the band’s favorite anime including the long-running Vampire Hunter D, along with inspiration from iconic works like Star Wars, Dracula and Joseph Cambell’s legendary monomyth, Vamp unravels an ominous journey through Nocturne Nexus, where rulers and rebels battle with the future hanging in the balance.

The project’s roots took place in Australia, where, after performing triumphant sets to thousands at the 2023 Good Things Festival, the band was more encouraged than ever to chase a bold, new, musical direction: one that found them tapping into the heavier influences they’d begun dabbling in on Halloween Mixtape II, adding a ferocious bite to their trademark pop-punk-meets-hip-hop sound.

“Seeing the crowd react to our heavier songs was really eye-opening for us,” says Torres, referencing “Animal,” featuring Ethan Ross and PLVTINUM, and the 20 million-streamer “Do Or Die,” songs that showcase the true versatility of the group. “That reaction inspired us to continue exploring that side of our sound, which informed how we started building out the world of Vamp.”

Leaning into these more morose, minor-key impulses, the band began crafting their next chapter. Songs like “SHALLOW” and “SHADOW TALK,” some of the first the band penned for the follow-up to Halloween Mixtape II, set the tone, with repeated references to darkness, shadows, and monsters – leading them to think bigger about what the set of songs could become. Before long, they were entrenched in building out the album’s details, crafting characters, settings, and storylines that added new layers of complexity and creativity to their already captivating sound.

Vamp follows Aurora X1, a half-cyborg/half-human heroine thrust into turmoil when the Shadow Cult, led by her estranged father, Obsidian, launches a plan to merge the Shadow Realm with the physical world. Following ancient legends, occult mysticism and the destruction left by the Shadow Cult, Aurora and her army of Shadow Breakers search for the Bloodstone, a powerful gem that grants them superhuman speed and strength – but not without its own cost.

Across the album’s 11 tracks – produced by the band’s own producers, Torres, Criales and Ernst, alongside Andrew Wade (A Day To Remember, Wage War), Hiram Hernandez (blessthefall, Real Friends) and Andy Karpovck (408, Taylor Acorn) and mixed by Zakk Cervini (Bad Omens, Bring Me The Horizon) – Magnolia Park soundtrack this dramatic tale of crimson blood and chrome-plated courage through their own mix of man and machine, stacking whirring electronics and industrial undertones alongside sledgehammer breakdowns, walls of detuned guitars and Roberts’ seam-splitting vocals.

The anthemic nü-metal rage, replete with sky-high melodies, is front and center on tracks like pre-release singles “WORSHIP” (ft. PLVTINUM and Vana) and “CULT,” which see both Aurora and Obsidian readying their followers for the epic battle ahead. Elsewhere, “CRAVE” finds Aurora’s followers, the Vampires, fighting a war within, battling their thirst for blood while attempting to sidestep a horrific act that might doom them forever.

But despite the intricately detailed, jet-black motif of Vamp – not just the music itself, but the accompanying photos, videos, artwork, merchandise and, as fans will soon see on tour, production at the band’s already raved-about live show – at its heart, the album is deeply personal. The songs stand as a unified, cohesive body of work, complete with a cliffhanger that sets up even more epic events in the future of Aurora X1 and the Shadow Realm. But divorced from the larger narrative, they also represent the push and pull of personal life. So while a song like the mournful “OPHELIA” stands as a reminder of the cost of war, and “THE SCREAMS” details Obsidian’s power to infiltrate the minds of his enemies, they’re born from very real places in the band’s personal lives: love and loss, the internal strength required to tune out the forces looking to shake us from our dreams.

It’s this ability to blur the lines – between genres, yes, but even between how their songs can resonate with audiences – that’s made Magnolia Park such an exciting band to watch. There are few acts in the scene who could effortlessly alternate between covering a beloved Disney track (“I2I,” which the band lent to the 2024 A Whole New Sound compilation) and conceptualizing a heady, intricate work like Vamp, but that unpredictability is truly what keeps fans – and Magnolia Park themselves – on their toes.

“The most exciting thing about this band is how everyone elevates everyone else,” Roberts says. “I'm just so glad that we're all able to do that and come out with great music and great vibes and feel like we’ve accomplished something special. That's the whole mission: to make sure that at the end of the journey, we're better than we were in the beginning.”