British extreme metal pioneers CARCASS have announced plans for a U.S. headline tour this spring with direct support from IMMOLATION and openers CREEPING DEATH. The tour kicks off on May 12 in Austin, Texas and will culminate on May 27 at Maryland Deathfest in Baltimore, Maryland. Tickets go on sale on Friday, March 25 at 10:00 a.m. local time at this location.

Tour dates:

May 12 – Austin, TX – Oblivion Access+
May 14 – Albuquerque, NM – Launchpad
May 15 – Tucson, AZ – 101 Toole
May 16 – Santa Ana, CA – The Observatory
May 17 – Roseville, CA – Goldfield Trading Post
May 20 – Colorado Springs, CO – The Black Sheep
May 21 – Omaha, NE – The Slowdown*
May 22 – Madison, WI – The Majestic
May 23 – Indianapolis, IN – Vogue
May 24 – Buffalo, NY – Town Ballroom
May 25 – Brooklyn, NY – Elsewhere^
May 26 – Worcester, MA – Palladium Upstairs^
May 27 – Baltimore, MD – Maryland Deathfest

+ No IMMOLATION or CREEPING DEATH
* No CREEPING DEATH
^ No IMMOLATION

Last summer, CARCASS frontman Jeff Walker spoke to AndrewHaug.com about how he has been spending the coronavirus downtime in his native United Kingdom. He said: “We’re kind of lucky that we had some reserves in the bank, so we could survive that way. I’m a bit of a squirrel; I always make sure there’s money in the bank to see us through hard times. And luckily, it was enough to tide us over for this period.

“As far as me getting by personally, I’ve just been looking for small joys in life — small things locally or whatever,” he continued. “Living a jetsetting life and having exciting times traveling the world and playing gigs, it’s one extreme to another. I’m just looking for small things to keep me happy and finding solace in the smallest things. I’ve been walking and cycling a lot more. There’s a lot of local history that I never noticed before — railway tracks and lines and really boring stuff, middle-age stuff like that that I’ve kind of got interested in.

“I’ve enjoyed the hiatus, to be honest… We’d been touring for seven years without a break, and it’s been healthy to step back and have a break. I’d also say it’s been a bit detrimental because we haven’t played together for 18 months now. So we’re gonna be incredibly rusty if we ever get to play again.

“It’s been positive, but now it’s starting to drag a bit,” Walker added. “The novelty’s wearing off because we just had a to cancel a European tour which would have been great timing for promotion of the [new CARCASS] album [‘Torn Arteries’].

“There’s no real end in sight for me. I wanna see things happen before I commit CARCASS to anything. We have confirmed a gig that we’re gonna play in November in the U.K. But as far as touring is concerned, I still see people booking tours and they still get canceled. I think it’s a bit kind of crappy to give false hope to people.”

CARCASS played its first pandemic-era concert on November 6 at the Damnation Festival in Leeds, U.K.

“Torn Arteries” was released in September via Nuclear Blast Records. Drummer Daniel Wilding did session work in Sweden at Studio Gröndahl with David Castillo while guitars were recorded at The Stationhouse with James Atkinson in Leeds, England. Eventually needing some form of residential location to finalize vocals, bass, and other guitarwork, the band headed back to Studio Gröndahl in Sweden to continue work in a very relaxed atmosphere with Castillo.

Banished from the frostbitten IMMORTAL nest, Abbath (the man) and ABBATH (the band) have made light work of establishing themselves as a fiercely independent creative force in extreme metal. Although not quite as brashly definitive as the illustrious classics that made the Norwegian so notorious, both 2016’s self-titled debut and 2019’s “Outstrider” were full of blistering, bombastic moments, all still rooted in the thunderous, fervently pitch-black heavy metal that seems to ooze from the singer / guitarist’s every pore.

As you might expect, “Dread Reaver” offers no radical departures, and we should all be thoroughly grateful for that. There are few things more exciting than the sound of Abbath (the man) at full pelt, and the opening “Acid Haze” provides a timely reminder of his uniquely berserk presence. Played at apocalyptic speed and bristling with fury, it sets the tone for another sustained sonic bombing raid, ending with a prolonged Abbath screech that seems to sum up his state of mind here. “Scarred Core” is marginally slower, but no less intense. The old-school values that he has always loudly espoused have rarely been more evident: this is steroid-bloated and violently hallucinating VENOM worship, thrillingly primitive and psychedelic.

“Dream Cull” was the first track that ABBATH released from “Dread Reaver”, and it’s arguably the most expansive on the record. With a greater sense of sonic space and a powerful, old-school gallop underpinning the brittle, wintry riffs, it has an epic, windswept feel that suits Abbath’s weather-beaten shriek perfectly. Lead guitarist Ole André Farstad’s explosive soloing comes as a welcome bonus, too. Elsewhere, “Myrmidon” bridges the divide between Norwegian black metal and POSSESSED’s “Seven Churches”: an unstoppable speed metal juggernaut aimed squarely at the night sky. “The Deep Unbound” is another all-out blitzkrieg; “Septentrion” takes a mid-paced battering ram to the grand mythology of the frozen north; “The Book of Breath” switches seamlessly from unrelenting brutality to a noirish, psilocybin fog, and back again.

The closing title track is a solid candidate for best of the lot. A muscular, marauding heavy metal anthem, with strong undercurrents of the otherworldly, it sounds sufficiently removed from its creator’s past achievements to be regarded as some kind of new manifesto for black metal heroism. As a ridiculously fiery version of METALLICA’s “Trapped Under Ice” also confirms, Abbath is still locked firmly into the heavy metal mainframe, and making some of the most dynamic music of his career. None more metal, even after all this time.



LINKIN PARK’s hit song “Numb” has surpassed one billion views on Spotify. It’s the band’s second track to reach that mark, following on from “In The End” which hit the milestone last June.

Back in November 2018, the music video for “Numb” surpassed one billion views on YouTube. Following the death of singer Chester Bennington in July 2017, fans of the group launched an unofficial campaign to get the “Numb” video to that milestone, a mission that was completed nearly a year and a half later.

“Numb” is taken from LINKIN PARK’s 2003 sophomore album “Meteora”. It was the 13th and final song on the LP and was released as the third single from the record. It topped the Alternative chart for 12 weeks and the Rock chart for three. The video, directed by band DJ Joe Hahn, is the oldest uploaded clip on YouTube to cross the one-billion mark.

The song was remixed as “Numb/Encore”, a collaboration between the band and rapper Jay-Z. Featured on the album “Collision Course”, it was a massive hit for both artists and earned them the Grammy Award for “Best Rap/Sung Collaboration.”

LINKIN PARK vocalist Mike Shinoda recalled a while back that “Numb/Encore” was one of the first things he came up with when the band was first approached to work with Jay-Z. “I was on the road at the time,” he said. “I immediately opened up my laptop and went to the store and bought his a capellas, and I made basically the single and the B-side, I made ‘Numb/Encore’ and sent them to him. So we were off to a good start and we basically just started this kind of working relationship from there.”

LINKIN PARK has not performed together in public since October 2017, when the surviving members staged a tribute concert in Los Angeles to Bennington. The band has not officially announced whether it intends to carry on following the death of Bennington, who committed suicide in July 2017 at the age of 41.

.@linkinpark’s #Numb has surpassed 1 billion streams on Spotify.
○#LinkinPark #Meteora #MakeChesterProud #Spotify pic.twitter.com/5Ira8TaqDB
— Linkin Park Billboard (@linkinparkbb) March 18, 2022

Kid Rock said Donald Trump once asked him for advice about U.S. policy on Islamic State and North Korea.

In an interview with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson broadcast on Monday night (March 21), the 51-year-old musician, who visited White House in 2017 with Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin, said that he was “there with [Trump] one day when he ended the caliphate,” referencing U.S. efforts against the Islamic State.

“[Trump] wanted to put out a tweet … I don’t like to speak out of school. I hope I’m not. But … the tweet was, and I’m paraphrasing, but it’s like, you know, ‘If you ever joined the caliphate, you know, trying to do this, you’re going to be dead.’

“He goes, ‘What do you think?’ [I said] ‘Awesome. I can’t add any better.’ But then it comes out and it’s … reworded and more political, to look politically correct. And just, ‘be afraid.”

He also said he and Trump were once “looking at maps. I’m, like, you know, like, ‘Am I supposed to be in on this shit?’ Like I make dirty records sometimes. I do.

“‘What do you think we should do about North Korea?’ I’m like, ‘What? I don’t think I’m qualified to answer this.'”

Kid Rock also praised Trump for speaking “off the cuff”.

“See now, if you watch a Joe Biden interview, and you watch a Trump interview, there’s no comparison. And Trump speaks off the cuff.

“I understand what it’s like, sometimes you get it wrong. But I would way rather hear somebody come from here [the heart] and get it wrong once in a while.”

Kid Rock had previously described himself to The Guardian as “definitely a Republican on fiscal issues and the military, but I lean to the middle on social issues.”

“I am no fan of abortion,” he said, “but it’s not up to a man to tell a woman what to do. As an ordained minister I don’t look forward to marrying gay people, but I’m not opposed to it.”

He also said he “played Barack Obama’s inauguration [in 2009] even though I didn’t vote for him. I didn’t agree with his policies, but there was an exciting sense of change in the air. That promise hasn’t been fulfilled — the country is more divided than ever.”

Kid Rock is currently promoting his new album, “Bad Reputation”, which was made available digitally on March 21. Physical CDs will arrive on April 6.

“Bad Reputation” includes the three songs Kid Rock released in January — “We The People”, “The Last Dance” and “Rockin'” — as well as his November 2021 single “Don’t Tell Me How To Live”, which was recorded with Canadian hard rockers MONSTER TRUCK.

“We The People” features the chorus of “Let’s go, Brandon,” conservative code for “Fuck Joe Biden” (born when a NASCAR reporter misheard a crowd, reporting that they chanted in support of racer Brandon Brown when they were actually chanting expletives toward the U.S. president), and also takes aim at the mainstream media, CNN, TMZ, Twitter and Facebook, as well as mask mandates and COVID-19 restrictions.

I can’t tell if he’s serious about Trump soliciting his advice on North Korea pic.twitter.com/kCCxq8JcBz
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 22, 2022