BLACK LABEL SOCIETY will embark on a U.S. headlining tour in the spring. Support on the trek, which will kick off on April 30 in San Diego, California and end on May 21 in Inwood, West Virginia, will come from Nita Strauss, the Los Angeles-based guitar shredder for the ALICE COOPER band.

A special BLABBERMOUTH.NET presale will begin on Wednesday, March 2 at 12:00 p.m. local time and end on Thursday, March 3 at 10:00 p.m. local time. When prompted, type in the presale code “BBMBLS2022” to access tickets before the general public. General on-sale will be Friday, March 4 at 10 a.m. local time.

Tour dates:

Apr. 30 – San Diego, CA – House Of Blues (buy tickets)
May 01 – Reno, NV – Virginia Street Social Outdoors (buy tickets)
May 03 – Casper, WY – Gaslight Social Outdoors (buy tickets)
May 05 – Belvidere, IL – Apollo Theater (buy tickets)
May 06 – Sault Ste. Marie, MI – Kewadin Casino (buy tickets)
May 07 – Bowler, WI – North Star Mohican Gaming & Resort (buy tickets)
May 09 – Lexington, KY – Manchester Music Hall (buy tickets)
May 10 – Raleigh, NC – The Ritz (buy tickets)
May 11 – Chattanooga, TN – The Signal (buy tickets)
May 13 – Fayetteville, AR – JJ’s Live (buy tickets)
May 14 – Tyler, TX – Country River Club (buy tickets)
May 15 – New Orleans, LA – Fillmore (buy tickets)
May 17 – Birmingham, AL – Iron City (buy tickets)
May 18 – Mobile, AL – Soul Kitchen (buy tickets)
May 19 – Daytona Beach, FL – Welcome to Rockville (buy tickets)
May 20 – Myrtle Beach, SC – House Of Blues (buy tickets)
May 21 – Inwood, WV – Shiley Acres (buy tickets)

BLACK LABEL SOCIETY’s 11th studio album, “Doom Crew Inc.”, was released last November via MNRK Heavy (formerly eOne Music).

In a recent interview with the Morristown, New Jersey radio station 105.5 WDHA, BLACK LABEL SOCIETY leader Zakk Wylde stated about the writing process for “Doom Crew Inc.”: “The way it always goes, it’s always the music first and then a melody. And then I’ve gotta find out something I wanna sing about. So then I’ll write the lyrics. That’s usually always the way it goes. And then, when it’s all done, then the solos go on it. The painting’s all done, and the solo is the frame that goes on the thing. So you can sit back and look at the whole thing. That’s the way we pretty much always do it.

“We did the box set, and then we did videos for that, and then, after that, [my wife Barbaranne] was just, like, ‘Maybe you guys can do a record,'” he recalled. “I said, ‘All right. No problem.’ So I said, ‘How long till the guys come out?’ [She said], ‘You’ve got a month till the fellows come out.’ So I was just, like, ‘All right. Let me get started.’ So I would just have a cup of coffee and just start writing riffs. You always get inspired by — for me, it’s always Mount Riffmore, which is CREAM, MOUNTAIN, [LED] ZEPPELIN, [BLACK] SABBATH, DEEP PURPLE… If you’re not getting inspired by the riffs those guys have created, it’s just like… So I’ll just go fishing and just start writing till you get to something you like.

“What we ended up doing [was] tracking about 30 songs and then whittled it down to the 12 that we have [on the album],” Zakk explained. “It’s funny, ’cause the ‘Farewell Ballad’ thing has been sitting around on YouTube for probably about 11 years or something like that — just that instrumental strip of music. And so I was just, like, ‘You know what? Let me just get around to finishing this thing.’ ‘Cause we had that bit of music, the chord progression that I wrote. So then I just finished it — I just wrote a melody, I wrote a song with that intro. So we finished that thing. And then ‘Love Reign Down’, the piano ballad, that was sitting around. I wrote that about my mother who passed away. That was during [the making of Ozzy Osbourne’s] ‘No More Tears’, actually. I remember noodling on the piano at A&M and I wrote that song. So it was good to actually finally put that on an album. But the rest of it is all brand new. ‘Set You Free’ was pretty much right at the end, when we were tracking everything else. So that definitely popped in there late at the end of the whole thing. But the album’s probably almost about a year old now, since we recorded it and finished it and mastered it and everything like that. But it’s just been sitting in the can until right now.”

“Doom Crew Inc.” was made available digitally on CD and vinyl plus a deluxe edition that includes vinyl, CD longbox, cassette and more. The 12-track album is both a tribute to the band’s “first to bleed, last to leave” road crew and a salute to the legion whose support, stretching back to 1998, rivals that of the KISS Army.

The songs are odes to celebration and mourning, the soundtracks to jubilant evenings and bewildering days recorded in Wylde’s home studio, the Black Vatican. On this album, Zakk trades solos and twin-guitar parts with Dario Lorina, backed by the rumble of longtime bassist John “J.D.” DeServio and powerhouse drummer Jeff Fabb.

Swedish occult rockers GHOST will release their fifth album, “Impera”, on March 11 via Loma Vista. The official lyric video for the LP’s latest single, “Twenties”, can be streamed below.

With its messianic promises of reigns of pennies and piles of moolah set to an appropriately manic musical backdrop, the unrelenting and propulsive “Twenties” stands in stark contrast to its predecessor, the eerily hypnotic “Call Me Little Sunshine”. In fact, the apocalyptically prophetic vibe of “Twenties” — particularly its lyrical relevance to historical events unfolding on the world stage (however incidental) — render the song utterly unique in the GHOST canon.

According to a press release, “Impera” “finds GHOST transported literally hundreds of years forward from the 14th century Europe Black Plague era” of its previous album, 2018’s “Prequelle”. “The result is the most ambitious and lyrically incisive entry in the GHOST canon: Over the course of ‘Impera”s 12-song cycle, empires rise and fall, would-be messiahs ply their hype (financial and spiritual alike), prophecies are foretold as the skies fill with celestial bodies divine and man-made… All in all, the most current and topical GHOST subject matter to date is set against a hypnotic and darkly colorful melodic backdrop making ‘Impera’ a listen like no other — yet unmistakably, quintessentially GHOST.”

Produced by Klas Åhlund and mixed by Andy Wallace, “Impera” consists of the following 12 songs:

01. Imperium
02. Kaisarion
03. Spillways
04. Call Me Little Sunshine
05. Hunter’s Moon
06. Watcher In The Sky
07. Dominion
08. Twenties
09. Darkness At The Heart Of My Love
10. Griftwood
11. Bite Of Passage
12. Respite On The Spital Fields

In a recent interview with El Paso Inc., GHOST mastermind Tobias Forge spoke his decision to record “Impera” with Åhlund, who also sat behind the desk for 2015’s acclaimed “Meliora” effort. Asked why he chose to end his streak of working with a different producer on each new GHOST LP, Tobias said: “The thing is you need to keep moving so that you don’t get stuck in friendly comfortable mode. ‘Meliora’, the record I made with Klas, was really good, but the recording and the production itself left a few things to be improved. When time came to record ‘Impera’, the writing and demoing had been done in 2020. But in early 2021, the American producer who was supposed to make the record couldn’t come because of the travel restrictions, and I couldn’t go to America. And because Klas is also a very scheduled person, he had a project lined up that fell through. All of a sudden, he had a few months off, and I was, like, ‘That is well-timed, because I don’t have a producer. Would you like to produce the record?'”

Forge worked on the follow-up to 2018’s “Prequelle” with Åhlund and Swedish co-writers Salem Al Fakir and Vincent Pontare, whose credits include Madonna and Lady Gaga.

Regarding his collaboration with Åhlund, Al Fakir and Pontare, as well as OPETH’s Fredrik Åkesson who was brought in to sharpen the album’s guitar attack, Forge recently told St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “I found that I can work really well with someone I respect, who is always pushing for the best. They make me want to write better, to get my game up a little.”

GHOST kicked off its co-headlining tour with VOLBEAT on January 25 at the Reno Events Center in Reno, Nevada. The 26-date trek, which includes special guests TWIN TEMPLE, will conclude on March 3 in Anaheim, California.

In March 2020, at final show of GHOST’s “Prequelle” tour in Mexico City, Mexico, the band officially introduced Papa Emeritus IV, the new character who will front the act for its next LP phase.

Forge performed as a “new” Papa Emeritus on each of the band’s first three LPs, with each version of Papa replacing the one that came before it. Papa Emeritus III was retired in favor of Cardinal Copia before the release of “Prequelle”.

Photo credit: Mikael Eriksson

Outspoken conservative rocker Ted Nugent has delivered his own version of the State Of The Union address, using the opportunity to peddle baseless 2020 election conspiracies while blaming the Democratic Party for the rise in crime across the U.S.

The 73-year-old rocker weighed in on the nation’s problems during Tuesday’s (March 1) edition of “The Nightly Nuge”, a news-style clip in which Ted offers his take on the news of our world every night. In the three-and-a-half-minute clip, he said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “State Of The Union. The state of my beloved United States Of America, the condition of the one and only experiment in self-government in history of humankind.

“This president has ruined everything that he touches,” he continued. “There’s a huge core army of good American families who have witnessed the evidence, the testimony nationwide, the video footage to confirm that Joe Biden is not really the president of the United States; he was not duly elected. He and his Democrat party have literally eliminated the very concept of a nation by opening our borders, because without secure borders, there is no nation. And the president has orchestrated the invasion of America. Crime is exploding because the Democrat party and the liberal district attorneys and the failed court system around the country unleashes devils, rapists, murderers, carjackers, stabbers, child molesters, child traffickers into our neighborhoods every day, and then they’ll look you straight in the eye and tell you they don’t know why the crime rate is exploding. The economy is in a shambles because of the policies of the United States government.

“I’ll tell you the State Of The Union today,” Ted added. “If it weren’t for the incredible hope and perseverance, positive spirit and tenacity, the indefatigable spirit of rugged individualism that is still alive and well in this country that are dedicated to stop this self-inflicted scourge of treason perpetrated by our government, there would be no hope. But I have great hope, ’cause I know the good families of this country. And we’re gonna secure our borders. We’re gonna end the crime rate. We’re going to put our heart and soul into being the best that we can be to make a strong economy and once again strengthen the U.S. military to deter assaults and attacks upon this great nation.

“My name is Ted Nugent. And keep your hope and spirit alive because the evil that we are now strangled by can be stopped and reversed if we the people vote and demand legal vote and we demand constitutional accountability from our elected employees.

“God bless the good families of this country. God bless the core of the United States Of America. God bless the heroes that are standing up to runaway tyranny by our own government.

“I love America, I love real America, and I will never stop fighting for her return to the only last best place. God bless real America and real Americans in the asset column.”

In January, Nugent once again repeated the baseless conspiracy theory that the riot at the U.S. Capitol was orchestrated by undercover FBI agents, Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Nugent, an outspoken conspiracy theorist who has refused to take the vaccine, has falsely claimed that public health measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic violate the Nuremberg code, a set of medical experimentation guidelines set after World War Two, as the vaccine is “experimental.”

In the past, Nugent, who battled COVID-19 last April, had referred to the virus as a “leftist scam to destroy” former U.S. president Donald Trump. He had also repeated a narrative pushed by conservative media and disputed by health experts that suggests the official death count from the coronavirus is inflated.

Nugent’s new studio album, “Detroit Muscle”, is due on April 29 via Pavement Music. The follow-up to 2018’s “The Music Made Me Do It” was recorded with Ted’s current band, which includes bassist Greg Smith and drummer Jason Hartless.