Nita Strauss, the Los Angeles-based guitar shredder for the ALICE COOPER band, has confirmed to Meltdown of Detroit’s WRIF radio station that the legendary rocker is continuing work on the follow-up to last year’s “Detroit Stories” album. “I actually have a call with [the Cooper camp] this weekend to discuss the progress of it,” she said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). “The last that I heard, we were in Nashville working on it. The band and I sat down and recorded quite a bit of music for this upcoming record. The band did also have a huge part in the writing this time, which is the first time that’s happened in the eight years that I’ve been in the band. So it was really, really fun — really exciting for us to get to work with a legend like [produer] Bob Ezrin. [It was] a huge, huge honor to be in the studio with him and Alice creating what we hope will be some more Alice Cooper music to just add to his legacy.”

She added: “I’m on the [Alice Cooper] live DVD. I’m on the live album releases, the live tracks that are bonus tracks and stuff, but [this is my] first studio album with Alice. I’m actually the only person in the [current lineup of Alice’s] band that hasn’t recorded anything with Alice before, so this is huge for me. [I’m] very, very honored.”

Asked about a possible release date for Alice’s new album, Nita said: “I don’t have that information. I can tell you a lot about my [upcoming solo] record, but when it comes to Alice, I’m a hired musician, just like the rest of ’em. Right now we are still touring on ‘Detroit Stories’, which just came out last year. So I don’t know that it’ll necessarily be immediately that we’ll see the next one. But please don’t take my word for it. It’s not my band. I don’t wanna speak out of turn. But I know we are gonna be touring on ‘Detroit Stories’ a lot this year.”

Less than a year ago, Alice told Australia’s Heavy that he wanted to record his next album on the road with the current lineup of his solo band. “I like it — I like the idea,” he said. “I brought up the idea because my stage band is so tight. They’re not even on [‘Detroit Stories’]. But they’re so tight that they can play anything. And I said, ‘Well, then why don’t we write the songs on the road about the road? Let’s write the songs about what happens on the road.’ Or just it could be funny, it could be tragic, it could be whatever. I said, ‘But let’s make this album rock, like you guys do. And I’d love to play it live during soundchecks.’ Instead of playing ‘Eighteen’ or ‘School’s Out’ or doing a soundcheck every day, I said, ‘Let’s rehearse these songs.’ And then, at one point, somewhere on the road when we have two days off, we’ll set up the next gig and record them all — record them live in a venue.’ And I said, ‘That would be unique. Nobody’s ever done that. So let’s do something nobody’s ever done.'”

Alice went on to say that he had every confidence that the members of his current solo band — Strauss, Tommy Henriksen (guitar), Ryan Roxie (guitar), Chuck Garric (bass) and Glen Sobel (drums) — would be able to rise to the occasion and make an album while on tour. “If you get the right players, you can do anything,” he said. “I’ve got Nita Strauss in there. Nita is just a monster guitar player. She was voted ‘Guitarist Of The Decade’ magazine in Guitar magazine, and my drummer was voted ‘Best Drummer In Rock’ last year. And the great thing about this band is they never have a bad night; they’re good every night. And they’re all best friends. I never hear an argument; I never hear an ego pop up; I never hear anybody yelling at anybody unless it’s funny. All I hear backstage is laughing.”

Released in February 2021, “Detroit Stories” was recorded with Ezrin, mostly in Royal Oak with Detroit musicians and featuring a mix of original material alongside covers of songs by Bob Seger, the MC5, Mitch Ryder’s DETROIT and OUTRAGEOUS CHERRY.

In 2018, Cooper issued “A Paranormal Evening At The Olympia Paris”, a recording of his December 7, 2017 concert at the world-renowned Olympia venue in France. The effort captured Cooper and his current bandmates performing a choice selection of classic Cooper hits, in addition to some highlights from 2017’s “Paranormal” album. Alice later said that he wanted to release a document of his band’s onstage prowess because they “deserved a live album.”

Frequently tipped for greatness, and not just because vocalist Lena Scissorhands looks more like a rock star than just about anybody else on the planet right now, INFECTED RAIN have a sound that seems to chime perfectly with mainstream metal’s current predilections. Broadly speaking, the Moldovans have been ploughing the same musical furrow throughout their 14-year existence, blending elements of nu-metal, metalcore, and alternative rock, whilst shrewdly evading categorization in the process. But with numerous bands exploiting the grey areas between the aforementioned subgenres, often adding more brutal and uncompromising elements along the way, “Ecdysis” seems both incredibly timely and oddly distinctive. Not much has changed since their last album, the equally excellent “Endorphin” (2019), but INFECTED RAIN sound like the right band at the right time, right now.

Again, it helps that Lena Scissorhands has a killer voice, with all the scream-to-sigh versatility that most modern metal demands, but these songs are very much more than the sum of individual parts. INFECTED RAIN are hitting their stride here. Songs like the pugilistic and pummeling “Fighter” and the grubby, unpredictable groove metal of “Longing” cover a lot of musical ground, despite their in-built succinctness, and no idea outstays its welcome. The heroically gnarly “Goodbye” begins with the kind of lurching, slavering riffing that you would expect to find on a WILL HAVEN record, and the sumptuously melodramatic and melodic chorus that follows makes sublime, if perverse sense. Similarly, “Everlasting Lethargy” has a split personality, veering from sludgy, slug’s-trail horror to bewitching post-rock-cum-trance-pop ambience like it was the most natural thing in the world. “Showers” repeats the trick, but with shades of state-of-the-art symphonic metal, a gentle whiff of gothic grimness and a hammering, blackened hardcore denouement. Most startling of all, “Nine, Ten”‘s woozy electro fever dream is a wonderfully delicate and disarming touch.

Not everything hits with the same intensity. “November” flatters to deceive with an initial flurry of skittering electronics, but its melodic payoff is a disappointment; “The Realm of Chaos” tries slightly too hard to be the heaviest song on the album. But when INFECTED RAIN snap into rulebook-torching, stylistic anarchy mode, as they do on the schizophrenic ebb and flow and giant hook-wielding of “Never the Same” and the stately pomp and proggy hues of the closing “Postmortem Pt.2”, they sound like a band with almost inevitable and massive success looming over the next horizon. Or possibly the one after that. Either way, “Ecdysis” crosses the streams with class and conviction.

Death metal fiends Fossilization unearth a single from their split with Ritual Necromancy, “Exalted in the Altar of Insignificance.”
The post Track Premiere: Fossilization – “Exalted in the Altar of Insignificance” appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

A new trailer has been released for “Pam & Tommy”, Hulu’s upcoming limited series about MÖTLEY CRÜE drummer Tommy Lee’s and “Baywatch” star Pamela Anderson’s infamous leaked sex tape.

Sebastian Stan and Lily James star in the series as Lee and Anderson, while Seth Rogen also appears as the man who stole the tape, and produced with his partner Evan Goldberg. The series also stars Nick Offerman, Taylor Schilling, Andrew Dice Clay, Pepi Sonuga, Spencer Granese and Mozhan Marnò.

Three of the series’ eight episodes were directed by Craig Gillespie, who helmed 2017’s “I, Tonya” — which also starred Stan.

“Pam & Tommy” premieres February 2 on Hulu.

Four months ago, Tommy said that he had no problem with “Pam & Tommy”. Speaking with ET’s Rachel Smith at the 2021 MTV Video Music Awards, Tommy admitted that he hadn’t seen the photos of 39-year-old Stan portraying him, but he said: “I know Sebastian; he’s playing me. And from what he’s told me, it’s a really beautiful story. I think a lot of people would think that it’s one thing, but it’s really about privacy and how things got crazy then. And there’s different laws now. The story’s actually cool. What actually happened wasn’t, but he told me it’s pretty wild.”

Asked if he is surprised the story is being told now, Tommy said: “Yeah. It’s such a… God, I feel like it was forever ago. But it’s a cool story, and people need to know. I mean, it’s cool. I’m stoked. That’s cool.”

The series focuses on the duo’s salacious relationship in the 1990s, including the leak of the private honeymoon video and the legal battle that ensued.

Lee and Anderson are not involved with the series, which was written by Robert Siegel and DV DeVincentis and produced by Annapurna.

Anderson and Lee got married on a beach in Mexico in 1995 after dating for just four days. The couple, who divorced in 1998, share two sons, Brandon, 24, and Dylan, 22.

The sex tape Lee made with Anderson during their 1998 honeymoon ended up finding its way online after being stolen from their home by an electrician. Pamela later sued the distribution company, but ended up settling, and the tape continued to be available online as a result. The tape reportedly made $77 million in less than 12 months.

“I’ve never seen it,” Anderson said on “Watch What Happens Live” in 2015. “I made not one dollar. It was stolen property. We made a deal to stop all the shenanigans. I was seven months pregnant with Dylan and thinking it was affecting the pregnancy with the stress and said, ‘I’m not going to court anymore. I’m not being deposed anymore by these horny, weird lawyer men. I don’t want to talk about my vagina anymore or my public sex — anything.”

In a new interview with Sonic Perspectives collaborator Rodrigo Altaf, former ICED EARTH and current ASHES OF ARES singer Matt Barlow said that we must try to get along better, regardless of political, religious or socioeconomic differences. “We’re very divided as human beings right now,” he said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). “And it’s somewhat disturbing. Well, actually, it’s very disturbing — it’s very disturbing that people profit off of it. That’s probably, to me, the more disturbing thing, is the idea ‘if it bleeds, it reads’ [sic], that old [expression] from the media, we see that every single day, man — every day — and it’s horrifying; it’s really horrifying to me.”

He continued: “[We have to be] open to the other side. That’s kind of the point of it. We all don’t have to agree on everything. Let’s agree on that. Let’s agree that we don’t have to agree, and be honest about it and be true about it. Because the thing is I can’t know what your life experience is; I can’t know what background you come from or really anything about that… So we have to find common ground as humans for each other and understand that just because I feel a particular way, it’s okay that I feel that way. I don’t feel that way because I’m slighting you; I feel that way because this is my experience. And much in the same way I have to understand that, hey, I don’t know what your background is, I don’t know what anybody’s particular life is about. So I have to be less judgmental, and I have to understand that I have to be. And everybody needs to be that way — everybody needs to be a lot less judgmental of everybody else’s position, man, because otherwise we’re doomed. That’s all there is to it.”

ASHES OF ARES, which also features former ICED EARTH member Freddie Vidales, will release its third studio album, “Emperors And Fools”, on January 21 via ROAR! Rock Of Angels. The LP ends with the eleven-minute-long epic “Monster’s Lament” which includes the long-imagined joining of forces between Barlow and another former ICED EARTH singer, Tim “Ripper” Owens.

“Emperors And Fools” was produced by ASHES OF ARES, and mixed and mastered by Byron Filson at Villain Recording in Phoenix, Arizona. The cover artwork was created by Kamil Pietruczynik.

A little over a year ago, Barlow reunited with ICED EARTH founder, songwriter, guitarist and producer Jon Schaffer to celebrate the holiday season with an EP called “Winter Nights”. Released under the SCHAFFER/BARLOW PROJECT banner, the effort contained the duo’s unique spin on five Christmas classics and two ICED EARTH songs.

Last April, Schaffer pleaded guilty to his role in the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol riot. As part of the plea deal, Jon entered into a cooperation agreement with the government.

Following the initial reports that Schaffer was involved in the riot, his ICED EARTH bandmates distanced themselves from his actions. Singer Stu Block and bassist Luke Appleton later posted separate statements on social media announcing their resignations. BLIND GUARDIAN frontman Hansi Kürsch also quit DEMONS & WIZARDS, his long-running project with Schaffer. The allegations also apparently affected Schaffer’s relationship with his longtime record label Century Media, which had released albums from both ICED EARTH and DEMONS & WIZARDS. As of mid-January, the Century Media artist roster page did not list either band.

In a new interview with Loudwire, IRON MAIDEN singer Bruce Dickinson was asked whether there are any plans for him to work on a new solo album to follow up 2005’s “Tyranny Of Souls”. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I am obviously coming over to [America to] do the one-man [spoken-word] show [beginning in late January]. When I get to the end of the one-man show thing at the end of March, then the idea is I’ve got about three weeks cooling my heels somewhere. I’ll lie down in a darkened room for a couple of days and recover from the tour and then put my singing head on and go and have a chat with [longtime collaborator] Roy [‘Z’ Ramirez]. ‘Cause we’ve already got a bunch of material, but we need to organize it a little bit. We have demos and everything, but we need to organize it a bit more properly and be a bit more serious about it — maybe write a few more tunes. And then basically leave it down to Roy. [Once] we’ve got what we wanna do, he can go off and start doing backing tracks and things like that. Obviously, I’m gonna be going out on tour with MAIDEN [later in the year], but we made ‘Tyranny Of Souls’ that way. ‘Tyranny Of Souls’ was done not exactly remotely — well, kind of remotely in that I wasn’t physically present when some of the backing tracks were done but he sent me the backtracks and I listened to them and went, ‘These are cool.’ And some of them I wrote the words to the backtracks, and the tunes and everything. And some of them we had already done. So mixing and matching like that sometimes gets great results.”

Back in December 2017, Dickinson said that his next solo LP would likely include a reworked version of “If Eternity Should Fail”, the opening track on IRON MAIDEN’s 2015 disc “The Book Of Souls”. At the time, he said that he had about “half” of his seventh record already written and he also confirmed that “If Eternity Should Fail” was originally penned as a Dickinson solo track.

He told Finland’s Kaaos TV that the original plan was for his next solo record to be “a whole concept album, which was gonna be called ‘If Eternity Should Fail’. And ‘If Eternity Should Fail’ was the title track to my new solo album,” he said. “And a bit like [Dickinson’s 1989 solo song] ‘Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter’ [laughs], it got commandeered for IRON MAIDEN. So if I did do another solo album, which I think I will, I might just stick to my original plan and have that as the title track. I mean, I did write it — it was the first track that I wrote for it. So, yeah, I’d probably still include that song. But it would be… the feel would be slightly different — not very much, though — from the MAIDEN version.”

In 2015, Dickinson told France’s Hard Force magazine that “If Eternity Should Fail” ended up being used by IRON MAIDEN after bassist Steve Harris heard the demos that Bruce was working on for what was supposed to be his next solo album. “And [Steve] went, ‘That’s a really cool song. Can we use that? That’s gonna be the opening song on the album,'” he recalled. “And I went, ‘Yeah, okay.’ And he was already writing, I think… He was already thinking of ‘The Book Of Souls’ as being the title, so he told me about the Mayan thing. And I’m, like, ‘Yeah, that’s cool. Okay. Yeah, I see where you’re going.’ But in my case, that song was written as part of a story. So the spoken word at the end is the beginning of a story that goes through the whole album. And one of the characters is Dr. Necropolis; he’s the bad guy. And the good guy is Professor Lazarus; he raises people from the dead. So that introduces Necropolis in the spoken-word thing. And I asked Steve… I said, ‘Look. Okay. I get having the song…’ ‘Cause it opens up with, ‘Here is the soul of a man.’ ‘Yup. Get that. But what about the end?’ I said, ‘Will people understand what this is about? Because this is nothing to do with the Mayans or anything. This is to do with… I’d come up with a concept album that doesn’t happen.’ [Laughs] And he [went], ‘No, no, no. It’s just talking about souls and everything, and it sounds great.’ I went, ‘Okay.’ [Laughs]”

Dickinson made his recording debut with IRON MAIDEN on the “Number Of The Beast” album in 1982. He quit the band in 1993 in order to pursue his solo career and was replaced by Blaze Bayley, who had previously been the lead singer of the metal band WOLFSBANE. After releasing two traditional metal albums with former MAIDEN guitarist Adrian Smith, Dickinson rejoined the band in 1999 along with Smith. Since then, Dickinson has only released one more solo album (the aforementioned “Tyranny Of Souls”) but has previously said that his solo career is not over.

AVENGED SEVENFOLD frontman M. Shadows has confirmed to Metal Hammer that the band will complete the recording of its eighth studio album next month. “In January, we’re going in to finish the strings on the record,” he said. “The record’s been recorded for a year, but we haven’t been able to put the real strings on it, because we couldn’t fly out to Prague. When an orchestra have to social distance and they aren’t sitting next to each other, they can get out of tune, and we have just finally got to a place where we can use this 70-piece orchestra as we intended. We finish the record in February, mix it in March.”

Regarding the musical direction of the follow-up to 2016’s “The Stage”, M. Shadows said: “There are so many influences… We’re very influenced by Kanye West. The thing about Kanye is that he is pulling from such great soul music. I didn’t grow up with that stuff — my dad listened to BOSTON and Alice Cooper [and] I didn’t get that taste of black music and old soul. So, diving deep into jazz musicians… We’re not trying to do a jazz record, but the chord changes and progressions are so eye-opening to us.”

Back in February 2021, AVENGED SEVENFOLD guitarist Zacky Vengeance told Detroit’s WRIF radio station that he and his bandmates had done “lots and lots of writing — at a lot slower pacer than usual” — during the coronavirus pandemic. “Now that we are a little bit older, we move around a little bit slower, but [we’ve done] tons of writing,” he said. “We’ve gone to the studio. It was kind of a weird time to do anything in 2020, but that’s when we felt like it was a good time to go out there and start tracking all the stuff that we had in us.

“But, like I said, we’re doing it at a slow pace, so we’re still in the process of recording,” he explained. “We’re taking it really, really slow, making sure everything is the way we like it. We’re not in a big rush to get anything out, mainly ’cause we wanna get on the road, and we wanna be able to bring it to life. We wanna tour, we wanna travel, we wanna play songs that people wanna hear; we wanna expose them to some new stuff. ‘Cause I just feel like rushing to put something out right now and letting it dissipate because of the void, while people are worried about where their next meal is coming from or the paycheck, the last thing in the world on people’s minds is, ‘AVENGED SEVENFOLD’s gonna put out a new album, and that’s gonna be the saving grace for us all.’ And I feel like we’ll take it slow, let the world get a little bit back to normal, and when people are ready, we’ll know — we have a good sense of that. We’ll slowly finish it up, and then unleash it when the world’s ready.”

In December 2021, M. Shadows told Kerrang! magazine about the musical direction of the new AVENGED material: “The [new] record sounds nothing like ‘The Stage’ — it’s a completely new direction, and it sounds nothing like anything we’ve done. That’s all I’ll say about it: it’s over the top, and it’s very eclectic and wild.”

AVENGED SEVENFOLD kept a low profile during 2019. A blood blister on M. Shadows’s vocal cords forced the band to cancel a summer 2018 tour with PROPHETS OF RAGE and THREE DAYS GRACE.

“The Stage” was surprise-released in October 2016. The release of the disc, which was announced the night it went on sale, earned the lowest sales of an AVENGED SEVENFOLD album in 11 years. It sold 76 thousand copies in its first week, 73 thousand of which were physical.

“The Stage”, AVENGED’s debut for Capitol, sold less than half as many copies in its first week as the group’s two previous efforts, 2010’s “Nightmare” and 2013’s “Hail To The King”.

AVENGED SEVENFOLD recently announced the Deathbats Club, a new level of connecting with fans based around non-fungible tokens, or NFTs — digital assets (free tickets for life, free meet-amd-greets for life, airdrops over the course of each year, drum lessons, guitar lessons, golf lessons, giveaways, skip the lines at shows, poker nights, movie nights, etc.) that can’t be replicated. After an initial drop of 101 free NFTs to whet fans’ appetites, they released 10,000 at the end of November via avengedsevenfold.io, with everyone who buys one becoming part of the community.

Platinum-selling rock band FALLING IN REVERSE has released the official Jensen Noen-directed music video for its new single “Zombified”. The song was written by FALLING IN REVERSE frontman Ronnie Radke along with Cody Quistad and Jon Lundin.

“Zombified” is expected to appear on FALLING IN REVERSE’s upcoming EP, “Neon Zombie”, which will be released “soon,” according to the band’s social media.

Last April, FALLING IN REVERSE took part in “Live From The Unknown”, an immersive livestream experience featuring two totally unique concerts with different setlists.

FALLING IN REVERSE recently announced “Live From the Unknown: The Tour”, a winter 2022 headline run which kicks off on January 13 in Atlanta and runs through February 4 in Los Angeles. The tour will feature support from WAGE WAR, HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS and Jeris Johnson.

Last fall, FALLING IN REVERSE’s No. 1 single “Popular Monster” earned platinum status. It has been streamed over 145 million times and has emerged as one of the biggest anthems of this new decade.

“Popular Monster” enjoyed a multi-week stint at No. 1 on the rock radio charts. The song landed in the top spot on the Mediabase Active Rock chart, Billboard’s Hot Hard Rock chart, and the Nielsen Rock chart. It marked the first No.1 single of the band’s career. It also followed the gold certification of “The Drug In Me Is You” and a sold-out anniversary tour.

Eddie Van Halen’s ex-wife Valerie Bertinelli has opened up about the legendary guitarist’s death.

In her new book, “Enough Already: Learning To Love The Way I Am Today”, which will be released on January 18, she reveals that she and their son, Wolfgang, were both present at the time of Eddie’s passing after a years-long battle with cancer in October 2020. They were joined by other family members, including Eddie’s second wife, Janie Liszewski, and his brother, Alex Van Halen.

People magazine has published an excerpt from the book in which Valerie recalled saying to Eddie just days before his death as they cried together: “Maybe next time, right? Maybe next time we’ll get it right.”

Eddie’s death on October 6, 2020 came in “slow motion,” according to Valerie, who said she got a call from Wolfgang that morning telling her “that Ed’s breathing has changed and that I have to get to the hospital ASAP.”

“‘I love you’ are the last words Ed says to Wolfie and me, and they are the last words we say to him before he stops breathing,” she wrote.

She said after 20 minutes of silence, they started sharing stories about the iconic musician and began laughing, not crying.

“Suddenly, all of us are cracking up,” she wrote. “We laugh — and it is so much better than crying.”

Bertinelli split with Van Halen in 2002 after 21 years of marriage. They officially divorced in 2007. Eddie then went on to marry Liszewski in 2009, while Valerie also remarried, tying the knot with Tom Vitale in 2011. Valerie told People magazine that both marriages were struggling before Eddie’s death. She eventually filed for separation from Vitale in November 2021.

On the day of the VAN HALEN guitarist’s passing, Valerie shared a photo of her, Eddie and Wolfgang, taken while Wolfgang was was still toddler, and she included the following message: “40 years ago my life changed forever when I met you. You gave me the one true light in my life, our son, Wolfgang. Through all your challenging treatments for lung cancer, you kept your gorgeous spirit and that impish grin. I’m so grateful Wolfie and I were able to hold you in your last moments. I will see you in our next life my love.”

Eddie died at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California. Following his death, fans left flowers at his childhood home on Las Lunas Street in Pasadena, California. Additional flowers, candles and fan mementos were placed on Allen Avenue where Eddie and his brother, VAN HALEN drummer Alex, scratched their band’s name into the wet cement of a sidewalk when they were teenagers.

“One of the many reasons that Ed and I split up is to give Wolfie a better vision of what two people who are supposedly in love treat each other like,” Valerie told Oprah.com. “Ed and I weren’t treating each other like two people that loved each other, and that’s what Wolfie was seeing. So I’m hoping that when he does get married and start a life for himself, that he takes his time and marries a friend and not just someone that he can’t keep his hands off.”

Valerie went on to say that leaving Eddie wasn’t an easy choice. “We were all very raw from 9/11, and you heard all these stories of people coming together,” she said. “They hated each other and they were back together and divorces weren’t happening anymore. And I’m, like, ‘Am I the only one in the world that wants out now because of 9/11? I’m not going to live my life if it’s that tenuous. That’s not how I want to live my life anymore.'”

VAN HALEN was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2007.

Rolling Stone magazine ranked Eddie Van Halen No. 8 in its list of the 100 greatest guitarists.