For three years, Sick New World Festival belonged to Las Vegas. The one-day heavy music festival debuted there in 2023, came back bigger in 2024, then canceled in 2025 when a Metallica and Linkin Park-led bill didn’t happen. It came back this year anyway, and it brought a second date. On Saturday, Oct. 24, the inaugural Sick New World Texas takes over Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth.
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Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile named themselves after the gray hills of mine tailings that still sit over northeast Oklahoma. The Picher field supplied more than half the lead and zinc used in World War I, and the waste, called chat, was left in the open for decades. Families picnicked on it. Kids sledded down it. Nobody tied the piles to the lead in those kids’ blood until much later, and by then Picher was on its way to becoming a ghost town. The OKC quartet sounds like that debt being collected. At Radio/East on a Thursday night, they played like demolition crew, and Austin, a city that has always made room for bands willing to inflict pain, took every hit. Who Loves the Sun is the latest in a catalog that keeps getting heavier and angrier, and nothing about this set suggested they plan to let up.
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Hours after playing a once-in-a-lifetime bill at Portland, Maine’s Thompson’s Point with Dinosaur Jr and Turnstile, Boston post-hardcore legends Fiddlehead weren’t ready to end their weekend just yet. At 2:30 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, September 27, a post came across my social media feed announcing a pop-up show at the MBTA’s Alewife Train Station in Cambridge, MA – going down in 12 hours. The post read “we may get shut down, we may be able to get thru one song or maybe multiple…” – by the morning the post was gone – but the word was out. An Instagram story confirmed the band would be playing around 2:30 p.m., telling people to show up early, but not too early and encouraging attendees to respect employees and commuters around them.
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The Cavalera name is heavy metal royalty. Brothers Max and Igor dragged Sepultura out of Belo Horizonte and turned it into one of the most feared bands on the planet, then walked away. Whatever Sepultura did without them is a footnote. What the brothers did next is a sprawl of bands and records that hasn’t let up, and the bloodline didn’t stop with them. Max’s sons and stepson fill out his lineups and run outfits of their own. The family business is metal violence set to a downtuned riff, and business is good. On Monday, September 21, the Cavalera clan took over Come and Take It Live on Riverside for a full night of musical brutality with Soulfly, Nailbomb and Incite. Nobody in the building showed any sign of slowing down.
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Levitation 2026 is coming up fast, and with programming scattered across Austin, a tight plan is a necessity if you want to catch everything worth catching. The festival will take place over a four day stretch on September 10 – 13, bringing a wide variety of bands to build a packed fest experience. The festival traces back to The Black Angels and founder Rob Fitzpatrick, who’s kept the lineups deep and eclectic year after year. Here’s another round of seven bands curated by The Cosmic Clash team worth building your schedule around. Set times and tickets are on the Levitation website.
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King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard don’t rest. The Melbourne sextet closed out the second Field of Vision Festival with two more three-hour sets on August 15 and 16, pushing deeper into the Meadow Creek grounds in Buena Vista, Colorado they’d already claimed as their own. They’d fired the first shot on day one: a surprise drop of their 28th LP, Alien Metal, with zero warning. Then came the dare. “No song repeats,” the band promised Friday night, and fans spent the rest of the weekend hunting for new-album cuts and deep tracks to see if that promise would hold. Field of Vision was three of only seven U.S. tour dates. There was no room to coast.
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It’s almost 1 a.m. and our ride is coming at 4:30 a.m. My chest is tight from not knowing if I have everything done at home and at work, but it is what it is. When I wake up from my short nap, it’ll be go time to head from Austin to Colorado for King Gizzard’s second Field of Vision Festival in Buena Vista August 14-16. The psych rock, metal, electronic and rock n roll band from Australia has become a touring phenomenon.
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Friday (August 7) evening marked night two of four of Somerville’s annual Somergloom Festival, and the first night at Davis Square’s iconic Crystal Ballroom. Fresh off a 15-date tour spanning the U.S. and Canada, Boston noise-punk power trio Miracle Blood brought a scorching, powerful set to the chandelier-clad ballroom and an eagerly awaiting hometown crowd as the band engulfed Davis Square at Somergloom Festival.
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The annual sweat-fest, Hot Summer Nights returned to the Red River Cultural District last weekend, marking another successful year of cover-free showcases that benefit local businesses throughout downtown Austin. The RRCD neighborhood non-profit presents the free showcases to keep venues and other establishments busy during the summer slow period in both the service and music industries for employees and musicians until the things pick back up in the Fall.
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On Friday, July 17 as part of the annual festival The Rumble, Turmoil made their way back to Chicago for a triumphant return, playing songs from The Process Of and giving it everything they had in the process. I felt like a kid again, bobbing to the riffs of “Let It Die” while screaming along to the opening salvo of the hardest intro of all time, yelling “what the fuck?” alongside frontman John Gula.
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The annual Hot Summer Nights in the Red River Cultural District of Austin is a RRCD-sponsored event that features hundreds
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