Aaron Burgess

CKY The Phoenix FILE UNDER: REBORN ROLLER RAGERS ROCKS LIKE: Alice In Chains, Queens Of The Stone Age, HIM WHAT’S DIFFERENT: Somewhere between now and CKY’s last album (2009’s Carver City), the acclaimed alternative-metal band suffered a schism that led to three-fourths of them keeping the name and the frontman playing his own music under a new moniker. The Phoenix, as ...

Mutoid Man War Moans FILE UNDER: METAL UP YOUR ASS ROCKS LIKE: Iron Maiden, Kyuss, Testament WHAT’S DIFFERENT: There’s no room for weak links in a power trio, and Mutoid Man—guitarist/singer Stephen Brodsky, drummer Ben Koller (Converge, All Pigs Must Die) and bassist Nick Cageao—are as mighty as trios come. Unabashed, unironic an ...

John Frum A Stirring In The Noos FILE UNDER: Psychedelic death metal ROCKS LIKE: Gorguts, Gigan, Ulcerate WHAT’S DIFFERENT: Considering John Frum’s lineup—current and ex-members of the Dillinger Escape Plan, the Faceless, John Zorn and more—you’d expect the band’s debut to be an eclectic but surgically precise slab of tech-metal. A Stirring In The Noos benefits fr ...

Lamb Of God The Duke EPs tend to be stopgaps: an easy way to hold fans’ attention between albums. Considering that Lamb Of God dropped their last full-length, VII: Sturm And Drang, a year ago, simply releasing the two new songs on The Duke would’ve been enough to buy the band time. But focusi ...

The Dillinger Escape Plan Dissociation With their 1998 EP Under The Running Board, the Dillinger Escape Plan forced metalcore to evolve overnight. The New Jersey quintet's stabbing, atonal guitar figures felt like Morse code from a war zone. Th ...

Green Day Revolution Radio Whether it’s wrestling with the world outside or the enemy within, punk needs a struggle if it’s going to mean something. For Green Day, wartime under George W. Bush gave 2004’s American Idiot a career-resurrecting sense of purpose, while the existential aftermath of a post-Bush America fueled 2009’s 21st Century Breakdown. And while the band’s 2 ...

Talking to AP before a gig in Toronto, Greg Puciato sounds remarkably composed for a man whose band, the Dillinger Escape Plan, are less than 24 hours from announcing their breakup. That’s because, in that same short window, Dillinger will also announce the Oct. 14 r ...

Metz II Options are good things to have. And, after making waves with their eponymous 2012 debut, Toronto noise-rock trio METZ saw their possibilities upped with album No. 2: fancier studios, more time to write, more temptation to embellish ...

Jawbox My Scrapbook Of Fatal Accidents Hard to believe, considering that Washington, D.C., post-hardcore legends Jawbox came up in an era where vinyl was king, but this marks the first time the band’s posthumous 1998 singles collection, My Scrapbook Of Fatal Accidents, is getting the vinyl treatment. And, ...

Never Young Never Young EP “Synthetic,” “digital” and “futurist” pop up among the adjectives in Never Young’s bio, but the Bay Area quartet’s secret weapon is a fuzzed-out analog peal that’s as indebted to early-’80s noise pop as it is to ’90s post-hardcore. Throughout this eponymous EP, the band sound like they’re ejecti ...

Loincloth Iron Balls Of Steel It's taken 12 years, one instantly out-of-print 2003 demo, and the departure of a founding member (guitarist Pen Rollings), but Virginia/North Carolina instru-metal trio Loincloth can finally cement their legacy with a full-length debut. Al ...

Split From left-field film soundtracks to dark literary figures like the late David Foster Wallace, Thursday’s influences have never been limited to hardcore; it’s just that the media blitz around the band traditionally gravitates toward the louder, faster elements of Thursday’s sound. Heck, even if yo ...

In the first installment of our web-exclusive interview with GREEN DAY, frontman BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG revealed what went into the making of their upcoming follow-up to American Idiot. In part two, Armstrong talks about the bigger picture. There was a lot of tension in the band going into American Idiot, to the point where you guys ended up in a sort of group therapy... Read More ...

BRAND NEW DAY For our "Most Anticipated Albums Of 2009" cover story, AP was granted exclusive access to the Hollywood studio where GREEN DAY have been working on the follow-up to 2004’s mega-platinum American Idiot. You’ll have to pick up the issue for the juicier dirt on the songs and the story behind Green Day’s latest opus, but considering all the great material the band left us with,

Ire Works Without a doubt, anyone reading about the Dillinger Escape Plan circa 2007 will see plenty of variations on the most famous old Nietzsche maxim: Because all that hasn’t killed this New Jersey quintet-namely a legacy of label/contractual problems and the gradual drop-off of all but one original member-has certainly made them stronger. But ...

Shadows Fall Threads Of Life Shadows Fall have enjoyed a tremendous surge of hype since their 2004 breakout, The War Within, cracked the Billboard Top 20; and even though there’s a big difference between being Century Media’s biggest act and impressing the bean counters at a major label, the band sound more than ready to prove their mettle with Threads Of Life. While Mast ...

Underoath Define The Great Line There’s a church in Pittsburgh that, although named for a bridge on the city’s South Side, also has the best accidental summary of Christian heavy music’s m.o. in its moniker. And while Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community (that’s no joke) is just one of many young arts- and music-friendly churches in America right now, it’s also just the kind of symbol we on the outs

Their songs may make you want to get out of your seat, but for their new album, MINUS THE BEAR had to get out of themselves to rediscover their voice. It’s an otherwise humdrum Thursday night in late June, and AP is trying to pin down the members of Minus The Bear at various points throughout the band’s hometown of Seattle. While we c...