How the Moody Blues returned to superstardom with Long Distance Voyager
With help from an ex Yes member and a new engineer, 1981 release marked a significant update without a loss of their musical values. But is it a concept album?
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The 20 worst music biopics ever made
Forget The Dirt, Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman: music biopics used to be badly researched, badly scripted, badly acted and badly received
Ex-Guns N’ Roses drummer Steven Adler on the chaos and carnage of Appetite For Destruction
The inside track on Appetite For Destruction from one of the men who played on it
How Porcupine Tree reinvented progressive rock for the 21st century metal generation
Porcupine Tree’s 2010 album The Incident capped their rise from cult psychedelicists to prog metal giants
The story of Cannibal Corpse’s Gallery Of Suicide, the album that helped keep 90s death metal alive
Cannibal Corpse kept the deathly flag flying during the nu metal era
Dee Snider’s wild tales of Gene Simmons, Robert Plant, Frank Zappa and Freddy Krueger
From Johnny Cash and John Denver to Manowar and Henry Kissinger, former Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider has mixed with them all
Barclay James Harvest’s 70s battles with orchestras – and why John Lees tried again
The recently-released live record from 2023 shows how much has changed in 50 years, as John Lees’ Barclay James Harvest look forward to the “progtastic” double album they’ve nearly finished
The Carlos Santana albums you should definitely listen to
With glorious Afro-Latin rhythms and ill-advised collaborations, Carlos Santana’s 60-year career path needs to be negotiated with care. These are his best albums
The unlikely story of George Murray, the David Bowie bassist who became a school superintendent
Plucked from obscurity in 1975 to be in David Bowie’s band, then unceremoniously dumped five years later, bassist George Murray looks back on his time with the Thin White Duke
The tumultuous story of Sepultura’s Roots album and their bitter split
How Sepultura made their most important album – and how it tore them apart
Metal Hammer writers name their top albums of 2024
Want to know what our writers and staffers have been spinning in 2024? Here’s the breakdown of every Metal Hammer contributors’ album of the year lists
Mikael Åkerfeldt on ABBA, nearly buying a record shop and Opeth's awesome 14th album
When ABBA-mad Opeth leader Mikael Åkerfeldt met one of their singers, he “lost it”. She didn’t sing on their new concept album, but some other, perhaps unlikely, big names did
Classic Rock's Ultimate 2024 Playlist
Icons and a-listers, retro bangers and psychedelic party-starters, firebrands, punks and alt.rockers - they’re all here
Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett’s five favourite cult horror movie villains
Kirk Hammett knows his horror – and these are his ultimate movie villains
The major Mötley Crüe hit that took Nikki Sixx eight attempts to write
It paid off by giving Mötley Crüe their biggest ever single
"I was in the hallway with Slipknot and I got screamed at." Vended might have big links to heavy metal royalty, but that doesn't mean they're getting an easy ride
Vended feature two spawns of Slipknot, but they're attempting to build their own legacy through their own terms. We head to LA to find out more
Why Frost* revisited dazzling debut Milliontown on latest album Life In The Wires
Leader Jem Godfrey, who took a financial hit to spend five months focusing on the band’s double-length concept album, explains why doing something connected with their past equals doing something entirely new
"People said, 'You're going to be a one hit wonder.'" How Higher cemented Creed as rock's new superstars
Inspired in part by recurring nightmares and visions of heaven, Higher cemented Creed as one of the most successul rock bands of the new millennium
How Pearl Jam made Lightning Bolt and embraced their inner Pink Floyd
Thirty years after being blindsided by fame, Pearl Jam were still doing things on their own terms
