Whose Riff Is It Anyway? Legacy Feuds, Original Keys, and What Texas Metal Owes the Old Guard
There's a particular kind of drama that only happens after a band has been around long enough to have something worth arguing about. This week, metal's elder statesmen reminded everyone that legacy is a battlefield — and if you listen closely, the fights happening in Rolling Stone interviews and podcast studios say a lot about how Texas's own scene treats its history, its feuds, and its fallen.
Original Keys, Original Tunings, and the Musicianship Flex
Rush's Geddy Lee told Rolling Stone that keeping the "Fifty Something" tour's songs in their original keys mattered to him — a small detail that's actually a massive flex when you're pushing 70 and still hitting those notes live. Around the same time, Andi Deris was on Mr. Music's "Meet My Guest" podcast insisting Helloween can still play its classic catalog in the original tunings, more than three decades after he replaced Michael Kiske and had to reshape his own voice around songs he didn't write.
It's a subtle flex, but it's the same flex Texas bands make every time they refuse to drop-tune a classic just to make it easier live. The state's progressive and power metal contingent — think Immortal Guardian — has built entire followings on the idea that technical difficulty is the point, not the obstacle. And the NWOTHM revival happening statewide, exemplified by bands like Millennial Reign, exists precisely because a generation of players grew up worshipping the 80s metal bands who never compromised the arrangement for the sake of ease. If you want to understand why Texas keeps producing bands obsessed with musicianship over shortcuts, look no further than Deris and Lee this week — that's the lineage.
The Osbourne-Snider Blowup and the Politics of Legacy
Meanwhile, the ugliest story of the week has nothing to do with music and everything to do with legacy control. Kelly Osbourne went after Dee Snider, calling him "spectacularly classless" after the Twisted Sister frontman questioned how much songwriting credit Ozzy Osbourne actually deserved — and took a swipe at Sharon Osbourne in the process. It's a reminder that even in death, the fight over who "really" made a band great never stops. Every scene has its version of this argument, and Texas metal is no exception — ask anyone who's spent time in a Deep Ellum green room debating who deserves credit for a riff that's been reworked by four lineups.
Rikki Rockett offered a more useful history lesson on the "Beardo & Weirdo" podcast, recalling how 1980s rock media manufactured a rivalry between Poison and Metallica — glam versus thrash, styled as a war that the bands themselves mostly didn't buy into. That media-manufactured tribalism never fully died; it just migrated online. Texas's crossover thrash scene has always operated as a rebuke to that whole framework. A band like Texas crossover thrash outfit Ass exists in the same DNA as the bands Rockett was talking about — fast, funny, unconcerned with which side of an imaginary genre line they're supposed to stand on. Crossover was always the genre that told the tabloids to get lost, and that spirit is alive and well in bands like Texas crossover thrash and hardcore act Trap Lord, who treat thrash riffs and hardcore breakdowns as the same toolbox, not competing ideologies.
Death Metal's Long Memory: Terry Butler and the Kam Lee Fallout
The nastiest legacy dispute of the week, though, comes straight from death metal's founding generation. Terry Butler — former Death and Massacre bassist, now in Left to Die alongside Rick Rozz — told Loud and Proud Italy in no uncertain terms that he and Rozz will never work with Kam Lee again, calling him "toxic." This isn't internet noise; it's two guys who helped invent an entire genre saying the wounds are permanent.
There's absolutely no way Rick Rozz and I are gonna ever work with him in the future.
It's a heavy statement from a guy whose fingerprints are on some of the best metal albums of all time, genre-defining records that Texas death metal bands have been quoting in interviews for decades. That lineage runs deep here — this state has one of the most active old-school death metal underground scenes in the country, and it deserves to rank higher than it does when people search "texas death metal" looking for what's next. Bands like Texas death metal act Gates of Sodom and Texas death metal band Tribal Gaze are proof the tradition Butler helped build is still producing vicious, technical, unapologetic records — the Butler/Kam Lee feud is a reminder of how personal and permanent the politics of this genre can get, even among the guys who wrote the blueprint.
CKY's Tribute to Brent Hinds Hits Different in Texas
On a heavier emotional note, CKY released "Beware of the Heartless," a new single featuring a posthumous guitar solo from the late Brent Hinds, timed to land just before the one-year anniversary of the Mastodon guitarist's death on August 20. Hinds was a friend of the band long before he became one of the most celebrated guitarists of his generation, and hearing his playing surface again — unplanned, unfinished business turned into a gift — is the kind of release that lands hard in any scene that leans on Southern heaviness the way Texas does.
Hinds's sludge-meets-prog sensibility runs directly through Texas's doom and stoner underground. Bands like Fort Worth doom act Pinkish Black, Texas progressive sludge and stoner metal project Otis Archer, and Texas doom and sludge band Corruption Fatigue all carry pieces of that same restless, riff-forward DNA that made Mastodon impossible to categorize. If you're building a list of the best heavy metal songs to memorialize a player like Hinds, it's worth remembering how much of his sound has already been absorbed into scenes hundreds of miles from Atlanta.
The Rest of the Roundup: Manson, Prong, Foghat, and What's Coming
Marilyn Manson released the video for "Unalive," the opening track off "One Assassination Under God — Chapter 2," the same week a judge scheduled his sexual assault lawsuit from former assistant Ashley Walters for a fall 2027 jury trial — a reminder that the industrial-adjacent shock-rock machine keeps running even as serious legal reckonings sit years out on the calendar. Texas has its own industrial pedigree worth remembering in the same breath: Texas industrial metal pioneers Ministry did the genre-blending, provocation-as-art thing before most of Manson's audience was born, and that influence still ripples through the state's heavier electronic-adjacent acts.
Elsewhere, Prong's Tommy Victor discussed the band's upcoming self-titled record, out November 6 on Napalm, describing a "rejuvenation" in the band's sound — worth watching as one of the metal bands touring 2026 acts likely to route through Texas venues. Foghat announced a new live album, "Live & Loud Across the U.S.A.," capping their 2025 "Slow Ride 50th" run — a good excuse to mention that Texas's Southern heavy rock lineage, still criminally under-covered, deserves its own spotlight soon. Wage War dropped the video for "Sweet Dreams" off their "It Calls Me By Name" EP, a reminder that metalcore's mainstream engine keeps moving fast — territory Texas exports plenty of talent into, from Texas metalcore band Crown the Empire to the state's deeper hardcore-leaning underground. And Misfire dropped a video for "Born to Die" ahead of a run with Raider this month, more proof the touring circuit never really slows down.
What It Means Locally
None of these stories happened in Texas this week, but every single one of them threads back into what makes the Texas metal scene worth covering in the first place — the musicianship arguments, the genre-tribalism nonsense, the death metal old guard's long grudges, and the way a scene mourns its own. If you're chasing new metal bands 2026 has to offer, start local — the state's doom crews, its death metal die-hards, and its crossover thrash lifers like Texas doom and heavy metal act Temptress are proving every week that the best metal bands aren't always the ones making national headlines. Check upcoming shows for who's actually playing near you, and if your band belongs in this conversation, submit your band — Texas Metal Index is building the index this scene deserves, one feud, tribute, and riff at a time.
