Lineup Roulette and Stage Walkoffs: What Metal's Chaotic Week Says About Texas's Own Reshuffling Scene
There's a particular kind of secondhand embarrassment that comes from watching a band implode in real time, and this week metal fans got a front-row seat courtesy of Abbath. The former Immortal frontman's solo project stormed off the SaariHelvetti festival stage in Tampere, Finland after roughly two minutes of music, leaving a paying crowd staring at empty amps. Whatever the internal reasoning, the clip has been ricocheting around metal Twitter and YouTube comment sections all weekend, and it's a useful reminder of something Texas black metal bands tend to understand instinctively: professionalism is part of the craft, not a compromise of it. Corpse paint or not, you don't get to skip the show and still call it art.
Texas has quietly built one of the more disciplined black metal and crossover thrash undergrounds in the country, and San Antonio's Morta is a good example of a band that treats the black metal and crossover thrash traditions as something to be executed with intent rather than theatrics. It's not a knock on Abbath's legacy — Immortal's catalog is untouchable — but the contrast between a two-minute festival walkoff overseas and the grind-it-out ethic of Texas's black metal and thrash scene says something about where the genre's next generation is putting its energy. Bands like Morta aren't playing this game for spectacle; they're playing it because the riffs demand it.
The Great Reshuffle: Metal's Lineup Reckoning Hits Home
If there's a throughline in this week's national metal news, it's lineup drama — the kind that takes decades to fully process. Anthrax's Scott Ian sat down for the Naked Lunch podcast and openly admitted that firing Joey Belladonna back in 1992 was, in his words, "heartbreaking," adding flatly: "In hindsight, I was wrong." That's a rare thing in metal — a founding member publicly conceding a 30-year-old decision was a mistake, long after the damage to band chemistry and fan trust had already been done.
Meanwhile, Nevermore drummer Van Williams gave an update on the band's new singer, Berzan Önen, telling India's Sinusoidal Music that the late, beloved Warrel Dane "would be proud of the guy we chose to replace him." It's a delicate thing to say out loud, replacing a singer whose voice is inseparable from a band's identity, but it's also exactly the kind of statement that puts pressure on a new frontman before he's even settled into the role. Add to that Aaron Stainthorpe's blunt comments about his 2025 ouster from My Dying Bride — "by kicking me out, they showed their cards" — and Sid Wilson quietly confirming his own exit from Slipknot after months of rumor, and you've got an entire week of metal news built on the same uncomfortable question: who actually owns a band's identity once the founding lineup starts to crack?
Texas metal has lived through its own version of this. Bands rebuild around new vocalists, drummers rotate through death metal and doom lineups constantly, and the local scene has learned to treat lineup shifts as part of the ecosystem rather than a death sentence. It's worth remembering the next time a Texas band announces a new member — the instinct to panic is usually less useful than the instinct to actually listen to what they do next.
Dio Never Dies: Primus, Osegueda, and the NWOTHM Torch Texas Is Still Carrying
On a lighter note, Primus brought Death Angel and Kerry King vocalist Mark Osegueda out not once but twice last week for a cover of Dio's "Holy Diver" — first at a stateside date and again at Dynamo Metalfest in Eindhoven, Netherlands. It's the kind of moment that reminds everyone why "Holy Diver" routinely lands on every list of the best heavy metal songs ever written: four decades later, it still works as a communal singalong between bands that otherwise sound nothing alike.
Dio-era heavy metal has an outsized influence on the new wave of traditional heavy metal (NWOTHM) revival happening right now, and Texas has plenty of skin in that game even though the mainstream metal press rarely covers it. Power metal acts like Hollister Fracus are proof that the state's appetite for soaring vocals, twin-guitar harmonies, and unapologetically triumphant songwriting never went anywhere — it just moved underground while everyone else was arguing about which subgenre counts as "true" metal. If you're building a list of new metal bands in 2026 worth paying attention to, Texas's heavy metal and NWOTHM underground deserves a much longer look than it's getting nationally.
Queens of the Stone Age's New Album and the Texas Stoner/Doom Connection
Queens of the Stone Age announced a new album this week, and while QOTSA operates in its own commercially massive lane, the announcement is a good excuse to talk about how much gravitational pull desert rock and stoner metal still have on Texas's doom scene. This state has quietly become one of the best incubators for heavy, riff-driven stoner and doom in the country, from the fuzzed-out sludge of Sweat Lodge to the cosmic doom of Zosimos and the low-end crunch of Burn Ritual. Add in the southern-fried heaviness of Mothership and the desert-tinged riffing of High Desert Queen, and it's clear Texas doesn't need Josh Homme's blessing to keep this sound thriving — but a new QOTSA record dropping into the cultural conversation never hurts a scene that already runs on Sabbath worship and desert-highway riffs. Bands like Egypt round out a stoner/doom underground that's arguably as deep as anywhere in the country, and it remains one of the most underdiscussed corners of the Texas metal scene.
Southpaw FLHC and Hardcore's Accountability Problem
Not every story this week is a fun one. Southpaw FLHC continues to push back against racism allegations amid rumors the band has been dropped by its label, with the group firing back defensively: "Don't y'all stupid mother*ckers realize that if we were really a racist band, we would just admit it?" It's not a great look, and it's not a defense that tends to age well regardless of the actual facts of the case. Hardcore and crossover thrash have always prided themselves on accountability being baked into the culture — call-outs happen fast and loud, and bands either address them directly or watch their credibility evaporate.
Texas's own hardcore and crossover scene has generally handled these moments with more transparency than deflection, and it's worth pointing to bands like Bitter End as an example of a Texas hardcore act built on the genre's foundational values of community and directness rather than controversy management. Whatever happens with Southpaw's label situation, the fallout is a reminder that hardcore's audience polices its own in ways few other metal subgenres do — and Texas crossover thrash and hardcore punk bands, including Morta on the thrash side, have largely built their reputations on not needing that kind of damage control in the first place.
Odds, Ends, and First Pitches
Elsewhere in the metal world this week: Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley threw out the ceremonial first pitch at an Angels game in Anaheim, proof that KISS's brand of theatrical showmanship — a direct ancestor of half the 80s metal bands who built stadium spectacle into their DNA — still gets invited to baseball games nearly 50 years into the band's existence. Alexisonfire debuted a new track called "Dogs of Chernobyl" live in Toronto, Limp Bizkit reportedly resurfaced in the studio working on new material, and MetalSucks' John Goblikon offered up a characteristically absurd meditation on "life-metal" as the antidote to doomscrolling despair — a bit that, underneath the joke, taps into something real about why people still need heavy music to process a chaotic news cycle.
Texas's own scene keeps expanding in the meantime, spanning everything from the arena-scale metalcore of Memphis May Fire to the genre-blurring technical shred of Polyphia — proof that when people talk about the best metal bands coming out of Texas, they're no longer just talking about one sound or one city. Whether you're chasing NWOTHM revivalism, sludge, hardcore, or full-blown genre fusion, there's a Texas band already doing it. Keep an eye on upcoming shows around the state this fall, and if you're in a band that isn't in our database yet, you can always submit your band for consideration.
