Lavish 8CD box set of Status Quo’s seminal “Status Quo – Live!” album from 1977 due in May

With a career now in their seventh decade, it’s no wonder that Status Quo have become national treasures. Even with some of their 90s output being a far cry from their best, the Rossi/Parfitt commitment to live work helped the band remain a massive draw for gig goers, and any musical missteps are easy to forgive when taking into consideration that Quo’s run of albums released between 1967-77 is almost flawless.

On 16th May, lovers of classic Quo are in for a real treat. The essential 1977 release ‘Status Quo – Live!’ will be reissued as a lavish 8CD box set. Obviously, this isn’t the first time that the album has been given the box set treatment: in 2014, a 4CD version coupled the original album with the previous Japanese-only release ‘Tokyo Quo’ and a decent quality bootleg recording from the Australian leg of the same tour.

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Check out ‘Sentinel Hill’, the new video by In Dakhma

When a band is pitched as “death metal”, there are certain tropes that the listener will expect. There are the pnrumatic drums – an integral part of the death metal sound, from the genre’s formative years, due to the brutal assault of bands like Suffocation – and the guttural vocals, often associated with the genre’s bigger names like Death and Entombed. You’d probably also expect to hear speed driven, huge sounding bass grinds, often providing a pivotal aspect to the aural assault.

Croatian band In Dakhma’s debut album ‘He Who Sows The Ground’ features all of that…and more. Check out ‘Sacrum’ and you’ll find a classic death metal sound delivered with a genuine enthusiasm; listen to ‘In Dogma’ and you’ll discover a hardcore infused bass part colliding with thrash riffs that are direct descendants from Sepultura’s massively influential ‘Arise’. Elsewhere, ‘Lies Beyond The Golden Ruins’ colours the band’s riffs with a hard nod towards groove metal, and the epic closer ‘Tower of Silence’ introduces sludgy riffs to bring something even heavier to the fore.

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Cober Mouth share insanely heavy new single ‘Steride’

Cober Mouth are a band who’ve never been afraid of genre-hopping. On their 2024 single ‘Open! Shut…’, they chopped in many of their already familiar alternative elements for swathes of rap and R&B, and on their current track ‘Steride’, they introduce heavy synth loops and an almost industrial level of heaviness to their cornucopia of noise.

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Check out ‘How Calm The Silence’, the new single from The Rattlebacks

The Rattlebacks had a very successful 2024. The Brighton based rock band released a selection of singles which received online acclaim, and towards the end of the year, they unleashed their debut album, ‘Sidewinder’, again, to a very positive response.

The album was a little more varied than a couple of the earlier singles suggested, with a couple of rather grungy tracks dropped between the huge old school rockers, and with a massive ballad providing one of the record’s standout tracks. It was very much the kind of album that suggested more greatness ahead.

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