In 2025, Canadian hard rock/metal veteran Ian Blurton released ‘Crimes of The City’, the second album to credit his band Future Now. With nods to Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult and 70s era Judas Priest, the album pitched itself very squarely in the direction of the older melodic metal fan, but with ten solid sounding tracks and no obvious filler, it was the kind of record that proved that old school sounds can still be very effective.
Goat Major’s debut album (‘Ritual’, released in 2024) was one of the best stoner/doom releases of the year. The still-new Welsh act mixed a classic Sabbath and Kyuss infused heaviness with an occult leaning and a pinch of dark psychedelia to create an album that sounded like something you’d always known, yet still wielded a world of huge sounding doomy metal riffs in such a way that the material still felt genuinely thrilling. Rather wisely, the band have largely chosen to stick to a similar formula for their 2026 follow up, ‘Death Comes Twice’, a collection of intense and heavy bangers that reinforces the idea that Goat Major are one of the UK’s best up-and-coming metal acts at the time of release.
Welcome back to the Real Gone Singles Bar, the place where we explore some of the more interesting tracks that have landed in our inbox over the past few weeks. This time around, we bring you a couple of superb singer songwriters, an interesting remix, an unmissable slab of alternative metal, a jaunty country number and more besides. As always, we hope you find something new to enjoy.
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Steak’s ‘Acute Mania’ (released via Ripple Music in 2022) presented a brilliant dose of stoner rock. Just as important as sharing some great riffs, the album boasted the kind of production job that made the London based heavyweights sound even heavier. The guitars adopted a tone somewhere between doomy and fuzzy – often making the band’s Kyuss influenced roots more than obvious – and the drums punched through everything with a genuine intent. In stoner terms, it offered the kind of professional sound you’d expect from a major label band a quarter of a century earlier. In short, ‘Acute Mania’ was a contemporary stoner classic.
Phoenix metallers Incite have been releasing classic sounding thrash/groove based albums for over a decade, but their most recent, ‘Savage New Times’ is one of their best to date. Ploughing through ten heavy workouts in a little over a half-hour, the record is insanely tight. From the speed-oriented opener ‘Lies’ – playing like a cross between Soulfly and the faster elements of Testment – to the groove laden ‘No Mercy, No Forgiveness’, to the heavy, rhythmic title track that showcases a sharper guitar tone for its first half, before tipping the hat very obviously in the direction of Soulfly for a much moodier climax, it’s a record that never lets up.