Drama of the Year - Metal Storm Awards 2025

Architects - The Sky, The Earth & AI Between

In the latest "Spotify is evil and so is AI" news, long-running metalcore heavyweights Architects found themselves targeted by the worst kind of obsessive fan: a machine that wants to be them.  Mere months after the release of the band's 11th album, The Sky, The Earth & All Between, Spotify listeners were treated to the unexpected boon of a brand new single, seemingly dropped onto the platform out of nowhere without a shred of warning from the band.  This quiet largesse was no early Christmas present, however.  Listeners quickly realized that "Ashes of the Kingdom" was not Architects - and not only was it not Architects, it was not anybody.  The song and its accompanying art proved to be entirely AI-generated.  Somehow, despite being entirely fake, despite apparently bearing no serious resemblance to the real band, this song was uploaded to the official Architects account on Spotify.  Fans also recounted seeing the same on YouTube Music and witnessing similar phenomena with other bands. After the fake song was reported, it was taken down, but Architects should probably consider themselves lucky: there's no reason to believe that Spotify will be so gracious when this inevitably happens again.

Needless to say, it's curious that there are evidently no safeguards to prevent this sort of thing, which is a phrasing that generously assumes it wasn't purposeful on Spotify's part to begin with. It certainly is possible that the AI track was associated with the genuine Architects profile through simple operator error, and Hanlon's razor chides us not to attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. But that other famous razor posits that effacement of menace can be an unnecessary charity: when an immoral company does an immoral thing, it's probably because they meant to.

Of course, this doesn't help us answer any of our manifold questions, the first and foremost of which is "cui bono?" Who benefits? What was the purpose? Who used AI to assemble that track in the first place, and why did they do that? To test the limits of their power? Out of boredom, spite, failure to produce genuine music? As a mere prank or for fraudulent ends? And then why was it uploaded? To see whether the experiment could fool anyone? To test the public reaction? Is this a vanguard for a larger rollout? And how was this able to be attached to an official artist profile on not just one but at least two major streaming services? How has this apparently happened with other artists as well? Where is this intrusion happening - at Spotify HQ, at a record label, at a distributor, through backdoor means unknown to all parties? Is this happening with official approval, negligence, or ignorance? Where did the money made from the streams go? Presumably to the parties formally associated with the account, i.e. Architects, Epitaph Records, Spotify, any other parties with a contract, but could the perpetrator reap any royalties? We haven't located any statements from Architects or Epitaph on the matter, so did they even know? Did Spotify deign to inform them of this worrying affront? What will happen the next time something like this occurs - will Spotify even be so obliging as to remove the offending track at all?

We'll ring Daniel Ek when he's done counting money and see whether he gives a shit, but for now, support genuine music and be a little nicer to Architects the next time you see them on tour.

Behemoth - The Cringe Ov Nergal

2025 will go down as the year Behemoth dropped their thirteenth studio album, The Shit Ov God. This charmingly titled record was described in the press release as "a defiant plunge into the depths" (yes, that's an actual quote someone approved).

Now, to be fair, black metal has always been a genre with the subtlety as thin as single-ply toilet paper. A pissing contest in provocation and blasphemy (so kvlt, you’ll pøøp vr pvnts). In that light, The Shit Ov God smells like an unapologetic attempt to squeeze every last drop of shock value out of a phrase that souds like black-marker-graffiti on a gas station bathroom wall. You can almost see a Nuclear Blast marketing executive rubbing their temples. Somewhere else, a middle-schooler chuckles so hard he snorts orange juice out of his nose.

And honestly, that still would've been fine. Metal has survived far worse album titles and will survive this one too.

But then, already knee-deep in mockery and online crap, then Nergal stepped in. Somehow making everything demonstrably worse. Standing bravely in the blast radius, instead of shrugging it off, he insisted, without even flinching, this masterstroke of poetic genius is dead serious. Capital-S Serious. Like, more-philosophical-than-you-think-it-is serious. What followed were solemn explanations clarifying that the album title is actually a profound contemplation on the divine nature of feces as a metaphor for the existential rot of postmodern society.

Please stop laughing. This is art. Nergal would like you to take this shit seriously. Or symbolically. Or spiritually. Because apparently that’s how shit works now. To confuse the fuck out of people (another actual quote, likely pulled straight out of his ass).

All arsing-around aside, The Shit Ov God does make you wonder about the real questions. Are Behemoth flushing their own legacy down the drain? How much secondhand embarrassment can a fanbase absorb before becoming clinically constipated? How does Nergal orient his toilet paper: over or under the roll? And, more pressingly, once you've planted your flag on this hill, where do you even go next? How do you wipe the slate clean after leaving a stain this size on the metal discourse?

The answer is obvious: you don't. You double down. You fully embrace the p00-tential. You make damn sure everyone hears the splash. Which means the only logical follow-up to The Shit Ov God is... The Shart Ov Satan. Load it up with guest appearances from Bathtub Shitter, Bowel Stew, Fecal God, Rectal Smegma, The Browning, or the ever-enigmatic Maynard James Keenan of STool. Pants down, err, hands down, that would be the most Behemoth thing Behemoth could do.

Thorns & Slagmaur - At The Arse Of Winter

If "Operation Master of Deceptions" sounds to you like something an 11-year-old might come up with as a ruse to stay home from school, you'd be exactly right: last November, local elementary school children Snorre Ruch and Rune Røstad hatched an adorable little plan to sneak some extra dessert and get out of doing their homework.  They pretended to be lost in the woods, going as far as to leave a note on the kitchen counter saying they'd run away from home, and led the town sheriff on a merry chase involving pranks worthy of Home Alone.  The brilliantly orchestrated caper was foiled when Mom came home and found the pair giggling whilst reading comic books under the bed.

Ah, no, wait now.  That's Snorre Ruch (54) of Thorns and General Gribbsphiiser (43) of Slagmaur, professional black metal musicians, who were in fact executing "the greatest black metal social experiment of the 21st century".  Yes, haha, you've been pranked!  You suckers thought they were bergtatt for real!  To be quite fair to them, it was extraordinarily elaborate, at least according to their own summary on the website of the fake Norwegian newspaper they created to sell the story and this summary on Metal Insider.  The full story is something like a feature-length horror film and two sequels, so we'll leave you to peruse the entire accounting on your own time, but the much shorter version is this:

Slagmaur has a new album coming out, Hulders Ritual, some years in the making; a hulder being a sort of female enchantress of Scandinavian folklore, known to live in the forest and deceive men to some sort of fate, Ruch and the General decided that the most thematically appropriate way to generate some hype for the album (...and, evidently, teach us a lesson or something?) would be to fake the moon landing.  Or, uh, fake getting lost in the woods.  So they conspicuously posted on social media about their journey to the mountains, went up the hill... and never came back.  News of their supposed disappearance spread through co-conspirators and concerned citizens alike, and naturally the villagers started getting worried - this is how Valfar died, you know, and it was a pretty unlucky year for metal musicians already.  Before too long, Fosen Fire & Rescue, the Norwegian Civil Defence, and the Norwegian Red Cross were involved in the search, which led unsuspecting rescue workers to some kind of haunted house and to accounts of a mysterious old woman also with the missing duo - a mysterious old woman who may have haunted the General in his youth, according to his mother.  The lore ran pretty deep.  And not just for our two missing orcs personally: supposedly, preexisting local legends about evil spirits and the ghosts of soldiers and so on filtered into the reporting, surpassing even the intended scope of the legerdemain.  The tale goes on.

And then, sure enough, wouldn't you know it, Ruch and the General resurfaced, remarkably fine and jolly, ready to declare "It was jvst a søcial experiment, brø!"  It was certainly some kind of undertaking, as it appears that the local Norwegian civil services actually deployed, albeit with the knowing excuse of the scenario to host a training exercise (out of which they got some glossy, high-quality promo photos courtesy of General Gribbsphiiser, a professional photographer).  If you're feeling a little lost by the whole thing, just be glad you're getting lost in your own home and not in the mountains.  And you can feel a little proud of yourself knowing that "You didn't just watch the ritual.  You became the ritual."

Vinnie Vincent - Whiny Whinecent

Vinnie Vincent, best known as the lead guitarist on KISS's Creatures Of The Night and Lick It Up and as the spearhead of Vinnie Vincent Invasion, announced an unorthodox plan for the release of his latest album, Judgment Day Guitarmageddon.  Apparently fed up with "premature pirating" and "whining bitching immature 'I want it for free babies'" (sic), Vincent decided that the only way to survive as an artist in today's rough economy is to find his 1,000 most devoted fans and shake them down for their lunch money.  You see, Vinnie has this whole new album in the can, 18 tracks of guitar-driven hard rock that he's certain will bust brains the world over, but he's looking for his fair deal in exchange for labor and services rendered, and he knows he's not going to get that from miserly streaming platforms.  He's not going to cast his masterpiece into the ocean of streaming anonymity.  He needs a way to bilk the consumers directly.

The solution?  Break the album down into 18 pieces and mete it out in installments.  The album will be released one song at a time, in the form of 18 CD singles limited to 1,000 copies each (500 for US release, 500 international), to be shipped when - and only when - all 1,000 copies of that respective song are bought and paid for.  Real primo special edition subscribers-only stuff.  And the price tag for the goods?  200 USD.  Each.  Yes, two hundred US American dollars - that's two Benjamin Franklins, or four Ulysses S. Grants, or ten Andrew Jacksons, or twenty Alexander Hamiltons, or a treasure chest filled with 20,000 Abraham Lincolns - for a solid five or six minutes of music.  And then you do that 18 times, and then you finally have the entire album.  An entire album that, we will remind you, you will need to listen to in the form of 18 separate CDs.  An entire album that, we will also remind you, was recorded not by Jeff Beck or Paul McCartney or J.S. Bach but by Vinnie Vincent.  And Vinnie's not budging an inch until each order is filled, and he's perfectly happy to release nothing at all if the fans don't bite (NOTE: we are also perfectly happy if he releases nothing at all).  That doesn't even include shipping: $25 a pop domestic (which'll run you another $450 total across the album) and a whole other $100 for international fans.  One can only imagine that for such an extravagant price tag Vinnie will personally come to your house, place the CD in your stereo for you, and serve you drinks while you endure generic hairspray dad rock (now that would be a real Vinnie Vincent Home Invasion).

Now, Vinnie describes it as "a blowtorch (...) Sexxtout, body groove, shreddfest, pure fire in the veins", which certainly sounds like one hell of a rock'n'roll album, to the extent it sounds like any recognizable concept at all.  It could be worth your left kidney after all.  He's gone as far as to compare it to Led Zeppelin II, Are You Experienced, and even Meet The Beatles, calling it "the greatest album of all time".  Well, it isn't.  No, it just isn't.  Like, excuse us, Vinny, but does this album contain "I Saw Her Standing There"?  Does it contain "Blitzkrieg Bop"?  Does it contain "Caramelldansen"?  No, it doesn't. Restrain yourself.  (It does at least contain such classics as "Heavy Metal Poontang" and "Cockteazer".) But it's clear Vinnie hasn't really thought this through in any respect; he's clearly not offering this in any other format, so unless the same 1,000 fans buy all 18 songs, some of them are going to be left with only a fragmentary album that they will be otherwise unable to enjoy in full, and he hereby guarantees that this creative work he apparently poured his entire heart and soul into will be buried forever in a crypt of super simps and will have no legacy or wide audience whatsoever.  Moreover, while the shipping industry gains $450-$1,800 per head, each of those fans is going to be out $3,600, which is not an amount of money that people can just casually throw around these days.  Look, all props to Vinnie for taking a massive swing at streaming platforms; music is commodified, musicians are dehumanized, making a living off art is harder than ever, and it's got to be frustrating as a lifetime professional musician to see your whole field just dry up before you - and it's going to take some massive action to communicate those consequences to people.  But that's rent money, pal.  That's groceries.  That ain't an hour of inconvenient hair metal you'll never be able to share an experience of with other people.  Maybe the heart's in the right place, but if this goes all the way to market it would sail right past Wu-Tang Clan's Once Upon A Time In Shaolin as the most expensive work of music ever, and that doesn't make Vinnie Vincent look like Rock'n'Roll Jesus; it makes him look like greedy corpos Kadokawa charging over $1,000 to own every episode of Nichijou.  In short, an asshole.

If this works out, Vinnie stands to gain $3.6 million.  That ought to be more than enough to cover production costs.  No word yet on whether he will be building himself a sauna with the proceeds.

Vitriol - Suffer & Become & Find Out

The new lineup of tech death concern Vitriol was barely two months old when it became the old lineup of Vitriol, and the parting of ways was rather, well, something something vitriol.  Right in the middle of a US-Canadian tour with Weeping, guitarist Keith Merrow, bassist Brett Leier, and drummer Andy Vincenzetti took their ball and went home, abandoning founder Kyle Rasmussen at what Merrow described as "a gas station in Vermont" (later clarified by Rasmussen to be an ice cream shop in Vermont, understandably not doing business in late November).  The statement that Merrow made on Instagram implied some kind of explosive conflict, which Rasmussen soon expounded on in a video roughly the length of Rust In Peace.  If you don't want to expend the entire run time of Paranoid staring at a ramblin' man, Lambgoat helpfully provides a transcription so you can CTRL+f through it.

Long story short: there was cocaine.  Or "nose beers", as Rasmussen puts it, in a brilliant bowdlerization to slip past social media censors.  According to his video, there was a lot of nose beer, and everybody imbibed, and in the midst of the cocaine there was conflict, as happens when you combine unstable individuals with stressful situations like trying to cross the Canadian border while operating under the influence of illegal stimulants.  Naturally, Rasmussen's version and Merrow's version involve some different perspectives as to who is proportionally how much of an asshole; Merrow points out that a band doesn't amass such an impressive roster of ex-members as Vitriol without a common problem being readily identifiable, while Rasmussen contends that abandoning someone with his girlfriend and dog at a closed business far from home with no money is not the very height of non-assholery, and, you know, there are probably some valid points being made by both parties here.  The sensational account of the sudden mid-tour marooning sparked a trend of solving personnel problems with gas stations, with bands like Health and Yomi taking inspiration; it also brought back fond memories of the same fate being unintentionally applied to folks like James Paul Luna of Holy Grail, Timmy Russell of Rose Funeral, and Jesus of Nazareth (meanwhile Necrobutcher announced that he was also on his way to abandon Kyle Rasmussen at a gas station). In the end, Rasmussen was able to get home thanks to donations from fans while the three ex-members decided to form their own band, so... all's well that end's well? 

Oh, and in a strange twist, a few days later Rasmussen posted another rambling and apparently satirical revelation on Instagram wherein he renamed himself "Preta" (after the class of supernatural entity described in multiple South and East Asian religious traditions as being a "hungry spirit" associated with suffering) and declared himself to be "publicly evil".  So... we'll see how that goes.  I guess we didn't learn any lessons about the cocaine, then.