Man oh man, am I excited about today! Bad Wolves is coming in! Can’t wait to shoot some video with those guys!
Linkin Park vocalist Mike Shinoda will make his first solo appearance since the death of bandmate Chester Bennington at the Identity LA festival this spring. The free event, which celebrates Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, will take place at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles on May 12th. Other artists who have yet to be announced will also perform in addition to Shinoda, who announced his participation in the event via Twitter.
Shinoda recently confirmed that he is working on a new solo album, inviting fans earlier this month to a night shoot in Hollywood for a music video from the set. The singer/producer released three new solo tracks as a digital EP in late January. Titled Post Traumatic, the set directly addressed the death of Bennington and Shinoda’s own anxiety over what would come next.
He told Alt Press about the experience of recording again, “A week after Chester passed, the idea of the studio was scary. And it wasn’t just the idea of attempting to make a song and being overwhelmed by those memories. There’s another layer of fear for artists in this situation that is, ‘What if I can’t make anything good [without that person]?’”
Linkin Park has not officially announced whether the group intends to continuing recording and touring together, following Bennington’s suicide last July.
Seether is returning to the road in support of its 2017 album Poison The Parish, kicking off a summer run of dates on July 12th with an appearance at Rockfest in Cadott, Wisconsin. In addition to several other festival stops, the trek will feature a number of headlining shows that will take the band into mid-August. 10 Years will join them for many of the shows in late July and August.
Poison The Parish is Seether’s seventh studio effort. It includes the singles “Let You Down” and “Betray And Degrade,” which hit Numbers One and Two respectively on rock radio last year.
Seether is making a series of upgrade ticket packages available for fans, with incentives including meet-and-greets, tour posters, set lists, VIP merchandise, early entry into the venue, a backstage tour, the ability to be side stage for the first three songs, a Poison The Parish license plate and more. You can see all the dates on the Road Rage page.
Metallica‘s latest album, Hardwired…To Self-Destruct, vaulted to the Number Two position on this week’s Billboard 200 album sales chart, nearly a year and a half since the disc was first released in November 2016. The jump was due to sizable sales generated from a concert ticket/album sale redemption offer for the band’s upcoming North American tour, which saw ticket buyers receiving a copy of the LP that counted as a sale. As a result, Hardwired… shifted approximately 65,000 equivalent album units in the week ending March 22nd.
Metallica’s showing is driven by traditional album sales, as 63,000 of its 65,000 units were in pure sales as opposed to streams or downloads. When Metallica bundled Hardwired…To Self-Destruct with tickets to its North American stadium tour last year, the band saw a similar gain in sales.
According to Billboard, Hardwired… is the 12th Metallica album to sell at least a million copies since Nielsen Music began tracking sales in 1991. The group has sold a total of 58 million albums in the U.S. in the Nielsen Music era, with 1991’s self-titled “black album” moving nearly 17 million copies alone to become the overall top-selling album of that span of time.
The 2018-2019 North American leg of the “WorldWired” tour will kick off on September 2nd in Madison, Wisconsin and run through March 13th in Grand Rapids, Michigan. See Road Rage for all the stops.
Rise Against's Tim McIlrath at Sonic Boom Photo: Lou Brutus
Rise Against will kick off an extensive North American trek, dubbed the “Mourning In Amerika Tour,” with a headline performance at the ’77 Montréal punk festival on July 27th. The run will also include a show at the Coney Island Boardwalk in New York City on August 1st and a concert with Fall Out Boy at Wrigley Field in the two bands’ hometown of Chicago on September 8th. Special guests AFI and opener Anti-Flag will perform at all headline shows.
Tickets will go on sale to the general public beginning Friday, March 30th at LiveNation.com. You can see the full list, where else? The Road Rage page! Rise Against is touring in support of its eighth studio album, Wolves, which came out in June 2017. The set featured the Top 10 rock singles “The Violence” and “House On Fire.” AFI released its 10th studio LP, the self-titled “blood album,” in January 2017.
Also announced yesterday, 3 Doors Down and Collective Soul are hitting the road together for a lengthy summer North American jaunt being billed as the “Rock & Roll Express Tour.” The amphitheater outing will kick off on July 6th in Atlanta and travel to 36 cities across North America before wrapping September 16th in Phoenix. Soul Asylum will act as special guests on selected dates along the route.
Special pre-sales and VIP packages get underway today, while general public ticket sales will start on Friday, March 30th at 10:00 a.m. local time. 3 Doors Down released its sixth studio album, Us And The Night, in March 2016. Among the group’s multiple chart-toppers are “Kryptonite,” “When I’m Gone,” “Loser” and “Here Without You.”
Collective Soul released a concert album titled Live last December. The band’s hits include its 1993 breakout “Shine,” as well as “Gel,” “December,” “Precious Declaration” and “The World I Know.”
Pearl Jam closed out the Latin American leg of its 2018 world tour with a headlining performance at Lollapalooza Brasil on Saturday night. Early on in the set, the band brought Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell — who turns 59 later this week — on stage and serenaded him with a massive singalong of “Happy Birthday.” Farrell then joined Pearl Jam for a performance of Jane’s Addiction’s “Mountain Song.” Pearl Jam will resume touring in Europe and the US this summer.
Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi has said in a new interview that he’d be interested in working with Judas Priest singer Rob Halford. The two musicians recently reunited for a Metal Hammer photo shoot, during which Iommi stated, “We’ve talked about [working together] for ages. When the time’s right it would be nice to write a track or two, or whatever. I’d like to do that. It’s nice to work with people that you respect and like.” Halford stepped in to sing for Sabbath at a handful of shows in 1992 after Ronnie James Dio quit — opening for Ozzy Osbourne — and also once filled in for Ozzy himself when the latter became ill on a 2004 Ozzfest date.
Finally, celebrating birthdays today are Scott Anderson of Finger Eleven and Johnny April of Staind! Live it up!
