Beef Squashed, EPs Dropped, and Florida's Noise Rock Underground Keeps Grinding: This Week in Metal
There's something oddly fitting about a week where old feuds get buried at a festival while a Tampa noise rock outfit keeps chipping away at the underground with zero fanfare. Metal's news cycle this week was a mixed bag of legacy artists doing legacy artist things, metalcore bands leaning hard into melancholy, and one genuinely heartwarming moment of two dudes who once fought each other on stage deciding, years later, that music matters more than ego. Let's get into it, with an eye on what all of it means for the Florida metal scene.
Beef, Squashed: What Palmeri and Bennett Taught Us About Scene Unity
Emmure's Frankie Palmeri and The Acacia Strain's Vincent Bennett spent the better part of two decades as heavy music's most infamous rivals, dating back to a 2009 dust-up that became internet legend. So when Palmeri joined Bennett on stage at Louder Than Life this past weekend, it landed as more than a nostalgia pop — it was a reminder that even the ugliest scene beef has a shelf life, and that the genre is bigger than any one grudge.
That's a lesson Florida's deathcore and metalcore underground has internalized for years. Bands like Dark Sermon, Cold Dead Hands, and Bodybox share bills across the state constantly, and the DIY ethos that keeps Florida basements and VFW halls booked depends on exactly this kind of camaraderie. When touring costs are brutal and every regional promoter is scraping together a bill, there's no room for petty rivalries. If Palmeri and Bennett can bury the hatchet after seventeen years, there's hope for anybody still nursing a grudge from a bad show in 2019.
Melodic Heaviness Is Having a Moment — And Florida Metalcore Should Take Notes
The metalcore and post-hardcore world dropped a flood of new material this week that all seemed to circle the same emotional register: grief, longing, and the search for something resembling heaven. Holding Absence premiered the video for "Heaven," off their new Sumerian Records album Modern Life Is Lonely, while Like Moths To Flames wrapped their five-song EP Does Heaven Ever Mourn For Me with a suitably morbid closer in "Tie The Ivy Through My Ribcage." Currents, never a band to do things the conventional way, surprise-dropped an entire EP called Worlds Away featuring reimagined versions of older tracks. Meanwhile Hollow Front returned with "So Long To Yesterday," a milestone single marking guitarist Dakota Alvarez's return to the band following his recovery from an ischemic stroke that had temporarily robbed him of his ability to play.
That Alvarez story deserves its own pause. Recovering enough to rejoin a touring metalcore band after a stroke is the kind of comeback that puts industry drama in perspective, and it's a reminder that this scene, for all its internet noise, is built on real people fighting through real things.
For Florida heads, this wave of atmospheric, melody-forward heaviness is worth watching closely. The state's metalcore scene has always had a foothold in this exact lane — bands like Faces of Many and The Warring Triad operate in similar emotional territory, blending breakdown-heavy riffing with genuine vulnerability in the vocals. If you're tracking new metal bands 2026 is shaping up to bring, keep an eye on how many Florida acts start leaning into this hybrid of heaviness and heart-on-sleeve songwriting. It's clearly resonating nationally, and Florida bands have never been shy about following a sound that lets them get loud and get real at the same time.
The Legacy Circuit: Ministry, Testament, and a WASP Frontman's Hot Take
Meanwhile, the genre's elder statesmen are staying plenty busy. Ministry dropped "Singularity," the third single from what's being billed as their farewell album — a phrase that always seems to stretch further than advertised in this genre, but Al Jourgensen has earned the right to call his own shot. Testament's Chuck Billy confirmed a remixed version of the band's 1990 album Souls Of Black is coming in 2027, telling Metal Express Radio it "sounds so good, really modern and raw." And Rammstein's Till Lindemann shared a performance clip of "Und Die Engel Singen" ahead of his upcoming Live In Krakow film and album.
Then there's W.A.S.P.'s Blackie Lawless, who used a recent appearance on Full Metal Jackie's Whiplash radio show to go fully off-script on politics rather than music:
"Anybody living in the United States that thinks that it's not the best in the world, you need your head examined."
Take that for what it's worth — Lawless has never been shy about opinions that have nothing to do with guitar tone. What's more relevant to Florida readers is the news that former W.A.S.P. guitarist Chris Holmes recently began chemotherapy in France for prostate cancer. Metal's old guard is aging in real time, and every remixed reissue or farewell tour is a reminder that the genre's founding generation won't be around forever. It's part of why regional scenes matter so much right now — somebody has to carry the thrash and heavy metal torch forward, and Florida has never lacked candidates.
Florida's Heavy Metal and NWOTHM Underground Deserves the Spotlight
Speaking of carrying torches: while the mainstream conversation stays fixated on legacy thrash and industrial acts, Florida's own new wave of traditional heavy metal bands keep grinding away with far less attention than they deserve. Bands like Helms Deep and Dungeon Wolf are flying the flag for riff-first, no-frills heavy metal, while Claimh Solais and Armor of God lean into power metal's more ambitious, storytelling-driven side. Throw in the gothic-tinged death metal of Storm Kingdom and you've got a genuinely deep bench of bands keeping the spirit of classic heavy metal alive in a state better known for its death metal pedigree.
If you're compiling a list of the best metal bands Florida has to offer right now, this NWOTHM-adjacent corner of the scene is criminally underdiscussed. It doesn't have the streaming numbers of deathcore or the festival slots of legacy thrash, but it's where a lot of the state's most technically gifted musicians are quietly doing career-best work. Consider this an open invitation to go dig into a Helms Deep or Claimh Solais set the next time one pops up on a local bill.
Wrong Keeps Florida's Noise Rock Underground Loud and Unpredictable
Not every scene development this week comes wrapped in a press release. Tampa's Wrong continue to represent one of the more interesting corners of Florida's heavy music underground — noise rock that leans dissonant, abrasive, and unconcerned with radio-friendly hooks. In a state whose metal identity is so thoroughly built on death metal's legacy, bands like Wrong matter because they prove Florida's heaviness doesn't have to come from blast beats and tremolo riffs. Sometimes it comes from feedback, discomfort, and a refusal to resolve a chord progression the way you expect.
Noise rock has always been a tougher sell for local bookers than metalcore or death metal, but it's exactly the kind of band that keeps a regional scene from calcifying into one sound. If your local venue is only booking breakdown-heavy bills, a band like Wrong on the lineup is a gut check — a reminder that "heavy" is a much wider net than most fest flyers suggest.
Odds, Ends, and the Broader Picture
Elsewhere, Five Finger Death Punch pushed physical copies of their new album Legacy out to U.S. fans (Europe and the UK are still waiting), Ice Nine Kills is curating a month of horror programming with AMC just in time for their favorite season, Extol premiered the second single "Disintegrate" from their long-awaited return, and A Killer's Confession — the project from former Mushroomhead vocalist Waylon Reavis — announced their new album Victim 3 for November. Oh, and Angus Young autographed an actual baby, which is either the most metal or least metal thing that's happened all week depending on your tolerance for chaos.
None of that news breaks in Florida specifically, but it all filters down eventually — through the touring circuit, through the bands your local scene idolizes, through the influence that shapes what gets written in basements from Pensacola to Miami. The throughline across all of it is that heavy music keeps mutating, forgiving old grudges, and finding new ways to sound like heaven and hell at the same time.
If your band has news, a new release, or a show worth flagging, don't wait for a national outlet to notice — submit your band and get it in front of the people actually paying attention. And if you want to see who's playing near you this month, check out the full list of upcoming shows across the state. Florida's scene doesn't need permission from the rest of the country to be great — it just needs eyes on it.