From Fort Lauderdale to the Sphere: Marilyn Manson's Florida Roots Resurface as the Scene Reckons With Its Past
Every so often the national metal press stumbles backward into Florida without realizing it. This week it's Marilyn Manson, whose latest record is getting torn apart by a fictional furious father on MetalSucks, and it's as good a reminder as any that long before the shock-rock circus set up permanent residence in the tabloids, it was a Fort Lauderdale bar band called Marilyn Manson & The Spooky Kids figuring out how to turn South Florida's swamp heat and strip-mall decay into theater. That's the thread running through this week's headlines — theatrical heavy metal, old scars reopening, and a scene still arguing about who gets to stand where in the pit.
Manson's Florida Ghost Returns to the Conversation
MetalSucks' recurring "Disgruntled Dad Reviews" bit tackled Chapter 2 of Marilyn Manson's "One Assassination Under God" with the kind of unhinged dad-at-the-mall energy that's become the column's signature, with Dave Mustcomplain growling about wanting to "stuff him in a locker or wedge his Fruit of the Looms up his ass crack." It's comedy, obviously, but it's also a backhanded acknowledgment that Manson still provokes a reaction thirty-plus years after he was workshopping songs in Broward County clubs. Whatever your position on the man — and there are plenty of positions, most of them complicated — there's no erasing the fact that one of the most controversial and commercially massive acts in metal history has Florida fingerprints all over its origin story. The band's early run through South Florida's DIY and goth-adjacent club circuit is part of the regional lore the same way Morrisound Studios and the Tampa death metal explosion are, just a different flavor of infamous.
Castle Rat, Dregen, and the Case for Theatrics
Speaking of theater: pro-shot footage of Castle Rat's full Bloodstock Open Air set dropped this week, and it's worth watching if you want a reminder of why heavy metal's current retro-doom-meets-arena-fantasy wave has staying power. Castle Rat leans all the way into the bit — robes, riffs, a frontwoman who treats the stage like a Renaissance faire with Marshall stacks — and the crowd response at Bloodstock suggests audiences are starving for bands willing to commit to a concept rather than just show up and play.
That same appetite for classicist, capital-H Heavy Metal showmanship is exactly why Dregen's exit from The Hellacopters is worth a second look through a Florida lens. In a new interview, the guitarist confirmed leaving wasn't his call, pointing to permanent hand damage from an injury three years back, and floated a wistful what-if:
"Maybe we could have gone full-on Iron Maiden and had three guitarists."
It's a throwaway line, but it lands differently in a state with an actual thriving NWOTHM and traditional heavy metal underground that rarely gets its due nationally. Florida's content gap in heavy metal coverage is a real thing — the index currently tracks seven straight-up heavy metal / NWOTHM acts and almost none of them get write-ups despite packing out the same rooms as the thrash and death metal bills. Tampa's own Shot is a case in point: a band built on the exact twin-guitar-harmony, leather-and-chains ethos Dregen was romanticizing, operating in a scene that too often gets reduced to its death metal pedigree. If there's a silver lining to a classic-rock guitarist publicly grieving over not getting to be Iron Maiden, it's that it puts a spotlight back on bands actually doing that work right now — Shot included, alongside genre neighbors like Absolon and Charon, who are proving the best metal bands coming out of Florida right now aren't all blast beats and gore.
A Scene Still Settling Its Accounts
Not every headline this week was about riffs. Former VCTMS touring bassist Davion Cutler went public with his own account of alleged mistreatment from Meredith Henderson, writing:
"During my time working for VCTMS, I was subject to many instances of verbal abuse, yelling, insults and in one case, even physical aggression from Meredith."
Allegations like this keep surfacing across the extreme music world, and they land hardest in a scene like Florida's, which is small enough that touring players, local crews, and fans all overlap constantly. The same week, Southpaw FLHC played their first show since denying accusations of Nazi sympathies, a free skate-park set that did little to resolve the underlying controversy even as it tested whether a local audience would show up regardless. Meanwhile overseas, Sex Pistols frontman Frank Carter threw a male fan out of a women-only mosh pit section and then doubled down publicly, stating the space was built to exclude "incels, homophobes, misogynists, racists, fascists" and specifying it as trans-inclusive. These three stories aren't related on paper, but together they sketch out a scene-wide conversation happening in real time about who shows get to be safe for, who bands are accountable to, and what happens when venues and fans actually enforce a standard instead of just posting about one. Florida promoters and local bands booking rooms from Orlando to Jacksonville are having versions of this same conversation right now, often with a lot less national attention. If your band or your show has a policy worth bragging about, that's exactly the kind of local news worth getting in front of — check upcoming shows around the state or submit your band if you want the index tracking it.
Mourning, Legacy, and the Death Metal Lineage
Heavier news on the health front: vocalist and vocal coach Amanda Somerville revealed her diffuse midline glioma is inoperable and can only be managed to "gain time," a gutting update from a singer whose session and coaching work touches a huge swath of the European power and symphonic metal world. It's the kind of news that puts the rest of this list in perspective.
Elsewhere, legacy and loss keep intersecting. Mastodon's Brann Dailor spoke candidly about late guitarist Brent Hinds, saying Hinds "got away with a lot of things that other people wouldn't be able to," a blunt but clearly loving assessment tied to the band's new album "Marrow Deep," written in the year since Hinds' death. And Swedish death metal lifers Unleashed paid tribute to Venom's Cronos with a live cover of "Countess Bathory" in Athens, a reminder that the extreme metal family tree traces back to a small handful of foundational bands everyone still owes a debt to.
That lineage matters enormously here, because Florida is arguably the single most important piece of real estate in death metal's entire history. The Tampa scene that produced Morrisound Studios also gave the world technical pioneers like Atheist and Nocturnus, bands whose fingerprints are all over the genre Unleashed has spent decades honoring. When international veterans cover Venom in tribute to Cronos, it's worth remembering that Florida's own death metal architects were building something just as foundational around the same era, and that legacy is still actively being carried forward by a new generation of riff-driven underground acts working the same clubs today.
The Bigger Picture for a Diverse Scene
Zoom out and this week's grab-bag of headlines — Metallica quietly rotating another deep cut into their Sphere setlist, Mortal Sin teasing best-of and live releases while writing new material, Metal Injection's list of covers that outdo the originals — all point to the same truth that makes Florida such a strange and compelling place to cover: this state doesn't have one metal scene, it has a dozen overlapping ones. The same region that birthed death metal's most technical architects also exports arena-scale power metal via Kamelot, platinum-selling metalcore and pop-punk crossover through acts like A Day To Remember and Mayday Parade, and now a quieter but no less dedicated wave of new metal bands in 2026 working the traditional heavy metal and NWOTHM angle that national outlets still mostly ignore.
None of that happens in a vacuum, and none of it happens without the unglamorous work of bands playing skate parks, bassists speaking up when something's wrong, and festivals deciding what kind of room they want to build. Castle Rat committing to the bit at Bloodstock and a Florida heavy metal band like Shot grinding it out in a local club are closer cousins than the geography suggests — both are betting that commitment to craft and theater still means something in 2026. Keep watching this space; the Florida metal scene has never needed outside validation to know what it's building.