After ‘bonkers gig’ at Huddersfield town hall paired doom metal bands with pipe organist, churches are keen to get in on the act

It was a “bonkers gig”, pairing heavy metal with a pipe organ – a musical curiosity that the bands thought would surely seldom be repeated, if ever.

But Pantheïst and Arð, the doom metals bands who performed the concert at Huddersfield town hall last year, have been inundated with requests to repeat the performance – with churches leading the way.

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(Sleeps Brothers)
On their sixth album, the hardcore Sheffield quintet bring furious riffs, howling, swearing and … acoustic guitars?

Formed by school friends in former mining villages near Sheffield, While She Sleeps were briefly on a major label but have gone an independent route to build a passionate fanbase large enough for them to headline London’s 10,000 capacity Alexandra Palace. Meanwhile, over 17 years the quintet’s music has developed beyond metalcore to reflect wider influences from Radiohead to Kendrick Lamar.

This sixth album attempts the sort of genre-busting metamorphosis Linkin Park went for with A Thousand Suns. Riffola and guttural, screamed vocals still abound (singer Loz Taylor has had three throat operations). Where 2021’s Sleeps Society album featured guests from Enter Shikari, Biffy Clyro and Sum 41, here Malevolence’s Alex Taylor pops in for the brutally anthemic Down.

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The psychedelic musician’s new album trades her obscure influences for stark folk, inspired by the death of her father – then warped through Google Translate. ‘You don’t to write too much about yourself,’ she says

Jane Weaver turns up to our interview in a Stockport restaurant carrying a plastic bag stuffed with albums. They are all old, the worse for wear – she’s taking them to be professionally cleaned later – and obscure: the closest the bag’s contents comes to mainstream is a compilation of soundtrack music from the 80s films of nouvelle vague director Eric Rohmer . “The music from the scenes set in discos or parties,” she nods. “ Really good. Eighties, French, synthesisers. Some of it sounds a bit like Air.”

This all seems very Jane Weaver-ish. Over the past decade or so, she has released a string of fantastic, acclaimed albums, each one a left-turn from the last. They’ve taken in acid folk, space rock, eerie, drifting electronic experimentation, hypnotic, vaguely krautrock-y instrumentals and full-on pop, all of them informed by separate moodboards of obscure influences that speak of a profoundly eclectic taste and a lot of time spent digging through esoteric records. Even 2021’s glittery, pop-facing Flock was apparently based in an infatuation with “Lebanese torch songs and Australian punk”. She is the kind of artist who says things like, “I just kind of went down the rabbit hole of 80s Russian aerobics music,” in the same way that other people might announce they’ve been streaming that Noah Kahan single a lot.

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Keir Starmer is on a personal mission to promote music to the under-11s. From rock’n’roll to Jonathan Richman, our writers suggest songs for an alternative schooling

• Charlotte Higgins: ‘Arts funding has collapsed under 14 years of Tory rule. Here are three ways Labour can fix it’

Rock’n’roll is nearly 70 years old: it can just sound arcane and distant to ears trained on 21st-century pop. An effective crash course in its revolutionary importance, how it changed Britain forever requires not one track, but two. First, play something that constituted pop music before Little Richard et al arrived: Dickie Valentine’s The Finger of Suspicion, Anne Shelton’s Lay Down Your Arms or Guy Mitchell’s frankly horrifying paean to fatherhood, Feet Up (Pat Him on the Po-Po). Then play Long Tall Sally, the feral opening seconds of which – in the context of what came before – sound like a bomb going off, or the world being turned on its head. Alexis Petridis

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Pub where Black Sabbath played their first gig gains Grade II status after thousands sign petition

A “one-of-a-kind” historic pub where Black Sabbath played their first gig has secured listed status, in a small victory for campaigners trying to save a famous Birmingham street from redevelopment.

The Crown, known as “the birthplace of heavy metal”, was one of the buildings at risk on Station Street, also home to the UK’s oldest working cinema, the Electric, which closed last week.

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Thirty years on from their masterpiece album The Downward Spiral, we assess the studies of faith, authority and self-loathing from Trent Reznor’s band

Year Zero isn’t Nine Inch Nails’ strongest album, veering towards the kind of overproduced studio product that Grammys voters like – although there is still a distinct imprimatur to this mainstream blues-rock, as if finished with a black NIN wax seal. God Given is its pop moment, with distorted noises building the type of groove that Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera or Kylie Minogue might have tried out at the time in a moment of label-troubling moodiness.

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The frontman answers your questions on metal’s punk rivals, working with Dolly Parton, his top Priest song and his time working in a Walsall sex shop

Was the first heavy metal record the Kinks’ You Really Got Me (1964) , Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild (1968 ), Black Sabbath’s Black Sabbath (1970 ) or something else? VerulamiumParkRanger
Gotta be Black Sabbath. I love the Kinks and Steppenwolf but by definition they’re not really metal. In terms of riffage, I’ve always defined metal to the greatest extent with the bass and it’s a big, meaty, Black Sabbath-style riff – a West Midlands sledgehammer ! That’s what Tony [Iommi] was doing, so it’s definitely Black Sabbath for me.

How did you feel about punk at the time, and is it weird that as time has gone on, punk and metal have become pretty interchangeable as far as their fanbases go? johnny5eyes
It was exciting for Priest to be around when the punk movement exploded from London. I remember seeing the Sex Pistols at a club in Wolverhampton, and I thought they had some metal vibes to them – the attitude and some of the riffs. I welcome anything like this because it’s the true essence of what rock’n’roll should be all about. The unfortunate thing that happened in the industry was that suddenly all the labels and the media focused exclusively on the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Clash. All great bands, but metal was kind of pushed out of the picture. For a while, there was this mantra that metal was dead. You can’t squash a whole movement because something else comes along, but we needed punk in the British music scene.

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Artists have previously only managed four wins in one ceremony, capping an astonishing year for the British singer who was once left in major label limbo

Three years ago she was lost in limbo at a major label, publicly lashing out with frustration at not being allowed to release an album. Now, the ultra-versatile British pop singer Raye has won six Brit awards in one year, smashing the previous record of four held by Harry Styles, Adele and Blur.

She capped a triumphant night for women across a range of genres, with 70% of 2024’s winning acts either female or non-binary – a marked change from recent years when the Brits faced criticism for being heavily weighted towards male artists.

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(Mute)
The avant garde musician’s first album in seven years features cinematic ambience, pummelling sound design and whinnying metal guitar

Iceland-based Australian composer Ben Frost has the portfolio career of most avant garde musicians, dividing his time between scores for film, TV and video games while also making opera and art installations. An album project seems almost quaint, but his first in seven years houses some of his very best work.

Frost has long tended towards symphonic grandeur, disrupting it with punkish guitar, glitching electronics and spooky sound design – with occasional spells of bluster or self-seriousness. But Scope Neglect undercuts that by centring the gnarly tongue-out riffs used by metal bands, played by prog-metal guitarist Greg Kubacki. Frost gave Kubacki and bassist Liam Andrews fully fledged orchestrations to guide the emotion of their playing – and then removed those orchestrations from the finished record, arranging it in a way that resists easy emotion.

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