Long Island Emo Royalty, Metal's Elder Statesmen, and Why New York's Groove Scene Deserves Its Own Headline
Some weeks in metal news feel like a family reunion where half the relatives haven't spoken in twenty years and the other half just showed up with a new album nobody asked for but everybody wanted. This week is one of those weeks, and buried in the noise of legacy-band anniversaries and unexpected genre pairings is a genuinely local story worth leading with: Amityville's own Taking Back Sunday just announced a 20th anniversary reissue of "Louder Now," complete with a bonus 7-inch on exclusive vinyl and a celebration show at Red Rocks this October. It's a reminder that Long Island didn't just produce hardcore and metalcore lifers — it produced a record that soundtracked a generation's breakups, and that record is old enough to legally drink.
Long Island Never Left: "Louder Now" at Twenty
"Louder Now" wasn't a metal record in the strictest sense, but its DNA runs straight through the post-hardcore and emo-adjacent scenes that fed directly into New York's heavier underground. Bands that grew up on Taking Back Sunday's Long Island basement-show lineage went on to form the metalcore and hardcore acts that still pack VFW halls and DIY spaces across the state. The reissue announcement, paired with a proper anniversary show, is a good excuse to revisit why this record still matters: it's a document of a specific New York moment, when Long Island's suburbs were quietly incubating some of the most influential aggressive music of the 2000s. If you're building a list of the best metal albums of all time and wondering why an emo record keeps sneaking onto "most influential" conversations at metal shows, this is your answer.
The Old Guard Refuses to Retire
Meanwhile, the genre's founding fathers are having a moment. Mercyful Fate has announced its first live show in over three years, slated for Spain's Leyendas Del Rock festival, and Rush is marking the 50th anniversary of "2112" with a reissue and a "Spirit of Radio" greatest-hits set, all while filming four sold-out Toronto shows for a possible concert film. These aren't New York stories on their face, but they matter here because New York's heavy metal and progressive metal scenes owe an enormous debt to both bands. King Diamond's theatrical menace and Geddy Lee's genre-blurring ambition are baked into the DNA of acts like Brooklyn's own Arka, whose power metal and progressive metal instincts feel like a direct continuation of that 1970s and 80s lineage, and progressive outfit Ashes of Ares, who mine similar conceptual territory. When people ask what defines the best heavy metal songs of the classic era, they're really asking what New York's current crop of power and prog bands are still chasing four and five decades later.
It's also worth noting how much of this year's biggest metal news cycle is, structurally, an 80s metal bands victory lap — Rush, Mercyful Fate, Cheap Trick playing an intimate Troubadour show, Heart finishing a new album a decade after their last. The reverence is earned, but it also puts pressure on regional scenes to keep building the next chapter. New York has no shortage of bands doing exactly that, whether it's the traditional heavy metal attack of Legend or the riff-driven songwriting of Lace, both of whom carry the torch for a sound that refuses to die just because its inventors are pushing seventy.
Hard Rock's Unlikely Renaissance
Philadelphia's Heavens Edge just announced a new album called "Philadelphia" — a full-circle move for a band returning to the city where they started, following the success of their comeback single "Get It Right." Around the same time, the mysterious project Crossbone Skully dropped "Thunder Love," a single featuring Def Leppard's Phil Collen and produced with input tied to Mutt Lange, one of the most decorated producers in hard rock history. Both stories point to the same trend: melodic hard rock is having a real resurgence, not as nostalgia but as active songwriting.
That's a genre New York has quietly stocked for years without much press attention. Buffalo's own hard rock veterans Talas — the band that gave the world bassist Billy Sheehan before he became a household name — remain a foundational reference point for anyone tracing the state's hard rock lineage, while doom-leaning heavy rockers Silvertomb and traditional NWOTHM torchbearers Alien prove the appetite for riff-forward, hook-driven rock never actually left New York, it just went underground for a while. If Heavens Edge and Crossbone Skully can get major coverage for leaning into unapologetic melodic hard rock in 2026, there's no reason New York's own hard rock and NWOTHM bands shouldn't be part of that conversation. This is exactly the kind of content gap regional coverage exists to fill — hard rock and NWOTHM bands doing real work with almost no dedicated press attention.
Death, Grind, and the Genre's Uglier Corners
On the heavier and uglier end of things, Texas death metal outfit Frozen Soul dropped an official live video for "No Place of Warmth" featuring none other than My Chemical Romance's Gerard Way, filmed during their April Los Angeles show — proof that death metal's crossover appeal keeps finding strange, compelling doorways into the mainstream. Meanwhile Philadelphia's Devil Master paid tribute to Japanese hardcore legends G.I.S.M. with a cover called "Death Anthem," ahead of their September full-length "Bloody Dreams."
New York's own death metal and grindcore underground has been building toward exactly this kind of crossover-adjacent, genre-blurring energy for years. Long-running brutal death metal institution Pyrexia helped define a sound that still influences new bands like Mangled and Scabiasis, while the state's grindcore contingent, led by acts like Chepang, keeps things unpredictable and politically sharp. On the raw black metal side — a genre with real depth in this state's index but almost no dedicated coverage anywhere — bands like Antimony and Silvaplana deserve the same kind of tribute-and-lineage conversation that's currently swirling around Devil Master and G.I.S.M. If you're tracking new metal bands 2026 has to offer, don't sleep on the raw black metal and death metal corners of this state — they're not chasing trends, they're setting them quietly.
Groove Metal's Quiet Empire Turns Twenty
Nekrogoblikon's John Goblikon penned a retrospective this week marking his band's 20th anniversary, a reminder that groove-metal-adjacent, genre-blending bands can build decades-long careers without ever needing radio play or major-label backing. It's a good moment to point out that groove metal is one of the deepest, least-covered genres in New York's own scene — the index tracks dozens of bands working this sound with almost zero dedicated press. Motivational Death fuses death metal brutality with groove-driven breakdowns, Dark Fate refuses to be pinned to a single genre at all, touching groove, thrash, power, and progressive metal in the same breath, and industrial-groove veterans Hanzel und Gretyl have been blending genre lines since long before "genre-fluid" was a compliment critics handed out freely. If Nekrogoblikon can spend two decades building a cult following on weirdness and groove, there's no reason New York's own groove-metal underground can't get the same kind of longevity and respect.
What This Means for the Local Scene
The throughline across all of this week's headlines — reissues, tributes, unlikely collaborations, decades-old bands still finding new gears — is that the best metal bands aren't just the ones headlining arenas. They're the ones building scenes brick by brick, the way New York's death metal, black metal, groove metal, and heavy metal underground has been doing for years without a fraction of the coverage legacy acts get. Metal bands touring 2026 will lean heavily on nostalgia circuits and 50th anniversary victory laps, sure, but the real story is always happening closer to home, in the DIY venues and small clubs where the next generation is figuring out its sound.
If you're hunting for metal concerts nyc bands are actually playing this fall, or trying to get a real sense of new york metal shows beyond the arena circuit, keep checking our upcoming shows listings — we're tracking the club dates, not just the festival headliners. And if you're in a band that belongs in this conversation, don't wait for a journalist from Los Angeles to discover you first. Submit your band and let's get New York's real story told.