Taylor Momsen's Grohl Team-Up, Mustaine's Bestseller, and the Long Game New York's Metal Lifers Are Playing
There's a particular kind of validation that comes when a band born in New York City nightclubs ends up trading guitar licks with grunge royalty two decades later. That's the story this week courtesy of The Pretty Reckless, and it's a reminder that New York's rock and metal lineage doesn't just survive — it keeps accumulating new chapters.
The Pretty Reckless and Dave Grohl, Together Again
Taylor Momsen's The Pretty Reckless just dropped a bonus version of "About You," the standout cut from their fifth album "Dear God," and this time Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl isn't just lending his name to a feature credit — he's on drums, guitar, and backing vocals, with Pat Smear joining him on guitar. For a band that's spent years wearing its Hole and Nirvana influences on its sleeve without apology, having actual Nirvana and Foo Fighters personnel show up on the record isn't just a flex, it's a full-circle moment.
It also underscores something New York's rock scene has quietly understood for a long time: the lines between hard rock, grunge, and metal have always been porous here. Momsen's band gets filed under hard rock and blues rock more often than metal, but the riffs, the volume, and the attitude have always skewed heavier than radio playlists give them credit for. A guest spot from Grohl — a guy who's played both sides of the heavy/alternative divide his whole career — only cements that The Pretty Reckless belongs in the conversation about where New York rock is headed as much as any band on this list.
Mustaine's Memoir Climbs the Charts, Tour Talk Heats Up
Dave Mustaine doesn't live in New York, but Megadeth's story has always intersected with this state's thrash lineage in meaningful ways, and his new memoir "In My Darkest Hour" debuting at No. 4 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction list is the kind of crossover moment that gets non-metal readers paying attention to a genre they'd normally ignore. Co-written with Joe Layden, the book landed via Grand Central Publishing's newly launched Da Capo imprint, and its commercial success says something about where heavy music sits in the culture right now — it's not a niche interest anymore, it's bestseller material.
Mustaine also confirmed something that should matter to anyone tracking metal bands touring 2026 and beyond: a 2027 run pairing Megadeth with Anthrax and Kerry King is reportedly in the works, dates still pending. Anthrax's Scott Ian has long name-checked the New York thrash underground as formative to the Big Four's sound, and a tour of this scale, whenever it lands, will inevitably draw attention back to the regional scenes — ours included — that provided the soil those bands grew out of. New York's own thrash lineage runs deep, from Yonkers' own death-thrash pioneers in Demolition Hammer to the grind-adjacent chaos of Brutal Truth, both bands that proved New York could go toe-to-toe with the Bay Area and Germany when it came to pure aggression.
Slipknot's Casagrande Teases New Material
Drummer Eloy Casagrande confirmed in a recent interview that Slipknot is tracking "a lot of songs" following the September release of the "Arsenal" single, calling the sessions "real music" in a way that suggests the band is leaning back into substance over spectacle. Slipknot's influence on an entire generation of New York metal and metalcore bands is hard to overstate — you hear it in the aggression-first approach of plenty of acts working the state's DIY circuit right now, from extreme death metal outfits to the crossover thrash crowd chasing that same mosh-pit chaos.
It's a good moment to point out that the conversation around new metal bands 2026 isn't just about who's signing to major labels — it's happening in basements and VFW halls across New York right now. If you're in a band chasing that same kind of real, unpolished heaviness, submit your band and get on our radar; we're always looking to cover what's actually happening on the ground rather than just what's trending nationally.
Smashing Pumpkins Return to Butch Vig, Reconnect With Alt-Rock Roots
The Smashing Pumpkins dropped "Black Stars" this week, their contribution to "The Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping (The Album)," marking their first studio reunion with legendary producer Butch Vig since the band's classic era. It's not a metal release in the strict sense, but it's worth flagging for New York readers because the alt-rock-meets-heavy sensibility the Pumpkins pioneered in the '90s runs directly through bands still active in this state's scene today. Long Island's Taking Back Sunday owes an obvious debt to that era's emotional heaviness filtered through aggressive guitar work, and it's a good reminder that the border between "alternative" and "heavy" has never been a hard line in New York — it's always been a spectrum.
Infant Annihilator Returns, HEALTH Goes to the Arcade
On the extremity end of the spectrum, deathcore outfit Infant Annihilator has confirmed their first new album since 2019 is coming in December, which is significant news for anyone who's spent the last several years wondering if the band's absurdly technical, brutally fast style was gone for good. New York's own extreme death metal and brutal death metal contingent — acts like Molested Nun and Cult Dialect — operate in that same unforgiving register, where technicality and sheer violence of sound are the whole point, and a high-profile return from a band like Infant Annihilator tends to reenergize that corner of the scene nationally.
Meanwhile, industrial outfit HEALTH debuted two new tracks, "NEGATIVE EDGE" and "BRAINROT," written for the new Street Fighter movie. It's a small story in the grand scheme of things, but it's a useful nudge toward a genre New York doesn't talk about enough: industrial and experimental metal. The state's black metal and industrial crossover acts, like Hatred Palisade, are working similar territory — cold, mechanized aggression layered under extreme metal structure — and they deserve more ink than they typically get. If HEALTH scoring a video game soundtrack puts industrial-leaning heaviness back in front of a mainstream audience, that's a win that trickles down.
The Weekly Tracks Roundup Keeps an Eye on New York
Metal Injection's latest Top Tracks of the Week roundup pulled from a wide net — Insomnium, Cro-Mags, Carnifex, Sable Hills, Defects — and New York's own progressive death-sludge act Hung found its way into that same conversation, which is exactly the kind of national-vs-local overlap worth tracking. Lists like that matter less for the ranking itself and more for what they signal: tastemakers are still scanning New York's underground for material worth featuring, and bands willing to put in the work on recording and release strategy are getting noticed outside their immediate scene.
Where This Leaves Us
None of this week's headlines originated in New York, strictly speaking, but that's almost beside the point. The through-line connecting a Grohl guest spot, a Mustaine bestseller, a Slipknot teaser, and an Infant Annihilator comeback is that heavy music keeps finding new ways to stay culturally relevant without losing its teeth. New York's scene — from the thrash lifers to the black metal purists to the hardcore kids still booking basement shows — has always thrived in exactly that tension between mainstream crossover and underground purity.
If you're trying to figure out where to spend your weekend, check upcoming shows around the state — there's a strong chance whatever band you catch tonight is doing the same balancing act these bigger names are doing, just at a much smaller volume. That's always been the appeal of covering this scene: the best metal bands of tomorrow are usually playing a room with forty people in it right now, long before anyone outside the five boroughs or the Hudson Valley has any idea who they are.