Taking Back Sunday Turns 'Louder Now' Into Vinyl Gold, and the Question of Who Owns a Band When Someone Lands Behind Bars
Long Island has a funny way of exporting bands that become bigger than the strip malls and Long Island Rail Road stations they came from, and this week the proof is in a 7-inch. Taking Back Sunday just announced a 20th anniversary reissue of "Louder Now," the 2006 record that took the band from Amityville basement shows to arena stages, complete with a bonus 7-inch of exclusive material for the vinyl heads. The band is also throwing a dedicated "Louder Now" set at Red Rocks this October, which is a long way from the VFW halls where New York's emo and post-hardcore scene cut its teeth, but it's a reminder of how deep this state's fingerprints run on genres that don't always get filed under "metal" but share the same DNA of volume, catharsis, and basement-show lineage.
"Louder Now" was never a metal record, obviously, but it mattered to a generation of New York kids who went on to form the sludge, hardcore, and metalcore bands populating this very index. The record's anniversary is as good an excuse as any to talk about how porous the line is between emo, post-hardcore, and the heavier stuff that dominates headlines here. If you were a teenager on the Island or upstate in 2006, there's a decent chance "Louder Now" shared a car stereo with whatever death metal or metalcore demo you were also obsessing over that month.
The Ethics of Keeping a Band Alive Without Its Namesake
MetalSucks launched a new Wednesday column this week called "Do I Suck?", and the inaugural question is a gut-punch: is it wrong to want to replace a bandmate in his own band because he's heading to jail for an extended stretch? It's the kind of question that sounds hypothetical until you've actually lived through it, and anyone who's spent real time in New York's DIY and underground metal scene has watched some version of this play out — a lineup gutted overnight by legal trouble, health crises, or just life refusing to cooperate with a tour schedule.
There's no clean answer, and that's exactly the point of the column existing. Bands are businesses, friendships, and creative partnerships all tangled together, and when one member becomes unavailable for reasons entirely outside anyone's control, the rest of the group is left holding a decision that has no good option. Do you freeze the band in amber until he's out? Do you bring in a fill-in and risk the perception that you're capitalizing on someone's absence? New York's scene, heavy metal bands especially, tends to be built on loyalty and long memories — the kind of place where people still talk about who did right by whom a decade later. It's worth remembering that as this conversation plays out nationally, because the same math applies whether you're a Long Island hardcore outfit or a heavy metal band two albums deep.
New York's Heavy Metal and NWOTHM Underground Deserves More Ink
Speaking of heavy metal bands built on loyalty: this state has a quietly thriving traditional metal and New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal contingent that doesn't get nearly the column inches of the hardcore or black metal scenes. Bands like Lace, DarkStarr, and Legend are carrying the torch for riff-forward, NWOBHM-indebted songwriting at a time when the genre is enjoying a real resurgence nationally. Doom-leaning heavy metal act Silvertomb fits into that same conversation, proof that New York's take on classic metal songwriting doesn't need to ape the past wholesale to honor it.
This matters right now because the week's national headlines are stuffed with old-guard metal news that reinforces exactly why this stuff still resonates. Judas Priest launched a virtual scrapbook digging into the band's earliest years, cult American metal institution Virgin Steele's David DeFeis confirmed he's already got "a lot of stuff on tape" for a follow-up to 2023's "The Passion Of Dionysus," and Jørn Lande has been talking up his songwriting collaboration with Tony Iommi on the Black Sabbath guitarist's upcoming solo record "From The Dark." None of these are New York stories on paper, but they're a reminder that 80s metal bands and the generation they influenced never actually left — they just kept writing, touring, and in Priest's case, digitizing their own history for anyone paying attention. New York's own heavy metal underground is doing the same thing in miniature: building catalogs, building scrapbooks of their own, one local show at a time.
Old Songs, New Context: Slipknot's First Voice and Metallica's Sphere Residency
Original Slipknot vocalist Anders Colsefni has been talking about what it's like performing songs from "Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat." again, and he described the experience as "pretty incredible" in a recent chat with Minnesota Music Note. There's something worth sitting with there for anyone who follows New York's own extreme metal scene — bands like Aeviterne and Dehumanized have members with decades of history in this scene, and watching a pioneer return to his earliest material decades later is a preview of what longevity actually looks like when a band or a scene survives long enough to have its own origin story worth revisiting.
Meanwhile Metallica brought "Harvester Of Sorrow" into their Sphere residency rotation this week with a new visual treatment, continuing their habit of digging into deeper "...And Justice For All" cuts for the Las Vegas run rather than resting on the obvious hits. It's a small thing, but it's a reminder of why that record keeps getting cited in every "best metal albums of all time" conversation three and a half decades later — there's still unmined material in a catalog that dense. For a New York scene full of thrash-adjacent bands like Decimation and Toxik, watching one of the genre's biggest acts still treat deep cuts as worth the production budget is a useful lesson in not phoning it in on the deep tracks.
The Touring Circuit Keeps Turning
Elsewhere on the national touring front, Saliva dropped a music video for "Rivers," a tribute to the late Limp Bizkit bassist Sam Rivers released on the one-year anniversary of his death, pulled from their "Breaking Through" album. Nervosa had to step off their UK tour with Xentrix after guitarist Prika Amaral's allergic skin condition flared up, a reminder of how physically brutal touring life actually is even when the shows themselves go off without a hitch. And Haywire announced a rescheduled Australian run ahead of dates supporting Rise Against and Dropkick Murphys, with Feel The Pain opening most stops — none of it New York news directly, but all of it part of the same ecosystem that eventually funnels bands through Brooklyn, Albany, and Buffalo rooms on their way around the country.
That's really the throughline this week: metal bands touring in 2026 are navigating health scares, lineup crises, legacy-catalog maintenance, and milestone anniversaries all at once, and New York's scene is a microcosm of every one of those pressures. Whether it's a hardcore band figuring out how to survive a member's incarceration, a heavy metal band quietly building a catalog without national press attention, or a legacy emo act turning a 20-year-old record into a vinyl event, the mechanics are the same up and down the spectrum. New metal bands in 2026 are inheriting a scene where the old rules about loyalty, longevity, and who gets credit for a band's legacy are being renegotiated in real time, in MetalSucks comment sections and in actual green rooms alike.
If there's a lesson in all of it for the bands reading this from a Rochester practice space or a Bushwick DIY loft, it's that the scene rewards the acts who stick around long enough to have their own scrapbook moment. Keep booking the shows, keep documenting the sets, and keep an eye on upcoming shows around the state — and if your band hasn't been logged yet, you can always submit your band and get counted among the New York acts actually doing the work this index exists to track.