At The Iridium, Alex Skolnick Reminds New York Why Jazz Clubs and Metal Guitarists Have Always Belonged Together
There's a particular kind of New York magic that happens when a room built for jazz standards gets invaded by a Bay Area thrash legend, and this Sunday it's happening again. The Alex Skolnick Trio — led by the Testament guitarist who's spent three decades proving that shred and swing aren't mutually exclusive — is closing out its 2026 run with a show at The Iridium on October 25th, and the whole thing is being recorded for a future release. That alone would be a nice footnote in the New York metal scene's week. But the venue is the real story here.
The Iridium isn't just another Midtown room with a sound guy who hates guitar amps. It's the club where Les Paul held down a Monday night residency from the '80s onward, occasionally pulling up surprise guests that read like a who's-who of guitar royalty. That a Testament member is now cutting a live album there, in a room steeped in six-string history that long predates thrash, says something about how porous the lines have gotten between "serious musician" spaces and metal. Skolnick has always lived in that overlap — jazz trio by night, Testament by... also night, depending on the tour schedule — and watching him do it in a club with Les Paul's ghost still rattling around the walls is as New York as it gets.
The Elder Statesmen Are Not Slowing Down
This week's national metal news cycle had a theme running underneath it, even if nobody planned it that way: the guys who built this genre are still building. Tony Iommi, 78 years old and still the reason riffs sound the way they sound, released his new solo album "From The Dark" on October 23rd and spent a Channel 4 interview explaining, with the kind of understated confidence only a Black Sabbath founder can pull off, that he keeps writing because "it keeps me going." In the same stretch of interviews, Iommi gave a shoutout to William Shatner's unlikely pivot into metal music — yes, that Shatner — calling it "really good what he's doing," which is either the most New York Captain Kirk crossover sentence ever written or just further proof that nobody in this genre is too old or too famous to keep swinging for something new.
Slash is doing the same thing from a different angle, teasing "Flying Blind," the fifth album from Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators, due February 2027 via Gibson Records, and calling the title "a great metaphor" for where the band's at. Meanwhile Sharon Osbourne sat for a BBC interview reflecting on the "Back To The Beginning" concert film — Ozzy's final performance, now immortalized theatrically — admitting she'll "probably" never watch it again, which is about as honest an answer as anyone could give fifteen months after losing him. Jack Osbourne, for his part, pushed back on backlash over AI recreations of his father, insisting the planned "digital Ozzy" won't be reduced to hawking cell phone plans. It's a strange era for legacy acts — equal parts reverence and resurrection — and New York, with its dense population of aging road warriors and their devoted audiences, feels every bit of that tension.
Because here's the thing: New York has its own version of this story, and it's been happening in dive bars and VFW halls for years without a Channel 4 crew around to document it. Talas, the Buffalo hard rock outfit that gave the world Billy Sheehan, has been a working New York band since the late '70s. Chris Caffery, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Savatage guitarist, has spent his career bouncing between power metal theatrics and straight-up shred without ever losing the plot. And Andrew W.K. — a one-man argument that party rock and heavy metal were never actually different genres — keeps proving that New York's veterans don't retire, they just keep finding new rooms to play in. If Iommi can drop a new record at 78, there's no excuse for anyone in this state's scene to think their best work is behind them.
Traditional Metal Isn't a Relic — It's a Living Scene
Speaking of not being finished: if you've spent any time arguing about the best metal albums of all time or debating which 80s metal bands actually deserve the "legendary" tag, you already know traditional heavy metal never really went anywhere — it just went underground for a stretch and waited for the next generation to rediscover the NWOTHM revival. New York's got a deeper bench here than people give it credit for. Bands like 13 Candles and Sword and Shield are keeping that classic, riff-forward heavy metal sound alive in clubs across the state, while Ceres leans into the power metal end of that same lineage. DarkStarr and Mykey Massacre round out a quietly thriving pocket of the scene that doesn't get the same column inches as the state's death metal and black metal underground but absolutely should. This is a genre built on guys like Iommi refusing to stop, and New York's traditional metal bands are proof the next generation of torch-bearers is already here — they just need the same spotlight the legacy acts keep getting handed.
When "Experimental" Means Something, and When It's Just a Grift
Elsewhere in the metal internet this week, a band that marketed itself as being "from the co-creator of Sleep Token" finally dropped music, and the consensus take — delivered with the kind of deadpan brutality only metal journalism can manage — was that it's somehow worse than Sleep Token itself. It's a reminder of how much weight a vague pedigree claim can carry in an algorithm-driven discovery era, and how little substance sometimes backs it up.
New York's experimental corner doesn't need borrowed clout to justify itself. The state's experimental metal scene — one of the index's genuinely underrepresented categories — includes acts like Kryvydya, who fuse death metal structure with genuinely unpredictable songwriting, and Genghis Tron, whose cybergrind-meets-progressive approach has influenced plenty of bands who'll never admit it. Barbiturate continues to push avant-garde death metal into strange, rewarding territory as well. None of these bands need a manufactured connection to a bigger name to earn your attention — they've built their own identities from the ground up, which is more than can be said for whoever thought "co-creator of Sleep Token" was a selling point instead of a red flag.
Loyalty, Controversy, and the Discourse Machine
Billy Corgan made headlines this week for standing by his friendship with Marilyn Manson, telling The New York Times flatly, "I don't want the world to tell me who my friends are." It's not a New York metal story in the strictest sense, but it's the kind of statement that ripples through every local scene conversation about loyalty, cancellation, and what we owe to art versus artist. Those conversations happen in green rooms and group chats across this state's scene constantly, even if they rarely make it into print.
Touring Season Keeps Rolling
On the touring front, the pipeline of metal bands touring 2026 and into 2027 keeps filling up fast. Saxon just announced a March 2027 European leg of their "Gods Of Thunder" tour, complete with the return of their 30-foot mechanized eagle for select dates. Wolfgang Van Halen's Mammoth is filming its London headline show for a future release, and Angra brought out a stacked guest list — including former members and Loudness's Akira Takasaki — for a cover of Deep Purple's "Burn" at Full Metal Japan. None of these are New York dates specifically, but they're the kind of international activity that tends to precede U.S. and Northeast stops down the line, and this state's venues have historically been first in line when the legacy acts come calling.
If you're trying to keep track of who's actually playing New York rooms this season — from Iridium jazz-club crossovers to basement death metal bills — the upcoming shows page is the place to check before you commit to a Saturday night. And if you're in one of the dozens of bands quietly building this scene from the ground floor, dropping new music with the same hunger as a 78-year-old guitar legend still writing riffs, don't wait for a music magazine to find you — submit your band and get into the index.