Charlie Benante's Double Duty, Kerry King's New War Cry, and the Supergroup Wave Hitting New York's Progressive Underground

Some weeks in metal news feel scattered. This one feels like a map of New York's entire DNA — thrash royalty moonlighting on a wrestling cruise, hardcore legends marking four decades of a record that rewrote the genre, and a fresh batch of progressive death metal landing from a supergroup stacked with pedigree. If you squint, almost every thread connects back to this state's fingerprints on heavy music.

Benante Is Everywhere, And One of Those Places Is Very Funny

Let's start with the man who never seems to sit still. Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante — also currently holding down the kit for Pantera on the road — popped up this week behind his other favorite instrument: chaos. Benante joined Fozzy aboard Chris Jericho's Rock 'N' Wrestling Rager At Sea cruise for a barnstorming cover of Judas Priest's "Living After Midnight," the kind of unannounced cameo that reminds you why cruise-ship metal bills exist in the first place. It's the sort of detour that's become a Benante signature: the guy is constitutionally incapable of turning down a good bash.

Meanwhile, back on dry land, MetalSucks' long-running comedy institution Disgruntled Dad Reviews turned its satirical eye toward a fictional Anthrax release titled "Cursum Perficio," with columnist Dave Mustcomplain declaring it a potential winner. It's a bit, obviously — the column has built a cult following precisely because it treats absurd, invented metal releases with the deadpan seriousness of a real review — but it's also a nice reminder of how much cultural real estate Anthrax still occupies in metal discourse, decades after "Among The Living" became one of the best metal albums of all time by any reasonable measure. Whether it's a real riff or a joke about one, the band's name still carries weight as shorthand for New York thrash at its most uncompromising.

Kerry King Declares Another War

Elsewhere in thrash-adjacent news, Slayer guitarist Kerry King announced "My War" as the first single from his upcoming second solo album, teased during an appearance on the "100 Songs That Define Heavy Metal" podcast. It's a small story on its surface, but it's worth noting how much gravitational pull King's solo project continues to exert on the broader conversation about where thrash goes after its founding generation. New York has never lacked for bands willing to carry that torch — from the technical death metal lineage of Suffocation to brutal upstarts like Sick Cell and Killed with Cash keeping the crossover thrash flame lit on local bills. If you're compiling a list of best heavy metal songs for 2026, King's new single is going to force its way into that conversation whether the purists like it or not.

Clutch, Corrosion of Conformity, and a Reminder That Hardcore Never Left

Maryland's Clutch dropped the video for "Beware The Fever" this week — banjo included, a first for the band — alongside the announcement of a sprawling 2027 U.S. tour with Corrosion of Conformity, Chuck Ragan, and, notably for this region, New York hardcore institution Agnostic Front. It's a lineup that bridges Southern sludge and NYC street-level aggression in a way that feels overdue, and it's exactly the kind of bill that should have local sludge and hardcore crowds circling dates the moment tickets go live. New York's own sludge contingent, including bands like Engineer, has been quietly building an audience that overlaps heavily with exactly this kind of Clutch/C.O.C. crowd — heavy, groove-forward, unbothered by genre purity tests. Keep an eye on the upcoming shows page as more dates near this region get locked in; with touring calendars for metal bands touring 2026 and into 2027 filling up fast, this is shaping up to be one of the bills worth planning around.

Forty Years of Age of Quarrel, and the Hardcore Blueprint That Never Expired

Speaking of New York hardcore: this week also brought a retrospective look at Cro-Mags' "The Age Of Quarrel" on its 40th anniversary, with Harley Flanagan's recent re-recording of the album serving as the news hook. Four decades on, it remains one of the foundational documents of NYC hardcore — the record that proved hardcore and metal weren't separate ecosystems but overlapping ones, a lesson this state's scene absorbed early and never forgot. You can trace a direct line from that record through the crossover attack of bands like Biohazard and street-punk survivors The Casualties, all the way to current acts like Combust who still treat the pit as sacred ground. It's a genealogy that makes New York's claim on hardcore history basically unimpeachable.

A New Progressive Death Metal Supergroup, and the Genre's Quiet New York Moment

The most intriguing pure music news of the week might be the debut single from Meridian Veil, a new project pulling members from The Agonist, Cryptopsy, Seven Spires, and Leprous. "The Watcher" premiered via Metal Injection and it's exactly as technically dense and atmospherically ambitious as that lineup suggests — crushing, but patient about it. Supergroup fatigue is real in this genre, but this one's pedigree is hard to argue with, and it lands at a moment when progressive and technical metal feel like they're having a real resurgence.

That resurgence has local implications. New York's progressive metal underground has quietly deep bench strength — from the long-running conceptual ambition of Transatlantic to younger acts like The Final Sleep and Crowned working the death-meets-prog angle that Meridian Veil is clearly aiming for. And on the metalcore-adjacent side, Silent Planet's confirmation of their new album "Infinite Sleep," accompanied by a "Fangs!!" video featuring Thornhill's Jacob Charlton, points to the same genre-blurring instinct — technical, melodic, unafraid of dynamics. New York's own Spire sit in nearly identical territory, working death metal, metalcore, and progressive structures into a single sound, and this week's national headlines make a strong case that the appetite for that kind of hybrid is only growing heading into whatever we end up calling the crop of new metal bands 2026 produces.

Fear Factory Reboots the Machine

Fear Factory announced their new album "Roboticist," due out early next spring, with Metal Injection offering exclusive vinyl and a signed CD for early birds. It's genuinely good news for a band whose industrial-metal template has been copied endlessly but rarely matched, and it's a reminder that the cyborg-and-machinery aesthetic Fear Factory pioneered still has teeth. New York's industrial and drone contingent — acts like Ghostly working the atmospheric, machine-adjacent end of heavy music — exist in a lineage that owes something to exactly this kind of cold, mechanized aggression, even if the execution looks completely different on the ground here.

The Legacy Beat: Owens, Ward, Van Halen, and Sabaton

Rounding out the week: former Judas Priest vocalist Tim "Ripper" Owens announced a massive February/March 2027 European run — 30 shows across 14 countries — proof that the appetite for 80s metal bands and their offshoots hasn't dimmed one bit on that continent. Black Sabbath's Bill Ward revealed he's mastering a new solo record next month, telling Metal Express Radio,

"We are mastering a new record next month. And we are shopping this year, and so hopefully..."

a tease that should have doom fans everywhere paying attention. Wolfgang Van Halen opened up on the Garza Podcast about the pressure of playing his father's songs at the Taylor Hawkins tribute shows. Sabaton dropped a new "Berserker" video featuring actor Eric Roberts. And doom supergroup Legions of Doom, featuring former Trouble and Corrosion of Conformity members, announced a 2027 live album recorded at KK's Steel Mill — further proof that doom's elder statesmen have no plans to slow the march.

What It All Means Locally

None of these headlines originated in New York, but almost all of them run through it — through Anthrax's half-century of credibility, through hardcore's NYC birthplace, through a progressive metal appetite this state's underground has been feeding quietly for years. If you're in a band working any corner of this — thrash, hardcore, progressive death, industrial, sludge — this is the week to make noise. Submit your band and get on our radar; the next wave of best metal bands conversations should absolutely include New York names.