When we knew MOTÖRHEAD were coming out with a new album, despite all the rumours of Lem’s ill health, we knew we wanted to catch up with the band that gave us our name for our birthday issue. PAUL SCHWARZ got to talking ‘Head with guitarist PHIL CAMPBELL and found out that nothing will tear ’em down

It all starts a bit uncomfortably. Upon arriving at Gibson’s offices – what better place to stage an interview with a guitarist than surrounded by 100-plus guitars? – I am grilled about what I will ask Phil Campbell. I blather that I will ask about the new record, touring plans, how Lemmy is getting on… “No, do not start by asking about Lemmy. Ask about the All-Stars,” recommends Ute Kromrey, Motörhead’s independent PR for the past 15 years (she coordinates press for the band worldwide and you can see why they’ve stuck with her: not for nothing does Lemmy call her The Germanator). At the time I feel silly – I’d quite forgotten about the All-Stars, who just played Bloodstock. Quickly reading up on the Motörhead guitarist’s covers combo while waiting for Campbell to finish his preceding interview, I am intrigued to note that … Read More

“We got drunk with Satan, man! It was pretty cool.” You read Iron Fist, so the fact that Ryan Waste of trad metallers Volture is referring to the NWOBHM legends and not the dark overlord surely doesn’t make this story any less enticing. “Wings Of Metal in Montreal, that’s the festival I just came from,” he elaborates. “Me and Nick [Poulos, guitars], we flew up there as fans just to go hang out, see Satan and Manilla Road and a bunch of my friends’ bands like Midnight and Goat Horn. It was amazing.” Waste and Poulos are the partnership at the heart of Volture: a pretty amazing band with a pretty amazing story. That story kinda begins a long time ago, when Waste was in his early 20s, had just started out with Municipal Waste (they hadn’t blown up yet) and decided to try to fulfil a lifelong dream: playing in a traditional heavy metal band. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but you know, I hadn’t found the guy with the ‘voice’. Brent had that amazing, falsetto voice. I was like: man, you need a band! I didn’t even know the guy, I just heard him sing. I was like: we need … Read More

Even if yours truly’s once reliable mind was largely intoxicated and thus not fully functioning, I was still taken by surprise when, back in 2010 while visiting Stockholm, Nifelheim’s Tyrant revealed that he, David Blömqvist and Fred Estby (from the then recently deceased Dismember) had just formed a “classic sounding hard rock band à la Rainbow” and were already penning some tunes while looking for a singer. Three years later, with sadly Tyrant now out of the picture due to lack of time, but now with an actual name (Dagger, suggested by former Entombed mainman Nicke Andersson, who also designed their logo) and a first EP (‘Mainline Riders’), that unlikely prospect has become reality. And yes, it couldn’t further from the HM-2 empowered brute force of Swedish ancient dödsmetal, as if after two decades of playing ‘Skin Her Alive’ at full speed those boys had needed a break.

“Yeah, it was something like that,” confirms drummer and ringleader Estby. “After Dismember went on hiatus before breaking up for good, I did the Necronaut album with me playing most of the instruments and friends like Tompa from At The Gates or Dread from Tormented doing the vocals, but I think it was … Read More

Renowned Dutch death metal brigade, Hail Of Bullets, recently completed their third Metal Blade full-length, ‘III The Rommel Chronicles’. According to drummer Ed Warby, “After a half-year period of slightly worrying metal fatigue I finally started writing in June 2012. I had to recover from several years of doing one album after the other: Gorefest, Hail Of Bullets, Demiurg, Star One, 11th Hour, etc, without time to breathe. I needed to recharge the batteries so to speak. But once I had the basis for what would become ‘Farewell To Africa’, the floodgates of inspiration opened wide and with contributions from Stephan [Gebédi – guitars, also of Thanatos] and Paul [Baayens –guitars, also of Thanatos and Asphyx] we soon had a full album.”

Ed explains further, “In the months before I had no desire to even pick up a guitar or play metal, so when that [‘Farewell To Africa’] riff finally came to me it felt like such a relief. It was one of those moments where the song almost writes itself, one riff leading to another until you have a fully-formed song. That gave me such a confidence boost, and even more importantly it put me back in ‘metal’ mode. At … Read More

For anyone involved in the underground scene, especially in London, Craven Idol have been impossible to miss. Over the last few years, they’ve been a consistent presence on the live circuit, delivering primitive, atmospheric death thrash. There’s been a marked increase in the quality of their performance over the last few years and they stand on the brink of following up 2010’s ‘Ethereal Altars’ EP with a full-length album. Released on October 15 by the excellent Dark Descent Records, ‘Towards Eschaton’ is a far more varied release than many will have expected with a melodic sensibility that sees the band paying homage to their ’80s inspirations.

Frontman Wrath met Iron Fist in one of Camden Town’s finest boozers to talk through the long road towards the album’s release. “Craven Idol is a brainchild of myself and Scourger, the two guitarists. We met at university and discovered very quickly that we had the same sort of interest in music. We wanted to play old school Sodom, German Poison, and were also big fans of old school heavy metal. The whole Australian black thrash movement was also coming out at the time and we wanted to incorporate all those things and not be too … Read More

25 years in the making, PENTAGRAM CHILE, are finally ready to unleash their debut album, and it’s made the wait all worth while and a true contender for death metal album of the year. OLIVIER ‘ZOLTAR’ BADIN meets ANTON REISENEGGER to find out what took so long…

Anton Reisenegger is a man that loves to defy time. Even if like most of his contemporaries he first picked up a guitar in his early teens, a couple of years later his penpals were riding high the wave of extreme metal and being sent overseas to record with fancy producers while he was struggling just to do gigs in his own country, let alone do an actual album. It was only at the turn of the century, when his now fully grown compadres were starting to drop the ball that he, on the other hand, was finally starting to reap the harvest of what he had sown. And now 44 years old and a family man living in the south of Spain, he’s never been busier. Although Criminal, his main priority in the early 2000s, has been put “on ice” until further notice, he’s been replacing the late Jesse Pintado in the international … Read More

The Portland black metal scene is famous for twisting and manipulating the blackened template into whole new forms, but MATRON THORNS, former collaborator with Bethlehem, has come up with a new nightmarish vision that he believes takes the essence of the genre right back to its pure evil roots. OLIVIER ‘ZOLTAR’ BADIN gets a sermon from the ÆVANGELIST…

How do you come up with such a strange and disturbed entity like Ævangelist? Matron Thorns: “With no particular agenda in mind, I’d say. We don’t approach music with any specific genre in mind. As the title of this album implies, it’s meant to be an experience happening to you as opposed to something you are only listening to. We wanted to take the idea of evil in music out of the realm of just hypothetical.”

It is almost as if your music was strongly seeking to install an almost masochist relationship with the listener. To many, it’ll sound much too chaotic and suffocating, yet those who’ll dare look into it will most probably end up being drawn to it, as if they were looking to be swallowed by the void it created… “When you’re saying that, I can’t help but recall the ’90s when it … Read More

We have plenty to thank ROSS ‘THE BOSS’ FRIEDMAN for. In 1973 he formed the metalpunk pioneers THE DICTATORS, in 1980 his band SHAKIN’ STREET were opening for Black Sabbath when Dio introduced him to a bass player looking to start a new band. That opportune meeting paved the way for the one and only MANOWAR but our hero did not stop there. Still killing with power, this time with DEATH DEALER, YIANNIS STEFANIS charts the history of this true King Of Metal

Your first high-profile band, The Dictators, is considered by many to be the ultimate proto-punk band, among the main instigators of the legendary CBGB’s scene. Quite an accolade – what is your take on this?  “You know, that is a good question. I would say that The Dictators are… punk, like the Ramones were not like the safety-pins and torn-jeans Malcolm McLaren type of punk. We, in the United States and especially in New York, were more street punk. We were kids that were growing up in The Bronx and Queens but the same could be said about kids growing up in England, where the economy at the time was bad. For us things were less style-orientated and more … Read More

When Live Evil was launched in 2010 it made the crazy decision to base its booking policy 100 per cent on the acts picked by Fenriz’s then-new Band Of The Week blog. It’s a policy that they’ve stuck to through to the third edition this month – if he keeps unearthing great new bands they’ll keep booking them. But of all the bands that have trod the stage at Live Evil, it’s Swedish thrash pack Antichrist that have played every single edition… it’s become a tradition. On the eve of Live Evil Attack III Dylan Hughes of A Fist In The Face Of God blog along with Brad Smith of Nocturnal Cult blog tracked down the hard-to-reach band for Iron Fist zine…

A few years ago on an email to a certain Mr Gylve Nagell I was warned to check out a new thrash band from Sweden called Antichrist. I never heard of this band and there was nothing about them anywhere online. I was ordering the Bastard Priest demo from Blood Harvest at the time and noticed they had Antichrist’s ‘Crushing Metal Tape’ demo so I added it to my order. Fuck it, a recommendation of anything with a hand-drawn cover should … Read More

It was so good to have KING DIAMOND back on British soil this weekend… and it’s good to have the King on the cover of Iron Fist issue 6. When we started this magazine a year ago (yep, we can’t believe it either!) it was always our dream interview and with the 30th anniversary of ‘Melissa’ coming up (we can’t believe that either!) Damien spoke to the man himself about his whole career, from Brainstorm to Bloodstock… he even hinted at a possible Fate reunion… we live in hope!

Putting issue 6 together was carnage, we must admit. It’s festival season, which means that most of our team were lying face down in a field somewhere in Europe rather than tethered to our keyboards, but we managed it – despite insane hangovers from Muskelrock, Metallsvenskan, Bang Your Head or Hell’s Pleasure.

In this issue we’ve tied down some in-depth exclusive interviews with cult Italian masters DEATH SS, British thrash overlords ONSLAUGHT and death dealers EXHUMED. Olivier ‘Zoltar’ Badin also spoke to both Chritus Linderson and Scott Reagers (who NEVER does interviews) about two SAINT VITUS albums that he believes deserve more attention.

We’ve also got interviews from RAMMING SPEED, CAUCHEMAR, GORGUTS, BESTIAL MOCKERY’S … Read More