Nu Metal News 30 September 2026, welcome to Wednesday. A Perfect Circle have put a new song out and blocked off most of next spring, Hatebreed have loosed another cut from the album that ends their six year wait, and Faith No More have taken the first headline slot at a European festival that runs eight months from now. Underneath the big names there is a rebrand with two very familiar players behind it, a support slot that puts Kittie in front of a synthwave crowd, and an artist who wrote to this column from Akron. Here is the day.
A Perfect Circle Answer To Whom It May Concern
A Perfect Circle released “To Whom It May Concern” on Tuesday and announced a spring 2027 North American run in the same breath. The song is the second piece of new music the band have shared this cycle, following “Starless”, and it leans further into the cold synth pulse and reverbed guitar that Billy Howerdel has always used as a foundation. Josh Freese plays on it. Where “Starless” built to a release, this one holds its tension and lets Maynard James Keenan stay low in the mix, half buried, which is a trick the band have used since Mer de Noms and still get more out of than most.
The tour runs 13 April to 13 June 2027 and takes in Vancouver, Boston, Houston, Nashville, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Puscifer open the first seven Canadian dates, which means Keenan works both halves of those nights, and The Cult pick up the support slot from 27 April in Boston onward. Artist presale opened this morning at 10am local time and the general on sale follows on Friday 2 October.
Howerdel framed the week around radio: “It is exciting to finally get some new music out into the world, and seeing ‘Starless’ reach #1 at rock radio this week.” Keenan kept it drier, saying he is “very much looking forward to pulling double duty through Canada with A Perfect Circle and Puscifer.”
No album has been announced, and nobody from the camp has put a title or a date on one. Two singles and a six month touring block is usually the shape of a record arriving, but the band have not said so, and this column is not going to say it for them. After the stadium routing that landed on Monday, 2027 is filling up fast.
Hatebreed Send Up The Carrion Choir
Hatebreed dropped “The Carrion Choir” today, the latest piece of Fatal Paradox, which arrives 6 November through BLKIIBLK, the heavy imprint of Frontiers Label Group. It sits second on the record. Chris “Zeuss” Harris produced, as he has for most of the band’s best sounding work, and the mix gives the low end room without sanding the edges off the guitars.
The track is built the way Hatebreed songs have been built for twenty five years, and that is not a criticism. A short, mean riff sets the tempo, Jamey Jasta lands on the downbeat with a phrase you will be able to shout back at him by the second chorus, and the whole thing is finished inside three minutes. What has changed across this album cycle is the guitar tone, which is drier and closer to the thrash records the band grew up on than the scooped hardcore sound of the mid 2000s. “Kill Count Increase” showed that in July. This one confirms it.
There is no video for “The Carrion Choir” yet, so the clip above is “Kill Count Increase”, the album’s lead single and its most recent official video. Fatal Paradox is the band’s first full length in six years, following 2020’s Weight of the False Self, and the vinyl run is deep enough that the webstore is carrying four separate colour variants. Six years is a long time for a band who have historically worked on a three year clock, and the two songs out so far suggest they used it.
Faith No More Take The First Mystic Headline Slot
Mystic Festival named Faith No More as the first headliner of its 2027 edition on Tuesday. The festival runs 10 to 12 June 2027 in Gdansk, in the Letnica district, and the announcement did not specify which night the band take. Early bird three day passes are listed at 879 PLN and three day VIP passes at 1,399 PLN while stock lasts, after the cheaper blind bird tier sold out.
This is the reunion becoming concrete. Bill Gould confirmed in June that the band were coming back in 2027, and the festival booking sits inside a schedule the band now list themselves: a January date at the Maracana in Rio with System Of A Down, Australian and New Zealand shows through January and February in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Wellington, and three European festivals in June, Rock im Park, Rock am Ring and Mystic. The festival’s own announcement made the case in terms this column agrees with, describing a band who pulled from “metal and pop, and from alt music and rap” long before anyone had a genre name ready for the result.
The Real Thing, Angel Dust, King for a Day… Fool for a Lifetime and Album of the Year are the records most often cited, with 2015’s Sol Invictus after them. The current lineup listed on the band’s own site is Billy Gould, Mike Patton, Roddy Bottum, Mike Bordin and Jon Hudson, which is the Album of the Year five.
For anyone in this column’s orbit, Angel Dust is the load bearing one. Half the bands who turned up between 1995 and 2001 were working from its playbook, the sudden tonal swerves and the willingness to be funny and genuinely frightening inside the same four minutes. Gdansk in June is a long way off, and if you are already pricing the trip, our festival outfit guide covers what actually survives three days on a Baltic field.
Angst Fabrik Become Machines Of Hate
The project Christian Olde Wolbers announced in February 2025 under the name Angst Fabrik has changed its name to Machines Of Hate. The social accounts went down briefly and came back under the new handle, and the bio notes that this name is also a working title, so it may not be the last one. Wolbers plays bass and sings. Raymond Herrera is on drums.
Both names reach back to the same place. Angst Fabrik is German for fear factory. Machines Of Hate is a phrase from Remanufacture, the 1997 remix record, and the title of one of its tracks. Two former members of a band making music together and naming it after their own back catalogue is about as clear a statement of intent as you get without a press release. Burton C. Bell was originally attached and stepped away in April 2025.
The real news underneath the rebrand is Herrera. He was filmed tracking drums this month, and his line about it was short: “After 16 years away from the kit, the machine woke back up. Still runs.” Herrera’s playing is one of the most imitated things in this whole genre, the double kick locked to the guitar rhythm rather than sitting under it, and hearing it again on new material is worth more than whatever the band end up called.
No release date and no label have been announced. Sources also differ on how long he has been away, with some putting it at sixteen years and others at closer to two decades, so take the number loosely. We covered another band settling on a name after a long rebuild on Saturday, and it is becoming a theme.
Kittie Join Carpenter Brut Across Europe
Kittie and Japanese noise unit VMO have been added to Carpenter Brut’s European and UK headline tour in March 2027. The run opens 11 March at the Albert Hall in Manchester and moves through Paris, Nantes, Lyon, Brussels, Cologne, Wiesbaden, Berlin, Warsaw and Oslo, finishing 24 March at Sentrum Scene.
On paper it is an odd bill. Carpenter Brut makes synthwave built for car chases; Kittie play down tuned, unhurried heaviness that has only got heavier since Fire. In practice the two share a sensibility, all the same horror film reference points and the same taste for a riff that repeats until it becomes a threat. Rooms like Ancienne Belgique and Huxleys Neue Welt are also a good size for what Kittie do now, big enough to feel like an event and small enough that the low end actually lands.
This is the second European routing this week to put a heavy band in front of an audience that did not necessarily come for one, after Sunday’s sixteen city continental announcement. Morgan and Mercedes Lander have spent the last two years rebuilding this band in public, from Spit XXV through Fire, and ten dates in front of someone else’s crowd is exactly how that work compounds.
Northlane Book Anemoia Across North America
Northlane announced a 26 city North American headline tour on Tuesday, running 12 February to 18 March 2027 with Allt, Aviana and Reliqa opening. Tickets go on sale Friday 2 October. The routing covers Sacramento, Anaheim, Mesa, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Orlando, Atlanta, Charlotte, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Salt Lake City, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.
It supports Anemoia, out 30 October through UNFD. The title is a good fit for what this band have been doing lately, since anemoia is nostalgia for a time you never actually lived through, and Northlane have spent three records now building industrial textures that sound like a remembered version of the late nineties rather than a reconstruction of it. “CUT_it”, the single above, is the clearest example, all clipped digital percussion and a chorus that opens up wider than the verse has any right to set up.
Reliqa on the undercard is the detail worth noting. They are the other Australian band currently doing something genuinely strange with heavy music, and putting them in front of 26 North American rooms is the sort of support booking that changes a career. Allt and Aviana fill out a bill that runs Swedish, Australian and considerably heavier than the headliner’s streaming numbers might suggest.
Featured Artist: Jai Ghost Builds A World, Not A Single
Jai Ghost, who also records as Jai Loyal, is from Akron, Ohio, with roots up the road in Cleveland, and he is signed to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony Records. That lineage matters here. Bone Thugs built their whole sound on melody delivered at speed over something menacing underneath, and Jai Ghost has taken that inheritance somewhere heavier, into a place where rap cadence, rock guitar and outright metal weight stop being separate rooms and become one building.
“I Seen Through the Devil’s Eyes” is the best way in. It is a film as much as a song, masked and high contrast and shot with a real eye, and the track underneath it keeps its tension by refusing to resolve when you expect it to. “Whispers Don’t Sleep” is the heavier end of the catalogue, and Hell of Pain is out now.
He calls these transmissions rather than songs, which sounds like a pose until you watch two of the videos back to back and realise the mask, the framing and the colour grading are carrying as much of the story as the verses are. The themes are identity, survival, faith and rebuilding, with Black creative freedom at the centre of all of it.
This is genuinely small. The Spotify page is in its very early days and the audience is being built one person at a time. That is the most interesting moment in any artist’s life and it is exactly why this section exists. If the rap to metal crossover is what brought you to this site in the first place, this is a name worth getting in front of now rather than in two years. There is a record called No Pulse coming. Jai Ghost’s management wrote to this column directly.
Looking Ahead: Friday Is A Ticket Day
Friday 2 October is doing double duty. Both the A Perfect Circle spring run and the Northlane February to March routing go on general sale that morning, and they overlap in enough cities that anyone chasing both should decide in advance which one matters more. Anemoia follows on 30 October and Fatal Paradox on 6 November, which makes the next six weeks unusually dense for records that people in this corner of heavy music will actually argue about.
Further out, Machines Of Hate have no date and no label, so the thing to watch is the social accounts rather than a release calendar. Mystic Festival will keep adding names to its 10 to 12 June bill in Gdansk now that the top line is filled. And Jai Ghost has No Pulse on the way with no date attached yet. Yesterday’s column covered a very full Friday release slate if you want to see how much is already stacked up.
Get Your Band In This Column
This column covers small and unsigned bands on purpose, every single day, next to the names everyone already knows. If you are in a band, or you work with one, send it over through the get featured form. It takes a couple of minutes and it goes straight to a human.
The bands that turn up there get the same space and the same care as anyone else on the page. Links, a photo or your artwork, and one line about what the song is actually about will get you a long way. If you want a sense of the house style first, the nu metal aesthetic guide is a decent primer on where this site is coming from.
Nu Metal News 30 September 2026, Your Questions
Is there a new A Perfect Circle album coming in 2027?
The band have not announced one. They have released two songs this cycle, “Starless” and “To Whom It May Concern”, and booked a North American tour from 13 April to 13 June 2027. That is often what precedes a record, but no title, date or label announcement exists, so treat an album as unconfirmed.
When does Hatebreed’s Fatal Paradox come out and what is on it so far?
Fatal Paradox is out 6 November 2026 through BLKIIBLK, the heavy imprint of Frontiers Label Group, produced by Chris “Zeuss” Harris. “Kill Count Increase” arrived in July and “The Carrion Choir”, which is track two, came out today. It is the band’s first full length since 2020’s Weight of the False Self.
Where and when are Faith No More playing in 2027?
Their own site lists a January show at the Maracana in Rio de Janeiro with System Of A Down, dates in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Wellington through January and February, and three European festivals in June: Rock im Park, Rock am Ring and Mystic Festival, which runs 10 to 12 June in Gdansk, Letnica.
Who is in Machines Of Hate?
Christian Olde Wolbers on bass and vocals and Raymond Herrera on drums, both formerly of Fear Factory. The project was announced as Angst Fabrik in February 2025 and renamed this week, and the band describe Machines Of Hate as a working title. Burton C. Bell was originally attached and stepped away in April 2025.
Who is Jai Ghost and where do I start?
Jai Ghost, also known as Jai Loyal, is an Akron, Ohio artist with Cleveland roots, signed to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony Records, making rap, rock and metal as one sound. Start with the “I Seen Through the Devil’s Eyes” video, then “Whispers Don’t Sleep” for the heavier side and Hell of Pain, which is out now.
- Consequence: A Perfect Circle announce 2027 North American tour, unleash “To Whom It May Concern”
- Lambgoat: A Perfect Circle announce North American tour, premiere new single
- Chaoszine: Hatebreed drop “The Carrion Choir” from upcoming album
- Hatebreed official site
- Mystic Festival: Faith No More as the headliner of Mystic Festival 2027
- Faith No More official site, 2027 tour dates
- theprp.com: Ex-Fear Factory members rebrand Angst Fabrik as Machines Of Hate
- Chaoszine: Angst Fabrik has changed name to Machines Of Hate
- Lambgoat: Kittie and VMO added to Carpenter Brut’s European and UK tour
- Chaoszine: Carpenter Brut reveals opening bands for European headline tour
- Lambgoat: Northlane announce 2027 North American tour with Allt, Aviana and Reliqa
- Blabbermouth: Northlane announce February/March 2027 North American tour
- Jai Ghost official site