Nu Metal News 7 October 2026, welcome to Wednesday. Today the column runs from one of the most ambitious live documents heavy music has produced all year to a bedroom-to-WOMADelaide rise out of South Australia, and takes in a Telecaster masterclass, a Melbourne deathcore signing and a Texas trio chasing hooks on the way. Six stories, one featured artist, and a look at what is queued up next.
Parkway Drive Bring Home Out Of The Sydney Opera House
On 9 June 2025, Parkway Drive walked into the Sydney Opera House with a full orchestra behind them and played their catalogue as if it had been written for strings all along. That night now has a release date. The concert film premieres on Tuesday 10 November at the State Theatre in Sydney, and the live album, Home, Live At The Sydney Opera House, follows on Friday 4 December.
The first look is “Prey”, track four on disc one, and it is the right choice to lead with. The song already had the slow-building menace that orchestral arrangement rewards, and hearing it with that room’s acoustics underneath Winston McCall’s voice makes the case for the whole project in four minutes. Twenty tracks across two discs, with guest appearances from Matthew Doyle, Nooky and Jenna McDougall, is not a victory lap. It is a band rebuilding its own songs from the floor up.
What makes this land is that Byron Bay has never made a secret of wanting the big swing. Parkway Drive have been scaling up for a decade, and an orchestra in a building that iconic is the logical top of that arc rather than a novelty. Pre-orders are live through the band’s own link, and the film premiere being a theatre event rather than a straight-to-streaming drop says plenty about how they intend it to be received. Heavy music has been showing up in rooms it was never invited into lately, something we touched on in Sunday’s column on heavy music turning up on live television, and this is the grandest version of that yet.
Hollywood Undead Book Twenty Nine Nights Across Europe And The UK
Hollywood Undead are taking the long way round in 2027. The band have announced twenty nine dates across Europe and the UK, opening on Wednesday 27 January and running to the end of February, with the UK leg closing things out in Birmingham, London, Manchester, Glasgow and Leeds. The European half takes in Tilburg, Zurich, Munich, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Warsaw, Stockholm and Copenhagen.
The artist presale opened this morning at 10am BST, with general sale on Friday 9 October at the same hour. In their announcement the band framed it as overdue rather than routine, pointing out that a handful of European festival slots this summer only underlined how many cities they had not played in years. That is the honest version of a tour announcement and it is the one worth printing.
It also lands with momentum behind it. The band’s current single, “Feels Like Home”, is out now and they are still working through a run of North American dates this month, with Omaha, Waukee and Maplewood all inside the next week. A winter run through Europe straight off the back of that is a heavy lift, and the kind of routing that tends to produce the shows people talk about for years. We were looking at Quicksand’s Australia and New Zealand routing in yesterday’s edition, and the pattern is holding: bands are going back for the territories they skipped.
From Ashes To New Put Reflections On The Road With Three Openers
From Ashes To New have mapped out twenty seven North American dates for spring 2027, running Friday 12 March through Sunday 18 April, from New Haven, Connecticut to Wilmington, Delaware. The run supports Reflections, the Lancaster band’s 2026 album for Better Noise Music, which gets a deluxe edition on Friday 13 November. Tickets go on sale this Friday, 9 October.
The support bill is the part worth paying attention to. Nevertel, Dark Divine and Hollow Pact are all on the run, with Dark Divine sitting out a handful of dates, and all three are exactly the sort of act that benefits most from twenty seven nights in front of a built-in audience. Matt Brandyberry called the lineup “absolutely killer” in the announcement, and on paper it is: four bands deep into the same melodic, rhythm-forward corner of heavy music, with no filler slot.
There is a charitable element too. The band are donating a dollar from every ticket to Musicians On Call, which puts live and recorded music into healthcare settings. Drummer Maty Madiro tied it directly to the record, talking about taking the healing power of music beyond the room where the band and their crowd make it together. Summer 2027 then sends them to Europe for Slam Dunk, Rock for People, Nova Rock and Jera on Air, so the Slam Dunk 2027 on-sale we flagged on Saturday now has another name attached to it.
John 5 Marks Three New Telecasters With The Phantom
John 5 has three new signature Telecasters with Fender, and rather than let the announcement sit as a gear press release he wrote a song for it. “The Phantom” arrived with an official video, and it does what his instrumental work has always done best: a melody you can hum sitting on top of playing that most people would need a slow-motion replay to follow.
The guitars themselves are the headline for players. Three signature models in one go puts him among the most decorated Telecaster artists Fender has ever worked with, which for a guitarist whose public profile has been built inside other people’s bands is a real statement of where he sits on his own terms. Anyone who has watched him hold down the right-hand side of a Rob Zombie stage knows the Tele is not a stylistic accessory for him, it is the whole voice.
What is quietly excellent about “The Phantom” is the restraint. There is room in it. The chicken-picking and the bends land because the arrangement gives them space rather than stacking shred on shred, and the result is a track that works as a song first and a demonstration second. If you only know him through his day jobs, this is the three minutes that explains why the guitar world has been paying attention for twenty five years.
Body Prison Sign To Greyscale And Call In Dane Evans
Melbourne’s Body Prison have signed to Greyscale Records and announced a six-track EP, A Waste Of Good Suffering, for Friday 20 November. Two albums in, Until Madness and Everything You Never Wanted To See, they arrive at the label with a catalogue already built rather than a promise, and the EP is tracked with the confidence that comes from that.
Lead single “Jesus Wept” brings in Dane Evans of To The Grave, and the pairing works because the two vocalists are not doing the same thing. Evans drops in with a different weight and a different attack, so the guest spot reads as a conversation rather than a logo on the artwork. The video is out now and the track list behind it, “Here We Go Again”, “Judas Cradle”, “Excess In Avarice”, “Blister Face” and “Ironclad”, suggests an EP with no interest in a slow build.
Greyscale have been one of the most reliable homes for heavy Australian music for years, and a Melbourne band with two LPs behind them is a sensible fit on both sides. Guest features have been doing a lot of heavy lifting this week generally, something we noted when Blind Channel brought in Aaron Pauley on Monday, and “Jesus Wept” is the heaviest example of it.
Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol Clear The Runway For Ca$h Grab
Austin’s Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol have put out “Follow Through”, the final single before Ca$h Grab arrives on Friday 23 October. The trio, Leo Lydon on eight-string, Aaron Metzdorf on bass and vocals and Sean St. Germain on drums, make a volume of noise that should not be possible from three people, and this record is where they start steering it.
Metzdorf described the new direction as “more pop song forward, while still in the idiom of heavy music”, and that is an accurate read rather than a hedge. Compared to 2024’s Big Dumb Riffs, the heavy sections here are more fleshed out and the band have left space for hooks and vocals to breathe. Metzdorf takes lead on five tracks, while Lydon stretches further than he has before on “Fate Is”, “Peaches” and the title track.
The influences they name, Built To Spill, Sugar and early nineties Rush, tell you this was never going to be a straight down-tuned record, and the band have the touring history to back the ambition: runs with The Sword, Death From Above 1979, Pigs x7 and King Buffalo, plus their own Big Dumb Fest in Austin. The album comes in LP, CD and cassette, and if you have been sleeping on this band because of the name, “Follow Through” is the song that fixes that. It also sits close to the Big Ass Truck I.E. riff worship we covered on Sunday, if that is the lane you live in.
Featured Band: Donni Heat Says Thank You On Pull Me Back
Donni Heat is an Adelaide artist working in the overlap where punk, alternative rock, nu metal and hyperpop stop being separate rooms. “Pull Me Back” came out on Wednesday 23 September through G.Y.R.O., and it opens a new chapter: the first single from a sophomore EP, and the point where the project’s sound gets noticeably bigger.
The song started life as a stripped-back acoustic piece about his relationship with his family, and you can still hear that skeleton underneath everything that was built on top of it. What it grew into is a thank you note at full volume, aimed at the people who shaped and steadied him. Massive choruses, heavy guitars, electronic textures and hyperpop edges all end up serving the same end, which is a track that carries emotional weight without ever getting quiet about it.
The production credits explain some of that reach. “Pull Me Back” was co-produced with longtime collaborator Kieran Hunt, mixed by Alex Copp of As December Falls, and mastered by Grammy-nominated engineer Steve Kerry, whose work includes Sleep Token and Evanescence. The influence of YUNGBLUD, Bring Me The Horizon and Sleep Theory is right there on the surface, but the structure is the thing: the song keeps finding one more gear.
Donni has put the groundwork in. The project launched in 2022 and the debut EP, Echoes From The Fallout (2025), moved through the five stages of grief across its runtime, picked up commercial radio support, filled a first hometown headline show and earned a finalist nomination in the South Australian Music Awards People’s Choice Rock category. 2026 has been bigger again: selection for NEXUS Arts’ Interplay program, a performance at WOMADelaide, support slots with Hot Chelle Rae and Hands Like Houses, and a first interstate headline run booked independently.
Donni Heat, Adelaide, South Australia
Modern alternative music built on huge hooks and honest storytelling, driven live by a performer who has spent four years turning a solo project into a band-sized sound. “Pull Me Back” is the most personal thing he has released and also the most forceful, which is a hard pair to get right. Donni Heat came to us through our get featured page.
“Pull Me Back started as one of the most stripped-back songs I ever wrote. As it evolved, I realised it wasn’t just about struggling, it became a thank you to the people who never gave up on me. I hope listeners hear this song and think of the people who’ve helped them through their own darkest moments.”
Looking Ahead: Three Records And A Festival Season
The next three weeks are busy. Ca$h Grab lands on Friday 23 October, the Reflections deluxe follows on Friday 13 November, and Body Prison’s A Waste Of Good Suffering closes out that stretch on Friday 20 November before Parkway Drive’s Home arrives in December. Four releases, four very different ideas of what heavy music should sound like in 2026.
Elsewhere, Thursday have extended their Full City Devolucion anniversary run into 2027, keeping the celebration of their three era-defining records going for another year, and Heavy/Hitter have confirmed they are in the studio tracking a debut album. coldrain’s OPTIMIZE = OPTDEMISE is also out and worth your time if you missed it in the week’s noise.
With Slam Dunk, Rock for People, Nova Rock and Jera on Air all firming up their 2027 bills, next summer is already taking shape. If you are starting to plan for it, our metal festival outfit guide covers the practical side, and Monday’s column has the Power To The People lineup if you want one more thing to budget for.
Get Your Band In This Column
Donni Heat is in today’s column because he filled in a form. That is the whole process. If you are in a band, signed or not, big or tiny, send us your release and we will listen to it properly. Head to nu-metal.com/get-featured, tell us who you are, where you are from and what you have just put out, and include your links and a photo or your artwork. Small and unsigned bands are the point of this column, not the filler around it.
Nu Metal News 7 October 2026, Your Questions
When does Parkway Drive’s Home live album come out?
Home, Live At The Sydney Opera House is released on Friday 4 December 2026. The concert film premieres earlier, on Tuesday 10 November, at the State Theatre in Sydney. The show itself was recorded on 9 June 2025 with a full orchestra, and the album runs to twenty tracks across two discs.
When do Hollywood Undead tickets go on sale for the 2027 European tour?
The artist presale opened on Wednesday 7 October at 10am BST and general sale follows on Friday 9 October at 10am BST. The tour runs twenty nine dates from 27 January 2027 through the end of February, finishing with UK shows in Birmingham, London, Manchester, Glasgow and Leeds.
Who is supporting From Ashes To New on the 2027 Reflections tour?
Nevertel, Dark Divine and Hollow Pact are all on the twenty seven date run, which goes from 12 March to 18 April 2027. Dark Divine sit out a handful of dates. Tickets go on sale Friday 9 October 2026, and a dollar from every ticket goes to Musicians On Call.
Who features on Body Prison’s new single?
Dane Evans of fellow Australian band To The Grave guests on “Jesus Wept”. It is the lead single from Body Prison’s six-track EP A Waste Of Good Suffering, out Friday 20 November 2026 through Greyscale Records. The Melbourne band have two albums behind them already.
Who is Donni Heat?
Donni Heat is an Adelaide alternative artist blending punk, alternative rock, nu metal and hyperpop. His single “Pull Me Back” came out on 23 September 2026 via G.Y.R.O. and leads a forthcoming second EP. His 2026 has included WOMADelaide, NEXUS Arts’ Interplay program and support slots with Hot Chelle Rae and Hands Like Houses.
- Theprp.com, Parkway Drive set release date for Home
- Theprp.com, Hollywood Undead to tour Europe and the UK in early 2027
- Knotfest, From Ashes to New head out on the 2027 Reflections tour
- Knotfest, John 5 unveils The Phantom and new Fender guitars
- Consequence, John 5 announces new signature Fender Telecasters
- Theprp.com, Body Prison sign with Greyscale Records
- The Mosh, Body Prison announce new EP and Jesus Wept
- It’s Psychedelic Baby, Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol share Follow Through
- The Nu-Metal Agenda, Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol follow through on final single
- Spotify, Donni Heat, Pull Me Back
- The Nu-Metal Agenda, daily news index
- Knotfest, Thursday continue the Full City Devolucion tour into 2027