Andy O'Connor

You have to be a total maniac to go to a festival focused on uncommercial, loud, raucous, confusing music in the summer in Austin, Tx. Hopefully, like me,

Here are the 11 best heavy metal wedding songs, designed to make your night the headbangers’ ball it could be.

Forget indie sleaze - there was something much, much darker and more captivating growing in New York’s underground in the early 2000s. Khanate were

Urban Heat are one of the best new bands to emerge from Austin in some time. However, it was a long road to get here

Blondshell and Urban Heat highlighted SPIN’s Five Worlds party on March 15 at the Pershing in Austin, Tx., sponsored by Diageo.

“Rock ’n roll is chaos, there’s no order or anything in the live experience, anything can happen when you play.” These words came down from the Metal God

Heavy Metal has often used shock as an attractant. But has the obligation to always be outrageous become a millstone around the genre’s neck?

What makes a truly awful metal album? It’s not just a lack of riffs, awful production, or quarter-assed vocal takes. Most of these records suffer from

Wallowing in hopelessness isn’t always healthy, but as long as there’s labor that’s not properly compensated, sometimes it’s all you can do. In the right

There are two reasons you should be paying attention to Rochester right now. The first is RXK Nephew, the workaholic rapper whose “American

Not gonna lie: we kinda missed SXSW, traffic, lines, free-flowing human chaos and all. SPIN hosted a number of raging day shows throughout the years, but

This month’s edition of Blast Rites, we spoke with Italian doom metal band Messa. We also highlight the best new metal of the month

Immolation have one of the most consistently great discographies in death metal. Their 11th album Acts of God, out this Friday (February 18) on Nuclear Blast, m

It’s list season, the only season that matters. That said, let’s talk about a list from nine years ago. Specifically, SPIN’s 100 Greatest Guitarists list,

When I first heard about Dream Unending, I did the Vince McMahon meme in real time, excitement scaling too far past healthy or sustainable. Tomb Mold's Derrick

Trying to be all things to everyone is a fruitless pursuit. It’s impossible on a logistical scale, much less an imaginative one, and no one ends up being

You can pin a lot of influences on Dallas death metal band Creeping Death, and most of them wouldn’t be far off the mark. Like a lot of modern death metal ban

September saw two high-profile metal releases from Iron Maiden and Carcass, plus a reissue of Metallica’s “Black Album,” one of the best-selling metal

Deafheaven singer George Clark goes behind the making of the band’s latest out, ‘Infinite Granite,’ which is out on August 20

It’s not often that you get one of America’s finest contemporary heavy metal composers in your proverbial backyard, but for the Austin area, having Nate