I used to love pop groups with a lot of edge like Sevendust, Altarbridge, Perfect Circle, POD…
Who’s out there these days making music with obnoxiously aggressive distorted guitars (in a good way) and tons of energy?
It seems like this genre has fizzeled off a bit, but are there any stand-out groups still playing whatever’s considered ‘hard rock’ these days?
very much prog rock, but my favourite band Haken is always worth a good listening to. Their early albums were very “progressive” sounding - meaning they fit the formula shamelessly. Their previous 3 albums (Affinity, Vector, Virus) is when they really turned up the distortion pedals to 11. Seen them live many times - might be what you are looking for.
I’m probably not going to be helpful here because I tend to not follow the heavy bands that are current. I’ve occasionally listened to modern hard rock, metal, and power pop but I would struggle to remember the names of those bands. The last batch of heavy bands that I used to listen to and became familiar with are bands like Faith No More, System Of A Down, Disturbed (because I inherited one of their CD’s), The Offspring, Alice In Chains and a few others. I’ve also YouTubed some relatively “current” bands, like Five Finger Death Punch and Katatonia 
You might like a band like Three Days Grace. They have a heavy, overdriven sound with a good pop sensibility. They’re not a new or current band though and you probably have heard of them already.
Mate, I have quite a few that might interest you. Most will be small to medium sized bands as I hunt down a lot of music on Bandcamp.
If you like, I can PM you or post them here. They will almost certainly not be household names if that bothers you or not.
Man! Those guy are interesting. Was watching a couple of their live youtube videos too. Good players!
Hmmm. I’d never heard of them, but I like what they’re doing! I’m doing some digging right now… was curious how that kind of edgy mainstream rock has been evolving over the past 5-6 years.
I’d definitely love to take a listen. Go ahead and post them here. I’m legitimately hunting for things to throw into a playlist, but also kind of curious what the larger international market is paying attention to in terms or ‘rock’ type stuff.
When I look at stuff like this… a lot of these guys look like they’re in their mid-30’s - 50’s. Has guitar-driven stuff gone COMPLETELY out of style or something??
I know that might sound weird, but I’m totally clueless as to what’s happening in the rock music world (which is why I’m doing some digging). I assumed there was as thriving marketing for this I just didn’t know about because I haven’t been paying attention. But is this stuff like… gone? A lot of these youtube videos (for the newer groups) are barely in the millions… what happened?
Tesseract has been slowly gaining quite a bit of steam over the past few years. I think Haken has dethroned Dream Theater as the quintessential prog metal band. Mastodon is pretty good for just raw modern rock/metal. Ghost is basically a modern day Alice Cooper, but they have some super catchy songs.
Is it even possible to listen to this song and not like it? I don’t think so:
I can’t handle cookie monster vocals, which sort of excludes me from 90% of the modern metal stuff.
Fair enough. The bands I find are a mixed bag in regards to how big they are. I mean, some are not small (55k+ followers on fb) and others have less than 2k. If that’s a genuine measure of course.
I will start posting a few here shortly.
Yeah, the Cookie Monster vocals are a real turn off for me too. That kind of vocal affect makes it difficult for me to take the music seriously.
I was going to mention Ghost, Slipknot, Five Finger Death Punch and some other “relatively” recent bands. From all the songs I’ve heard of theirs, Ghost strikes me as a pop band somehow. Maybe it’s their “soft” vocals.
Slipknot and Five Finger a death Punch is probably not what Jonathon is looking for though because their vocals can be somewhat Cookie Monster sounding at times but FFDP has some fairly commercial, catchy songs.
I absolutely know what you mean! (feeling very old now). Another thing that I used to like about prog- rock back in the day (I’m talking early seventies when I was a teenager) is their total disregard of what you are or are not supposed to play. Genesis was completely different to Yes or to Tull even though they all may have borrowed from classical music, jazz and folk music on top of blues and early rock. Modern progrock to me sounds technically demanding, but musically, well, much less interesting. But again, saying it out loud makes me feel ancient…
Haaaaaaaaaa! I had to search cookie monster on youtube to remember what he sounded like but now I know what to call that particular vocal technique.
Todays episode brought to you by the letters I, R and D!!!
I’ve been following these young ladies (three sisters). Not super heavy, but a lot of great energy and fairly catchy tunes. Good to see the youngsters embracing the ‘hard rock’ sensibilities.
The Warning
I really thought I was going to hate Ghost… then I saw them touring the first album and I was hooked.
Cookie Monster vocals always turned me off as well… but then I heard music from the likes of Opeth and Amorphis where it wasn’t all Cookie all the time, and the music spoke louder to me than the ‘harsh vocals’ employed. It also helped that when singing clean both Mikael Åkerfeldt (Opeth) and Tomi Joutsen (Amorphis) have really good voices!
If you want to check out something modern, proggy and heavy… how about Leprous?
Here’s a group from Australia called Electric Mary. Hard pounding rock with outstanding vocals that you may like.
Thanks for the link to The Warning. They are only 21, 19 and 17 years old and phenomenally talented.
The lyrics are far beyond their age and I have been really enjoying their music.
Glad you’re liking them. Check them out here when they were only 16, 14 and 12!
They are all amazing… but Paulina just beats that drum kit into submission!
been listening to them for some time now, really great band.
It’s kind of crazy… I can’t put my finger on why they’re fun to watch, but they just are.
I think it’s interesting that the singer’s learning to use her voice like that. It’s hard to get a female voice to adapted to work with that genre. That first video you posted seemed like a semi modern-rock type style, but the live one came across as more of a 90’s grunge throwback. Not a bad thing, just an observation.
