Sophie Lloyd, courtesy. Collaborating with Trivium’s Matt Heafy was a full circle moment for guitar shredding phenom Sophie Lloyd. “There’s the picture of me when I was recording my very first EP, Delusions, back in 2016 and I was wearing this big Trivium T-shirt that I ironed on myself,” Lloyd…

Machine Gun Kelly performs at Oakland Arena in Oakland on July 19, 2022. OAKLAND — At Aftershock Festival in 2021, in the midst of his war of words with Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor, many people booed and threw water bottles at Machine Gun Kelly. Kelly’s Oakland stop in support of Mainstream…

Machine Gun Kelly, “mainstream sellout.” There’s very little room for sitting on the fence when it comes to rapper-turned-pop-punk rocker Colson Baker, better known as Machine Gun Kelly. MGK is either a punchline or a hero, depending on where you sit. But to his credit, he has a self-awareness…

Avril Lavigne, “Love Sux.” In some ways, the seventh album by Avril Lavigne is a return to the Canadian pop-rocker’s roots. In others, it’s finally reaching the territory she’s strived for from the start. Lavigne has always existed adjacent to the pop-punk moniker, but often, that classification was based on…

Mudvayne performs at Aftershock Fest in Sacramento on Oct. 9, 2021. Courtesy Aftershock. SACRAMENTO —Saturday night Aftershock line-up was marked by two reunions, of sorts. The night was headlined by The Original Misfits, with vocalist Glenn Danzig and bassist Jerry Only. The reunion, which came in 2016, followed three…

INSERT FOOT is into the post-apocalypse, post-rock and post-metal, but he’s not over Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly. I wince when someone attaches the word “post” to a noun. Except for maybe “apocalypse,” which is pretty clear, as there’s probably not much margin around an apocalypse. “Post-modern” was…

By the logic of Machine Gun Kelly, this column will be a hit. Welcome to another installment of … what should we call this? Things I write about when my attention span equals a housefly on really good meth? Strike that. There’s no such thing as good meth, kids.…

Mike Shinoda woke up to a new reality in late July 2017, a few days before his band Linkin Park was set to embark on tour. He had lost his friend and longtime bandmate Chester Bennington to suicide. Just like that, everything changed. The floor fell out from underneath…