Metal Edge Presents
Highlights
READER POLL RESULTS: TOP 5 BON JOVI SONGS
Top 5 Bon Jovi Songs as Voted By The Fans.
JESSE LEACH PICKS THE 5 HEAVY BANDS THAT SHAPED HIM
Photo: Dimitry Mak When we asked Jesse Leach to put together a top five for Metal Edge, the Killswitch Engage and Times of Grace frontman went digging into the heavy, hard-to-classify corners of his record collection. His picks lean toward bands that resist tidy genre tags — records that rewired how he hears aggression, atmosphere, and everything in the murk between. "I don't really know if they fit into a category," Leach says, "but they're bands that shaped me." Here are his five, in his order. 1. Neurosis Leach doesn't hold back on the band that tops his list. "Neurosis to me are more like a religious movement or a cult," he says, and the reverence tracks. The Oakland band started out in the late '80s as a scrappy hardcore-punk outfit, then spent the next two decades slowly mutating into something vast and ritualistic, laying down much of the blueprint that other bands would later file under post-metal. Leach walks the arc himself, from the punk snarl of The Word as Law through the experimental turn of Souls at Zero and on to the crushing peak of 1996's Through Silver in Blood, still the record most fans point to when they try to explain why the band feels less like a concert and more like a spiritual event. He carries the thread all the way to 2012's Honor Found in Decay, and if the whole catalog is new to you, this is the year to start: Neurosis resurfaced in 2026 with An Undying Love for a Burning World, a comeback strong enough to earn them a spot on our 20 Best Albums of 2026 So Far. 2. ISIS If Neurosis built the temple, ISIS furnished it with wide, cavernous rooms. Aaron Turner's Boston-bred crew turned heaviness into architecture, stacking patient, atmospheric post-metal into songs that swell and recede like tides — Leach singles out the way even the drums breathe differently, the snare loosened until it lands with a deep, hollow thud. He points newcomers toward the pairing most fans start with, 2002's Oceanic and 2004's Panopticon, then nudges them on toward 2006's In the Absence of Truth. There's a neat bit of symmetry in Leach's top two, as well: Turner joined the reactivated Neurosis in 2024, closing the loop between the two bands that shaped so much of this sound. 3. Kiss It Goodbye From here the list drops the atmosphere and goes for the throat. Kiss It Goodbye were a short-lived Seattle unit built from the wreckage of New Jersey noise-hardcore legends Deadguy and Rorschach, fronted by Tim Singer's throat-shredding howl. Leach reaches for a pile of adjectives — "vicious, crazy, seething, maniacal" — and 1997's lone full-length, She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not, earns every one of them, a dissonant, groove-heavy slab that pointed the way for later bands like Botch and Daughters. Fittingly, it was produced by Billy Anderson, the same board wizard behind some of Neurosis's heaviest work, one more quiet thread running through Leach's picks. 4. Groundwork Leach is careful to point listeners toward the right Groundwork — the one from Tucson, Arizona, since a separate Connecticut band shared the name. Arizona's Groundwork burned bright and brief across the first half of the '90s, welding political fury to jagged, emotional hardcore, and Leach boils the sound down to three words: "insane, dirty, gnarly." All of it peaked on their only full-length, 1994's Today We Will Not Be Invisible Nor Silent, a record he happens to be personally tied to — when it got a 30th-anniversary reissue, Leach was among the friends and admirers who contributed writing to its booklet. 5. Disrupt Leach closes with the rawest pick of the bunch. Disrupt were crust-punk lifers out of Lynn, Massachusetts — "Boston's finest," in his words, and the ones he's most plainly stoked on ("straight up, pissed off... love it"). Across a run that stretched from the late '80s into the early '90s, they fired off politically charged d-beat and grindcore at maximum velocity, and their sole full-length, 1994's Unrest, crams thirty tracks of anti-authoritarian fury into one scorched-earth listen — a record that helped define American crust before its members carried that weight into the pioneering sludge of Grief.
5 MUST SEE ACTS AT INKCARCERATION FESTIVAL
Inkcarceration returns to the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, July 17–19. Here are the five sets we’re planting our feet for. Limp Bizkit — Sunday, July 19 Limp Bizkit close the festival on Sunday night, capping a reappraisal that once seemed impossible: Fred Durst’s crew went from industry punchline to one of the most in-demand live draws in heavy music, pulling pits full of teenagers who weren’t alive when “Nookie” first hit MTV. There’s little new music to promote and the set leans on the same hits it always has, “Break Stuff,” “Rollin’,” “My Way,” “Take a Look Around” and their metal reworking of George Michael’s “Faith,” which is exactly what a Bizkit crowd turns up for, roaring along the second each one kicks in. This year’s run also carries real weight after the death last October of founding bassist Sam Rivers, and the band has framed these shows as a celebration of his legacy as much as a party. Anchoring it all is Wes Borland, the greatest nu-metal guitarist of all time. Shop Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water Jinjer — Friday, July 17 Jinjer open your Inkcarceration weekend on Friday, and Tatiana Shmayluk lands in Mansfield deep into the biggest touring campaign of the band’s career. The Ukrainian quartet have spent all of 2026 circling the globe behind their fifth album, Duél, from a 50,000-strong European headline run through Latin America and Indonesia and into a 37-date North American trek with Crystal Lake and Entheos that stands as their first US headline tour since 2024. The record’s 19th-century masquerade concept hands Shmayluk room to swing between fry screams, subterranean gutturals and the clean melodies that turned “Pisces” into a viral touchstone almost a decade ago. Look for “Tantrum” to detonate the set early and “Someone’s Daughter,” her tribute to Joan of Arc, Frida Kahlo, Marie Curie and Cleopatra, to land as its emotional center, all delivered with the groove-tech precision that has made Jinjer one of modern metal’s most dependable live acts. Gojira — Saturday, July 18 Two summers after they became the first metal band to play an Olympic opening ceremony, Gojira loom over Saturday’s bill as arguably the most decorated heavy act on the planet. That Paris rendition of “Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça ira!)” earned the Duplantier brothers a Grammy for Best Metal Performance and a spot at Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning farewell, and with a new album, their first since 2021’s Fortitude, still expected before year’s end, the Bayonne institution could well slip an unheard riff into the set. This year also marks a decade since Magma, the grief-stricken breakthrough that reshaped the band and earned them their first Grammy nomination, available now on an exclusive Lava vinyl. What’s guaranteed is the full-body physicality of a Gojira show: the pick-scrape squall of “Flying Whales,” the environmental fury of “Amazonia,” and a low end you feel in your sternum long after “Vacuity” brings it home. Shop Gojira Machine Head — Saturday, July 18 Robb Flynn has spent more than thirty years proving Machine Head can weather any lineup shuffle, and the Bay Area crew arrive at Saturday’s bill behind Unatøned, the leanest, most ferocious record they’ve cut since the Burn My Eyes era. Guitarist Reece Scruggs slots into a set built for maximum whiplash, where recent gut-punches like “Unbound” and “Outsider” share air with the circle-pit scripture of “Davidian” and the raised-fist chorus of “Halo,” Flynn conducting the whole thing with the authority of a frontman who has commanded festival fields since the mid-’90s. Lorna Shore — Sunday, July 19 Will Ramos owns one of the most astonishing voices in extreme metal, and Lorna Shore hit Sunday’s bill having spent the past year touring I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me into the ground, the New Jersey deathcore outfit’s most ambitious record to date. Ramos rose to viral fame on the pterodactyl shriek that anchors “To the Hellfire,” and live he reproduces that inhuman range with a consistency that has to be seen to be believed, from abyssal gutturals to symphonic grandeur. A Lorna Shore set moves from the Pain Remains trilogy into the newer eruptions of “Oblivion” and “Prison of Flesh,” each one a reminder that the band has spent the last few years hauling deathcore onto the biggest stages metal has to offer.
