Splat, Dopamine Chamber, and the Great PA Name-Drop Coincidence of the Week

Sometimes the metal news cycle hands you a gift you don't even have to dig for. This week, hard rock elders Deep Purple dropped the music video for the title track off their new album Splat!, produced once again by Bob Ezrin. Meanwhile, Dublin post-punk darlings Fontaines D.C. announced their new record Dopamine Chamber, teasing it with a Kurt Vile cameo. Neither band has any idea that Pennsylvania is already home to a thrash outfit called Splat and a groove/power/thrash act called Chamber. It's a coincidence, sure, but it's also as good an excuse as any to remind readers that the Pennsylvania metal scene doesn't need a British hard rock institution or an Irish art-rock darling to get attention — the names are already circulating in our own backyard, and the music backing them up is doing the heavy lifting.

Splat and Chamber represent two different flavors of what makes the commonwealth's underground tick right now. One leans into the riff-heavy, pit-starting tradition that's never gone out of style here, the other blends groove, power, and thrash into something a little more genre-fluid. Both are worth your attention regardless of what's happening on a classic rock legend's sixth Ezrin-produced record or a Dublin band's major-label rollout. If you haven't caught either live yet, check the upcoming shows listings — Pennsylvania's calendar stays stacked enough that there's rarely an excuse not to.

Thrash Never Left, It Just Got Local

Speaking of thrash, it's worth zooming out on just how healthy that corner of the Pennsylvania scene remains. Splat sits alongside a deep bench of homegrown thrash and speed metal acts — Spesimin, Mercifix, Emanon, and Sosterik among them — all mining that same riff-forward, tempo-obsessed tradition that made the genre a cornerstone of American metal in the first place. When you talk about the best metal bands coming out of this state right now, you can't do it without acknowledging how much of that conversation still runs through thrash, whether it's the classic NWOBHM-via-Bay-Area blueprint or something messier and more modern.

That tradition got a timely reminder this week from the genre's elder statesmen. Slayer marked the 40th anniversary of Reign In Blood with a full-album performance in Mexico City, support coming from the now-silent but still-revered Power Trip. Four decades on, an album that clocks in under 30 minutes is still treated like scripture, and that's a useful data point for any Pennsylvania band grinding through a Tuesday night set at a half-full VFW hall: brevity, aggression, and conviction outlast trend cycles every time. Meanwhile, drummer Gene Hoglan is gearing up for double duty on the Death To All/Dark Angel Australian tour in January 2027, playing with both bands on the same run. Hoglan's entire career has been a master class in how a working musician stays relevant by refusing to specialize too narrowly — a lesson plenty of PA multi-instrumentalists juggling two or three projects already understand instinctively.

Visa Delays and the Realities of Touring in 2026

Not every headline this week was celebratory. Scottish speed-metal raiders Hellripper announced they're expected to miss roughly half of their debut U.S. tour due to visa delays, hoping to rejoin the Havok, Slackjaw, and Xoth bill for the back half of the run. It's a frustrating but increasingly common story, and it's one Pennsylvania promoters and fans should pay close attention to. Every time an international act gets stuck in bureaucratic limbo, it's often a regional support slot — frequently filled by a local band — that either disappears or gets reshuffled at the last minute. If you're booking shows or running a DIY space anywhere between Philly and Pittsburgh, building relationships with dependable local openers isn't just good scene-building, it's increasingly a hedge against exactly this kind of disruption. It's also one more reason the submit your band page exists — the more bands in our database with up-to-date show history, the easier it is for promoters scrambling to fill a last-minute gap to find the right regional fit.

Signings, Singles, and the Metalcore Pipeline

On the metalcore and post-hardcore side, Solid State Records announced the signing of What Lies Below, who premiered their "Return To Nothing" video alongside news of a fall tour with Midwinter. SharpTone's Dead7 also dropped a new single, "Feels Like," and UK sonic-extremists Loathe shared a live video of "Remnant" filmed during a recent Los Angeles show. None of these are Pennsylvania bands, but the signing-and-touring pipeline they represent is exactly the model that acts like If Not For Me, Since the Fire, Gallowglas, and Hero Destroyed are chasing in their own corners of the state. Pennsylvania's metalcore and post-hardcore scene has always punched above its weight — this is the state that gave the broader genre acts like Motionless In White and Circa Survive, after all — and watching labels like Solid State and SharpTone continue to build rosters around heavy, melodic, structurally ambitious music is a reminder that there's still a clear lane for PA bands chasing that same sound to break through nationally.

Masculinity, Loyalty, and Metal's Ongoing Reckonings

Two interviews this week touched on themes that extend well beyond any single band. Slaughter To Prevail's Alex Terrible discussed his evolving views on masculinity, framing strength less as physical dominance and more as an internal battle:

"I'm going to confront my own weaknesses and fears. That's where my real battle begins. And I want to become someone who inspires others to do the same."

It's a notably introspective statement from a vocalist whose stage persona leans hard into brutality, and it's part of a broader conversation happening across heavy music about what toughness actually means. Meanwhile, Billy Corgan addressed his continued friendship with Marilyn Manson amid ongoing allegations, framing his stance through a lens of personal loyalty while stopping short of excusing the accusations themselves. Both conversations are uncomfortable in different ways, but they reflect a genre still actively wrestling with how it defines strength, accountability, and community — conversations that play out just as intensely in basement shows around Allentown or Erie as they do in magazine profiles.

Chaos, Math, and the Experimental Underground

If you want proof that heavy music is still willing to get genuinely weird, look no further than Frontierer's new album Ultraviolet Parasite, which arrived in full alongside the video for "Ions & Oxygen Rockets." Frontierer's brand of mathcore chaos — dissonant, structurally unpredictable, almost violently technical — sits in a lineage that Pennsylvania has quietly contributed to for years through acts like Dysrhythmia, whose instrumental math-rock-meets-progressive-metal approach has made them one of the state's most consistently inventive exports. It's an area of the scene that doesn't always get the column inches it deserves compared to thrash or metalcore, but with new metal bands in 2026 increasingly blurring genre lines entirely, the experimental and math-adjacent corner of Pennsylvania's underground deserves more attention going forward — consider this a down payment on that promise.

Elsewhere on the Radar

A few other items worth a mention: Kaosis enlisted Carla Harvey and Mike Hrubovcak for a new track tied to the Deathgasm 2: Goremageddon project, instrumental prog outfit Polyphia dropped their new album Be Not Afraid alongside the "Can You Feel It" video, and Deafheaven announced an early 2027 tour with Interpol, continuing a collaborative relationship between the two bands. None of these are Pennsylvania stories directly, but they're all useful weather vanes for where heavy music's mainstream is drifting — toward genre fusion, toward legacy-act collaboration, and toward artists who refuse to stay boxed into one scene. That's a trend the Pennsylvania metal scene has been living out for years already, long before it had a trendy national name.

So, file this week under coincidental but instructive. Deep Purple's Splat! and Fontaines D.C.'s Dopamine Chamber aren't connected to our own Splat or Chamber in any meaningful way beyond a shared word — but the fact that this state can boast bands worthy of the comparison says plenty about where things stand heading into 2026.