Simon Neil leads a back on top Biffy ...

A choir on one of Germany’s Big Four thrash bands’ new album? “We always did our own thing.”

California’s sleaziest exports were always gloriously out of step with the times. Here are the cherries on their catalogue cake.

Bristol blues punks/chaos merchants punch harder on second album.

In the wake of Peter Gabriel’s departure, GENESIS faced an existential question: carry on, or call it a day? Looking back 50 years, band members revisit the fraught months after their first frontman’s exit – and the creative surge that set the scene for one of rock’s most improbable second acts. “The band was meant to be dead and buried,” learns Peter Watts. “But we refused to lay down and die.”

HEAVY METAL HAS evolved a great deal since four young musicians in Birmingham, England, saw a crowd gather across the street from their rehearsal room, lining up for an opportunity to get terrified by