Doom Legends in Turmoil, Hardcore Mourns Lou Koller — What It Means for Ohio's Underground
Tuesday in the metal world felt like a gut-punch delivered in stereo: one legendary frontman abruptly cut loose from the band he spent 35 years building, and an entire hardcore community reeling from the loss of one of its most important voices. Neither story happened in Ohio, but both landed hard here, because Ohio's scene has spent decades drawing from the same wells of doom, death and hardcore that these headlines are shaking up. Let's get into it.
Aaron Stainthorpe's Exit From My Dying Bride Sends Shockwaves Through Doom
Aaron Stainthorpe co-founded My Dying Bride in 1990 and fronted the band for 35 years, becoming one of the defining voices of British doom-death. His dismissal this year was, in his own word, "heartbreaking," and it's the kind of split that reverberates well beyond the UK gothic-doom circle. Stainthorpe isn't going quietly, though — he's already announced Towards the Sinister, a new project reuniting him with three former My Dying Bride members: guitarist Calvin Robertshaw, bassist Ade Jackson and drummer Rick Miah.
"Heartbreaking" — Aaron Stainthorpe, describing his split from My Dying Bride
It's worth noting, purely as a fun coincidence for our readers, that Ohio's own Sinister — a thrash metal outfit, not to be confused with Stainthorpe's new doom-leaning venture — shares half a name with the project making headlines this week. Different genre, different continent, but it's a reminder that Ohio's thrash scene keeps churning out bands worth your attention regardless of what's trending in the UK doom underground.
The bigger story here is what Stainthorpe's situation says about doom and death-doom as a whole: even the genre's most tenured frontmen aren't immune to lineup upheaval. That's relevant to Ohio, where death-doom remains criminally under-covered despite a real bench of talent. We've got five death-doom acts in the regional index and, frankly, zero blog coverage to show for it until now. Bands working the slower, heavier, more atmospheric end of things — think the crushing tempos of StoneCross or the stoner-doom sludge of Witchhelm — deserve a spotlight the same way Stainthorpe's next chapter is getting one. If you're building a doom-adjacent bill in Columbus, Akron or Cincinnati this year, these are the names to build around.
Hardcore Loses Lou Koller, and Drain Steps Up at Warped Tour
The hardcore world is still processing the passing of Sick Of It All's Lou Koller, a voice that shaped NYHC and influenced two generations of bands who followed. At Warped Tour this week, Santa Cruz hardcore band Drain paid tribute by covering "It's Clobberin' Time" days after his death — a gesture that landed exactly the way it should have: raw, immediate, and from the heart.
Ohio's hardcore and hardcore-adjacent scene runs deep enough that this loss hits close to home even without a direct regional connection. The crossover-thrash lineage that Sick Of It All helped cement runs straight through bands like Ohio's own False Hope and Ground Zero, both of whom trade in that same pit-igniting, no-frills aggression. If you've spent any time at a basement show in Cleveland or Dayton, you already know that spirit never left.
Eric Ellis Returns With Manners, Fourteen Years Later
Speaking of hardcore's harder edges, Eric Ellis — known for his work in Bury Your Dead and Reflux — dropped a new video for "Manners" under his solo/band moniker Ellis this week. It's Ellis's first major public output following 14 years in prison on RICO-related charges, and the track carries the weight you'd expect from someone with that story to tell. It's a reminder of how much real life bleeds into hardcore and metalcore, genres built on catharsis in the first place.
That intersection of death metal grit and hardcore urgency is exactly the lane Ohio's Entrenched occupies, and it's also where post-hardcore stalwarts like The Plot In You have built a national following out of Ohio. Ellis's comeback story is a good excuse to revisit why this hybrid sound continues to resonate — it's confessional, it's brutal, and Ohio has never had a shortage of bands willing to go there.
King 810 Hits the Road for the Autumnal Rites Tour
Michigan's King 810 announced the Autumnal Rites Tour with Guerrilla Warfare, kicking off in September. It's exactly the kind of run that tends to swing through the Midwest, and with venues across Ohio hungry for aggressive, street-level metal, don't be shocked if a date lands within driving distance of Cleveland, Columbus or Cincinnati before the leaves finish changing.
This is also a good moment to plug how you find out about these things before they sell out. Ohio's concert calendar is packed heading into fall — from club shows to bigger rooms, including the increasingly metal-friendly booking at MGM Northfield Park concerts, which has quietly become one of the go-to stops for touring hard rock and metal acts hitting Northeast Ohio. If you're searching "metal concerts near me" and coming up empty, our upcoming shows page is the fastest way to see what's actually routed through the state this year, and it's worth bookmarking as the 2026 touring cycle starts taking shape.
Dez Fafara's Health Update Hits Different for Ohio's Nu-Metal and Groove Faithful
Coal Chamber and DevilDriver frontman Dez Fafara revealed he's been living with a benign tumor in his head for nearly two years, with potential surgery still on the table. He shared the update on the Garza Podcast, following up on the blackout and vertigo episode that forced Coal Chamber to cancel a U.S. tour previously. It's sobering news from a guy who's spent three decades as one of heavy music's most reliable road dogs.
Fafara's health scare is a gut-check for the whole nu-metal and groove metal generation, a lineage Ohio helped write with bands like Cleveland's own Chimaira, whose groove-laden, metalcore-adjacent attack put Northeast Ohio on the map in the 2000s. That same DNA lives on in current Ohio groove acts like Ants of the Sky, proof that the sound Coal Chamber and DevilDriver helped popularize still has plenty of gas left in the tank locally.
Krallice's Scout Order and the Avant-Garde Undercurrent
New York's Krallice dropped "Living Useless Ritual" from their upcoming album Scout Order, their first with Profound Lore since returning to the label, and booked a European/UK tour to support it. Krallice has spent years pushing black metal into weirder, more technical territory, and that restless spirit has an audience in Ohio too. Bands like UvU, working in avant-garde and post-metal spaces, and atmospheric black metal acts like Spiral Staircase and Crepuscular Night, prove Ohio's black metal underground isn't content to stay in one lane either.
The Sludge Metal Gap Nobody's Talking About
Here's a stat that should embarrass us as much as it motivates us: Ohio's regional index currently tracks 41 sludge metal bands and exactly zero blog posts covering them. That's an entire subgenre hiding in plain sight. Bands like Gaia Weeps and the experimental sludge/post-metal crew in Reflex Machine are out there right now making some of the heaviest, most texturally interesting music in the state, and they deserve more ink than they've gotten. Consider this a flag in the ground: expect deeper coverage of Ohio sludge in the coming weeks, because a scene this size doesn't stay quiet forever.
Where This Leaves the Ohio Scene
Between doom's lineup drama, hardcore's mourning, groove metal's health scares and black metal's avant-garde pivot, this week's national headlines are really a mirror for what's already happening at the local level. Ohio has always had its own version of every one of these stories — its own thrash lifers, its own doom disciples, its own hardcore true believers. If your band belongs in that conversation, don't wait for someone else to make the case for you — submit your band and get on our radar. The best metal bands of any era got there by showing up consistently, and that's just as true in 2026 as it was during the 80s metal bands boom that built this whole genre in the first place.