Ex-Nine Inch Nails guiarist Danny Lohner has remixed Daath's "Dead on the Dance Floor" for release July 10 as part of a yet-untitled digital EP. The track integrates the band's feral riffs with Lohner's electronic beats and samples. "At some point in our lives, each member of Daath has spent their time with Nine Inch Nails music," guitarist Eyal Levi said, according to MTVnews.com's Metal File. "They are a huge part of our musical upbringing and collaborating with one of their main minds is an honor that we are very excited about."

Apocalyptica have gotta be pissed. Two classically trained female harp players, who go by the name Harptallica, have released their self-produced debut of Metallica covers, Harptallica - A Tribute, on iTunes. The musicians, Ashley Toman and Patricia Kline, both have Masters of Music degrees from Rochester, New York's Eastman School of Music. A tour is forthcoming.

Through the Eyes of the Dead will release their new album, Malice, August 21. The follow-up to 2005's Bloodlust will mark the debut of singer Nate Johnson (ex-Premonitions of War, Deadwater Drowning), who replaced Anthony Gunnels in March after Gunnels lost interest in the band. The disc was produced by Erik Rutan (Goatwhore, Cannibal Corpse) and includes "Failure in the Flesh," which is currently streaming on the band's MySpace page.

Seattle band Himsa have finished recording their yet-untitled fourth album, which they've been hammering away at in the studio with producer Steve Carter (Cradle of Filth, Aiden) since mid-April. Vocals were later produced by Devin Townsend (Lamb of God, Darkest Hour), and Tue Madsen (Kataklysm, Mnemic) is currently mixing the album.

Australia surf-thrash band Alchemist have finished recording their new full-length, Tripsis, which is scheduled for U.S. release in September. In a statement, singer/guitarist Adam Agius called the disc, "The most consistently heavy album since Spiritech, with all the Alchemist trademarks — psychedelic, atmospheric, packed with crushing riffs, intertwined guitar, melodies and groove. Tripsis is also the fastest album delivered by Alchemist, with a few songs taking the surf-thrash sound to new heights." Tracks include "Wrapped in Guilt," "Degenerative Breeding" and "Grasp the Air."

Grindcore band Leng Tch'e have replaced guitarist Geert Devenster with ex-Aborted axeman Peter Goemaere. Devenster quit the group last month because his "priorities in life" changed and he "wasn't having fun anymore."

Bay Area thrash band Dekapitator will release their debut, The Storm Before the Calm, July 24. Two tracks, "Toxic Sanctuary" and "Run With the Pack," can be previewed on the band's MySpace page. ... We'd love to hear the story behind this band's name: Arsonists Get the Girls. They'll release their second disc, The Game of Life, August 14. Produced by Zach Ohren of Castle Ultimate, the disc features 12 dizzying tracks, including "Shoeshine for Neptune."

The new album by Swedish metal legends Entombed, Serpent Saints - The Ten Amendments, is scheduled to drop July 31. It will be the band's first studio album since 2004's Inferno. Expect a U.S. tour in late fall or early winter 2008.

For a full interview with Despised Icon, check out this week's Metal File.

As I Lay Dying are metalcore no more. So says frontman Tim Lambesis about the band's next album, An Ocean Between Us, which was partially inspired by the way many artists in the genre have become lazy and formulaic.

"We spent some time listening to our last album [2005's Shadows Are Security] and, just from being on tour, we became a little bit jaded by how the genre — as a whole — has sort of copied itself over and over again," he told MTV.com's Metal File. "We decided we wanted to be more diverse, even down to the point where we sort of felt like we should really focus on writing songs in different categories, and then pick the best songs from those categories and use them for the record."

The upcoming album, which was produced by Killswitch guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz (Every Time I Die, All That Remains), is scheduled to come out August 21. While writing the songs, the band experimented with everything from melodic indie metal to nail-grinding thrash, but whatever style they were exploring, As I Lay Dying did so with energy and aggression. "On the tempo side of things, we wanted the record to be pretty fast as a whole," he said. "[But we also] wrote songs that have a more emotional depth to them — songs that aren't just pound-your-face-in all the time."

While it wasn't easy for As I Lay Dying to hook up with Dutkiewicz because of tour commitments and the guitarist's back injury, Lambesis said it was well worth the trouble. "He has great ears, and even if he ended up going with one of the original ideas we had from pre-production, it was confirming that it was his set of ears that gave it the thumbs up."

As much as As I Lay Dying scrambled to have the songs in working shape for Dutkiewicz, the process wasn't any less stressful once the producer arrived. "When we were recording drums, the computer crashed," Lambesis said. "When we started guitars, we had some bad cabling, so the first few days of guitars, we had distorted lines. And then we had a bad batch of strings, where every string in the entire box was buzzing on the frets."

And while As I Lay Dying are a Christian band, there were some decidedly "Amityville Horror" moments. "One day, I just woke up and came downstairs, and inside the vocal booth, there were just flies all over the wall — maybe 30, 45," Lambesis said. "And there are no windows in my vocal booth, so I couldn't figure out how they got in there."

For the full interview with As I Lay Dying and the rest of this week's metal news, check out this week's Metal File.

Now check out something that buzzes almost as much at 45 flies -- the video for As I Lay Dying's "Confined":

DevilDriver aren't the only band to get exasperated with hotshot handicapped producer Jason Suecof in the studio. Chimaira got so frustrated with Suecof blowing off sessions and changing subjects six times a minute that they threw him into his swimming pool, wheelchair and all. But like Chimaira, who wound of creating one of the best albums of the year -- Resurrection -- with the demented Floridian, DevilDriver and Suecof were a dysfunctional marriage made in heavy metal heaven. Which doesn't mean they didn't nearly kill the man.

"We couldn't be more polar opposite, and I had to tell him to shut the f--- up so many times. I was ready to wring his throat" frontman Dez Fafara told MTVnews.com's Metal File. "We actually got into it about two or three times where he would criticize something and I would just be like, 'You suck, you've got no groove.' But the friction worked and we came out of it the best of friends. More importantly, he really captured this band, and now I feel like it would be hard to work with anyone else."

A brief listen to the new DevilDriver album, The Last Kind Words (out June 5) confirms Fafara's conviction that he and his bandmates are finally at the top of their game. Like the band's first two albums, 2003's eponymous debut and 2005's The Fury of Our Maker's Hand, the new disc combines brutal thrash and death metal with elements of nu-metal, but the songs are now more progressive, weaving in a new level of melodic variation and atmospheric flourishes.

"I think we knew we had to reach within ourselves as a team and pull something out that was really different," Fafara said. "Everyone totally put aside their egos and stepped up to the plate to do what needed to be done. In America right now, there's so much of that sing-songy metal going on, so we knew if we did something totally balls-out it was going to be well-received."

The title of the album comes from the lyrics to "Not all Who Wander are Lost," which pretty much conveys the singer's belief that people should live in the moment instead of dwelling on the misfortunes of the past. "The 'last kind words' could be 'f--- you' before complete annihilation," he explained. "For me, this album is about being motivated to stand up to the punishment of being a human and to have the character in you to go on when all people want to do is hold you down."

For the complete interview with DevilDriver and the rest of this week's metal news, check out MTV.com's Metal File.

And now, check out DevilDriver's video for "End of the Line":

Being an ambient metal band opening for thrash and experimental outfits can pose certain challenges. But when Chicago instrumental voyagers, Pelican, were booked to play a San Francisco club with Swedish prog-metal masters Opeth, they thought they were home free. There they were in one of the most liberal cities in the country opening for one of the most open-minded metal groups in the world. Then they plugged in.

"We started playing, and right away some people started yelling, 'fags' at us," Pelican guitarist Laurent Lebec told MTVnews.com's Metal File. "Then someone else shouted, 'You guys look like Weezer.' I couldn't believe it. These guys were coming to see Opeth, this really progressive band, yet they were still locked in such rudimentary middle-school kind of nonsense attitudes."

Such uncouth metalheads might react more positively to Pelican's new album, City of Echoes. Unlike 2005's sprawling The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, the new record is full of songs like "Bliss in Concrete" and "Spaceship Broken-Parts Needed," which are heavier and more concise than past sonic excursions.

"We definitely wanted to write shorter songs that got to the point a little quicker dynamically and pleased us as a live band as opposed to what we were before this record, which was a band that toured rarely and indulged itself in the studio," Lebec said. "When we were touring for our last album, we could only play five songs because they were all so long, and that can be tiring for an audience."

Pelican were also inspired to shift musical gears by the recent influx of instrumental bands influenced by Neurosis, Isis and post-rock outfits like Explosions in the Sky. What was once inspiring and unconventional has grown a little stale and Pelican didn't want to get stuck meandering in the haze.

"We've all grown up in punk and death-metal scenes," Lebec explained. "We've been in grind bands, thrash bands, you name it. And our drummer [Larry Herweg] plays in Lair of the Minotaur, which is a total Swedish metal band. So doing songs that were more to the point and maybe a little heavier didn't seem like that huge of a stretch."

For the complete interview with Pelican and the rest of this week's headbanging news, check out this week's edition of MTVnews.com's Metal File.
And if you're interested in more about Pelican, here's some live footage and an interview:
Pelican Live In Seattle-Live Eye Tv

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You might remember this limerick from elementary school: "Back to back, they faced each other/ They drew their swords and shot each other/ The deaf policeman heard this noise/ Then came to kill the two dead boys."

Even if you don't, The Chariot's bassist Jon 'KC Wolf!' Kindler does, and one day, out of nowhere, he blurted it out. Intrigued by the poem, frontman Josh Scogin (ex-Norma Jean) decided to fragment all the phrases to compose the song titles for the band's second album The Fiancée.

"I did some research on it to make sure it wasn't in a book or something, [then] I made up my own version of the poem so that each track would have its own title," Scogin tells MTVnews.com's Metal File. "And when reading it together, it would still make sense and keep in line with the original poem's story."

Such a conceptual approach might perfectly lend itself to some pretentious, thematic album that would take the band forever to complete. But The Chariot had no intention of doing the all too trendy concept album. Instead, they shot from the hip, stressing spontaneity and impulse to create a record far more immediate than their 2004 debut Everything is Alive, Everything is Breathing, Nothing is Dead and Nothing is Bleeding.

"It was actually a very easy record to write," Scogin tells Metal File. "It came more naturally to us. Sometimes with art, there's the art of, 'Well, I just created it because that's just what I wanted to do,' and then there's the art of, 'Well, we have a deadline, and we have to be done by this date — no exceptions.' This time the record was more the former — we wrote all of these songs within a week of each other and they all came very naturally, very fast and very easy. I like that process a lot better."

For the rest of the interview with The Chariot and more of this week's metal news, check out MTV.com's Metal File.

Then check out the video for The Chariot's "The Company, The Comfort, The Grave":

They may fit the broad definition of stoner rock, but Fu Manchu have never liked the term. Oh, they like stoners and they don't mind being lumped in with other psychedelic bands inspired by Black Sabbath, but when push comes to shove, they just don't like labels. They probably wouldn't even like being called super-duper rock.

"We've always just done what we wanted regardless of what anyone wants to call it," singer Scott Hill tells MTVnews.com's Metal File. "To me, 'stoner rock' means, like, the Grateful Dead — hippie garbage. I've just never been into that mellow, hippie kind of stuff. But now it seems to be associated with a heavy guitar and fuzzy-sounding guitars, and in that respect, whatever, that's fine; it's kind of what we are. But it's kind of a lame term."

With Fu Machu's newest album, We Must Obey, Hill can make a stronger case than ever that Fu Manchu aren't stoner rock. The songs are heavier than anything the band has done before, and, while they're still filled with trippy passages, Hill feels the band is turning over a new stone.

"I think people will be a little surprised by that," he says. "I grew up as a kid listening to 1980 to 1985 punk rock and hardcore stuff — that's my main deal. I still listen to that stuff, every day, all day. I think some of those influences are coming out on this record. But people who have been into us for a while, they'll like the slower, heavier stuff on this album. The fuzz tone's in full effect, it's just a more aggressive record for us. But our sound is still there."

For the complete interview with Fu Manchu and the rest of this week's metal news, check out MTVnews.com's Metal File.

They've jokingly labeled their own music Nintendocore and sarcastically referred to their new album, A Natural Death, as "the futility and arrogance of creation and destruction, the overwhelming scale of space and time, and the brutal majesty of nature, the horror of birth and the beauty of death." And, zany experimental metalcore outfit Horse the Band have also created an Internet sitcom"Lawrence and Friends," which involves a love triangle between a sugar cube, a suicidal pencil and singer/songwriter Carla Hassett.

But just because the band members emphasize their senses of humor as much as their love for noise doesn't mean these Los Angeles oddballs don't rip. Their songs mix chaotic metal, electronic videogame noises and abrupt rhythmic shifts to create a sound that's totally brutal and can be easily enjoyed simply as a showcase of aggression. However, the band's comic element is right there for anyone who's interested.

Take the new track "Murder," the lyrics of which are self-explanatory -- kind of. "The kids have been loving it," says frontman Nathan Winneke. "I tell them it's a song about killing white people, and they go crazy," he tells MTV.com's Metal File. [The lyrics were written from the perspective of an American Indian in 1847], So it's OK."Needless to say, Winneke doesn't hold much sacred, least of all himself. As interesting and unconventional as Horse the Band are, the singer claims the music is simply the byproduct of misspent youth, inexperience and random chaos. "We're very reckless and immature and have no idea what we're doing," he says. "We should probably break up as a band, because all we're going to end up doing is killing ourselves. But hopefully, it will be funny."

For the complete interview with Horse The Band and more metal news than you can fit into a corpse-free casket, check out MTVnews.com's Metal File.

Horse the Band's "Birdo":

Their sound is almost as perplexing as their name. The Number 12 Looks Like You combines extreme metal, death metal, jazz, grindcore and hardcore into a frenzied, original sound that's wondrously exhausting to listen to.

"We don't want to sound like anybody else," singer Jesse Corman tells MTVnews.com's Metal File. "We stepped it up to the point where we've killed everything we've ever done previously, while a lot of bands that started out heavier have seemed to be going more melodic and easier on crowds — at least that's the trend. It seems to be the path a lot of these heavy bands are going these days, and we didn't want our fans to be like, 'Oh no, it's all just going to be melodic.' We wanted to make sure we really kicked some ass."

The New Jersey band's new album, Mongrel, -- which comes out June 19 -- does just that. The Number 12 Looks Like You spent four months in a Seattle studio working on the album with producer Casey Bates (Heavy Heavy Low Low, Gatsby's American Dream).

"This record's definitely something you've never heard before," says Corman. On top of being incredibly heavy, there's stuff in there that's just the catchiest stuff I've heard in so long."

For the complete interview with The Number 12 Looks Like You and the rest of this week's music news, check out MTVnews.com's Metal File.

A Life Once Lost didn't title their upcoming album Iron Gag for nothing. Like the torture device for which it's named, the record is cold, harsh and will leave a metallic taste in your mouth that just might make you, well, gag. And, for the first time, singer Bob Meadows pulls no punches lyrically, taking direct aim at the targets of his contempt.

"There's just a lot of things I've wanted to say to a lot of people on this record," Meadows told MTVnews.com's Metal File. "It was just inspired by a lot of things I've wanted to say but haven't because I had to watch myself. There are so many ugly things going on in the music scene and life, and I was just like, 'F--- it, if I say something that's going to piss someone off, then it wasn't meant to be anyway. Let me just get this all off my chest.' So, this album's just really pissed, and it's just very vicious."

Throughout Iron Gag, Meadows lashes out against womanizers, racists, addicts and anyone who isn't living up their full potential. And, when the band members sat down to write the record, they made sure nothing slipped in that didn't meet their standard of excellence.

"The songs are just way more fierce [than anything on 2005's Hunter," Meadows says. "There's just an element about it that Hunter didn't have, and I think maybe that was just us doing it ourselves. It was us learning from [Hunter producer and Anthrax guitarist] Rob Caggiano how to actually approach the songs and my working with [Lamb of God's] Randy Blythe on the vocal production, which taught me how to approach the songs well. And with all of that working together, we've definitely put out a record that's going to move a lot of heads — make people turn around and be like, 'Holy sh--.' It's a monster of a release."

For the rest of this week's metal news check out the rest of this week's Metal File on MTVnews.com. Now rock with the brutal "Vulture" from the supposedly "less fierce" Hunter. Wonder what A Life Once Lost's idea of mellow is?