IoMP 174: What Have You Been Listening To? — August 2026
What do you do when the month's new releases aren't exactly setting your world on fire? Go digging through everything else metal has to offer.
The August 2026 edition of “What Have You Been Listening To?” finds Collin and Tom facing one of the more underwhelming months of the year for new music — but somehow emerging with two completely different lists of albums worth checking out.
Collin's playlist takes him from Finnish melodic death metal with Norther and the hardcore attack of Cancer Bats' “Give Me Dirt” to Electric Callboy's “TANZNEID” and the dark atmosphere of Fen's “ELEMENTAL Part One: MOURNING EARTH.” But his biggest discovery comes from an album he admits he should have heard much sooner: Kanonenfieber's “Soldatenschicksale,” a record strong enough to earn his number-one spot and immediately launch the band onto his radar as one of the future heavyweights of German metal.
Tom, meanwhile, goes hunting a little farther off the beaten path. Cease To Resist's “Edge Of Silence” brings catchy modern metal into the mix, Warforged gets weird and progressive with “The Grove | Almanac”, and Cairiss delivers the atmospheric “Wilderness.” Italian progressive power metal band Noveria becomes one of Tom's biggest surprises with “Becoming After” before he jumps back a full decade for his number-one pick: Protest the Hero's “Pacific Myth,” an album he's been revisiting ahead of an upcoming road trip to see the Canadian prog masters live.
Even the honourable mentions stretch across generations, with Collin falling down a Deep Purple rabbit hole while Tom discovers Russian melodic death metal newcomers SYRAX and their “Another Side of the Battlefield EP.”
And the listeners aren't sitting this month out either. Metallica's “The Shortest Straw,” Torpor!'s “Dungeon Descent” and Edmonton's wonderfully unsubtle Powerlöad all enter the conversation.
Of course, this is still Influencers of Metal, so staying on topic is largely optional. Somewhere between the album recommendations are hockey stories, arguments about summer album releases, questionable jokes, and Tom's brilliant decision to play a video of silence randomly interrupted by James Hetfield throughout the recording — an experiment Collin immediately regrets.
So was August really a bad month for metal, or did the good stuff just require a little more digging?
Click play, grab a few recommendations for your own playlist and find out what Collin, Tom and the listeners have been spinning throughout August 2026.
MUSIC:
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