News

By The Riff Report Blog 🤘🔥 Well… that’s it, butt. Hawkins has shut up shop, the bikes are parked, the synths have faded out, and Stranger Things has officially ridden off into the Upside Down sunset. After nearly a decade of monsters, mullets, metal riffs, D&D dice, and trauma dumped directly into our eyeballs, Netflix’s flagship nerd-rock epic has bowed...

The hangover years. The download era. The LadBaby industrial complex. 🤘🥴 Right then butt, strap in. From X Factor coronations to viral chaos, from proper pop bangers to charity-fuelled sausage roll dominance, here’s every UK No.1 single on New Year’s Day from 2007 onwards. This is modern chart history, for better or worse. 😈📀 📀 THE FULL LIST 2007 –...

Hangovers fade. Chart trivia is forever. 🤘🥴 Happy New Year, you beautiful riff goblins. While the nation was rubbing its temples, hunting leftover Pringles, and questioning life choices, the UK Singles Chart was quietly crowning a No.1 every New Year’s Day. And from 1966 to 2006, it delivered a proper mixed bag of genius, madness, Christmas leftovers, novelty chaos, and...

The month of frost, leftover Quality Street tins, questionable New Year’s resolutions… and, as it turns out, an absolute pile of rock and metal legends entering the world. That’s right, butt — while the rest of us were busy freezing our socks off and wondering if it’s socially acceptable to eat Christmas chocolate for breakfast, some of the biggest names...

Last chords, final bows, and a lot of misty-eyed lighters in the air 🔥🎸 2025 wasn’t just another year on the rock calendar, butt. It was a year of goodbyes. The kind where the amps hum a little longer, the crowd sings a little louder, and everyone pretends they’re not absolutely gutted. Across arenas, festivals and legendary hometown shows, a...

31 December 2025. 6:00am. No fireworks. No stadium-sized farewell concert. No VJ dramatically smashing a television with a guitar. Just one final music video… and then MTV Music UK was gone. After decades of music television being part of the furniture of British pop culture, MTV’s dedicated UK music channels reached the end of the road on New Year’s Eve...

Picture this, butt. Palm trees swaying. Sunshine glinting off the lagoon. A Disney resort soundtrack humming away like nothing in the world could ever be sad again. Now imagine John Lennon casually signing the legal death certificate of The Beatles. Yep. That actually happened. 😲 🎄 A Holiday That Changed Music Forever Fifty-one years ago today, on December 29, 1974,...

Some people write the songs.Some people stand under the lights.And then there are the quiet architects behind the curtain, nudging legends toward immortality without ever demanding the spotlight. One of those figures has sadly left the building. Michael Lippman, the music industry heavyweight who helped steer the careers of David Bowie and George Michael, has died aged 79. And while...

Yes, Really. And No, You’re Not Imagining It. Just when you thought Facebook’s organic reach couldn’t sink any lower than a dropped pint at a sticky venue floor, Meta have apparently looked at bands, DIY artists, promoters and independent media and said: “You know what would really help? Charging them.” According to reports doing the rounds, Facebook may soon charge...

Greek prog/tech death metal legends. 8 albums deep. Zero messing about. Alright butt, listen up 🤘Athens’ own Acid Death have thrown down a very grown-up, very serious call to arms. After decades of riff surgery, pit destruction, and brain-melting death metal science, the band are officially on the hunt for a new European booking agency. And no, this isn’t some...

Leave it to Slipknot to kick over another table while everyone else is still arguing about the menu. **Slipknot co-founder and resident chaos architect Shawn Crahan, better known to the world as Clown, has weighed in on the great AI panic… and surprise surprise, he’s not clutching his pearls. Instead, he’s calling it “a professor in my pocket.”And honestly? That’s...

WITH KORN SCREAMING “ARE YOU READYYYYY” INTO YOUR SOUL 🤘🔥 Forget fireworks. Bin off Auld Lang Syne. And respectfully tell the BBC countdown to do one. If you want to actually welcome the new year properly, there’s only one ritual that matters, and it involves nu-metal, distortion, and a scream that could crack time itself. Here’s the plan, mun. It’s...

Right. Stop scrolling. Cancel your plans. Phone your mum.Because this image has just dropkicked British snack culture straight into a new dimension. What you’re looking at isn’t just a tube of crisps.It’s Pringles x Greggs: Sausage Roll flavour.And whether it’s real, fake, AI witchcraft, or a message beamed directly into our souls from the snack gods… one thing is clear:...

The Lost Venues, the Surviving Rooms, and How the City’s Sound Grew Teeth 🎸🏴 Swansea has never been a quiet city. Even when the venues vanished, the amps unplugged and the doors got boarded up, the noise never really left. It just moved down the road, squeezed into smaller rooms, or waited patiently for its next chance to kick off....

Before smartphones. Before broadband. Before the algorithm decided you were really into air fryers and Viking tattoos… there was BBC Ceefax. And it was quietly brilliant. Ceefax wasn’t just “text on the telly”. It was an information delivery system built for a world that hadn’t yet decided everything needed to be instant. It lived invisibly inside analogue TV signals, hiding...