Rachel Roberts - Journalist

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My Work

Featured Articles

Explore a featured selection of my writing work below. To take a look at my news stories (rather than features) across Guitar.com and MusicTech please see the news writing tabs on the side bar.

Kerrang! •

Take your crown! Linkin Park reclaim their throne at Download

It’s been a long time since Linkin Park have been at Download, and it’s almost as if the universe itself knew they were coming. The sky above hangs in hues of dusty lilac and pink, mimicking the swirling colours found in the cover art of their 2024 album, From Zero. It was 2014 when they were last here, and a short teaser trailer for their forthcoming film Unshatter plays out before they arrive, with Mike Shinoda confessing within it, “the hardest part of ending is starting up again.”
Their com...
Kerrang! •

The time of your knife! How Ice Nine Kills slaughtered Download

Going to an Ice Nine Kills set is like unwrapping Halloween candy pocketed by trick or treating in a dodgy neighbourhood. There could be all kinds of horrors hidden inside the sweetness, your would parents warn, but the temptation and morbid curiosity is far too strong. High on the sugar rush and risk of what you might be getting yourself into, you eat it up anyways, much like how Download gobbles down the gory goodness today. The Apex is dripping with early evening sunshine, and a lot of faux b...
Kerrang! •

Drama, danger, disgustingly good riffs: What happened when Architects…

The sun is casting a beautiful buttery glow on Architects as they headline the Opus Stage. A sweet, idyllic setting, just perfect for the band to throw the gnarly Elegy at us, and for frontman Sam Carter to snarl into his mic like there’s personal beef between them while looking cold as fuck in his shades. “Yeehaw!” he yells. It’s not long before the set really does descend into the wild wild west, though.
All is going smoothly through corkers like Doomsday and Gravedigger, until their set beco...
Kerrang! •

"It’s Download cranked all the way to 11": How Electric Callboy got…

Electric Callboy are sort of the Spinal Tap of the modern age, but with a little more whimsy about their character. Not jaded rockstars but proudly nonsensical and vulgar, they’re so daft, it’s a gift to us all. Their concoction of tomfoolery and heaviness is the exact type that Download laps up in all its weird and wonderful glory. Taking to the Apex, Callboy are rightfully platformed on the biggest stage, offering the perfect space for their bizarre interludes and costume changes, and a short...
Kerrang! •

“We’re here to feed the pipeline and give visibility to artists”: How…

When Cassie Fox founded LOUD WOMEN in 2015, it was sort of a happy accident. Tired of feeling like she and her bandmates were the only women in the room when playing gigs, she decided to host one herself with friends. Over a decade later, LOUD WOMEN is now a global feminist DIY music collective spanning across four continents.
“It was actually quite a selfish thing that I was doing,” Cassie tells Kerrang! today. “I certainly wasn’t thinking global at that stage. I wasn’t in music, I had two sma...
Kerrang! •

“Grief is such a weird thing… There’s no right way to do it”: As…

Did you ask to be set free? This is what As Everything Unfolds are asking on their new album, and it probably has hundreds of thoughts racing through your mind as you try to answer it. As a band that love big questions and world-building, that’s exactly what they want you to do: think deeply.
“I like that somebody might look at it and go, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’” says vocalist Charlie Rolfe. “What is free? Is it freedom from your current situation? Is it freedom from social media? Freedo...
Kerrang! •

LØLØ: “You wanna be an asshole? You’re going to get a song”

It’s 7:30am in Los Angeles, and LØLØ has not long woken up. She also just broke up with her boyfriend.
Such an emotional upheaval coming so close to the landmark moment of releasing her second album (the excellently-titled god forbid a girl spits out her feelings!) is kind of on-brand for the pop-rock star, whose music wrestles with what it means to navigate love and life as a woman who feels everything so deeply, and at 100 miles per hour.
“It’s fine. I was in my lover era for this album, and n...
Kerrang! •

Fighting the brainrot: The importance of listening to albums in full…

Could you imagine a world where catch-ups with friends lasted no longer than 10 minutes? Or what it’d be like to go to the cinema and have the film constantly fast-forwarded to the biggest moments of action? Alarmingly, our relationship with music is becoming like this.
We’re skipping tracks and speeding up songs, trialling them by their first chorus only and then moving on. Even those of us who live and breathe music are impacted by the competitive nature of social media and the culture of quic...
Guitar.com | All Things Guitar •

“Nothing pisses me off more than someone throwing a label on me: I’m 19!” Grace Bowers is determined to forge her own path

The 19-year-old guitarist has been anointed the saviour of blues-rock, but she’s got no interest in being pigeonholed by others as she moves into the next phase of her music careerThe music industry isn’t very good at understanding artists who don’t want to sit in a box, particularly strong young women. This is the story of Grace Bowers, and even we don’t have her figured out like we thought.Today she is happily “doing nothing”, and her uber-chilled manner is exactly the same as it is when she’s...
The Forty-Five •

Sløtface’s Haley Shea on returning to their DIY roots: “We’re taking it back to the way we did things in 2016”

Wholesome punk collective Sløtface are throwing it back to 2016. Not just posting nostalgic snaps on Instagram, they’re creatively liberated and returning to their DIY beginnings. We find out more about their next steps…A lot has changed since Sløtface formed in 2012. Not only have they evolved into a revolving collective of musicians, but they’re back to their independent beginnings after being signed to a label for the last decade. Across their lifetime they’ve released three albums and a stri...
The Forty-Five •

Girli: “It’s obscene that we have to be so expectant of violence every day”

girli never writes an album about one thing. Her music is always colourful and courageous, casting a lyrical net far and wide and on her forthcoming third album, she is more in tune with herself than ever.Chances are, every woman you know has a story about sexual harassment or violence. We all know how frustrating it is to stuff keys between fists, to have no choice but to send ‘I’m home safe’ confirmation texts, and how the justice system continually fails us. Alt-pop artist girli has been spea...
Kerrang! •

From Kurt Cobain to Wes Craven: The icons who inspired Ice Nine…

“Kevin created not just a music festival with Warped Tour, but a cultural movement. [I was always] excited to go to Warped every year, and Kevin gave Ice Nine Kills our shot when we were nobody. The first one I attended was probably in ’99 or 2000, and it was the first time I had seen so many punk bands that I loved in the same place. I would go with my buddy Andrew, and we would sneak backstage and hand out demos. I remember getting thrown out by, I think, Pennywise’s tour manager…”“He’s one of...
Kerrang! •

Witch Fever: “If our mere presence is pissing people off that much,…

“We had a comment before we started this tour asking if we were related to someone in Volbeat and that’s how we got the slot,” sighs Witch Fever vocalist Amy Walpole, near laughing at the sheer absurdity. “The singer of Volbeat isn’t my dad – that’s not why we’re here!”
The Mancunian four-piece – completed by bassist Alex Thompson, guitarist Alisha Yarwood and drummer Annabelle Joyce – are all smiles today meeting K!, squished on a sofa backstage at the 3Arena in Stockholm, Sweden amid their len...
Kerrang! •

VENUS GRRRLS: “We’ve not had a conventional journey… We’re all just…

As artists, VENUS GRRRLS want their music to stand for something. Their slogan – ‘grrrl as fuck’ – harks back to the riot grrrl movement of the ’90s. Fittingly, Venus is also the only planet named after a female god; it’s an entity that does things differently.

“It’s an attitude,” states GK. “It’s always a bit of a fine line we’ve wanted to walk with this, because ‘girls in alternative music’ is not a genre, and that’s a question we’ve come up against during our time as a band.
“That’s not the...
Kerrang! •

Delilah Bon: “The problem isn’t young girls wanting to be a princess……

You brought along Becky Baldwin from your band Hands off Gretel. What was it like to reconnect with her and share a stage together again?“I needed a bass player I knew would be able to learn the songs quickly. Becky was perfect. It’s so nice for me to be able to give her a crowd that’s like the crowd we needed with Hands Off Gretel. Becky is very rock, her style is very metal. As we did more shows, she was saying that she was finding it quite difficult to shake her ass and play bass at the same...
Kerrang! •

The Paradox: “Billie Joe messaged us, ‘How would you guys like to…

Hanging out with The Paradox is like stepping into a time machine. Frontman Eric Dangerfield has a Game Boy Color in-hand, and drummer Percy ‘PC3’ Crews is excitedly telling us what it’s like to work with blink-182’s Travis Barker.
The Atlanta pop-punk crew – completed by Donald Bryant on bass and guitarist Christopher ‘Xelan’ Bernard – recently teamed up with Travis on sugar-rush party anthem, Bender. Practically dripping in ’00s pop-punk sunshine, it thunders with an attitude similar to prime...
Kerrang! •

Pinkshift: “Love is rage, because when you love something, you fight…

“Our frontal lobes have developed!” chuckles Pinkshift vocalist and guitarist Ashrita Kumar, as they look back on all that has changed between the band’s 2022 shiny debut, Love Me Forever, and their brand-new beast, Earthkeeper.
Ashrita, fellow guitarist Paul Vallejo, and drummer Myron Houngbedji were the plucky new kids on the block when Love Me Forever dropped; it was a firecracker of a record that felt wound up and tense, sparkling with pop-punk energy as it tore into the anxieties of trying...
Kerrang! •

Album review: Nova Twins – Parasites & Butterflies

Life has felt starkly contrasted for Nova Twins of late. Both within the band and their lives around it, there have been soaring highs, and challenging lows. While 2020’s Who Are The Girls? debut was an introduction to the two and 2022’s Supernova was a celebration of their power, Parasites & Butterflies is a pause for reflection that looks at the juggle of success and pressure.
The skill and musical innovation of Nova Twins is outstanding, and arguably not discussed enough. On their third stud...
Kerrang! •

Hevenshe: “My fans are my team. They are my investors and my…

“There is a real collective exhale at a Hevenshe show,” says Jenna McDougall, creative force behind the ‘life-affirming femme rock’ project and Tonight Alive vocalist, as she cradles a restless pooch in her lap.
“I’m just starting to properly gauge what my audience feels like to me and what we’re sharing at my shows compared to Tonight Alive,” she adds. “There are a lot of similar people, so it doesn’t differ hugely except there’s no moshing or screaming for your life!”
Off the back of a headlin...
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