Concert promoter Psyko Steve has helped build Arizona’s music scene
‘Everyone knows Steve’: Concert promoter Psyko Steve has helped build Arizona’s music scene, including Phoenix Rock Lottery.
It’s shaping up to be a banner year for new releases from the Arizona music scene.
The year got underway with Playboy Manbaby releasing their first album since 2018, a satirical takedown of life as know it in 2026. And The Format returned from a lengthy hiatus with “Boycott Heaven,” their first album since 2006.
The first few months of 2026 will also see new albums from the two surviving members of experimental hip-hop trio Injury Reserve (as By Storm); Puscifer (one of several bands fronted by Maynard James Keenan); Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, and Paper Foxes.
Two local artists are releasing children’s albums (Mega Ran and Alice Cooper). And before the year is out, we’ll see new albums from The Word Alive, The Maine, Authority Zero, Grey Daze, Sacred Reich and more.
Here’s a look at what we know for now about the year in local music.
The Format
After 17 years on hiatus, these Glendale-spawned indie-pop legends returned to active duty with a sold-out performance at Veterans Memorial Coliseum as part of the Arizona State Fair in September, offering fans an early taste of the reunion album almost no one knew was in the works at that point.
“Boycott Heaven” is The Format’s first release in 20 years, inspired in part by singer Nate Ruess having learned to play guitar, which inspired “a crazy writing streak,” as Ruess recalls. At a certain point, he started thinking ‘This would be a really awesome Format album.’”
So he reached out to the only person who could make that happen, former bandmate Sam Means, and the reunited duo started bringing that idea to fruition. In January 2025, they entered Henson Studios in Hollywood to start recording with Brendan O’Brien, famed producer of career-defining albums by the likes of Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots and Bruce Springsteen.
They emerged with an album that rocks a good deal more than longtime fans may have expected. As Ruess, who won two Grammy during that hiatus as the voice of fun. (multi-platinum rockers who began their own hiatus in 2015), told The Arizona Republic, “In all the albums that I’ve made, I’ve never turned the guitar up. This felt like an opportunity for us to, like, turn the guitar up.” Out now.
Playboy Manbaby
These Phoenix punk chose to the fifth anniversary of an angry mob storming the Capitol in Washington D.C. as U.S. lawmakers were preparing to certify the election of President Joe Biden as the only suitable release date for their latest effort, a satirical masterstroke of darkly comic social commentary titled “Violence.”
As singer Robbie Pfeffer says, “To put something out on January 6th, when the current president tried to overthrow the United States government and has now pardoned all those people, and everyone dances as quickly as they can to ignore what actually happened, it seems pretty fitting for an album that’s about a world that’s basically ignoring what’s happening to it.”
As “a person who detests violence,” Pfeffer was drawn to “Violence” as a title for this album, he explains, because “it’s just this thing that’s pretty universally recognized as a bad, scary thing. And this is an album that talks about a lot of bad, scary things.”
Zac Carper of FIDLAR produced a move that led to their most fully realized effort yet.
Highlights range from an opening track that compares this moment in our history to “a dumpster fire burning bright” to a song called “Way It’s Done” that sets the tone with “My offspring is a receptacle for all my bad ideas” and features one of Pfeffer’s most inspired moments as a lyricist (“My family lives in fear because I live in regret”). Out now.
By Storm
RiTchie with a T (Nathaniel Ritchie) and Parker Corey of experimental hip-hop trio Injury Reserve release their debut single as By Storm in 2023 – “as a handoff,” they explained on social media, from what they’d managed to accomplish with Stepa J. Groggs (Jordan Groggs), who died in 2020.
Injury Reserve’s last album, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” was released in 2021. “My Ghosts Go Ghost” is their first album as By Storm — an album they intended to release in 2025.
As they explained in announcing the album on their Substack page, “When we first shared our logo over a year ago with the caption ‘new music in 2025’ the phrasing was deliberate. We had been working on new music since wrapping up the final Injury Reserve tours at the end of 2022 but we did not have an album. The pressure of both debuting a new band while also following up a relatively successful album in ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ was clearly affecting us, so instead we decided to simply start releasing songs we were confident in.”
Four of the nine songs on “My Ghosts Go Ghost” are streaming now. The full album arrives on Jan. 30 via deadAir. An initial vinyl press will be limited to 1,000 copies.
Paper Foxes
These local darkwave heroes have signed to Cleopatra Records, a label renowned for its eclectic catalog spanning punk, industrial, goth and metal with a roster now including Iggy Pop, The Damned and Ministry.
When the signing was announced, they issued a statement saying, “We’re honored to be part of a label that has championed so many visionaries across genres. Cleopatra understands artists who blur lines and bend expectations. That’s exactly where we want to be.”
In that same news release, they said the album “promises a darker, more cinematic sound, exploring themes of identity, technology, and alienation in a fragmented world.” They’ll be celebrating the release of “Rituals” on Jan. 30 at Club Contact in downtown Phoenix.
Puscifer
Nearly two decades since Puscifer’s first release, the band led by Maynard James Keenan of Tool and A Perfect Circle will release the long-awaited follow-up to 2020’s brilliant “Existential Reckoning.” Written and recorded across Arizona, in Los Angeles and on the road during last year’s Sessanta tour, “Normal Isn’t” is set to be released on Feb. 6.
Tapping into the music that shaped them, Keenan, fellow vocalist Carina Round and studio whiz Mat Mitchell have created a modern post-punk album, venturing into more guitar-driven territory with a dash of goth-tinged drama.
Keenan issued a statement saying “‘Normal Isn’t’ reflects this time we are living in. As storytellers and artists, our job is to observe, interpret, and report. We take in our environment and share what we see, and what we see around us does not appear normal. Not by a long shot.”
As he was working on material, Keenan set up his own digital recording system and built full song ideas before presenting them to Mitchell and Round, a new approach that Round says changed the whole dynamic. In a good way.
As Round summed it up in a statement, “Instead of just saying, ‘I want this to sound like Fleetwood Mac on cocaine if they had a baby with PJ Harvey,’ Maynard was showing us his intention, which was really cool.” (Out Feb. 6)
Meat Puppets
These Tempe punk legends have a special project targeted at mom-and-pop stores coming out sometime in February. It’s four seven-inch EPs, each drawing on their library of old recordings. Each disc contains songs from Meat Puppet’s early ’80s Phoenix club days (1981-’82). The focus is on cover versions, though there is some improv.
Each release will be available in different regions of the country (and probably online as well), and once their limited editions sell out, all four will be made available in a 7-inch box set.
Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers
On March 14, these local legends will be celebrating the release of their new album, “Hell to Breakfast,” in the parking lot outside the Yucca Tap Room, where Clyne and drummer PH Naffah launched one the most successful Tempe rock acts of their generation, the Refreshments, in the ‘90s.
That release show doubles as a celebration of “Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy,” the Refreshments’ breakthrough that gave the world “Banditos,” turning 30.
“Hell to Breakfast” was primarily produced by Naffah. A few songs were produced by Mike Harmeier of Mike and the Moonpies, a neotraditional country act from Austin, Texas, that recently changed its name to Silverada.
Arriving March 6 with album art by fellow local legend Bob Boze Bell, “Hell to Breakfast” is the Peacemakers’ ninth studio release, and it should speak directly to the fans who flock to see them every time they grace a stage. The two singles they’ve shared in advance — “You Got Lightnin’” and “Agua Caliente” — are among the tracks that feel like future staples of the live show.
“You Got Lightnin’” is an anthemic rocker reminding listeners that “when you feel like a B-side, always spinnin’ face down, remember, you can strike anywhere, ‘cause you got lightnin’.”
“Agua Caliente” is old-school country gold, from the opening riff to the vivid imagery with which he sets the scene in that opening verse, with “them 16 cigarettes still burning in the morning light outside my motel door,” a line he follows with “(Expletive), I don’t smoke no more/ Looks like I woke up in trouble.”
Alice Cooper
A second Rock For Children album is in the works at Alice Cooper’s Solid Rock Teen Centers. Rock for Children earned a Best Children’s Music Album Grammy nomination for a compilation titled “Solid Rock Revival,” which arrived in 2024.
Executive producer Joe Norelli says recording will take place at all three Solid Rock Teen Centers, “utilizing kids as band members and bringing in artists such as Alice to do vocals, maybe Slash again to play guitar.”
The plan is to come up with 13 songs fit for children with songs about summer, school, Halloween and more. “We’ve got a Christmas song that was actually written by Rob Halford and he’s on board to sing it for the album,” Norelli says. “We try and pattern the album on the year. You go through school, summer, Halloween, Christmas.”
In addition to Halford and Cooper, the album is set to feature guest appearances by Darryl “DMC” McDaniels of Run-DMC, Sister Sledge and more. “One of the keys this year is we have a song that the whole Cooper family is going to be on, right down to the grandchildren,” Norelli says.
Solid Rock is hoping to release a single or two from the album at Coopstock, the non-profit’s annual spring fundraiser, with the full album expected to arrive in July or early August, accompanied by animated videos.
The Word Alive
Phoenix metalcore veterans The Word Alive are working on their first release since “Hard Reset,” a 2023 release that earned a four out rive from Kerrang!, whose critic hailed it as “a beefy offering” that “feels like the mark of a re-birth for The Word Alive.”
According to a Jan. 16 post on The Word Alive Facebook page, they’re “writing a new album and it is already insane.” Replying to a comment on that post, they added that “one of the songs is easily the heaviest of our career,” agreeing with a fan who said “Going to be the heaviest one since ‘Deceiver’.”
Released in 2010, “Deceiver” was The Word Alive’s first album, of which an Alternative Press reviewer wrote, “The relentless drive of so many of the songs found on ‘Deceiver’ have an urgency and added aggression to them that would make many of their peers recoil out of fear.”
The Maine
The Tempe rockers The Maine are set to drop their first release since a self-titled effort released in 2023. Chorus.fm included “The Maine” on its year-end best-of list, writing “The pacing on the new record is electric and frenetic, while still allowing a few songs to brood in the darkness to fit the overall mood and aesthetic of the black & white album artwork.”
John O’Callaghan spoke to US Weekly in September, saying “We are in the studio right now, and we’re pretty deep in the process.” That same article quoted O’Callaghan saying, “This little break that we have right now is nice to put some distance between us and what we’ve been toiling over. I’m excited to have that space and then revisit when we get back home. It’ll be out sometime next year, for sure.”
Authority Zero
These Tempe punks posted a video on Facebook in mid-January from Underdog Studios in Mesa, where bandleader Jason DeVore said they were “working on a brand new record coming out later this year with our friend Cameron Webb.” It’s not the first they’ve worked with Webb, who produced “The Tipping Point” (2013), “Ollie Ollie Oxen Free” (2021) and “30 Years: Speaking to the Youth” (2023).
This is Authority Zero’s ninth full-length album. DeVore says, “We’ve been hard at work these past few months writing songs, and we’ve decided to work with Cameron Webb again this round. There’s no shortage of content to write given the state of the world, so we’re looking very forward to incorporating our own perception of those elements within.”
Grey Daze
Long before he rose to fame as the tortured voice of Linkin Park, whose breakthrough album, “Hybrid Theory,” is the biggest-selling debut and rock album of the century, Chester Bennington found that voice in Phoenix as a skinny teen who won his spot at center stage in Grey Daze singing Pearl Jam’s “Alive” at his audition.
Bennington was planning a reunion with his former bandmates to record news versions of their old material at the time of his death in 2017. That germ of an idea led to the release in 2020 of “Amends,” an album built on vocals Bennington recorded between the ages of 18 and 21. A second album using Bennington’s old vocal tracks, “The Phoenix,” followed two years later.
Since then, they’ve picked up a singer, Cris Hodges. Founding member Sean Dowdell issued a statement when they shared a single from the EP they’ll release in March, saying Hodges has “an energy and voice that reignited our passion for making music. We’re inspired every day by the fans who continue to find hope in these songs.”
Sacred Reich
In a statement announcing a parting of ways with longtime drummer Dave McClain in October, Sacred Reich added, “We are excited for this new chapter in Sacred Reich history. We are finishing up our new record, ‘Into the Abyss,’ that will be released in the Spring of 2026 on Metal Blade Records. Great things are coming. We can’t wait to share it with you.”
In December, they shared a statement welcoming drummer Eduardo Baldo to the fold and said, “We are finishing up mixing our new album.”
Mega Ran
Mega Ran says he plans to drop another children’s album this year, the third in a series that started in 2023 with “Buddy’s Magic Toy Box,” a pivot inspired by the Phoenix schoolteacher turned rapper fostering a child he has since adopted.
A second children’s album, “Buddy’s Magic Tree House,” was released in 2025 and earned the rapper his first Grammy nomination — for Best Children’s Music Album.
“There will definitely be something this year,” he says. “What I’ve done in the past is we’ve done the original release and then we do, like, a remix release in the off year. So at the very least, I would do something like that. So yes, there will be a children’s release.”
Sundressed
These guys just played a Farewell Phoenix! concert at The Rebel Lounge. But we still get to claim them for at least a year or two. In a recent post about the move to San Diego in which Trevor Hedges called it “my coastal sabbatical,” the singer signed off with “Just know I’m going to make a badass sundressed record and come back through on tour before you know it. Love y’all!”
Other recent social posts refer to a new record and new label in 2026.
Dorsten
The brother-sister duo are recording a three-song EP with producer Mark Needham, whose previous credits include the mixing of the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” and the engineering and mixing of Fleetwood Mac’s final studio album, “Say You Will.”
Pariah Pete
This local rapper says, “2026 could just be the year to move the needle for me. I’m going into it more focused, prepared, and excited than I have ever been in my career.”
He’s also releasing an album produced by Stravs of Katastro at Kamp Recording Studios — “with huge contributions,” he says, from longtime collaborator and “dear friend” Sk8zen as well as his bandmates The Mercuries (Gus Campbell, Carly Bates and Malik Nelson).
Pete says the 10-track album feels like his “true” debut. “Although I’ve released numerous music projects in the past, over live band production & beats, this feels like the truest snapshot of my artistry,” he says. “I’m so excited to get it out in the world and to showcase what Arizona is capable of.”
He’s planning a summer release accompanied by shows in Phoenix and beyond. “We want to tour as much as we possibly can,” he says. “The sky truly feels like the limit right now.”
Ed has covered pop music for The Republic since 2007, reviewing festivals and concerts, interviewing legends, covering the local scene and more. He did the same in Pittsburgh for more than a decade. Follow him on X and Instagram @edmasley and on Facebook as Ed Masley. Email him at [email protected].
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.azcentral.com ’
