"A 2005 electric guitar in black ebonized wood with a mahogany neck with pearl inlay. Serial number 061570505. This guitar was played by Slash on the Velvet Revolver Libertad tour for the song ""Psycho killer."""
UK genre-blurring outfit Loathe — a band that moves seamlessly between crushing heaviness and atmosphere, folding shoegaze, prog metal, electronics, and massive breakdowns into something entirely their own — have announced their incredibly anticipated third album, A Stranger To You, arriving July 17th via SharpTone Records. The album features Jordan Rakei, Static Dress, Mansur Brown, NOWHERE2RUN, and bucki sugar. Today, they share the video for new single “Revenant.” Perhaps their heaviest song to date, “Revenant” features NOWHERE2RUN, the new project from Jami Morgan and Eric “Shade” Balderose of Code Orange.
Engineered, produced, and mixed by the band’s Erik Bickerstaffe, along with additional mixing from Ed Al-Shakarchi. A Stranger To You is as brutal and urgent as it is light and considered. The album is anchored in the journey Loathe have experienced since their sudden rise following the release of their now cult-classic I Let It In and It Took Everything — years defined by relentless touring, rapid global growth, and a fanbase that continued to expand at a remarkable pace even in the absence of new music, culminating in a fully sold-out 2025 U.S. tour that moved over 30,000 tickets.
Dunlop has launched the MXR EVH Modern High Gain Pedal. Designed in direct collaboration with Eddie Van Halen in 2015, this powerhouseof a device delivers EVH High Gain tone in raw, uncompromised and crushing form –searing, intense, and razor sharp.
The Output and Gain knobs allow you to balance saturation and clarity, ensuring that the heaviest riffs retain definition. Meanwhile, dedicated Bass, Mid, and Treble controls shape your tonal character with exacting precision – from crunchy syncopated rhythms to fiery, harmonically rich solos.
When it’s time to push your leads over the edge, the Boost switch kicks the gain up to the next level. The 55Hz/80Hz switch toggles between a fatter or punchier low end, adapting seamlessly to any setup. And for maximum clarity at cranked output and gain levels, the Noise Gate control reins your signal in with just the right amount of discipline.
MXR EVH Modern High Gain Pedal highlights:
Delivers crushing EVH High Gain tone in raw form
Output and Gain knobs balance saturation and clarity
Bass, Mid, and Treble controls shape tonal character with exacting precision
55Hz/80Hz switch toggles between a fatter or punchier low end
Noise Gate control clamps down the unwanted noise to your liking
The MXR EVH Modern High Gain Pedal carries a $269.99 street price. For more information visit jimdunlop.com.
A few months ago we reviewed theGigahearts Hyper Soup, a mindfully executed, UK-built Shin-Ei Superfuzz /Boss FZ-2 Hyperfuzz mutant that impressed with its performance, high quality, and, especially in light of those two factors, price. The recently released Mashed Voltaire Deluxe earns accolades on the same counts. And like the Hyper Soup, the Mashed Voltaire Deluxe design is rooted in a fuzz of some renown—the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff.
But the Mashed Voltaire Deluxe is a Big Muff in the same way beef bourguignon is just a few cuts of tough meat. With a filter section that can offer detailed EQ shaping, preamp control, and high- and low-gain modes, the MVD can move from Big Muff tones to mid-gain drive associated with RAT or Distortion + voices. It also features a “starve” mode that approximates low-battery voltage but can be shaped to create a wide variety of crispy fried lo-fi fuzz. There are fuzz sounds by the multitude here, which makes the MVD an exceptional bargain.
The Mighty Muff—Exploded and Expanded
As the Deluxe in the name suggests, this is not Gigahearts’ first bash at this circuit. But the first iteration wasn’t a simple Big Muff copy either. It came with the saturation control—a feature included here that reshaped the basic fuzz voice profoundly. It also featured the starve switch and the variable voltage knob that stars here. Those two additions to a traditional Muff circuit yield many extra colors. But when combined with the filter resonance and frequency controls, the low, high, and band-pass filter EQ section, and the preamp control here blow the Big Muff envelope wide open.
How you view the MVD’s utility might depend on your relationship with the keep-it-simple-stupid concept. In the strictest sense, the MVD is not simple. The knobs are sensitive and the controls are highly interactive, so you don’t have to fiddle much to end up in a tone zone much different than the one you were in two seconds earlier. A less patient user could get lost in the weeds pretty easily—or end up beat down by option fatigue.
Though the MVD doesn’t respond to guitar volume attenuation in a dirty-to-chiming-clean, Fuzz Face kind of way, backing off the gas still opens up many additional colors.
On the other hand, it doesn’t take a ton of homework to decipher the MVD’s workings. The pedal’s big vocabulary will be super useful to composition-, arrangement-, and mix-minded players and studio hounds. Its ability to carve very specific variations on a distortion theme makes creating counterweight to a booming bass, a wide drum image, or another guitar track satisfying and intuitive. The MVD also rewards a roll-the-dice-and-see approach when you need something, anything other than your same old distortion recipe.
Candy Fuzz Candide
Where does one start to describe the MVD’s range of tone moods? Well, it’s Muffy at its foundation, that’s for sure—big, weighty, loud, and assertive. But it only takes a few twists of the rangy EQ controls to turn that sound on its head. With the three filters wide open the pedal is predictably titanic and hot. But max the high-pass filter, dial the low and band-pass filters way back, add expiring-battery voltage levels via the starve switch, and cool it on the preamp, and the MVD could be a primitive, 2-transistor, 1966-vintage fuzz.
Together, modest settings for all three filters can sound warm and rich, and then made warmer or gnarlier with a shift in frequency or change in resonance. Switch the gain toggle to high and the same setup becomes even bigger, and much more aggressive. I suppose a clever mathematician could calculate the tone permutations made possible by this control array. But it seemed pretty close to infinite to me.
Though the MVD doesn’t respond to guitar volume attenuation in a dirty-to-chiming-clean, Fuzz Face kind of way, backing off the gas still opens up many more colors. If your guitar has pots with a smooth, long taper, you can widen the MVD’s palette even more. This is especially true with single-coils, and the thickness of humbuckers leaves you with less headroom. But I’m guessing the big, blooming sounds of an SG and the Mashed Voltaire will be consolation enough for a compromise in dynamics. Similarly, it’s at home with Marshall-style circuits or clean Fender-derived ones. Each amp style can coax countless tone variations from the MVD.
If the Mashed Voltaire Deluxe is intriguing as a more expansive Big Muff, it definitely impresses as a kind of greatest hits album. To my ear, the pedal’s essence leans more toward early Big Muffs like the triangle and ram’s head. I heard hints of Colorsound’s big, open, less clipped and compressed Big Muff variant, the Supa Fuzz. Perfect approximations of a Sovtek Big Muff’s thick and complex harmonic makeup were more elusive for me, but I would not be surprised if they were in there somewhere and I didn’t manage to uncover them. You come to assume that the MVD can deliver whatever fuzz tone you imagine.
The Verdict
Though it bets big on the patience and adventuring spirit of possible users, Gigahearts is doing something very cool here, at a fair price. If you get nervous in the absence of presets, the Mashed Voltaire Deluxe’s dense interactivity could cause panic attacks. And you’ll have to be fairly fearless or very confident to move through a wide cross-section of MVD’s voices onstage. But if you’re excited by a palette that moves beyond primary colors, you might blissfully disappear into the web of fuzz sounds the Mashed Voltaire Deluxe can weave.
Crazy Tube Circuits announces the release of Triptychon, a fully analog, three-part gain system designed to recreate the way classic fuzz tones were originally built.
Built around the concept of the triptych, Triptychon brings together three independent yet interconnected tone engines. Inspired by classic recording techniques, where fuzzes and treble boosters were driven into already pushed amplifiers, it restores this interaction for modern-day rigs, where most players rely on clean platforms and pedal-based gain structures.
Triptychon features a 4-voice fuzz panel inspired by iconic designs, a dual-voice boost and upper octave fuzz panel for harmonic expansion, and an amp-like drive panel that recreates the feel and response of a pushed amplifier.
At its heart, a custom six metal-can silicon transistor design delivers true germanium-like tone, feel, and cleanup response, without the instability associated with traditional germanium circuits. Assignable or independent effect switching and dedicated switchable anti-buffer circuits ensure consistent performance across a wide range of setups.
Triptychon is designed and hand-built in Athens, Greece.
Joe Pernice never would have written “It Got Away From Me,” a haunting orchestral-folk ballad from his new album, Sunny, I Was Wrong, if one of the baseball players he coached hadn’t casually tossed out that hooky turn of phrase during a game. By extension, he also never would have collaborated with Jimmy Webb, one of his “all-time songwriting idols,” who plays tasteful piano on the tune. “A kid dropped an infield pop-up,” he tells Premier Guitar. “And as he ran by during the change of innings, I said as a teaching moment, ‘Hey, what happened out there?’ He goes, ‘I don’t know, coach. It just got away from me.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my god.’ I sat down in the dugout and wrote that title in my phone. I was like, ‘That’s a hook I hadn’t known, and there’s a lot of possibility with a line like that.’”
Turns out, you have to be open in order for the gods to gift you a great song—even in such unlikely places. That seems to be a mantra for Pernice, the singer-songwriter best known for his work with the alt-country act Scud Mountain Boys and the long-running indie-pop outfit the Pernice Brothers. He leaves guitars in almost every room of his Toronto home (not the bathroom—yet), picking them up for a meditative strum in case inspiration strikes. He might start a song and whittle away at it for a few years, finally finding the perfect pathway into a melody or lyric. You have to let the song present itself. That seems to be another mantra for Pernice—and that process has never been more apparent than on the gorgeous Sunny, his proper solo debut following a pair of pandemic-era home recordings.
“I go digging,” the Massachusetts native says, breaking down his delicate blend of the literal and abstract. “I’m often trying to learn something about myself, and what I have learned how to do over time is to relax. Before, I’d think, ‘You’re being untrue to this. Blah, blah, blah.’ But if you’re trying to write the most evocative song you can, you have no choice but to try other things. I think I learned that from writing books—you sometimes have to abandon your true story for the better story.”
The way Pernice tells it, an essential part of Sunny’s story is, once again, America’s pastime.
“For years, I coached baseball,” he says. “I had a kid, and I decided I wasn’t going to tour as much. Even though music was always there, for years it wasn’t my main focus. It was being a decent parent and spending time with my kid while he still wanted to spend time with me. When they get to a certain age, they don’t want to spend time with their old man. I get it. He became a freak for baseball and played high-level ball for years, and I got roped into coaching. I think my time away from focusing so hard on music just brought me back to it—I started to get my time back when my son was a certain age, and I think I’d learned a bunch of stuff. I know it sounds clichéd, but I was a different person.”
Photo by Colleen Nicholson
Joe Pernice’s Gear
Guitars
Martin D-15M w/ Fishman Matrix pickup (light strings, detuned one whole step)
Godin-made La Patrie nylon-string w/ Fishman Matrix pickup (detuned one whole step)
Early 1970s Gibson Blue Ridge w/ Fishman Matrix pickup (detuned a whole step, guitar is highly modified with a custom bridge, nut, Grover tuners, and re-bracing)
Pernice says he became more “chill” as a songwriter, realizing the most ambitious idea isn’t always the best one. So much of his past work, including the Pernice Brothers’ acclaimed 1998 debut, Overcome by Happiness,is defined by clever, classic pop craftsmanship: how the chords and melodies and harmonies unfurl in ways both surprising and instantly satisfying. But with Sunny, I Was Wrong, he wanted to get out of his own head.
“I decided, ‘It doesn’t have to always be so complex,’” he says. “‘You don’t have to always have a middle-eight with a key change. You don’t have to over-produce stuff.’ That opened up a lot of possibilities. I might have been more accepting of songs that were not so complex where, at another point, I might have thought, ‘That’s not original’ or ‘That’s not good.’ I think having been a parent and going through all the shit that involves, good and bad, I was open to being changed. Now I really don’t care. More than ever, I’m just in it for myself.”
Here, with this “solo” branding, he’s also in it by himself—or, at least, largely without the services of the Pernice Brothers (his brother Bob sings on the peaceful title track, and Patrick Berkery plays drums amid the blissful folk-rock sway of “If You Go Back to California”). “Kind of without making a big deal about it, I think my old band is over,” he says. “I can’t really see myself doing a record as Pernice Brothers anymore. I can’t say it will never happen, but I think that’s run its course.”
“I think one of the hardest things to achieve with a record is a sound, a vibe.”
That decision had nothing to do with musicianship. It mostly came down to geography. Since his bandmates are “scattered all over the world,” he says, “it was nearly impossible to get people [together] to record, let alone rehearse a few times to get a sense of the songs.” And with Sunny, Pernice wasn’t interested in remote recording. He wanted the intimate feel of a band playing in real time. “I think one of the hardest things to achieve with a record is a sound, a vibe. There are different ways to get that, but in this situation, I wanted all the people in the same room.”
An opportunity presented itself—once again, in a roundabout way—through family. Pernice’s son, now 20, went to school with the daughter of Barenaked Ladies bassist Jim Creeggan, and the two musicians became friends. “I met Jim not through music but through the school community,” he says. “Jim’s wife has a nonprofit organization and raises money for different causes. Jim has a world-class recording studio, and a few years back he said, ‘My wife is doing a fundraiser. Would you come play a few songs, and I’ll back you up?’” Creeggan suggested they play as a trio, joined by pianist Mike Evin. That lineup sparked something in Pernice: “I always knew Jim was a great player, but that fundraiser put it in the back of my mind. I also knew I was going to use [Mike] because his style spoke to me—it was exactly what I was thinking.”
They all teamed up at Creeggan’s studio, with their core lineup rounded out by drummer Mike Belitsky, best known as a member of Canadian indie-rock band the Sadies. They instantly found a chemistry, reflecting the vast and “vibrant” musical community in Toronto. “I know more musicians here than when I lived in New York City,” Pernice notes. “We started messing around, and it was like, ‘Holy smokes, this sounds really good. We’re getting a thing that I can’t get remotely.’ Before you know it, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is an entirely different project.’”
“I’m often trying to learn something about myself,” Pernice says, “and what I have learned how to do over time is to relax.”
Photo by Glen Quinn
They achieved exactly what he initially sought: a warm, unfussy, live-ensemble sound with minimal punch-ins. And the actual compositions reflect that energy: melancholy and graceful, full of introspective and imagistic lyrics, dominated sonically by acoustic strumming, adorned with occasional accoutrement like moaning slide guitar (the gentle “I’d Rather Look Away”) and past-sunset pedal-steel. The most notable addition is an airy vocal harmony from Aimee Mann, who adds a touch of elegance to “Deep Into the Dawn.”
“No exaggeration—as soon as I started singing the melody, I started thinking about Aimee Mann,” he says. “I think I have 19 or 20 albums. That single recording is my favorite of any I’ve ever done because it happened exactly as I hoped. I wouldn’t change a thing. To my ear, that one just had it all.”
“I don’t think I used a pick on a single song. It’s all thumb and strummed with my fingers.”
Pernice also has no regrets about the album’s soothing acoustic-guitar sound. “I think it’s just perfect,” he says. “I don’t think I used a pick on a single song. It’s all thumb and strummed with my fingers. We tried to use my nylon-string, but it was just too dark. Jim said, ‘Hey, Ed [Robertson, from Barenaked Ladies] has this no-name, small-body, parlor-size, steel-string acoustic. I’ve used this before. It sounds great. Wanna try it?’ We did, and we were like, ‘Holy shit, it sounds incredible!’ I said to Jim, ‘Will Ed sell this?’ He said, ‘Absolutely not, because I’ve already tried to buy it.’ It’s some ’80s knockoff that just sounds fantastic. I do not exaggerate when I say I couldn’t tell you what brand the guitar is—not only because I’m a luddite, but also because it was nothing of note.”
It’s not that Pernice doesn’t value quality guitars—it’s more that he’s open to any instrument that sounds and feels inspiring, regardless of the brand on the headstock. His collection runs the gamut: a Martin D-15, a Godin nylon-string, and a “weird one-off Gibson” with a Martin top that he got from a friend at a guitar-electronics company. (“It was never meant for human consumption,” he says. “But I’ve consumed it.”)
Photo by Colleen Nicholson
Another notable piece: a Gibson Blue Ridge with a bolt-on bridge and a fascinating backstory. “In 1978, there was a big blizzard in Massachusetts—it was a state of emergency. There was like four feet of snow. My brother, as a teenager, was hired with his buddies to shovel snow for a week. My late cousin worked in a place called the Record Garage in Cambridge, and they sold guitars, too. He called my brother and said, ‘I have this Gibson that turns out to have been owned by Billy West of Ren & Stimpy fame.’ My brother bought that guitar. I was a bike racer as a teenager and into my early 20s, and at one point I traded a 1987 Cannondale bicycle for the Gibson, and I still have it. I wrote a million songs on that guitar—probably more on that than anything. I learned how to play on that guitar.”
“The lucky thing for me is that picking up a guitar and strumming is a super-attractive event.”
Guitar-wise, nothing much has changed for Pernice in the many years since. He surrounds himself with 6-strings, makes a habit out of strumming around on them, and waits for that a-ha moment. His batting average is clearly excellent, but it’s all about putting in the reps: One ordinary day, he wound up writing five songs, four of which were “keepers” and two of which (“Peace in Our Home,” “Force Feed the Fire”) ultimately made it onto Sunny, I Was Wrong. “The lucky thing for me is that picking up a guitar and strumming is a super-attractive event,” he says. “I don’t have to make myself do it. It’s instant gratification.”
Pernice’s new album is his debut solo studio effort.
It also leads to surreal moments he still can’t wrap his brain around, like working with Webb on “It Got Away From Me.” After that baseball player planted the initial seed of inspiration, Pernice fleshed out the full song—including a lyrical reference to the Webb-penned 1967 orchestral-pop smash “MacArthur Park.” Pernice sent the track to friend and Webb collaborator Pete Mancini, hoping he’d play it for the maestro himself. He did—and then wound up playing on the piece. “I’m a huge fan,” he says. “He’s like a Beatle to me.”
When he thinks about the journey that song took—from a kid’s casual remark to collaborating with an all-time hero—it makes him realize how strange and beautiful songwriting can be.
“I remember writing that song at my kitchen table,” he says. “I was probably sitting with a cup of coffee in the morning in my underwear. It goes from an idea, to a finished song, to a recording, to having one of your songwriting idols playing on it—and now I’m talking about it to you, a guy I’ve never met. That came from a kid saying something on a baseball field! That kind of stuff always blows my mind: ‘That’s so weird. It came out of nothing.’”
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