Golden Gods 2015 Guide: Breakthrough

Orange Amplification Presents the Metal Hammer Golden Gods In Association with World Of Warships is taking place on 15th June in London and we want YOU to choose the winners. There are eleven voted categories that we need your help with, and here’s the guide to the Breakthrough category.

Cast your votes in the Breakthrough category here.

**The Amity Affliction **Yet another of the seemingly endless supply of top notch Australian bands that are springing up. The Amity Affliction are in pole position to follow Parkway Drive’s lead into metal’s big league and have spent most of the last 12 months touring the globe in support of their Let The Ocean Take Me album. It’s a record so chocked full of instant metalcore stompers like The Way Down it garnered them some serious attention, and saw them impress Of Mice & Men fans as their main support on the recent UK tour (to the extent that you’d have thought they were closing the show).

Halestorm Former Grammy winners they may be, but here in the UK it’s taken a while for us to catch up to the hard rock majesty of Halestorm. Lzzy Hale and her band have been impressing UK audiences at festivals and support slots for a while now, but this is the year that they stepped up to become a headliner in their own right and released a new album, Into The Wild Life, which is rammed full of catchy and accessible classic rock with their frontwoman’s mightily impressive vocal wail. We can only see them getting bigger.

**Bury Tomorrow **The Southampton-based metalcore exponents nearly split up a few years ago, but now they are riding high on the crest of a wave that started with 2012’s Union Of Crowns album and continued with last year’s Runes. Both are characterised by big metallic hardcore riffs and even bigger choruses that refuse to dislodge themselves from your brain after only one listen. Even more impressive are their live shows, which tread the line between heavy metal fury and pure silliness. Their Download set in 2014 was one of the weekend’s most memorable with a fanbase that continues to build.

Babymetal Babymetal are a legitimate phenomenon, their mix of technical heavy metal and saccharine J-pop vocals is one of the most divisive things to happen in heavy music recently. And for every one person deriding them as the death of metal, there appear to be 500 in love with this most unusual band. Despite their debut album having not been released here in the UK they were greeted by a field filled with 60,000 rabid fans at last year’s Soniphere festival. They then went on to play sold out shows at London’s Forum and Brixton O2 Academy. As shocking as it all may be, don’t expect Babymetal to be going anywhere any time soon.

In This Moment In This Moment have been a really big deal in their native US for a while, and now the UK is just beginning to catch up with Maria Brink’s motley crew – mainly due to new album Black Widow which has all of the taken their sleek metallic stylings and added the type of polished production that’s sure to sell a shit tonne of records. The band also brought their lavish and spectacular stage show over to the UK for a headline tour for the first time in their career, so it’s all set up for ITM to become one of the biggest bands in rock, and they look like they’re ready to capitalise on the promise.

To vote in the Golden Gods and win tickets to the ceremony head over here now.

Stephen Hill

Since blagging his way onto the Hammer team a decade ago, Stephen has written countless features and reviews for the magazine, usually specialising in punk, hardcore and 90s metal, and still holds out the faint hope of one day getting his beloved U2 into the pages of the mag. He also regularly spouts his opinions on the Metal Hammer Podcast.