Forbidden

Forbidden, the self-titled sixth studio album by the San Francisco Bay Area thrash band FORBIDDEN, is their first full-length since Omega Wave in 2010. It closes with "Flower of Life", more than nine minutes long and subtitled Chaos By Design in the label's international track list, and Mastodon's Brann Dailor joins the band on "Sycophantasy". Four songs came out ahead of it with official videos: "Divided By Zero" in June 2025, the band's first new song in fifteen years, "Mutually Assured Dysfunction" that October, "Psyclops" in July 2026 and "Burning The Lungs Of Earth" that September. Guitarist Craig Locicero, drummer Chris Kontos and engineer Zack Ohren produced it at Sharkbite Studios in Oakland, California, and the label is BLKIIBLK, the heavy metal imprint of the Frontiers Label Group. Locicero and bassist Matt Camacho both played on the 1988 debut, which carried the name the band had started under in Fremont, California, in 1985, Forbidden Evil; Twisted Into Form followed in 1990. The band split in 1997, reunited in 2008 and went quiet again in 2012, then returned in 2023 with singer Norman Skinner, Kontos, formerly of Machine Head, and guitarist Steve Smyth beside Locicero and Camacho, playing that line-up's first European show at the Alcatraz festival in Kortrijk, Belgium, on 11 August 2023. Smyth left in July 2024; Voivod's Daniel "Chewy" Mongrain followed him until November 2025, when Jeremy Von Epp took the second guitar, as he does in the album credits. BLKIIBLK's international edition has eleven tracks; Marquee Inc.'s Japanese CD, MICP-12048, shares its date of 23 October 2026 and adds a cover of XTC's "Dear God" as track nine, between "Sycophantasy" and "The Burden", for twelve.