Formed in Minsk, Belarus, two previous album releases by alternative metal group Mission Jupiter have hinted at their potential to be one of the few acts from that territory to achieve lift-off worldwide. Having recruited powerhouse singer Kate Varsak prior to writing and recording their upcoming third album, Aftermath, the result is a set of dramatic, epic songs with thoroughly modern production values that should see them soar.
‘Self-Destruction’ has been released today as the latest single to be teased from the record. The heaviest and punchiest song by Mission Jupiter to date, the band explain that the story behind it is deeply personal and refers to a battle with mental disorder. “When you’re feeling down, it feels like the parasite living inside you has won, and you’re stuck in mental and physical discomfort forever. The only way to survive is to take a pill to ease the pain. We hope this song will resonate with our listeners on a profound level.”
’Self-Destruction’ follows the recent ‘Human Nature’, a song that Prog stated “displays the far-reaching appeal of a band who mix atmospheric prog, the darker undercurrents of Cocteau Twins and up-tempo alternative metal”, while Metal Talk described it as being “swamped by wonderful moods and melodies driven by guitarist Vlad Shvakel and drummer Eugene Zuyeu, all wrapped around a stunning female voice.”
Long-serving Manchester UK Psychonauts The Speed Of Sound present ‘Eight Fourteen Monday’, a compelling highlight track from their mega-album trilogy A Cornucopia: Minerva, Victory, Bounty, released via Californian cult label Big Stir Records.
Arriving on the heels of their latest audio-visual trip – ‘Permafrost’, this song narrates the everyday experience of a dreary commute to explore themes of isolation, detachment, and the contrast between superficial politeness and genuine emotion, all while subtly referencing the devastating historical event of Hiroshima.
Since their formation in 1989, The Speed of Sound’s music has always been idiosyncratic and counter-intuitive, in search of something new. Creating music with lyrical bite, expanding their foundation of 1960s, punk and new wave influences, their dynamic and stylistic variation crossing borders and pushing boundaries at every opportunity.
“Light and spaciously airy, the music contrasts with the imagery of a dark and gloomy early Monday Manchester morning commute. The inevitable announcements of delays and cancelations say “we would like to apologise” rather than “we apologise”; a subtle difference with a totally different meaning. Everyone is wrapped in their own thoughts and staring at their phones, retreating internally to avoid thinking about the discomfort of the journey,” says frontman John Armstrong, further noting "Eighty years ago, as of August, the bomb fell above Hiroshima at eight fourteen on a Monday.”
With overlapping themes of independence – both culturally and artistically – each disc of the A Cornucopia trilogy has its own vibe and personality: Minerva is belligerence in musical form, Victory is a manifesto of artistic creativity and Bounty represents the fruits of artistic freedom, all taking place far from the grasping tentacles of the ‘music industry’.
A Cornucopia began with the band’s own love of the album format and a determination to make long-form music rather than merely produce a conveyor belt of unrelated singles. The interlocking themes of A Cornucopia are deliberately made for album listeners to enjoy, each disc being its own standalone entity while also forming part of the larger whole trinity.
Backxwash, aka Ashanti Mutinta, is a Zambian-Canadian rapper & producer based in Montreal, Quebec. She is most noted for her 2020 Polaris Music Prize-winning album God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It.
Her work includes a culmination of themes around the intersection between faith, identity, and queerness. The poetry of her lyrics are the beginning of a cathartic healing process in which she is granting herself permission to be angry.
Backxwash’s critically acclaimed trilogy—God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It (2020), I Lie Here Buried With My Rings and My Dresses (2021), and His Happiness Shall Come First Even Though We Are Suffering (2022)—has cemented her as a visionary in experimental hip-hop. The trilogy reflects different points in her life and delves into themes of identity, spirituality, and personal struggle, blending haunting beats with unfiltered, introspective lyricism.
Backxwash emerges from the shadows of her trilogy with Only Dust Remains, a new direction that showcases her evolution into a broader and more diverse sonic landscape. The record details the experience of life and death all occurring at once, while embracing a more melodic and complex soundscape.
Lyrically, the verses on Only Dust Remains are more complex, word-heavy, and poetic. The album touches on themes of mourning, reflection, and hope, exploring them with a sincerity and depth that deepen her storytelling. This is a work that balances light and shadow, crafting a narrative that is as introspective as it is outward-reaching.
Only Dust Remains stands as a testament to Backxwash’s ability to evolve while maintaining the raw emotional power that defines her music. This is an album that demands to be felt as much as heard, inviting listeners to engage deeply with its intricate layers and striking themes.
Reinhold Friedl & Costis Drygianakis – ta amfótera en / two into one
zeitkratzer productions – 28th February 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
Reinhold Friedl has been a significant contributor to the world of avant-garde music for a long time, not only as a leading explorer of the potentials of the prepared piano, as pioneered by John Cage, but in excavating the works of historical composers and reconfiguring those of more contemporary ones, leading the zeitkratzer ensemble through performances of Metal Machine Music and selected cuts from Whitehouse’s catalogue.
This particular collaboration coalesced during the pandemic, after which, as we learn, ‘Costis Drygianakis recorded Reinhold Friedl’s special piano sounds on a Blüthner grand piano with a bunch of extremely diverse microphones, ranging from a beautiful old Neumann U67 to a cheap tape cassette machine and even a Dictaphone. The resulting recordings have been classified, selected and processed at his home studio in Kritharia, Greece. No other sounds have been used.’
ta amfótera en is one continuous piece, just over an hour induration, and it’s a journey, to say the least. By ‘journey’, I mean torturous experience. It’s dark, punishing, pulverising, scraping, nightmarish. The first two minutes alone are a soundtrack to extreme horror – fear shaking amidst tremulous piano, heavy discord rumbling low and disconcerting to the point of spiking anxiety, after which there are protracted warped drones and rumblings which drag on, scraping and twisting, sonorous and uncomfortable. Amidst rolling, swirling, churning ambience and awkward, uncomfortable noise, random piano notes spike, seemingly at random. Gongs chime, crash, and clash.
When I was a child, the warping, discordant intro to ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran intrigued me. It created a palpable tension which affected me inexplicably at the age of nine. Perhaps this brief snippet of sound, dissonant, metallic, paved the way to my later obsession with musical otherness. The specific reason I reference this formative experience is that lengthy segments of two into one sound almost exactly like those opening bars of ‘Rio’ – scraping, discordant, a little like twisting metal.
two into one warps and hums, scrapes and drones, and occasionally plonks and thunks, the sounds rising from a random and seemingly unarranged twisting spill of sonic strangeness. There are chimes, and chsllenges.
There is much space – just as there are whistles and feedback – on two into one. The experience is, perhaps inevitably, disorientating, vaguely bewildering, even. There is something about this work which lifts you off the planet: to attempt to pin it to the particulars of contemporary rock music seems to be missing the point. Explore this release… and discover.
It seems like all of the bands of yesteryear are resurfacing in some form or another right now.
Indie rock duo The Bolshoi Brothers present their new single ‘Just a Girl’, previewing their debut eponymous album, set for release on March 21. The accompanying video is an appealing black and white visual vignette, filmed by Matus Foris and Vegas Storm and featuring Nova Clark as ‘The Girl’.
Now based in the USA, The Bolshoi Brothers is made up of Trevor Tanner and Paul Clark, both original members of legendary Beggars Banquet-signed 80s new wave band The Bolshoi. The two hadn’t recorded or played together since the band’s fateful breakup 35 years ago. Due to working on this album during Covid lockdowns, they recorded the tracks remotely from their respective home studios – Trevor in Florida and Paul in Seattle.
“Working with Trevor again after a significant hiatus was akin to find a little gate behind the bushes at the end of the garden that leads into a whole new world. Within days of passing rough musical ideas back and forth, we were making great music again, created at a time when the world was in lockdown, with a pandemic and all that comes with it, creating fear and confusion,” says Paul Clark.
It might be a stretch to describe Brain Pills as a supergroup, but the various members of this trio all have form, with guitarist Mike Vest being a one-man guitar-driven noise industry and with 11 Paranoias and Bong being among his extensive catalogue of projects – and he’s joined by percussionist Nick Raybould and Poundland vocalist Adam Stone. It should be no surprise, then, that this is dark, dense, and gnarly.
‘Faded’ offers four and a half minutes of thick, sludgy, trudgery that feels like an eternity – in a good way. It’s reminiscent of early Melvins – think the slow grinding trawls of Gluey Porch Treatments, rarely over three minutes in length but churning the guts low and slow and feeling twice that.
The sound is immense, a mass of distortion, the kind of overloading, all-out speaker-damaging wall of noise that hits you physically.
The heavy effects on the vocals – magnificently low in the mix – adds a brain-bending psychedelic twist to the megalithic sonic landslide, making for punishing, gnarly perfection.
The band are currently looking for a label to release the album which ‘Faded’ is taken from.
As Metropolis continue with their run of PIG reissues, the arrival of the remastered Wrecked reminds us of the run they had in the 90s. Having hardened up the sound showcased on debut album A Poke in the Eye… and follow-up Praise the Lard, and having toured with Nine Inch Nails in the Downward Spiral tour, PIG found themselves signed to Trent Reznor’s Nothing label for the release of Sinsation (1995), which melded the more experimental aspects of The Swining and Red Raw & Sore from a couple of years previous and cranked up the guitars – and the sleaze and depravity – to eleven. And after Sinsation came Wrecked, and having returned to Wax Trax!, in the US at least, the album was released first in Japan in ’96 and the US a year later with a substantially different tracklisting – and was an absolute bastard to get here in the UK in either form.
This version brings together the tracks which featured on both the original Japanese edition – which was criminally missing ‘No One Gets Out of Her Alive’ and ‘Contempt’ – and the American edition, which brought ‘The Book of Tequila’ and ‘Fuck Me I’m Sick’ in their place.
Wrecked very much represented PIG at their wildest, most wide-ranging, and arguably their heaviest. The title track drifts in on some mellow steel guitar country vibes and ambient chilling… and then gets gnarly with gritty industrial rigging and snarly vocals that are quintessential PIG. Raymond Watts may not have been in the best place during this period, but creatively… the music he was making was something else, and Wrecked stands up just as well now as it did on release. I’ve mentioned previously that PIG stand apart from their contemporaries, and while Watts was a touring member of Foetus in the late 80s and worked with JG Thirlwell when PIG was born, as well as being a member of KMFDM for a time, as much as those elements of aggrotech and industrial metal are core to the sound, Watts took it somewhere else entirely. Where? It’s hard to say: PIG’s work simply doesn’t conform to any genre forms or models – PIG just are PIG. While a couple of tracks had been previously released in different forms – the original versions of ‘Find It, Fuck It, Forget It’ and ‘Blades’ appeared on The Swining, released only in Japan in 1993 (prior to a 1999 US reissue) – it would be wrong to suggest that their inclusion on Wrecked suggested a lack of material, given just how radically different these versions are. The same is true of the reworked version of ‘My Sanctuary’, which appeared on Praise the Lard: expanded, more grandiose, more everything, the ‘Spent Sperm Mix’ taking the track to preposterous heights while audaciously combining industrial, techno, and gospel with orchestral strikes galore.
Since the US and Japanese editions included various alternative mixes, it would have been nice to see this version feature all sixteen tracks featured on the 2017 tour edition, which is arguably the definitive edition. But what we learn here is that you can’t have everything, and this edition at least has the majority of the prime cuts. Sequentially, it follows the Japanese edition, with the tracks which featured on the US release at the end.
The drumming on this album is brutal, choppy, the guitars cutty, stuttering, heavily distorted, but with a bright, clear, digital crispness that really slice hard. Watts growls, snarls and sneers, dark and salacious, and everything about Wrecked is harsh and ugly. ‘Find It, Fuck It, Forget It’ is a full-throttle beast of a track, with a sample-laden breakdown in the mid-section, with snippets of reports on American obesity and the like (in place of the sped-up snippet of ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ on the original), and it’s pretty dark and unforgiving.
‘Blades’ is one of the greatest tracks ever recorded by PIG or anyone – it’s one of those songs that just does something to you. The ‘Slash Mix’ on here may not be the best version – for my money, I prefer the more orchestral original, but this rendition is dense and girthy, and fits with the sound of Wrecked. Then there’s ‘Save Me’, the album’s slowie, and so, so powerful. It takes ‘anthemic’ in a whole new direction.
Watts has always made music with a boldly theatrical approach to the industrial template – and Wrecked really turns up the dial on everything – density, volume, aggression, intensity, and this expanded reissue is an essential document in the broader industrial oeuvre. It’s also an outstanding album in its own right.
SWANS have announced details of their seventeenth studio album, Birthing, due for release on Mute / Young God Records (N America) on 30 May 2025. Birthing will be released on triple vinyl (in a brown chipboard sleeve, double CD (in a brown chipboard digi-pack), and digitally. Initial pressings of the triple vinyl and CD editions will come with a bonus DVD featuring ‘Swans Live 2024 (Rope) The Beggar’, a live concert film directed by Marco Porsia from the last Swans US tour, plus Christopher Nicholson’s documentary from Michael Gira’s solo tour in 2022 entitled I Wonder If I’m Singing What You’re Thinking Me To Sing.
Listen to the first track to be shared, ‘I Am a Tower’ here:
“The material contained in this album was largely developed over the course of a yearlong Swans tour, during 2023 – 2024 (‘The Healers’, ‘I Am a Tower’, ‘Birthing’, ‘Guardian Spirit’, ‘Rope’, and ‘Away’), then recorded and further orchestrated and rearranged in the studio. Two pieces were created and performed in the studio (‘Red Yellow’, ‘The Merge’).
In all cases the material began with me sitting in my office with an acoustic guitar, singing and dreaming about what would become of these skeletal songs. I’m blessed to have such a stellar group of musicians to work with live (listed below), and through improvisation, endless revisions and an intensity of focus in performance (not to mention endurance), over the course of time the music morphed into what you generally hear on this collection.
This album, coupled with the recent live release, Live Rope, constitutes my final foray (as producer / impresario) into the all-consuming sound worlds that have been my obsession for years. We’ll do a final tour in this mode towards the end of 2025, then that’s it.
After that, Swans will continue, so long as I’m able, but in a significantly pared down form. Hints of that direction can be found in a few moments on the current album. In the meantime, my hope is that the music provides a positive and fertile atmosphere in which to dream.” – Michael Gira / Swans
‘On and On’ is the title track from On And On, the 3rd studio album from the post-genre power trio mssv featuring the legendary rhythm team of drummer Stephen Hodges (Tom Waits, Mavis Staples, David Lynch) and bassist mike watt (MINUTEMEN, fIREHOSE, Stooges) alongside the unique and iconoclastic guitar of its genre-bending bandleader, Mike Baggetta.
On And On features brand new songs that were written by Baggetta before their 58-show 2023 US tour and performed every night, recorded and produced by Chris Schlarb at BIG EGO Studio in Long Beach, CA immediately after. The album comes out on BIG EGO Records on 12” LP vinyl, digital download and streaming services on Friday, March 7, 2025 and features artwork by John Herndon (Tortoise). The digital versions feature eight separate, boundary-pushing tracks. The vinyl features these pieces joined with connecting passages into two continuous side-long movements, making for a trippy and experimental listening experience. I hope you’ll consider covering this release with an interview, feature, news story or album review. Feel free to repost this video
Featured in the works on this album is a band-improvised song and, on the vinyl issue only, six more band-improvised interludes. These improvised, then recomposed, instrumentals had their parts recorded separately by each member, then edited down, recombined and recomposed by Baggetta’. They serve as an important connective tissue between the songs on each side, turning On And On into an exciting and trippy psychedelic fever dream of a concept album. This serves to really bring out the story of On And On: at its heart it is an album where all the works combine to create an endless episodic journey through the temporal and seemingly fleeting nature of society, personality, music, and life and death on Earth, only to realize that all of these are also endlessly repeating.
Seven of the eight new songs feature vocals from Baggetta, now much more comfortable in his vocal role from the previous mssv album Human Reaction. The wordcraft heard here in On And On goes a lot deeper than his previous lyric writing, while still remaining wholly individual in its exploratory playfulness. The subject matter here, while being universally relatable, is rife with personal references, stories of his and the band’s friends and relationships, and one song “Despair & Hilarity” including lyrics written by one of Baggetta’s most important musical collaborators Steve Gigante (7 Year Rabbit Cycle, W-S Burn, THETEETHE).
Continuing to explore the seemingly endless depths of Hodges’ and watt’s musicianship and skill over the many tours and albums in mssv has grown an instantly identifiable sound from Baggetta’s songwriting for this band. But the trust that has formed between them, that comes from long-running musical partnerships, has also made it possible for mssv to explore more interesting ways to incorporate improvised music into the lives of their songs, innovating their music in new ways while still keeping the fearless nature of each musician and this band fully intact. On And On skillfully combines all of these elements into a newly evolved lens for the music of mssv, deftly displayed in this album as a high concept love letter to everyday life.
mssv HARU tour
mar 13 – thu – san pedro, ca – the sardine
mar 14 – fri – costa mesa, ca – the wayfarer
mar 15 – sat – joshua tree, ca – giant rock meeting room
mar 16 – sun – phoenix, az – cibo
mar 17 – mon – silver city , nm – whiskey creek zocalo
mar 18 – tue – albuquerque, nm – guild cinema
mar 19 – wed – albuquerque, nm – guild cinema
mar 20 – thu – lubbock, tx – co-opt
mar 21 – fri – oklahoma city, ok – resonant head
mar 22 – sat – dallas, tx – the wild detectives
mar 23 – sun – san antonio – the corn pound
mar 24 – mon – houston, tx – continental club
mar 25 – tue – baton rouge,la – mid-city ballroom
mar 26 – wed – jackson, ms – end of all music
mar 27 – thu – birmingham, al – saturn
mar 28 – fri – tallahassee, fl – the bark
mar 29 – sat – orlando, fl – will’s pub
mar 30 – sun – gainesville, fl – loosey’s
mar 31 – mon – savannah, ga – el rocko lounge
apr 1 – tue – charlotte, nc – snug harbor
apr 2 – wed – greensboro, nc – flatiron
apr 3 – thu – washington, dc – pearl street
apr 4 – fri – philadelphia, pa – solar myth
apr 5 – sat – Kingston, ny – tubbys
apr 6 – sun – new york, ny – mercury lounge
apr 7 – mon – east providence, ri – myrtle
apr 8 – tue – keene, nh – nova arts
apr 9 – wed – winooski, vt – the monkey house
apr 10 – thu – syracuse / ithaca, ny – TBD
apr 11 – fri – buffalo, ny – mohawk place
apr 12 – sat – pittsburgh, pa – mr smalls funhouse
apr 13 – sun – cleveland, oh – beachland tavern
apr 14 – mon – columbus, oh – ace of cups
apr 15 – tue – Indianapolis, in – state street pub
Aural Aggravation 