Having issued ‘Let The Flowers Grow’ (a surprise duet with Boy George) as a standalone single in late 2024, original post-punk icon Peter Murphy followed it in mid-February with ‘Swoon’, a majestic slice of synth-punk/funk that also served as a perfect Valentine’s Day gift for his fans.
‘The Artroom Wonder’ is available as a brand new single from today (21st March), with Murphy explaining its genesis as “an echo from my 4th year at senior school. Daniel Ash [former Bauhaus bandmate] and I are listening to the mysterious 6th year cool intelligentsia that have gathered in the artroom. We have dared to enter their conclave, and the music coming from it is intriguing. We discover that the song being played is [David Bowie’s] ‘The Bewlay Brothers’, highly intelligent, mystical and sensual, with the singer’s voice as seductive as anyone I’d ever heard.”
Justin Chancellor of Tool plays bass guitar on ‘The Artroom Wonder’, one of several guest musicians on Murphy’s new album Silver Shade, which is scheduled for release on 9th May 2025 via Metropolis Records on 2xLP (with colour variants), CD and digitally. Containing both ‘Swoon’ and ‘The Artroom Wonder’, the physical and Bandcamp digital formats will also include ‘Let The Flowers Grow’ as a bonus track.
Produced by Youth (Pink Floyd, The Verve, Crowded House, as well as a member of Killing Joke, The Orb, The Firemen) at his studio in Spain, ‘Silver Shade’ is Murphy’s tenth studio album and a long-awaited follow-up to ‘Lion’, which the pair worked on together a decade ago. A symbiotic relationship born of artistic collaboration, Murphy states that “this new album is as powerful as any of my work to date.”
Noisepicker get a pass for a rather lame name by virtue of being absolutely phenomenal purveyors of noise rock, and that they are absolutely phenomenal purveyors of noise rock is a fact, not an opinion.
It’s also a fact that the album’s title, The Earth Will Swallow The Sun, is factually inaccurate. But again, they get a pass, not least of all because without Earth, there would be no Sunn O))) and the whole world of drone metal was born from Earth and the sun, or at least Sunn O))) revolve around that… but I digress. The Earth Will Swallow The Sun marks the return of Noisepicker after a seven-year break following the release of their debut, Peace Off, in 2018, because… life, apparently. This seems to be how it goes. Stuff happens, you get busy dealing with it, and simply doing everyday stuff, like laundry and life admin, and before you know it, shit, five years have evaporated, and that’s half a decade.
‘Do not expect neat, polished, note perfect, carefully constructed sound. Noisepicker are loud and abrasive. They pay homage to the genres which made them fall in love with music in the first place – doom, punk and blues – and bring it all together in a hearty and heavy concoction that is all their own.’, they forewarn, and yes, it’s all true. The Earth Will Swallow The Sun places texture and impact and density over palatability and accessibility. And that’s for the good: the world is engulfed in slick digital mass-produced music, and there seems to be something of a rebellion against it in underground circles, with artists with nothing to lose going all-out to splurge their souls with unapologetically raw output. And this is something that feels relatable, it’s music to connect with, because it’s real, immediate, direct, and without compromise. To listen to something so unfiltered is to feel alive.
The album starts sparse, with strong hints of Mark Lanegan, with Harry Armstrong delivering a heavy-timbred vocal croon that emanates from the chest and crackles in the throat, over a simple guitar strum and some anguished drones, until finally, almost two minutes in, it all kicks in with some big guitars, thudding drums, booming bass. It’s a hint at the potential energy that Noisepicker offer, and if opening an album with a slow-paced dredger of a song seems like an odd choice, it paves the way for some high-octane, high-impact racket, sliding immediately into the darkly chaotic snarl of raging riff-out roar of single cut ‘Chew’, which lurches and lumbers between grunge and metal and heavy psychedelia.
Things only get more intense from hereon in. ‘Tomorrow Lied the Devil’ is built around a solid blues-based boogie, but with everything cranked up to eleven and Armstrong giving it some gravel-throated grit while the guitars chug hard against thunderous percussion. ‘Leave Me the Name’ sees them coming on like Chris Rea not on the road to hell, but dragged up, charred and rotting from the depths of hell, and ‘What Did You Think Was Going to Happen’ is dense, dark, gnarly, menacing and lands like a punch to the gut. The riff is actually a bit Led Zep, but with so much distortion and a vocal that sounds like a death threat, it all takes on a quite different dimension, while ‘The End of Beginning’ is simply a slow but blistering assault. None of this is pretty, and none of this is gentle. All of it is strong, and rabid in its intensity. ‘Start the Flood’ offers some wild bass runs amidst the raving riff-driven mayhem – because we need for there to be more happening here. There’s some rabid raving about supernovas, and then the title track comes on like some deranged stoner rock blitzkrieg that has hints of Melvins and a megadose of daftness. We need that daftness as much as we need the guitar carnage. There’s a smoochy swagger to the blues / jazz-hued ‘Lorraine in Blood’ that’s like Tom Waits narrating a pulpy crime novel, before ‘Lunatics’ brings the album to a more experimental conclusion with its dominant crowd noise backing.
It’s rare for a side-project to stand above the main band, but Armstrong has his fingers in many pies beyond Orange Goblin, and Noisepicker are a rare entity in every way. The Earth Will Swallow The Sun is something else. It’s the sound of a pair of extremely capable musicians really testing themselves, and having fun in the process. It’s fun to listen to, too. Hard, and harrowing at times and in places, but ultimately fun.
And finally, followingthe single release of ‘The Reflecting Skin’, Mercury’s Antennae deliver their first album in seven years, in the form of Among the Black Trees, the release date set to mark the Spring Equinox. It’s a nice detail which feels pertinent. This last winter has felt particularly grim: not necessary especially cold or even seasonal by historical or conventional standards – but dark, unpleasant, and relentlessly grim – and that’s without even contemplating global events. The Spring Equinox is a specific point of celebration, even elation, perhaps, at which the long, dark nights begin to recede, buds and shoots begin to appear, leaves unfurl, and the first flowers bring colour. The renewal, rebirth, and even a bubbling sense of optimism is palpable, and reminds us that whatever atrocities mankind commit upon the planet and one another, nature has a resilience which transcends all of it.
They describe the album’s nine tracks as ‘existential tales [which] inhabit a ghostly realm of reflection, rebirth and reconciliation, overlaying dense bass, swirling ghostly guitars, and atmospheric electronics, all melding with lustrous and soaring vocal melodies’.
It begins with the glacial synth-led six-minute ‘A Sunless Winter Night’, and it conveys that through the medium of sound as the layers of vocals sweep and soar. It’s vaguely reminiscent of Ultraviolet-era All About Eve, and its slow beats are absorbing and compelling as they clip through the swirling sonic backdrop.
It’s a heavily chorused, reverbed, and otherwise processed guitar which chimes and flutters its way through ‘The Moon Viewing Garden’, a song which is truly beautiful, but also aches with a beautiful sadness, while the six-and-a-half-minute ‘Whispered Among Flowers’ presses the downtempo, atmospheric vibe, with soft washes of chiming, reverb-hazed guitar and wispy synths shaping and shading everything delicately – although it’s the thudding classic goth bass groove that really pins everything together.
As much as the early goth sound emerged from a range of sources, spanning Siouxsie and the Banshees to Bauhaus, and not forgetting The Cure, it’s fair to say that Craig Adam’s bass style and Wayne Hussey’s twelve-string picking on The Sisters of Mercy’s debut album set a definitive template. Among the Black Trees is by no means derivative, but the lineage is evident.
This brings us to the lead single, ‘The Reflecting Skin’: it’s certainly a high mark of the album, but also perfectly representative of its boldly atmospheric intent, and the way it blends the melancholy and the uplifting, perfectly articulating the complexities of emotional and mood-driven highs and lows and the swings that come with what one may describe as ‘seasonal variations’.
While the instrumental ‘PERMIAN’ provides a solid-sounding interlude, ‘As I Lay Hidden (Deer Island)’ offers something quite different, a swashing, dark, Cocteau-Twins influenced slice of dream-pop which also brings with it a folksy twist, and the result is – I’ll say it – epic. And that’s perhaps the ultimate summary of Among the Black Trees as a whole.
As much as many of the songs feel introspective, their expansive nature feel very much outward-looking, as if scanning the horizon for hope, for optimism. It’s something we need to cling to. It can’t all be bad, after all.
To suggest that Among the Black Trees offers light at the end of the tunnel would be misleading. There is no end to the tunnel right now. But Among the Black Trees is a magnificent work, one which is abrim with subtle emotional depth and sound which is truly immense – yes, epic – in scope. It’s an ambitious and expansive album, which offers so much – and delivers on all of it. For the large part, it’s a work that’s understated, but it is, in its own way, quite spectacular.
Melvins 1983 – the lineup featuring Buzz Osborne and original drummer Mike Dillard – offer a second preview of Thunderball (out 18th April, Ipecac Recordings) with today’s release of ‘King of Rome’.
The charging track once again features contributions from avant-electronic artists Void Manes and Ni Maîtres, with Osborne saying of the song; “The ‘King of Rome!! Hot Cross Buns! This song is a hot little punk rock number. I hope all of you enjoy it and tell your friends.”
This is a release that’s certainly been a long time in coming: twelve years, in fact. Time flies when… life happens. Chaos Inception tore their way through two albums and then… they stopped. But now the Brazilian makers of supremely full-on black / death metal are making their return with eleven cuts of brutal, two-hundred-mile-per-hour, gnarly, grunty metal, charged with the most relentless riffs and no apologies.
Sometimes, words feel somewhat futile in the face of such a monster attack. As you find yourself gasping for breath and your heart racing – because music can be so much more than something you listen to, and can be something that you feel, and even if death metal isn’t something you’re drawn to, there’s something to appreciate in the blistering force of a release like this.
Vengeance Evangel is everything they promise when they write that ‘The music channels an intensity that transcends mere aggression, evoking a spirit of triumph from within its seemingly chaotic energy.’ The energy does, indeed, seem chaotic: every track presents a maelstrom of churning guitars, blistering blastbeats, double-pedal bass drum attack, raw-to-the-core – but making music this frenetic also requires immense discipline and technical ability, and this is something that perhaps escapes the casual listener, or the non-listener who skips it and dismisses it as just so much frenzied metal noise.
The intensity of the sonic assault is matched by the intensity of focus in the performance on Vengeance Evangel. The solo work on ‘Falsificator’ is absolutely wild, a complete fretboard frenzy, swerving between a blanket of rapidfire notes and virtuoso mania, crazed tapping and squealy notes all over, while the drumming is nothing less than a raging tempest that goes way beyond timekeeping and hits a different platform of exploding, beat-heavy attack.
They slow things considerably on the slugging, chugging, ‘La Niebla en el Cementerio Etrusco’, but while the chords are low and slow the percussion blasts away at twice the speed, and the contrast alone is utterly brain-melting, and that’s before you get to the gut-punching guitar and vocals dredged from the pits of hell.
The title track is perhaps one of the weakest, by virtue of its predictability, being rather death-by-numbers – or perhaps it’s simply because of the strength of the tracks it finds itself in company with.
The jolting explosion of ‘Ultima Exitium’ is fast and furious, and it feels as if they crank everything up a few notches on the second half of the album for a pounding, punishing, relentless assault, pulling out unexpected stops/starts, swerving tempo changes, eye-popping solos – it’s got the lot, and all delivered with heartstopping precision. Vengeance Evangel is monster of an album, and the level of detail within each composition is remarkable. No wonder it took twelve years.
NIGHTBEARER launch the crushing performance video ‘His Dark Materials’ as the first single taken from their new full-length Defiance. The third studio album of the German death metal bookworms, which is based on a concept inspired by Sir Philip Pullman’s fantasy book trilogy "His Dark Materials", has been scheduled for release on June 13, 2025.
AA
NIGHTBEARER comment: “The tell-tale title ‘His Dark Materials’ is both, lyrically and musically, an excellent represantation of what were are about to unleash with our third album Defiance in 2025”, vocalist Michael Torka declares. “We hurl ourselves into the millennia-old war against the tyranny of a god who never existed, against his corrupted earthly and celestial vassals. It’s a fight against brutal oppression that is carried out in the name of liberation from superstition. This is the final, relentless battle for freedom!”
While they’re no strangers to the Southern California independent music scene, hardcore foursome Feed the Beast are poised to introduce themselves to more regional, national and international stages and speakers with their latest album, Mercy, the band’s debut for Futureless.
Feed the Beast’s history has been cultivated via years of consistently releasing recordings and fortifying a considerable presence across venues in their western Los Angeles and Santa Monica locales. Mercy signals their return from a hiatus with a reshuffled roster and new record label affiliation in tow. The group has seized the opportunity to not only elevate its presence, but also expand its latitude of sonic expression, melding the time-tested heaviness with occasions for experimentation and engaging in novel musical niches.
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Nick Jett (of Terror) in under a week, Mercy is a compendium of punishing yet precise heavy cuts, deftly interspersed with melody, space, dynamics and syncopated rhythms. Original members James Hutchinson (vocals) and Nicholas Garcia (guitar) penned Mercy across a span of a few months with former Feed the Beast members Tye Trujillo (bass) and Patrick Chavez (drums).
“Nick’s the man,” says Garcia of Mercy’s producer. “He’s very efficient and it still blows my mind that we tracked seven songs in three or four days. It’s very cool to get to work with someone who is very professional.”
Feed the Beast’s origins began as high school friends who connected through their love of music. “It was a very small school, which was even funnier how we were all into the same music,” says Garcia. “It was just kind of a coincidence.”
This coincidental connection eventually found the group putting their musical minds to work as Feed the Beast began composing its material just before the COVID era struck in early 2020. After the pause, Feed the Beast soon booked themselves a busy self-release schedule with a handful of singles, the Vengeance album in 2022, and 2023’s EP, Silhouettes.
With Trujillo and Chavez leaving to focus on other projects (Trujillo plays in Suicidal Tendencies, filling his father Robert’s spot that became available when he joined Metallica, while Chavez plays with OTTTO), Hutchinson and Garcia retooled the lineup, recruiting new band members Julian Lincona (bass) and Billy Greenwood (drums) to support Mercy, which is slated for a release on Futureless in May 2025.
Mercy’s first single is ‘Tombs Underneath the Tombs,’ of which Hutchinson says is about “being content with and even embracing hell, which is a fate worse than hell itself. It takes on the perspective of an incredibly narcissistic individual who believes they are smarter and stronger than everyone, including creation itself.” Additional singles from Mercy include ‘Exorcism’ (which Hutchinson describes as “the most hopeful song of the first four singles”) and ‘Unjustified’.
Ah, Shoe York, indeed… I find some amusement in the fact that the original York feel compelled to reference its later tribute city. I’m not sure if Brew York is just a plain pub or born out of a feeling that punning on New York may be in some way beneficial to their profile – but they do make some great beers and are doing well in terms of distribution and expanding their pub outlets, and this can only be a good thing. Shoe York, meanwhile, offers a nigh of shoegaze courtesy of a trio of local acts.
Some MBV lurches from the PA as I find a surface to lodge my pint of porter, and the place is filling up early doors, which is encouraging, and also heartening. Grassroots venues tend to survive on tribute bands and the bigger visiting bands, so to see a local night so well-attended is significant.
Joseph B Paul does a line in New Order / Joy Division influenced pop that at times sounds more like a darkly spun reimagining of Erasure. The setup is with live guitar, and everything else sequenced, and the drums are way too low in the mix, depriving the songs of the groove that’s clearly integral to their form. In contrast, the vocals are possibly a bit too forward, and devoid of any reverb, they sit on top of, rather than within the arrangements. Joseph does some bouncy dancing and it’s all very 80s, and perhaps there are dreampop elements in the mix, but it doesn’t exactly feel shoesgaze as much as shoehorned.
Joseph B Paul
Suddenly, it’s absolutely rammed by the time Moongate take the stage. There is a bar queue, too. I don’t simply mean the bar is busy: there is a queue of individuals snaking back halfway into the rows of people facing the stage. This is wrong. It is not how bars work. I circumnavigate the queue. I don’t get served much quicker, but feel some sense of relief in not perpetuating this dismal wrongness, and I do make it back to the front in time for Moongate.
Moongate do a nice line in dreamy indie that jangles, drifts, and washes gently with a hint of melancholy over the ears, and Joseph has a lot to answer for, being the subject of around 75% of the set, the subject matter of which is predominantly heartbreak, breakups and breakdowns. It’s a nice set, and they’ve got clear potential – and more so when the singer moves on from Joseph.
Moongate
Aiming are three serious, studious, earnest bearded young men. Their drum machine is also low in the mix, but with a crisp, Roland snare sound cutting through the swathes of layering guitar and synths. The live bass has a bouncy groove and is really solid in a 4/4 chuggalong way. In fact, the bassist is excellent, delivering sturdy low-end, and this works: the band have a certain energy and a level of polish that’s slick but nor completely slock or passionless.
The band don’t do chat, but the audience does. This is the most loudly talkative audience I’ve experienced in a while, it’s positively a roar between songs.
Aiming
The song they announce as a new song is perhaps the strongest of the set, which is encouraging, with a delicate melody and solid guitar and bass fusing together. It works well, but there are no real surges or crescendos, and as much as these may be more overtly shoegaze in forms, on this outing… they could do better. But… they’re tight, melodic, captivating, and go down a storm.
Only the middle of March and I’m running behind on releases, so my apologies to Teleost for letting this one slip down the pile, especially as I’d been looking forward to it for some time. Even their earliest live shows, Before rebranding as Teleost, the duo, consisting of Leo Hancill and Cat Redfern, showed a rare musical chemistry, resulting in music of huge, immersive power. Recent shows, such as their recent York homecoming show with Cwfen, demonstrated that they have reached a whole other level of almost transcendental drone, a place where sound becomes a physical force.
But the challenge for any band who are so strong as a live unit, is how successfully can that be translated via the record medium. To commit the sound to tape – or digital recording – is in some way to compress and contain it, to reduce it to two – or even one – dimension. A recording is essentially a listening experience, without the visual element, without the klick drum or the low frequences vibrating your ribs, and all of the other stuff. So how have Teleost faced up to that challenge? Remarkably well. No doubt recording the guitar and drums live has helped retain the huge sound of the live experience. No slickening, studio polishing, just that huge sound caught in real-time, and Pedro at The Audio Lounge in Glasgow has done a remarkable job, clearly understanding what the band are about.
Three Originals opens with the ponderous grind of ‘Forget’, where a sustained whistle of reverby feedback is rapidly consumed by the first thick, sludgy chord: the distortion is speaker-decimatingly dense, and there’s so much low-end you feel it in the lower colon. It’s pure Sunn O))), of course, but then the ultra-heavy drums crash in and the vocals start… Hancill’s approach to singing is very much about rendering his voice an additional instrument rather than the focal point, and the elongated enunciations convey an almost abstractly spiritual sensation.
The first time I saw Earth was following their return with Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I, and I spent the entire show completely hypnotised by Adrienne Davies’ slow drumming. It was an experience I shall never forget: it was if time slowed down, and empires could rise and fall between each beat. I haven’t experienced anything similar since, until Teleost. And once you’ve had such a powerful visual experience in a musical context, it’s not only impossible to forget it, but it becomes integrated with hearing the band. And so it is that on listening to Three Originals, I find myself reliving that experience. It’s clear where Teleost draw their influences, but in amalgamating that low, slow drone of Sunn O))) with the more nuanced, tectonic crawling groove of latter-day Earth, they offer something that is distinct and different.
The seven-and-a-half-minute ‘Ether’ blasts in and the sheer density of that guitar is pulverizing. It simply does not sound like two people, let alone that it’s one guitar and no bass. There’s a delicate mid-section consisting of a clean guitar break before the landslide of distortion hits once more. Final track, ‘Throwaway’ is anything but, another sprawling, seven-minute monster dominated by gut-churning sludge and yawning yelps of feedback, while the vocals drift plaintively in the background.
Three Originals is without doubt their strongest work to date, my only complaint being that it simply isn’t long enough. But then, if each track was fifteen minutes long, it still wouldn’t be. In the field of doomy droney heaviosity, Three Originals is in a league of its own.
Magic Wands is a dark pop duo originally formed in Nashville by guitarists and vocalists Dexy and Chris Valentine. Now based in Los Angeles, they are known for their shimmering and dreamy sound, which incorporates elements of shoegaze, dream pop, post-punk and goth. Heavily textured guitars, synth drones and ethereal vocals are combined in their songs to conjure an otherworldly atmosphere.
‘Moonshadow’ is the title track of a forthcoming album due out in the early summer on Metropolis Records. “It is a raw and introspective song about travelling at night on an underground train and how you can’t escape yourself or your own shadow,” explains Dexy Valentine.
‘Moonshadow’ follows ‘Hide’ and ‘Armour’ (both issued in 2024) as the third song to be lifted from the new album.
AA
Magic Wands will be supporting labelmates The Birthday Massacre on a North American tour prior to the release of the ‘Moonshadow’ album. Dates are as follows:
28th March NEW YORK CITY, NY (le) Poisson Rouge 29th March PITTSBURGH, PA Crafthouse 30th March DETROIT, MI Small’s 31st March CHICAGO, IL Reggies 2nd April MINNEAPOLIS, MN Fine Line Music Hall 3rd April KANSAS CITY, MO RecordBar 4th April DENVER, CO The Oriental Theater 5th April SALT LAKE CITY, UT Metro Music Hall 7th April SEATTLE, WA El Corazon 8th April PORTLAND, OR Dante’s 10th April SAN FRANCISCO, CA Bottom Of The Hill 11th April LOS ANGELES, CA EchoPlex 14th April SAN DIEGO, CA Brick By Brick 15th April MESA, AZ Nile Theater 17th April HOUSTON, TX Warehouse Live 18th April DALLAS, TX Granada Theater 19th April AUSTIN, TX Come And Take It Live 21st April TAMPA, FL Orpheum 22nd April ATLANTA, GA Masquerade 23rd April ASHEVILLE, NC The Orange Peel 25th April VIRGINIA BEACH, VA Elevation 27 26th April BALTIMORE, MD Soundstage 28th April WASHINGTON, DC Union Stage 29th April MECHANICSBURG, PA Lovedrafts Brewing 1st May BOSTON, MA Paradise Rock Club 3rd May TORINTO, ON Velvet Underground 4th May MONTREAL, QC Foufounes
Aural Aggravation 