Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Ritual Error – Terminal with Benefits

Posted: 11 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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25th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Two years on from their debut, Dial in the Ghost, London noisemongers Ritual Error are cack with an album which they threaten ‘takes the band in a meaner, more angular, direction’, defined by ‘Abrasive bass, shrill guitars, frantic and precise drumming, everything sounds like it’s gonna fall apart. And for the sickos: howled lyrics about sexual alien abductions, an island state obsessed with 12-foot immigrants, and booking agents who turn themselves into tattoos to please their clients. Plus, a shit tonne of JG Ballard references!’

As a huge Ballard fan myself, this only adds to the appeal. The thing that’s struck me about his writing in recent years – particularly his later works – is that it’s only grown in relevance. The rise of the flag shaggers last year – ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ as the racist shitheads behind festooning every lamppost with national flags branded it – compelled me to revisit Ballard’s final novel Kingdom Come. Published in 2006 – yes, twenty years ago – it’s study of rising fascism in the context of rampant consumerism and materialistic boredom felt like reading news reportage as much as a novel.

It’s an inescapable fact that we live in the weirdest, scariest, and darkest of times, and I’ve suggested before that the making of noise is perhaps one of the last rational methods of dealing with the world as it now is, and Ritual Error seem to fully embrace this idea on Terminal with Benefits.

The jerky, jolty, lurchy ‘songs’ are interspersed with brief interludes, untitled passages mere seconds in duration, plus the five-minute parenthetical ‘instrumental’ which sits in the middle of the album. Yes, Terminal with Benefits embraces all of the difficult bends in the roads, the awkwardness and the resistance. I begin to wonder if there are even any benefits to the terminal status of our societal decline.

‘Tapeworm’ is a gnarly mess of distortion and anguish, and lunges into Shellac territory in no time. Great! But also ‘woah!’ This is some gnarly, heavy shit, an abrasive blast of discord. ‘Hung Up On a Clown’ is a lurching, psychotic blast of disorientated confusion, staggering hither and thither and calling to mind Leeds’ finest, Blacklisters.

Noise rock has been around for a while now, but you know you’re hearing the best of it when it makes your stomach lurch and you feel a bit queasy and vaguely dizzy, and perhaps even a bit stressed and a sense of bewilderment closes in from different angles. With the looping guitar parts and surrounding racket, the sense of overwhelm and anxiety arrives early while listening to Terminal with Benefits.

‘Domestic Pattern’ is a truly jolting assault which stars a bit juddery, then goes totally askew. And it only gets messier. And messy is the word. This is one fucked-up shit moras of noise, with slanted skewed guitars – not metallic or distorted, but clean and trebly.

‘Family Plot’ is Shellac amped up to the point of queasiness, and reminiscent of a slew of gnarly 90s acts, and the swaggering swing of ‘(Instrumental)’ (which isn’t an instrumental at all) hits hard. The same is true of this album as a whole, a work of noise rock par excellence.

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September Song – The Perfect View

Posted: 8 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Sons of Art – 18th October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been four years since September Song released Two Miles Out. That album, they say, rather like its predecessor, The Arrogance of Time ‘started off reflecting more on global events, but ended up introspective once again’. A lot has happened in the last four years. Having crawled out of the pandemic, the world is now a place of constant turmoil, with wars raging all around the globe, climate change threatening our food supplies and our very ways of life, and then there’s AI… It’s in this context, John Douglass writes, that ‘The Perfect View continues along the same pattern with the deeply personal intertwined with the wider world. It’s full of frustration and anger at humanity’s inability to look after our ‘beautiful world’ whilst always trying to remain optimistic.’

To realise these eleven songs, the core duo of John Douglass (harmony and spoken vocals, acoustic and electric guitar) and Steve Hogg (lead and harmony vocals) are joined with a veritable roll-call of musicians – no fewer than fifteen contributors are credited, bringing an array of talents from drums and percussion, and bass, to saxophone, pedal steel, Portuguese guitar, flugelhorn, flute, and mandolin. For all that, the arrangements balance lusciousness and layering, with an apparent ease and simplicity. They describe themselves as ‘alternative pop’, but this feels inadequate for conveying the span of the styles on offer here, with elements of folk and indie spun through tunes which are, in places, fairly straightforward radio-friendly rock. And while most of the songs have an uptempo, upbeat, easygoing vibe, the lyrics are often altogether darker.

‘I Cry For You’ sounds pretty chipper, until you hear Hogg deliver the lines ‘You shit on my dreams, destroy everything / I cry for you.’ It’s quite the juxtaposition of content and form. Likewise ‘Hey John’, which brings a lightly jazzy flavour proceedings, and features in the second chorus, ‘Hey John, so you’re doing well / But what the fucking hell is it all about John’, after painting a pretty dark scene in the opening verse:

I saw 24 people on the floor, they were lying on the ground

The mothers, the freaks, the children, I like them around

Don’t step on the microphone, it’s lying on the floor

I was quite unwell for a while but I think I’m better now

It shook me up, it let me down, made me feel, like running aground

There’s a dip during the second half, where by the seven-minute ‘One Good Summer’ slides rather too comfortably into smooth jazz territory. There’s no small irony in the fact that the most overtly commercial song on the album is also the weakest, followed by the honky-tonky ‘All Alone’.

John Douglass’ lyrics are a clear strength, and take different forms: while given to the use of rhyming couplets with a meter which is as clear on the page as when sung, he’s equally prone to more prose-like forms, and even presenting short narratives and quite visual vignettes. The details contained in the narrative of ‘Pray for Me’ are keenly observed, depicting, among other things, morning anxiety and ageing. The album’s closer, ‘Beautiful World’ refers back to the lyrics of ‘Pray for Me’, providing a neat thematic bookending.

As such, there’s considerably more going on when you start to dig into the songs, and things aren’t nearly as jaunty as they initially sound.

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Lustmord Lombardo – The Pulse Of Atoms

Posted: 7 October 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Ipecac Recordings – 2nd October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Who had a collaboration between drumming legend Dave Lombardo with dark ambient / industrial demigod Lustmord on their bingo cards for 2026? No? Me neither, but then I didn’t have the US attacking Iran or an outbreak of the plague in Russia, either, so maybe my finger isn’t as much on the pulse as I thought.

This coming together has been simmering for a fair while, after all: they met backstage at a Fantômas show, introduced by mutual friend Buzz Osborne, around the time that Lustmord and Melvins released their collaborative album. That was released in 2004. It’s certainly been some time in the offing, then.

While Lombardo has enjoyed a 40-year career playing with Slayer, Misfits, Mr. Bungle, Suicidal Tendencies, and Testament among others, Lustmord’s modus operandi has largely been as a collaborator, with nearly as many albums produced with other artists as as a solo artist since he first appeared on the industrial scene with his eponymous debut in 1981.

It’s perhaps partly because of the sprawling – and lengthy – careers of the artists involved that The Pulse Of Atoms is a work that proves hard to place. It’s certainly a hell of a departure for Lombardo, given that this is, first and foremost, a dank, ominous ambient work, on which only one of the seven compositions runs short of the six-minute mark. The drums are very much a part of the texture and the atmosphere, rather than a driving or dominant force. It’s interesting to observe how a drummer whose field is metal and rock – however broadly applied – sits in a work which is explicitly neither rock nor metal, and moreover, is largely unstructured, formless, even.

“One thing about an album like this is that you can’t really point it out as being part of any specific genre or hopefully any specific period,” Lustmord explains. “Is it from last year? Is it from 10 years ago, is it from 20 years ago, is it from 5 years in the future? It’s trying to create something that has its own sound, not tapping into whatever musical language or history you’re familiar with. It goes way, way further back. This is the sound of planets dying or of stars being born. It’s about a bigger picture. It’s the sound of the birth of the universe and the death of the universe; it’s not rock and roll.” It most certainly is not, and this is very much the heart of the album’s power.

The first piece, ‘An Eternal Presence Part I: Unknown’ begins as a murky and unsettling rumble, and it’s fully two minutes before the percussion arrives. And when it does, it’s a rolling, tribal thrum. It is rhythmic, but the thunderous beats emerge from a deep, dark sonic swamp, amidst hints of Nordic forest paganism, and stop and start and feel as tentative as they do aggressive. Counterpart ‘An Eternal Presence Part II: Relentless’ lives up to its title with truly thunderous percussion, which rolls and rumbles with a rare intensity, before sliding into the grey gloop of ‘Paleomagnetic Resonance’, a dark ambient piece which drifts, formless, creepy, a slow-moving unsettling expanse of sound which drifts like fog and conjures a vision of a barren wasteland. It hums and drones and rumbles and suddenly, three minutes in, aggressive drumming crashes in and heavy drones glide down sonorously… the weight is palpable.

We crawl from the glacial desert that is ‘Beyond the Vast Cold Waste’ trepidatious, tremulous, into an apocalyptic world. Explosions ricochet in the distance. It feels like the world is ending. The experience is unsettling, but unshocking: we all knew the end was nigh. Didn’t we? This sounds and feels like the end of days. It’s suffocatingly dense. The weigh presses down on the shoulders and the back of the neck.

Like ‘An Eternal Presence’, ‘The Desolate Shore’ also spans two parts with a combined time of almost fifteen minutes. It’s here that we finally find a sense of true rhythm and groove, and Lombardo delivers driving dynamism against a swirling vortex of dark noise. The experience is like being sucked into a vacuum. It’s genuinely scary – like a warzone, like the collapse of civilisation, like the end of time. The final track, ‘The Abyssal Deep’ is ten minutes of the most desolate, disturbing ambience you’ll hear all year. It will suck the life out of you through its density alone.

This album feels less like a collaboration and more like a collision of musical colossi from very different spheres. And it’s immense, and intense.

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Listen: DROWNING IN THE STATIC FLOW by OMNIBDGR

Posted: 3 October 2026 in Albums, Recommended Streams and Videos
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There’s just so much noise – everywhere. And it’s only getting louder and more distracting. It’s not just in the street, or social media, or the constant pinging and buzzing of your phone, it’s not just the backdrop of social media and the babble in the street… The pace of life is changing, and it seems like there’s no downtime, no respite, no peace. And the noise… the noise is a distraction. Its function is to fill your head, keep you anxious and on edge and looking, not the other way, but in all directions at once, apart from the one where you might see something. The noise exists to keep everyone in place, to entice you to buy more stuff you don’t need with money you don’t have. We are all drowning the static flow, which runs 24/7, 365. How to deal with all this noise? And how to counteract it? With more noise, of course. Disruptive noise. Fight fire with fire – or noise with noise of a different kind.

This album is that disruptive noise, which holds a mirror to it all and subverts and refracts it in infinite splintering directions. It’s an all-out assault on the endless stream of static and distraction, the chatter and hum.

This time around, Omnibdgr are doing things differently. Expanded to a trio and with a live drummer for the first time, there’s a newfound freedom from the constraints of programming. They all played live in the same room, embracing the bleed of other sounds in the mics, and this is the glorious, rebellious result. And ‘bleed’ is the word: Drowning in the Static Flow bludgeons away like never before, blunt and brutal, and loud enough to blow all the other noise away.

The live drums create a different dynamic and stand at the fore of a sound that’s percussion driven and bass heavy. Then, there’s everything else. And it’s all going off.
They may be underground, but Omnibdgr are the uprising, the sound of that vital rupture, the noise of resistance.

Stream the album in fill here:

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Emma Ruth Rundle – These Killing Times

Posted: 28 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Errant Child – 18th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

These Killing Times is Emma Ruth Rundle’s sixth studio album. It’s released on her own Errant Child label, and it’s a bold work.

As we learn from the accompanying notes, it weas ‘written as she watched from afar the devastating effects of yet another climate disaster unfold in early 2025, Emma reflected on the roots of the systemic issues that filter directly into so many catastrophic global events, and made a conscious choice to reach towards making a hopeful record. Where outside forces tempted her to turn inwards, towards isolation and hopelessness, she instead reached outwards to create a record that acknowledges pain, but offers both community and resilience in response.’

I keep thinking, and saying this – as much as anything in an attempt to process the information: the word is on fire. The world is at war. Just because World War 3 has not been declared doesn’t change the fact that with Russia vs Ukraine, The US vs Iran and the spread around the Middle East, not to mention the fringe involvement of the UK and other NATO allies in supposedly ‘defensive’ moves, and civil wars in Sudan and Myanmar, the globe is pretty hot right now. I omit Israel’s assault on Gaza and the West Bank from this list because the disproportionate imbalance disqualifies this as a war, and I shall move on from there because this is ultimately an album review, but the points and distinctions need to be made, and are fitting in context of the album’s title and inspiration. Also, when I say that the world is on fire… this is no exaggeration.

There is a sense that doing your recycling and so in is but pissing in the wind, but you have to play your part, right?

On These Killing Times, Emma Ruth Rundle takes her time in exploring her themes: all bar two f the album’s tracks extend beyond the five-minute mark, and the lilting piano of the first song, ‘Powerless’ makes for a song which is more uplifting than the title suggests. But powerless is how I’ve felt these last few months. Weak, defeated, drained, as if there was nothing I could do. But I digress: from behind the rippling notes and layered vocals blast powerful riffs which are quintessential grunge. And the way she chews her words… is glorious. It speaks of a social awkwardness, a self-conscious contradiction that balances the desire to be heard with an embarrassment of being heard too clearly. This was, of course, the dichotomy which lay at the heart of grunge, and was a particular contradiction which lay at the heart of Nirvana: the words mattered, but it was too much to sing the words with clarity.

‘God’s Picture’ is a slow-builder, whereby layers build as does the song’s power. By the end, It’s simply enormous. ‘Anvil’ is, meanwhile, subtle in its approach but, in the chorus, as heavy as the title suggests. Her vocals venture skywards with an almost folky quality towards the end of the song, but it’s the turbulence of the build which has the most impact. ‘Catherine Wheel’ spins with a rare energy, her vocal soaring and spiralling skyward.

Stripping things back, which she does – albeit infrequently – for ‘Don’t Delay Heven’ Rundle becomes most open in revealing her vulnerable side, and ‘Enough’, too is both sparse but heavy, and the intensity of the final two minutes is phenomenal, a brain—melting swirl.

These Killing Times is almost schizophrenic in the way it flicks between ponderous folk and mega riffs, but that’s it’s success, ultimately. What an album.

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Sly & The Family Drone – With Love

Posted: 25 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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28th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Time has a habit of evaporating, and life has a tendency to obstruct plans, and so it is that the latest offering from twisted jazz weirdos, with the slightly slushy, smushy loved-up Clintons Cards connotations of its title was intended to land on Valentine’s Day. Oh well, it’s perhaps for the best. I’m picturing a scene where a couple are enjoying a romantic evening in, a candlelit dinner with some nice food, a glass of wine, and after maybe a Rom-Com they’re getting in the mood, but instead of Barry White or something smooth and sultry, one of them says “I know just the thing. There’s this new album by Sly and the Family Drone…” Fuck knows how the scene ends, but it’s certainly not with the blissful soft-focus union of an 80s romance – more likely indescribably carnage, likely unspeakable gore, probably even at least one death.

As ever, most of the titles are random or otherwise inexplicable, although I’m sure they have their reasons, but unusually, the crazy puns and wordplay are largely absent, suggesting perhaps a newfound seriousness – although that seems unlikely. And what of ‘Cloth Control’, the album’s final piece? There’s probably something wrong with me that I’d leap to ‘touching cloth’, but from a band with songs with titles like ‘Handed Cack’ and ‘Sunken Disorderly’

‘Psychic Surgery’ begins innocuously enough, although, being Sly and the Family Drone, it’s more dark atmospheric sax and swampy drone with a reverb-soaked abb and flow, than it is smooth, seductive sax: there’s a noirish hint to the opening minutes, before supernatural skitters begin to creep in at a low level, and the percussion begins to clatter with unsettling irregularity – but increasing urgency – a couple of minutes in. It conveys the sense of a gathering storm, and noise begins to swell… but it passes without breaking. However, any sense of relief is but brief, as things get weirder and more tense with the more electronic ‘The Guts of Albion’. It starts with a murky, muffled-sounding pulsation, and a metallic clatter that calls to mind Neubauten or Test Dept. It’s against this tense backdrop, with heavy hints of another growing tempest, that the sax arrives – and this time, it is actually pretty smooth. I mean, it’s hardly 80s Tina Turner, or Dave Brubeck for that matter, but it’s by no means disagreeable. But as the beats build, and the sonorous drone sustains, so sax becomes more fragmented and the tension grows, and around halfway through the track’s seven and a half minutes, a plateau is attained, and you feel a shift as static and distortion creep in… and finally, it hits like a tidal wave. It’s the perfect release.

As a title, ‘Over the Rainbow’ instantly calls to mind the song from The Wizard of Oz. A ballad, but one flavoured with hope and optimism for another place, a brighter future. But while that motif is actually present, it’s distorted and stretched and played against a backdrop of three and a half minutes of crackling distortion: it’s more like hearing a lullaby or the tinkling of a child’s music box when it appears on the soundtrack to a horror movie. The context shifts, and something light and innocent becomes something dark and ominous. And here, we feel that disconnect, that discomforting disjointedness. Here, it’s quite subtle, but in some respects, that renders it all the more unsettling.

‘In The Oils’ goes for the low, heavy drone – and you feel it in our gut, a slow churn. There are some vocals swimming low in the mix, and there are moments where if feels like listening to Throbbing Gristle where the speaker’s submerged in a domestic aquarium. Plus, the final three minutes bring more drumwork than anyone would ever need in a lifetime. It’s not beats, it’s an explosion. But it feels good, because yes, finally, we get it: a climactic, pummelling blast of tribal drums and a rising drone that feels more like a jet engine warming up for take-off. It’s a climax which is a mind-bending crescendo that feels like the end of days.

The last track, ‘Cloth Control’ is built on a slow, rolling drone and reverberating, echo-swamped sax hum and grinding electronics which lead the listener into an otherworldly space of abstraction and strangeness. And what’s strangest of all is that feels like a different album with every play, and different layers, different aspects, reveal themselves.

Overall, the percussion is much less prominent on With Love than on many previous releases, but the abstract jazz meanderings and overall sense of musical exploration is significantly greater than ever. The only thing that’s really predictable about Sly and the Family Drone is their unpredictability, and With Love ventures into new realms of weirdness.

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Bombstrap – Big Enemy

Posted: 24 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Tartarus Records – 2nd October 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, and album comes crashing in and you feel its impact hard. It’s not so much an album as a massive detonation. A work that redefines its genre. An album that blows the top off our head.

Big Enemy by Bombstrap is that album. It’s s throbbing, gnarly, primitive punk album. So what’ s special about that? Bombstrap are special, in presenting a skin-peeling, furious rage what hurts. It’s not in any way refined or pretty, it’s raw and gritty and it’s real.

According to their bio, they were ‘born inside Rotterdam’s anarchist Poortgebouw community in 2025’and ‘have quickly established themselves as one of the most uncompromising new names in underground hardcore. Split between Manchester and Rotterdam, the four piece channels nihilism, black alchemy, and ultraviolence into a feral sound that owes as much to No Trend and Total Abuse as it does to a complete rejection of authority and conformity’.

They describe Big Enemy as ‘a blast of caustic, explosive hardcore delivered with ruthless precision’, and add that ‘Fueled by nihilism and anarchic conviction, the album is a sonic bullet aimed squarely at the heart of a corrupt society, uncompromising, abrasive, and impossible to ignore’. It’s hard to argue.

On the album’s second track, ‘Master Alchemist’, they step up and turn everything up to the max, and there’s no letup from hereon in. This is an album that grazes and cuts hard. Some of the bruising, raging noise belongs to the spirit of the early 90s – not just grunge, but riot grrl – but equally, Bombstrap belong the domain of hardcore punk and noise rock, and Big Enemy s a rabid and positively feral scream. This is an angry, explosive work. Every track is killer – and a pure distillation of nihilistic punk rage. ‘Machhiavellianism’ is, like half of the tracks on Big Enemy, well short of two minutes long – in fact, it’s only a second over one minute – and in that time they bring punk energy and a hundred miles an hour. There’s more than a dash of The Dead Kennedys to ‘Bakhmut’, and the final track, ‘Poppy Seeds’ is manic and packs a swaggering rock ‘n’ roll riff.

Big Enemy isn’t just a metaphorical ‘fuck you’ to the big enemy in all its forms – big government, corporations, billionaires, and all the rest, but a literal one, with a raging, exasperated ‘fuck you’ being a common refrain across the album’s ten tracks. And too right: sometimes, there are no other words that do the job, and all there is, is to scream out the most primal of invective. Big Enemy is Bombstrap telling it like it is. No bullshit, no pretence, Bombstrap are the real deal.

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Static Abyss – The Dying Hunt

Posted: 21 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Peaceville  – 28th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The Dying Hunt is the third album by Static Abyss, who feature Autopsy’s Chris Reifert and Greg Wilkinson. They describe themselves as ‘a monstrous hybrid of twisted, doom-laden brutal death’. And brutal it is.

On this outing, they note the addition of Chad Gailey of fellow death merchants Necrot on drums, and promise an album that ‘plummets the listener again into the festering, psychedelic swamps of lunacy, with the spiralling melodies texturing the relentless savage riffs for an effective nightmare-inducing trip through the sonic abyss. Continuously and relentlessly flitting between brutal passages and hypnotic otherworldly craziness, The Dying Hunt reflects the ailing world and the unravelling of the psyche of its inhabitants in this darkly dystopian landscape, for a masterful descent into sick Death Metal combined with Crust and Doom elements.’

Yeah. That ‘darkly dystopian’ thing… it’s the world we live in now. There’ no escaping it. It’s no longer a fringe thing. environmental disaster isn’t a conspiracy theory. Rogue AI and WW3 are no longer the domain of sci-fi and speculative fiction: governments across Europe are recommending people take peremptory action and are preparing for war. And this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. The bottom line is – and I’ve doubtless said this before – is that we’re fucked. I don’t mean this dramatically, or in any way hyperbolically.

On The Dying Hunt, Static Abyss articulate the anxiety over the sense of impending doom through the most rabid, raging, nihilistic blasts of hellish metal imaginable. The first track, ‘Skull Blasted’, is a sub-two-minute blast of scorching, soul-ripping fury. You don’t need the words, you just need to feel the force, and it tears its way through your very being like a wildfire. You feel your inner being scourged away in a mere moment.

And hell, do these mofos bring the riffs – but they also bring some psychedelic weirdness. ‘Lobotomized at Last’ swerves from relentless grind to a rather pleasant passage. It’s one of only a few. ‘Wall of Delusion’ is nothing short of overloading riff-mania, the band launching headlong into a relentless, brutal sonic assault. ‘Bleeding in the Fog’ starts out a bit mor melodic, a bit more liker it’s a lean to the raw, spitting depths. ‘Sinew Leech’ is it’s harsh and it’s brutal and the force and depth of the gut-churning grind only grows as the song and the album progresses. And it’s hellish, harsh, face-melting fury from the get-go. The face-melting ‘Bleeding in the Fog’ is exemplary. The Dying Hunt is relentless is its riffery. It’s one of those albums that is so heavy it slowly saps the life out of you.

AA

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30,000 Monkies – Super Rebound

Posted: 15 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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FKN KVLT REKORDS – 18th September 2026

The band describe their latest album, Super Rebound, as ‘is an action packed record with an unsound hero at the wheel. Wildly navigating through a landscape filled with leaden riffs, open harmonies, foghorns, and a dose of unadulterated joy and radiant bliss. Deranged, but sweet. Fuming with feels.’

This is only their third full-length album in their fifteen-year career, although they’ve maintained a steady flow of EPs, some of which have been on the longer side (their last release, HONESTY INTEGRITY FRIENDSHIP PASSION contained only four tracks, but due to the last one having a run time of twelve and a half minutes long, it spanned a full thirty minutes) – and they reckon this could be their definitive document, their magnum opus, the apogee of their riff-centric intent rendered concrete.

It’s certainly a big old guitar-driven racket, and it’s not without detail or humour, either. The first bars of the first song, ‘The Gums’, are kinda nicey-nicey, picked, melodic, a bit indie, a bit emo even, then all hell breaks loose with a thunderous slab of a riff and rabid vocals and I’ve no idea what the fuck they’re yelling about, but waaaauughh! It’s all good. Then there’s a rather Shellac-like mid-section where they persecute a single note for what feels like an eternity before going black metal in a blanket of fretwork and explosive percussion. It’s a lot to cram in to five minutes, but in keeping with the band’s name and general ethos, it’s chaotic and wildly unpredictable.

The punningly-titled ‘Prism Break’ melds driving repetition and the dingy riffery of early Melvins with something more fiery as they fire up all cylinders for a brutal sonic assault.

The three pieces with (quite self-explanatory) parenthetical titles are instrumental interludes where they lay down the guitars and explore very different territories. Consequently, after the meandering instrumental of [Horns Wailing], the sledgehammer sound of ‘Mountainesque 4’ his even harder by virtue of contrast. It’s six and a half minutes of unbridled raging racket, which hammers away relentlessly. The guitars are as dirty as they come and blur into the bass in a mess of overloading distortion, the barking vocals low in the mix… the midsection is, once again, a complete shift, venturing into almost neoprog territories, with swirling synths and pomp-filled bass runs. It borders on muso, but feels somewhat tongue-in-cheek – not quite parody prog, but the lilting, picked notes which play to the fade certainly mark a contrast. And then there’s the recent single, ‘Unsound Hero’, which tests the patience with the most protracted, strung-out intro, consisting initially of nothing but a crashing snare for the longest fifteen seconds imaginable, and then a clean guitar pulse enters the mix and… are they in time with one another? Something doesn’t seem quite right… Yes, of course it’s intentional. I’m momentarily reminded of The Melvins’ track ‘Mine is No Disgrace’ from The Crybaby, with JG Thirlwell – a sprawling eight-and-a-half minute behemoth that pushed the quite-loud dynamic thing to its absolute limit – because here, 30,000 Monkies drag that intro out, and out, teasing at when the levee will break and the riff will hit, exploring a melodic, proggy, Oceansize-like melodic drift… at two minutes and seven, there’s a pause. Silence. Nothing. Suspense. Two seconds is a long time when you’re teetering on the brink, when you’re hanging, waiting… But at two minutes and nine, BLAM! And that riff is low, grinding, and raw. The slow grinding notes ring long and resonate as they trudge into the domain of rib-crushing weight. Stripping it all away leaves the sound of a soul being torn apart and offers no solace – quite the opposite, in fact – before the devastating onslaught of the final minute.

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You might think these guys are fucking with you, and in a way, they probably are. The title track is nothing short of pure riffmania, nearly seven minutes of punishing, pulverising power that’s absolutely relentless, crushing, and again holding a single chord for what feels like an eternity in the final minute.

This is noise rock with the emphasis on the noise, the filthy overdrive and feedback cranked to the max, and any moments of respite are simply lulls and lures designed to amplify the impact of the most brutal, rib-cracking riffs when they land. The formula isn’t genius, or even new, but 30,000 Monkies know precisely how to utilise it for optimal impact. And ‘Swerver’ hits hard, alright.

The ringing layers of ambience which shape [Bells Ringing, Tale Melting] are a world apart from the rest of the album, and while the warping sounds which drag and drift aren’t entirely soothing, they’re on another plane from the fiery wall of guitars which dominate Super Rebound… until the final three minutes, when they pull out the most devastatingly crushing doom of the entire album. It feels like a trick, an ambush, and one we should have seen coming, because 30,000 Monkies just can’t help themselves. There has to be a bone-splintering, skull smashing riff at some point in every song. It’s just a question of when it lands.

Super Rebound is a work of genius, with 30,000 Monkies really delving into suspense and detail – but more than anything, it’s a riff-laden rager of an album.

AA

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Push For Night – That Porous Line

Posted: 13 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Three years on from Lasped Gasps, their collaboration with Jon Mueller, experimental duo Push For Night, consisting of Oliver Chapoy and James Elliott, decided they needed to take a slightly different approach and pull back on the intensity a tad and allow some hints of light into the darkness for the follow-up.

They write in the accompanying notes – as if offering reassurance to anyone who may be concerned that this means that their new album is some kind of breezy pop fun – that That Porous Line ‘is absolutely a collaged, flickering, chaotic, electro-acoustic record. The project is the project after all. Although our tomb-room isn’t fully hermetic (what is?), I think it is a place PFN will always reside. A total escape outside into harshly lit reality without mystery is fairly unappealing, for us anyway. Inside is personal, guarded from too much light; a dark terrarium of weird ghosts and peculiar shadows ripe for conjuring and harnessing in order to make them kick and howl in a way pleasing to us. Or at least be near enough to them to try and hear what they sing. That’s the motive. We decorate the cave, invite the specters to reveal a message, and try to capture something. Inside, cocooned in the semi-dark of our uncommon space, we bang our heads against the act of interpreting these shifty, chimeric, hidden sonic shadows. How big is it in here? How much further down can we go? Did something move in that corner over there? Can it touch us? Can we catch it? That’s where the fear is. That’s where the fun happens. That’s why we listen. That’s why we play.’

Compared to Lasped Gasps, pretty much anything would be lighter and less tense. But the first composition, the nine-and-three quarter-minute ‘A Good Hosing Down’ immediately makes clear the difference, opening with some scratchy strings and chiming notes which ring through a soft static and ambient mist. There’s no real sense of danger or threat here, and you don’t immediately feel as if you’re suffocating. But around seven minutes in, the atmosphere does change, and shit does get weird. Warped, spongy electronics rub against one another as they twist and turn in unpredictable directions.

The underlying structure of ‘Fang Vendor’ is a low, slow beat and swampy bass that’s almost a desert rock reimagining of Suicide, but over these are strains of retro-futurist space-age synths and random glitches and all kinds of sonic incursions that disrupt the flow.

At the centre of the album stand a brace of monolithic works: ‘It’s Sure To Be Dark If You Shut Your Eyes’ and ‘Idler’s Reward’ both pass the eight-minute mark, and place the collage nature of their approach to the fore. On the former, fragments of processed, glitched-out vocal samples and random snippets intersect with a piano motif which fades in and out while flickering beats flit around subtly in the distance, by no means driving or propelling the piece forward, instead adding further distraction to a palette already overloaded and blending to indistinction. Heavy drones, elongated organ sounds, ominous rumbles, and electronic explosions fizz and spark all over. Cymbals crash and tension builds. The latter provides some respite, with a slow, gradual glimmering change of hue accompanied by a sparse pulsation. I start to envisage the deep sea, the gentle, fluid movements of jellyfish… but then there’s a corrupted proggy synth break that utilises an awful farting synth sax sound or something, and further on, there’s some trilling jazz-infused woodwind. No two ways about it: That Porous Line explores experimentalism to the max. Asserting that the duo apply the collaging of materials indiscriminately may sound like a harsh criticism, but I make the observation more in the context of William S. Burroughs’ cut-ups, which brought collage to the page, and, shortly after, audio works, with the intention of creating art which was closer to life, and the way we experience an array of sensory inputs simultaneously. That Porous Line may be a fair bit smoother in its application of the methodological principles than early adopters of sound collaging – from John Cage to Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, but ultimately, this is about applying a technique established a long time ago in art to other media, specifically sound. And the aim is to be disorientating, to overlay fragments to achieve a certain effect.

‘Bait is Lowered’ is a dark, rippling wash of unsettling layers of sound, creeping, thrumming, before sputtering beats burst amidst a wail of siren-like sounds and everything dissolves into a panic-infused morass of sound. In many ways, it’s low-key: there are no brain-shredding walls of white noise here, but nothing about it is right, nothing about it is easy, comfortable.

That Porous Line isn’t one of those albums where you find yourself praying for it to finish, and it doesn’t suck the life out of you – but it’s no party, either. Culminating in the wall of static wash that is the final minute of ‘Turned Slowly and Slowly Turned’, and the somewhat proggy, somewhat Krautrock, somewhat ambient title track which draws the curtain remarkably gently. It’s a journey, and no mistake.

AA

a3365526305_10Push For Night

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