Last month, A Place To Bury Strangers announced their sixth studio album, See Through You, out 4th February 2022 on Dedstrange, and shared its lead single ‘Let’s See Each Other’. Today, they return with ‘Hold On Tight’, a noise-pop ripper bursting with chaotic delirium.
The accompanying video, directed by Meriel O’Connell, sees bandleader Oliver Ackermann moonlighting as the concierge of New York’s most eccentric hotel. When a candlelit dinner suddenly turns into a lovers’ quarrel, Ackermann joins a mysterious lone patron (drummer Sandra Fedowitz) and maître d’ (bassist John Fedowitz) to bring the noise. “When the getting’s good, I hold on tight. Sometimes I forget to enjoy where I am and the people around me. It is critical to be thankful and enjoy existence and have fun. Having a bad night? Reflect and kick yourself into gear,” says Ackermann.
Swedish microlabel Dret Skivor marks its first birthday with another suitably challenging release, in the shape of a split release featuring spoken word artists Dale Prudent and Christopher Nosnibor. As both artists also purveyors of harsh noise, they’ve combined the disciplines to create complimentary pieces of some of the harshest noise-backed spoken word around.
As the accompanying notes detail, ‘This release brings together two spoken word artists who also do harsh noise. These are the results. Nosnibor rants and raves in the York area of England and elsewhere. Prudent performs no audience spoken word in (in)appropriate spaces around Hammarö in western Sweden. ‘
Available as an audiocassette in a limited edition of six, and also as a download, Dret 12 is an instant underground classic.
Listen to the dense blast of Nosnibor’s ‘A Psychological Spasm’ and Prudent’s sprawling, feedback-soaked ‘på bunkern’ here, and follow the label’s advice – Listen through decent headphones or decent speakers for the full horror of what lies within……
Constellation is honoured to welcome Montréal producer Kee Avil to the label. Her hybrid songcraft of postpunk, electroacoustic and electronics gets inside our heads and under our skins in the best way. She’s celebrating by sharing a song and video. Details of her first and phenomenal full-length album to follow in early 2022.
‘See, my shadow’ is a kinetic assemblage of tension and release with chiselled guitar lines, plucked and pounding prepared piano, scraping metal, electroacoustic micro-samples and alternating blasts of crisp drum programming, all galvanised by Kee Avil’s intimate, inscrutable, insistent vocal.
Watch the video here:
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Led by Montréal producer Vicky Mettler, Kee Avil combines guitar, voice, electroacoustics and electronic production to create song assemblages that teeter on the edge of collapse while oozing forward, like sticky resin picking up and shedding disparate elements along the way. Kee Avil evolved from playing guitar with broken cymbals and drumsticks to forging askew tempos and templates glued together by samples of screws dropped into crystal bowls. Her self-titled debut EP, released in 2018 on Black Bough Records, harnessed her improvised music and prepared guitar background toward a newfound structural sensibility and arresting vocal / lyrical experimentation; she has been immersed in the exploration of distinctive compositional architectures ever since, expanding her sonic palette with increasing and intensive detail, where twitchy, finely wrought postpunk electro-industrial avant-pop songs are meticulously assembled to resemble disassembly.
Honed through pre-pandemic tours in North America and Europe (sharing stages with Marc Ribot, Pere Ubu, Bill Orcutt and Fly Pan Am, among others), Kee Avil’s emerging body of work signals a vital, viscous, virtuosic new voice in experimental songcraft – where touchstones include Juana Molina, Scott Walker, Fiona Apple, and Eartheater; where PJ Harvey meets Pan Daijing or Grouper melds with Autechre.
Kee Avil will be presenting a new and definitive collection of studio recordings in early 2022.
Industrial bass act SINthetik Messiah has just unveiled their new single, ‘Religious Soldier’.
‘Religious Soldier’ is about exposing religious leaders for brainwashing, abusing their followers and specifically, how they want their flock to be ‘good soldiers’ in their own twisted version of what it means to serve God. Setting the tone of the new single, SINthetik Messiah’s ‘Religious Soldier’ features a recording of a fake priest performing a fake exorcism on a brainwashed woman.
The sonic hammer of sound behind ‘Religious Soldier’ draws musical inspiration from the hardcore drum and bass, power noise, EBM, and old school industrial music scenes. The main vocalist, Bug Gigabyte takes his vocals from a punk rock type scream to a full on male choir. Lyrically, he begs the audience to wake up and not fall into a cult.
This two-track EP precedes a full length album due out in 2022.
Beneath the bright lights, and beyond the velvet ropes of Hollywood lies a different Southern California: a desolate land filled with darkness, punctuated by unrealized dreams, and broken down with anguished hearts. TIGERCIDE, formed half a decade ago in LA, gives musical form to this landscape with the ethereal, melancholic vocals of Shexist and the sparse, shadowy, and balanced beats of Saint Brendan.
The post-punk of bands like Joy Division and The Fall embodied a de-industrializing Manchester. The Bristol sound of Massive Attack and Portishead gave voice to the multicultural grittiness of their city. So too does the darkwave trip-hop of TIGERCIDE capture the ethos of Angelenos anxious about their future. In a city characterized by soaring rents, temperatures, and population, can there be any more California dreaming?
Teasing their forthcoming self-titled debut album, Manchester’s most uplifting cacophonous craftsmen Chew Magna, are serving up their own alt-rock antidote to lifelessness in the modern age with the ironically titled new single ‘Listless’ – complete with an unsettling self-made David Lynch inspired video.
“Listless is mostly about wasting an abundance of potential,” guitarist and vocalist Laurie says, alluding to the track’s thundering chorus as it sharpshoots, “I’d kill for what you’ve got” to a motoring Krautrock groove. Recorded at Salford’s The White Hotel with SWAYS producer Martin Hurley, it is a restless and incendiary re-introduction to a band who have been busy cranking up the dial on their unyielding attack of guitar squall. “For this track we melded two songs together; you can hear the jam the main part came from,” Laurie reveals.
‘Listless’, the first track to be unleashed (and the last to be written) from the four-piece’s upcoming debut album, is unrelenting in its anthemic riff, symphonic vocal, guitar and bass flirtations, crashing drums and overall wall of enduring sound.
The accompanying ‘Listless’ video was created and filmed by the band in a single day, in a cleared-out spare bedroom on zero budget. Each Magna members’ eyes covered as their senses are heightened, slide projections and shadows dance across their turtlenecks and barefoot stance which culminates in the strangest but most addictive of calisthenics style dance routines since ‘Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)’.
“The end result is delightfully odd,” says guitarist Simon who, alongside partner Annie, took the directorial lead. “The angles are quite Lynchian, driven by us using lighting in unusual ways to enhance the confines of the small space. It was a case of setting each scene with the things we had in the house and the dance adds a surreal, claustrophobic feel to the song’s already uncanny theme.”
A further foray into Chew Magna’s poetic and philosophical world, ‘Listless’ is the first earful of the band’s eagerly-anticipated debut album arriving Spring 2022 – a record they say, sees them “emerging from Covid’s sleep.” An onslaught of decibel-destroying fuzz and rising tension, Chew Magna explores the angst felt of wasting one’s potential, freedom’s plight, apocalyptic cautionary tales, inverse worlds, the passing of youth, conspiracy theories and life’s countless frustrations.
Rotherham based three-piece, sludge band Swamp Coffin have shared the video for new single ‘Your Problem’, taken from their upcoming album Noose Almighty set for release on 26th November (APF Records). Vocalist/guitarist Jon Rhodes comments,
"We were close to finishing writing the album but knew that we needed something huge and pissed off to open the record with, to really set our stall out for what was coming. “Your Problem” was one of those songs that just came together really quickly. I went in to rehearsal with the verse and chorus riffs and by the end of the session we’d got what you hear on the album. Lyrically it’s about those people that have followers instead of friends who are never seen to do any wrong but are ultimately only out for themselves and will happily stab you in the back without ever letting the mask slip. It’s about revenge after a betrayal and we wanted to play off that with the video and make it as claustrophobic a viewing experience as possible.”
Dreams are one of the guiding inspirations on the new album from Norwegian collective Lindy-Fay Hella (Wardruna) & Dei Farne and today they share the imaginative new video/track ‘The Lake’ from their forthcoming album Hildring (By Norse, 26th November).
About the meaning of the song, Lindy-Fay comments, “The Lyrics for ‘The Lake’ are taken from one of my cousin Roy’s dreams. We have been discussing the dreamworld for many years already. So, to my big surprise, I discovered that [director] Gaui’s story for the video also was directly taken from a dream. When eating breakfast at his and Marita’s cozy home in Faroe Islands, I asked: "The story for the video is very beautiful, how did you come up with that?” Gaui replied: “ Oh well, I dreamt about it. It is just taken from a dream.”
This kind of charming synchronicity is very befitting to Lindy-Fay Hella & Dei Farne, who have created a record which celebrates the power of all of our senses and encourages listeners to seek the magic in our surroundings, awakening curiosity and our sense of wonder.
Check out the official video for ‘The Lake’ below:
A Place To Bury Strangers announce the release of their sixth album See Through You on 4th February 2022. It’s not just a return to form for the band, but also a return to their fiercely independent, DIY roots on their own label, Dedstrange.
Outpacing even their own firmly blazed path of audio annihilation, this 13-track album repeatedly delivers the massive walls of chaos and noise that A Place To Bury Strangers are renowned for. It’s an explosive journey that explores the listener’s limits of mind-bending madness, while simultaneously offering the catchiest batch of songs in the band’s discography. It’s a nod to the art school ethos of the band’s origins, while forging a new and clear direction forward.
The first single ‘Let’s See Each Other’ is an intimate and disarming love song from a forgotten future. Syncopated memories and deconstructed fantasies of lovers lost in a city that doesn’t know their names. The accompanying video, directed by David Pelletier, features the band destroying the song while imploring people to reunite.
In late October 2019, following a successful UK tour ending in a sold-out concert at the mythical Roundhouse in London, SUNN O))) entered studio 4 of the BBC Maida Vale on invitation to record a live session for Mary Anne Hobbs to be broadcast on Samhain via her excellent radio show on BBC6. To enter the legendary John Peel studios was to enter a temple of music and experimentation, liberty in ideas and sound.
The brilliant Anna Von Hausswolff and her band had accompanied SUNN O))) on the UK tour, and Anna joined SUNN O))) in the BBC studio on synths and with her tremendous voice on the Pyroclasts pieces. Today, SUNN O))) premieres an excerpt from the remarkable “Pyroclasts F” track ahead of the November 26th CD/Digital release date.
Check the visuals that accompany the pre-release excerpt here:
Aural Aggravation 