Portuguese heavy sludge hitters Vaneno have just dropped the official video for ‘Sludgehammer’, the crushing second single from their forthcoming album Chaos, Hostility, Murder, due out May 26 on Raging Planet Records.
Shot in black and white, ‘Sludgehammer’ embodies everything Vaneno stands for: heavy, unrelenting riffs, cavernous grooves, and a primal energy that feels like it could destroy entire brick walls. The track delivers a punishing blend of sludge, stoner, and death metal, the kind of sound that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go.
KAYO DOT have revealed the video single ‘Oracle by Severed Head’ taken from their forthcoming new album Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason, which is scheduled for release on August 1, 2025.
Watch it here:
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KAYO DOT comment: “The song ‘Oracle by Severed Head’ is about prophecy, but not the clean, transcendent kind that we’ve been taught to expect”, mastermind Toby Driver reveals. “This is prophecy as defilement – a sacred voice ripped from the past and forced through a severed head – a voice no longer truly its own, but distorted, fragmented, bleeding into the present. It is a song that interrogates the ways in which manipulated versions of the past continue to invade the present, asserting themselves in violent ways. These voices might be real and they might speak some truths, but who, through the obscene fracture that brought them back, are we really listening to? And at what cost? Musically, ‘Oracle by Severed Head’ pulls us into that space of rupture. It is built on a large ensemble – guitars, drums, bass, strings, woodwinds, trumpet, and vocals – an orchestration that calls back to the earliest Kayo Dot works. The song is a perfect choice for a first single, as it celebrates our return to form while marking the passing of time since ‘Choirs of the Eye’. The music is expansive but controlled, allowing tension and release to breathe in real time. Its beauty is at odds with its plaintiveness, as aching melodies and delicate harmonies evoke a sense of loss and longing. The climaxes feel inevitable, yet somehow unexpected. In these moments, the music mirrors the emotional intensity of our most powerful moments, but also speaks to the underlying disquiet of the present – trapped between what was and what is yet to come.”
dälek share a new track ‘The Essence’ ahead of European tour dates this May. The experimental hip-hop pioneers are currently in the studio working on their follow up to Precipice and have given fans a taste of what’s to come in this new single.
“The Essence is a window to where me and Mike are at right now. We quite literally took it back to the essence on this joint. Straight up me on the MPC 3000 and Mike on Processed guitar, playing off of each other as we created the track. Lyrics and flow are central to the joint and dictated the direction of the production and how we sculpted the arrangement.
As always there are layers to the meaning but I also wanted to be crystal clear on what I was spitting. There are minimal to no overdubs. We somehow kept the heavy “wall of sound” feel but stripped away superfluous layers to just the parts and pieces that were needed to complete this as a “dälek” song. This is just a taste of what is coming.” – Dälek
The lyrics of ‘The Essence’ are full of defiance and energy, something which the band will no doubt bring to their live shows; "We had civilizations interconnected throughout history/Our art and architecture composed with sacred symmetry/I’m seeing these past lives vividly/Refuse to let them kill our joy wit bigotry."
dälek live 2025:
May 20th – Berlin, DE – Neue Zukunft May 21st – Vilnius, LT – Kirtimai Cultural Center May 22nd – Tallinn, EE – Paavli Kultuurivabrik May 23rd – Helsinki, FI – Sonic Rites Festival May 24th – Budapest, HU – Instant-Fogas May 26th – Prague, CZ – Palac Akropolis May 27th – Brno, CZ – Kabinet Muz May 28th – Vienna, AT – Flucc
UK death/grindcore act COFFIN MULCH released the new EP In Dub on May 2nd via At War With False Noise. The EP sees Coffin Mulch collaborating with MICK HARRIS – Napalm Death legendary drummer until 1990’s Harmony Corruption album – who remixed two tracks from the British band for the occasion!
They write:
This is kinda neither a death metal record, nor an industrial record, nor a techno record. I don’t know what it is, and that’s what’s cool about it. We live in a world where most folks seem to want to find their niche and exist in that, and it wasn’t sitting right constantly just being thought of as “an HM2 band” I guess. I’d imagine this will probably split a lot of people, but it might gain us some new followers! Honestly, that’s pretty secondary to the thrill of getting to work with one of my heroes and create something that’s turned out to be a really unique, challenging, and DIFFERENT record.
Brooklyn hardcore outfit Cash Bribe are back with a vengeance, unveiling their third EP Demonomics on June 13, 2025, via Futureless. This marks the band’s debut release with the label, and they’ve never sounded more vicious, precise, or relentless.
The EP’s title track, ‘Demonomics’, is now streaming everywhere—an absolute sonic assault that sets the tone for what’s to come.
Norwegian post-rock outfit Korean Cars return with ‘Magalomaniac’, the second single from their debut mini-album #1, set to be released on May 23 via Mas-Kina Recordings.
Following the haunting and immersive lead single ‘Drömtorp’, this new single turns the dial from introspection to tension as “Magalomaniac” is a slow-burning eruption of cinematic builds, distorted beauty, and emotional urgency.
Blending melancholic post-rock with melodic post-hardcore, Korean Cars create a dynamic soundscape where atmospheric depth meets raw emotional release. Drawing from the alternative and post-hardcore scenes of the ’90s and 2000s, the band’s sound fuses soaring melodies, jagged noise, and unpredictable shifts into a captivating experience.
Formed by members of Rumble in Rhodos, Infidels Forever, Arms on Fire, and Insense, Korean Cars combine seasoned musicianship with a shared passion for layered, emotionally charged songwriting. Their sound echoes the cinematic textures of Explosions in the Sky and the emotional punch of Trail of Dead — a beautiful chaos of melody and intensity.
AZURE EMOTE drop the video clip ‘Feast of Leeches’ as the first single taken from their new full-length Cryptic Aura. The fourth studio album of the American progressive death alchemists has been scheduled for release on July 25, 2025.
AZURE EMOTE comment: “The first single ‘Feast of Leeches’ is a frantic release of anger and madness”, mastermind Mike Hrubovcak writes. “For far too long have we suffered the pressure of outside vultures feeding off our personal energies. It’s fitting that this video was created by ‘Drain Hope’, because it visually expresses the frustration of being surrounded by leeches and parasites that are sucking on our lifeblood, while leaving us ultimately drained and lethargic. It’s like suffocating under dirt but still crawling through the mud in hopes of getting out. We are all waiting to breathe, but always holding our breath, and continually striving to be, while awaiting our death.”
Romanian atmospheric post-black metal visionaries Genune return with their third full-length album,Infinite Presence, set to be released on May 17 via Consouling Sounds. The album will be available on black vinyl, cool blue vinyl, CD, and digital formats, and marks a profound artistic leap — one born from radiant hope and deep absence.
Ahead of the album, they’ve revealed ‘The Sun Will Always Shine’. Hear it here:
Formed in 2012, Genune found their true voice with the 2018 debut Cern Sol, building a unique sonic identity that fuses the intensity of post-black metal with elements of shoegaze, electronica, Americana, and Anatolian rock. Their music is captivating and richly textured, moving between moments of fierce intensity and delicate introspection.
Lyrically, the band continues to explore themes of time, consciousness, identity, and existence, told through a poetic, modernist lens. Their 2021 album Inert & Unerring focused on the intricacies of identity — a theme expanded and transformed on Infinite Presence.
Gothenburg’s metallic hardcore crew Obstruktion have just dropped a brand-new music video for their latest single, ‘Touched by the Void’ and it hits with the force of a collapsing world.
Taken from the band’s highly anticipated second album The End Takes Form, which is set to be released on May 30 via Suicide Records, this track shows Obstruktion at their most intense, merging pummeling hardcore grooves, death metal heaviness, and raw emotional catharsis.
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The band comments: “In many ways, ‘Touched by the Void’ feels like a full-circle moment for us on this album. Much like ‘Death Comes Near’ it draws heavily from our roots in Swedish death metal, but we wanted to expand on that with a hardcore intensity that reflects the urgency of the themes we’re exploring,"
"Lyrically, the song wrestles with two interconnected ideas: the personal struggle to confront our own mortality and the broader, collective destruction we perpetuate as a culture. It’s raw, heavy, and deeply reflective — a snapshot of both individual and societal chaos. This track embodies the duality that defines the album: unrelenting power paired with introspective vulnerability.”
Jakko M. Jakszyk, perhaps most recently known as lead singer and second guitarist in King Crimson, is proud to announce his new solo album Son Of Glen – set for release on the 27th June 2025. The record is a companion piece of sorts to his acclaimed memoir ‘Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair’, that was released in October 2024, and explores many of the themes and the subjects that the book touches upon.
To coincide with this announcement, you can now hear the stunning 10-minute long title track here:
A specially commissioned video for Son Of Glen, will be premiered on the 2nd May. Look out for more information on that soon.
Jakko comments: “A romantic fantasy narrative based on what I discovered about my real father after decades of fruitless searching for him.
Glen Tripp was a US airman based in the UK who fell for a dark-haired Irish singer. And here I was many, many years later repeating what he had done by falling for another. What if he had been watching me and guiding me from ‘afar’?”
Jakko’s remarkable songcraft is evident on ‘Son Of Glen’, as his elegiac lyric muses on our fixation with nostalgia and the human condition, and yet where great songwriting, pathos and poetry would be enough to satiate most listeners, let us not forget that Jakko is (somewhat enviably) also a phenomenal guitarist, exceptional singer and multi-instrumentalist, whose precision production and skill for crafting glorious spatial soundscapes takes his arsenal of talents and skills, to a place where it’s more than justified to say, there is no one else quite like Jakko, doing everything that he does, with the proficiency he does it.
Aural Aggravation 