Well, well… new noise from Benefits as a further taster for the upcoming album – and it’s different again… but it’s also a clear part of the Benefits continuum. Hard-hitting lyrics and noise that you can groove to as well, with some valuable insights intercut for good measure.
From Paris to Palestine we witness the maddest crimes,
Are we living in the saddest times, analyse.
FOR POWER. FOR GREED. FOR OIL. FOR ME.
Watch the video here:
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Divide And Dissolve have announced a new album, Insatiable, arriving via Bella Union April 18th.
Helmed by Black and Cherokee composer and multi-instrumentalist Takiaya Reed, Divide and Dissolve has announced her new album, Insatiable, due out April 18 via Bella Union. Already legends on the international doom metal scene, the new album is an evolution of sound and intricacy. Over the 10 tracks, it runs the gamut of doom metal, building upon the genre’s trademark sludgy guitars and thundering drums with Takaiya’s deft and wondrous saxophone.
Today Divide and Dissolve share lead single ‘Provenance’, a powerful and dynamic composition that evokes the spirit of hope and possibility. Takiaya shares, “Provenance is an examination of where things begin and how they can end.”
Watch the video here:
The album title Insatiable, came to Takiaya in a dream. She had a vision of a better world, one that gelled seamlessly with the optimism of her take on heavy music: “I saw and have felt the impact of people committing great acts of harm, causing pain in a never ending cycle. I have also seen and felt the strength and power of people committing great acts of love,” she says. For Takiaya, this is what it means to be “insatiable”; it’s the way we choose either a path of destruction or one of compassion, and experience it to its fullest. “It’s an album about love, and it feels important to experience this, now more than ever.”
Divide and Dissolve’s music is an acknowledgement of the dispossession that occurs due to colonial violence, it honours ancestors, opposes white supremacy and calls for indigenous sovereignty. Strapped with thunderstorms of crashing cymbals, crunchy feedback, stomach-churning riffs and neo-classical inflections, the new collection delves into the idea of freedom through impermanence and destruction vs compassion, an urgent call to imagine a better world before it’s too late. Listen to it, digest it, and become insatiable.
Photo credit: Abbey Raymonde
Long Trax Productions – 31st January 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
The brief liner notes are almost as perplexing as the cover art and the rest of Will Long’s Bandcamp page. I mean, you might think that the title is the key here. While clocking in around the eleven-minute mark, these compositions, as much as they’re far from short, well, I’ve certainly heard many longer trax, with many albums featuring a single twenty-minute piece on each side. But of course, it’s a pun. Sort of. Regardless, spreading these four tracks across four sides of vinyl feels somewhat indulgent, although I won’t go quite as far as to say exploitative, despite the temptation.
Will Long has to date created an extensive catalogue of work, both with Celer, since 2004, and as a solo artist – and when I say ‘extensive’, I mean extensive, with Celer having released around a hundred albums (if you include collaborations and compilations), and his solo output is equally overwhelming in volume. The Long Trax releases have arrived sporadically between other releases, and are broadly connected, in stylistic terms. As Long puts it, ‘round 4 of the Long Trax series [is] the pivotal moment of truth. Four new deep cuts spread across 4 sides of vinyl in dual sleeves, and spun onto disc. An all-analog, hardware machine affair, full of glacial pads and icy stabs, rhythm composure (composer) sequences, round booming basslines, and narrators from beyond. It’s the real thing, still chugging along.’
Less than a minute into ‘One in the Future’, I’m feeling late 90s chilled techno vibes, and I’m dragged back to a handful of club experiences where I fucking hated the music and I hated the posers.
I’ll admit, I’ve always had something of a fraught relationship with dance music and its culture. I suppose I’ve generally leaned towards rock, but have found spaces in my head and heart for some dance and adjacent, loving the KLF from the start, and so much of the electronic music from the late 70s and early 80s. Chris and Cosey’s Trance is a straight-up dance album, and I dig it not just because it’s a Throbbing Gristle-related release. But, as I discovered when visiting a club in Brighton on visiting friends in the late 90s, some stuff, I just struggle to connect with. And this is it. To add to my story, I attended an Optimo night in Glasgow in 2004 to see Whitehouse. It was a strange event, in that most were there for the downtempo dance, which was halted for three quarters of an hour while William Bennet and Philip Best cranked out the most punishing, ear-shredding set to the sheer horror of the majority, before smooth beats returned, to their relief. My experience was inverse to the majority. Whitehouse did not go down well: the end of their set did. As the relentless bouncing beats returned, I was happy to leave, as were my whistling, devastated ears.
‘One in the Future’ is the longest eleven minutes of nondescript sonic wallpaper I have had the pain to endure in over a decade. It’s the monotony that hurts. It’s soulless, tedious, and nothing happens. And this is a fair summary of the album as a whole. To my ear, to my mind, to my insides, it feels so devoid of… anything that I can connect to. The samples blare, the squelchy synths blip and bloop and pulsate over tedious beats and maybe I need different drugs or a different brain, but this is relentlessly tedious, monotonous and crushingly dull. Get me out of here!
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Stockholm-based stoner rock upstarts Caboose are set to shake up the scene with their debut album, Left For Dust, to be released on March 21st via Majestic Mountain Records, and to mark the occasion, they’ve just released the high-energy video for ‘High on You’.
Watch it here, and thank us later:
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Formed during the frigid winter of 2022 by four high school friends, Caboose started as a school project aimed at crafting high-tempo stoner rock. What began in a makeshift garage studio quickly evolved into something much bigger, as the band honed their fuzz-driven sound, blending classic rock grit with the modern stoner rock spirit.
Now, nearly two years into their journey, Caboose has become a staple of Stockholm’s rock scene, delivering high-volume, riff-heavy performances from underground venues to festival stages. With fuzz-drenched riffs, thick grooves, and raw energy, Left For Dust cements Caboose as a band to watch in the Swedish rock underground.
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Neon Kittens have made a fab little video for the track ‘Here’s My Handle’.
It’s taken from their split album with THE BORDELLOS & DEE CLAW, released on Cruel Nature Records on 21st February, and you can watch it here:
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METAMORPH conjures 2025 with the new single & video, ‘Hiss Kiss,’ a celebration of the snake’s magic and the promise of rebirth. Dropping in time for Valentine’s Day, the witchy Imbolc celebration, and the Year of the Snake. Love strikes like venom, and ‘Hiss Kiss’ is the antidote—a gothic dance floor anthem that wraps you in its serpentine embrace.
Launching METAMORPH’s Wheel of the Year release ritual, ‘Hiss Kiss’ is the first single to drop for these witchy holidays. The ritual culminates with the release of the album on the harvest celebration, Mabon (September 22) and closes the year with haunting remixes to complete the spellbinding journey.
“’Hiss Kiss’ is serpentine spells set to sound—your fangs deep in my flesh, feel the world’s caress, new pardine, dance divine,” tempts Margot Day.
Dark, seductive, and dangerously divine, ‘Hiss Kiss’ is the ultimate goth dance floor banger to kick off the year.
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Dark electronic & trans-atlantic duo, DEATH BY LOVE has just announced the release of their debut single & video, ‘Strong Inside’ courtesy of Distortion Productions.
‘Strong Inside’ is a song that deeply reflects the inner struggles of the human experience. The lyrics touch on universal themes of vulnerability, self-acceptance, the constant search for inner peace, and authentic connections. It’s a song about self-preservation and a yearning for closeness and connection and the aspiration for a balanced and authentic self. It’s the resilience of the human condition that makes us all “strong inside”.
DEATH BY LOVE is poised to captivate the goth-industrial music community. offering a compelling glimpse into the band’s artistry. The band is also finalizing their first full-length album, set for a summer release. It promises to deliver an immersive and richly-layered musical journey.
‘Strong Inside’ is available on most digital platforms including Bandcamp.
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Industrial glam kingpin Raymond Watts aka PIG will reissue a remastered and expanded version of his 1996 album Wrecked via Metropolis Records on 7th March. His fifth full-length record, the remastering has been made by Tom Hall at Abbey Road, while its reappearance coincides with UK live dates to promote the 2024 studio album ‘Red Room’. The PIG live band currently includes En Esch (ex-KMFDM, Pigface) and Jim Davies, formerly of Pitchshifter but best known for his acidic and acerbic guitar lines on several chart hits by The Prodigy. Davies co-wrote many of the songs on ‘Red Room’.
Whereas the recently reissued Sinsation (1995) had originally been released on Nothing Records (the label established by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails), its follow-up saw a switch to Wax Trax!, the leading ‘90s exponents of industrial rock.
“Revisiting Wrecked for remastering was a sobering experience that left me shaken,” states Watts. “I recalled a period when I was stirred to a creative frenzy of crisis and desperation while searching for beauty. Although I can still hear glimpses of it, the bonfire of my hope was more an expression that was savage and twisted.”
Following the desperate burning that had resulted in Sinsation, Watts considers it more “a yearning, grinding plea for liberation that manifested in ‘Wrecked’, a tomb I had built for myself and my troubles that only the very bravest would dare enter.”
The original press release for Wrecked had described the album as “a nihilistic slash and burn, a scrapbook of manifestos and suicide notes written in dried blood.” In the cold light of day almost three decades later that description still holds true.
Wrecked features contributions from former KMFDM members Günter Schulz and Steve White, as well as Julian Beeston (ex-Nitzer Ebb, Cubanate).
Ahead of the expanded remastered reissue, they’ve released a video for ‘Everything’, which you can see here:
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Dilettante return with their second album Life of the Party, Pidgeon’s first totally self-produced record and her most personal one yet. Made in the confines of a converted freight container, the album is an outpouring of frustration towards societal pressures and the acceptance of realising she sees the world differently to others. “I went to see Poor Things and I really felt like Emma Stone’s character made sense to me,” explains Francesca. “She’s really literal and sort of just looks at the way polite society always does things and says, ‘why are we doing that? That doesn’t make sense, let’s do it this way’.”
Life Of The Party covers a range of topics, from turning thirty and feeling the pressure to start a family, to feeling constrained within monogamous relationships as well as the more weighty matter of speaking out about sexual assault and dealing with the associated repercussions.
Sonically, the album maintains Dilettante’s signature art pop sound and impressive loop pedal skills whilst also diving into a more synth heavy realm. In parts, the record also sees Pidgeon exploring a gentler sound, reverting back to a more traditional and raw songwriting “I’d been listening to Andy Shauf and Harry Nilsson a lot and I was trying to actually write from the piano”. Life of the Party sees Dilettante continue to push boundaries, “This record is, at times, the weirdest stuff I’ve ever put out and at times the poppiest,” she adds.
To coincide with the release, Dilettante have released a video for the title track. Watch it here:
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Dark electronic trio, PAWN PAWN has just unveiled their latest EP, Halloween. The EP delivers a darkly electrifying journey through a spectrum of synth-driven styles, each track a study in emotional and sonic extremes. The Halloween EP is both a love letter to synthpop’s past and a step into its future. While inspired by film director, John Carpenter, the EP is named in honor of a holiday many dark hearts celebrate every day, Halloween’s trajectory goes through the brooding, pulsing opening track, ‘Trick Or Treat’ to the seductive, shadowy anthem, ‘Tell You With My Eyes’, then closing with ‘Jealousy Looks Good On Me’, a high-octane fusion of ’90s industrial-pop that balances chaotic aggression with razor-sharp melodic hooks.
They’ve produced a video to accompany the closer, which you can watch here:
The EP’s themes, like Halloween, are about embracing darkness and emotional extremes: vengeance, obsessive attraction & jealousy. They also represent tales of liminal spaces; the spaces between thinking about revenge and actively seeking it, or the space between obsessing over someone and actually making a move.
The EP also addresses the lines between passion and destruction, the idea being that an emotion like jealousy can theoretically make us more passionate and wanting to be the very best version of ourselves. Meanwhile that eternal desire competes in a battle that can never be won and is ultimately self-destructive.
Says vocalist, Liz Owens Boltz, the music on the EP is “about exploring synthpop and industrial-pop…this is really our first official foray into these genres. So our creative journey has brought us here, trying on a darker and more aggressive sound, and having fun with it.”
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Aural Aggravation 