Plant-based metal avant-gardists BOTANIST have planted the new track ‘Angel’s Tumpet’, named after the highly toxic and hallucinogenic nightshade shrub as the first single taken from their forthcoming album VIII: Selenotrope, which has been sowed now in order to bloom on the release date May 19, 2023.
Listen to ‘Angel’s Trumpet’ here:
AA
BOTANIST comment: “The notion of a ‘Selenotrope’, a plant that only blooms in moonlight, was in the mental vault since 2016, as were the drums that I had recorded for when the day came”, mastermind Otrebor writes. "The added solitude of the lockdown, in addition to the solitude that I normally prefer, was the conduit to entering this new place in the Verdant Realm. After I completed tracking, I sent the session to Dan Swanö, with whom I had already loved working for the Photosynthesis album. Dan felt that ‘Angel’s Trumpet’ was the album’s banger. So here it is to introduce you to the nocturnal floral world of VIII: Selenotrope.
Cardiff post-punk outfit Red Telephone are set to release their highly anticipated debut album Hollowing Out on the 31st March 2023. The only single taken from it ‘Waiting For Your Good Days’ is out now.
Hailing from Cardiff, Red Telephone’s richly layered alt-rock could have emanated from a club in Blade Runner’s dystopian LA – combining angular guitars, Krautrock-inspired rhythms and New Wave-tinged synths with infectious pop sensibilities. Drawing on post punk and synth pop influences, the band has been catching the attention of DJs across BBC 6 Music, BBC Radio 1, Absolute Radio and Radio X; with comparisons to the likes of MGMT, Super Furry Animals, Mitski and Berlin-era Bowie being drawn. The band have recently appeared at BBC 6 Music Fringe Festival, Focus Wales, Swn Festival, Other Voices and Llangollen Fringe, supporting Warmduscher. With previous single releases on Welsh-based labels Libertino Records and the Popty-Ping Recording Company, the band’s highly anticipated debut album is set to be released in March 2023.
Like much of the album, this song was initially composed by Bethan on the piano. It features Ynyr and Bethan on trumpets but also features Ioan Hefin, the man responsible for performing Welsh music’s greatest and most iconic trumpet solo in Eryr Wen’s Gloria Tyrd Adre. It’s a song about love and the feeling of trying to comprehend the magnitude of the love that you can feel for someone. It can relate to any form of love but in this instance it was written when their daughter turned 3 years old, with Bethan trying to articulate and comprehend the outpouring of love felt for a child and the hugeness of childbirth; the challenge, escalation, triumph, glory and the raw vulnerability of it all.
Something unlike anything you’ve heard before, SEVERANCE is the 9th release from multi-instrumentalist, compulsive creator, and unrepentant volume addict Timo Ellis (Cibo Matto, Spacehog, Yoko Ono) under the NETHERLANDS moniker. Officially out on the 31st of March 2023 via Svart Records, SEVERANCE features all the hallmarks of Ellis’ work, including blistering post-shred guitar heroics, primal drumming, and soulful, yet searing caterwauls. But as with every NETHERLANDS release, Ellis has inexplicably found a way to ratchet up the intensity, render the dynamic shifts more extreme, and hone his menacing melange of melody and rhythm into a uniquely weaponized form of rock ‘n’ roll that reaches towards high art.
While Ellis is perpetually working, he’s not one to work with without a grander purpose than loud music for the sake of loud music. He adds:
SEVERANCE, the title track, describes the tragic predicament of how our “species” gets more and more dangerously disconnected from our experience as Earth-bound, collective animals; about how our foundational hyper-materialist (and human-supremacist) notions of civilizational “progress” and “the future” delude us to into endlessly, blindly exploiting and destroying each other, all of the Earth’s remaining life support systems…along with whatever remaining senses of beauty, magic, and mystery still even exist at this point.
An album exploring topics as heavy as the ones SEVERANCE tackles requires sonics to match. For Ellis — a prolific producer and engineer himself — the skills and peerless engineering sensibilities of tastemaking heavy music producer Kurt Ballou (Converge, High On Fire) and the hallowed walls of Ballou’s God City Studio in Salem, Mass, proved the ideal space to capture the record’s massive sounds. For Ellis, Ballou’s unmatched attention to detail and “comprehensive tuning” of the drum and organic guitar sounds on SEVERANCE proved to be an x-factor in capturing the most monstrous and fully refined NETHrock release to date.
An album which makes it easy to understand why contemporary heavy metal luminaries like Joe Duplantier of Gojira and Bill Kelliher of Mastodon count themselves amongst NETHrock’s biggest fans, SEVERANCE is another chapter in the book of a band that’s consistently released heavy music on its own terms and with its own undeniable personality.
Svart Records proudly presents SEVERANCE by NETHERLANDS out on CD, black- and transparent red vinyl colorways and digital platforms on March 31st 2023.
Yes, we’re a day late with this, but… pah, fuck it. It’s a solid and epic tune.
Progressive rockers Haken are set to release their seventh studio album Fauna on the 3rd March 2023, the group’s most genre-busting and conceptually fascinating album to date.
Today, the band celebrate Valentine’s Day with the launch of their latest single ‘Lovebite’.
Watch the video now here:
‘Fauna’ sees the band exploring new ideas conceptually as Ross continues. “The premise of the album when we started writing it was that every song would have an animal assigned to it. They all have something related to the animal kingdom that we could write about, but they also connect to the human world. Each track has layers, and some of them are more obvious than others.”
“It reminds me of The Mountain,” adds guitarist and fellow founder Richard Henshall. “There, we had the idea of not really a narrative-based album, but more the concept of climbing a mountain and overcoming the obstacles along the way. Then we took that and thought about how it could relate to our everyday lives. All of Fauna’s animals relate to us, personally.”
‘Fauna’ also marks the return of keyboard player Peter Jones, whose sounds can be heard permeating the entire album. “What Pete’s brought sonically to the band has played a massive role in why we do have a lot of new sounds on this record,” says Ross. “It’s always a new dynamic when there’s a change in personnel, and this is a fresh and reviving one. It’s certainly helped proximity-wise, with Pete being in the country: Pete and Ray [Hearne, Haken’s drummer] would be at Rich’s place and they’d just start jamming. That’s really key to how the songs start.”
Canadian dark-pop act The Birthday Massacre have just issued a video for ‘Precious Hearts’, a song included on their current album ‘Fascination’. The clip was cut to footage filmed at a show in their home city of Toronto in October 2022 during a North American tour to promote the album, shortly before they arrived in the UK to play a long-awaited (and sold out) ten date UK tour (which we dug here at AA).
Watch the video here:
AA
BM will be on tour in the US again from late April, with nine headlining shows bookending eleven further guest slots with Lacuna Coil. Their full itinerary can be seen below.
As anyone who ever listened to the legendary BBC radio DJ John Peel will know, hearing a favourite artist re-interpret a familiar song by another artist can bring new insights into both, as well as being a lot of fun.
During a break from writing Midas Fall’s fifth album, Elizabeth Heaton took some ideas that had been incubating for a while and, along with bandmate Michael Hamilton, applied their own unique perspective to three well-loved songs by Bruce Springsteen (Dancing in the Dark), Radiohead (Creep) and Placebo (Every You Every Me).
Covers EP sees Springsteen’s driving rock anthem reimagined as a quieter, more introspective narrative, imbued with ‘80s synths and Heaton’s softly hopeful but uncertain vocals. Radiohead’s Creep is a dreamy, kaleidoscopic waltz that slowly builds to a raging climax. On Every You Every Me, the icy undertones of Placebo’s original version are magnified even further, evoking a bleak landscape cloaked in dark, haunting sounds.
For first single ‘Creep’ Liz from the band states, “Creep, along with the other tracks on the upcoming EP were created during lockdown. We took some of our favourite tracks from growing up and gave them a different feel. As a teenager Radiohead were the first band to make me feel that music could be something more, so have been a massive influence to me musically, especially when I first started writing. I was listening to Creep and imagined it played in a waltz style time signature. With the aid of my keyboard and a glass of wine the vocals seemed to flow very easily and were captured in a single take. From there it grew arms and legs."
Listen here:
Covers EP will be released digitally worldwide by Monotreme Records on 7th April.
Well this is bold… But if you’re going to cover a classic, you have to do something special with it.
The Canadian alternative rock band A Primitive Evolution (A.P.E.) released an excellent third album entitled ‘Becoming’ in late 2018 that fused industrial, metal and electronic sounds to create a raw, visceral yet soulful record that blurred boundaries to show off a genre-blending mix of Nine Inch Nails, The Cure, Tool, Radiohead, The Prodigy and even U2.
Recorded at their Desolation Studios set-up in their home city of Toronto, it included input from writer/producer Ian D’Sa (Billy Talent) and engineer Kenny Luong (Metric) and displayed obvious crossover potential that had the band placed firmly in the ‘ones to watch’ category. With songs also featured in films such as ‘Chastity Bites’ and the vampire musical ‘Suck’, as well as several North American TV shows, their next step was keenly anticipated.
Then….frontman and guitarist Brett Carruthers joined old friends and compatriots (and labelmates) The Birthday Massacre as their new bassist, with writing, recording and touring duties foor them (not to mention a pesky pandemic) necessitating that A.P.E. be temporarily placed on the backburner.
The band have today taken a step back into the limelight with a new single entitled ‘Ace Of Spades’. Yes that one….and who saw this leftfield/rightfield (it’s all the same to me) curve ball of song choice coming? But, as Carruthers explains: “We actually started playing it live for fun years ago while writing ‘Becoming’ and were listening to a lot Motörhead classic. We thought, what if we slowed it way down to sound like one of our dirty rock jams? We fell in love with the result and played around with it, and finally decided to record and release it. We’re just sad Lemmy will never get to hear it, but hopefully the metal gods may accept our filthy offering!”
‘Ace Of Spades’ is included on a three track EP that is set for release on 3rd March via Metropolis Records. Check it here:
Allen Epley (Shiner, The Life and Times) has released a video for "Evangeline" off his recent debut solo album Everything, out now on Spartan Records.
“We wanted something simple but stark and beautiful. Having a solo record and figuring out how to do things like videos for it is strange for me because I’m usually doing it with a band. So after many potential scenarios, we decided to just get some simple close up footage in my garage in Evanston. Clayton Brown who made the video, (who was also first drummer in Shiner!) grabbed some beautiful shots of Chicago via the Blue Line and it absolutely matches the kind of sadness and sense of melancholy that the song carries in it. There’s a theme of escaping and wandering throughout the record so this was perfect” – Allen Epley
Witch Ripper have unveiled their next single, the slick mid-tempo crusher ‘Icarus Equation’, which is taken from the forthcoming album The Flight after the Fall. The sophomore full-length of the American melodic sludge metal outfit is scheduled for release on March 3rd, 2023.
Witch Ripper have announced the first US shows in support of the new album. A European tour is in the making.
The title of the track ‘Icarus Equation’ hints at the ancient Greek mythological character Ikaros, who flew too close to the sun on wings held together by wax during a daring attempted escape. The wings melted and Ikaros fell to his death, and the story is generally used as a metaphorical warning against having unrealistically high ambitions.
Listen to this epic cut here:
Witch Ripper comment: “The new single, ‘’Icarus Equation’ was the first song written for the new album”, guitarist and vocalist Curtis Parker writes on behalf off the band. “I think that we rewrote the final part six times before we landed on what’s on the record. We’re incredibly happy with how that ending turned out. ‘Icarus Equation’ represents perfectly how our two vocalists can not only juxtapose against each other but come together in unison – like we do on the bridge. In the story of the album, this song represents loss. A loss of life and a loss of wanting to carry on. Our protagonist is at his lowest during this song. That being said, we wanted to show that there is a light at the end of the tunnel by ending on a giant major key ballad-style moment.”
Live
18 MAR 2023 Seattle, WA (US) Substation 29 MAR 2023 Portland, OR (US) High Water Mark 30 MAR 2023 Eugene, OR (US) Old Nick’s 31 MAR 2023 San Francisco, CA (US) Kilowatt Bar +Brume +Nite 01 APR 2023 San Jose, CA (US) The Caravan Lounge 02 APR 2023 Los Angeles, CA (US) Redwood Bar 04 APR 2023 Tempe, AZ (US) Yucca Tap Room 05 APR 2023 Albuquerque, NM (US) Moonlight Lounge 07 APR 2023 Denver, CO (US) Skylark Lounge 08 APR 2023 Salt Lake City, UT (US) Aces High Saloon 09 APR 2023 Boise, ID (US) The Shredder
Aural Aggravation 