Having completed a trilogy of experimental songs, Papillon de Nuit begin a new cycle, reaching for the epic, and with a more structured (but no less adventurous) approach. With Steve Whitfield on board (The Cure, The Mission) as Producer, and an array of incredibly talented, diverse musicians and singers, Ariadne is the first release in this phase. We are delighted to share it with you.
Continue with us on our journey….
AA
METAMORPH has just revealed their new single – a gut-punch of emotion and power, ‘Crown of Shattered Glass’. The song is impossible to ignore—a warrior cry wrapped in razor-sharp gothic rock.
Margot Day’s bold vocals cut through a cinematic soundscape of pounding beats and darkwave edge, delivering a chorus that demands to be felt: “Shattered, shattered, I’m stronger than you know”. Every lyric carries the weight of a hard-earned victory. The shattered glass isn’t a weakness—it’s a crown. This is the sound of breaking free.
With sharp lyricism and relentless energy, this track transforms heartbreak into pure power, hitting hard and lingering long after the last note.
As the Wheel of the Year turns, METAMORPH unveils a new track every six weeks, each one an incantation of power, love, and defiance—all leading to a full METAMORPH album this fall.
AA
Having issued ‘Let The Flowers Grow’ (a surprise duet with Boy George) as a standalone single in late 2024, original post-punk icon Peter Murphy followed it in mid-February with ‘Swoon’, a majestic slice of synth-punk/funk that also served as a perfect Valentine’s Day gift for his fans.
‘The Artroom Wonder’ is available as a brand new single from today (21st March), with Murphy explaining its genesis as “an echo from my 4th year at senior school. Daniel Ash [former Bauhaus bandmate] and I are listening to the mysterious 6th year cool intelligentsia that have gathered in the artroom. We have dared to enter their conclave, and the music coming from it is intriguing. We discover that the song being played is [David Bowie’s] ‘The Bewlay Brothers’, highly intelligent, mystical and sensual, with the singer’s voice as seductive as anyone I’d ever heard.”
Justin Chancellor of Tool plays bass guitar on ‘The Artroom Wonder’, one of several guest musicians on Murphy’s new album Silver Shade, which is scheduled for release on 9th May 2025 via Metropolis Records on 2xLP (with colour variants), CD and digitally. Containing both ‘Swoon’ and ‘The Artroom Wonder’, the physical and Bandcamp digital formats will also include ‘Let The Flowers Grow’ as a bonus track.
Produced by Youth (Pink Floyd, The Verve, Crowded House, as well as a member of Killing Joke, The Orb, The Firemen) at his studio in Spain, ‘Silver Shade’ is Murphy’s tenth studio album and a long-awaited follow-up to ‘Lion’, which the pair worked on together a decade ago. A symbiotic relationship born of artistic collaboration, Murphy states that “this new album is as powerful as any of my work to date.”
AA
Melvins 1983 – the lineup featuring Buzz Osborne and original drummer Mike Dillard – offer a second preview of Thunderball (out 18th April, Ipecac Recordings) with today’s release of ‘King of Rome’.
The charging track once again features contributions from avant-electronic artists Void Manes and Ni Maîtres, with Osborne saying of the song;
“The ‘King of Rome!! Hot Cross Buns! This song is a hot little punk rock number. I hope all of you enjoy it and tell your friends.”
AA
NIGHTBEARER launch the crushing performance video ‘His Dark Materials’ as the first single taken from their new full-length Defiance. The third studio album of the German death metal bookworms, which is based on a concept inspired by Sir Philip Pullman’s fantasy book trilogy "His Dark Materials", has been scheduled for release on June 13, 2025.
AA
NIGHTBEARER comment: “The tell-tale title ‘His Dark Materials’ is both, lyrically and musically, an excellent represantation of what were are about to unleash with our third album Defiance in 2025”, vocalist Michael Torka declares. “We hurl ourselves into the millennia-old war against the tyranny of a god who never existed, against his corrupted earthly and celestial vassals. It’s a fight against brutal oppression that is carried out in the name of liberation from superstition. This is the final, relentless battle for freedom!”
AA
While they’re no strangers to the Southern California independent music scene, hardcore foursome Feed the Beast are poised to introduce themselves to more regional, national and international stages and speakers with their latest album, Mercy, the band’s debut for Futureless.
Feed the Beast’s history has been cultivated via years of consistently releasing recordings and fortifying a considerable presence across venues in their western Los Angeles and Santa Monica locales. Mercy signals their return from a hiatus with a reshuffled roster and new record label affiliation in tow. The group has seized the opportunity to not only elevate its presence, but also expand its latitude of sonic expression, melding the time-tested heaviness with occasions for experimentation and engaging in novel musical niches.
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Nick Jett (of Terror) in under a week, Mercy is a compendium of punishing yet precise heavy cuts, deftly interspersed with melody, space, dynamics and syncopated rhythms. Original members James Hutchinson (vocals) and Nicholas Garcia (guitar) penned Mercy across a span of a few months with former Feed the Beast members Tye Trujillo (bass) and Patrick Chavez (drums).
“Nick’s the man,” says Garcia of Mercy’s producer. “He’s very efficient and it still blows my mind that we tracked seven songs in three or four days. It’s very cool to get to work with someone who is very professional.”
Feed the Beast’s origins began as high school friends who connected through their love of music. “It was a very small school, which was even funnier how we were all into the same music,” says Garcia. “It was just kind of a coincidence.”
This coincidental connection eventually found the group putting their musical minds to work as Feed the Beast began composing its material just before the COVID era struck in early 2020. After the pause, Feed the Beast soon booked themselves a busy self-release schedule with a handful of singles, the Vengeance album in 2022, and 2023’s EP, Silhouettes.
With Trujillo and Chavez leaving to focus on other projects (Trujillo plays in Suicidal Tendencies, filling his father Robert’s spot that became available when he joined Metallica, while Chavez plays with OTTTO), Hutchinson and Garcia retooled the lineup, recruiting new band members Julian Lincona (bass) and Billy Greenwood (drums) to support Mercy, which is slated for a release on Futureless in May 2025.
Mercy’s first single is ‘Tombs Underneath the Tombs,’ of which Hutchinson says is about “being content with and even embracing hell, which is a fate worse than hell itself. It takes on the perspective of an incredibly narcissistic individual who believes they are smarter and stronger than everyone, including creation itself.” Additional singles from Mercy include ‘Exorcism’ (which Hutchinson describes as “the most hopeful song of the first four singles”) and ‘Unjustified’.
Check ‘Tombs Underneath the Tombs’ here:
AA
Photo: Hunter Astrid @shottbyhunter
3rd January 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
Only the middle of March and I’m running behind on releases, so my apologies to Teleost for letting this one slip down the pile, especially as I’d been looking forward to it for some time. Even their earliest live shows, Before rebranding as Teleost, the duo, consisting of Leo Hancill and Cat Redfern, showed a rare musical chemistry, resulting in music of huge, immersive power. Recent shows, such as their recent York homecoming show with Cwfen, demonstrated that they have reached a whole other level of almost transcendental drone, a place where sound becomes a physical force.
But the challenge for any band who are so strong as a live unit, is how successfully can that be translated via the record medium. To commit the sound to tape – or digital recording – is in some way to compress and contain it, to reduce it to two – or even one – dimension. A recording is essentially a listening experience, without the visual element, without the klick drum or the low frequences vibrating your ribs, and all of the other stuff. So how have Teleost faced up to that challenge? Remarkably well. No doubt recording the guitar and drums live has helped retain the huge sound of the live experience. No slickening, studio polishing, just that huge sound caught in real-time, and Pedro at The Audio Lounge in Glasgow has done a remarkable job, clearly understanding what the band are about.
Three Originals opens with the ponderous grind of ‘Forget’, where a sustained whistle of reverby feedback is rapidly consumed by the first thick, sludgy chord: the distortion is speaker-decimatingly dense, and there’s so much low-end you feel it in the lower colon. It’s pure Sunn O))), of course, but then the ultra-heavy drums crash in and the vocals start… Hancill’s approach to singing is very much about rendering his voice an additional instrument rather than the focal point, and the elongated enunciations convey an almost abstractly spiritual sensation.
The first time I saw Earth was following their return with Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I, and I spent the entire show completely hypnotised by Adrienne Davies’ slow drumming. It was an experience I shall never forget: it was if time slowed down, and empires could rise and fall between each beat. I haven’t experienced anything similar since, until Teleost. And once you’ve had such a powerful visual experience in a musical context, it’s not only impossible to forget it, but it becomes integrated with hearing the band. And so it is that on listening to Three Originals, I find myself reliving that experience. It’s clear where Teleost draw their influences, but in amalgamating that low, slow drone of Sunn O))) with the more nuanced, tectonic crawling groove of latter-day Earth, they offer something that is distinct and different.
The seven-and-a-half-minute ‘Ether’ blasts in and the sheer density of that guitar is pulverizing. It simply does not sound like two people, let alone that it’s one guitar and no bass. There’s a delicate mid-section consisting of a clean guitar break before the landslide of distortion hits once more. Final track, ‘Throwaway’ is anything but, another sprawling, seven-minute monster dominated by gut-churning sludge and yawning yelps of feedback, while the vocals drift plaintively in the background.
Three Originals is without doubt their strongest work to date, my only complaint being that it simply isn’t long enough. But then, if each track was fifteen minutes long, it still wouldn’t be. In the field of doomy droney heaviosity, Three Originals is in a league of its own.
AA
Magic Wands is a dark pop duo originally formed in Nashville by guitarists and vocalists Dexy and Chris Valentine. Now based in Los Angeles, they are known for their shimmering and dreamy sound, which incorporates elements of shoegaze, dream pop, post-punk and goth. Heavily textured guitars, synth drones and ethereal vocals are combined in their songs to conjure an otherworldly atmosphere.
‘Moonshadow’ is the title track of a forthcoming album due out in the early summer on Metropolis Records. “It is a raw and introspective song about travelling at night on an underground train and how you can’t escape yourself or your own shadow,” explains Dexy Valentine.
‘Moonshadow’ follows ‘Hide’ and ‘Armour’ (both issued in 2024) as the third song to be lifted from the new album.
AA
Magic Wands will be supporting labelmates The Birthday Massacre on a North American tour prior to the release of the ‘Moonshadow’ album. Dates are as follows:
28th March NEW YORK CITY, NY (le) Poisson Rouge
29th March PITTSBURGH, PA Crafthouse
30th March DETROIT, MI Small’s
31st March CHICAGO, IL Reggies
2nd April MINNEAPOLIS, MN Fine Line Music Hall
3rd April KANSAS CITY, MO RecordBar
4th April DENVER, CO The Oriental Theater
5th April SALT LAKE CITY, UT Metro Music Hall
7th April SEATTLE, WA El Corazon
8th April PORTLAND, OR Dante’s
10th April SAN FRANCISCO, CA Bottom Of The Hill
11th April LOS ANGELES, CA EchoPlex
14th April SAN DIEGO, CA Brick By Brick
15th April MESA, AZ Nile Theater
17th April HOUSTON, TX Warehouse Live
18th April DALLAS, TX Granada Theater
19th April AUSTIN, TX Come And Take It Live
21st April TAMPA, FL Orpheum
22nd April ATLANTA, GA Masquerade
23rd April ASHEVILLE, NC The Orange Peel
25th April VIRGINIA BEACH, VA Elevation 27
26th April BALTIMORE, MD Soundstage
28th April WASHINGTON, DC Union Stage
29th April MECHANICSBURG, PA Lovedrafts Brewing
1st May BOSTON, MA Paradise Rock Club
3rd May TORINTO, ON Velvet Underground
4th May MONTREAL, QC Foufounes
AA
Swedish electronic environmentalists TWICE A MAN present the track ‘Birds Eye View’ as the first advance single taken from their forthcoming new full-length The Coloured Breeze Is a New Dimension. The highly anticipated album has been scheduled for release on June 13, 2025.
TWICE A MAN comment: “Overview can light sparks in the place where your roots are waiting”, guitarist and vocalist Dan Söderqvist writes on behalf of the band. “If you follow the time you can destroy the eradicating wheels of commerce. Don’t drown yourself in pretended sleep! There is a common knot that must be untied. Our thoughts are the light and nature sings our lullabies.”
AA
While the skies of the world are darkening, something powerful and resilient is pushing from below through the pungent springtime topsoil close to the City of Göteborg in Sweden. This sprout that is charged with organic and electric energy bears the name The Coloured Breeze Is a New Dimension. TWICE A MAN planted its seed with the song ‘Dahlia’, a ‘new’ track that was written to complement the compilation album Songs of Future Memories.
For three years, the Swedish dark electronic trio fertilised and nurtured the germ bud until it had taken firm root in their musical heritage and began to send offshoots to find new sonic spots beyond any previously built garden walls. The Coloured Breeze Is a New Dimension is an organic entity that creates something new by re-combining its musical DNA in various ways. As a result, its tracks blossom in many hues of electronic colours.
AA
A track about the last man to insult Stalin to his face and live to tell the tale – left communist Amadeo Bordiga…
It’s a spoken-word groove sensation!
AA
Aural Aggravation 