Following the announcement of their new album Syv and the release of the wonderfully brutal first single ‘Utbrent’ last month, Norwegian black metal masters Mork are back today with their latest instalment of filth and misanthropy, ‘Heksebål’. An epic and progressive piece journeying back to the old times of judgment, fear and witch burning, ‘Heksebål’ arrives alongside a haunting new video by Matt Vickerstaff.
Watch the video here:
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When asked about the new single, Mork creator, frontman and mastermind Thomas Eriksen said “A depiction of mankind destroying what they don’t understand. Witch-hunts and witches at the stake burned to a crisp. Probably one of the more progressive songs with spellbinding riffs of witchery. May the spell curse those in doubt to a lifetime of bad luck and misery!”
Now marking twenty years since inception – which has seen a strong rise through the tiers of the black metal scene – Mork was created by Thomas Eriksen in 2004 & was primarily a side-project from inception until the debut album, Isebakke, in 2013. Since then, with a constant flow of releases and live performances spanning various continents including a hugely successful slot at this year’s Hellfest, the band has rightly earned the accolade as one of the top Norwegian black metal acts of recent years.
UPCOMING MORK SHOWS
14th September – Royal Metal Fest, Aarhus, Denmark
21st September – John Dee, Oslo, Norway (SYV release show)
28th September – The Bell Festival, Enebakk, Norway
12th October – California Deathfest, Los Angeles, USA
30th January -> 2nd February – 70.000 Tons Of Metal, Miami, FL – Ocho Rios, Jamaica
Norwegian hardcore/noise-rock innovators Hammok have just released the video for their latest track, ‘One Minute.’ Known for their explosive energy and genre-pushing sound, Hammok takes a step in a different direction with this release, offering a moment of calm after the storm that was their debut album, Look How Long Lasting Everything Is Moving Forward For Once.
‘One Minute’ is a collection of thoughts, feelings, and observations from the past two years of traveling and playing shows. Written early in the process of creating Long Lasting, the song didn’t quite fit with the rest of the album but always felt like it deserved to be heard. Now, presented in isolation, this track stands as the odd one out—an introspective piece devoid of screams, offering a different side of Hammok’s musical journey.
The band comments: “The calm after the storm that was Long Lasting. This is one of those songs that just slips out of you when you least expect it. While writing the Long Lasting album this song was finished early in the process but never really fit the album but there was always a feeling the song deserved to be put out for people to hear. The song is a collection of thoughts, feelings and observations throughout traveling and playing shows the past two years. Both the good and the bad. So here it is, presented in isolation, the odd one out. NO SCREAMS THIS TIME!!!!!!!!”
Bordeaux-based rock/metal band Seeds of Mary are back with a powerful new video for ‘Amor Fati,’ the first single from their highly anticipated new album, LOVE, set to be released on October 18th via Klonosphere / Season of Mist.
Directed by Thomas Duphil, the video for ‘Amor Fati’ delivers the big, bottom-heavy riffs that fans have come to expect from Seeds of Mary, coupled with dark and somewhat melancholic choruses.
Watch the video here:
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The band comments: ‘Amor Fati’ is the opening track of the new album. We chose it as the first single because it can be seen as a distillation of what the rest of the record holds: heavy riffs, haunting melodies, and ethereal atmospheres. Lyrically, it has a philosophical approach, drawing on the concept of Amor Fati dear to the Stoics and Nietzsche: ‘love what happens.’ The lyric video, created by our friend Thomas Duphil, features bodies in all their roughness and imperfections. This was the most obvious way for us to talk about self-acceptance, reality, and the trials of a fleeting life that leave their mark on our flesh. Each song on the album LOVE deals with a facet of love. Here, it’s perhaps its most intimate expression. And the fact that this track was written during the Covid period is probably no coincidence. We inevitably found ourselves confronting ourselves a lot during this significant time.”
LOVE, due out on October 18th, promises to be a defining moment in Seeds of Mary’s discography, blending their signature heavy riffs with dark, introspective lyrics and a raw, emotional edge. The album sees the band walking into heavier and darker tunes, incorporating more aggressive and screamed vocals, adding a new dimension to their already dynamic sound.
When iconic Norwegian vocalist Gaahl, revived TRELLDOM he did the only thing that could ever be expected from this exceptional artist: the unexpected. Hardly anybody could have predicted the stylistic shifts and the twists and turns of the forthcoming new full-length: …by the shadows…
A few weeks back, TRELLDOM opened their set at this year’s edition of Bergen’s Beyond the Gates festival followed the introduction via By the Shadows with the new opening track ‘The Voice of What Whispers’. This avant-garde jazzy yet relentlessly driving song conjured looks of confusion, fascination, and even rapture onto many faces in the crowd. Now the band releases ‘The Voice of What Whispers’ as the third single in the shape of an equally unexpected yet fascinating video. Who would have thought to see a Japanese horror style clip from a Norwegian band with deep roots in the black metal scene?
Dallas Kent might sound like a fictional cowboy, or possibly a made-up American town in a made-up state, but it’s actually the name bestowed upon the collaboration between London-based composer/producer Ian Williams (originally from Canterbury, Kent) and singer Crystal Brown (from Dallas, Texas). In that context, the moniker makes sense, of course.
As their bio explains, ‘It started in the late 2010s when Williams was looking for a singer to work with on some of his dark electronic pop songs, with Brown happening to live one street away from his studio in Hackney, East London… They swiftly recorded a considerable amount of material, but had to shelve the project when Brown relocated to the USA. The duo continued to discuss their options until finally, with Crystal settled in San Francisco and the pandemic giving everyone time to pause their normal lives, they decided to complete what they had begun so many years before.’
There’s no question that the pandemic changed a lot, if not, in some ways, everything. While many suffered with extreme alienation and the traumas of isolation and separation, it also forced a realisation of what was achievable, creatively, despite separation, and proved that the idea that ‘distance is no object’, which had long been embedded within the channels opened by The Internet was not merely a concept, but something which was more than simply a conceptual matter.
I suppose I realised this around the turn of the millennium, when I experienced something akin to a lockdown situation of sorts, albeit for very different reasons. I had relocated to Glasgow around Easter 2000 under difficult personal circumstances. I didn’t really know anyone. I was yet to make friends in my new job there. And I was so fucking broke I could barely afford to eat – a situation not particularly conducive to socialising and building new friendships. A friend I had known in York, who had subsequently moved to Sheffield, introduced me to Hole’s chatroom, and, stuck at home and unable to sleep, I found myself spending my nights online chatting to people from around the world at all hours, at least until, with dial-up Internet costing a penning a minute, I racked up a phone bill I couldn’t pay, and had my phone cut off. Then along came MySpace, and again, the possibilities for communication and collaboration across continents were immediately apparent. People who missed the age of the chatroom and MySpace were perhaps less predisposed to these potentialities, and consequently, the pandemic lockdowns hit them harder: they had to learn these things anew.
Anyway. This single entitled ‘Ghost Highway’, which, their bio tells us, ‘is redolent of Massive Attack and Ennio Morricone’ is the first fruits of their collaboration, ahead of ‘a full album that promises to be a mash-up of cinematic downtempo sounds, Americana, French disco and anything else they can throw into the mix.’
‘Ghost Higheway’ is very much a spacious trip-hop-influenced piece, with haunting vocals and a thick, dubby bass rolling low under a slow, deliberate, nod-along beat. Its magnificence lies in its sparse simplicity, and the fact it’s over almost as soon as it begins, and you find yourself yearning to delve deeper, to keep moving into this atmospheric world they’re presenting… it’s like the opening pages of mysterious, mystical novel, drawing you in and then…
The accompanying video is similarly compelling but without resolution: they describe it as ‘David Lynch-ian’ and explain how it was ‘filmed by Brown on her phone before being edited as psychedelically as possible by Williams.’
That they’ve kept this all in -house and simple and delivered something so compelling, so strong, is testament to their imagination and capacity for innovation, proving just how much can be achieved with minimal tech and over distance, given the drive and determination.
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DALLAS KENT | Crystal Brown (photo by Ian Williams) & Ian Williams (photo by Damien de Blinkk)
Having founded the industrial-electro act genCAB in 2006, David Dutton put the group on hold following the release of their debut album II transMuter two years later. A forward thinking record in the genre, it had blended elements of EBM and synth-pop into song arrangements perfectly suited for aggressive rock.
genCAB eventually returned in 2022 with a long-awaited follow-up entitled ‘Thoughts Beyond Words’, as well as the genre-bending ‘Everything You See Is Mine’ EP. These were promoted on a US tour with Aesthetic Perfection, for whom both Dutton and genCAB drummer Tim Van Horn had spent the intervening years playing live. 2023 saw genCAB sign to Metropolis Records, with the album ‘Signature Flaws’ appearing in the autumn. A meditation on one’s own demise, it introduced elements of shoegaze and post-hardcore to an already dense melting pot of disparate sounds.
‘Let It Rip’ is a new EP that precedes the cryptically entitled album III I II (THIRD EYE GEMINI), due out in late September 2024. Half of the full-length record is a modern day update of the best material contained on their 2008 debut, with the remainder consisting of brand new songs inspired by the re-recordings.
An improvement in the genCAB sound was already apparent via a recent rework of the 2008 track ‘Perish The Thought’ released as a single in 2023, but everything else is also now amped up to 11. Although retaining a raw and fresh feel that is faithful to the original renditions, the songs have been completely restructured and are sung with more confidence and conviction than ever by Dutton.
Buñuel return with Mansuetude, the band’s first release outside of their outlandish trilogy of albums (comprising A Resting Place for Strangers, The Easy Way Out and Killers Like Us). A co-release between SKiN GRAFT and Overdrive, arriving 25th October 2024.
BUÑUEL boasts the singular vocals and razor sharp lyrics of Eugene S. Robinson (ex-Oxbow) and a powerhouse Italian trio comprised of guitarist Xabier Iriondo (Afterhours, A Short Apnea), bassist Andrea Lombardini (The Framers) and drummer Franz Valente (Il Teatro Degli Orrori). Mansuetude was produced by Timo Ellis, and features guests including Jacob Bannon (lead singer of Converge), guitarist Duane Denison (the Jesus Lizard, Tomahawk,The Denison Kimball Trio), vocalist Megan Osztrosits (Couch Slut), cellist Andrea Beninati and David Binney on alto saxophone and vocals.
The music on Mansuetude warps and buckles with complexity, freedom, tenderness and primaeval energy all at once. A prime example is the lead single "Drug Burn," crunchy, melodic and harder than a lot of hardcore. About the track the band comments;
“One of the steadfast rules the Hells Angels used to tout to members, NO DRUG BURNS. Which just goes to show, there really IS honour among, well you know. Following a wayward path to an even more wayward song, BUÑUEL’s rendering of said BURN will make your ears (and eyes, if you’re lucky enough to see the video) burn.”
Listen here:
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The title, Mansuetude – meaning “meekness” or “gentleness” – might seem like a juxtaposition when listening to the record that is, in Eugene’s words, “extreme but articulate”, however the record aims to convey a balancing of different forces and shades of being which make up the human experience. Throughout Mansuetude, Buñuel take every given opportunity to stretch out their musical tendrils towards discomfort, surrealism, and the deconstruction of tradition, as they reach absolute abandon. They go well beyond the realm of noise rock, encompassing many moods from post-hardcore to avant-noise, hard-blues to post-industrial, symphonic to trash metal and even free-jazz.
Drummer Franz comments that “Buñuel is a name that embodies a certain cultural and literary reference, which evokes an entire world. Like his films, our Buñuel is surrealism. We take the listeners into a place that’s suspended between dream and reality.”
“What we’re doing with Buñuel is to carve out a very specific glimpse… partly into hearts of darkness, but more specifically into the depth of our secrets,” says Eugene. “Secrets we keep from each other, ourselves and whatever futures we’ve imagined for ourselves. We are ultimately trying to communicate something direct and deadly about the human condition.”
Buñuel makes music for those of us willing to take a closer, unflinching look at the depths of human instinct, and on Mansuetude the band extend their reach farther than before, creating an album that is akin to a powerful impulse, or perhaps even an exorcism.
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(BUÑUEL, L-R: Franz Valente, Xabier Iriondo, Andrea Lombardini, Eugene S. Robinson | By Annapaola Martin
I’ve been enthusing over Eville for a while now. This is no small thing: in the main, I’m not really big into Nu-Metal. Back in the late 90s, the emergence of Limp Bizkit and KORN didn’t so much leave me cold as cause me to wilt inside, and as time progressed, the emergence of more, ever lamer and more cliché exponents of the genre pushed me deeper into the realms of despondency. Anyone who’s read anything I’ve written over the last decade will know that I’m not one of those middle-aged sad-sacks who bemoans the fact that there hasn’t been any new music worth listening to released since I turned 30. I’m not frozen in time, and I don’t believe that any genre is completely and irredeemably shit. Even Nu-Metal.
Eville are a case in point. One reason Nu-Metal was shit back in the day is because it was so overtly the domain of white blokes. So the prospect of a female-fronted Nu-Metal band changes things for a start, and having seen this ad recently, I have witnessed first-hand their capacity to whip up a frenzy.
And ‘Blood’ sure whips up a frenzy alright. It captures Eville at their absolute best: massive, slugging guitar riffs that punish, and hard, on every level, paired with poppy autotuned vocals and keen, earworm melodies. ‘Blood’ strikes the perfect balance between gut-punching riffage and strong melodic tunage. It does not get better than this, and you really need Eville in your life.
Following hot on the heels of his new album ‘Red Room’ (released in May 2024), industrial rock mainstay Raymond Watts aka PIG has today reissued a fully remastered version of his seminal mid-‘90s album ‘Sinsation’ via
Following hot on the heels of his new album ‘Red Room’ (released in May 2024), industrial rock mainstay Raymond Watts aka PIG has today reissued a fully remastered version of his seminal mid-‘90s album ‘Sinsation’ via Metropolis Records (CD, digital) and Armalyte Industries (deluxe 2xLP vinyl). Out of print for almost three decades, it makes a timely reappearance just ahead of a North American tour.
‘Sinsation’ was originally released in 1995 on Nothing Records, the label established by Nine Inch Nails kingpin Trent Reznor, and not long after PIG had opened for NIN at a number of shows. Nothing was an influential and commercially successful label with a cult underground following that also issued records by Marilyn Manson, Squarepusher, Autechre, Meat Beat Manifesto, Pop Will Eat Itself, Einstürzende Neubauten and Plaid, as well as NIN themselves.
(CD, digital) and Armalyte Industries (deluxe 2xLP vinyl). Out of print for almost three decades, it makes a timely reappearance just ahead of a North American tour.
‘Sinsation’ was originally released in 1995 on Nothing Records, the label established by Nine Inch Nails kingpin Trent Reznor, and not long after PIG had opened for NIN at a number of shows. Nothing was an influential and commercially successful label with a cult underground following that also issued records by Marilyn Manson, Squarepusher, Autechre, Meat Beat Manifesto, Pop Will Eat Itself, Einstürzende Neubauten and Plaid, as well as NIN themselves.
Aural Aggravation 