Posts Tagged ‘dark’

Damage Control & OHMelectronic – Red Lines EP

Posted: 15 September 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Metropolis Records – 11th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Red Lines, the new EP from international electro-industrial group Damage Control – centred around a core quartet of Bill Barsby, Richard Thacker and Alex Wise (all based in Australia), plus Markus App from Germany – and finds them in collaboration with the Canadian duo OHMelectronic.

“‘Red Lines’ is about psychological warfare, the endless cycle of human conflict and the hunger for power that lies in the hearts of men,” says Huxtable of the EP title track. “While the lyrics were inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the same themes haunt America and it’s global conflicts. As tyranny and the fog of war repeats itself through every age, so too does the hope that we learn from our mistakes.”

I only wish I had that same hope, could share that optimism: the trouble is, we never do seem to learn from our mistakes. One might have thought that we – as a species – would have learned from the outcomes of two worlds wars, the second of which involved genocide and nuclear annihilation. Yet somehow, we’re in a place where to suggest that there’s a genocide taking place in Gaza is controversial, and we have world leaders who are so unpredictable that in recent months, I’ve taken to checking news sites on my phone on waking at 5am to make sure the world hasn’t ended. But then, it’s not just world leaders who seem perilously close to the button – because despite myriad dystopian sci-fi works detailing how AI will destroy us, those who run the multi-billion dollar corporations developing it are more interested in next year’s profits than the future of humanity. I say humanity, but something has changed in recent years. A trigger has flipped. Where is the humanity?

Russia had seemingly been biding their time during the pandemic, and pounced on Ukraine the moment restrictions were lifted. But the whole world changed during the pandemic: people emerged from restrictions fired up and angry. The mask – and the gloves – were off. The evidence was plain to see: people were suddenly ok driving aggressively, yelling at random strangers in the street, and being openly racist. Politics turned a new shade of ugly, and while America leads the way there, the rest of the world isn’t far behind, and war is all around us and escalating by the week, to the point that much conflict around the globe goes unreported in Western media. Even the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, have seemingly faded into the background in much of the news media, giving the impression that it’s mundane and life goes on. What the actual fuck happened? Is this really where we are, who we are?

Before we arrive at ‘Red Lines’, the EP’s lead – and title- track, the percussion-driven ‘Manifesto’ pounds in, and thunders and pumps hard under a thick sonic haze. It’s a quintessential techno-electro / industrial cut, which reaches back to the late 80s and early 90s Wax Trax! catalogue for references.

The title track is tight and oppressive, quiet, queasy, dense, grinding bass with serrated edges, and thudding beats are welded together as the backdrop to minimal synths wavering cautiously. The vocal is understated, monotone, but breathy, while reeling off a list of horrors. By the end, the sensation is suffocation, and there is no room, and no air, to breathe. It’s not only Damage Control at their absolute best, but one of the most gripping tracks in the genre in a while. It’s the claustrophobic intensity that makes it.

‘Modernity’ is tense and dense, a pumping hard-edge disco groove, and a snarling response to the to the dark and difficult word in which we find ourselves. It marks a fitting close to a powerful document of these difficult and alienating times.

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Chat Pile – Who Loves The Sun

Posted: 31 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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The Flenser – 4th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Chat Pile have only been around for seven years, but in that time they’ve cemented themselves as among the leading exponents of contemporary noise rock. Timing, when even accidental, counts for so much, though. Their debut EP landed in the spring of 2019, with the follow-up coming towards the end of the year. They were hardly a hit on their local scene, and then there was the pandemic, which did nothing for any band looking to build a fanbase through live shows. They managed to get signed, but it seems that the key element in their favour was the fact that since the pandemic, everything has been utterly fucked. Fucked beyond words, fucked beyond comprehension. And this is why the world has been crying out for horrible, sludgy noise to give a voice or a home to those myriad confused emotions, for a band that speaks both to and for them.

Who Loves The Sun is their third album, and it’s worth stepping back from my review to quote from the bio which accompanies the album, since it provides valuable context and traces the band’s evolution: ‘Whereas their debut album God’s Country depicted a particularly American flavor of dread, and the follow up Cool World showed a cruel planet defined by global systemic violence, Who Loves The Sun now peels back the skin on how a collective indifference for a decaying world defines this new century. Touring off the back of their previous albums in part lent itself a confidence in the universality of their music. Stin comments, “I’ve always felt that Chat Pile is such an American concept thematically, but it seems like that’s not particularly true – people all over the world are resonating with what we have to say.” Spanning imagery of coastlines devouring cities as a result of inaction on climate change, the dread of working dead-end jobs, and the species’ collective submission to data-driven inauthenticity, Who Loves The Sun depicts the common experience of existing in a doom loop which feeds the malaise that permeates all aspects of our lives.’

And yes: these are global issues they tackle here. America might be a bit more fucked than some other places, but ultimately, we’re all fucked (in part because of America, although that’s no fault of these guys).

It’s a murky, rolling drum, bouncing around in a sea of reverb which launches the album, ‘Creature’ lurching in mid-pace with a filthy bass and some sinewy guitar. The atmosphere is tense, the vibe mid-90s gnarly. I’m straight back to Touch ‘n’ Go and underground scuzz, the grainy gritty heft of Tad, Oil Seed Rape, Zoopsia, It’s heavy, alright, but it’s more than that: it’s sweaty, greasy, and it’s intense. The walls move closer, the air becomes denser, and it’s harder to breathe.

Who Loves The Sun isn’t a hooks and choruses album. It’s a thick, treacle-like trudge through a succession of gut-churning riffs. As such, it’s very much the soundtrack to the trawling through doom loops. On the face of things, they don’t sound like a band with massive international appeal, but the same was true of Nirvana and Slipknot. It’s more Bleach than Nervermind, though. The world at large massively underestimates the need to vent complex emotions through difficult, heavy music, and if anything, the last few years have elicited the need for music that’s darker and heavier than ever. It feels like we’re living in the end of times, and we need music that reflects it.

‘Break my face and call me your friend,’ Raygun Busch sings in a cracked, tired voice during a quiet moment on ‘Deep Blue’. Most of the vocals are either screams or otherwise buried amidst the wall of jagged riffery. ‘Same Rules’ starts quiet and dungy, and explodes into a nihilistic roar. Neither are friendly, but both articulate the existence within dark spaces, both internal and external.

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Landing mid-album, ‘Shrine’ is a classic quiet / loud composition , and it captures the grunge feel but with additional metal fury, and a harsh hybridization that blends metal with grunge filth. The same could be said of most of Who Loves The Sun. It’s dark, it’s jarring, and is heavy. It’s bleak and does nothing to entice you out to a brighter space. ‘Influence’ simply becomes more claustrophobic over its four-and-a-half-minute duration as it stomps its concentric circles of anger and anguish. ‘Family Funeral’ strays towards Shellac territory as it builds a bludgeoning wall of noise ahead of closer ‘October all the Time’. This is not an accessible or easy album. But it’s the album we need to express all of the angst that’s pouring in all directions right now. It’s also the answer to how we will get through it all. More big riffs. And more again.

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Perverts In White Shirts – CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories

Posted: 18 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Misanthropic Agenda – 4th September 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

As titles go, this is one of those which is closer to an explanatory essay than a mere title. My last encounter with Perverts In White Shirts was four years ago, on the release of Meaning What Exactly? The tracks were lengthy, but the album was short¸ at least competitively. In contrast, CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories is an absolute monster: making a departure from the four longform pieces on Meaning What Exactly? presents twenty-eight individual pieces which find Nathalie Dreier and Dave Phillips plunge into some particularly heavy territory, and not without personal weight, either. I shall quote from the accompanying notes:

Rooted in Nathalie’s isolated upbringing in the controversial Children of God cult, the album draws on fragments of this group’s music, alongside songs and texts from other fanatic movements and gurus. Working with this source material, the anarchic, tongue-in-cheek

Perverts in White Shirts transmogrify, decontextualize, and reimagine melodies and words previously steeped in ideology, isolation, and indoctrination.

Before I start, I would like you to consider the time investment that reviewing an album that’s some two hours long demands, particularly when the final track runs for nearly half an hour. And from the outset, it’s a challenging work. ‘Truth’ warps and twists, and while ‘Come to Mommmy’ is, on the surface, a work of slow, psychedelic folk, it soon becomes apparent that this is the sound of dysfunction, and as we’re carried on through the album, the warped weirdness of the CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories reveals itself.

They describe the album as ‘a two-hour cringe-pop journey of disarming, catchy tunes’.

It’s not. It is two hours long, but it’s more a hybrid of dark ambience, samplism, and William Burroughs-style audio cut-ups. And it’s a headfuck. No, it’s more than that. In places, it’s not just disorientating, but nausea-inducing. It sounds, and feels, deeply wrong, and no more so than when it’s at its poppiest, its mellowest, its most accessible. Something at the heart of this album is deeply disturbing, in the horror movie sense.

Shouting and chanting and heavy reverb collide with ominous, tingling electronica, and dolorous low-end bass drones which border on dungeon synth. ‘Love is the Only Weapon’ is exemplary, and deeply uncomfortable. ‘dedication to the tackling of the beast’ pitches a processed, almost robotic vocal, the words abrim with religious connotations, against a low rumbling electronic bass.

‘Never Forever’ is stark and sparse, almost dubby, a work of minimal dance even, but there are horror movie hints to the vocals which reverberate dissonantly, hauntingly, around the rattling beats and slow, exploratory bass, which resonates… and then out of nowhere, the half-minute long ‘The Answer’ explodes in an industrial blast which is nothing short of explosive. In contrast, ‘A Change’ is a low-tempo crawler that’s rich in atmosphere, and positively eerie, its whispered vocal bordering on the subliminal. Against this is the euphoric ‘Love’. But that euphoria feels like the result of manipulation, and not because of the power of the suggestion from the notes. Listening to the warping, wefting, twisting otherness of CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories is an uncomfortable experience, which has nothing to do with spirituality and everything to do with the fact that humans are fucking weird. Apart from in Pet Sematary, how many scary hauntings can you list from other species? Where are all the demonic cats, the spirit dogs and rabbits? Brion Gysin said that ‘man is a bad animal’, and it’s hard to argue.

Similarly, CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories is a horrible album. It trawls through terrain that’s unplotted, and doesn’t stop at the waymarkers where there are, well, anything. The duration is a slog. You crawl your way to the end and just want to lie down. Sure, it’s psychedelic, but mostly it’s torture.

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machiner – motion waves

Posted: 12 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Butterfly Effect Records – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s always the north, isn’t it? Sure, The Cure and Bauhaus and Siouxsie all originated down south, but it’s always been the North of England that’s been the true heartland of all things dark and gritty, and, well, goth. Reading – somewhat belatedly – Lol Tolhurst’s roundly-lauded tome on the topic, one thing that shines through is his being struck by the north / south divide, and how places like Manchester in the late 70s displayed a far more pronounced level of deprivation. It is, indeed, grim up north, and the reason that Leeds was the true spawning ground of the goth scene in the early 80s is in many ways self-evident.

History has a habit of repeating itself, and for all the talk of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ a few years back, it’s still grim up north, and there are numerous parallels to the late 70s and early 80s when it comes to life in England post-Brexit.

machiner list among their influences Nine Inch Nails, New Order and Depeche Mode, and state that their objective is to ‘transform emotional vulnerability into something expansive and cinematic’. And they’re from Hartlepool in County Durham. While for some, County Durham will likely connote the cathedral, the university, and cobbled streets of the city itself, but beyond this, the once industrial county, where mining was its primary source of employment, there is a very different, and far less idyllic picture. And its in this context that we come to machiner, a band who balance elegance and a sense of the epic in what one might call the classical sense, with the dinge and deprivation of much of the region.

Over the course of the eight songs on motion waves, machiner weave some deftly-crafted slices of expansive, dreamy alternative rock, the soaring guitars interlaced with layers of synth, and while the results are neither overtly dark or heavy, there are undercurrents of brooding tension. And what’s more, the melodic, cinematic nature of the music makes for an accessible vehicle for altogether bleaker lyrics. Take these lines from ‘ivory skies’, for example:

low life in the hall outside my door

and a girl cries in the bedroom just below

last night I heard her head crack off the wall

then a silence like I’ve never heard before

well this is England…this is now

And sadly, this is life now. By way of a brief detour, but for necessary context, it’s a grim statistic that instances of domestic violence spike when there is international football being played. Womensaid quote research which found that cases of domestic abuse increased by 38% when England lost a match and 26% when they won or drew. The response of the Reform party – who run Durham County Council – was to post a video cheering England on to prevent domestic violence. This is England, and this is now. And these are shit times.

The seven-minute ‘dark age’ is a magnificently poised, almost prog-leaning composition, and the piano-led ‘the sound of disappearing’ rolls past on a soft drift which is not only gentle, but truly pretty. And herein we arrive at the essence of machiner: as much as they detail the grimy, gritty realities, they’re looking towards escape routes and better futures. motion waves is the sound of a way out of a thorny thicket. ‘iceburn’ in particular soars skywards, and the easy ‘cast me in amber’ – which again extends to almost six and a half minutes – brings a strong New Order vibe, and pairs it with some nagging electronica laced with heavy hints of shoegaze: in short, it’s perhaps the ultimate assimilation of the elements which make up the textured sonic amalgamation of machiner’s dynamic style.

‘ever over’, which reminds very much of Oceansize, brings things to a strong and solid conclusion, and it makes for a dextrous conclusion to a magnificent album, one which brims with texture, dynamic energy, and a sense of movement. Bold… and beautiful.

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tejploopare – gråkråka

Posted: 7 August 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

How do I know it’s Bandcamp Friday? Is it because I’ve received in the region of fifty emails by midday for new releases? Well, yes, there is that. But ultimately, it’s the fact that there’s a new release on Swedish microlabel dret skivor. This month’s is a radio-friendly unit shifter available to download and as a CD in a limited edition of two copies.

With uncharacteristically voluble notes accompanying it, we find the work described as ‘A chance meeting between winged and un-winged and captured hooded crow monologue.’ It would be impossible not to infer some element of reference to the 1979 debut album by Nurse With Wound, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, which in turn was taken from Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror, a work which sits within the broader oeuvre of Surrealism. All of this serves to present a comprehensible intertext given what dret skivor and its artists are all about – which, to boil it down to less academic terms, is ‘weird shit’.

Tejploopare add, ‘We thank our avian masters for the source material and Remo de Vico for his programming skills in creating the time-stretcher Loom that has been used in the creation of this piece’.

But if you’re expecting birdsong, or even something inspired by Hitchcock’s The Birds, think again. Gråkråka is just one fifteen-minute track which, regardless of its source material, manifests as one extended echo-heavy swirling drone, as much akin to the sound of a giant millstone grinding against another from the depths of a huge cavern, or the sound of a million bats taking flight from a cave with the audio slowed by maybe three hundred percent. Admittedly, I’ve never really listened to crows in conversation, and was unaware – or had forgotten – that they have the capacity to mimic the sounds of other birds, animals, and machinery’, according to learnbirdwatching.com. While the veracity of this is debatable, it is understood and accepted that crows are capable of advanced and highly sophisticated communication, using a range of techniques.

But let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and take on face value that gråkråka is simply the sound of crows, manipulated to a greater or lesser extent to forge a churning, whirring, multi-textural sonic experience. It’s not a drone per se, so much as a rumbling eddy, an endless whistle, and a slow grind, all at once, and these all shift around in tone and the level to which they sit to the fore over the track’s duration. At times, the upper buzzes and hums, the higher frequency fizz, makes my inner ears itchy, and make me feel a palpable relief that I don’t suffer tinnitus, but am coming to the opinion that perhaps a certain level of hearing loss may not be such a bad thing for the avoidance of sonic torture at certain frequencies. If only I hadn’t been so bloody sensible wearing earplugs to gigs this last twenty years, eh?

Gråkråka is not a work of harsh noise: it’s not even overtly noisy. But it is one of those aural explorations which is designed to inflict discomfort. And in that, it succeeds. By the mid-point, it’s attained a quire specific level of torturousness, and while it does pull back from this for a time, what replaces that scouring blast is a quivering ominous rumble, which again swells and replicates the sensation of some unseen fear growing closer: put another way, it’s the soundtrack to a nightmare, to a horror without words or boldly manifestation, simply a psychological attack which goes on, and on, twisting to a trebly roar akin to a demon rasping suicidal ideations into your ear during the final five minutes.

It’s not actually a criticism when I express the view that gråkråka feels like a long fifteen minutes. It’s not intended to be one of those soft ambient drifts where half an hour simply evaporates. Quite the opposite: this is an album that’s raison d’aitre is to seed discomfort and make you squirm from beginning to end. And it does.

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Lawrence English – The Rest Is My Ghost

Posted: 30 July 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 7th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Lawrence English is an artist who invariably creates works imbued with insight and purpose, with concept and theoretical grounding in the contemplative, academic sense. I had the good fortune to interview him by email some years ago, which proved to be not only illuminating, but exhilarating on a personal level when he wrote insightfully and knowledgeably of William S. Burroughs and the cut-up technique. I very much get the impression he spends as much time considering his work as he does creating it, in the physical sense.

That interview, sadly, is long gone, along with the site which published it. This is true of many interviews, reviews, and indeed, works of fiction which I had published online through the years, and I’m not sure they exist on hard drives anymore either so far down the line. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, we were sold the dream that The Internet would be the archive of everything. The idea went that if it existed, however niche, you could find it online, and this was essentially the precis for Warren Ellis’ 2007 novel Crooked Little Vein. This was also the time of MySpace and what felt like a new world, full of potential. And then the corporations took over and it all turned to shit. I daresay others have a different perspective, but this is mine. And of course, Ellis turned out to be another sleazy male shitbag and overnight saw his outstanding career sunk by his own actions. But I miss those days when the Internet was exciting, anarchic, and not dominated by AI and bots or riven with social and political engineering and so on.

And this is where we arrive at The Rest Is My Ghost, and Lawrence’s notes on the album:

‘Nostalgia is not an ideology, though in this moment, we could be mistaken for thinking it might be just that. Over the past years, the idea of nostalgia has been filtered through various political and technological lenses and has become a tool used for forgetting, rather than remembering. Instead of embracing histories’ complexities and inconsistencies, this version of nostalgia seeks only singular recollection. This contemporary phenomenon of nostalgia has become a methodology at best, and a weapon at worst, used to erode the past and project forward a collapsed and unimaginably sanitised version of things, places, and ways of being from former times. It’s this projection that sees it playing a mounting role in a social pathology associated with reducing the imagined possibilities of future.

‘The Rest Is My Ghost is a record that interrogates the manifestations of this reductive futuring and celebrates those that have tried (and failed), and those who continue to push back against decayed and revisionist positions. It’s a record that considers the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures.’

These observations are on point. The far-right parties in the UK – in particular Reform and its adherents are largely basing their campaigns on nostalgia. But not even real nostalgia. They hark back go a golden age that never was with dewy-eyed yearning for a completely glossed reimagining of the 1950s, whereby kids cycled to school down cobbled streets, and bidding the milkman, who is whistling cheerily, a good morning, and dad does off to work in his tweed tie while mum goes to the village store and buys freshly baked bread and eggs laid on the local farm. And NONE OF THIS HAPPENED. This is probably why the Facebook pages in support of Nigel Farage and espousing this worldview are bursting with bollocks AI mages of London busses and phone boxes and cardboard cutout people.

We still had rationing until 1954, some nine years after the second world war ended – although by this time, we were living in the grip of the Cold War and fear of nuclear annihilation. A golden age indeed.

On The Rest Is My Ghost, Lawrence English conjures many rich, immersive atmospheres, many of which evoke nostalgic echoes of myriad shades. ‘大’ opens the album with a crashing gong and eerie wraiths and swirling eddies of sound which slowly give way to tectonic crashes and earth-shattering bursts of sound which connote a collapse of civilisation, and, indeed, the planet. It’s heavy, and it’s hard to breathe while surrounded by this rib-crushing, oxygen-bereft swirl of sound.

As much as ‘Acid Nostalgia’ makes an obvious nod to a particular moment in time, there is both humour and serious comment to be unravelled here. It’s something I noticed in my thirties: peers would bemoan how there had been no decent music released since they were twenty-one or so. This was patently untrue: what they were actually saying is that they switched off after they left college or university and got jobs, started families, and disengaged. Their rave days, their festival days, were their life pinnacle. They associated these experiences of their youth with freedom and a lack of responsibility, and found themselves unable to separate their ageing and becoming entrenched in adulthood, the 9-5 and all that shit, with the times themselves.

There’s no escaping or denying that things have a unique buzz when they’re new, and in your teens the senses are heightened, and you can spend the rest of your life failing to recapture that initial rush. But some of these sad fucks… it’s like their lives ended at eighteen or so, and by the time they hit thirty they’re embittered.

Echoes and layers and dark ambient forced define The Rest Is My Ghost. ‘Sodium Vapour Halo’ (remember when street lights weren’t white LEDs? Remember the sodium haze?) presents a howling wall of sound, a sound that screams anxiety, that swirls all around and grips your very being and shakes it. Ah, ‘Aerial Cable’… it’s a subtler, but no less wry commentary which stands alongside South Park’s ‘Member Berries’ episode. Nostalgia is big business, but one which very much traps people into an idealised misremembrance of the past – and keep them buying anniversary reissues of the albums they had on tape or whatever when they were in school.

By the time we arrive at ‘Hack’, we find ourselves worn out and exhausted as we trudge through drifting sand dunes of sound.

The Rest Is My Ghost is not a representation of the all-pervasive nostalgia trip that keeps the people docile – or angry, as they rage about wanting their country back, idealising a time before immigrants took over (which would, of course, predate the Roman Empire). As English positions it, it’s an interrogation – and in intense one, which responds to the ugly side of the wave of nostalgia which is sweeping through contemporary culture. It also feels like a response, and one which doesn’t shy from confrontation. While so much of this nostalgia appears to stem not so much from a love of the part but a fear of the future, so The Rest Is My Ghost encapsulates a certain sense of anxiety over the prospect that we fail to make progress in a meaningful and constructive way. This is a dark album for dark times. Without words, The Rest Is My Ghost not only conveys so much, but provokes so much thought and speaks on so many levels, making it an essential work.

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Watch: ‘Enough’ by Emma Ruth Rundle

Posted: 25 July 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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‘Enough’ is the scathing new track to be taken from Emma Ruth Rundle’s These Killing Times. The album will be released via her own imprint Errant Child on 18th September.

Clocking in at 6 minutes and 29 seconds, ‘Enough’ serves as a reminder of how Emma Ruth Rundle uniquely fuses gentleness and intensity. Opening with a hypnotic drum rhythm (courtesy of Jess Gowrie, drummer for Chelsea Wolfe and Mrs Piss), the single is driven by a deep-toned acoustic guitar riff that nonetheless offers a sense of calm. A distinct note of optimism emerges the moment the iconic singer’s voice enters—a sentiment that swells during the choruses, which grow increasingly impassioned with each repetition, ultimately building to a crushing heaviness in a climax tormented by Patrick Shiroishi’s saxophone. It is a track that offers comfort, even as its message proves scathing. Emma elaborates:

“‘Enough’ is inspired by the ‘Man Who Sold The World’ – and in a retelling of the story of Elijah, we imagine him as an Elon Musk type figure – we ask – is not the whole world enough? We ask the many gods to unleash vengeance and carry this man away into the angry sky – piece by piece  – this song is a reflection of the times we live in and is a vision for the dispensation of the billionaire class. The world belongs to all beings."

Conceived by Emma in collaboration with artists Mason Rose and Blake Armstrong, and edited by Mitch Wells, the music video for ‘Enough’ showcases a gothic theatricality that is sure to pique curiosity. Almost as if Nosferatu had landed in the world of legendary puppeteer Jim Henson—a major inspiration for the visual universe of These Killing Times — the video depicts the singer haunted by a creature known as ‘The Companion’. The video’s atmosphere, at once romantic and dark, is further heightened by a series of shots that look for all the world like stop-motion animation.

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These Killing Times is electrifying, emotional and charged with anti-patriarchal feminist rage. The forthcoming studio album from the multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and multi-disciplinary artist is a reactive anthology, bristling, full of life and full of resistance.

Although this new album possesses a spirit of defiance, it retains the tenderness, rawness and vulnerability that saw her previous globally acclaimed full-length, Engine of Hell (2021), resonate with so many listeners.

These Killing Times returns to a full-band set up for a fuller sound, a more sonically powerful accompaniment to her now more direct vocal style. The album features drummer Jess Gowrie (Chelsea Wolfe, Mrs. Piss), long-time friend and collaborator Troy Zeigler, Patrick Shiroishi, Nick Reinhart (Tera Melos), Gina Gleason (Baroness), Marissa Nadler, Lukas Frank (Storefront Church) and Amelia Baker (Cinder Well). The instrumentation is brighter and more urgent than ever before, lending a fascinating magnetism to Emma’s music which feels fresh and new.

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Photo credit: Mason Rose

Old Corpse Road / Miško Boba / Evil Dungeon Crawler / Aubzagl – The Fulford Arms, York, 5th July 2026

Posted: 6 July 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Like many places, York may have lost a fair few venues through the years, but its live music scene is positively buzzing right now – especially when it comes to alternative music. And so it is that today sees day three of the tenth annual Swinefest – ostensibly a punk festival, but a broad church which offers a celebration of all kinds of weird, even down to The Masochists playing a set of covers of Rudimentary Peni songs – on Millennium Fields in the afternoon, while in the evening The Fulford Arms promises a smorgasbord of the darkest, most extreme metal. My daughter and I swing by the Fields for a bit in the afternoon, passing The Dark Horse coffee shop which has a (very loud) acoustic performer playing outside on the way, and catch The Sex Cripples’ set before hayfever drives us home. And then the evening, once the pollen has descended, I’m able to venture out safely without wanting to tear my eyes from their sockets. It’s bliss. Entering the dark venue, already murky with smoke, I find myself immediately at ease, and a pint of Vocation Heart & Soul is a winner.

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The Sex Cripples (Because I have to document every act I see, regardless)

I’m here first and foremost for Miško Boba, a band so powerful live they’re probably addictive, but The Fully has a record of hosting some quality metal gigs, and this one, curated by Steelheart Promotions, proves to be one of them.

Oftentimes, black metal can be a bit hit and miss, and in particular the openers can be a bit rough and ready, but while Leeds’ Aubzagl – purveyors of ‘antifascist blackened metal’ may not quite have their image down, but their sound is definitely there, with their twin vocals –guttural growling from the guy who also plays keyboards, a higher, screaming howl from the flame-haired, mask-wearing bassist/lead vocal who’s centre stage, and quite a presence. One of the guitarists is wearing a PWEI T-shirt, which seems a bit incongruous, but apart from the aforementioned bassist, they’re all in shorts and T-shirts and thrash hard. It’s a meaty racket alright. There’s a cover towards the end of the set which they say is a 90s song that influenced them, and it takes me a bit to recognise that it’s an adaptation of Nirvana’s ‘Tourettes’. They play hard, and fast. Very fast, and have songs about killing nazis and hating billionaires. Easy targets, but YES! With 5-string bass and 7-string guitar, they’ve got density. They call up their former bassist, Luke, whose birthday it is (he’s defected to Miško Boba, but all seems amicable) , to join them, and as a 6-piece they’re absolutely phenomenal as they bring the set to a ferocious finale.

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Aubzagl

Evil Dungeon Crawler is a name that sounds like it came from a black metal band name generator, but what does it matter when the logo is a classic spiky pile of sticks? They’re committed to the look alright, with all the hair, spikes and the most elaborate face paint, but how to they sound? Dark and deranged, and as if dragged from flaming purgatorial pits. Their set is a brutal, fierce, and relentlessly hellish half hour, delivered with captivating showmanship, through a whorl or twirling hair. So much hair… Would see again.

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Evil Dungeon Crawler

There’s perhaps a bit much bass and not quite enough guitar to begin with, but Miško Boba are as fierce as ever. And as the set progressed, so the sound improved, and the detail of the interplay between the two guitars and the folkier aspects of their compositions came through. The atmospheric, melodic passages render the returning riffs even more powerful. And perhaps around halfway through he set, I realise just how devastatingly loud they are. And I say that having seen Sunn O))) earlier in the week. It’s a different kind of volume intensity, of course, and with more treble, but in a low-ceilinged small venue, their sonic impact is significant.

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Miško Boba

There’s something ancient and earthy ingrained within their sound which sets them apart. It’s as though the black metal ferocity systems from prehistory, something primal, and every song manifests as a purging from the pain of past lives. They close the set with a new song about a massacre which took place outside Lithuanian capital. It’s the heaviest thing yet. Holy shit. If it’s in any way representative of the forthcoming album, then their best is very much yet to come.

Old Corpse Road boast two guitarists, one of whom looks like Uncle Fester exhumed, a bassist who resembles Giant Haystacks – also exhumed – and a hooded singer who doesn’t look too menacing despite the corpse paint. But shit, they’re heavy from the first bar. Sonically, it doesn’t get much darker or more black metal than this.

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OId Corpse Road

Theirs it truly the sound of souls shrieking as they incinerate in hell. It hurts. The droning, sepulchral synths add layers of menace to a sonic assault which is relentless in its punishing ferocity. My notes are scant because I’m completely enthralled. When done half-arsed, black metal can be lame cosplay, but at its best, it’s nothing short of terrifying and utterly ruinous. Old Corpse Road are firmly in the latter category, and tonight’s set is gloriously brutal.

TATV GRAL – Treachery EP

Posted: 5 July 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

Active since the mid-nineties, Chicago’s TATV GRAL (tätü ’gräl) are an industrial-leaning dark synth act, the vehicle of Allen Addington, and one very much represents the seedy, sleazier, grindier aspect of the scene. As they put it, ‘Forged in shadow, shaped by archetypal psychology, the gay male gaze, and the ritual power of containment’, and the songs in their catalogue are abrim with hints of fleshly sensuousness and dark desires pitched alongside pulsating beats.

The Treachery EP offers four versions of ‘Treachery’ – the original, plus remixes by DSTR (Daniel Myer of Haujobb), Tweaker (Chris Vrenna of NIN), and fellow Chicago industrial outfit [melter]. These are some names to be reckoned with, making this a significant release for TATV GRAL, making several steps up the ladder, so to speak. And it flexes some muscles, too.

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In terms of context, there’s a fair bit to this, from Hellenistic astrology to the psychology of James Hillman, we learn that ‘the song places these symbolic forces in dialogue with Coil’s ritual electronics, Kenneth Anger’s astrologically timed film work, and the Jungian tradition that informs them.’ Thankfully, knowledge of all of this is not a requirement when it comes to appreciating the song or the EP. But add to this the fact that Addington requested the project’s collaborators to not simply remix the track, but to draw out an emotional aspect not present – or at least, not explicitly conveyed – in the original, and it’s yielded some interesting results, which take it beyond the standard remix EP – thankfully. It’s a format that tends to feel lazy, delegating creative responsibility to others and milking material for all its worth and more, and more often than not I find I’m bored shitless of hearing the same song back to back to back with bigger beats or more bass or synth and stretched out over double the duration of the original… after Nine Inch Nails released Fixed, the remix EP had reached not only its peak, but its limit, as far as I’m concerned.

There are, of course, some exceptions, and this is one of them.

In its initial iteration, ‘Treachery’ grinds along, breathy, suggestive, with a pumping groove and with hints of DAF and Man 2 Man and Depeche Mode circa Black Celebration in the mix, and as when listening to ‘Stripped’, it’s hard to decide of you need a wank or a shower most.

The DSTR Remix is the longest of the three, adding almost a whole minute to the running time, and accentuating the heavy grinding bass synth and altering the vocals by downtuning them. The effect is weird, filthy, and vaguely menacing. The [melter] mix is all about the stomping beat and feels more aggressive, sweatier, more muscle-flexing. The arrival of the Tweaker Remix is well-timed, being altogether sparser, more minimal, and more expansive, picking apart the components and introducing significant space. You might say it’s less techno and more industrial, but whatever you say, it’s a dramatic shift in interpretation, and it works well.

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The March Violets / Heathen Apostles / Mouth Ulcers – The Warehouse, Leeds, 3rd June 2026

Posted: 4 July 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

The March Violets’ career path has followed an unusual trajectory – as is perhaps fitting for a band which always stood apart, even from the scene it helped create. A band who’d disbanded before I even discovered them, they’ve released more new material since their 2007 reunion than in the whole of their initial career. Rosie has survived throat cancer, which stalled post-reunion activity for a while, and co-founder Si Denbigh was forced to depart following a stroke some years ago. But they’re still here, and in their current three-piece iteration, they’re touring as hard now, almost forty-five years since their inception, as ever, and they’re very much an active, still-writing band.

But this current tour is an unashamed nostalgia fest, playing the entirety of their 1984 compilation Natural History, which gathered (most of) their early single releases, and which was given a reissue for Record Store Day this year – hence the ‘(Un)Natural History Tour’ with all of the songs, but not in the same order. Tonight is particularly special, being a homecoming show, and they’ve cued up some hotly-tipped support acts for the occasion.

Up first, Mouth Ulcers – who have been booked to support none other than The Mission for one of their four nights at The O2 Forum in Kentish Town, London, marking the 40th anniversary of God’s Own Medicine. Wayne Hussey recently described them as ‘definitely the real-deal and a band that are deservedly going places’. It’s hard to argue. The singer, Zak, looks a bit Nick Cave in a rather baggy suit with bootlace tie, and as a band, they cohere as well visually as they do sonically, serving up a set of A1 shoegaze goth. Brittle, atmospheric guitars interweave… and that bass! Bassist Jamie-Lee is static, almost mannequin like, and knocks out the most perfect metronomic groove in the vein of Craig Adams era Sisters with complete nonchalance. Propelled by some supremely crisp drumming, they’re an absolute rush, and a complete revelation.

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Mouth Ulcers

Heathen Apostles make for a mess obvious choice for the bill, but prove to be an inspired one. They described themselves as Western Gothic, or Gothic Western, and play lively and dramatic folk, which is at times dark, with a cracked old double bass with loads of gaffer tape and a fiddler who plays hard, gnashing his teeth when it gets intense. Guitarist Chopper Franklin has steel-toed boots with the metal on the outside, and Mather Louth (vocals / guitar / frame drum. Theirs is quite a long set, but they have hauled themselves all the way from LA, and the fact they’ve toured recently with Fields of the Nephilim speaks not only of their quality, but how they’ve been embraced by the UK goth scene.

“Fuck Donald Trump… We’re not that kind of a roots band,” Louth tells us. It’s a sign of the times that nearly every band over from the US feels the need to make clear that they don’t support the regime of the orange fascist, but it’s always reassuring to hear it.

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Heathen Apostles

Protest song ‘No Peace’, which they say is being censored by online platforms – is a clear standout. ‘Without a Trace’ is introduced as a gothabilly hoedown, and it’s hard to resist the urge to get some air at this point, but I stick around, and ‘The Reckoning’ makes for a rousing finale. They’re not my kind of thing per se, but it’s hard to fault the energy and the showmanship.

The mighty March Violets are straight in with ‘Long Pig’, followed by ‘Religious as Hell’, which has only made the setlist a handful of times since 2007. To say it’s a joy to hear it is an understatement: as the first track off their first EP, it exemplifies The Violets’ most primitive, angular post-punk roots, with its stuttering drum machine and squalling guitar. ‘Hammer the Nail’ is one of only two later songs in the set, meaning we get to revisit a wealth of material which hasn’t been aired live in donkeys. ‘Radiant Boys’ hasn’t made the setlist for a couple of years, and ‘Undertow’ has barely made the cut in the last decade, but tonight, they sound fresh and punchy.

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The March Violets

On stage, they’ve stripped the setup right back, the guitar and bass going straight into the PA via DI, meaning that not only are there no drums, but no amps, and there’s no smoke and the lighting is pretty straightforward, too. This bareness only heightens the sense of proximity, and there are some nice exchanges with the audience. It also means that with none of the usual distractions, I find I watch and listen more closely, and am reminded just how unconventional their song structures are, as well as how unique Tom Ashton’s approach to guitar playing is, not only with the use of harmonics, but also the way he navigates the fretboard. And as on last year’s tour, he looks to be so happy to be up there – and the same is true of the rest of the band, for that matter. Rosie is on top form, super-sprightly and in fine voice, and the sense of occasion – playing these early songs in the very place where it all started – isn’t lost on her.

The set closes with ‘Snake Dance’ – because there it simply has to – and they encore with ‘Walk into the Sun’, the only other post-Natural History song of the set. It’s a solid pop tune (that’s now fully forty years old), and a supremely upbeat way to finish the night. And a great night it was at that.

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