Posts Tagged ‘Doom’

Zero Swann – Ones Who Love

Posted: 12 April 2026 in Reviews, Albums
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8th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Six months on from Benefactor, and Washington D.C. improvisational psychedelic outfit Zero Swann are back again with Ones Who Love. This marks quite a step up in output following a two-year gap after 2023’s Amon Zonaris.

Once again, it’s a set built around theatrical, gothic vocals, drones and cacophonous percussion, feedback, and more drones, all wrapped in layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of reverb.

On first hearing the album’s first song, ‘Chrisom’, I had to hit the pause button a few times to check there wasn’t some other music playing on one of my open browsers. There wasn’t. One might reasonably draw parallels to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, which to my ear (an ear which has been exposed to one hell of a lot of strange experimental shit) sounds like people playing different tunes in different rooms of the house, with the doors all open while you’re standing in the hallway. But the experience is truly more akin to MySpace circa 2007, when every post and profile would be playing music and you’d spend an age trying to figure what you needed to mute while slowly going mad. The drums don’t seem to be in time with themselves, let alone the abstract instrumentation, and the vocals float around in that sea of reverb as if in another dimension entirely. It’s not only disorientating, but quite quease-inducing.

This is – as anyone familiar with Zero Swann will know – the template for the album. The hectic, multi-layered percussion on ‘White Lips’ splashes around in a swirl of treble, reverb, and phase or flange, while amidst a stuttering bass throb and chaotic mess of noise. This is lo-fi to the max: black metal production values applied to Batcave-era goth with a heavily experimental edge.

It’s all going on with ‘Shrine Slavery’: drum ‘n’ bass beats put through the mangle and a thousand effects are paired with haunting, howling layers of shoegaze guitars, while Jeremy Moore comes on like Michael Gira in his messianic mode circa Children of God, calling the end of days while all burns around him. The title track is a towering, hypnotic monster of sound on sound, and it feels huge, not to mention apocalyptic and terrifying.

The derangement continues on the murky ‘Pig Scalder’ with echo-soaked guitars to the fore – the quintessential US ‘death rock’ sound (something that very much separates the UK and US interpretation of ‘goth’) – but with swirling chaos behind it all. With so much going on, and in all directions all at once, it’s virtually impossible to concentrate on or otherwise pick out the lyrical content, and while this may be detrimental in some respects, the fact of the matter is that this is Zero Swann’s sound – messy, multiplicitous, discontiguous. And it’s best approached by simply letting it all happen, immersing oneself in the mayhem. It’s impossible to pick apart the separate elements – and equally impossible to piece them together.

‘Tidal Skull’ again brings a dingy, doomy, gloomy gothy morass which is hard to penetrate and even harder to decipher and unravel, and ‘Storage Organ’ is a riot of sludgy, sepulchral darkness. Ones Who Love is hard going. And I actually dig it – but it’s one seriously challenging listening experience. The last song, ‘What You Never Wanted’ lurches and lumbers its way through five and a half minutes of sludge that stands practically waist-deep, and you slosh and crawl and trudge your way to the end. There are no short cuts, no easy routes, no alternative directions.

Whichever way you look at it, there’s no other act around which sounds like Zero Swann. On Ones Who Love, Moore goes deep and goes dark. Spectral structures emerge from thick fogs of noise and reverb, very like ruins looming through gloom. Gloom and ruins essentially summarise what Ones Who Love gives us. As was the case with its predecessor, Ones Who Love is not an easy or accessible album – to the extent that it often feels like a test, a challenge: enjoyment and appreciation are not the same thing.

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Teleost – Teleost

Posted: 25 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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22nd March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

After an eon evolving their sound with comparatively little to show in terms of releases, Teleost have really picked up the pace of late: Three Originals was released in January 2025, followed by ATAVISM in December of last year, and here we are barely three months on faced with a new eponymous EP. Clearly, they concentrate their mental energy into the music rather than the naming of their EPs – and rightly so. The title is inconsequential: the music is what this is all about. moreover, what this, and what Teleost are all about, is exploring those dark tones and the ways in which frequencies resonate against one another, particularly at volume.

Live shows – particularly of late – have more than attested to the necessity for volume for Teleost, in the same was as is true for Earth, and Sunn O))). The simple fact is that some sounds, some frequencies, some resonant interplays, simply cannot occur at low volumes. Anyone who suggests that these bands – and Swans and A Place to Bury Strangers, among others – exploit volume gratuitously simply doesn’t understand the way in which vibrations change things. Teleost, however, very much do. And with their ultra-slow doom-drone, this is a band who really go into microcosmic detail when it comes to tonal shifts and reverberations within their great wall of sound.

This – their second EP, and sixth release in all – features three tracks. And once again, epic is the word. The four-and-three-quarter-minute sludgefest that is ‘Palanquin’ feels like a brief bridging piece between the megalithic ten-minute ‘Navigator’ and the eight-minute ‘Standing Stone’. And holy shit, is this heavy.

With Telost, the guitar has always been heavy, thick, grinding, the sound more akin to two guitars – or more – grinding out a speaker-shredding tsunami. But this… this takes it up several notches. It’s not just the guitar sound itself, of course: the production achieves the rare feat of capturing not just the rib-rattling, lung-shredding sound of a duo that take Melvins’ reattenuation of Black Sabbath to a skull-crushing level of pain.

With Teleost, there’s a clear sense of structure, of linear progression, too. ‘Navigator’ starts out gently, a textured hum, a buzzing drone, clean strings strummed but resonating. Low tom beats enter the mix and the build is slow, deliberate. Leo Hancil’s vocals reverberate – detached, a pagan-like incantation low in the mix. The suspense builds. Dissonance chimes, but still we traverse through deep fog and mud-thick tracks. And then at five minutes, it hits. And it hits so hard but so sweetly. The impact is immense. THAT is a riff, and how to land it. It completely knocks the air from your lungs, then proceeds to tear your limbs off, one by one, while shredding your skin with blunt but brutal claws.

How two people can create this organ-bustingly megalithic noise is unfathomable. But they do, time and again, growing ever more immense with each show, and with each recording. Yes, I say it every time, but every time, it’s true: Teleost have transcended to another echelon with this release: denser, heavier, louder, more punishing – and at the same time more immersive and transportative.

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Licorice Chamber – Remnants

Posted: 24 February 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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24th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It may only be February, but 2026 is looking like the year of the long-threatened goth renaissance. It’s been bubbling for a while, with first-wave bands like Red Lorry Yellow Lorry releasing new material for the first time in decades late last year, as well as second wave names such as Corpus Delicti making strong comebacks. And what’s noticeable is that their audiences don’t consist entirely of old bastards who’ve been adherents of the scene since the 80s: on recent ventures to see Corpus Delicti and Skeletal Family – whose current singer, it has to be said, is considerably younger than the rest of the band – I’ve witnessed first-hand a substantial proportion of the audience represented by under thirties, even under twenty-fives and teens – and they’re getting into the dressing up, the hair and makeup, too. Why? A vaguely educated guess based on observation and an A-Level in Sociology taken just over thirty years ago suggests that there are a number of factors involved here: what goes around comes around – this always happens – with an element of kids raiding their parents’ music collections or otherwise becoming nostalgic for the music they heard growing up (thanks to my parents, I have records by Barbara Dixon and Phil Collins, although I drew the trauma line at Steeleye Span and The Bee Gees) – and also the times in which we live. Depression, oppression… post-punk and the substrain that would become goth emerged from pretty bleak times – and we once again find ourselves in bleak times, bleaker, if anything. We no longer live under the shadow of the bomb as we did during the Cold War. Instead, we live in a world at war, a world where AI is taking over in a way that resembles the maddest sci-for dystopia, and where the prospects of work and home ownership for those finishing school and college are nothing short of abysmal.

It’s not all gloom and doom, though, because… no, wait. It is, but Licorice Chamber are coming through on the emerging wave of bleak bands to provide a fitting soundrack to existential mopery.

Licorice Chamber perhaps isn’t the greatest band name ever, but it’s in keeping with the latest influx of goth and goth-adjacent acts like Just Mustard (and also reminds me of Fudge Tunnel), and since band names are inherently stupid by nature if you pause and reflect on it in any depth – dissect any band name and conclude that it’s not at least vaguely stupid, is my challenge – it’s fair to let it ride. After all, it’s the music that matters.

On Remnants, Licorice Chamber serve up three brooding slices of classic contemporary goth which are thematically linked under the banner of the EP’s title, as they explain: “The EP title Remnants suggests aftermath, what survives destruction. Rather than romanticizing despair, the songs feel like they’re exploring what’s left when illusions fall away.”

‘Feign’, the first of these three cuts, is magnificently understated, a mid-tempo song that’s as much about the space between the sound of the instruments as the instruments themselves, and while there’s a heap of reverb around everything, something in the production calls to mind the quiet flatness of The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds. But the backed-off drums and fractal guitars serve to place Layla Reyna’s powerful, emotive vocals to the fore.

Heavy by name and heavy by nature, the second song packs a far greater density, a cinematic rock workout, which builds to a climactic finale and finds Layla floating majestic through a sonic maelstrom.

The final cut, ‘Never the Same’, is the longest of the three, and is a slow-burner rendered more kinetic by some busy drumming moments, and with its picked guitar and dark atmospherics, it finds Licorice Chamber inching into the kind of territory occupied by doom / goth acts like Cold in Berlin and Cwfen – and that’s not simply a case of lumping heavy bands with female vocalists into a bracket together: there’s positive commonality here.

Remnants is dark, but bold, and in its own way, uplifting.

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Listen: ‘Butch’s Guns’ by sunn O)))

Posted: 19 February 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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SUNN O))) share the new track ‘Butch’s Guns,’ another standout from the band’s forthcoming eponymous album. The new song is available today on all streaming services.

Also today, SUNN O))) is announcing new summer headlining shows in the EU and UK beginning Tuesday, June 23rd in Zurich, CH at Rote Fabrik and currently running through Monday, July 6th + Tuesday, July 7th in Berlin, DE for a two-night stand at Silent Green Betonhalle. The tour will include stops in Belgium (Antwerp), the Netherlands (Amsterdam), Germany (Köln), and the UK (Bristol, Brighton, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, and London). Additional live dates to be announced soon.

Tickets for the majority of these June and July shows go on sale Friday, February 20th at 10 am CET. Please find a current list of dates below.

SUNN O))) recently added shows to the band’s upcoming 2026 North American headline tour in support of the album. The tour will now include stops in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, Denver, Boise, Seattle, and Portland (OR). Tickets for the North American shows below are on sale now.

North America, March/April 2026

Mon. Mar. 30 – San Francisco, CA – Regency Ballroom
Tue. Mar. 31 – Los Angeles, CA – The United Theater on Broadway 
Wed. Apr. 01 – Phoenix, AZ – The Van Buren
Fri. Apr. 03 – Dallas, TX – Trees Lounge
Sat. Apr. 04 – Austin, TX – Emo’s
Sun. Apr. 05 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall
Mon. Apr. 06 -  New Orleans, LA – Civic Theatre
Tue. Apr. 07  – Atlanta, GA – The Goat Farm
Thu. Apr. 09 -  Columbus, OH – The Bluestone
Fri. Apr. 10 – Washington, DC – The Lincoln Theatre
Sat.  Apr. 11 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer
Sun. Apr. 12 – New York, NY – The Town Hall
Mon. Apr. 13 – Montreal, QC – Le National
Tue. Apr. 14 – Toronto, ON – 131 McCormack
Thu. Apr. 16 – Chicago, IL – Salt Shed
Sat. Apr. 18 -  Iowa City, IA – Englert Theatre
Sun. Apr. 19 – Omaha, NE – The Waiting Room
Mon. Apr. 20 – Denver, CO – Ogden Theatre
Wed. Apr. 22 – Boise, ID – Shrine Social Club
Fri. Apr. 24 – Seattle, WA – Showbox (So Do)
Sat. Apr. 25 – Portland, OR – Roseland

UK/EU, June/July 2026 – Just Announced

Tue. Jun. 23 – Zurich, CH – Rote Fabrik
Wed. Jun. 24 – Antwerp, BE – Trix
Thu. Jun. 25 – Amsterdam, NL – Paradiso
Fri. Jun. 26 – Koln, DE – Essigfabrik 
Sun. Jun. 28 – Bristol, UK – Prospect Building 
Mon. Jun.  29 – Brighton, UK – Corn Exchange 
Tue. Jun. 30 – Liverpool, UK – The Dome
Wed. Jul. 01 – Leeds, UK -  Project House
Thu. Jul. 02 – Birmingham, UK – 02 Institute
Fri. Jul. 03 – London, UK – Troxy
Mon. Jul. 06 – Berlin, DE – Silent Green Betonhalle
Tue. Jul. 07 – Berlin, DE – Silent Green Betonhalle

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Photo credit: Charles Peterson

Slaughterday – Dread Emperor

Posted: 15 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Testimony Records – 13th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

When I first started Aural Aggravation – kinda by stealth, with no fanfare – back in October 2015, with a review of Philip Jecks’ Cardinal, it was with a view to using the platform to break away from more conventional and comparatively short-form reviews to indulge in more personal, reflective, essay-type analysis. But with a bursting inbox and a desire to provide coverage to as many acts as possible, sometimes it’s not always appropriate to spend hours and column inches pondering the context and the content through a framework that sits between reception theory and gonzo journalism. More to the point, there simply aren’t enough hours.

Slaughterday is an old-school death metal duo, and Dread Emperor is their sixth album. They promise ‘crushing doom-ridden ultra-heavy parts to calculated outbreaks of utter brutality,’ and cite as lyrical inspirations ‘H. P. Lovecraft and other masters of horror’. They go on to add, ‘while sinister things crawl and creep through the duo’s timeless brutality, they have always portrayed them with a sinister flair of their own. These days, the band has repurposed those monstrous creatures as metaphorical ciphers for relevant contemporary topics’.

Titles such as ‘Rapture of Rot’, ‘Necrocide’, ‘Obliteration Crusade’ and ‘Astral Carnage’ speak for themselves, and the ‘crushing’ ‘doomy’ aspects they focus on in their pitch are very much to the fore: ‘Enthroned’ lifts the curtain with some slow, heavyweight riffery, and paves the way for the rabid attack of ‘Obliteration Crusade’.

That bands which blast out frenetic guitar mayhem at a thousand miles an hour with impenetrable growls and howls by way of vocals go to lengths to sell the merits of the lyrical content is something which is a source of vague amusement – I mean, as if you could make out a single word by ear. But it’s beside the point, really: as I’ve touched on before, it’s about the conveyance of sentiment, the implication of meaning.

On Dread Emperor, Slaughterday leap and lurch from bowel-bursting heavyweight sludge-trudge to flamboyant pirouettes on the frets. As they say themselves, they ‘deliver everything that they excel in, which is also precisely what their fans want from the duo’: as such, it’s no criticism to say that Dread Emperor ticks genre boxes, because it’s mission accomplished for the band. And it’s hard to argue otherwise. Dread Emperor delivers riff after riff, drives hard, brings the heavy and snarls, growls and spits its way with gut-churning malevolence from beginning to end.

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Listen: Glory Black by sunn O)))

Posted: 13 January 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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On Friday, April 3rd, 2026, sunn O))) will release their eponymously titled first full-length album for Sub Pop.

sunn O))) was co-produced & mixed by the band and Brad Wood (Hum, Tar, Sunny Day Real Estate, Liz Phair), and was recorded at Bear Creek Studios in Woodinville, Washington, January 2025. You can now listen to the album’s closing track, ‘Glory Black.’

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Framing the album visually are two paintings by the late American artist Mark Rothko – one on the front cover and one on the back cover, with the art reversed for UK & European pressings. And, within the CD and LP package are expansive liner notes by author Robert Macfarlane, whose 2025 novel Is a River Alive? is one of many sources of inspiration for the album. And, illustrations by French artist Elodie Lesourd are also featured on the inner LP sleeves and accompanying album merch.

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sunn O)) will tour in support of the album. Tickets for the below shows will go on sale to the general public on Friday, January 16th at 10am (local).

Wed. Apr. 01 – Phoenix, AZ – The Van Buren
Sat. Apr. 04 – Austin, TX – Emo’s
Sun. Apr. 05 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall
Mon. Apr. 06 – New Orleans, LA – Civic Theatre
Tue. Apr. 07 – Atlanta, GA – The Goat Farm
Thu. Apr. 09 – Columbus, OH – The Bluestone
Sat. Apr. 11 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer
Mon. Apr. 13 – Montreal, QC – Le National
Tue. Apr. 14 – Toronto, ON – 131 McCormack
Thu. Apr. 16 – Chicago, IL – Salt Shed
Sat. Apr. 18 – Iowa City, IA – Englert Theatre
Sun. Apr. 19 – Omaha, NE – The Waiting Room

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Cold in Berlin / Rhombus / Arch Femmesis / Play/Dead / Flowers of Agony – The Fulford Arms, York, 27th December 2025

Posted: 28 December 2025 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

In my workplace, there’s been an email thread circulating with end of year reviews of best and worst gigs etc. It started around the end of November. I had four more shows to go to then, including this one, and you never know if your gig of the year could be a last-minute entry – especially with Cold in Berlin having dropped Wounds mid-November. What with this and Sorrows by Cwfen, it’s been a stellar year for New Heavy Sounds, showcasing some remarkable work by female-fronted bands who really bring the weight.

I’m here first and foremost as a fan tonight: not only hyped by the prospect of seeing Cold in Berlin again for the first time since 2019, but revved by the prospect of Arch Femmesis, who I discovered supporting The Lovely Eggs in May ’22. Their performance struck me and stuck with me, making them an act I vowed to see again whenever the opportunity arose.

Furthermore, this goth Christmas do is a fundraiser for the Sophie Lancaster Foundation. For those unfamiliar, Sophie, aged 20, and her boyfriend were attacked simply for being goths by a bunch of teenage boys, and Sophie would die from her injuries a few days later. It’s one of those things that’s hard to process, and as disparate as the goth / alternative ‘community’ is in such times – and as the range of acts on tonight’s lineup evidences – they prove that there is solidarity among outsiders.

I arrive feeling like I’ve not properly dressed for the occasion – no painted leather jacket, no tassels, no band T-shirt, no winklepickers. I favoured a woollen hat over my Stetson because it’s fucking freezing and I need to cover my ear as well as my hairless head. I console myself with the notion that my resemblance to Andrew Eldritch as he now looks might boost my goth cred. I’m not entirely convinced it does: the place is thick with beards and hair and leather. And I do mean it’s thick… the turnout is impressive for a cold night between Christmas and New Year, a time when a lot of people are away or hibernating or lolling in a festive food coma.

‘We are Flowers of Agony’ announces the guy with glittery makeup and a Siouxsie and the Banshees baseball cap. We? It turns out he has an entire band on his mobile phone, right down to backing vocals. The result is some kind of overwrought synth pop Meatloaf karaoke. Credit where it’s due, it takes some guts to get up there and do that, but… Agony might be a bit harsh, but it was pretty painful.

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Flowers of Agony

Play/Dead are hard to find online amongst the voluminous links to the 80s post-punk act Play Dead, and are very much from the industrial / metal end of the goth spectrum. The singer channels Trent Reznor all the way, and image-wise they’re strong (apart from the lead guitarist, who appears to have just got off work, while shots from previous gigs show him to be suited and booted). The songs are just as strong, and brimming with rage and angst, with programmed drums and sequenced synths interweaving well with the twin-guitar and bass assault. Nihilistic anthem ‘God is Terrorist’ is more Marilyn Manson than Nine Inch Nails, while the penultimate song, ‘Subliminal Messages’ is more Depeche Mode in its template. It’s hard to fault their execution.

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Play/Dead

It’s nigh on impossible to fault Arch Femmesis on any level. The Manchester-based but from Nottingham electro-punk duo can’t be judged by other bands’ standards, because they are something of a unique proposition. Zera Tønin (who featured on ‘Land of the Tyrants’ on the latest album by Benefits) is simultaneously sultry and scary when she’s singing, but sassy and straight-talking between songs, regaling us with details of her menstruation, wind, flatulence and halitosis, and there’s some banter and audience interaction, too. Lyrically, she’s pretty up-front and straightforward, too, and again, not without humour. They’re backed by some pretty hard beats, and by the end of the set they’re pumping hard (the beats, although Zera probably is, too). There’s an element of ‘what have I just witnessed?’ circulating in the post-set buzz, but that’s part of the appeal – that and the fact they were proper bangin’.

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Arch Femmesis

Upbeat trad goths Rhombus have been going since around the turn of the millennium, and have become ubiquitous on the scene during that time, particularly here in Yorkshire. They’ve built quite a following: there are people here tonight who’ve seen them ten, twenty times, and one guy who they hand a certificate for his fiftieth time in attendance. Their formula seems specifically designed for those whose musical credo is ‘I know what I like, and I like what I know’. By way of an example, current single ‘Running From My Shadow’ leans on ‘Walk Away’ by The Sisters of Mercy for intro (that song seems to have become one of the definitive templates for contemporary bands doing the trad goth thing) before going a bit Skeletal Family.

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Rhombus

“Audience… step closer,” instructs bassist / vocalist Edward Grassby. Towering, burly, bearded, behatted, he’s a commanding presence. His addition that the band ‘Won’t come into the crowd, won’t spit beer…’ felt like a rather disparaging dismissal of the previous acts who hadn’t spent beer, but spent considerable time in amongst the punters. And this is where I realise that the band’s personality is a bigger issue than the derivative sound. Well, not the entire band: Lee Talbot’s drumming and Rob Walker’s Simon Hinkler style guitar are outstanding… but Alixandrea Corvyn’s interpretive dance and air drumming detract from her actual singing, and Grassby comes exudes an air of arrogance which far from endearing, and likely a major factor in why I’ve never taken to them. That and the fact they’re called Rhombus. That said, I seem to be in the minority in my view, as there are plenty who are hugely enthusiastic (at least by old goth standards) for them.

Cold in Berlin just keep getting darker and heavier with each release, and tonight’s set draws primarily on the new album, Wounds, and the EP, The Body is the Wound which foreshadowed it – meaning it’s dark and heavy. It’s also absolutely stunning. Maya seems remarkably at ease, and smiles a lot between songs – but during the songs, she emanates a chilling demeanour, a control and intense focus which is utterly petrifying. Often, she ventured out into the crowd, and glides, ghost-like, between the audience members. She’s glacial, while around her, the riffs conjure a devastating maelstrom. This is no better exemplified than when they drop ‘Dream One’: the vocal delivery is icy, stark, the control bordering on psychopathy. The instrumentation is spacious, with air between the suffocating power chords to begin, until everything crashes in and hits with an almost bewildering intensity. There is no ‘White Horse’… but the strength of the nine-song set more than compensates. There isn’t a moment that isn’t like being slammed by a sonic hurricane, and it’s not just because of the pulverising volume.

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Cold in Berlin

Sometimes, you don’t know what you need until you get it. I for one had no idea that what I really needed was a half-tempo rendition of ‘Love Buzz’ to conclude my last outing for beer and live music of 2025, but Cold in Berlin on peak form really outdo themselves: this is absolutely crushing, the slowed-down bass-led riffing so heavy it knocks the air from your lungs. It’s a conclusive pinnacle to a megalithic performance, and the best possible finale to a great night at the end of a great year for live music.

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Cold in Berlin

And to close my last write-up of a live event for the year, a year which has been dominated by Oasis and festivals and immense arena events, I feel compelled to add that having attended a few academy-size events this year, all of the best shows I’ve witnessed – and I’ve been to fifty in all so have enough to benchmark by – the best by far have taken place in sub-500 capacity venues, and there is absolutely no substitute for packing into a tiny place with no barrier and standing close enough to see the whites of their eyes, the sweat beading, the chords played. And tonight encapsulated this perfectly.

Listen: ‘The Raven’ by Indica Blues

Posted: 15 December 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Born in the shadow of Oxford’s dreaming spires and forged in a haze of down-tuned amplifiers, UK heavyweights Indica Blues return in 2026 with their most ambitious and apocalyptic work to date. Their long-awaited new album, Universal Heat Death, will be released on January 31 via digital platforms and CD, marking the band’s first full-length since their critically acclaimed second album We Are Doomed.

To herald the album’s arrival, Indica Blues unveil their new single ‘The Raven’, a towering slab of blues-soaked doom that captures the band at their most urgent and expansive. Driven by crushing riffs, haunting dual-guitar interplay, and a foreboding atmosphere, the track sets the tone for an album obsessed with collapse, consequence, and the slow grind toward oblivion.

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Since forming in 2014, Indica Blues have carved out a formidable reputation as one of the UK’s most compelling psychedelic doom-stoner hybrids, once described as “bong-filling rock that is platinum heavy, but blessed with a melodic sensibility underneath it all.” Their sound, a molten blend of fuzz-drenched blues, doom, sludge, and psychedelic melancholy has earned them devoted fans worldwide and praise from both underground tastemakers and major publications.

Their previous album, We Are Doomed, received 4 stars in Kerrang!, reached No. 4 in the Doom Charts, and proved eerily prophetic: an apocalypse-themed record released just as the first wave of the global pandemic brought the world to a halt.

“We’re looking forward to touring Universal Heat Death*, and hope no cataclysmic world events stop us this time,” laughs bassist Andy Haines.

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Pak40 – Superfortress

Posted: 9 December 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Inverted Grim-Mill Recordings – 4th December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Before we arrive at the present, let’s rewind a bit. Everyone likes some backstory, a hint of prequel, right? So we’re going back to 2018, and the arrival of the Crusts EP by Pak40, a band named after a German 75 millimetre anti-tank gun, and a review which I started by saying that ‘I practically creamed my pants over Pak40’s live show in York, just up the road from my house, a few months back. I didn’t exactly know what to make of them, which was part of the appeal – they didn’t conform to any one style, but they were bloody good.’ 2021 brought the arrival of debut album Bunker, a heavy slugger by any standards.

They’ve always been a band devoted to sonic impact, and since guitarist Leo Hancill paired up with Cat Redfern to form Teleost and then relocated to Glasgow, Pak40 have been resting – but not giving up or growing tame. And more than anything, that time out has been spent in contemplation over intensifying their sound.

It may be that production plays a part, but Superfortress goes far beyond anything previous in terms of density and intensity. This is not to diminish the potent stoner riffery of Bunker, which contained some mammoth tracks with some mammoth riffs, but Superfortress is a major step up. Sure, Bunker was all the bass, but here, they elevate the volume and intensity in a way which replicates the thunderous, ribcage-blasting, ear-flapping force of the live show.

Four years on from Bunker, Superfortress very much solidifies the Sabbath-influenced aspect of their hefty doom / drone sound with the reverb-laden vocals, but also ratchets up the monstrous weight of previous releases by some way.

The first track, the ten-minute megalith that is ‘Old Nomad’ is as heavy as it gets. The drumming is relentless in its weight and thunderous force, but the bass… Hell, the bass. It lands like a double-footed kick to the chest, even through comparatively small speakers, replicating the impact of the live sound on the current tour. ‘Crushing’ may be a cliché but Pak40 deliver a density of sound that just may smash your ribs and smash your lungs. The title track begins tentatively, the riff only forming at first, before the drums and distortion kick in and from then on it’s massive, even before the vocals, bathed in a cavernous reverb arrive. Its low and it’s slow and it’s doomy, but it’s also earthy and rich in that vintage folk horror doom vibe, and it’s the slowed-down Black Sabbath inspired riffing that dominates the third and final cut, the feedback-squalling instrumental ‘Ascend’.

There’s something wonderfully old-school about this – but at the same time, it pushes things further in terms of weight and volume. And in those terms, Superfortress sees Pak40 push those things to an extreme. This is a monster.

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PAK40 / Teleost / ATKRTV – The Fulford Arms, York – 4th December 2025

Posted: 5 December 2025 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

It’s a cold and very wet Thursday night in December. The kind of night that would validate the narrative that music venues go bust because they’re not supported, and people want to see bands they know over local acts and so on – if the place had been quiet. But there’s nothing quiet about tonight., in terms of turnout or decibels. Ok, it’s not rammed, but it’s respectably busy, and as for the volume… These guys take it all the way to eleven.

The promoter’s strategy of booking a local / student / uni band to open up is one that rarely fails, and there’s a significant turnout early doors for ATKRTV. It helps that they’re good, albeit an acquired taste and not your average uni band. Operating in the classic power trio format, their primary inspirations are clearly US noise rock and grunge – there’s a bit of the Jesus Lizard here, a dash of Sonic Youth and Shellac there – as well as UK 90s noise that makes nods to the likes of Fudge Tunnel and Terminal Cheesecake – but there’s a lot going on, with hints of avant jazz in the blend, too. They’re a bit rough round the edges, but there is a musical style which is forgiving of this, and the jagged jarring juxtapositions of squalling guitar work with some meaty bass work evidences a technical ability beneath the surface of the feedback-strewn tempest. And while the banter might need some work, the songs are a glorious angular explosive racket, and they give them a hundred percent. And this is why it’s always worth getting down early doors. Every headliner was a support act once, after all.

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In my recent review of that debut album, Atavism, I commented on how the challenge would be for them to replicate the live sound in the studio. This is because their life sound is simply immense. There really is no other word for it. And this is not volume simply for the sake of it: this is volume as an expression, volume which renders the music physical, volume without which certain frequencies and tonalities, so integral to their sound, would not be achievable. Their performance in this same venue back in February was spellbinding, and I came tonight in the hope of replicating that experience. And oh yes, I did, and then some: Teleost seemed to take things to the next next level tonight.

Theirs is a subtly different take on the whole droning doom / stoner form, incorporating almost folky elements in the way that more recent Earth albums do. And instead of being solely about bludgeoning riffery – and hell, there’s plenty of that – there’s a rare attention to detail, not just in the delicate picking and soft cymbal splashes in the quieter moments, but in the full-spectrum sonic experience they conjure. And yes, conjure is the word: this is a world of magic made with a mystical blend of musicianship, amps, pedals, and something else quite indefinable. The way Leo Hancill uses a standard guitar, played through a substantial but not extravagant pedal set and two amps, to cover the range of both guitar and bass is spectacular in itself, but what really makes their sound unique, and it’s so easy to lose yourself in the timbre and texture, the way the sounds reverberate against one another to create this sensurround experience.

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Teleost

Once again, I find myself truly mesmerised by Cat Redfern’s ultra slow drumming. What’s most remarkable is how effortless she makes it appear. Granted, her sticks are batons, but she is still an immensely hard hitter please with absolute precision. Yet she plays with an order of serenity, her expression calm, almost a smile, although it’s clear that’s behind this is intense concentration, and perhaps an element of telepathy between herself and Leo. Certainly the intuition between pair is remarkable, and no amount of rehearsal alone can achieve this level of tightness. The way they navigate the peaks and troughs, spinning elongated quiet passages, where they reduce everything to a hushed hum and the tinkle of a cymbal before bringing in a cataclysmic riff with pinhead precision is nothing short of phenomenal. And for all the noise, the experience is remarkably calming.

Before Teleost, there was PAK40. But with basis / vocalist Andy Glen now resident in Germany, and Leo Hancill living in Glasgow, activity from this former York duo is now extremely rare. That they’re touring with Teleost, having released a new EP simultaneous with the Teleost album makes economical sense, but also represents a significant feat of co-ordination.

It’s not difficult to identify the origins of Teleost when listening to pack 40. They’re certainly slow and heavy. But their style draws more overtly on the Sabbath-based doom sludge template, and there much more overtly metal. In places, they present a sort of blackened New Age metal hybrid. There’s also something more direct about their drum / bass combination. But oh, that bass. The thick, tearing distortion when the riffs kick in are agonisingly close to brown note territory: you feel your ribs rattle and your skin quivering.

In contrast to Cat Redfern’s zen drumming, Leo drums with his face, and in contrast to Hanclil’s slow nodding guitar style, Andy Glen goes all out with some unrestrained headbanging as he unleashes the most pulverising bass riffs. PAK40 are harder, and more abrasive. And this is why the double-header works: for all of their similarities, the two bands bring different shades of heavy. And they’re both intense, physical forces.

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I babble some shit to people on the way out. I think I got away with it, because everyone is equally dazed. We’ve been blitzed, blown out of our minds and shaken out of our skins tonight by a musical experience that borders on transcendental. It’s a cut above your average wet Thursday night in December, for sure.

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