Posts Tagged ‘Industrial’

8th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s both an understatement and perhaps a needlessly obvious thing to remark that there is an overwhelming amount of new music around right now. And so it’s aggravating, not to mention disappointing, to hear people of a certain age – and I’m talking the over 35s here, but it becomes considerably more pronounced as the demographic slides up the scale – bemoaning that there’s no decent music being released anymore. No, that is not the problem. In fact, it’s simply not true, on any level. The problem is that there is so much new music that, depending on your tastes and preferences, finding the wheat among the chaff can be like finding a needle in a haystack, if we’re going to push some cliches. The cliches are relevant, because even among the ‘good’ music, stylistically, at least, a lot of what’s out there is a rehashing of other stuff, and finding anything that feels new or different is rare.

Bellhead are doing something different. Sure, there are elements of post-punk, goth, noise-rock, but there’s nothing ‘template’ or ‘by numbers’ on display here. The fact they don’t have a conventional musical lineup is a key factor, of course: two basses, a drum machine, and no guitar.

The title track is sparse at first, there’s reverb lead bass played high on the neck ringing out and taking the job of a lead guitar, over a grimy, low-slung low-end bass, with some menacing, distorted vocals snarling low and dark. It’s more atmospheric than industrial, at least in the verses – twisty, grindy, reminiscent of PIG with its breaking out into a roaring anthemic chorus – but that chorus sounds like UK goth circa ’86 when it collided with hard rock. It’s huge, it’s hooky, and it’s strong.

‘Heart Shaped Hole’ is hard and heavy, aggressive but with some well-conceived texture and a production that brings everything to the fore simultaneously, amplifying the intensity. The sound is dense, and having bemoaned how a few bands have suffered from their drum machines being too low in the mix during live performances of late, Bellhead utilize theirs to full effect, pitching the beats well up in the mix. It smacks you right in the face and lends the songs an essential muscularity, providing a relentless driving force to which the bass welds itself. The rhythm section is the pulsating heart of any band: with Bellhead, with everything being the rhythm section, more or less, the pulsations aren’t just strong – this is a relentless blast of bass and beats. And there is not much let-up, either. ‘Shutters + Stutters’ is gritty and dark but with a serrated pop edge.

The piano intro to ‘No Dead Horses’ is something of a false lull, because it soon twists and snarls and sneers, emanating menace and sleaze while crunching overdrive grinds over a loping rhythm.

The brace of remixes tacked into the end may be nice bonuses on one hand, but feel perhaps superfluous on the other, with a Stabbing Westward remix of ‘Bad Taste’ from their previous release, and a remix of ‘Heart Shaped Hole’ wrapping it up. The remixes are solid, the former being a super-high-octane dancefloor stomping smasher. But the EP’s five tracks alone are an outstanding document that feels complete in itself., balancing fire and force and heavy atmosphere. But from whatever angle you view it, Threats is all killer, and finds Bellhead taking things to another level.

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Philadelphia-based industrial sludge metal band WORST ONES has unleashed the new single ‘Vex’. The track is a crushing, no-holds-barred exploration of Americaʼs decaying ideals. Drawing from the bitter truth of the American Dream’s collapse, the track delves deep into the rise of fascism and the heartbreaking act of protest by soldier Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in protest of the war in Palestine.

Musically, ‘Vex’ fuses the raw aggression of ’90s hardcore with the sludgy weight of doom and the mechanical grind of industrial metal, drawing influences from the likes of Biohazard, Eyehategod, and Godflesh. A standout element of the track is the signature “sickness” – rhythmic noise loops that twist and churn alongside the brutal guitars and drums, creating a suffocating atmosphere of unease. It’s a track thatʼs as punishing as it is poignant, reflecting the chaotic, fractured state of the world today.

WORST ONES has explained the meaning of the song as follows:

“’Vex’ is an expression of disillusionment and resistance under the weight of a system built on lies. The lyrics question what freedom is when we live in a country that supports widespread oppression and death. There’s a sense of despair in the verses and searching for answers in the chorus but in the end the song turns into a statement of defiance and resilience.

The opening line “Wasted life is on us, covered all up in flames” addresses the heinous amount of people killed in war and how “the powers that be” utilize new types of bombs that don’t even leave behind a body, literally covering it up.

The lyric “Do you really believe the reaper will bring peace” challenges the concept that violence and killing would bring peace. It questions the false idea that through war or death there can be an end to suffering.

The final lines “They want to destroy us, but we can’t be beat" reaffirm that despite everything, resistance is still possible and even inevitable to triumph. It’s a defiant statement in the face of a system designed to crush individuals, but where the refusal to give up remains unbroken. I wanted to end the song with a statement of positivity and strength.

The story of Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in protest of the war in Palestine, deeply resonated with me. He was someone who joined the US Army, maybe out of ignorance or patriotism, only to feel betrayed by what he was asked to do. His act of protest was a refusal to be complicit in a system that had deceived him, and that sense of betrayal and defiance is something Vex reflects. It’s a statement of refusal in the face of violence, war, and manipulation.

As a Syrian American, these themes aren’t just abstract ideas to me. I’ve experienced how propaganda shapes people’s perceptions, how violence is justified in the name of power, and how the most vulnerable are always the first to suffer. I wrote the lyrics with a universal approach to the words because it’s not just now, it’s about the cycles of control, war, and resistance that keep repeating. This song is my way of expressing frustration, grief, and the refusal to be silenced.”

‘Vex’ is accompanied by a lyric video – watch it here:

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Worst Ones band photo

28th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Ahead of a new album release, Protokoll 19 have given us the single ‘When Will It End’. It’s a question I ask myself almost daily. Because fucking hell. Life. The world. Both seem to be an endless hell. You wake up, lug yourself to work, trudge home, you’re wiped, and it’s as much as you can do to eat food, maybe do some chores and get ready for bed again. You scan the news and it’s Armageddon, especially this last couple of months: the world is at war and the fascist agenda of the US ‘government’ sends tsunami-force reverberations around the globe daily. And it just goes on and on and on, forever the same. Here in the UK, our government has decided that mental health issues which [prevent people from working are being ‘overdiagnosed’. We’re all being spectacularly gaslit here. This isn’t a question of overdiagnosis: it’s a matter of how terrible, terrible times – we’re still not really over the effects of the pandemic, and everything since then has felt like the realisation of every dystopian fiction and the worst aspects of history recurring – affect people and send them into states of mental distress. When will it end?

This single, they tell us, ‘sets the tone of what can be expected from the album as a whole. When we find ourselves in a dark place, it often feels like there is no way out. The longer it goes on the more difficult it becomes to engage in anything. We isolate ourselves and see these thoughts as a burden. We’re haunted by these thoughts because they’re always lurking in the shadows.’

With this single, Protokoll 19 deliver a full-throttle stomping technoindustrial blast of skin-prickling tension. The vocals are mangled and gnarly and are more toward the black metal end of the spectrum, a demonic rasp that splutters gasoline and broken glass over the clean surface of hi-NRG synths and a pumping beat. Intense is the word. There is no snoozing through this.

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Metropolis Records – 7th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

As Metropolis continue with their run of PIG reissues, the arrival of the remastered Wrecked reminds us of the run they had in the 90s. Having hardened up the sound showcased on debut album A Poke in the Eye… and follow-up Praise the Lard, and having toured with Nine Inch Nails in the Downward Spiral tour, PIG found themselves signed to Trent Reznor’s Nothing label for the release of Sinsation (1995), which melded the more experimental aspects of The Swining and Red Raw & Sore from a couple of years previous and cranked up the guitars – and the sleaze and depravity – to eleven. And after Sinsation came Wrecked, and having returned to Wax Trax!, in the US at least, the album was released first in Japan in ’96 and the US a year later with a substantially different tracklisting – and was an absolute bastard to get here in the UK in either form.

This version brings together the tracks which featured on both the original Japanese edition – which was criminally missing ‘No One Gets Out of Her Alive’ and ‘Contempt’ – and the American edition, which brought ‘The Book of Tequila’ and ‘Fuck Me I’m Sick’ in their place.

Wrecked very much represented PIG at their wildest, most wide-ranging, and arguably their heaviest. The title track drifts in on some mellow steel guitar country vibes and ambient chilling… and then gets gnarly with gritty industrial rigging and snarly vocals that are quintessential PIG. Raymond Watts may not have been in the best place during this period, but creatively… the music he was making was something else, and Wrecked stands up just as well now as it did on release. I’ve mentioned previously that PIG stand apart from their contemporaries, and while Watts was a touring member of Foetus in the late 80s and worked with JG Thirlwell when PIG was born, as well as being a member of KMFDM for a time, as much as those elements of aggrotech and industrial metal are core to the sound, Watts took it somewhere else entirely. Where? It’s hard to say: PIG’s work simply doesn’t conform to any genre forms or models – PIG just are PIG. While a couple of tracks had been previously released in different forms – the original versions of ‘Find It, Fuck It, Forget It’ and ‘Blades’ appeared on The Swining, released only in Japan in 1993 (prior to a 1999 US reissue) – it would be wrong to suggest that their inclusion on Wrecked suggested a lack of material, given just how radically different these versions are. The same is true of the reworked version of ‘My Sanctuary’, which appeared on Praise the Lard: expanded, more grandiose, more everything, the ‘Spent Sperm Mix’ taking the track to preposterous heights while audaciously combining industrial, techno, and gospel with orchestral strikes galore.

Since the US and Japanese editions included various alternative mixes, it would have been nice to see this version feature all sixteen tracks featured on the 2017 tour edition, which is arguably the definitive edition. But what we learn here is that you can’t have everything, and this edition at least has the majority of the prime cuts. Sequentially, it follows the Japanese edition, with the tracks which featured on the US release at the end.

The drumming on this album is brutal, choppy, the guitars cutty, stuttering, heavily distorted, but with a bright, clear, digital crispness that really slice hard. Watts growls, snarls and sneers, dark and salacious, and everything about Wrecked is harsh and ugly. ‘Find It, Fuck It, Forget It’ is a full-throttle beast of a track, with a sample-laden breakdown in the mid-section, with snippets of reports on American obesity and the like (in place of the sped-up snippet of ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ on the original), and it’s pretty dark and unforgiving.

‘Blades’ is one of the greatest tracks ever recorded by PIG or anyone – it’s one of those songs that just does something to you. The ‘Slash Mix’ on here may not be the best version – for my money, I prefer the more orchestral original, but this rendition is dense and girthy, and fits with the sound of Wrecked. Then there’s ‘Save Me’, the album’s slowie, and so, so powerful. It takes ‘anthemic’ in a whole new direction.

Watts has always made music with a boldly theatrical approach to the industrial template – and Wrecked really turns up the dial on everything – density, volume, aggression, intensity, and this expanded reissue is an essential document in the broader industrial oeuvre. It’s also an outstanding album in its own right.

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14th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Eville, who have been gaining momentum – and radio play – for a while, soared to a new peak with ‘Ballistic’ late last year. While sonically encapsulating the title, it also distilled the very essence of the band into THE most explosive two-and-a-bit minutes of no-messing nu-metal.

If ‘Plaything’ suggests something more cuddly, think again. Once again, they tap that classic nu-metal structure of a quiet but tetchy intro, jittery electronics by way of an intro – Something that can be traced back to Pitch Shifter’s first couple of albums back in the early 90s. ‘Gritter’ from Submit is exemplary, and of course not only would Pitch Shifter transition to an overtly nu-metal sound at the turn of the millennium, incorporating elements of drum ‘n’ bass in their sound in the late 90s, but guitarist Jim Davis played with both Pitchshifter (as they became) and The Prodigy. This detour is simply to illustrate the crossover between genres, and to contextualise the sound Eville have absolutely mailed – because after this tense, tetchy intro, the monumental riff hits, and hits hard, and immediately hits an irresistible groove.

A mere ten seconds in, and it’s clear that this is going to be a killer – and it is.

‘I might look cute but Imma get gnarly / I can get nasty, nothing gets past me,’ Eva Sheldreake warns, picking up the lyrical thread of ‘Ballistic’ and presenting a strong feminist stance. The message is direct and clear, and the band’s photos back it up: whether the outfit is a pink bikini or decorating garb, never judge a woman by her outfit, and never assume she’s lacking capability, whether it’s to do DIY or play guitar and rock out, hard.

‘Plaything’ certainly rocks out, and hard. The sheer density of the sound kicks the air out of your lungs, while the chorus hook is as strong as they come. The mid-section goes full Slipknot, the barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat referenced in the lyrics translating to the brutal delivery.

Where Eville stand out – apart from on every level – is in the way they bring ultra-pro, radio-quality production and accessible melody to massively hefty, bludgeoning metal. If there was ever any doubt that they should be playing festivals rather than pubs, ‘Plaything’ obliterates it. No two ways about it: these guys are ready to conquer the world.

With the US cult act Psyclon Nine currently midway through a North American tour, ‘Devil’s Work’ is the second boundary breaking single to be lifted from their forthcoming new album. Possessing a similar brooding, menacing quality to its recent predecessor, ‘I Choose Violence’, both songs are included on And Then Oblivion, set for release on 21st March 2025 via Metropolis Records.

Melding elements of Industrial Rock, Metal, Deathcore, Ambient and Trap, band leader Nero Bellum has previously stated that his modus operandi is “to break as many genre limitations as possible, while staying true to the concepts and imagery that Psyclon Nine evokes.”

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33.3 Music Collective – 5th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It doesn’t seem like five minutes since Beauty in Chaos emerged with their debut album, and here, in the blink of an eye, we are looking at a twenty-nine track ‘reimagined’ version of the fourth album from this ever-expanding collective, curated by Michael Ciravolo (formerly of Human Drama and Gene Loves Jezebel. I’m not even going to start on the roll-call of personnel who have featured on these releases: I’d still be going by the time I’d finished listening to all twenty-nine tracks.

It’s certainly quite an expansion on the original eight songs which made up Dancing with Angels, which notably featured Wayne Hussey and Ashton Nyte among its guest vocalists. There is, as one might anticipate, an abundance of remixes – no fewer than five versions of ‘Holy Ground’, for example, and four of ‘Hollow’. Some are better than others, some are pretty radical, others less so, with the standard examples of slapping a big beat and some effects tossed into the mix with variable results, but Combichrist and Bellwether Syndicate are noteworthy for their contributions.

The ’almost acoustic version’ of ‘Made of Rain’ stands out not only by virtue of not being a remix, but also being a really good take on the song. But the selling point here are the songs which didn’t appear on the original album, which appear right at the very end of the monumental track-listing.

Their take on T-Rex’s ‘Children of the Revolution’ harks back to the early 90s when Al Jurgensen was arguably at his peak and dropping leftfield covers of ‘Lay Lady Lay’ and ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’, accompanied as it is by a video which finds the band performing behind a mesh fence, as Ministry did while touring Psalm 69 (as much for their safety as for effect). It also calls to mind the club scene in The Hunger where Bauhaus play ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, and I don’t doubt that this is also intentional: Bauhaus – and Bowie – can both be heard waving influence through Beauty in Chaos’ songs. “The revolution will be televised”, Al announces through a loudhailer, and well, if you’ve seen any news in the last fortnight, you’ll know this to be a fact. However, the issue isn’t that anyone’s being fooled here, but that no-one seems willing or able to stop it: just as the world watched on as Israel perpetuated genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza, so it gawps, motionless, as Trump and Musk undertake a coup, and not just making a grab for absolute control over the United States, but world domination. It’s absolutely fucking terrifying – unlike this recording. It’s a solid enough cover, but perhaps lacks the bite and heft it deserves, being more straight-up than cranked-up.

‘Open Your Eyes’, originally by Lords of the New Church, also feels apposite – indeed, lyrically, it’s never been more relevant, and while this cover, again, is almost entirely faithful to the original and is accompanied by a video clearly shot during the same session as ‘Children of the Revolution’, it hits home to wrap up the album in fine style.

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Metropolis Records – 17th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The arrival of So Lonely in Heaven marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the existence of The Legendary Pink Dots. And it’s a concept album. Edward Ka-Spel sets it out as follows: ‘Way way back in the early days I used to say a lot about ‘The Terminal Kaleidoscope’, a concept comparing the fragile planet we live on to a drowning human being with life flashing before his or her eyes, the images constantly accelerating. It’s 2024, a little over two decades since the turn of this unbearably turbulent century and the concept appears to have become an unlikely soap opera where we are the cast.’

It’s their second post-pandemic album, and it’s weighted with a sense of impending doom and biblical destruction spun in a suitably grand fashion whereby prog meets avant-garde and electronica.

It can be a bit of a gamble opening an album with a long song – the risk being losing the listener before things have even got going. But it’s a calculated risk, on an album where most of the songs are pretty long.

Some of it’s Ka-Spel’s tone and enunciation, but the title track which is that first long song, carries hints of an electronic reimagining of Suede, circa Dog Man Star. That is to say it also sounds a bit Bowie, and a bit Kraftwek, and with some weirdly bits of glitchy noise and reverby piano, it has echoes of Outside.

Thereafter, there are big sounds and big moods and big concepts in abundance, and it’s by no means an easy album to pigeonhole. Space and environmental issues are woven through the twelve tracks, which, as I fumble for a context, evoke equally the whimsical hippy trippiness of Gong and the inventiveness of The Young Gods. ‘Choose Premium : First Prize’ delves into tense electro territory, and presents a rather harder edge than the preceding songs, and it’s here we really begin to feel the sense of the ‘machine’ which is a central focus of the album’s thematic content:

The machine is everything we are. It sees everything, hears everything, knows everything and feeds, speeds, drinks us down, spits us out – we lost control of it at the instant of its conception. You may cough, curse and die, but the machine will resurrect you without the flaws, at your peak, smiling from a screen, bidding someone in a lonely room to join you. It’s an invitation from Heaven, where anyone can be anything they want to be, but it’s a Nation of One. You’ll be everything we are. You’ll be a shadow of yourself. You’ll repeat yourself – endlessly. You’ll be desperate for some kind of explanation. You’ll be lonely. So very lonely…

This is nowhere more apparent than on the sparse, acoustic-guitar centred neofolk bleakness of ‘Wired High : Too Far To Fall’, which swells and soars and expands to immense proportions, as well as plunging to dark, sonorous depths over the course of its seven minutes. Elsewhere, ‘How Many Fingers In the Fog’ has a more post-punk feel to it, but still spun with a proggy haze, and there’s a lingering wistful melancholy which clings to it.

That there are whimsical, light-hearted moments of plinky-plonky keys and segments of So Lonely in Heaven sound more like wide-eyed stargazing in pure awe shouldn’t trick you into thinking this isn’t a serious album. The medium is the message, and entertainment is a diversion, a distraction, the ultimate lie that it’s ok to sit, sedated, and forget the world. The shit that’s gone down in America is the absolute proof of this: while everyone has been entertained by the circus, a coup has been taking place. This isn’t hyperbole, and this isn’t simply some scuffle in a small third-world republic. Meanwhile, people, especially here in the UK, are largely preoccupied with the current season of Love Island or whatever instead of trembling in fear for the future.

For all the buoyancy and quite enjoyable moments – ‘Blood Money : Transitional’ offers a quite accessible, easy groove beneath its darker surface – ‘business is business’, Ka-Spel sneers over a quite Depeche Mode-like accompaniment.

So Lonely in Heaven is varied, and sometimes sounds as if belongs to another era – but at the same time, it’s unexpectedly and shockingly relevant and now, and is well worth your time – whatever time you have left.

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Liquid Len Recording Company – 28th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

I suppose I lost track of ‘new goth’ bands at the end of the 90s, and am still a way behind even now I’m a bit more back on it, and so History Of Guns, described by Mick Mercer – the authority on all things goth, who’s Gothic Rock Black Book was a bible for be when I was 13 and discovering the scene, as “By far, the most inventive UK band to have got their hands caught in the Industrial threshing machine” – bypassed me.

As the parenthetical numerals in the title suggests, this is a remixed version of their debut single, released twenty-five years ago, and it’s accompanied by a brace of new songs by way of B-sides, in the way things used to be done back then, when you had 12” and CD singles – and while I don’t get nostalgic for much, there was something special about these formats. Then there’s the fact a 12” single used to cost about £3.50 and a CD single a couple of quid – which probably sounds as incredible as a £1 pint or 3p tin of beans (Kwik-Save, No-Frills, c1995) to anyone under 35 – meant they were affordable, accessible.

But while we’re talking nostalgia and the passage of time, the accompanying video uses footage, originally filmed by Danni Cutmore on a VHS camera, of the band writing and performing the song at Earthworks studio in Barnet in 1998. It’s grainy, fuzzy, saturated, and looks like it could just have easily have bene shot in 1988, or even 1978. On the one hand, digital technology means the quality of video footage, even when shot on a cheapy mobile phone, is usually crisper, and isn’t prone to deterioration – but on the other, it’s so commonplace, it has less currency and less buzz about it, somehow.

The music itself… yes, it’s got that vintage post-punk feel to it, spun with an industrial edge, and pitching the band alongside Alien Sex Fiend, Cabaret Voltaire, Nitzer Ebb, Coil, Nine Inch Nails, Deathboy, The Prodigy, and LCD Soundsystem is all quite fair enough.

The classic spindly goth guitar sound spins spidery webs across a thumping drum machine, and there’s that quintessential low-slung bass groove… not to mention Del Gilbert’s theatrical baritone which looms powerfully over all of it. But then there are shuddering laser synth blasts which bubble up from nowhere, fizzes and whizzing and bleeps create the sensation of listening to two songs at the same time. Perversely, it somehow works, not least of all because there are strong hooks and the beat hits just right.

First B-side, ‘i am defective’ shows how they’ve evolved: it’s a dubby instrumental which leans far more into the electronic territory which only coloured their debut single. It’s also harder-edged and more overtly industrial, too, not just with the electronics, but the crunching, serrated guitars which cut in and threaten speaker damage. ‘LMS (Deep Mix)’ – a radical reworking of ‘Little Miss Suicide’ is in the vein of Rosetta Stone circa The Tyranny of Inaction – at least to begin with, but then swerves hard into the kind of electronica that qualified as technogoth or even cybergoth and reminding me why I drifted from the goth scene at the time. Now, I’m a bit more open to these things, and as an example of hard-edged industrial goth, it’s solid.

This release presents a neat straddling of the band’s formative years and their current sound: a clear win for fans, and a neat introduction for the unfamiliar.

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“Way way back in the early days I used to say a lot about ‘The Terminal Kaleidoscope’, a concept comparing the fragile planet we live on to a drowning human being with life flashing before his or her eyes, the images constantly accelerating. It’s 2024, a little over two decades since the turn of this unbearably turbulent century and the concept appears to have become an unlikely soap opera where we are the cast. Let’s hang in there….”
Edward Ka-Spel – The Legendary Pink Dots

SO LONELY IN HEAVEN – THE CREATION

So Lonely in Heaven is the new album by the Anglo-Dutch experimental rock band The Legendary Pink Dots, who formed in London in 1980 and are still helmed by co-founder and frontman Edward Ka-Spel. Their second full-length effort since the World stopped for a Global Pandemic, group members were still scattered across three countries and two continents as they began writing it, with ideas spun across Cyberspace for months. However, the magic eventually happened collectively in small spaces with the tape running.

SO LONELY IN HEAVEN – THE MESSAGE

The machine is everything we are. It sees everything, hears everything, knows everything and feeds, speeds, drinks us down, spits us out – we lost control of it at the instant of its conception. You may cough, curse and die, but the machine will resurrect you without the flaws, at your peak, smiling from a screen, bidding someone in a lonely room to join you. It’s an invitation from Heaven, where anyone can be anything they want to be, but it’s a Nation of One. You’ll be everything we are. You’ll be a shadow of yourself. You’ll repeat yourself – endlessly. You’ll be desperate for some kind of explanation. You’ll be lonely. So very lonely….

Check ‘Blood Money’ here:

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THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS | photo: Michael McGrath