Posts Tagged ‘Metamorph’

Metamorph – Harlot EP

Posted: 22 June 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Distortion Productions – 20th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Ahead of their new full-length album release, Haunted Hearts, slated for an autumn release, Metamorph have served up the Harlot EP, which offers their usual blend of glistening electropop with a dark gothy, witchy flavour, and promises to be ‘your summer soundtrack—sweat, stilettos, and seduction.’

Living in the north of England, the last thing I would have expected to be doing was writing this at what is, with any luck, the tail-end of a heatwave – but is does mean that while I’m short on the stilettos and seduction, I have more than enough sweat to make up for it. But it does remind me of the difference in where UK goth – particularly the early stuff – and US goth comes from in terms of its geography and broader environs. As the phrase goes, ‘it’s grim up north’. It rains a lot. It’s often cloudy, windy, and cold. Until recent years, if it went over 20ºC, even in the summer, it was hot, and you’d be forced to remove the leather jacket. These conditions, coupled with generally poor conditions of low wages, high unemployment, and social deprivation, meant that dark music articulated the experience of the world as is.

America has always had its own problems, of course, but summer has always been a bit different from on this side of the pond – inasmuch as the US tended to have summers. Anyway. ‘Harlot’ is classic Metamorph: uptempo. HI-NRG, somewhat sultry, gothy electropop, and concise, clocking in at a fraction over two and a half minutes. With pounding beats and a throbbing bass, it’s got that late 80s eurodisco / technogoth vibe, with a hint of KMFDM but popped up. In terms of singles, it delivers everything you’d want.

The five remixes are solid, in particular – and I’ve amazed myself in writing this – the dance mix, which really places the bass and the beats to the fore, and the expansive Allie Frost Remix is really quite special, adding a well-suited 80s spin to the sound, led by a dominant snare which is just perfect.

But my awkwardness with remix-led releases remains, and this EP gives us the same song, six times. It’s a good song, and some of the remixes are great, but… Bring on the album.

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Watch: ‘Harlot’ official lyric video by Metamorph

Posted: 22 June 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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METAMORPH’s Harlot EP arrives to set the Summer Solstice ablaze—six banger tracks of goth pop-rock indulgence, dripping with fire, rhythm, and rebellion. Margot Day’s voice stuns. Her melodies seduce. She conjures pure fire. pure craving. pure power: “Dance, Harlot, rebel, whore… It’s my body, my fire, my flame.”

Produced by METAMORPH’s sonic alchemist Erik Gustafson, the Harlot EP includes the original title track, a high-voltage METAMORPH Dance Mix, and wickedly reimagined remixes from Spankthenun, IIOIOIOII, and Allie Frost—plus an instrumental for DJs to conjure their own dark glamour.

Witchy, seductive, and made for long nights and black-lacedays, Harlot doesn’t just celebrate the Solstice—it turns the Wheel of the Year in true witchcraft style. Each METAMORPH drop is a ritual, a spell, a seasonal shift in sound and power.This is your summer soundtrack—sweat, stilettos, and seduction.

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Watch: Metamorph – Crown of Shattered Glass

Posted: 22 March 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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METAMORPH has just revealed their new single – a gut-punch of emotion and power, ‘Crown of Shattered Glass’. The song is impossible to ignore—a warrior cry wrapped in razor-sharp gothic rock.

Margot Day’s bold vocals cut through a cinematic soundscape of pounding beats and darkwave edge, delivering a chorus that demands to be felt: “Shattered, shattered, I’m stronger than you know”. Every lyric carries the weight of a hard-earned victory. The shattered glass isn’t a weakness—it’s a crown. This is the sound of breaking free.
With sharp lyricism and relentless energy, this track transforms heartbreak into pure power, hitting hard and lingering long after the last note.

As the Wheel of the Year turns, METAMORPH unveils a new track every six weeks, each one an incantation of power, love, and defiance—all leading to a full METAMORPH album this fall.

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Watch: ‘Hiss Kiss’ by Metamorph

Posted: 1 February 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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METAMORPH conjures 2025 with the new single & video, ‘Hiss Kiss,’ a celebration of the snake’s magic and the promise of rebirth. Dropping in time for Valentine’s Day, the witchy Imbolc celebration, and the Year of the Snake. Love strikes like venom, and ‘Hiss Kiss’ is the antidote—a gothic dance floor anthem that wraps you in its serpentine embrace.

Launching METAMORPH’s Wheel of the Year release ritual, ‘Hiss Kiss’ is the first single to drop for these witchy holidays. The ritual culminates with the release of the album on the harvest celebration, Mabon (September 22) and closes the year with haunting remixes to complete the spellbinding journey.

“’Hiss Kiss’ is serpentine spells set to sound—your fangs deep in my flesh, feel the world’s caress, new pardine, dance divine,” tempts Margot Day.

Dark, seductive, and dangerously divine, ‘Hiss Kiss’ is the ultimate goth dance floor banger to kick off the year.

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Metamorph – HEXPLAY

Posted: 14 July 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Distortion Productions – 5th July 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Released to coincide with the start of their US tour to promote the album HEX, released in March, HEXPLAY offers up remixes of three tracks from the album, by artists including Leaether Strip and Red Lokust.

Remix albums and EPs do tend to be a bit of a mixed bag, and my cynical side says they’re an easy way of milking maximum product from the material an act has – and the fact that the Grendel remix of ‘Veridia’ already appeared as a bonus track on the digital version of HEX does little to dispel this notion with this release (the album contained seven new tracks including lead single ‘Witch Lit’ released the year before, expanded with three remixes, and there was previously a standalone Stabbing Westward remix of the title track).

There are two further mixes of ‘Veridia’ here. Of these, the Leaether Strip reworking which opens this set is the most radical, transforming the dark electrop of the original – which clocks in at just over two minutes – into a sprawling five-minute exploration of brooding esotericism, with a hint of Eurovision-friendly groove. Pushing the bass up in the mix, it’s darker and denser than the original, and adds new depths and dimensions. Placing it up front was a sound decision, as for my money, it’s the strongest track here.

In the hands of Third Realm, the contemplative mid-tempo ‘Raining Roses’ is transformed into a cinematic anthem, and it’s a triumphant reworking – not a huge stretch in terms of imagination, but it simply makes the song so much bigger.

SPANKTHENUN take ‘Witchlit’ in a darker, murkier direction, straddling stuttering techno and ambience. It’s quite a departure from the original, unexpectedly tense and claustrophobic, and if it lacks the magical, haunting nature of the original its quite brutal treatment is big on impact and shows the song in quite a different light.

The last couple of tracks are solid enough, but perhaps a shade predictable, and certainly lacking the impact or imagination of those which precede. This is what I mean when I say that remix releases are a mixed bag, but I’m equally aware that this is a question of taste, and some will likely prefer the versions I’m less enamoured with.

Here, the source material is strong, which definitely gives the remixers a head start, and while I’ll often find myself asking ‘why mess with perfection?’ credit is due on this occasion for offering versions which, if not improving on the originals, certainly bring something different and worthwhile.

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Metamorph – HEX

Posted: 18 March 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Distortion Productions – 8th March 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Metamorph have made their way onto these virtual pages a couple of times with previous single releases, most recently ‘Witchlit’ just over a year ago to the day as I write this. And, it turns out, this single was the very long lead-in for this long-player, which comprises seven new tracks which follow ‘Witchlit’, augmented by three remixes.

I’m going to park the remixes to save retreading territory that’s growing tedious and focus on the album proper, which kicks off in solid style with the pumping dark disco of ‘Veridia’ which blends surging dance pulsations with 90s enigma music and a dash of eastern mysticism to conjure a compelling hybrid or esoteric origins that lands with a dancefloor-friendly immediacy and energetic beat and throbbing bassline – and packs it all into just two pumping minutes.

There’s a lot to be said for starting an album strong and going straight in and hitting hard over the slow-build, and in today’s attention-deprived climate, it really does seem like the way to go – and Metamorph nail it here. They want your attention, and they’re bold about it.

‘Witchlit’ is up next, and it’s perfectly placed as a shimmering slice of dark electropop, sultry but lively, like Siouxsie gone electro. This is Metapmorph at their best – haunting, gothy, a little bit twisted. The title track crashes in next, bursting with flamboyant Europop vibes counterbalanced by darker shades – and once again, they pack it all into two and a half minutes.

Casting an eye down the tracklist, the majority of the songs on HEX are under three minutes in duration, and the album showcases a real economy of songwriting – no expansive mid-sections, no extravagant solos. They really do keep it tight.

‘Woo Woo’ is perhaps the album’s weakest track , not only with its mundane lyrics – ‘I won’t lie / I’m gonna get real high’ and unimaginative efforts to be sexy – but its wholesale immersion in commercial pop stylings. It feels like a stab at mainstream accessibility which is beneath them and isn’t particularly successful; in contrast, the mid-tempo brooder, ‘Raining Roses’ is brimming with dark, doomed romanticism , and ‘Broken Dolly’ borders on industrial and steps over the edge into a darker shade of darkness. ‘Wasteland Witch’ is well placed, a glammy industrial stomper that pumps up the tempo just when it’s all getting a bit dark and moody.

‘Whore Spider’, the last album track proper, could reasonably describes as an electropop anthem – mid-tempo, building, and unexpectedly hooky, while unexpectedly bringing back the wild woodwind. You can almost smell the incense as it spirals thickly to its finale.

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Metamorph – Witchlit

Posted: 15 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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7th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Having emerged in 2016, Metamorph are, in the grand scheme, relative newcomers to the goth scene, but the voice behind the name, Margot Day was an integral part of the 80’s NYC underground music scene while fronting the legendary Goth band The Plague with their album Naraka in 1987.

While goth tends to be associated with the early 80s, it was in 87/88 that the genre broke the mainstream, with The Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland and The Mission’s Children going massive on an international level. It was a boom time slightly below the mainstream radar, too, with Fields of the Nephilim releasing two major albums (Dawnrazor in ‘87 and The Nephilim in ’88), and Christian Death’s controversial landmark Sex and Drugs and Jesus Christ also being released in ’88. These were still dark times – the opening of Disneyland Paris provided only so much distraction from the fact this was the height of the cold war.

No doubt the Metamorph story, whereby Margot ‘escaped temporarily to the jungle by the sea to conjure new witchy Metamorph songs… after she had a miracle healing and felt summoned to make more music’ will be repeated ad infinitum, so instead, I’ll skip straight to the new single, the first new material since the Kiss of the Witch concept / narrative album released in September 2022.

‘Witchlit’ may not belong to the same suite of songs as the album, but there are clear thematic connections, and it’s a corking slice of quintessential gothy electropop, dark, seductive, a driving beat and bass and a teasing twist of menace and aggression with an explosive chorus that speaks of obsessive tendencies and longing – and it’s all tightly packed into a concise two and a half minutes. ‘Witchlit’ is single perfection.

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Metamorph – Dream Curve

Posted: 6 May 2022 in Singles and EPs
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1st May 2022

James Wells

As a slice of buoyant yet dreamy electropop, it’s hard to fault ‘Dream Curve’, the new single by self-professed ‘witchy goth rock band’ Metamorph. Well, ok, lyrically it may not be quite Leonard Cohen or Richard Butler (both completely piss on the popularly esteemed Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison), but then ultimately, the purpose of pop music isn’t primarily to distil every word into a moment of poetical genius. No, the purpose of pop is to entertain, and, where possible, to stick in your head, and here, Metamorph achieve.

‘Dream Curve’ blurs fragments of image and reflection amidst a swirl of synths pitched against an insistent bear and pulsing sequenced synth bass. It’s pure Europop: it’s fundamentally simple, but it’s effective.

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Watch: ‘Love in the Wreckage’ by Metamorph

Posted: 7 April 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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“Witchy” goth rock band, METAMORPH recently unveiled their new single, ‘Love In The Wreckage.’ Not, sadly, an homage to JG Ballard, the song tells a story of life in today’s chaotic world. It’s a transmutation of the world’s chaos into love; a tale of light in the dark.

METAMORPH’s music has always been about change. 2021 was full of so much chaos and pain. METAMORPH’s Margot Day says: “There has been a strange undercurrent of joy in the madness. I found myself transforming this emotional intensity into a spiritual awakening. These new lyrics and melodies are pouring in like an avalanche.”

Check ‘Love in the Wreckage’ here:

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