Long held in high regard for a sound that is a modern and unique take on classic goth and post-punk, Swedish trio Then Comes Silence have released a brand new single entitled ‘Judgement Day’. It is the first to be lifted from Requiem Ballroom, their new studio album out on 20th November.
“This song is about failure, bad decisions and poor behaviour – those who will be the first in line on doomsday,” the band explain. Beginning with a catchy Euro techno melody, the surprising intro creates a contrast to the band’s established roots from the outset and serves as a metaphor for the theme of the song. The band itself ‘fails’ by letting something completely unexpected and out of character take over.
A video for ‘Judgement Day’ has been directed by Damon Zurawski of Future Legends Films and can be seen here:
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Requiem Ballroom will be the follow-up to Trickery, the seventh full-length album by Then Comes Silence released in 2024. Collecting accolades galore, the UK’s Classic Rock magazine described it as “the post-punk influence of Bauhaus or Joy Division offset by an ’80s windblown, cinematic sense of drama presented with silky production and confidence.” Vive Le Rock concurred, remarking on its “huge, spectral sound that cascades the post-punk genres seamlessly whilst delivering a unique and compelling sound that is as captivatingly gripping as it is intense.”
Alternative Pop / Electro-Rock firebrand THE NOISE WHO RUNS returns with ‘The Summer Talking’, a catchy sonic respite that disguises devastating social critique beneath shimmering indie-pop hooks. Sneaker Pimps legend Ian Pickering spins a tale of romance and nostalgia before spiralling into an indictment of climate denial, political inaction and humanity’s addiction to comforting lies. The striking video contrasts postcard-perfect holiday escapes with the growing environmental crisis, this song asks an uncomfortable question – are we sleepwalking through catastrophe while convincing ourselves everything will somehow work out?
This track is lifted from PIckering’s new (and now acclaimed) Re: GenX album, a fearless uncompromising record that puts an entire generation (and society itself) on trial. Addressing war, consumerism, inequality, media outrage and the collapse of collective responsibility, he sounds a warning siren for a world in freefall. Blending dark electronic textures with anthemic alternative rock, The Noise Who Runs is one of alternative music’’ most fearless voices, offering a brutally honest examination of the choices that have brought us to the brink.
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Built around the repeated refrain, “It’s just the summer talking”, the song explores the promises we make when sunshine, nostalgia and hope temporarily blur our view of reality. Balancing melancholic indie-pop with widescreen alternative rock, it follows dreams of escape, new beginnings and forever as they gradually reveal themselves to be fragile seasonal illusions. Beneath the relationship story lies a wider reflection on the comforting stories we tell ourselves—about love, our lives and the future itself.
Martin Virgo is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer who worked with musical luminaries such as Björk and Massive Attack in the early 1990s before going on to enjoy global success with his own band, Mono, later in that decade.
Almost three decades on, Virgo is releasing his debut solo album. Entitled Ghost Piano, it can be seen as a prequel to his hit-making years. Classically trained in composition and piano at the Guildhall School of Music, he had developed a taste for Chopin, French Impressionism, the austere strangeness of Erik Satie and the minimalism of Philip Glass and Brian Eno. However, he then hooked up with Nellee Hooper and began a career in pop music that also led to work composing for cinema and TV commercials. These included an award-winning ad for Help The Aged.
“I came to the point a couple of years ago when I wanted to create something that was completely stripped of all the frippery and distractions of modern production techniques,” explains Virgo. “I wanted to write music that had a sense of lineage, but within a very distilled style. I also wanted to take a break from the world of digital audio production, so all the tracks on Ghost Piano were recorded live by myself on a Steinway model B acoustic grand piano, with the cello on the title track played by Nick Cooper (The Michael Nyman Band).”
Hear the title track here:
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Ghost Piano contains eleven evocative pieces in which the listener can hear the ‘ghosts’ of Chopin, Debussy and Satie playing in the absinthe soaked atmosphere of late 19th century Paris. “You can hear those influences on this album, although I think there are also traces of my time working with Björk on Debut, Massive Attack and Nellee Hooper on ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ and ‘Safe From Harm’, Shara Nelson on ‘Friendly Fire’ and Alanis Morissette on ‘Still’ (from the film Dogma),” Virgo adds. “These were all formative creative experiences for me. By the time I came to write and produce Mono songs like ‘Life In Mono’ and our album Formica Blues, I had embarked on a quest for a more European sounding harmonic and melodic palette.”
UK industrial glam maverick Raymond Watts aka PIG has released a brand new single, ‘An American Ideal Of Beauty’, on Metropolis Records. Co-written with old friend Marc Heal (Cubanate, C-Tec), who provides a co-vocal and synth work, the song also features Günter Schulz (ex-KMFDM) sharing guitar duties with Watts’ regular songwriting partner Jim Davies (ex-The Prodigy and Pitchshifter).
“I wanted to distil and hone the sound of the current PIG album, ‘Hurt People Hurt’, so inviting my old partners in swine Marc and Günter to join Jim and myself in the studio seemed the perfect blend of brutality and beauty to feed, fertilise and transmogrify the hog into Hogzilla,” Watts explains. "This new single was the first result of our work as a quartet, hammered in the heat of the anvil of hurt.”
A stunning video for ‘An American Ideal Of Beauty’ directed by E Gabriel Edvy for Blackswitch Labs can be seen here:
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The recording sessions produced three more new songs, each of which has been remixed by contemporaries that include Stabbing Westward’s Chris Hall and Combichrist. All eight tracks are collected on Dirt Box, an EP that will be issued on 4th September, a week after the commencement of PIG’s ‘Hurt People Tour’ of North America. The 44 dates are to promote Hurt People Hurt, which received stellar reviews upon release in late May, and include performances in Chicago, Los Angeles and Austin as part of the Cold Waves XIV festival.
NYC art-rockers Ecce Shnak present ‘Eddie, Legalistic Homeslice’, the second single from their full-length album Dandy Variances, anticipated later this year via Records, Man Records. Recorded and produced by Jeff Lucci, this single was mixed by Grammy award-winning producer Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Prince, Nine Inch Nails, Julian Lennon).
Formed in the mid-1990s and forged in NYC’s experimental scene, Ecce Shnak (pronounced Eh-kay sh-knock) is made up of David Roush (composer, bassist and baritone vocalist), Bella Komodromos (vocals), Chris Krasnow (guitar), Gannon Ferrell (guitar), and Henry Buchanan-Vaughn (drums).
An ode to camaraderie, ‘Eddie’ reaches its lyrical denouement with what may be the “oldest prayer of friendship", but sounds like a throwaway Rivers Cuomo line: “I pray you don’t be a rat in a rat-suit! Pray you don’t be a rat in a rat-costume!”
“Like ‘Larry, Sleepover Friend’ from our 2019 Joke Oso EP, our new song is a garage-rock homage to a beloved friend of mine. Like ‘Larry’, ‘Eddie’ explores big themes in great friendships: their gnarly ambivalences, their absurd misunderstandings, their inside-jokes, and their contradictory mix of irreverence with utmost care,” says David Roush.
“We are also overjoyed to feature two great friends as the co-stars of the music video, the preposterously funny and talented comedic duo Syd and Olivia! I was lucky to have met these two pugnaciously podcasting, thoughtfully Thespian, joke-slinging YouTube yokels on a fantastic journey to the Greek island of Crete two years ago, and the rest was thirst’ory.”
Bella Komodromos adds, “They absolutely kicked butt at their roles in this Wes-Anderson-hued buddy-comedy music video, directed and produced by DJay Brawner. It is our ardent hope that all fans of Ecce Shnak and Syd and Olivia alike can shart out with their hearts out to this badass collaboration!”
Apart from directing and editing the new video with Brooks Jones, Beth Narducci and David Roush, Brawner also worked on the video for the album’s lead track ‘Vincent’, an homage to superb music videos of yesteryear – for Meshuggah’s ‘Bleed’ and 311’s ‘Down’. Here, operatic trills collide with frantic rock energy in a high-decibel takedown of a formulaic antagonist through the power of one’s own voice.
‘At Last, I Found You’ arrives as a standalone single to bookend the releases from their album, F.I.V.E. (Fear Increases Violent Emotions), released in January, ahead of a two-month tour of Europe, including some UK venues that are some way off the beaten track (which is a bummer for those on the regular circuit stop-offs, but a boon for those in neglected places like Whitchurch and Morecambe. The song was written during the F.I.V.E. sessions but intentionally held back until listeners had time to fully absorb the album, before emerging as its final companion piece, and it says something of the standard of material – as well as the level of confidence in said material – when a band are comfortable leaving what they know to be one of their strongest cuts off the main release.
But, as guitarist and bandleader Fabrizio Giampietro explains, “‘At Last, I Found You’ was always the most immediate and instinctive song we wrote during the F.I.V.E. sessions. We deliberately left it off the album because we wanted listeners to experience that record’s emotional arc without this song becoming its centre of gravity. Six months later, it
felt like the right moment to finally share it.” There’s a logic to this: so many albums are dominated by THE single, and in the age of streaming, where people tend to play tracks rather than albums (apparently – I personally shun streaming as a medium, and make a point of listening to vinyl and CD albums in full, from end to end, both when reviewing and also while cooking) it’s a decent strategy to encourage – by any means – listeners to focus on the body of work that is the album, over individual tracks.
‘At Last, I Found You’ is an obvious single cut, being a classic slice of dark synth pop with a distinctly European feel, and in drawing comparisons with early A-Ha I’m paying a strong compliment (I will forever maintain that the darker currents in their music are severely underappreciated, and songs like ‘I’ve Been Losing You’ and ‘Manhattan Skyline’ have ben wrongly eclipsed by ‘Take On Me’, because the Internet and compilation album compilers have a tendency to reduce acts with many, many hits down to one song to be endlessly repeated… don’t believe me? Duran Duran’s ‘The Reflex’ spent six weeks at number one in the UK, but you could be forgiven for thinking that ‘Rio’ was their only hit, and likewise that The Cult only had ‘She Sells Sanctuary’ as a charting single. We can learn from this just how history gets twisted, not primarily by the dissemination of false information, but by omission. Of course, I’ve digressed – that’s what I do, and I also strongly believe that the narrative of real life isn’t to be found in the main thread, but in the digressions. It’s not about the career or the landmark events, it’s about the weird detours and the dirt that falls between the cracks along the way, the stuff you don’t even notice while you’re looking at the next thing, the goals.
‘At Last, I Found You’ is dark but positive: Massimo Ciampani’s baritone vocal leaps upwards for the soaring choruses. An insistent beat and throbbing bass drive the song, which draws together elements of 80s synth pop, 90s goth and contemporary darkwave with a crisp precision.
What goes around certainly comes around: Christine Plays Viola formed in 2008, which was certainly a lull time for the popularity of goth and adjacent music. The present is another world, not just with heritage bands like Corpus Delicti and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and The March Violets releasing new material and / or touring, but new acts like Mouth Ulcers and Just Mustard bursting onto the scene. These are exciting times, and ‘At Last, I Found You’ is an exciting release. And while I rarely give advice, I would strongly recommend checking out the album.
‘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.
After years in the vault, The Stevenson Ranch Davidians share ‘Love, Light, Beauty & Truth’, a soaring anthem that feels more urgent than ever. Fusing shimmering ’60s-inspired psychrock, folk and Americana into a hypnotic swirl of hope, the New York collective delivers a powerful message of resilience in troubled times. Recorded years ago, the song’s relevance has only intensified, transforming it into a timeless rallying cry wrapped in radiant melodies and good vibrations.
This marks the beginning of a wave of previously unheard recordings, as they emerge with renewed momentum. Following their acclaimed Amerikana album, they recently completed their fourth album at Rick Rubin’s legendary Shangri-La Studio. 2026 also brings a run of live dates, including several with Elephant Stone ahead of the album’s release in early 2027. With this single, The Stevenson Ranch Davidians show that some songs aren’t just worth waiting for—they arrive exactly when the world needs them most.
Since Chat Pile’s formation just over six years ago, the Oklahoma City-based quartet has grown from a scrappy passion project of four local film and music enthusiasts into one of the defining heavy acts to emerge from the 2020s underground.
Ray B. (vocals), L. Manhole (guitar), Stin (bass), and Cap’n Ron (drums)’s crushing, crass, and cathartic take on noise rock resonates in a cracked reality. Their music captures a raw, undeniably human essence that’s increasingly fleeting in an age marked by ceaseless torrents of algorithmic slop, technological overreach, and the cold, crestfallen state of society. Nothing about their forthcoming third LP, Who Loves the Sun, feels synthetic. In a world increasingly shaped by disposable content, Chat Pile answers with something defiantly real and organic.
Who Loves the Sun’s latest single, ‘PEN I S MALL’ is “…the heaviest Chat Pile song to date. The song and title refer to a stretch of time when Raygun was working as a maintenance man at one of the local shopping malls here in OKC. He screamed himself into a pretty brutal headache tracking this one if I remember correctly,” says Stin. Ray B. continues: “If survival wasn’t so brutal in the United States, a maintenance job at a local mall could in theory be a fun gig… Of course, the awful beast known as Capitalism is extremely rickety with not enough to truly go around in fair share as those in the lower and even middle positions know all to well.”
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While Chat Pile’s 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.
Reaching into the collective consciousness to commiserate and carouse, Chat Pile now dissects how the apathy-bloated state of 21st-century existence is an active, slow-motion apocalypse, threads of which are woven through the album’s ten tracks. The album is lyrically and sonically as aggressive and confrontational as ever, but here Chat Pile approached the record’s songwriting with hooks in mind, drawing on the melodic tones of pre-2000s indie/alt-rock and new wave.
The perfect allegory for the thematic essence of Who Loves the Sun is the photo embossed on the record’s cover. As with much of Chat Pile’s work, Oklahoma City itself looms over the album like a character, its sprawling isolation, economic contradictions, and underlying sense of decay embedded in the fabric of the record. Devon Tower, a glassy, largely vacant monolith of a building, looms alone high above the Oklahoma City skyline, while an unknown burnt-out home or storefront envelops the foreground. Devon Tower was originally owned by the Devon Energy Company, who announced they were leaving Oklahoma last year. A monument to empty promises stands without a care in the world, while it’s only a matter of time before the blight it was responsible for swallows it up, too.
Live dates:
UK/EU 08/06 – Ancora, PT – Sonic Blast 08/08 – Katowice, PL – OFF Festival 08/09 – Prague, CZ – Fuchs2 ~ 08/10 – Budapest, HU – A38 ~ 08/11 – Vienna, AT – Arena (supporting HEALTH and Carpenter Brut) 08/12 – Munich, DE – Live/Evil ~ 08/14 – Col Du Lein, CH – Palp Festival 08/19 – Dublin, IRE – Button Factory ~ 08/20 – Dublin, IRE – Button Factory ~ 08/22 – Bristol, UK – Arctangent Festival
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09/12 – Oklahoma City, OK – Tower Theatre = (SISU Fundraiser Fest) 09/17 – Minneapolis, MN – First Avenue +^ 09/19 – Chicago, IL – Riot Fest 09/20 – Englewood, CO – The Gothic Theatre +& 09/23 – Salt Lake City, UT – The Metro Music Hall + & 09/25 – Seattle, WA – Showbox SoDo + & 09/27 – Portland, OR – Revolution Hall + & 09/29 – Sacramento, CA – Ace of Spades + 09/30 – San Francisco, CA – The Regency Ballroom + & 10/03 – San Diego, CA – Music Box + & 10/04 – Los Angeles, CA – The Belasco + & 10/06 – Mesa, AZ – The Nile Theater + & 10/08 – Austin, TX – Radio/East + & 10/09 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall + & 10/10 – Dallas, TX – Granada Theater + & 11/05 – Detroit, MI – The Majestic Theatre + % 11/06 – Millvale, PA – Mr. Smalls Theatre + % 11/08 – Norwalk, CT – District Music Hall + % 11/10 – Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Steel + % 11/11 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer + % 11/12 – Washington, DC – Black Cat + % 11/14 – Charlotte, NC – Underground + % 11/15 – Atlanta, GA – The Masquerade + % 11/16 – Nashville, TN – Brooklyn Bowl + % 11/18 – Columbus, OH – Newport Music Hall + % 11/20 – Indianapolis, IN – Deluxe at Old National Centre + % 11/21 – St. Louis, MO – Delmar Hall + % 11/22 – Lawrence, KS – The Granada + %
~ with Ragana + with Soul Glo ^ with Prize Horse & with Virga % with Shallowater = with Portrayal of Guilt, Nightosphere, Traindodge, Primal Brain
French progressive rock outfit HamaSaari have shared a stunning live performance video for ‘Frames’, one of the standout tracks from their acclaimed sophomore album Pictures, released earlier this year via Klonosphere.
Captured at the iconic Le Petit Bain in Paris during the band’s recent European tour supporting Norwegian progressive rock veterans Gazpacho, the video showcases HamaSaari at their most accomplished, translating the cinematic atmosphere of the studio recording into a powerful live performance. The footage was filmed by Pascal Van Beurden and edited by guitarist Jordan Jupin.
Reflecting on the experience, the band comment: “Le Petit Bain, floating on the Seine, is one of those Parisian venues with a soul all its own. Playing that stage, in that setting, felt like something special. That’s where we laid down ‘Frames’ that night, on our date with Gazpacho. We were already a week into the tour by then, well drilled, and it was their team, Pascal on sound and Jael on lights, who had our backs that night. It made for such a comfortable show. They even let us play one extra song, a gesture that really touched us. We’d also like to thank Lena Hemp (Uxcr Official / Hemp Prod) for capturing the footage and letting us loose in the edit room. And thank you to everyone who was there and shared that beautiful night with us.”
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Their latest album, Pictures, expands upon the foundations laid by their debut Ineffable, exploring themes of perception, memory, mythology, dreams, and the invisible boundaries between reality and imagination. Rich in atmosphere and emotional nuance, the album invites listeners to reflect on the images we choose to preserve, the stories we inherit, and the beliefs that shape who we are.
Fresh from touring alongside Gazpacho, HamaSaari will continue bringing Pictures to audiences across Europe throughout the year, with appearances at clubs and festivals in France, Germany, and the UK. Check out the confirmed dates below:
04.07 — Holzbunge, DE — Woodbunge Festival 16.07 — Lille, FR — High Voltage Bar 17.07 — London, UK — The Camden Club 18.07 — Abingdon, UK — Prog For Peart Festival 19.07 — Manchester, UK — The Peer Hat 21.07 — Middlesbrough, UK — Café Etch 22.07 — Nottingham, UK — Mist Rolling Inn 25.07 — Xanten, DE — Rhine Ent . Festival 29.08 — Tresboeuf, FR — La Charrue Festival 17.09 — Nantes, FR — Prog Night (la carriere) 14.10 — Lyon, FR — Rock N’ Eat 24.10 — Amiens, FR — La Filature
Aural Aggravation 