From Interpol to Editors to White Lies and far beyond, including, at present IST IST, dark-edged post-punk acts displaying strong Joy Division influence have been emerging for the last twenty years now, and more. Some are better than others, some capture the mood more effectively than others.
It’s perhaps because they’re from Leeds that The 113 are particularly good at capturing the mood: the spawning ground of goth in the 80s, the Leeds scene has always stood apart from not only the mainstream, but other major cities of the north, particularly Manchester and Sheffield, which in turn have always had their own identities: in the early 00s Leeds was hotbed for innovative post-rock, and has, over the last decade, yielded ever noisier, ever more angular, ever weirder bands, but also bands of quality who simply do – or did – their own thing, from Hawk Eyes and These Monsters to Castrovalva and I Like Trains, Thank, Post War Glamour Girls, Beige Palace, Black Moth, BELK, Irk, and of course, the mighty Blacklisters.
The 113 aren’t nearly as abrasive or far-out as many of these acts with whom they share turf, but their debut EP, To Combat Regret, released last March packed some blustering urgency to the familiar post-punk template. Both ‘Scour’ and previous single ‘Leach’ continue the same trajectory – lean, dark post-punk vibes, driven by dense bass, insistent percussion and some sinewy guitar work, creating tension and using it to powerful effect – but if anything, this is tauter, tenser, and more nuanced: the melodic, shoegaze mid-section adds significant impact to the song’s explosive conclusion.
This, in conjunction with ‘Leach’ says that the forthcoming EP, TheHeadonist (out April 17th) will be killer, and the upcoming tours in April and May look like something to get excited about, too.
It’s very early doors this evening, even considering there’s a club night starting at 10:30. I arrive at 6:05 to find a substantial queue of goths who are clearly keen. When they open up at 6:15, I enter the venue to the full-length version of ‘This Corrosion’, followed by ‘Play For Today’ by The Cure. Welcome to Leeds, goth city. Making a brief jaunt around the UK in support of new album Liminal, Corpus Delicti couldn’t have chosen a better city, or a more fitting venue to stop by. It’s well-timed, too: the album’s been out long enough to have bedded in with those who’ve heard it (which it seems is a fair portion of the audience), meaning that they’re not all waiting for the older material, and are every bit as enthusiastic for the new songs.
They’re also pretty enthusiastic for support act Auger. For me, they’re rather harder to take to, but nod due to lack of assessable material. Quite the opposite, in fact. Auger are very much from the lighter, poppies end of the goth spectrum, with some anthemic moments and at times inviting comparisons to Depeche Mode. The live drums add significantly to the dynamic. The live guitar less so, as it’s not particularly easy to pick out in the mix, and it’s the programmed bass on the backing which really fills out the sound. With synths, additional percussion, and – possibly – backing vocals all coming from the laptop, there’s an element of feeling like the pair are only doing a third of the work. The sound is, as one would expect, pretty slick. Singer Kyle Blaqk emotes, clutches his breast, and bounces around, and at times they come across more like a goth Erasure than anything else.
Auger
Corpus Delicti really are a cut above in every way. Sonically, they’re outstanding, and so, so tight. They have their sound absolutely nailed, from the meaty bass grooves and powerhouse tribal percussion to the brittle, chorus-heavy guitar sound, which rings out crisp and clear. And they give it all to the performance – not in a cheesy way, they don’t try for audience participation, but exude presence and radiate electricity. They seem to enjoy themselves, too: guitarist Franck is positively smiley throughout, and even when he experiences a minor issue with his pedals, he shrugs it off and is back in the mix in moments, still smiling and pacing about the stage with a restless energy. He and bassist Chrys are equally lively, swapping positions and constantly on the move. The whole band is very much stage forward, presenting what you might call an attacking field in football, bringing the show to the audience.
Corpus Delicti
Liminal, their first in almost thirty years, is a corker, and just as it begins with the high-impact, drama-filled ‘Crash’, so they open the set. They attack it with a rare intensity, and an energy they sustain for the duration of the set. Said set draws substantially on the new album, but equally pulls from all corners of their extensive catalogue, with ‘Appealing Skies’ and ‘Motherland’ land back-to-back representing 1995’s Obsessions fairly early, and landing ‘Lorelei’ and ‘Chaos’ in the second half of the set. Singer Sébastien is a strong presence, by turns menacing and stoic, impassive: he’s got moves and shapes and at times, he looks at an individual audience member in a way that’s capable of penetrating the soul. I certainly felt it.
Corpus Delicti
After closing the main set with the slower title track from the new album, they don’t take too much coaxing to return to the stage to deliver a triple-whammy of back-catalogue classics, with a bruising ‘Noxious’, followed by ‘Saraband’ and ‘Broken’.
They thank us for a great night, and say they’ve enjoyed themselves. So have we, very much indeed.
US dream-pop duo Magic Wands have released a brand new single, ‘Wishing Well’. With an insistent rhythm and swirling guitars, plus a vocal that adds to its hazy atmosphere, the song sounds like an immediate post-punk meets shoegaze classic.
“The lyric came to me when I was a guest of a guest at a wedding one summer,” explains vocalist Dexy Valentine. “There was an obvious sense of excitement at the event, but I didn’t really know anyone there so I snuck off outside and sat by a wishing well fountain and started writing on a napkin. When we came up with the music for this song I thought these words would fit perfectly.”
Co-written and produced by Dexy with her partner Chris Valentine, ‘Wishing Well’ is the title song of an EP scheduled for late April. It follows the January release of ‘Sacred Mirrors’, a collaborative single with Psychedelic Furs guitarist John Ashton.
Jeremy Moore – aka Zabus – continues his phenomenal creative run with the release of Avoidance Moon, another wildly inventive melding of myriad forms. And with Avoidance Moon, Moore pushes the established elements of the Zabus sound still further, cranking up the distortion and reverb to insane levels. It’s gothic, but it goes beyond. The theatricality is off the scale, but the feel is also very, very old school, and while it evokes the spirit of Dance Society and early X-Mal Deutschland and the like, it also calls to mind early Christian Death, and The Damned, with a bit of The Jesus and Mary Chain tossed into the blender for extra feedback spice.
The title track, which opens the album, is sparse and lo-fi, as quavering analogue synths hover their way through a crashing tube-crunched guitar, the gruff vocal and extraneous noise which runs in the background all bouncing around in a cavernous reverb with additional layers of murk. But something about it carries a certain, indefinable emotional resonance.
‘Theoretical Jesus’ brings reverb-soaked shoegaze and thunderous percussion – and splintering discord in the vein of A Place to Bury Strangers. Elsewhere, the heavy vibe with all the reverb is reminiscent of Modern Technology, perhaps because the baritone vocals share a common ground, too.
Avoidance Moon presents an uncompromising sonic swamp: on ‘Baited Idyll’, the thick, murky sound is cut through by the sharpest cymbal splashes, harsh treble clashes which strike like blades. ‘Punishment to Extinction’ melts together the warping wall of noise of My Bloody Valentine with the drama of Nick Cave: amidst the chaos, Moore casts his dark, theatrical incantations.
Avoidance Moon is a riot of late 70s / early 80s post punk, dark, attacking, dingy, lo-fi, analogue to the end. It’s likely too primitive for many ears, but it’s precisely the primitive nature of it all that appeals. So many acts pretend to draw inspiration from post-punk, but Zabuslives it. Avoidance Moon, then, is dense, suffocating, intense.
A little over two years on from the short film, Mill Session, Abrasive Trees have made another leap in pairing with Argonauta Records, a label which specialises in stoner, doom, sludge, and post-metal, and have unveiled ‘Carved Skull’ as a taster for upcoming album Light Remaining.
At first glance, having been variously described as Post-Punk/Post-Rock/Post-Folk, Abrasive Trees are a strange fit for the label, but with this seven-and-a-half-minute epic, it makes sense.
The intro is a slow-build, with echoes of latter-day Swans in the insistent percussion, repetitive jangling guitar and wordless droning vocals which pave the way for a spectacular sustained crescendo which introduces the riff which provides the track’s recurrent motif, and it’s almost two minutes before we arrive at the lyrics, in which Matthew Rochford reflects on the times in which we find ourselves and yearns for something better – a return to, if not necessarily simpler times, then honesty and humanity.
Can we write a eulogy, for this current age?
And leave the lies behind
Our fears are carved upon our skull
Our pain marked on our skin
The undercurrents reach back into dark folk imagery, and this is mirrored in the sound, too. Sonically, it’s rich and layered, simultaneously weighty but uplifting – which is perhaps a foreshadwing of the album’s thematics as alluded to in the title Light Remaining, which implies looming darkness, and yet., still some light – light synonymous with hope. These are dark times. But we must have hope. Without hope, what do we have?
With ‘Carved Skull’, Abrasive Trees have conjured a big sound, as is befitting of a big tune, which is bold and impactful, and likely an indication of what’s to come.
People are unpredictable. The world is unpredictable. And just when we think we’ve seen it all, a couple of days ago, US Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before the House Judiciary committee, making for TV the likes of which few of us have ever witnessed. We’ll return to this in due course, as it’s relevant beyond the fact that gig-going tends to provide respite and time out from all the madness.
And so it is that it’s hard to predict gig attendance, particularly when ticket availability is being touted to the thirteenth hour. But with a last-minute surge in attendance – seemingly because Flat Light (is that a pun?), playing their debut show, had managed to coax everyone they’d ever met out to see them – the place was packed early doors, which was unexpected for a cold dark night on Valentine’s weekend during the wettest and most depressing February in history.
Flat Light are up first. They’re five white office-type guys playing pedestrian indie. They were together enough, went down well, but apart from the last song – where they upped the tempo and came to life a bit, and in fairness, sounded really good – it was a pretty tepid, inauspicious start.
Flat Light
Suffering from the lack of a soundcheck, Knitting Circle spend the first couple of songs working on their levels, and even then, the sound is a bit muffled – specifically the vocals and guitar. But given that guitarist Pete is also the sound engineer, the fact that they pull it together is beyond admirable, and closer to heroic. Since whittling down to a three-piece, they’ve really focussed their sound, and following a spell of pretty intense gigging, they’re well-honed, and as always, an absolute joy to watch. As is often the case when Knitting Circle play a hometown show, there’s a new song: this time, it’s ‘Witch Folk’ which speaks of the thousands of women persecuted for witchcraft, forgotten by history. It boasts a particularly angular guitar jangle. They close with a quickfire ‘Losing My Eggs’, and while fluffing the false ending / intersection, recover with grace and good humour. Mistakes happen: it’s how an act deals them which counts, and Knitting Circle very much rose above and came out on top of all of the challenges presented to them tonight, proving that DIY is not a synonym for amateur.
Knitting Circle
The Unit Ama clearly spent some time on their soundcheck: they sound absolutely fantastic from the first note. On their last visit to York in the summer of 2024, they played a short set around the middle of a bill which also featured The Bricks and Teleost, as well as Objections and Cowtown (I clock a couple of Objections T-shirts tonight). Here, with room for a more expansive set, they seem simultaneously relaxed and energised. Their set is tight, but in disguise as something loose, improvised. It’s apparent, thought, that as much as there’s a keen intuition between the three of them, they’ve put some rehearsal time in.
Jason Etherington’s basslines are hypnotically cyclical, and paired with Christian Alderson busy jazz drumming, played with frayed drumsticks (and, at one point, a bow applied to cymbals), when they break out of the stuttery meandering segments to hit a groove, it’s blissful.
The Unit Ama
They’re by no means a band who do chat or bantz, instead conjuring epic expanses of quiet improv while tuning up and reconfiguring – in such a way that the actual songs seemingly emerge from nowhere, rising out of swampy expanses of discord and drift, of clattering cymbals and a general sense of slow-swirling chaos. But before playing the penultimate song of the set, a new one called ‘In Your Shoes’ being aired for the first time, Steve Malley pauses things to rant about the insanity of Bondi’s testimony: he was visibly shaken by what he’d witnessed, and I felt it in my chest. He blurted rage about Bondi’s ‘blatant fucking cunting lies’, before apologising for his choice of language, amending it to ‘blatant fucking cunting mistruths’. He’s absolutely spot on, and this leads the charge into a full-throttle blast that’s punk rock – Unit Ama style (perhaps with a heavy hint of Shellac by way of a touchstone – and very much a departure. It’s ace, too.
They’d planned to leave it there, but the audience convince them to give us an encore, which topped things off nicely. It seems that one thing you can predict is that a Fuzzled event at the Fulfordgate is guaranteed to be a good night.
It might have been a result of the inclement conditions, but setting foot in Huddersfield for the first time in my life, I’m struck by how incredibly quiet the streets are for a Friday night, and it’s far from packed in the upstairs room at The Parish when The Shakes take to the stage at 8:15. Now, I am a strong advocate of checking out support acts, and have discovered some outstanding bands by getting down early doors. This isn’t one of them. Musically, they’re competent players, but the material is very middling rock, the kind that’s easy to take or leave, but the singer thinks he’s some kind Bono meets Michael Hutchence rock star. It’s not a good look, and even if it were, it would require some serious charisma and immense talent to pull it off, and this fella has neither. The No Great Shakes, you might say. The room is considerably busier half an hour later. It’s almost as if people knew.
The Shakes
Having joined Skeletal Family in 2021, replacing Hannah Small after a brief tenure, and making her the band’s fourth vocalist, Anneka Latta has not only settled in nicely, but brings her own presence and a wonderful dynamic to the unit. Having recorded Light From Dark, released in 2023, their first album since 2009’s Songs of Love, Hope & Despair, her place feels not just solidified, but integral.
Skeletal Family
Tonight’s set draws substantially on Light From Dark, as well as featuring a new and unreleased song, which they’re planning to record in the coming months, indicating that as much as they’re a ‘heritage’ band, they’re still very much creatively active as well as keeping busy on the live circuit. And not only are they sounding fantastic, but there’s a real energy about their performance tonight. Anneka is all the energy, relentlessly bouncing, bounding, swinging and swaying about the stage, but the rest of the band are well animated, too: Ian “Karl Heinz” Taylor is particularly ambulant when switching synths for sax and adding some nice groove to the solid rhythm section, with stand-in drummer doing a superb job of delivering those quintessential rolling tribal rhythms paired tightly with Trotwood’s solid, urgent basslines. It’s all topped with Stan Greenwood’s spindly guitar lines – very much a defining feature not only of the Skeletal Family sound, but representative of that early northern goth sound. It’s clear they’re having a great time, and their collective enthusiasm is infectious.
Skeletal Family
And as much as the set showcases their current creativity, it does, essentially, contain a respectful share of their definitive early 80s back-catalogue, busting out the rambunctious sax-blasting ‘Move’ up front and an extended ‘She Cries Alone’ landing in the first third of the set. Non-album single ‘Just A Minute’ gets an airing, too, representing their poppier mid-80s sound (as was the direction of the scene around Leeds at the time, as output from this period by The March Violets evidences, and one can’t help but feel that major labels picking up the top-selling ‘alternative’ acts may have been a factor). The sole cut from debut Burning Oil is ‘Someone New’, meaning the spiker, punkier songs like ‘So Sure’ don’t make the set, but might not have been such a good fit with the rest of the songs or Anneka’s more conventionally ‘rock’ vocal style. That, and the fact they keep it tight with a punchy set of around fifteen songs, packed into a little over an hour, with no encore.
They leave us with ‘Promised Land’, which is without doubt one of the best singles of that ‘first wave’ of goth era, with its nagging guitar and driving bass. They perform it with gusto, and it sounds as fresh and exciting now as ever, topping off a set that’s both entertaining and exhilarating.
The iconic Jah Wobble has teamed up with guitarist Jon Klein on Automated Paradise, their third collaborative album and debut album as a duo with Dimple Discs. Out March 27th, this eight-track collection is previewed by the invigorating lead track ‘Fading Away’, a track that pulsates with motorik drive and the raw electrical tension of British post-punk and new wave, its shimmering progressive layers seemingly surging through the circuits of life itself.
The pairing of post-punk legends Jah Wobble (Public Image Ltd.) and Jon Klein (Specimen, Siouxsie & The Banshees) is no coincidence. Initially combining forces on the Metal Box – Rebuilt In Dub album, released in 2021, they continue to collaborate – both live and creating music in the studio.
“Jah Wobble and I share a mutual desire to keep a momentum going at the centre of the creative process. So we keeping it moving and trust our instinctive decisions and ideas. Automated Paradise is essentially a collection of jams and sketches, all made very spontaneously. We’d made several albums together previously, starting with 2021’s Metal Box – Rebuilt in Dub, so he had a wide range of experiences and strategies to draw from,” says Jon Klein.
“‘Fading Away’ is an end-of-civilisation story, echoing one of the earliest themes of human literature and reflecting a persistent human anxiety about the fragility of social order.”
Jah Wobble adds, “Making this record with Jon Klein was (as ever) an absolute buzz . Totally in the moment. Proper post punk. Angry and humorous. ‘Fading Away’ was the first track we finished from this album. We did this record in a handful of very intense, spontaneous sessions. Right place, right time sort of thing”.
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This album follows two 2025 albums for Wobble - Dub Volume 1 (Dimple Discs) and the expanded reissue of the 2017 album The Usual Suspects, featuring 25 career highlights, re-recorded and including some of Wobble’s finest material, alongside tracks by Invaders Of The Heart and PiL.
This is Jah Wobble’s first post-punk album in recent years, following an array of travel and dub records. The brash guitar-driven tracks reflect his continuing preoccupation with the declining state of the nation. Driven by his experience working weekly at a music-based community project in Merton, along with Jon Klein, this record recalls the spirit of Mark Stewart – angry in an empathetic, constructive way. Like much of his recent work, the lyrical content was often inspired while traversing London’s transport system.
Jon Klein is a guitarist and producer best known as a member of Siouxsie and the Banshees from 1987 until 1994, which saw the release of the albums Peepshow, Superstition and The Rapture. Originally in the Bristol band Europeans, he then formed the glam-goth act Specimen and relocated to London, where he co-founded The Batcave nightclub. He has worked with Talvin Singh and Sinéad O’Connor, and co-produced a string of No. 1 albums for Warner-signed Spanish band Fangoria, fueling a decade-long streak of chart-topping success in Spain. His most recent work being as co-producer and guitarist with Jah Wobble.
Jah Wobble (born John Wardle) is a bass guitarist and vocalist from East London, whose career encapsulated genres from post-punk, dub and world music to experimental rock and electronic music. An original member of Public Image Ltd (PiL) from 1978-80, he made two groundbreaking albums with the band, which included the iconic Metal Box.
Ashley Reaks is an artist who has very clear creative cycles, releasing, as standard, an album a year, and sometimes two, which make the fallow periods more conspicuous. This is not one of those fallow spells: Nature Reversed arrives just four (dark, cold, wet, gusty, wintery and generally depressing) months after At Night the World Belongs to Me, released at the end of September last year. And it marks something of a shift, and even ventures into the realms of what one might consider a ‘concept album’.
Reaks describes the album as ‘a stark, hallucinatory journey through the Yorkshire Dales and the inherited wounds of a father–son lineage. Mixing messed-up jazz fragments with rural, almost medieval folk textures, the album follows a narrator who must invert his own nature to survive the authoritarian “Old King” and then claw his way back to himself through wildness, shame, desire, and the raw, cyclical violence of the natural world.’ That’s a lot to unpack. If it was the plot for a novel, it would be a twisty-turny work, rich in allusion and haunting imagery – but likely jazz-free. But to compress all of this into nine songs and forty-five minutes… Ambitious would be one word for it.
The album’s first piece, ‘I Don’t Like The Old King’ does very much explore the expansive fields of folk, but through a proggy filter, performed with synths, and underpinned by a strolling bass – somewhat reminiscent of the Bauhaus song ‘Part of the Third Part’, at least at the start – and a beat that both shuffles and swings. It’s the bass that defines ‘We Forage in the Gutters’, going full Jah Wobble in its dubbiness. But at the same time, there’s a sparseness, an introspection which is different here. The elements we’ve come to expect from Reaks are all present and correct, but Nature Reversed takes those elements to another place, and it feels like the freneticism has been turned down in favour of a more focused approach.
As with everything Reaks releases, Nature Reversed is interesting… by which I mean it’s a collage of weirdness that draws together a host of disparate elements. Just as Reaks’ artworks are crazy collages, so his music is relentlessly unpredictable. ‘The Desire to Seduce Euphoria’ is perfectly representative: it brings together some moody, melancholic postpunk, with chiming, reverby guitar… there are some processed vocals and there’s some jazz in the mix… I say ‘some’, but the mid-section is a massive blast of horns, before it careens into a heavy prog synth workout What the fuck IS this? This is no criticism: Reaks relentlessly challenges the borders, and does his own thing.
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Nature Reversed gives us all of the conventional Reaks elements – but the wild jazz is dialled back significantly. He describes it as ‘cut-up jazz, awkward Eastern folk, medieval motifs, old ghosts, and new life pushing through ancient stone walls — music about inheritance, rebellion, and what survives when you break things wide open’, and so it’s no surprise that William Burroughs features in the list of inspirations, ‘ranging from ‘nature poet’ John Clare and William Burroughs to Rip Rig + Panic, Talk Talk, PJ Harvey, Robert Wyatt and Captain Beefheart, Nature Reversed fuses literature, music, and visual art into a chaotic, lyrical, and intimate landscape. Ultimately, it’s a meditation on survival, rebellion, and renewal — the feral life that surges when you break open your origins.’
As is always the case with Reaks’ work, Nature Reversed is a huge intertext, and it would be reasonable to describe him as a classic postmodernist, celebrating and revelling in multitudinous sources, plundering his influences and inspirations openly and emphatically. This feels more restrained, more contemplative, and lyrically there’s a proliferation of images drawn from nature – but then again, there’s no shortage of sharp-edged, darker stuff, as on ‘Picking on the Meat Membranes’, and ‘Swan in a Womb’ brings together post-punk grooving bass, sprawling jazz, glittering prog synths and vocal processing – and this is point of definition for Nature Reversed, really. It’s everything, all at once, but at a sedate pace. Don’t be fooled by the gentler, more introspective sound: Reaks stull pushes experimentalism to the absolute limits, and Nature Reversed is the singular sound of creative freedom.
The Devil’s Door sees And also the trees (AATT) present a quiet storm of an album. At times filmic, poetic and intense, with an undercurrent of dark psychedelia, it follows The Bone Carver (2023) and Mother-of-pearl-Moon (2024) in completing a trilogy of releases by the current line-up of one of the original UK post-punk acts.
The new record features signature AATT tropes that include poetic lyrics, orchestral guitar and soundtrack influenced songs inspired by newsreel, oil paintings and folklore. However, it also adds some surprising instrumentation – including guest violinist Catherine Graindorge – that skews the album towards a soundworld where John Barry meets Béla Bartók.
Ahead of the album, they’ve unveiled a video for the song ‘The Silver Key’. Watch it here:
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AATT formed in 1979 in rural Worcestershire, an environment that has provided a constant inspiration to a group whose music has often explored the dark underbelly as well as the beauty of the British countryside. AATT are renowned for their captivating live performances, a unique style of mandolin-like electric guitar, evocative lyrics and dark jazz rhythms – not to mention a creative independence fiercely preserved for over four decades.
The group have a long standing relationship with the Cure and have both played and worked together since the early ’80s. As part of AATT’s 2026 touring schedule, they will be special guests of the Cure for three shows at the Festival de Nîmes in southern France in late July. These will be preceded by early spring dates in Belgium, France and Greece:
7th March NAMUR (BE) La Nef De L’Eglise Notre Dame D’Harscamp 18th March TOURCOING (FR) Le Grand Mix 19th March ANGERS (FR) Joker’s Pub 20th March LORIENT (FR) Hydrophone 21st March CHERBOURG (FR) Espace Culturel Buisson 22nd March PARIS (FR) La Gaité Lyrique 4th April ATHENS (GR) Death Disco Indoor Festival 2026 24th July NÎMES (FR) Festival de Nîmes 25th July NÎMES (FR) Festival de Nîmes 26th July NÎMES (FR) Festival de Nîmes
Founded by singer Simon Jones and his guitarist brother Justin, AATT have maintained a continuous presence on the post-punk and alternative rock scenes worldwide. The group have released sixteen studio albums to date.
Aural Aggravation 