Posts Tagged ‘Review’

Small Rocks – The Future in a Rearview Thumbnail

Posted: 1 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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6th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Matt Wand is best known for his work as a founder member of experimental samplists Stock, Hausen & Walkman between 1989 and 2001, although his body of work in collaboration with other artists, and under numerous pseudonyms, and as a solo artist is extensive. His latest project came to my attention via a friend, and a tape, and suddenly it felt like the 90s again, when word of mouthy was the most likely source of introduction to new music – alongside the weekly inkies and John Peel. Not that I’m about to harp on about the good old days, particularly as I have the good fortune to be fed a constant stream of music that never fails to amaze and confound, but it does highlight and remind just how limiting the force of the algorithm is, the endless conveyor belt of ‘if you like this…’ and services simply lining up the next track in an eternal playlist which subscribers tend to passively permit to pass into their ears, and how the cultural relationship has changed over time. And yes, something has been lost: endless streaming music on tap isn’t the boon it’s often hailed as. Spotify and the like delivers sonic wallpaper. How many of its users will listen to an album end-to-end and multiple times in sequence over the course of a week and a month, really engaging and excavating every last detail while it beds in?

I’ve begun with a digression, but the joy of music – for me, at least – is the way in which it inspires trajectories of thought, often in the most unexpected directions. It’s as if it has the capacity to unlock doors to forgotten recesses within the mind. Anyway, to shift focus specifically to the album at hand, while credited to Small Rocks, the album’s cover (the artwork of which is almost as disturbing as that of the first Toe Fat album) appends this with the words ‘in dub’, and this very much gives a clue to the contents – that is, fourteen instrumental compositions centred around dense, strolling basslines and sparse, echo-soaked beats.

A number of the tracks on here – ‘A Lung Full Of Woofer Gas’, ‘Give Me Back Me Bucket’, and ‘Blind Mute Specialist’ – date back to 2002’s three-way split album Dub TribunL, which featured Small Rocks alongside Atom™ and The Rip-Off Artist. This is an album which has been a long time in its gestation.

Leisurely grooves and rippling reverberations abound, with puns and wordplay making for an added bonus – ‘Curlew Curfew in Corfu’, anyone? On ‘Bassically Unsettled’, the thick, rubbery bass bounced its way through subtle and mildly disorientating tempo changes, while ‘Mirror Sigil Manoeuvre’ is sparse and spacey, the beats landing like drips from stalactites in an immense cavern. And yes, as minimal as it is, the sounds are mentally and visually evocative.

Landing in the middle of the album – or the end of side one on the cassette – ‘The Moss Veil’ is less dubby and more a work of dark ambience with hints of Dr Who amidst the dank swampiness and sporadic whirrs and bleeps. It calls to mind the weirdy sci-fi sounds of soundtracks of the late 70s and early 80s and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

The title track, which raises the curtain on side two, is more uptempo and verges on being some mutant drum ‘n’ bass, before the multi-00layered ‘Keep Quiet & ROT (mit bADbLOOD JA Kötting) ‘, which takes a swerve into more industrial territory, while hinting at the cut-up tape experiments of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, conducted in the later ‘60s and early ‘70s, while at the same time coming on like a reggae Butthole Surfers. It really is all going on here on The Future in a Rearview Thumbnail. ‘a Lung-full of Woofer GAS’ is a hybrid of dub with minimal techno, and ‘Give fe me back Me BUCKET’ brings an industrial-strength percussive clatter that owes as much to Test Dept as any other act, while ‘The Custodian’ closes the set with a warping, glitchy tension that’s again infused with a more retro vibe, although the distant snare which lurks in the background is swamped in reverb and vocal fragments float around in a dubby fashion.

The Future in a Rearview Thumbnail is a rare expression of experimentalism, an album which dares to venture in different directions, and celebrates its strangeness.

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The 113 – When I Leave

Posted: 31 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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EMI North / Launchpad+ – 30th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The 113 have done it again – only this time, more so. Like its predecessors, single ‘When I Leave’ is take from the forthcoming debut EP, The Hedonist, which is due to land on 17th April. And once again, it steps things up.

It follows the noisy path of debut, ‘Leach’, a vitriolic blast which powers in on a thick, thunderous overdriven bass, paired with an attack of heavy-hitting, cymbal-smashing percussion, slamming in with hard impact in the opening bars. Immediately, it’s the sound of a band that means business and arrives with a physical force. The vocals are straight in with a pumped-up spleen-venting tone of disaffection, and on this outing, the focus of their dissection and dissatisfaction with the conditions of contemporary living is lasered in on ‘the personal, exploring the gamified and repetitive nature of dating apps, where every interaction can seemingly begin to blur into the next’.

The accompanying notes expand on this, explaining how ‘the track captures that specific sense of cyclical monotony; scripted conversations, fleeting intimacy, and the almost inevitable feeling of disillusionment that can occur following the search for something real within systems designed with the purpose of endless scrolling: “Nice to meet you! Scratch the skin and we’re done, and hold the stench of a thousand pros playing for fun”.

Does anyone actually gain anything but grief and stress from dating apps? A few shit experiences, perhaps gathering a stalker or pest along the way, but really, how many find love – versus how many find nothing but the dregs of humanity?

It’s perhaps relevant to mention here that I met my (now late) wife online, in a music chatroom, at the turn of the millennium, before dating sites existed and before it was socially acceptable to meet people from online in real life. Her friends and parents were far from encouraging about her meeting me: back in 2000, the perception was that the Internet was full of weirdos, creeps, stalkers, and worse. Now… perhaps we’re more willing to take those gambles with the ever-expanding creep of isolation as a result of floating office hours, where people only see one another occasionally, the death of after-work drinks, and social media taking precedence over in-person interaction. How do you meet new people nowadays? Is this really what we’ve come to? It would seem the answer is yes….

And then, the guitar kicks in over that thick bass and pounding percussion, and it’s squalling and dissonant and then everything hits a laser focus to drive home a blistering chorus – their strongest yet – and POW! ‘When I Leave’ is two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of concentrated, distilled intensity.

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Credit: Naomi Whitehead

Octavian Winters – Elements of Air

Posted: 25 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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25th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Pitched as ‘one of the most exciting new bands on the North American dark post-punk scene’., Octavian Winters formed – or, as their bio would have it – ‘was born into the ghostly isolation of San Francisco’ in 2022. Already, the pandemic seems to have receded into a past which feels like a fever dream. The fact that German post-punk legends Pink Turns Blue dig them enough to have picked them as support for their tour of the western US in April speaks for itself, and in many respects, so does this single, a thick slice of classic vintage-style gothiness that’s cooked to perfection.

Frontwoman and lyricist Ria Aursjoen says: “‘Elements of Air’ is about how we see the world, our chosen frame of reference, and how much power that holds over us — including the power to destroy things we value. The direct inspiration was someone I knew who chose to view the world through a lens of hate, and how that ultimately cost the friendship.”

In these times of extreme division, this is likely to be a scenario which is relatable to many. While the arrival Trump in the Whitehouse (and the advent of Brexit here in the UK) was an obvious moment of rupture, the pandemic proved to be a defining moment in time where people seemed to take more polarised positions. And since emerging from the successive lockdowns, the world feels like a different place – a place not only in the grip of war, but a place where people seem intent on causing anguish, antagonism, and aggravation, as if they’re spoiling for a fight, and if it’s not over immigration or race or the like, then they’ll settle for sparking a dispute over car parking or dustbins. Disharmony dominates the social discourse, and many have found themselves having to sever ties to once-close friends in the interests of self-preservation.

Driven by rolling drums and a dense bass, it’s topped by a choppy, metallic, flange-coated guitar, reminiscent at times of X-Mal Deutschland, which scratches and scrapes it way through the track. And then there’s Ria Aursjoen’s airy vocals which breeze in and weave a spellbinding melody. Part Toni Halliday (Curve), part Maria Brannigan (Sunshot), she brings an almost poppy vibe to the dark-edged post-punk party. Sure, it’s a formula that has its roots much further back, with The March Violets and Skeletal Family incorporating an accessible, pop-with-a-twist vocal, with snaking melodies steeped in Eastern mysticism.

Listening to any ‘new’ goth inevitably leads me down a rabbit hole of memory lane excursions into ‘old’ goth: the genre is rich in intertext and references, influences and appropriations, and it was ever thus, the early 80s acts who were goth before the label existed – Bauhaus, The Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie – all belonged to the post-punk milieu, which draw on Bowie, The Doors, The Stooges. Perhaps more than in any other genre, there’s a lineage and a trajectory which can be traced back through the decades to its musical prehistory and which has remained quite intact through the various waves, of which there have now been several.

As such, it’s not so much about breaking new ground, but how inventively the tropes are used, and how well-crafted, how well-executed the songs are. And in the case of ‘Elements of Air’, the crafting and execution is spot on.

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Octavian Winters band photo (greyscale)

The SPKtR – The Last of Men

Posted: 24 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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24 March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

SPK require little introduction, although industrial / electronic pioneer Graeme Revell has spent most of his time in recent years exploring and talking about AI – not just its applications, but its implications – having been an early adopter of this now world-changing technology. As such, SPK have been effectively dormant since the late 80s, with their last new material having been released in 1987. In their absence, their legacy has grown, but the fact that last year saw the first musical activity in a very long time, with a couple of live shows in Europe, with Graeme performing with his son, Robert, still came as a surprise to many. Then, Revell announced the birth of The SPKtR – a new phase for SPK – although he wasn’t giving much away.

But now, finally, The SPKtR have unveiled ‘The Last of Men’, and it’s a chilling slice of dark, industrial-strength electronica. The vocals are heavily processed, low, ominous, doomy in a filmic sense, a shade Darth Vader, the lyrics hinting that the future is a synergy of man and machine:

We are the last of men

We are the broken faith

The soul is a lie

The mind is a ghost

We are the machines

Marching to the future

Not so long ago, this was purely the domain of science fiction. But of course, science fiction in its purest form takes emerging science and uses it to create a fictional narrative based on potential scenarios (I’m thinking here of works like Prey and The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, which specifically cite research papers, rather than the more hallucinogenic kind of work by Philip K. Dick or the cyberpunk works of William Gibson, although the latter does very much explore the space of virtual and alternative realities, the likes of which became habitable with the advent of the Internet). And now the futures depicted in works of science fiction are here, and the prospects for where we go from here are giving rise to extremely divided views. Some people are embracing AI wholeheartedly, while other are experiencing abject fear, and not only over the prospect of losing their job to AI. There have been reports of AI weaponry overriding commands and going rogue in simulations, and AI coaxing vulnerable individuals to take their own lives. For every person who loves AI, there is another who loathes it and is of the belief it will bring about our doom.

If the song itself sounds like the end of days, the accompanying video – a clip of which accompanies the stream on Bandcamp is truly apocalyptic. And it’s AI generated, of course, as is, quite clearly, the single’s artwork. Whatever your stance on AI, there’s no question that it’s visually striking, and works as an accompaniment to the audio.

Writing on the single, Graeme explains its meaning and presents a more balanced, nuanced position:

“‘The Last of Men’ is not about human extinction. It’s about the end of a certain idea of Man — sovereign, central, in control. Is it a warning? Yes, if we cling to a myth of human exceptionalism while delegating cognition, memory and desire to systems we barely understand, we risk becoming decorative in our own civilisation. A celebration? Yes, of transformation rather than replacement. Humanity has always been prosthetic. Fire was prosthetic. Language was prosthetic. Electricity was prosthetic. AI is a cognitive prosthesis. The anxiety comes from the fact that this prosthesis talks back.

If there’s a message I’d stand behind, it’s this: We are not witnessing the end of humanity. We are witnessing the end of human centrality. Whether that becomes tragedy or metamorphosis depends less on the machines than on our willingness to evolve ethically, imaginatively, and politically alongside them. It’s always an investigation. SPK prefers probing thresholds rather than conclusions.”

It’s a lot to unpack, and everyone reading this will likely hold a different view on this. The extent to which AI was involved in the music itself is unclear – the video, more obvious. Is applying AI to this extent as part of an ‘investigation’ valid, or is it something which, by its very nature is complicit in the expansion of AI, a surrender of creative control to a machine which we don’t have a rein on?

‘The Last of Men’ is a striking release, and a powerful return for SPK, with the new SPKtR moniker denoting the start of a new era. How it will unfold remains to be seen, and will likely be interesting. All we can do is watch this space…

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The SPKtR - The Last of Men cover art

Decent News – Computer

Posted: 25 February 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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17th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Decent news is hard to come by these days – by which I mean for the last five or six years. During the pandemic, every day was a nightmare, as the graphs and charts and rolling death toll was beamed into our homes via every available channel. A lot of people simply switched off and went to the greatest lengths to avoid any form of news media at this time, but for many of us, it became a compulsion, an addiction we couldn’t kick even while fully cognisant that it was fucking us up.

It seemed that dark shit was building up under lockdown, and the moment restrictions were lifted, Russia invaded Ukraine, and not that long after, al hell broke loose in Gaza, and then Trump ‘won’ a second term in office. The entire globe has lost the plot. But snippets of decent news do filter through occasionally, like the arrest of The Artist Formerly Known as Prince Andrew, and former US Ambassador, the Former Prince of Darkness, Peter Mendelson. We can only hope this is the beginning of a toppling of a much, much bigger house of cards.

In other decent news, we have the arrival of Computer, an EP by US industrial metal act Decent News, and ten years and three albums into their career, they seem to be absolutely thriving on this fucked-up state of affairs. Perhaps ‘thriving’ isn’t quite the word, but as the accompanying notes summarise, ‘Computer, as a whole. is largely inspired by the current state of the world. The same generation that taught us to not believe everything we read on the internet somehow keeps believing everything they read on the internet and is therefore, making the world a far worse place.’ We’re on the same page on this.

The five tracks on Computer are pretty wild: the first of these, ‘Flesh for the Feast’, which addressed the topic of ‘being brutalized while trying to exercise your right to protest’ blends sequenced backing elements and robotix vocals with squalling guitars, powerhouse percussion, and raw, raging hollering, and it all blasts in at a hundred miles an hour. ‘Drowned in Power’ is harsh and metallic, inviting comparisons to PIG at their gnarliest industrial metal points, but with the raging anger cranked to the max. While the lyrics aren’t often decipherable, it’s clear that this is the voice of protest. ‘Help Computer’ continues in the same vein, bringing the pumping energy of KMFDM.

After the slow, slow-slung bluesy sleazer that is ‘Bloated & Blue’, ‘Valueless Trade’ swaggers in on a ballsy bass groove and a mess of guitar noodling and samples before hitting an overdriven riff-centric blast that straddles hardcore and metal.

Pretty, it is not. Blunt and hard-hitting, it is. Decent news for everyone who isn’t a fan of insipid sonic chewing gum or a right-wing wanksack.

AA

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Licorice Chamber – Remnants

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

Christopher Nosnibor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AA

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Abrasive Trees – Carved Skull

Posted: 16 February 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Argonauta Records – 13th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

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.

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Ergocaust – Souls In Pain At Work

Posted: 9 February 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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27th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The context for this, the debut release from Ergocaust, is in some ways an uplifting tale, whereby something positive emerges from a bad situation. They explain that the track was ‘Composed the day I got fired and refined until I made peace with reality, this song was forged out of blood, sweat, tears, hunger, and misery.’

The wheels of capitalism drive our lives, and we have simply no choice in the matter. Hate your job? Tough shit. Suck it up. You’re expendable, and easily replaced. Labour is cheap, and so is life, and not just to the highest echelons of society, but even to lower-level management. They’re only interested in the stats, and will do anything to save their own arses when under scrutiny by the next level up… and so it goes on up the hierarchy. The bottom line is about profit, and survival, and the person above you does not give a fuck about how you pay the rent or feed your family. It’s about how they pay their rent and feed their family, and how they can make cuts to boost their own bonus.

As Ergocaust writes, this ‘encapsulates the idea very neatly just by the title’. It’s fairly direct, and puts an emotive, anguish-laden spin on the notion that under capitalism, workers are confronted with the contradiction of producing and reproducing the conditions of their own alienation. Never mind religion: work is the opium of the masses, whereby the workers are too busy earning a crust and too exhausted from doing so to rebel. The reason everyone is trapped on the hamster wheel is that as much as you hate your job, you need to work to survive. You want out of the hellish job, but to be released from the hellish job is to wonder how you will survive. There are no options.

Ergocaust channels a host of conflicting emotions by the medium of a song with a complex, detailed structure, which draws together a range of musical styles, spanning black, thrash, and industrial metal to forge a compelling hybrid. The fact that its instrumental is perhaps an asset. Articulating complicated and conflicting emotions is something which, all too often, words fail to achieve: in such instances, the language of sound and the power of music serves the purpose more effectively.

It may clock in under three minutes, but ‘Souls In Pain At Work’ is dense and it speaks – by which I mean, it howls anguish, rage, pain. But therein lies beauty and joy, in that  from trauma emerges great art.

GLDN – Vessel

Posted: 4 February 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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6th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

GLDN – the musical vehicle of New York industrial / metal artist Nicholas Golden. It’s been a good couple of years since we’ve heard from him, but he’s back with what he’s calling a ‘hard reboot’. And there’s some emphasis on ‘hard’ here.

Of ‘Vessel’, GLDN is up-front, writing of ‘abandoning the organic grit of the First Blood era, this track establishes a cold, clinical architecture. It is an industrial-metal indictment of the “Trauma Economy”— where pain is sold as content…. merging the mechanical dissonance of 90s industrial with the high-fidelity aggression of modern metal.’

The first fifteen seconds alone are a brutal slab of overloading distorted guitar, bringing that nu-metal brick walling, lump hammer-like bludgeoning. The sound is thick and heavy, and when it arrives, Golden’s vocal is menacing and tortured, at first a whisper, then a scream. Amidst a snarling trudge of heaviosity, Golden evokes Trent Reznor circa The Downward Spiral in his vocal delivery, but occasionally veers into raging metal, following the instrumental work into squalling grindcore territory.

Although tightly structured, ‘Vessel’ is not a verse / chorus song: it’s a relentlessly brutal assault of the most devastating order. It’s the sound of extreme emotional violence, it’s having your oesophagus ripped out by a clawed hand, it’s nihilistic rage distilled into less than four minutes. It’s nothing short of devastating.

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The 113 – Leach

Posted: 21 January 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

I find it most disconcerting shopping in my local Co-op. The self-service checkouts film you, and you can see yourself on the screen above your head while you scan your items. Surveillance and facial recognition is everywhere now. The other day, I passed a venue where a guy in a flat cap was ordered my security to remove his hat and “look into that camera” before being told he could replace his cap and enter the venue. We really have come to this: you can’t go shopping or go for a drink without a capture of your visage ‘for security’. I appreciate that shoplifting is at a record high and violent crime is rife, but is this really the solution? How about asking why we have these issues? And what happens with these captured images? Who views them? How long are they stored, and where? Are they being passed off to train AI?

The ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about’ argument is missing the point, and no longer holds water. The state of things in America with brutal ICE raids where countless American citizens have been mauled, detained, and even murdered (because regardless of the official line, Renee Nicole Good was murdered: those shots were not fired in self-defence, and we live in a horrible, brutal, fucked-up world). And this shit affects you. Well, it certainly affects me, and I know I’m not alone in feeling jumpy, on edge, endlessly anxietised by the prospect of what may happen next, the prospect of waking up to discover that WWIII has broken out while asleep.

This new single by 311 touches on this, significantly, as it happens. as their bio notes summarise: ‘Propelled by discordant guitars and thunderous offbeat rhythms, ‘Leach’ is an abrasive dystopian statement on surveillance, data harvesting and the quiet unease of modern digital life; both a rallying cry against the advancement and negative impacts of big tech, and an honest admission of powerlessness and inevitability in the face of it all.’

It’s a killer single and yet again evidence of just how fertile Leeds is as a spawning ground for fantastic bands. London, Manchester, even Sheffield receive so much hype, but despite being the epicentre of goth in the early 80s and the place for post-rock in the mid 2000s, Leeds seems to be criminally lacking in recognition for its contribution to music, despite Blacklisters, despite Pulled Apart by Horses… and 311 are another bands that should be flagging the city on the national – and international – radar. Because ‘Leach’ brings it all, from churning math-rock, angularity and anguish, colliding post-rock with post-punk and huge energy, they pack menacing and searing riff energy and… and… yeah. This is good.

It’s worth remembering punk and post-punk emerged from terrible times, where it felt like music offered a rare escape, both for those who created it and attended shows. And here we are again.

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