CERESIAN VALOT release a visualiser for the next single ‘Valojuovat’ (‘Tracers’) taken from the forthcoming debut full-length Uumen (Depths). The first album of the Finnish heavy alternative band has been scheduled for release on May 23, 2025.
Wille Naukkarinen writes: “The new advance single ‘Valojuovat’ is one of the most recent songs that I wrote for Uumen and my personal favourite on this album”, the guitarist and main songwriter reveals. “I don’t have much to tell about the composition process, because this was one of those rare cases where the song basically wrote itself. The instrumental version was completed pretty quickly. It’s a mix of prog and melancholia, showcasing both our quieter and heavier side in a very melodic way. I recommend to listen to ‘Valojuovat’ with your eyes closed.”
Panu Perkiömäki adds: “This song has strong dystopic vibes”, the vocalist opines. “The key idea of the song is inspired by the writing of Albert Camus. It’s a song about wars and other manmade disasters. It is also a song about solving problems by changing the channel, if the news get too stressful. ‘Valojuovat’ does even contain some doubts about religions and their infallibility.”
Helmed by Black and Cherokee composer and multi-instrumentalist Takiaya Reed, Divide and Dissolve will release their new album, Insatiable, on April 18 via Bella Union.
The 10 track album run the gamut of doom metal – from the ear-splitting depths of lead single ‘Monolithic’, to contemplative, softer moments on the aptly titled song ‘Grief’, released today. Like all of Divide and Dissolve’s music, Insatiable is almost entirely instrumental.
While the album’s sheer grandiosity represents an evolution in Divide and Dissolve’s sound, it also marks the very first time that Takiaya has ever lent vocals to a D//D song. On ’Grief’ her distorted voice echoes atop a vibrating bass tone, repeating the lyrics: “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do/ I’m so lonely without you.” Takiaya explains, “The voice is such a mysterious instrument. This album feels different, and I wanted to honour that”.
The director of the music video, Sepi Mashiahof, adds; “The music video for ‘Grief’ is an ode to the feelings of empowerment, resistance, and sadness that Divide and Dissolve weaves into our bodies. It’s an expressionist diary made up of dissonant and revelatory memories. Grief eclipses everything around us, innocuously lingering in the functional movements of our daily lives, then aggressively literal in the reflective silence behind our eyes. Grief is inherent to our existence, knowing that a better world exists for all of us and its potential is boundless, yet we’re made to suffer the atrocities of greed and exploitation instead. We can honor Grief as a passage of life, but we must resist the forces that impose it as a numbness to injustice.”
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Divide and Dissolve live dates (so far):
18-05-2025 Desertfest London – London 30-08-2025 Supersonic Festival – Birmingham
Ahead of the release of their new album, The Double, Brooklyn-based goth-folk duo Charming Disaster have unveiled a video for the track ‘Trick of the Light’.
The Double invites listeners to step across the border of an alternate reality, where spells are cast, time travel is possible, plants are taking over civilization, and vampires lurk in the shadows. Adventures in the darkness lie beyond the threshold.
The album’s ten songs include ‘Black Locust,’ a lullaby about mortality; ‘New Moon,’ a magical nature ritual; ‘Trick of the Light,’ a reimagining of Bram Stoker’s Dracula; ‘Time Machine,’ in which Charming Disaster change the past and start over again; ‘Scavengers,’ a walk in the woods with vultures and bones; ‘Beautiful Night,’ a defiant response to struggles with depression; ‘Vitriol,’ a tribute to artist Thomas Little, who turns guns into ink; ‘Haunted Lighthouse,’ a swashbuckling sea voyage; ‘Gang of Two,’ a true crime adventure; and ‘Green Things,’ a love letter to what grows between the cracks (and its inevitable takeover).
The album features an array of talented collaborators. Co-producer Don Godwin, who has worked on Charming Disaster’s entire discography, contributed bass, drums, and horns as well as engineering and mixing. ‘Haunted Lighthouse’ features Broadway percussionist Mike Dobson along with circus composer Peter Bufano, who played piano and accordion and engineered the track at Cirkestra World Headquarters in Boston, MA (with additional tracking at Tonal Park). ‘Scavengers’ features cello recorded by Kate Wakefield of the duo Lung, who also created the string arrangement for ‘Beautiful Night.’ Stefan Zeniuk of Gato Logo contributed saxophone to ‘Green Things.’
In conjunction with The Double, Charming Disaster is releasing the second edition of their “oracle deck” (similar to a Tarot deck). The Charming Disaster Oracle Deck contains 72 cards (including 12 new cards for the second edition), each representing one of the songs from Charming Disaster’s discography. The cards feature illustrations commissioned from more than thirty different artists. The deck can be used as a divination tool, or as a visual accompaniment to Charming Disaster’s music. The duo themselves use these cards in their live performances to determine the set through the element of chance.
Having completed a trilogy of experimental songs, Papillon de Nuit begin a new cycle, reaching for the epic, and with a more structured (but no less adventurous) approach. With Steve Whitfield on board (The Cure, The Mission) as Producer, and an array of incredibly talented, diverse musicians and singers, Ariadne is the first release in this phase. We are delighted to share it with you.
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.
NIGHTBEARER launch the crushing performance video ‘His Dark Materials’ as the first single taken from their new full-length Defiance. The third studio album of the German death metal bookworms, which is based on a concept inspired by Sir Philip Pullman’s fantasy book trilogy "His Dark Materials", has been scheduled for release on June 13, 2025.
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NIGHTBEARER comment: “The tell-tale title ‘His Dark Materials’ is both, lyrically and musically, an excellent represantation of what were are about to unleash with our third album Defiance in 2025”, vocalist Michael Torka declares. “We hurl ourselves into the millennia-old war against the tyranny of a god who never existed, against his corrupted earthly and celestial vassals. It’s a fight against brutal oppression that is carried out in the name of liberation from superstition. This is the final, relentless battle for freedom!”
While they’re no strangers to the Southern California independent music scene, hardcore foursome Feed the Beast are poised to introduce themselves to more regional, national and international stages and speakers with their latest album, Mercy, the band’s debut for Futureless.
Feed the Beast’s history has been cultivated via years of consistently releasing recordings and fortifying a considerable presence across venues in their western Los Angeles and Santa Monica locales. Mercy signals their return from a hiatus with a reshuffled roster and new record label affiliation in tow. The group has seized the opportunity to not only elevate its presence, but also expand its latitude of sonic expression, melding the time-tested heaviness with occasions for experimentation and engaging in novel musical niches.
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Nick Jett (of Terror) in under a week, Mercy is a compendium of punishing yet precise heavy cuts, deftly interspersed with melody, space, dynamics and syncopated rhythms. Original members James Hutchinson (vocals) and Nicholas Garcia (guitar) penned Mercy across a span of a few months with former Feed the Beast members Tye Trujillo (bass) and Patrick Chavez (drums).
“Nick’s the man,” says Garcia of Mercy’s producer. “He’s very efficient and it still blows my mind that we tracked seven songs in three or four days. It’s very cool to get to work with someone who is very professional.”
Feed the Beast’s origins began as high school friends who connected through their love of music. “It was a very small school, which was even funnier how we were all into the same music,” says Garcia. “It was just kind of a coincidence.”
This coincidental connection eventually found the group putting their musical minds to work as Feed the Beast began composing its material just before the COVID era struck in early 2020. After the pause, Feed the Beast soon booked themselves a busy self-release schedule with a handful of singles, the Vengeance album in 2022, and 2023’s EP, Silhouettes.
With Trujillo and Chavez leaving to focus on other projects (Trujillo plays in Suicidal Tendencies, filling his father Robert’s spot that became available when he joined Metallica, while Chavez plays with OTTTO), Hutchinson and Garcia retooled the lineup, recruiting new band members Julian Lincona (bass) and Billy Greenwood (drums) to support Mercy, which is slated for a release on Futureless in May 2025.
Mercy’s first single is ‘Tombs Underneath the Tombs,’ of which Hutchinson says is about “being content with and even embracing hell, which is a fate worse than hell itself. It takes on the perspective of an incredibly narcissistic individual who believes they are smarter and stronger than everyone, including creation itself.” Additional singles from Mercy include ‘Exorcism’ (which Hutchinson describes as “the most hopeful song of the first four singles”) and ‘Unjustified’.
SUMAC and Moor Mother share the new piece ‘Hard Truth’, taken from their upcoming work The Film, to be released on April 25th. The piece highlights how inscrutably bold their collaboration is, invoking a haunting vocal melody atop burbling electronics and a density of distorted pulses, the throb accentuated by tactile scrapes. As a mere hint to what is contained within the album’s labyrinthian scope, the piece is brimming with the subtle, yet boundless creativity that the ensemble explores across the album.
The Film’s moniker speaks to the fact that it is conceived and delivered as a complete album, a full story or narrative. Moor Mother puts it best: “The idea is to create a moment outside of the convention. This is a work of art. Thinking about the work as a Film, instead of an album or a collection of songs. This task is impossible in an industry that wants to force everything into a box of consumption. You won’t understand or get the full picture until the artwork is completed. This work is developing and is requesting more agency within the creative process.”
The Film does have clear themes running throughout – again Moor Mother expounds: “the themes are universal in nature – land – displacement – the climate – human rights and freedoms – war and peace – the idea of running away from the many violent forces and horrific systems of man and empire.”
AUSTERE have unveiled the video clip ‘Time Awry’ as the first single taken from the black & dark metal duo’s forthcoming new album The Stillness of Dissolution. The band from Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia will release their fifth full-length on June 6, 2025.
AUSTERE comment: “The first single, ‘Time Awry’ was the second song written for The Stillness of Dissolution, our forthcoming new album”, guitarist, keyboard player, and vocalist Mitchell Keepin explains on behalf of the duo. “The first few songs written for the album tend to have a slightly more stripped back ‘rock’ sound than those written later, and that is on display here. Lyrically, it is presented from the viewpoint of a betrayed and solemn soul – a man with a heightened awareness of the inescapable running of time and seeking to accelerate that process.”
Finnish stoner rock power trio KAISER has just dropped a brand-new music video for ‘Brotha’, a standout track from their crushing second album, 2nd Sound, released March 7, via Majestic Mountain Records.
Building on the raw, riff-fueled foundation of their debut, KAISER pushes their sound further into heavy, groove-laden territory, delivering thick, blues-soaked riffs, thundering rhythms, and soaring melodies that land somewhere between Kyuss, Sleep, and early Clutch.
Aural Aggravation 