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.
Continue with us on our journey….
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METAMORPH has just revealed their new single – a gut-punch of emotion and power, ‘Crown of Shattered Glass’. The song is impossible to ignore—a warrior cry wrapped in razor-sharp gothic rock.
Margot Day’s bold vocals cut through a cinematic soundscape of pounding beats and darkwave edge, delivering a chorus that demands to be felt: “Shattered, shattered, I’m stronger than you know”. Every lyric carries the weight of a hard-earned victory. The shattered glass isn’t a weakness—it’s a crown. This is the sound of breaking free.
With sharp lyricism and relentless energy, this track transforms heartbreak into pure power, hitting hard and lingering long after the last note.
As the Wheel of the Year turns, METAMORPH unveils a new track every six weeks, each one an incantation of power, love, and defiance—all leading to a full METAMORPH album this fall.
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‘I’m Tired Of Being Your Mother’ is the third and final post-release digital single from the Jesus Lizard and, along with ‘Cost of Living’ and ‘Westside’, will make up the Record Store Day exclusive Flux EP, out April 12th in independent record stores.
This will be the only physical release of these three songs, available April 12th, on Black Vinyl with an etched b-side. Download and stream now, along with the new album, Rack here.
About the track, David Yow says; “When a friend of mine was about eight years old, living outside of New Orleans, his mother once said to him, in a slow dull drawl, “I’m tired uh bein yo mutha.” That really struck me. The lyrics are actual quotes of awful things mothers have said to their children. Heartbreaking!!”
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Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins
Christopher Nosnibor
It might be a stretch to describe Brain Pills as a supergroup, but the various members of this trio all have form, with guitarist Mike Vest being a one-man guitar-driven noise industry and with 11 Paranoias and Bong being among his extensive catalogue of projects – and he’s joined by percussionist Nick Raybould and Poundland vocalist Adam Stone. It should be no surprise, then, that this is dark, dense, and gnarly.
‘Faded’ offers four and a half minutes of thick, sludgy, trudgery that feels like an eternity – in a good way. It’s reminiscent of early Melvins – think the slow grinding trawls of Gluey Porch Treatments, rarely over three minutes in length but churning the guts low and slow and feeling twice that.
The sound is immense, a mass of distortion, the kind of overloading, all-out speaker-damaging wall of noise that hits you physically.
The heavy effects on the vocals – magnificently low in the mix – adds a brain-bending psychedelic twist to the megalithic sonic landslide, making for punishing, gnarly perfection.
The band are currently looking for a label to release the album which ‘Faded’ is taken from.
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Dark electronic trio, PAWN PAWN has just unveiled their latest EP, Halloween. The EP delivers a darkly electrifying journey through a spectrum of synth-driven styles, each track a study in emotional and sonic extremes. The Halloween EP is both a love letter to synthpop’s past and a step into its future. While inspired by film director, John Carpenter, the EP is named in honor of a holiday many dark hearts celebrate every day, Halloween’s trajectory goes through the brooding, pulsing opening track, ‘Trick Or Treat’ to the seductive, shadowy anthem, ‘Tell You With My Eyes’, then closing with ‘Jealousy Looks Good On Me’, a high-octane fusion of ’90s industrial-pop that balances chaotic aggression with razor-sharp melodic hooks.
They’ve produced a video to accompany the closer, which you can watch here:
The EP’s themes, like Halloween, are about embracing darkness and emotional extremes: vengeance, obsessive attraction & jealousy. They also represent tales of liminal spaces; the spaces between thinking about revenge and actively seeking it, or the space between obsessing over someone and actually making a move.
The EP also addresses the lines between passion and destruction, the idea being that an emotion like jealousy can theoretically make us more passionate and wanting to be the very best version of ourselves. Meanwhile that eternal desire competes in a battle that can never be won and is ultimately self-destructive.
Says vocalist, Liz Owens Boltz, the music on the EP is “about exploring synthpop and industrial-pop…this is really our first official foray into these genres. So our creative journey has brought us here, trying on a darker and more aggressive sound, and having fun with it.”
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the Jesus Lizard have just wrapped up their wonderfully received UK and Irish live dates in support of Rack, and it won’t be long before they hit the road again.
The band share a brand new track, ‘Westside’ and the single is only available digitally.
About the track, Duane Denison comments; “’Westside’ goes along with the previous single ‘Cost of Living’ — which was subconsciously influenced by Leonard Bernstein’s "West Side Story" and hence the name. Really."
David Yow adds; "There is a part in ‘Westside’ where the lyrics say, “…give him back his arm”. That was inspired by David Lynch’s Lost Highway, when Robert Blake’s character says, “Give me back my phone.”
Listen to ‘Westside’ here:
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UNREQVITED drop the new lyric video ‘The Antimatter’ as the second single taken from the forthcoming new album A Pathway to the Moon.
UNREQVITED comment: “The next single track, ‘The Antimatter’, is an exploration of chaotic dissonance that transcends the palisade of precedence within its taxonomy”, mastermind 鬼 writes. “A grave tumult that culminates into a disturbed meridian of bedlam and unrest, thereafter dissipating into an apprehensive tranquility as wistful and haunting as a brooding gaze.”
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Mortality Tables – 16th June 2024
Sometimes, personal events drive creative work in a way which runs away from the artist. It ceases being first and foremost about ‘art’, and the need to expunge, to offload, to outpour takes precedent. It’s not a conscious thing, something planned: the fact is that creativity leads the way, and art is not something one necessarily can direct or determine – at least, not true art. Art happens in response to things, and oftentimes, the most powerful art is born from exploring the deepest, most intensely personal scenarios. Such explorations may not reveal a great universal truth, but then again, they may present something that’s unexpectedly relatable. And this is where we find ourselves with The Engineer.
Mat Smith has no ambitions of leading the country, and nor does his musical output seek to obfuscate his journey or his reality. The Engineer documents this reality, and I shall quote, quite comfortably, the press release which provides vital context here:
‘In 2012, writer and Mortality Tables founder Mat Smith (Electronic Sound, Clash, Further. wrote a short story, ‘The Engineer’. A work of fiction, the story was loosely based on his father, Jim Smith, a skilled mechanical engineer who had spent most of his adult life working in a factory in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Engineer represented Mat’s thoughts, feelings and fears about his father’s retirement.
‘The story was later narrated by author, producer, playwright and poet Barney Ashton-Bullock. 29 artists, working in the fields of sound art, electronic, experimental and contemporary jazz music, were then approached to provide a sound response to a thirty-second extract of Barney’s narration. The order in which they agreed to be involved determined which section of narration they would be asked to respond to.
‘The collated 29 responses were curated and recorded over the next two-and-a-half years and assembled into a single, 14-minute collage by James Edward Armstrong. Its sprawling, disjointed presentation of short, rapidly-replaced ideas is intended to evoke the devastating confusion of Alzheimer’s, which Mat’s father was diagnosed with in 2018.’
This is about as intense and personal as it gets, and I’d like to think that this well-crafted work makes for a fitting homage. The sleeve image depicts a teenage Jim Smith on Margate’s Promenade in the 1950s, and the narrative tells the story based on his life against a shifting sonic backdrop.
On the surface, it’s a quite charming work. But it’s also sad, a tale of the way the ageing process is one of decline. And as the story progresses, a different kind of decline becomes the focus. It’s also a narrative of the way work has a way of stealing life away, especially for the manual worker. It also speaks of the difficulty of relationships, emotional disconnection, and ultimately faces the issue of mortality in the most real and matter-of-fact way. Time passes, and it passes far too fast. When you reach a certain age, every birthday gives pause for thought, and every picture gives rise to a pang of sadness. Even the passage of a year or two… how do you compute? How do you deal?
It seems that many simply don’t: I often hear or read people remark how people dying – and they die, they don’t pass, although hardly anyone ever says or writes it – people dying in their 60s or even early 70s is ‘no age’ or how they were ‘taken too soon’. I struggle with this. People have a finite time, and I speak from painful personal experience when I write that I feel that it’s quality of time which counts most. To witness a slow degeneration tends to be far more painful for those around the person experiencing it. Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease, and all profits from this release are going to the Alzheimer’s Society. This is to be applauded, of course, but not simply for its charitability, but because of its art.
The Engineer may only be fourteen minutes in duration but represents twelve years in the making, and the input of more than thirty people in various capacities. In short, it’s an immense project, and the amount of time and energy poured into such a complex, detailed work is immeasurable.
The narrator starts out feeling vaguely AI, but in no time, we come to feel a connection with poet Barney Ashton-Bullock’s delivery. It’s crisp and clear, and in some respects has BBC documentary commentary. Its power derives from its simplicity: the narrative itself is straightforward and linear. Its sonic backdrop is not, and it’s disorientating, and at times uncomfortable, incongruous, at odds with the point of the narrative with which it’s paired. The sounds behind the narrative range from grinding, churning industrial din to woozy blooping electronica and shuffling disco and is altogether less linear, mutating over the course of the piece. It will leave you feeling disorientated, it will leave you feeling harrowed, possibly even stunned, and drained. But this is as it should be. The Engineer is ambitious, and a quite remarkable work.
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HEAVY TEMPLE celebrate today’s release of their sophomore full-length Garden of Heathens with the launch of an official video single for the track ‘Extreme Indifference to Life’.
HEAVY TEMPLE comment: “This album is just as much a projection into the future of the band as it is a reflection of past personal experience”, singer and bass player High Priestess Nighthawk writes. “It’s about realizing my power, but I also hope that people hearing this will be able to find their own. We were able to create something truly beautiful out of a lot of strife, and ultimately what I took from the creation of Garden of Heathens is that nothing matters and everything matters. We’re all what we’ve been waiting for. We just need to believe it. I’ve been doing this for over a decade and it feels like I’m just getting started.”
Garden of Heathens is out today, on Friday, April 12, 2024 and streaming in full on all relevant platforms. Check the video clip for ‘Extreme Indifference to Life’ here:
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Decline and Fall, a new Dark Wave project from Portugal formed by Armando Teixeira, Hugo Santos and Ricardo S. Amorim, today share a new track off their forthcoming debut EP Gloom, which is set to be released on May 3rd via Bleak Recordings.
Armando Teixeira has a long and multifaceted career and is considered one of the pioneers of EBM and Industrial in Portugal, through projects such as Ik Mux, which began in 1986, and Bizarra Locomotiva, which he founded in 1993 and remained the main creative force until he left a decade later. With a vast and award-winning body of work as a composer, whether in Boris Ex-Machina, Knok Knok, Da Weasel, Bullet or Balla, which has been the artistic incarnation he has nurtured for the longest time, he also has a prolific career as a record producer.
Ricardo S. Amorim is the author of the books Culto Eléctrico and Wolves Who Were Men-The History of Moonspell, and met Armando Teixeira in 2015 for an article about Bestiário, the second full-length by Bizarra Locomotiva, released in 1998. When they met again years later, in conversations about music and records that influenced them, Armando Teixeira’s desire to return to his roots was awakened, composing in a way that brought to the surface what would be his primary influences, from post-punk to new wave, through industrial, but with a necessarily more evolved experience and artistic maturity, as well as access to completely different tools from those he had when he started out in the 80s, and a technical and theoretical knowledge that has never stopped growing.
Wanting to surround himself with people who shared this vision, Hugo Santos, from Process of Guilt, which, over the last 20 years, has explored heaviness and rhythmic intensity, punishingly repetitive and cathartic, as a privileged form of expression. Common tastes and influences are discovered, records are shared that have influenced all three or that are new discoveries for one or the other, inspiration grows and the seed that gives rise to Decline and Fall germinates.
Listen to ‘Undone’ here:
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Aural Aggravation 