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They Came Like Swallows is the first album-length collaboration between Thurston Moore and Kramer (now officially Bonner Kramer), two giants of alternative/ experimental music. The accomplishments and influence of these two artists in the world of independent music cannot be overstated and the result of their artistic union is a startlingly cohesive statement that burns through landscapes of primitive outsider rock, avant-garde composition, progressive ambient and further locales boldly and beautifully unnamable. “Kramer and I reconnected in Miami, Florida, a few years back, many many years after each of us had departed NYC on separate life adventures. It was only a matter of time before Kramer and I started making plans to record together and with his irrepressible due diligence he quickly set up a mobile recording contraption in the pad I was decamped in, the Florida sunshine flowing through the palm leaves, lithe lizards skittering across the windowsills, and we just went for it.

Kramer had the idea to cover a Joy Division tune, a left turn from the improvisations we had been tracking, though wholly in keeping with both our sensibilities of light and dark unifying in transcendent songwriting, both of us devotees of 'the song' as well as 'the freedom.’ What transpired is They Came Like Swallows, a session we immediately felt should exist as a prayer to the war-torn souls of the families of Palestine continually decimated by the brutality of genocide. We agreed beyond words to offer our music as a sonic activism and as a beneficent energy. This album is our duo exchange for human dignity, it is our soul music for any semblance of a peaceful planet.” ~ Thurston Moore “For the first time in our nearly 45 years of friendship, we had identical time windows open to make a record together,” recounts Kramer. After all this time not a moment is wasted as the duo immediately taps into the heightened core of improvisational tension across these seven offerings. Volcanic opener “Urn Burial” notches a similar historic union (John Cale and Terry Riley) to meet the circumstances of the moment, with swirling mists of organ and pounding toms over guitar that thickens the atmosphere with jagged, grimy dissonance.

Solemn strings open the second track, “The Redness In The West,” with Kramer’s cello and viola in dueling bow beneath the high tension drive and sustain of Thurston’s electric guitar, tapping out a Morse code of tension that mounts endlessly into a fog of inevitable war by the end. Moore and Kramer’s sense of experimentalism is in free and full grandeur throughout They Came Like Swallows, though the duo keep a strong and constant sideways eye on melody, composition and architecture, to the ends that any strict lines between song and improvisation are blurred beyond qualification.

As if to punctuate this point, Swallows closes with a nightwork cover of Joy Division’s “Insight,” a doleful coda that breathes out with a solemn inner grace under Thurston’s instantly stylistically recognizable guitar melodies as they weave into he and Kramer’s unison voices. As the lone vocal piece and only traditional ‘song’ form on the album, “Insight” is unique to this set and as a closing statement draws connective lines back to the kind of dynamic, electrified melodicism that wove deep, melancholy patterns into the untamed fire of Sonic Youth’s Sister and Daydream Nation. In the album’s final moments, the two voices repeat the lyric “I’m not afraid anymore” as mantra, underscoring the heavy, unsettled themes and methods that preceded it. Kramer describes the creative process of They Came Like Swallows: “I had composed and recorded a few pieces at my home studio over the course of a couple weeks. Thurston was spending the winter in South Florida, so I flew down and spent a few days recording his guitar parts in his home there. Watching him spontaneously compose his parts was pretty astonishing, to say the least. Once we'd finished working on those pieces, we began improvising and following wherever the music pointed us, and another few pieces were born. We got straight to it, without anything driving us other than the joy of finally working together.

My personal goal was to remain present and catch as many surprises as I could from Thurston's guitar work, and there were plenty during those few days. We had a fucking blast.” Thurston’s contributions here will be readily familiar to any acolytes of his other works, the through-line between his inspired playing, cradled in Kramer’s meticulous, solid arrangements. “If I had to make this record again, I'd do it all exactly the same way,” Kramer says. “It’s like jazz, you don't think about it. You just do it. It was miraculous, and you don't fuck with a miracle.”

For the first time, this landmark album of ritualistic dark folk and shamanic soundscapes is pressed into Double LP, and the result is a breathtaking artifact that transcends the boundary between music and mysticism. Presented in a deluxe edition LP with a lavish 30x30 insert, brought to life by Rune Serpent Europa, this release is a kind of talisman. The packaging itself feels like a gateway: ornate, otherworldly, and perfectly attuned to the spirit of Havamal , where Nordic tradition, animistic ritual, and primal sound converge in a timeless invocation. Spinning Havamal on vinyl unleashes the full incantatory power of NYTT LAND 's music. The analog warmth deepens the resonance of the throat-sung mantras and the droning instrumentation, pulling the listener into a world that is equal parts ancient ritual, frozen landscape, and whispered prophecy.

Every track becomes a rune carved in sound, vibrating with hidden meaning, echoing the eternal cycles of life, death, and rebirth. There is a romance in this edition that goes beyond mere presentation. The act of lowering the needle becomes an invocation, a summoning of ancestral voices and forgotten gods. The record itself feels alive, as though the spirits of the sagas reside within its grooves. Each listen is a ritual, each flip of the vinyl a turning of the cosmic wheel. With Havamal now available on LP, collectors and devotees of dark folk finally hold in their hands a relic worthy of the album's mythic aura. This is music to be inhabited, to be carried into dreams and into shadows, to be used as a key that unlocks the hidden chambers of the soul. A triumph of art, craft, and spirit, this vinyl edition is destined to become a coveted treasure.

Kaash Paige’s 2 LATE TO BE TOXIC is a R&B heartbreak story told in real-time. The focus track, “What Happened 2 Us,” is a raw and hazy reflection on broken love, written from the wreckage of what once was. With her signature slow-burn cadence and a voice full of ache, Kaash peels back the ego and lets the pain speak. This track marks a shift into deeper, darker R&B while fans flock to her digital diaries and hotline for catharsis. The album closes the chapter that KAASHMYCHECKS cracked open.

Call it soulful dream pop, proto-trip hop or downtempo jazz - "Tender Rain" is the follow-up LP to the successful "This Is" album and continues to deliver Ghia's unmistakable sonic magic. On this release, the band shares a selection of previously unreleased vocal songs alongside instrumental pieces, all carried by their trademark chilled and almost meditative atmosphere. Most of the recordings date from the early 1990s, while early demo versions of "New Love" and "Teardrops in Your Eyes" may reach back as far as the late 1980s.

The album opens with the title track "Tender Rain," where smooth vocal jazz harmonies merge effortlessly with soulful pop elements. The track originally appeared only on CD in 1993 on the small Mikado label run by renowned German guitarist Ulli Bögershausen. The band recalls that the piece was first pre-recorded using MIDI equipment and a Tascam 16-track recorder before being completed in the studio with drums by legendary drummer Mickie Stickdorn (Carsten Bohn's Bandstand, Cyklus, Elephant, Lake), percussion by Corinna Ludzuweit, and the final touch-Lisa Ohm's remarkable vocals.

At the time, Mikado was also looking for instrumental material for radio and synchronization use. They selected the track "Tropfstein" for a sampler CD and requested more pieces. In response, "und recken ihre schlanken Glieder" (roughly translated as "and stretching their slender limbs") was composed especially for the project, as Frank Simon remembers. Both tracks appeared on the now rare Mikado sampler CD under the alias z. Zt., short for "zur Zeit" ("at present" or "these days").

Several further pieces in a similar vein were created during this period, including the previously unissued "Auf unserm grünen Sofa," "Reise bei Nacht," and "Was ich Dir noch sagen wollte." These tracks are beautifully crafted downtempo pieces featuring smooth, jazzy piano lines combined with touches of ambient and New Age aesthetics. "Auf unserm grünen Sofa" stands out in particular and will likely resonate with all downtempo enthusiasts. Lutz Boberg recalls that many of these recordings were captured during a single afternoon in the studio, fueled by spontaneous ideas and creative momentum.

On tracks such as "Teardrops in Your Eyes," "New Love," and the haunting Dark Spirits Mix of Ghia's song "What's Your Voodoo?", singer Lisa Ohm delivers soulful pop performances with her clear and captivating voice. "Change Your Sex," the third track previously featured on the Mikado sampler, leans more toward late-1980s funk and was aimed at radio and DJs at the time. Its subject matter was relatively daring for the period, telling the story of someone contemplating a change of sex "to get rid of the troubles."

Together with "This Is" and "Curacao Blue", "Tender Rain" forms another essential chapter in the rediscovery of the band's work. More than thirty years after their creation, these recordings still sound strikingly fresh, reflecting a unique style that in many ways anticipated the rise of trip-hop in the early to mid-1990s.

Between elegant and dark electronic beats and cosmic ambient breaths, seven tracks enveloped in the voice of a multi-talented artist, dedicated to deconstructing the song form and breaking down language to create an esoteric sonic world where the archaic, contemporary, and futuristic entwine like the gravitational dance of two galaxies about to merge. Born in 1992 in Gallura, with a jazz background that allows for absolute compositional freedom, Daniela Pes is a unique personality in today"s scene. Her distinctive features include the use of voice as an instrument and textual exploration: in Spira, the Sardinian artist sings in a language that does not (yet) exist. Ancient Gallurese words, fragments of Italian terms, entirely invented words form the organic molecules of an unprecedented language where verses are free from metrics, and words are not conveyors of a concept but pure sound, like beads of an articulated phonetic rosary, inaccessible rationally but intoxicating emotionally. Spira is an album of visionary music interpreting the sonic dramaturgy as utopia.

File under Boy Harsher Jae Matthews lends her unmistakable voice to a striking reinterpretation of Buzz Kull’s cult classic “Man On The Beat.” Built for midnight drives and neon-lit highways, Matthews’ version transforms the track into a dark, hypnotic pulse of tension and atmosphere, carried by her haunting, commanding vocal. Released as a special limited-edition 12" by Heartworm Press, the single reimagines the underground favorite with a colder, more cinematic edge.

On the B-side, Los Angeles duo Spike Hellis deliver an extended remix, stretching the track into a dancefloor-ready transmission of ecstatic synth and rhythm. Matthews is widely known as the vocalist of the dark electronic project Boy Harsher, but here she steps into a different light, channeling the nocturnal spirit of the original while making the song unmistakably her own.

Saxophonist, producer and composer Brian Allen Simon explores darker hues, transposing waking and altered states under his studio veil Anenon. On the deeply evocative new album 'Dream Temperature', he shifts electronic processing to the foreground, introducing digitized wind instruments and unworldly atmospherics, not heard since his innovating mid-late 2010s output.

A longtime Los Angeles resident, born and raised, Brian Allen Simon has expressively operated under the moniker Anenon, releasing the highly revered 'Petrol' (2016), 'Tongue' (2018) and the viscerally beautiful 'Moons Melt Milk Light' (2023), in a line of unwavering musical dialogues. While the penultimate album was a deliberate, reductive, entirely acoustic detour that was born out of a want to unplug, 'Dream Temperature' sees Brian primed with a newly discovered wind synthesizer as his central compositional tool, alongside acoustic piano and tenor saxophone. The entirety of the album's electronics are triggered by Brian's lungs, generating otherworldly synths modulated by expressive breath control, channelled through the laptop as the core processing chamber for added textural components and field recordings.

A free floating and heavy emotional resonance marks 'Dream Temperature' from beginning to end, invoking the feeling of waking up, still heavy from a night of half-remembered dreams, and continuing one's day in this state. Simon maps out the album's spatial voice early on the statement title track, a deep, yet compact cut, generated from digital saxophone rasps that whistle by in close proximity, along with haze filled textures and sub bass. There is a sonic oscillation of urban grit and pastoral drift throughout as tracks pass by like introspective thoughts, fueling both a tense and ethereal quality that underpins the album. Interluding solo and part-solo piano improvisations 'Last Sun 1' and '2' are positioned adjacent to the buffering digital soundscapes. Their softer, still processed timbres pierce the melancholic exterior, offering a contrasting tenderness that could echo the grace of Ry?ichi Sakamoto, the spiritualist rigor of ECM's Keith Jarrett and a touch akin to Aphex Twin's piano miniatures. 'Nulle Part 1+2' signals the first appearance of an acoustic wind instrument, as tenor saxophone flourishes are juxtaposed against noisy drones, all shouting at the void, with notes resurfacing like lost digital data.

The album was recorded at home during either sunset or nocturnal hours between September of 2024 and October of 2025, a period in which Brian found himself craving more lengthy and intimate studio time as he searched for more pronounced textural qualities amidst his new sonic ambitions. 'When The Light Appears, Boy' shows further evidence of this deeper universe, revealing a grittier edge as the album's essential blueprint is sonically inked. A sprawling expanse of wind synths rhythmically encircle the listener before a dreamy, ghostly ambience blankets 'Toyama'. The sound is evocative of the productions of post dubstep era luminaries such as Burial or the productions of HTRK's Nigel Yang. More isolating and enveloping than the previous all acoustic record, this is music both disorienting and yet warmly inviting all at once. A sonic diarist at heart, personal field recordings were also taken from Sardinia, Japan, Big Sur and LA which intersect at unexpected moments throughout the album's 31-minute play time.

'Dream Temperature' is a vital coalescence of both Simon's electronic and acoustic practices with repositioned electronics akin to earlier works, both haunting and elegant, yet still profoundly personal. Simon continuously resonates as an experimental outlier treading an enthralling, non-linear musical path. This music resolutely glows with an unknowing aura, like an untapped energy source waiting to be discharged.

Preceded by Piazza Centrale and the subsequent Seia the album of the singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, new promise of the Italian music scene, moves along the traces of memories to tell a timeless story, using a very personal language in which singer-songwriter music, pop, and electronic experimentation naturally coexist. Hypnotic and magnetic, her music is a subtle, elusive seduction, an emotion that delicately insinuates itself into the mind, an invitation to get lost in its beauty. A passion that touches the deepest chords of the soul, without the overwhelming rush of the senses, but with the intensity of a pure and profound feeling. Gaia Banfi was born in Milan, has been living in Bologna for years, but in her album, it is Genoa that resonates, the place of her childhood, which here becomes an imaginary setting for a symbolic dimension in which everyone can recognize themselves, through seven tracks in which all those melancholies that swell as we grow up, the lacks, the turbulent and dark loves, the unrequited ones, but also the vitality, the discovery, the absence of judgment, and finally the awareness, the inner conquests, the clemency, and the love for oneself, take voice.

Fifteen years after their first album "Time for a Change", and drawing on the experience of two others ("Elephanz" 2017, and "Rien de personnel" 2023), ELEPHANZ now returns with a fourth album that carries the scent of first loves, the kind you sing from the heart with your hands gripping a guitar.

"Love. Hurt. Repeat." tells, across ten songs, the story of a return to oneself, like coming home after years spent roaming the world, only to realize that everything you needed to understand yourself was already there at the starting line.

To help you understand what this new album makes me feel, I'd like to tell you about my first meeting with Jon and Max in 2009, when I became the band's bassist. Sixteen years ago, I discovered these two young men and set off in their family Kangoo van on my very first tour.

Through our early rehearsals around the piano of their childhood, I discovered their love for pop music in all its breadth, always in search of harmonies and melodies that touch the heart in the simplest way and gently ease your sorrows along the way. With them, I learned to appreciate the mainstream hits I had previously dismissed on principle, and I discovered the demanding art of melody as I listened to them sing about love and friendship through unforgettable catchphrases.

Listening today to some of the songs from their new album, I think back to those two young men with a big-city rock look, shut away in the living room of their family home, talking only about leaving that dull countryside behind to live the big life in the capital (Streets of Rage). What I once took for a kind of revenge against the hostile environment of their adolescence was in fact an almost vital need to find their place among others, to feel understood in order to feel at ease in their own skin.

Today, I find them again with the same guitar and the same inexpensive Juno as back then, but with the confidence shaped by years of concerts, writing, studio encounters, and all kinds of experimentation. The music of this fourth album has never been so close to that of their earliest days, but their voices have been set free. They no longer sing about who they dreamed of becoming, but about who they have always been, their most distant concerns, sometimes even their darkest ones, yet always in search of the light.

It is as if ELEPHANZ had to travel all the way around the world to come face to face with themselves again. There is no longer any shame in being who you are, and it is even the best way to understand yourself, to exist and to heal. To heal from grief and heartbreak, to understand the child you once were and the one who carried them (Mother), to forgive yourself and finally learn to love yourself.

That is what makes this record as sensitive as it is powerful and strikingly truthful. It was written and recorded like a cry, live, in just a few weeks, using the instruments of their beginnings: sharp bass and drums, powerful guitars, and synthesizers that are at times soaring, at times carriers of liberating melodies. The art of ballads remains, as does that of universal pop songs.

There is a beautiful urgency here, the urgency of finding oneself again in order to understand oneself through both pain and beauty, and "Love. Hurt. Repeat." is its most perfect expression.

Venturing into “a limbo world between medieval tropes and modern-day decay”, New Orleans musician Urq (half of art punk duo Spllit) returns with a new solo offering. Recorded over a single, intense month, This Dismal Village is a homespun document that sits somewhere between jittery punk, dreary psychedelia, and hooky bedroom pop. Recorded to 4-track, the record embraces limitation as a creative engine, resulting in a sound that is raw, unsettled, and deeply atmospheric.

The album is set not in a fixed point in time or geography, but a liminal environment where dystopic visions and archaic fixtures exist side by side. In the dismal village, kings and witches share space with televisions, skyscrapers, and modern enterprise; organ fanfares echo down streets populated by disgruntled townsfolk and whispered gossip. It is simultaneously the dark ages, 1950s suburbia, and a 21st-century metropolis. Embracing anachronism was central to the project’s identity, an attempt to collapse history into a single, uneasy present.

Sonically and philosophically, the album sits firmly in the tradition of rough and raw cassette rock. Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand looms large as an influence, particularly its ability to build an entire world through unpolished, first-take recordings. Robert Pollard’s idea of the “four P’s” (psych, punk, prog, and pop) serves as a neat summary of the artist’s musical instincts and each element can be traced right through the heart of This Dismal Village. Further inspiration comes from post-punk’s so-called “Calgary Sound,” a loose movement blending psych pop, post-punk, and math/prog elements with a home-recorded, unpretentious ethos.

The result is an album that unrolls like a place wandered through, uneasy, occasionally familiar, and impossible to pin down in time. All captured on tape before it could disappear like an apparition, like a dream only half-remembered.

From Detroit’s techno resistance to Berlin’s elastic minimalism, Lusaka’s ancestral futurism to Chicago’s house communion, When There Is No Sun is a recording project, uniting visionary electronic music producers to reimagine the universe of Sun Ra. One of the most radical musical pioneers of the 20th century, Sun Ra used jazz, electronics, poetry, and performance to expand the possibilities of sound, identity, and imagination. Commissioned by Omni Sound and curated by Ricardo Villalobos, the series brings together Underground Resistance, Chez Damier & Ben Vedren, Calibre, A Guy Called Gerald, She Spells Doom, Barış K, and Ricardo Villalobos himself. Drawing from Omni Sound’s recordings of Living Sky by the Sun Ra Arkestra and My Words Are Music of Sun Ra’s poetry, the producers pull fragments of sound and text into their own creative orbits, passing through the portal that Sun Ra opened into a realm where the impossible is possible. Saul Williams, Tunde Adebimpe, Mahogany L. Browne, Abiodun Oyewole, Anthony Joseph and Tara Middleton are the featured voices that turn rhyme into rhythm and revelation into resistance Rooted in deep reverence for Sun Ra’s legacy, yet reaching forward as a living, generative force, When There Is No Sun is not a tribute but a continuum, balancing the pulse of electronic music with the spirit of experimentation, embodying Sun Ra’s promise that ‘there are other worlds’ if you are willing to see them.

Like its cover, Nicolas Remondino's Hìeratico plays in the rich shades of crepuscular spaces. A night-tuned, percussion led album where prepared drums are accompanied by flickers of spoken word, acoustic instruments and muted electronics,

The title translates to 'hieratic', for Remondino a "black and gold" term laden with dualities and complex connotations. A sense of teetering between sparkling light and richly coloured darkness imbues the music, the compositions simulating a sense of heightened acuity as they convey us through a spooky elemental soundworld. The opening title track begins with a metallic shimmer, a drum skin activated in a way that sounds like it's being smelted. A cushioned rhythm enters, a smothered timbre akin to hearing something lurking around the garden. On "litho non-danse", percussion cracks like branches and dried foliage under foot.

Remondino recorded initial outlines for the pieces at Giuseppe Ielasi's studio in Milan, before fleshing out these ideas with his own additional instrumentation and contributions from a globe-spanning network of collaborators. On "blue hymne", chiming percussion equal parts jubilant and sinister heralds spoken word from Limpe Fuchs. "Tombal" opens with Massimo Silverio whispering in the Carnic dialect, a minority language from the Carnic Alps. Around, Marco Baldini, Pierre Bastien and Remondino construct a somber soundscape that cranks and sighs in the crevices.

Hìeratico is an album of hybrids. Diverse voices, accents and dialects deliver its lyrics, the instrumentation underpinning it crosses idioms. The drumkit at its core is modified to amplify its resonant tones and harmonics. Inspired by natural substances and phenomena: stone, wood, wind, earth, metal, grass, rain, clouds and bark, Remondino explores how percussion could evoke their materiality, treating drums as lucid textural instruments as much as rhythmic timekeepers. It gives the album a finely shaded depth and clarity as it conjures the vibrancies that reside in darkened corners. Hìeratico dwells in a sensation that crosses borders, the speckles of light in the oblique night sky. Listening is an aural equivalent to stepping into a pitch black forest and waiting for your eyes to adjust, a lightless void turning into a spectacular tableau of shadows and glows. Daryl Worthington

Nicaraguan-American artist Dagmar Zuniga makes music that feels both intimate and expansive: songs drift like disrupted signals, carried by harmony, tape hiss, and a strong sense of touch. Her debut solo album in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music — written and recorded in New York, Norway, and Athens, Georgia over a period of five years on her longtime companion, the Tascam 424 — was uploaded to Bandcamp and YouTube in January 2025, quickly garnering over two hundred thousand views and the attention of artists such as Mount Eerie, who invited her to tour with them that summer. This year, what was once a jewel of tapped-in algorithms and message boards will meet the world at large, with in filth arriving digitally on March 4, and physically on April 10, via AD 93.

in filth is an atmospheric, devotional collage where one voice multiplies into a chorus of selves, sometimes delicate, sometimes severe; an effect created by Zuniga’s masterful layering of texture and complex harmonies. Synths glitter out like spears of sunlight from beneath clouds of moody, time-distorted guitars, and songs spin about themselves like tightly-wound music boxes, making use of a kind of hypnotic repetition, before melting apart into their components or slipping into the following track.

Zuniga began recording to tape as a teenager, drawn to the physicality of the medium — how a tape recording is fragile, mutable, and alive. Though her ethereal sound may draw easy comparisons to other female pioneers of psychedelic folk, she is influenced just as much by the darker sounds of Syd Barrett and The Fall. Like Barrett, Zuniga is a painter, and she is interested not only in recording music but in creating a full, self-contained artistic universe: she creates her own artwork, merchandise, music videos, and bootleg tapes of new and unfinished music that she exclusively sells at live shows (“If something is not material, it does not exist,” she insists). Her world has not gone unvisited, garnering her a monthly show on NTS Radio ‘World of Pain’, as well as a forthcoming appearance at Rewire Festival in April 2026.

Though Zuniga’s work explores themes of solitude and suffering, the suffering in her songs is not borrowed or displayed; it is held, then opened outward through empathy — an exacting practice of attention that insists on shared ground. Solitude, in her work, is not withdrawal but a starting point for connection. Likewise, over time, her recording process has become increasingly communal, with in filth featuring musicians Hayes Hoey, Austyn Wohlers (Tomato Flower), and Zach Phillips (Fievel Is Glauque). Newer recordings widen the circle even more. For Zuniga, collaboration is a way to “find a place between worlds,” echoing Badiou’s idea of love as a vision refracted through the prism of difference. Meaning emerges there — in the space between voices, between artist and listener. “I hope my music helps people work through difficult experiences,” she says. “The same way it helps me.”

Hard rock paired with a pinch of cowpunk and hearty Danish gruffness: This unique mix has earned D-A-D a passionate fan base whose loyalty and devotion extends far beyond Scandinavia. A bond just as deeply rooted, as that between Hamburg dark rock giants MONO INC. (whose current album Darkness once again conquered the top spot on the German charts) and their raven family. Back in 2008, MONO INC. paid tribute to D-A-D with a cover version of “Sleeping My Day Away” and today, what belongs together rocks together, as MONO INC. plays D-A-D! What's more, in MONO INC.'s version of Grow or Pay, their epic, melancholic dark rock meets the unmistakable raspy voice of D-A-D singer Jesper Binzer.

“We've adored D-A-D since we first saw them live in the early 1990s,” explains MONO INC. mastermind Martin Engler. “The fact that we were able to get Jesper Binzer on board for our version of ”Grow or Pay“ and that D-A-D will also be joining us as special guests on our 2026 tour in Bremen and Munich is almost too much of an honor.”

JAPAN & PORCUPINE TREE SYNTHESIST RICHARD BARBIERI RETURNS WITH NEW STUDIO ALBUM 'HAUNTINGS' GATEFOLD 2LP EDITION, PRESSED ON CLASSIC BLACK VINYL. Richard Barbieri remains one of contemporary music's most distinctive voices. Emerging as a key architect of the late '70s/'80s synthesiser revolution with David Sylvian's art-rock ensemble Japan, his visionary synthesiser programming expanded the horizons of electronic music & left a lasting mark on artists from The Human League & Duran Duran to Gary Numan & Talk Talk. His subsequent & ongoing tenure with Steven Wilson's legendary progressive outfit Porcupine Tree across albums such as 'In Absentia' (2002), 'Fear Of A Blank Planet' (2007) &, most recently, 'Closure/Continuation' (2022) further affirmed his status as one of the most intuitive & unique musicians of his generation.

'Hauntings' is Barbieri's first studio album since 2021's 'Under A Spell', deepening the pensive, dark instrumental aesthetic of its predecessor. A diverse collection of immersive sound worlds, both dark & uplifting in equal measure, 'Hauntings' is influenced by a nostalgia for the past & future, & for things that didn't happen yet still manage to haunt the mind & soul. What is real & what is simulation? The album finds Barbieri at the height of his powers, his deft keyboard & sonic architecture conjuring a shadowy, creeping Lovecraftian atmosphere. The music wanders through the streets of a gloomy lamp-lit Victorian London & drifts into grain-speckled snapshots of Belle Époque Paris. These journeys into the past are contrasted with nihilistic but euphoric forays into the future, "Traveler" & "A New Simulation" bristling with the itchy modern anxiety that often runs through his best work. Contrasting the sound designs & electronics of Barbieri, the album features performances from renowned musicians Morgan Agren (drums & percussion), Percy Jones (bass guitar) & Luca Calabrese (trumpet). This 2LP 45 RPM edition of 'Hauntings' is presented in gatefold packaging & pressed on classic black vinyl.

10 songs from what is possibly the best anarchopunk band currently in existence. The dynamics of the tracks are refreshingly simple, a powerful yet neutral- sounding recording, with very little embellishment or stylized production to hide behind, approaching filth with distorted guitars, haunting bass lines, and steady drum beats, all elevated by the combination of the three voices perfectly balanced between melody and hatred. In a quantized world, one can perceive an endearing dose of human spirit through their tense and disturbingly melodic expressions. A modern Anarcho Punk classic that is surprising to find 40 years after the wonderful bands that spawned the genre, especially England. Includes poster and insert with lyrics.

Since reviewing Pomegranate Seeds: An International Benefit for Mutual Aid in Gaza, the compilation put out by the DISSIDENTS, I've been hunting for more VAMPIRE material, so when I saw I was assigned this LP I became very excited. VAMPIRE is an Australian band that plays apocalyptic anarcho- punk. A sense of extreme urgency pervades VAMPIRE's sound, and What Seems Forever Can Be Broken is ten songs that combine the demanding hardcore of CONFLICT, with a foundation of CRASS, and the rough-hewn delivery of raw punk. The resulting album is dark, hauntingly mesmeric, but also aggressive with a sense of communal voice. In other words, this is anarchopunk that is of the moment, and articulates exactly what contemporary punk is about without being preachy or elitist. This is that eye-to-eye, in-the-trenches vocalization of criticism that comes off as eye-opening and perspective-altering. What Seems Forever Can Be Broken is by far my favorite release thus far in 2025, but also might be the best album I've heard in a really long time. Like, this is benchmark-level material, so definitely give this a listen.

The album opens with the ominous guitar-driven Hollow Sky, accompanied by its haunting music video's verdant vistas. The song, with Iceglass ghostly vocals, shimmers with that sounds like an Omnichord flittering like sonic firefly lights and brooding bass. This perfectly scores the less traveled wanderings through the dark wooden path of Dante's perdition, leading to the titular well that graces the album cover. The Crater opens with an unsettling riff and bass, with low, repetitive frequencies on the synth create a sense of unease. Here, Iceglass recounts a fatalistic requiem for the king of romance that is cataclysmic and leaves a scar upon the earth. With Fall Industrial Wall, once again, Iceglass channels a silky and Nico-like emotive deadpan; against a dirgelike melody backed by minimal synth, bass, and drum. Almost medieval and plaintive, with its folk droning horns, deep and shallow in their resonance. This song is anachronistic, setting the scene of ruins centuries-old with crumbling edifices strewn about like memories lost in time. With the poetic lyrics of The Chamber do we find the eponymous abyss. Here, dualities are laid bare; besides love, there is heartbreak, and without this sorrow, what meaning would there be to love if one knows not what it is to lose? This song encapsulates the idea that love is heartbreak, and love lost is reaching the deepest chamber of the heart. This is carried through a sombre horn, minimalist drum machine, and deliberate bassline overlaid with Iceglass german and english lyrics. The Well is led in with a softly distorted bassline overlaid with eerie banshee howls give way to Iceglass otherworld vocal refrain, echoing through time as if emanating from a hole in the ground, and encircling that hole is a garden of woe and despair. The sinfully seductive song The Moor features a captivating SAX SOLO courtesy of Perseas; a welcome shift in tone, juxtaposed well with the intensity of Iceglass tenebrous vocal purr. This hitherto unexplored foray into dark sensuality takes the song into sordid mid 80s territory, bringing to mind a dusky drive along a serpentine road, with equally haunting instrumentations straddling time with icy fire. Broken Characters is an acoustic folk interlude featuring Selofan's Dimitris Pavlidis on guitar. Here we find a more gentle approach with its earnest and romantic lyrics. The song's melodic hook is a soft caress along with the forlorn horn elements highlighting Iceglass at her most Nico-sounding vocal yet, singing the sorrowful truth that most artists are indeed broken characters. Chimerical opens with dirgelike synth organs. The chill of winter has befallen the lamentations sung by Iceglass carried by haunting chord progressions and minimal percussion, plaintively beseeching the song's subject to remain elusive, idealistic, and a dreamer. After an album highlighting more Jill than Jack, our male protagonist finally makes his ascent in the sonorous and breathtaking Dark Hill, a masterful march of sweeping synth horns, and trepidatious drum machine with William Maybelline's bellowing voice cracking like thunder, rattling the atmosphere like his heart against his ribs. Spirals swirls in a cautionary knell of cathedral-esque droning synth dirge, with Icarian lyrics shining like a sombre ray of hope; like the sun's rays creeping into the darkest of places. The song, minimalist in its tight percussion, echoes with the solace of Larissa Iceglass vocal litany; invoking elements of the supernatural, almost like a Casio preset sequenced to the beating of an angel's wings.

As Selofan's fifth studio album, Vitrioli, from 2018, is a testament to the tragedy of life. The Greek duo, Joanna Pavlidou and Dimitris Pavlidis, who recorded the album in the Fabrika Records home studio, continue on in their poetic, but heartbreaking, music set to a dance beat. Between languages (Greek, English, German, and Spanish), Selofan feels on the brink of mania with Vitroli. However, the madness is controlled, the songs are restrained hysterics that culminate into the alchemic perfection of the band's specific moody sound.
From synthpop to synthpunk elements, the twelve-track LP leads listeners through dark corridors and into haunted, empty beds. There is a resignation to a doomed destiny with Vitroli—a trait that connects all Selofan releases—as a bitter pain and loneliness that cannot, or will not, subside.

The album begins with "Give Me a Reason" whose lyrics feel universal in this day and age: Give me a reason, to get out of bed / I could just watch the ceiling instead. Its heartbreak is profound as bells and voice pads echo under Joanna's voice. The adjacent music video for the song was directed by Dimitris Chaz Lee, and the band describes the video as "depicting the fragile nature, conflicts, emotional demands, and vulnerability of each person in a relationship."
"Billie Was a Vampire" is a story about an undead creature who works at a nightclub followed by the urgency of "Black Box." Brass sounds moan against the fast beat and suggest a frenzied need to escape.

"I'm Addicted" became the second single for the LP. I am addicted, you are mine, Joanna demands of the lover. The music video, also directed by Dimitris Chaz Lee, depicts a clean, white photoshoot primed for the most beautiful creatures of the Athenian wave scene. Alex Macharias, from the legendary Greek band In Trance 95, acts as the photographer for the session, as the models pose and flail under the bright bulbs. The director states: "Addiction is a mental state, something inside all of us. It altered our perception and created a parallel world of avant-garde beings and flashy lights making us part of this everlasting bond."

You probably have at least one friend who is completely obsessed with Marnie Weber. Her dark, punk-infused humour and fearless embrace of eccentric feminine power archetypes combine with gut-punch viscerality and a strange beauty that is anything but pretty.” Village Voice “This neo-gothic fairytale wavers between happiness and sadness, amusement and tragedy, attraction and repulsion.” The White Review “Weber reaches a new scale for her work…The sentimentality and romance at its root fearlessly sets it apart.” BOMB “Wild multimedia works that often dwell on the ghostly and the monstrous. Think: Fairy tales gone seriously awry.” LA Times Acclaimed LA multidisciplinary artist and musician Marnie Weber collects highlights from a long and storied career on Returning Home: The Music of Marnie Weber, a collection of neo-goth art-pop that steers between kankyō ongaku pop songs, noise-rock, and haunted fairytale darkness. The career of Marnie Weber (b. 1959) began with gigs paid in beer at an LA trucker bar in 1977. Her band, Party Boys, formed when Weber was then 19 and had just left home. By the early 80’s, the band began regularly performing at LA’s fabled Al’s Bar, sharing the stage with generational talents that passed over its beer-drenched floors. L7, Beck, Arto Lindsay, Ry Cooder, The Fall, Fear, Hole, Hüsker Dü, Social Distortion, Nirvana, The Residents, Sonic Youth, Urge Overkill, Jesus Lizard, the Misfits, among plenty more, played to audiences that included Bret Easton Ellis, Steve Buscemi, Tommy Lee, Bill Murray, Al Pacino, Sean Penn, and Chloe Sevigny.

The first resonant space Zosha Warpeha played in was the Emanuel Vigeland Museum in Oslo, Norway. Built as a mausoleum, its walls reach up into a gradual archway, creating an environment where sound expands and reverberates for twelve seconds before decaying into silence. Warpeha was greeted only by dim lights when she entered, and it wasn’t until she had spent several minutes listening that she was able to make out the frescoes that covered every inch of the room: graphic depictions of the cycle of life from conception through death. As the sound of her Hardanger d’amore encountered the walls and these slowly emerging scenes, they obscured its point of origin in both time and space, augmenting its own life cycle. The experience sat in the back of her mind over the next several years as she developed her own patient style of composition and performance, one that comes into full bloom on her new album I grow accustomed to the dark.

When Warpeha was selected as an artist in residence at Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room in 2025, she saw it as an opportunity to more intentionally explore how her music might fill a room with ample natural reverb. I grow accustomed to the dark documents two single-take solo performances for Hardanger d’amore and voice at IPR, with both pieces composed in a unique tuning system developed to interact with the space itself. Listeners can trace resonance from the contact of the bow on gut strings into the body of the instrument, its five sympathetic strings offering another layer of refraction, before the sound is thrown about the cavity of the room. The echoes emerge like a photographic double exposure, or wisps of smoke that linger in the air, creating ghostly harmonic convergences that blur the line between what is there and not-there. Sound begins to act like light, a synesthetic alchemy that transforms drones into beams and ornamental trills into flickers.

Both side-long compositions, “filament” and “visual purple,” exemplify a duality that animates Warpeha’s music: an expressive, individualistic style that draws on extensive knowledge of her instrument’s history in folk traditions, and an austere, devotional quality maintained by focus and precision. Though very different in character and structure, both pieces evolve slowly through numerous repetitive phrases, passages of stillness, and bursts of intensity. “filament” opens with a cycle of delicate melodic fragments played and sung around a drone before blossoming into an outpouring of swooping arpeggios, harmonics flying from the strings like sparks off a bonfire. The disorienting pulsation of harmonic beating forms the core of “visual purple,” the close-tone dissonance building to a swarm of open strings ringing boldly throughout the space. After the knotty tones reach their climax, the piece collapses into studied quietude, hushed, but without any drop in intensity.

When Warpeha first visited the Vigeland Museum in 2019, she was in Oslo to deepen her relationship to the Hardanger fiddle through the study of Norwegian traditional music, which is primarily passed down aurally. The experience of learning songs by ear, not only internalizing the tune but also absorbing the techniques and tonalities by listening, was a crucial step in her development as a composer. The years since have seen her sharpen those skills as a prolific member of the New York avant-garde and improvised music communities. Warpeha’s music encourages listeners to join her in this journey, to listen closely with each repeated phrase and through each dramatic shift. Like the frescoes on Vigeland’s walls, with time and intention, the depth of I grow accustomed to the dark comes on like a revelation.

Consuming you in one swoop, through 10 tracks of poetic electronic-pop odyssey’s, Evadney’s sensational voice acts as the guiding force, weaving between piano, strings, harp, driving electronic elements, and almost beatless moody textures.

Following the release of 3 eps on Black Acre, being remixed by I.JORDAN, inclusion on Jamz Supernova’s BBCRadio ‘Ones To Watch’ list, the Glastonbury Emerging talent list and creating an audiovisual live show performed in the UK and Shanghai, Evadney’s debut album ‘It’s Dreaming’ looks set to solidify him as a bold new voice on the UK music scene, bringing with him a new world of melancholy, narrative-driven pop.

The subjects of sexuality, love, family and a yearning for the divine are played out across this cinematic piece of work. “I’m asking myself and everyone to consider; Where is your love? What does it mean for you? What are your boundaries around it and why?” - Evadney.  On ‘Plie’ Evadney’s vivid storytelling flows effortlessly in a surreal conversation with an angel who teaches him how to dance. ‘Qualia’’ is a harp laden ode to his parents and their enslaved ancestors, whilst ‘Leathered & Laced’ and ‘Good Lord’ are devastatingly beautiful and honest stories of Evadney pulling himself out of his darkest moments of lost direction and substance abuse.

I Made It All Up For You is the new record by Hugo Race Fatalists, their 6th studio album, set for release March 20, 2026 thru Gusstaff Records / Helixed on LP/CD and digital.
"In his 40-year career, Hugo Race has lived a thousand lives and played the role of songwriter, producer, musician, performer, head of a record label (Helixed). His music went from folk to lounge, from "trance industrial blues" to psychedelia, from world music to electronics. Starting from post-punk Melbourne in the 1980s, he took fascinating paths that led him from Africa to Turkey, from Berlin to Romagna…"
Hugo Race returns after highly successful collaborative albums with Michelangelo Russo (100 Years), The Church frontman Steve Kilbey (Speed of the Stars) and Gianni Maraccolo (The Vigil, winner of the prestigious Premio Ciampi) with I Made It All Up For You, an epic album with his Italian band Fatalists - existential songwriting framed by the band's signature fusion of roots music, electronica, Italian soundtracks and desert rock.
"I wanted to create something melodic and beautiful in defiance of our current reality. The songs started as bare acoustic sketches written in a remote mountain cabin in Italy where I had two weeks off during a solo tour. The weather turned into a raging blizzard, the days a struggle to keep the wood fire lit and the smoke out of the house. I wrote about twelve songs, threw them all away, started again with an unplugged electric guitar in front of that
damp fire, searching for the album's theme. When the smoke cleared, I was at the crossroads of a long term relationship unraveling under a blazing antipodean sun.
Fatalists recorded the basic tracks at the floating studio on the Puccini lake an hour out of Florence - Giovanni Ferrario (Scisma, PJ Harvey) on guitars and synth, Francesco Giampaoli (Brutture Moderne) on bass and Diego Sapignoli (Sacri Cuori) on percussion.
Violinist Massimiliano Gallo met me in Sicily for a short tour to learn the new songs, adding layers of his Calabrian magic to the mix. Jennifer Charles (singer of New York band Elysian Fields) and I had been talking for a long time about making new music and this was the occasion when we made it happen. Jennifer's distinctive voice graces this
album on the songs I Collide and Broken Love, the lyrics of which were written by author and designer Alannah Hill. My longtime road brother Michelangelo Russo also dusts the tracks with his otherworldly electric harmonica on Against The World, Born To Fly and Open Field. A lot of joy and pain and reflection went into the making of this album and I hope that comes across; this is about the darkness yes, but also the light. Everything changes and every ending is a new beginning but it's how we experience transformation that really matters. I hope you love this album. I made it all up for you."
Hugo Race, Naples, 2025

Here we find ourselves, among the Canadian miscreants Egregore whereupon they return from whence the wind howls like a damned choir and the Earth knows no master, to chart a broader sonic wilderness via ‘It Echoes In The Wild’. And much as sea-rogues and freebooters sought fortune upon blackened waters, so too does Egregore venture musically into diabolic and ungoverned lands. Presenting something more expansive, elemental and untamed on ‘It Echoes In The Wild’, the early occult Black Death Metal lunacy embraces atmospheric breadth equally alongside primitive force to delve deep into not only geographic wilds, but the psychological, esoteric and spiritual hinterlands at the edges of complete madness. Dark invocations and secret tongues draw forth echoes from forest and fen, cave and cliff, tempting the temporally tethered to receive the curse, all the while driven by a primal, unknowable sardonic menace. Though the voyage be perilous, to succumb to ‘It Echoes In The Wild’ is to become ensconced in a lawless dominion of the soul in service of a higher call. Mirroring nature’s unbridled forces and the hidden echoes that dwell within, Egregore’s second album takes the band’s mystical insanity and magickal perversion to the edge of the abyss and plunges forward.

Apollo Records proudly present the vinyl reissue of ‘Morning Light’, the acclaimed 1997 album from Mark Van Hoen’s Locust project; a work that blurred the boundaries between ambient electronics, trip-hop, and dream-pop with an emotional precision few have matched since.

Originally issued during the label’s pioneering late-’90s era, ‘Morning Light’ marked a bold evolution for Van Hoen, best known at the time for his dark, abstract ambient work under Locust and as a member of Seefeel. Seeking to create something more human and melodic, Van Hoen assembled a rotating cast of collaborators, including Zoe Niblett, Craig Bethell, Neil Halstead (Slowdive/Mojave 3), and Wendy Roberts, blending fractured dance rhythms, live instrumentation, and intimate vocal performances into something both deeply personal and effortlessly cinematic.

From the haunting reimagining of The Carpenters’ ‘No-One In The World’ to the slow blooming emotional arcs of ‘All Your Own Way,’ ‘Folie’, and ‘The Girl With The Fairytale Dream’, the album’s 13 tracks form a widescreen narrative of melancholy and beauty. Reviewers at the time hailed it as “a subtle delight” and “sheer God-given genius”, comparing its mood and texture to Massive Attack, This Mortal Coil, and Portishead, yet noting its entirely singular voice.

This reissue restores Morning Light to vinyl for the first time in over two decades. A crucial artefact from the fertile intersection of experimental electronica and ethereal pop, ‘Morning Light’ stands today as one of the label’s most quietly influential releases.

I Made It All Up For You is the new record by Hugo Race Fatalists, their 6th studio album, set for release March 20, 2026 thru Gusstaff Records / Helixed on LP/CD and digital.
"In his 40-year career, Hugo Race has lived a thousand lives and played the role of songwriter, producer, musician, performer, head of a record label (Helixed). His music went from folk to lounge, from "trance industrial blues" to psychedelia, from world music to electronics. Starting from post-punk Melbourne in the 1980s, he took fascinating paths that led him from Africa to Turkey, from Berlin to Romagna…"
Hugo Race returns after highly successful collaborative albums with Michelangelo Russo (100 Years), The Church frontman Steve Kilbey (Speed of the Stars) and Gianni Maraccolo (The Vigil, winner of the prestigious Premio Ciampi) with I Made It All Up For You, an epic album with his Italian band Fatalists - existential songwriting framed by the band's signature fusion of roots music, electronica, Italian soundtracks and desert rock.
"I wanted to create something melodic and beautiful in defiance of our current reality. The songs started as bare acoustic sketches written in a remote mountain cabin in Italy where I had two weeks off during a solo tour. The weather turned into a raging blizzard, the days a struggle to keep the wood fire lit and the smoke out of the house. I wrote about twelve songs, threw them all away, started again with an unplugged electric guitar in front of that
damp fire, searching for the album's theme. When the smoke cleared, I was at the crossroads of a long term relationship unraveling under a blazing antipodean sun.
Fatalists recorded the basic tracks at the floating studio on the Puccini lake an hour out of Florence - Giovanni Ferrario (Scisma, PJ Harvey) on guitars and synth, Francesco Giampaoli (Brutture Moderne) on bass and Diego Sapignoli (Sacri Cuori) on percussion.
Violinist Massimiliano Gallo met me in Sicily for a short tour to learn the new songs, adding layers of his Calabrian magic to the mix. Jennifer Charles (singer of New York band Elysian Fields) and I had been talking for a long time about making new music and this was the occasion when we made it happen. Jennifer's distinctive voice graces this
album on the songs I Collide and Broken Love, the lyrics of which were written by author and designer Alannah Hill. My longtime road brother Michelangelo Russo also dusts the tracks with his otherworldly electric harmonica on Against The World, Born To Fly and Open Field. A lot of joy and pain and reflection went into the making of this album and I hope that comes across; this is about the darkness yes, but also the light. Everything changes and every ending is a new beginning but it's how we experience transformation that really matters. I hope you love this album. I made it all up for you."
Hugo Race, Naples, 2025

Scopeotaku’s latest is a continuation of themes he explored in System Failure. Mutating into darker dimensions, influenced by recent world events. reality error is steeped in strangled synths, tape hiss and distorted echoes. Featuring crushed low-tech rhythms and recordings inspired by science fiction B-movies. Scopeotaku seizes the means of production with full on DiY approach. Setting out to soundtrack a dystopian society that has lost touch with the soul of humanity. A world where corporate greed and disruptive extremist views amplified by echo chambers soaked in misinformation drown the voices of reason and compassion. Within this murky swamp however lies a glimmer of light and hope for us all to not accept the future but to shape it.

50 DiY tapes with download code included.

Recorded in Glasgow

For here lies one of the most influential bands in the realm of gothic metal, a group with doom and death metal roots that has flourished for over three decades, boasting thirteen albums that have garnered devoted acclaim. This injustice is now being set right by The Circle Music , beginning with the vinyl release of the classic album "Burning: A Wish", which emerged twenty-four years ago. "Burning: A Wish", released in the twilight of the year 2001, stands as a dark reliquary of dreams lost to the velvet fog of melancholy. To revisit it now, two dozen years later, is to unseal a time capsule of gothic ache, doom- laced longing, and the tormented tenderness that only Lacrimas Profundere could conjure at their creative height. It was a candle-lit corridor between worlds. A slow fall into velvet shadows. A scream muffled by rain.

By the time "Burning: A Wish" was released, Lacrimas Profundere had already begun to evolve from their early death- doom origins, shaping their identity with the sophistication of seasoned mourners. The death growls had receded, replaced by the haunted, baritone croon of Christopher Schmid, whose voice is an echo from a chapel ruined by time. Yet, while the growls faded, the emotional gravitas remained intact, transmuted into melody, into baroque gloom, into something more sorrowfully refined. Produced with lush, theatrical clarity, the album never drowns in its own atmosphere, it breathes with it, moves with it. The soundscape is dominated by somber guitar textures, languid tempos, and subtle orchestral touches. From the very first notes, it is clear that this is music for ruined lovers and moon-drenched graveyards.

This is the hallmark of Lacrimas Profundere 's style: an emotional minimalism that does not explain or elaborate, but merely opens wounds and lets them breathe. That this album has remained, until now, absent from the warm embrace of vinyl is both tragic and oddly poetic. For what format better suits a record such as this than the one that cracks and hisses like an old seance? Vinyl is tactile, intimate. It requires attention, reverence. To place Burning: A Wish on a turntable is to light a candle in the dark.

Peach Discs' first release of 2026 comes from fast-rising star of the Manchester scene PACH. (pronounced "pack"). Five slippery rollers built for dark rooms, wafty terraces and the most locked-in of afters.

"The Wake-Up Call" EP represents the full spectrum of the PACH. sound, one rooted in the minimal tunes coming out of Romania but with a cheeky playfulness that can only come from a life spent in the trenches of UK club culture. The A1 "Keep It Bubblin’" is a prime example, as Todd Edwards-style vocal chops flirt back and forth with dub-inspired feedback lines, or "5am Wake-Up Call's" skipping, UKG-adjascent hats. Things get a little rowdier with "Complex Waveform's" scuzzy bassline that wouldn't sound out of place coming from the Clone Records ecosystem. Here it's bolted to a chassis of tough, techy drums and trippy vox that tickle at your peripheries. Flip to the B-side for something a little deeper – the dubbed-out percussion and disembodied voices of "Not That Kinda Party" contrasting with the moody, low-key synthetic tones of "Book The Dungeon", both sharing a mutual concept of smartly stripped-back, hypnotic jams that focus on heads-down grooves and rolling energy.

MASKxSOUL is the new international project, featuring the baritone Alexander Korenkov (of Mariinsky Theatre, Theatre du Chatelet, and JFK Center fame, who performed with Vladimir Yurovsky, Valery Gergiev and Anton Batagov) and introducing the voice and music of Tatiana Selivanova (Vanilla Quartz), backed up by Jason Kohnen (The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, The Lovecraft Sextet, Mansur) and Dimitry El-Demerdashi (Mansur). One might say that MASKxSOUL blends dark-jazz, tsar punk, and Eastern folklore with the setting of the romantic landscapes inspired by the Russian classical tradition. MASKxSOUL presents a new vision of a perennial classic, namely, Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, a romantic novel in verse that has served generations of artists across the globe as inspiration, with a debut single dedicated to Pushkin's 222nd anniversary on June 6th 2022. The complete eight track MASKxSOUL debut album "Onegin" is available now through Denovali.

After decades spent shaping the sound of southern Madagascar and becoming one of the defining voices of tsapiky, Damily returns with Fanjiry, his most intimate and focused record to date. Known for electrifying village ceremonies and carrying the fever of Toliara across continents, he takes a sharp turn — not away from trance, but deeper into its core.

Recorded in just three days at Studio Black Box with analog wizard Peter Deimel, Fanjiry strips the tsapiky band down to a single guitar and a single heartbeat. Damily plays alone, yet fills the space completely — bass, rhythm, melody, pulse, and breath merging into a dense and vibrating sound. Every riff is architecture, every harmonic a door opening onto memory, childhood landscapes, and nights where music heals, binds, and exhausts the dark.

There is no nostalgia here, no museum of tradition. Fanjiry is a new frontier for tsapiky: raw, precise, suspended between earth and sky, born from craft and necessity. The title — the last star before dawn — captures its essence: a quiet moment before the world awakens, where a single guitar can hold an entire history and still point forward.

Steeped in nocturnal, death rock adventurism, riven with a post-punk anxiety that feels increasingly like the twitching heart of our modern age, and driven by hardcore punk intensity, the second studio album from Boston’s FINAL GASP, titled New Day Symptoms, does what all great rock records do - not only does it place itself within a lineage, summoning up and amplifying a spectrum of powers from Rock n' Roll lore, it makes them resonate in the here and now. It gives voice to those fears and frustrations lurking just under the surface of waking consciousness and turns them into a rallying cry. Throughout New Day Symptoms, FINAL GASP create a potent reaction from the furious and the forlorn, frontman Jake Murphy’s vocalizes both a supercharged howl into the void and a remorseful echo back. But where the band’s 2023 debut, Mourning Moon, was a concentrated shot of acrid, underground death rock, its propulsion tanks largely filled with references to Samhain and Killing Joke, New Day Symptoms keeps all the core urgent energy while vastly broadening its scope. Through the anthemic, acid-corroded vistas of "Look Away" and gothic tub-thumping beat of "Gifted Shame" to "No Hand To Lead" channelling "Don’t Fear The Reaper" and its loping groove, New Day Symptoms takes the familiar into uncharted territory and makes the unfamiliar instantly, internally recognisable. With new space to explore, this is an album that feels a mapping of personal trials and dark recesses. Short: Boston's FINAL GASP return with New Day Symptoms - the new album steeped in nocturnal, death rock adventurism, riven with a post-punk anxiety that feels increasingly like the twitching heart of our modern age, and driven by hardcore punk intensity! FFO: Danzig, Killing Joke, TSOL, Lathe of Heaven, Poison Ruin, Gouge Away, Tribulation

After decades spent shaping the sound of southern Madagascar and becoming one of the defining voices of tsapiky, Damily returns with Fanjiry, his most intimate and focused record to date. Known for electrifying village ceremonies and carrying the fever of Toliara across continents, he takes a sharp turn - not away from trance, but deeper into its core. Recorded in just three days at Studio Black Box with analog wizard Peter Deimel, Fanjiry strips the tsapiky band down to a single guitar and a single heartbeat. Damily plays alone, yet fills the space completely - bass, rhythm, melody, pulse, and breath merging into a dense and vibrating sound. Every riff is architecture, every harmonic a door opening onto memory, childhood landscapes, and nights where music heals, binds, and exhausts the dark. There is no nostalgia here, no museum of tradition. Fanjiry is a new frontier for tsapiky: raw, precise, suspended between earth and sky, born from craft and necessity. The title - the last star before dawn - captures its essence: a quiet moment before the world awakens, where a single guitar can hold an entire history and still point forward.

Named after his grandfather's pool hall cafe in Alert Bay, British Columbia, the record connects small-town grit with the bright lights of Nashville, where Willie recorded with Grammy- winning producer Tom Hambridge (Buddy Guy, Kingfish, Susan Tedeschi). From roadhouse stompers to backseat ballads, Garret T. Willie sings of love, loss, addiction, and resilience with a voice that cuts like hi- beam headlights on a dark backroad. Bill's Cafe is alive wire of energy and soul, carrying old-soul traditions into the future with fire and truth.

Saxophonist and producer Ben Vince announces the release of his sixth album, Street Druid, the first in almost six years via AD 93.

Street Druid merges acoustic, manipulated and electronic sound and it has saxophone, synth, voice, guitars and drum machine, and features drum kit from Moses Boyd. It features artwork by Byzantia Harlow. It is at once tender, psychedelic and fierce. It is not interested in genre or category. It lasts just under 45 minutes.

A prelude for the future, hands join to cast a peace spell. Consciousness is vast water seeking divine essence and meaning where colours merge and refract. The street druid walks through the night, a benevolence in the darkness, guiding you home. Immersed in noise, life can feel empty, like hollow vessels, a sentient interlude. At times we are found in Gaia’s rhythm, kinetic and rebuilt, transcending through the impact of sound on the body. Every moment is a new change, a new challenge, a new life, we must ride the wave if we are not to be caught adrift or drown. Trying to keep hope intact, we must not retreat into fear, recognise we all live here in Longville and stop the fire before it engulfs us all.

French artist Trypheme debuts on Impatience with “Odd Balade”, a darkly-hued collection of songs drawn from human delicacy and dreamworld mythology.

“Odd Balade” is Trypheme’s most ambitious and boldest record to date - both lyrically and musically. The album’s thirteen tracks resist rigid genre boundaries and flutter from medieval folk realms, sprawling synths, gothic 80s wave, leftfield pop, haunted vocals, mutant electronica to reverbed guitars - all reflected through her own shadowy prism. Especially album closer “A Walk In The Vercors” evokes a soothing serenity that echoes the sonic balm of Julee Cruise.

Trypheme’s musical repertoire trends heavily electronic and somewhat abstracted, but on “Odd Balade”, the artist slips into the role of the modern troubadour with a shift to a more poetically and personal songwriting that is infused with symbolism and dreamlike fantasies. The connective tissue of the album is the audacity to love and the vulnerability that ensues. As intimate and introspective as the lyrics are, the themes remain universal and human to the core: the fear of losing a loved one, the melancholia of leaving places and t“the fear of losing a loved one, the melancholia of leaving places and the cycles of life. The record was largely composed in Chars, stirred by the French village’s eerie atmosphere and frequent trips to the seaside in Brittany, where Trypheme resides. Drawing inspiration from the rugged terrain of the seaside landscapes, the writings of Allen Ginsberg and Mark Fisher and the hyperrealist art of Scott Prior, Trypheme uses her songs to depict life with broad strokes of rhythm.

On “Odd Balade” Trypheme consolidates herself as a gifted, nimble songwriter, masterly producer and subtly powerful vocalist. The record combines her skill for crafting lush, alien sound worlds and efficient, alluring arrangements with stealthily devastating songs. Belin’s voice becomes a key ingredient, appearing on eleven of Odd Balade’s thirteen tracks, by turns heavily manipulated, sampled and replayed as a form of percussion, or basically bare.

“Odd Balade” is the manifestation of Trypheme’s roving artistic practice, a ceremonial-grade sacrament cast in a rich nocturnal glow. Pairing the mundane with the mythic, the album stays true to its core: odd and strangely familiar.

RIYL - Riding off into the sunset to an unknown destination, hauntology, present, tales told by the fireside, hot summer rain, adventures, to feel a warm presence when you are walking in the forest or in the mountain, coastal landscapes, sailor’s stories, slow motion, vitesse, heavy blossoms, colors, the warmth of the sun, the tenderness of the moon, getting lost in unfamiliar streets, city’s lights, motorway rest area by night, magic numbers, rendez-vous, picnic, serendipity, poetry, the smell of old records and old books.

Tiphaine Belin has been releasing music as Trypheme since 2016. Odd Balade was written and produced by Belin, and mixed by Belin and Abel Roux. It was mastered by Amir Shoat. Cover art photography is by Ariane Kiks, with art direction by Ariane Kiks in collaboration with Mathilde Chaize.

Dictaphone are back with their 6th full length called "Unstable". In the 25th year of the project Brussels born composer and mastermind Oliver Doerell is surrounded again by a lot of musicians & friends. Roger Döring is there, his clarinet and saxophone play has always been a trademark sound of the band - also Alexander Stolze's ghostly violins. The dark atmosphere and experimental sound of the new album is a reference to the 80s belgian art music scene, which Doerell had the luck to experience in his formative years. Minimal jazz meets musique concrete meets a postpunk mind. On this new album “Unstable“ more voices and vocals than usual can be heard - especially Helga Raimondi (who already sang on the last album “Goats and Distortions 5") . As a collage artist she is also responsible for the visual side of Dictaphone - she designed the cover artwork and the visuals for the live shows.

The Brussels-Berlin-Teheran connection: Other guests on "Unstable" are the voices of Kaveh Ghaemi and Ashkan Afsharian, who Doerell met during a modern ballet production by Modjgan Hashemian (2008). The trumpet of Shahab Anousha can be heard in the track “La fin“ - Oliver Doerell and Shahab Anousha also share the spoken words Project “Noufān”. For nearly 20 years Oliver Doerell is linked to the Iranian Diaspora in Berlin and the Dictaphone track “Rattle” from the classic album “ Poems from a rooftop “ (2012) has been a hit in Teherans underground scene since the beginning. Furthermore the title track “Unstable“ is a homage to Ian Curtis of Joy Division. The words of this piece are based on the setlist of Joy Divisions last show.

Dictaphone played more than two hundred shows all over the world (including festivals Mutek, Transmediale, Unsound , Benicassim and many others). Their music can be heard in countless films, tv series and theatre pieces - (“the responder“ (BBC) , “the love he knows” (Ali Mohammad) , “Don´t move“ (Modjgan Hashemian) , Ring (Felix Ruckert) among others.

West Mineral returns with lushly amorphous actions by Shiner, Pontiac Streator & Ben Bondy aka Shinetiac; together fused for an immersive flux of vapoured dub, chopped and droned Billie Eilish, and fidgety algorithmic jams.

There's not a single, specific sound you can peg to the West Mineral axis at this stage in the label’s evolution - it's rather a set of shared aesthetics that freely bend into various interconnected shapes. Shinetiac's contemptuous, critic-baiting gear is the ideal example; on their last album, 2023's 'Not All Who Wander Are Lost', skittery, ketamized IDM sparkled over Spice Girls samples and the Foo Fighters' 'Everlong' was transmuted into Sneaker Pimps-style trip-hop. 'Infiltrating Roku City' might be a little less blatant with its out-and-out poptimism, but it takes a similarly dim view of conservative "big ambient" snobbishness. Just a few minutes of 'Bluemosa' should be enough to let you know what's up; the overall character of the sound is hazed, with frozen pads and garbled, dubbed-out voices smudged into a mess of effects and samples. But it sups up different nuances as it wriggles, absorbing scampering breaks, dizzy acoustic guitar strums and half-heard wordless vocals, flipping in the third act to emerge from its shell as minimalist balearic folk-pop - something like Bon Iver doing 'Electric Counterpoint'.

Brooklyn's Shiner, Philly's Pontiac Streator and Berlin-based Ben Bondy navigate the labyrinthine streaming landscape, guided by their own private experiences of mindless doom-scrolling and cruising the darkest corners of YouTube. They formulated 'Infiltrating Roku City' while they were rehearsing last year and spent the winter stitching together various recordings and jams into a layered, dry-witted commentary on our algorithmic reality. Laden with inside jokes and refried memes, it's surprisingly elegant gear; handling the most unseemly elements like sonic recyclers, earnestly repurposing pop and nostalgia to create an atmospheric echo of contemporary reality.

Screwing Chief Keef's enduring 'Citgo', 'Clublyfe (hulu)' emphasises the original's AFX-pilled euphoria with Robert Miles-style piano hits, replacing Young Ravisu's brittle 128kbps trap rhythm with a glitchy rattle that picks up dembow spikes as it rolls. 'I Hate Being Sober' vaporises the Chicago drill pioneer's 'Hate Bein' Sober', blocking out his voice with glitchy, downsampled interference and elasticated Rhodes. The trio team up with Orange Milk's goo age on the sublime 'Crisis Angel', catching a ray of Malibu's sunshine in the process, and reduce Billie Eilish's voice to a Romance-does-Celine cinder on 'Billie', stretching it to fit next to gassed Future ad-libs and swooping 808 Mafia sub womps. And although the album takes a murky diversion on 'Roku Axes Ultra’, and a cloud-stepping centrepiece ‘Purelink’ in homage to the eponymous dubbed ambient dynamos, it's back on course with 'Jiafei (NETFLIX)', taking aim at TikTok bot videos and welding screams from Florida metal band Underoath to AI-strength vocal curlicues.

The funky, atmospheric, evocative and sometimes downright weird output of companies such as DeWolfe, Cavendish, Burton and the ubiquitous KPM have always been a guiding inspiration for ATA Records, as evidenced in the spooky soundtrack works of The Sorcerers, the big band brass of The Yorkshire Film & Television Orchestra and even in the soul-jazz of The Lewis Express ('Theme From The Watcher).

Everything released on ATA is written and guided by the label heads Neil Innes and Pete Williams, who frequently dip their toes in the Library pond while working on other projects. These occasional one-off tracks have accumulated over the past few years and have now found a home on the first volume of an ongoing series : The Library Archive

Recorded using the same techniques and equipment used to create the now legendary catalogues of music sold to the film and television industry of the 60's & 70's, The Library Archive could easily sit alongside the plain minimalist covers of KPM or Telesound.

The fierce Brass of 'Whack, Slap & Blow' and 'Kaye Okay' could both be a Keith Mansfield cut, acting as a theme tune to a glamorous saturday night tv show circa 1972. 'Duck Strut' is a cheeky slice of Bass driven Brit-funk, Muted horns and flute adding an element of Quincy Jones amongst the grooving drums and percussion. 'The Needle Nose', 'Midnight Heist' and 'Wiretap' are amongst the more cinematic tracks on the album. Moody and atmospheric, they conjure up images of dark alleys, shadowy figures and dead letter drops. 'Wigged out' channels the wonky organ weirdness of Italian library legends I Marc 4 while 'Nuclear Wind I & II' use Moog and Mellotron as electronic counterpoint to ethereal voices. 'Siren's sea's' acoustic interlude conjures up images of distant clifftops, gossamer vocals enticing you onto the rocks before album closer 'Planet Nine' traverses the cosmos.

Malena Zavala is an Argentinian-born, London-based artist, producer, and filmmaker, known for crafting ethereal, genre-blending music that navigates the space between her Latin heritage and her British upbringing. With the forthcoming album If This Life Could Start Again set for release on 30 January 2026 on Paraná Records, Zavala presents her most intimate, cohesive, and accomplished work to date, marking a significant evolution in her artistic journey.
With her new album, Malena creates an atmospheric dream pop world, weaving singer-songwriter intimacy with synth pop, Argentine folk, indiepop, rock and experimental music, threaded together by her blissful vocals and dreamy guitar work. Gorgeously warm and vivid, If This Life Could Start Again charts the journey from pain to acceptance, mapping out the non-linear nature of healing through a sonic landscape. Each song embodies a distinct emotion within that journey, from grief and chaos to feeling lost, seeking refuge, finding confidence, and finally acceptance and letting go. Drawing on her Argentinian roots, Malena uses the Andes mountains as both a visual and thematic anchor – the difficult climb towards higher ground becomes a metaphor for healing, whilst being lost at rock bottom reflects the darkest moments of the journey. 
Completely composed and performed by Malena herself, the album was recorded in Girona’s L’Empordà countryside in Spain with producer Luke Smith. As a professional producer and audio engineer, this was Malena’s first time relinquishing production control – an intimate creative shift that allowed their shared vision to shape the album’s rich, enveloping sound. 
However, Zavala’s career to date has been a testament to self-sufficient artistry. Her critically acclaimed debut, Aliso (2018), was written, recorded, and produced alone in her parents’ garage, which honed her dreamy bedroom pop sound. The album, praised by The Guardian for its “gently warped and beguilingly melancholy guitar pop,” ****, immediately catapulted her from DIY beginnings to prestigious stages, supporting acts like Lord Huron at London’s Roundhouse and Men I Trust at Village Underground and subsequently continuing on their UK/EU tours. Later with standout performances at Latitude, Green Man, and All Points East. Her consistent radio support from key influencers including BBC Radio 6 Music, BBC Radio 1's Huw Stephens, and Steve Lamacq has solidified her presence on the airwaves.
Her second album, La Yarará (2020), saw Zavala delve deeper into her roots, exploring Latin traditions like Cumbia and Bolero. This exploration of identity continues powerfully on the new album, but with a newfound lyrical depth and sonic confidence. The new album, If This Life Could Start Again, is a raw and transformative eight-track journey that maps the emotional landscape of healing. Written after a period of personal upheaval, the album traverses themes of grief, hereditary trauma, and self-discovery. The record’s narrative is structured like a mountain ascent. A challenging climb through varied emotional terrain, posing the central question: “Will you join the journey?” Sonically, this journey mirrors the non-linear path to acceptance, evolving from acoustic folk and synth-pop to funk-infused rhythms and rock anthems.
As a formidable live performer, Zavala has built a robust touring profile across the UK and Europe. She will embark on an extensive tour in February and March 2026 to support the album, with dates spanning major cities from London and Glasgow to Berlin, Paris, and Barcelona.
With If This Life Could Start Again, Malena Zavala fully realizes her artistic vision as a self-taught producer to an autonomous artist commanding her career through Paraná Records whilst reflecting the vast landscapes of her heritage and affirming her place as a compelling and evolving voice in contemporary music.