-> >;TRELLDOM treiben ihren musikalischen Kurs mit "...by the word..." wild entschlossen weiter in der neuen musikalischen Ära voran, die sie nach einer 17-jährigen Ruhephase mit dem Vorgängeralbum "...by the shadows..." (2024) eingeleitet hatten. Bandkopf und Sänger Kristian Eivind Espedal alias Gaahl hat den komplexen und dennoch finsteren Sound des Vorgängers mit seinen sorgfältig ausgewählten Mitstreitern konsequent weiterentwickelt. Das exponentiell gewachsene Selbstvertrauen und die hart erarbeitete Erfahrung der zumindest oberflächlich sehr unterschiedlichen norwegischen Musiker spiegeln sich deutlich in jedem Track von "...by the word..." wider. TRELLDOM vollenden den Prozess, sich von der engsten Definition des Black Metal zu lösen, ohne dabei ihre künstlerische Mission zu verraten. Ihre neue Musik bleibt nicht nur dem Geist ihrer Black Metal Herkunft treu, sondern der Sound der Norweger ist auf seine eigene Weise sogar noch finsterer und verstörender als je zuvor. "...by the word..." ist auch das Ergebnis von Espedals wagemutiger Ausweitung seiner immensen stimmlichen Bandbreite in noch weiter entlegene, unerforschte Territorien. Dies wurde zum Teil durch seine Rückkehr in die berühmten Grieghallen Studios in Bergen erreicht, wo er erneut mit Eirik Hundvin alias Pytten zusammenarbeitete – jenem legendären Produzenten, der maßgeblich an der Entstehung des Sounds des "norwegischen Black Metal" beteiligt war. TRELLDOM stehen fest in Espedals künstlerischer Tradition stets das Unerwartete zu tun. Mit der Erforschung avantgardistischer Dissonanzen, gewagter Rhythmusmuster und wilder Ideen zerstört "...by the word..." erneut Erwartungshaltungen und Vorurteile. Dieses Album verlangt intensives Zuhören und fordert mit jeder Note heraus!-> >;
-> >;
Tracklist:-> >;
1. When This Was Young-> >;
2. I Speak Forgotten Voices-> >;
3. This Moment the Life of a Memory-> >;
4. By the Word-> >;
5. Folding the Mind-> >;
6. The Word – Chose to Vanish-> >;
7. In There Outside

Source: Prophecy

-> >;Wenn man die Melancholie der engen grünen und grauen Täler Nordenglands mit der ewigen Sehnsucht des portugiesischen Fado verbindet, die der tosende Atlantik und die Sommerglut am Ende der Welt gebiert, dann erwachsen daraus SLEEPING PULSE. Das Duo aus Sänger Mick Moss, der vor allem für seine Arbeit mit ANTIMATTER bekannt ist, und dem portugiesischen Gitarristen Luís Fazendeiro zeichnet die beachtliche künstlerische Leistung aus, derartig existenziellen Schmerz mit jeder Note ihres zweiten Albums "Dreams lt; Limitations" hörbar zu machen. Mit ihrer eigenen Variante des Progressive Doom oder sogar Post-Rock als klanglicher Grundlage komponieren SLEEPING PULSE Songs, die auf die beste Art und Weise zutiefst emotional und zugleich aufregend klingen. Das Duo schwelgt jedoch keineswegs in Selbstmitleid, sondern nimmt das Unvermeidliche an und lebt es aus. SLEEPING PULSE brauchten mehr als ein Jahrzehnt, um einen würdigen Nachfolger für "Under the Same Sky" (2014) zu erschaffen. Mit "Dreams lt; Limitations" knüpfen SLEEPING PULSE genau dort an, wo sie aufgehört haben, wagen sich dabei aber auch behutsam weiter auf ihrem steinigen Weg. Dieses Album ist eine bedeutsame Einladung an alle, für die Rockmusik nicht nur Party und Krawall bedeuten. "Dreams lt; Limitations" verleiht Schmerz und Verlust eine musikalische Stimme, bietet aber zugleich an, einen Teil der Last zu tragen, Trost und Hoffnung zu spenden und sich in dunklen Zeiten als ein verständnisvoller Begleiter zu erweisen.-> >;
-> >;
Tracklist:-> >;
1. Dreams lt; Limitations-> >;
2. Rise-> >;
3. Illuminate-> >;
4. The Butterfly Collector-> >;
5. Two Wreaths-> >;
6. The Constraint-> >;
7. Behind The Glass-> >;
8. Extrasolar-> >;
9. When I Am Young Again -> >;
-> >;
Bonus tracks (artbook only):-> >;
1. Behind The Glass (Acoustic)-> >;
2. Rise (Acoustic)-> >;
3. Two Wreaths (Orchestral)-> >;
4. Dreams lt; Limitations (Remix)-> >;
5. The Constraint (Remix)-> >;
6. When I Am Young Again (Orchestral)

Source: Prophecy

-> >;DYMNA LOTVA gelingt mit ihrem vierten Album "Vyraj" ein Quantensprung in ihrer rasanten musikalischen Entwicklung. Die belarusischen Dissidenten beweisen eindrucksvoll, dass sie in jeder erdenklichen Hinsicht über eine breite künstlerische und thematische Palette verfügen. Obwohl "Vyraj" nach wie vor auf einem soliden Fundament aus Black und Post-Black Metal gebaut ist, gehen DYMNA LOTVA über einfache Kategorisierungen hinaus, indem sie sich auch von Doom, Heavy und Progressive Metal inspirieren lassen und sogar Elemente aus der elektronischen Musik, Goth und Folklore einbinden. Das Album besticht mit einer Fülle atmosphärisch dichter Songs, die den Hörer auf eine emotionale Achterbahnfahrt einladen – von den dunkelsten Tiefen der Depression und Angst, über rohe Wut und Trotz, bis hin zu Höhen ekstatischer Wonne. "Vyraj" ist ein musikalisches Kaleidoskop mit sich ständig verändernden Mustern und Klangfarben von bemerkenswerter Schönheit, die in fesselnde Melodien übergehen und mitunter sogar eine pop-artige Verlockung ausstrahlen. DYMNA LOTVA bleiben dabei stets Revolutionäre. Dies ist aufgrund der politischen Verfolgung der Gründungsmitglieder und der anhaltenden Zensur des Lukaschenko-Regimes, die zur Flucht aus ihrer belarusischen Heimat führte, nur natürlich. Auf "Vyraj" legen DYMNA LOTVA ihren lyrischen Fokus jedoch auf andere Themen. Das Hauptkonzept des Albums ließe sich als "belarusische Ethno-Astronomie" beschreiben. In slawischen Legenden wird der Sternenhimmel sowohl mit dem Jenseits als auch mit irdischen Reisen in Verbindung gebracht, was eng mit der persönlichen Erfahrung der Musiker durch die erzwungene Emigration verflochten ist. Die Idee der Totenreise spiegelt sich im Albumtitel "Vyraj" wider. Dies ist der Name eines mythischen Reichs, in das Vögel zum Überwintern ziehen und wo die Seelen der Verstorbenen ihre letzte Ruhe finden. Mit "Vyraj" machen DYMNA LOTVA einen weiteren großen Schritt in ihrer stürmischen Entwicklung. Es ist leicht vorherzusagen, dass diese einzigartige und höchst originelle Band schon bald auf den Plakaten großer Festivals und auf zahlreichen europäischen Bühnen zu sehen sein wird.-> >;
-> >;
Tracklist:-> >;
1. Zory-> >;
2. Veha-> >;
3. The Boat of Despair-> >;
4. Viedźmieragina-> >;
5. Niama Darohi-> >;
6. Bu Samoje-> >;
7. Ustań Za Mianie-> >;
8. Return My Coffin Home-> >;
-> >;
Bonus-CD (nur Artbook):-> >;
1. Zory (Instrumental)-> >;
2. Veha (Instrumental)-> >;
3. The Boat Of Despair (Instrumental)-> >;
4. Viedźmieragina (Instrumental)-> >;
5. Niama Darohi (Instrumental)-> >;
6. Bu Samoje (Instrumental)-> >;
7. Ustań Za Mianie (Instrumental)-> >;
8. Return My Coffin Home (Instrumental)

Source: Prophecy

Montreal’s The City Gates return with Chimera, an eight-track record that treats post-punk, shoegaze, and darkwave as materials under pressure. The album moves through history, unrest, memory, and private collapse with a sense of architecture: basslines locked into grim forward motion, drums pushing the frame, guitars spreading into vast metallic sheets, and synths giving the songs a cold, spectral edge.

The title suits the record. Chimera feels like a creature assembled from competing impulses: urgency and drift, force and disintegration, intimacy and distance. The City Gates are working at scale, but the album never loses its physical charge. You hear the friction of strings, the mass of the rhythm section, the hum of equipment, and the sense of a band building pressure from the floor upward. Its best moments feel less like escape than confrontation, with each track moving through states of fracture, longing, and control.

Lyrically, the album circles isolation, emotional disconnection, distorted memory, and the strange loneliness of modern life. The voice often sits half-buried in the mix, less as confession than transmission, as if these songs are arriving through concrete, static, and old wounds. The imagery leans toward the urban and existential: people slipping out of reach, perception bending, private grief feeding into a larger social unease. The City Gates understand how to make distance feel bodily, how to turn absence into weight.

The Great Devourer sprawls across five and a half minutes like a cathedral built for bad news, all gorgeous shoegaze guitars, stacked vocals, and doomsday dread in its Sunday best. It is a lamentation with teeth: hunger, sacrifice, mothers crying dry, children held close while some great beast of appetite waits at the edge of the village. The song works because it keeps the horror plain. No grand mythology lesson, no ornate footnotes, just a warning bell rung over and over until fear starts looking like religion.

Pilgrimage takes exhaustion and gives it a pair of boots. This is the sound of someone walking away from the wreckage with no parade, no rescue party, and no clean moral to pin on the wall. Shelter, mercy, burial coins, fire, farewell: the song gathers these ritual objects like a person packing for a trip nobody survives unchanged. It has the feeling of a funeral procession folding inward, each step scraping away another layer of sleepless spiritual rot. Capitol Hill is all locked doors, buried damage, and the nasty little thrill of daring someone to dig too deep. The song circles a private ruin with a kind of poisoned intimacy, as if the past has been hidden somewhere close enough to smell but too dangerous to touch. Bitterness creeps through it, uncertainty gnaws at the frame, and by the end the band seem to define themselves through the only proof they trust: the noise they make together.

Mayfly is brief because it has to be. A tiny life opens its eyes and immediately gets walloped by sunlight, love, war, pain, and the knowledge that the clock has already started laughing. The song catches that first brutal astonishment of being alive, when every sensation arrives oversized and almost rude. Its beauty comes from limitation, from the way a life can burn hard simply because it has no time to waste. Radium Love turns romance into a glowing little death wish. Love here is luminous, poisonous, and probably wearing a nice dress while ruining your organs. The beloved becomes a guide through the horror show, but the light leads both ways: toward comfort, toward rot, toward the old industrial joke of calling poison a cure. It is tender in the way a fatal dosage can look tender from across the room.

Sing Coven Sing heads for the woods with a grin and a matchbook. The song is an initiation, a farewell to ordinary misery, and a leap into a stranger form of belonging. The coven calls, the town falls away, and the body starts answering before the brain can file a complaint. There is ritual here, yes, but also relief: the great pleasure of leaving the ruins behind and joining the dance nobody in polite society wants to admit they hear. Silence of Her Fate plays like a mountain folktale told by someone who knows where the bodies were hidden. A woman moves through curse, ritual, disappearance, and inherited damage, her body made into the meeting place between personal terror and an older, bloodier history. The song has ceremony in its bones, with vanished tribes, secret rites, and a doom that feels passed down rather than chosen.

It’s a Violent Life rides in from the frontier with a pistol, a spotlight, and a knife tucked somewhere beneath the costume. Johnny Barter and Kate O’Malley belong to the grand tradition of doomed lovers and dirty ballads, where romance buys you one more drink before the floorboards turn red. Crime, showbiz, vengeance, and devotion all get thrown into the same dusty saloon, and the result is a fatal little western where the curtain call comes with a body count.

Listen to Chimera, out now via Icy Cold Records and Velouria Recordz, below. You can order the album here.

Chimera by The City Gates

Recorded, mixed, and produced at the band’s own Velouria Studios in Montreal, the album benefits from that self-contained process. Live drums, guitars and bass pushed through amps, and vintage synths give Chimera a tactile immediacy; the record feels handled, revised, and patiently sharpened rather than polished into sterility.

“Working in our own studio gave us the space to shape the sound at our own pace, letting each track’s atmosphere unfold as we recorded, mixed, and produced everything ourselves,” the band proudly states.

That patience is audible throughout. Chimera is a record of broken signals, blackened romance, and beauty caught inside systems of pressure. The City Gates build tension as structure, then let each song move through it with poise, force, and a bruised sense of grandeur.

In the past, The City Gates have shared stages with Chameleons, Trisomie 21, A Place to Bury Strangers, ACTORS, Hapax, Traitrs, Selofan, Solar Fake, Nothing, The March Violets, Ductape and more.  After doing a Canadian East Coast tour, the band will embark on a European tour from May 29 to June 6.

Tour dates:

29 May, Berlin, Germany at Wild at Heart (with Cataphiles)
30 May, Holzminden, Germany at Horstberg 76 (with Golden Apes)
2 June, Paris, France at QG103
3 June, Gent, Belgium at The Crossover (with Fragment)
4 June, Rotterdam, Netherlands at SoundVille (with Death By Audio)
5 June, Wuppertal, Germany at Loch (with Us & I)
6 June, Modave, Belgium at Deux-Ours

Follow The City Gates:

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The post “In Her Veins, The Darkness Pulls” — Montreal’s The City Gates Shares New Album “Chimera” Ahead of European Tour appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Source: Post-Punk.com

When you woke me for a walk, I kept you near me
Fulfilled my function: a phantom limb to fondle
False appendages

Sleep arrives like mercy until someone pulls the cord and lets the room flood with bad news. On Cries From the Half-World, Texas electronic duo Slow Pulse return with a song that treats dreaming as both shelter and wound: a place where the dead, the distant, and the desired remain visible only until consciousness barges in with its boots on.

Slow Pulse is the revived collaboration between Nicolas Nadeau, known for the darkly romantic post-punk outfit Single Lash, and Justin Sweatt, whose work as Xander Harris helped carve out a strain of industrial disco that felt equal parts dancefloor discipline and VHS dread. Sweatt has also released more elegiac work under his own name, while Nadeau brings a baritone that can make even resignation sound luxurious. The two have circled one another across the Texas dark music scene for years, but after reconnecting at the memorial of a mutual friend, the dormant project found a grimly fitting reason to breathe again.

Cries From the Half-World sounds like a conversation held at the edge of grief, with one person speaking from the bed and another from some unreachable place beyond it. The lyrics move through exhaustion, sleep, suicide, tenderness, and the cruel arithmetic of hindsight, where knowing more would have meant beginning less. What might read as despair on the page becomes something more complicated in Nadeau’s delivery: a voice weighing compassion against resentment, memory against fatigue, and the private sanctuary of dreams against the brute interruption of waking life.

Musically, Slow Pulse pulls from a record bag dense with minimal wave, post-punk, techno, industrial, and dub, but their touch is too idiosyncratic to collapse into genre exercise. The electronic bloops and bright synthetic beads carry a sly Erasure-like sweetness, while the rhythmic framing nods toward the clipped movement of Depeche Mode, and the doomed romanticism of Asylum Party. Suicide’s cold urban throb and Cabaret Voltaire-style samples hover somewhere in the architecture, and Hot Chip’s sense of sadness dressed for the dancefloor flashes through the edges. Still, Sweatt’s production leaves enough wrong angles in the room: little discordant jolts, rubbery pressure, and brittle machinery beneath the pop curve.

The result is heartbreaking without begging for pity. It understands that talking can be necessary and useless at the same time, that sleep can be the only reunion available, and that waking may feel like being dragged back into a world already worsened. Cries From the Half-World is dance music for the hour after the memorial, when the body moves because standing still would be worse.

Listen to Cries From The Half-World below and order the single here.

Cries From the Half-World by Slow Pulse

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The post “Drowning When I Close My Eyes” — Texas Synth Duo Slow Pulse Share Haunting Single “Cries From the Half-World” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Source: Post-Punk.com