„One“ ist der Titel des kommenden SEVENDUST-Albums. Es ist seit 1. Mai 2026 erhältlich, im November 2026 sind SEVENDUST auf Tour durch Europa. In Deutschland gibt es Konzerte in Hamburg, Köln und München.

Mi „Construct“ haben SEVENDUST den vierten und letzten Clip zum Album veröffentlicht:

Ein Video zur dritten Single hat die Alternative Metal-Band Anfang April geteilt:

Anfang März  hat die Band mit „Unbreakable“ einen weiteren Song aus „one“ veröffentlicht:

Eine erste Single ist seit Januar inklusive Video online: „Is This The Real You?“ bei YouTube.

SEVENDUST „ONE“  Tracklist & Cover

One
Unbreakable (Video bei YouTube)
Is This The Real You (Video bei YouTube)
Threshold (Video bei YouTube)
We Won
Construct (Video bei YouTube)
Bright Side
The Drop
Blood Price
Misdirection

SEVENDUST-Line-up: 

Lajon Witherspoon (Gesang)
Clint Lowery (Gitarre)
John Connolly (Gitarre)
Vince Hornsby (Bass)
Morgan Rose (Schlagzeug)

SEVENDUST 2026 EU & UK Tourdaten
November 25th – Hamburg, GER
November 26th – Köln, GER
November 27th – München, GER
November 29th – Tilburg, NL
November 30th – Paris, FRA
December 2nd – Norwich, UK
December 3rd – Wolverhampton, UK
December 6th – Newcastle, UK
December 7th – Glasgow, SCO
December 8th – Belfast, N.I.
December 9th – Dublin, IRE
December 11th – Bristol, UK
December 12th – Southampton, UK
December 13th – Nottingham, UK
December 14th – Manchester, UK
December 15th – London, UK

Source: Vampster

Okay, ich dachte, ich schaue mal rein, was ich da vor knapp acht Jahren so geschrieben habe über „Grave Mounds And Grave Mistakes“, das letzte Album der Briten A FOREST OF STARS, und siehe da, es ist eine ellenlange Abhandlung gewesen über ein geradezu überirdisches Meisterwerk avantgardistischer Metal-Musik voller Verve und Wut. Wie soll man das bloß toppen – also, beides jetzt? Ich bin auch nur ein Mensch, und A FOREST OF STARS sind auch nur eine Band, aber – es ist geradezu unglaublich – wir sind beide noch da, und vielleicht ist das ja der passende Einstieg für einen Text über ein Album, das sich „Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface“ nennt, auf deutsch: „Stapelüberlauf in Leichenhaufen-Interface“. Wie bitte?

Genau: Die Texte liegen mir gar nicht vor diesmal, denn ich will nicht warten auf die Special Edition, ich rezensiere nur die Promo, und da sind keine Texte bei, aber die Lektüre dieser wird ich lohnen: „I am my own maggot – consuming myself!“ rotzt uns Sänger Curse zum Einstieg mal vor die Füße, und allein dieses Rotzen, dieser völlig irre Spoken-Word-Gesangsstil zwischen Proklamation und Wahnsinn wäre genug, um mich erneut in Begeisterungsstürme zu versetzen, aber die Textfetzen, die ich verstehen kann ohne mitzulesen, zeigen, dass sich hier auch lyrisch mal wieder Welten öffnen, die sich lohnen zu betreten, wenn man – vorsichtig ausgedrückt – eine gewisse Skepsis gegenüber der herrschenden Normalität sein Eigen nennt.

Ein perverses Cabaret
Doch der Gentlemen’s Club Of A FOREST OF STARS wäre nicht eben jener, wenn er nicht auch musikalisch auf fast 74 unglaublich kurzweiligen Minuten wieder alle Register ziehen würde. Dabei wählt er einen Weg, den viele avantgardistisch agierende Bands kennen, den der wachsenden Zugänglichkeit nämlich: Jeder Song auf „Stack Flow in Corpse Pile Interface“ wartet mit geradezu lieblichen Melodien auf, dargeboten von „Katheryne, Queen Of The Ghosts“ auf ihrer Violine oder mit ihrer Stimme. Wenn sie geigt, klingt das wunderbar melancholisch und niemals schräg (ein Glück!), und wenn sie singt – und das tut sie oft diesmal – , erinnere ich mich erstaunlicherweise an THE GATHERING, als diese mit „How To Measure A Planet“ damals den Metal hinter sich ließen. (Wer sich davon überzeugen will, möge eines der im Stile des Artworks animierten Lyric-Videos anklicken – ich empfehle „Roots Circle Usurpers“.)

Doch keine Angst: A FOREST OF STARS sind nach wie vor eine Metal-Band, und jedes der sechs Stücke bietet ausreichend Gitarren und sogar Blast Beats, so dass ich die Einordnung als „Black Metal“ durchaus nachvollziehen kann, wenngleich hier stilistisch der Doom im Vordergrund steht und A FOREST OF STARS nach wie vor eher in ein perverses Cabaret passen würden als in eine satanische Messe oder einen norwegischen Fjord. Ja, das hier ist trotz der gestiegenen Zugänglichkeit und der vielen elegischen Parts immer noch ganz schön sperrig, auch wenn man doch einiges an zarten Melodien mehr dabei hat (es gibt sogar eine folkloristisch anmutende gespielt auf einem Glockenspiel!) und am Ende wirklich alle Bombast-Register zieht – dafür sorgt nicht zuletzt Mr Curse mit seinem unglaublichen Charisma, und dafür sorgt die Band durch ihr perfekt ausbalanciertes Spiel mit Harmonie und Disharmonie.

A FOREST OF STARS sind und bleiben einzigartig (wütend)
Aber nochmal zu Herrn Curse: Mann, was ist der wütend! Ich hasse Studio-Videos, aber von ihm würd ich mir eins anschauen; egal, ob er über „a thousand miserable piss artists“ schimpft oder beklagt, dass man sich doch bitte sein eigenes Loch graben möge, dieses hier sei seins… Es ist immer eine Wonne, und dabei hab ich – s.o. – noch nicht einmal damit angefangen, mir Gedanken über den eigentlichen Gehalt seiner Texte zu machen. Es gibt so einen Sänger kein zweites Mal, lediglich Alasdair von den auch sonst sehr von A FOREST OF STARS inspirierten ASHENSPIRE klingt ähnlich, aber Curse war eher da, und er hat Katheryne an seiner Seite, um den ganzen Hass, der sich durch ihn Bahn bricht, durch Zartheit auszugleichen. Es ist kein besonders originelles Rezept, sicherlich, aber die künstlerische Umsetzung dessen sucht einfach ihresgleichen in der internationalen Metal-Szene.

Übrigens auch visuell: Wie immer haben A FOREST OF STARS ein Gesamtkunstwerk geschaffen und bieten eine aufwändige Special Edition an, die neben einer 28minütigen EP namens „Ticket To Writhe“ auch dazu einlädt, sich in das von Mr Curse stammende, gewohnt unkonventionell in bunten Farben gehaltene Artwork zu vertiefen. Ja, „Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface“ mag, typisch für die Band, schrill, irre, pompös und avantgardistisch sein – es ist vor allem bunter, wehmütiger, insgesamt weniger aufgedreht als die Vorgänger und in sich sehr stimmig: ein reifes, großes Werk einer brillianten Band, die genau weiß, was sie tut und was sie will, nämlich auf einem Fundament aus opulenter, schwelgerischer Wehmutsmusik wilde Worte voller Wut ausspucken über eine Welt, die so schön sein könnte (und es paradoxerweise ja auch ist). Danke, danke, danke!

Spielzeit: 73:33 Min.

Veröffentlichungsdatum: 08.05.2026

Label: Prophecy Productions

Tracklist – A FOREST OF STARS – „Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface“

1. Ascension Of The Clowns (Lyric-Video auf YouTube)
2. Street Level Vertigo (Lyric-Video auf YouTube)
3. Mechanical Seperated Logic
4. Roots Circle Usurpers (Lyric-Video auf YouTube)
5. Sway, Draped In Vague
6. Not Drinking Water

Mehr im Netz:

facebook.com/aforestofstars

instagram.com/aforestofstarsband/

a-forest-of-stars.bandcamp.com

Source: Vampster

Little is known about Cold Sector. Shrouded in mystery, this is the debut album of...

Source: Side Line

Blindpop’s style could be described as a fusion of dream pop, electronica, indie and wave. Or as the band, founded in 2016, put it themselves: basement pop! We continue our two-part interview with David Pümperlin about the new album “Voliere”. If you missed the first part, you can read it here . “Reappraisal”, enlightenment & […]

Source: Orkus

It has been 23 years since Nightwish released the single “Ever Dream”. The song is more operatic than later works and the music itself is more in the heavy metal genre. “Ever Dream” was awarded a gold record in Finland and later went platinum. Incidentally, Anette Olzon applied to join Nightwish with this song, but […]

Source: Orkus

Before the Italian post-punkers Design release their third album “Faithless” on May 15, 2026, we take a closer look at the single “Blame”. The band themselves describe the song as follows: “A reflection on individual responsibility and guilt. Owning up to your mistakes – against the tendency towards denial – becomes a necessary step to […]

Source: Orkus

Die finnische Deathcore-Band ENEMIES EVERYWHERE hat mit „Atonement“ eine neue Single mitsamt Lyric-Video veröffentlicht. Produziert wurde der Song von Atte Laru, der auch einen Großteil des Songs geschrieben hat.

ENEMIES EVERYWHERE Line-Up:
Sasu Mikkola – vocals
Otso Saano – guitar
Ville Vesala – bass
Veikka Laru – drums

ENEMIES EVERYWHERE „Atonement“ (Lyric-Video bei YouTube)

Source: Vampster

Die Heavy Metal-Band IRON KOBRA hat mit „Unchained & Untamed“ einen zweiten Track ihres kommenden Albums „Eternal Dagger“ veröffentlicht. Es ist nach „Dungeon Masters“ (2012) und „Might & Magic“ (2015) das dritte Album der Deutschen aus Gelsenkirchen und wurde von Stefan Castevet (VULTURE) produziert.

„Eternal Dagger“ wird am 19. Juni 2026 via Dying Victims Productions erscheinen. Vorab gibt es zum Opener „Trembling Dungeons“ auch in Lyric-Video.

IRON KOBRA Line-Up:
Matze – Bass
Björn- Drums
Ela – Guitars, Vocals
Steffen – Guitars

IRON KOBRA „Eternal Dagger“ Tracklist
1. Trembling Dungeons (Lyric-Video bei YouTube)
2. Forbidden Fruits
3. Fliehen
4. Shibuya Nights
5. Silver Strings And Iron Wings
6. Eternal Dagger
7. Unchained & Untamed (Audio bei YouTube)
8. Treacherous Tyrant
9. Mountains Of Madness

Source: Vampster

Die Psychedelic Stoner Rock-Band GREEN DESERT WATER hat mit „Eerie Meadows“ ein neues Album angekündigt. Es ist das dritte Album der Spanier und wurde gemeinsam mit Sergio Tutu in den Tutu Estudios in Corvera aufgenommen und gemixt und von Chris Goosman gemastert.

„Mit ‚Eerie Meadows‘ wollten wir die Dualität zwischen dem Schweren und dem Ätherischen erkunden – den Nebel, die uralten Wälder und das Gefühl, in der Wildnis ein Zuhause zu finden“, sagt die Band. „Die Aufnahmen in einem neuen Studio waren eine Herausforderung, der wir uns gestellt haben, um unseren Sound weiterzuentwickeln; es ist ein Album über die Kreisläufe des Lebens, die Narben, die wir tragen, und das Feuer, das selbst unter dem Nordlicht weiterbrennt.“

„Eerie Meadows“ wird am 19. Juni 2026 via Small Stone Recordings erscheinen. Vorab gibt es den Track „The Blacksmith“ zu hören.

GREEN DESERT WATER Line-Up:
Juan Arias García – bass
Dani Barcena – drums, percussion
Kike Sanchís – guitar, vocals

GREEN DESERT WATER „Eerie Meadows“ Tracklist
1. Northern Lights
2. The Blacksmith (Audio bei Bandcamp)
3. Eerie Meadows
4. Woodcutter
5. Holy Ground
6. Wolfhound
7. Bos Primigenius
8. Meteora

Source: Vampster

Die niederländische Alternative Rock / New Wave-Band INSIDE SHADOWS hat mit „Supernova Gamma Rays“ eine neue Single mitsamt Video-Clip veröffentlicht. Der Song beschäftigt sich mit dem Ende unseres eigenen Systems. Da sich die Sonne ausdehnt und irgendwann erlischt, würde Überleben bedeuten, die Erde hinter uns zu lassen und uns ins Unbekannte zu begeben. Produziert wurde der Song von Miles Jacobs.

INSIDE SHADOWS Line-Up:
Mitchell Verschoor – vocals, guitar
Sander Pietersen – drums
Daphne Muijderman/Verschoor – bass, backing vocals

INSIDE SHADOWS „Supernova Gamma Rays“ (Video bei YouTube)

Source: Vampster

Die Death Metal-Band COPROLITH hat mit „Putrescence“ ein neues Album angekündigt. Es ist nach der 2023er-EP „Coprolith“ das erste Album der Kanadier aus Toronto und wird am 3. Juli 2026 via Me Saco Un Ojo Records (Vinyl) und Rotted Life (CD) erscheinen. Vorab gibt es den Track „Possessed by Incoherent Violent Suggestions“ zu hören.

COPROLITH Line-Up:
A.M – Bass
S.A – Drums
J.H – Guitars
A.K – Guitars
K.D – Vocals

COPROLITH „Putrescence“ Tracklist
1. Sentenced to the Grave
2. Putrescence
3. Defiling Incantation
4. Birthed by Remorseless Flames
5. Another Skull to Claim
6. Possessed by Incoherent Violent Suggestions (Audio bei Bandcamp)

Source: Vampster

Die Melodic Rock-Band KISSING KAOS hat einen Video-Clip zum Titeltrack ihres neuen Albums „To Your Limit“ veröffentlicht. Es ist das erste Album der US-Amerikaner aus Atlanta und wurde von Andy Reilly bei Muse Productions produziert. Release-Termin war der 1. Mai 2026 via Mighty Music.

Nach der Debüt-Single „Chaos Inside“ ist zuletzt auch die Single zu „Yesterday’s Kids“ erschienen.

„‚Yesterday’s Kids‘ handelt von rebellischen Teenagern, die nie das Feuer verloren haben, das sie ursprünglich dazu gebracht hat, sich in die Musik zu verlieben“, kommentiert Sänger Joe Flynt. „Der Song ist für alle, die dazu beigetragen haben, die Szene aufzubauen, die Flamme am Leben zu erhalten und sich geweigert haben, Rockmusik zahm oder vorhersehbar werden zu lassen.“

KISSING KAOS Line-Up:
Joe Flynt – vocals
Brian Jung – drums
Jon Lansburg – guitars
Chris Taylor – bass

KISSING KAOS „To Your Limit“ Tracklist
1. Hey Sugar
2. Tear It Down
3. Heartache And Scars
4. Can’t Fake Me
5. To Your Limit (Video bei YouTube)
6. Breakthrough
7. The Joker
8. Chaos Inside (Video bei YouTube)
9. Yesterday’s Kids (Video bei YouTube)

Source: Vampster

Die Heavy Metal-Band ORGA MECHA hat mit „Humanity.exe“ ein neues Album angekündigt. Es ist der erste Release der US-Amerikaner aus Kalifornien rund um Frontfrau Melissa Pinion (STYGIAN CROWN). Release-Termin ist der 26. Juni 2026. Das Cover-Artwork stammt von Pavel Kurbanov. Vorab gibt es den Track „Idols and Gods“ zu hören.

ORGA MECHA Line-Up:
Melissa Pinion – Vocals, Synth
Raoul Rañoa – Guitar
Rob D – Bass, backing vocals
Captain Black – Drums, backing vocals

ORGA MECHA „Humanity.exe“ Tracklist
1. Rise
2. Into the Fray
3. Idols and Gods (Lyric-Video bei YouTube)
4. May We Never Die
5. Swords Held High
6. Steel Mandible Swarm
7. The Pestilent Age
8. Lathe of Heaven
9. Let this be Your Final Battlefield
10. Cries of Redemption (feat. Mike Scalzi)

Source: Vampster

Die australische Grindcore / Electronic Party Metal-Band GOPHER hat nach „Kupu Kupu Malam“ mit „Party In the Sky“ einen weiteren Video-Clip ihres neuen Albums „Tunnel Buddies“ veröffentlicht. Erschienen ist das Album am 1. Mai 2026 via Prime Cuts.

GOPHER Line-Up:
Ernie Bingo – vocals
Ned Smelly – guitars

GOPHER „Tunnel Buddies“ Tracklist
1. Op Shop Reject
2. Chilli Man
3. Keno King
4. Hot Mess Express
5. Five Bucks A Day
6. Party In the Sky (Video bei YouTube)
7. Does The Queen Queef
8. Seoul Hole
9. Shopping Trollied
10. Kupu Kupu Malam (Video bei YouTube)
11. Rock And Chiko Roll

Source: Vampster

Die Dark / Atmospheric Death Metal-Band VIANDE hat mit „Monument aux morts“ ein neues Album angekündigt. Es ist nach „L’abime dévore les âmes“ (2022) das zweite Album der Franzosen und wird am 31. Juli 2026 via Transcending Obscurity Records erscheinen. Zuletzt hat die Band den Vorab-Track „Cercueil de Vase“ veröffentlicht.

VIANDE Line-Up:
B – Guitar, synths
J – Vocals
O – Bass
I – Drums

VIANDE „Monument aux morts“ Tracklist
1. Linceul immense (Audio bei Bandcamp)
2. Sacrifice ardent
3. Germes de mort
4. Monolithe de chagrin
5. Cercueil de vase (Audio bei YouTube)
6. Une cage d’os
7. L’esprit cachot
8. Austérité maximum
9. L’homme Brasier (Bonus) (Video bei YouTube)

Source: Vampster

Mit „Legatum Mortuorum“ wird am 15. Mai 2026 via Carbonized Records das neue Album der Blackened Doom Metal-Band DESICCATION erscheinen. Es ist nach „Cold Dead Earth“ (2022) das zweite Album der US-Amerikaner aus Kalifornier und wurde von Drummer und Bassist Patrick Hill (OROMET, FERAL SEASON) gemixt und gemastert. Das Cover-Artwork stammt von Muhamad „MFA XII“ Candra (u.a. für NINKHARSAG tätig). Nach dem Track „The Alchemy Of Grief“ gibt es nun auch den Titeltrack – mit Alex Miletich (VILE RITES, MORTUOUS) als Gast an der Lead-Gitarre – zu hören.

DESICCATION Line-Up:
James Bratt – guitars, vocals, synths
Soell Bratt – vocals
Patrick Hills – drums, bass, synths, background vocals

DESICCATION „Legatum Mortuorum“ Tracklist
1. All Light Is Gone
2. Cursed In Cold Silence
3. Legatum Mortuorum (Video bei YouTube)
4. The Alchemy Of Grief (Audio bei YouTube)
5. Ashes Unto The Abyss
6. Lamentations Beyond The Veil

Source: Vampster

Die Death Metal-Band CARBON TOMB hat mit „Passage to a Neutron Star“ ein neues Album angekündigt. Es ist nach der 2023er-EP „Carbon Tomb“ das erste Album der Dänen und wurde mit einem Cover-Artwork von Jon Toussas ausgestattet. Release-Termin ist der 17. Juli 2026 via Transcending Obscurity Records.

CARBON TOMB Line-Up:
Richardt – Guitars and shrieks
Jeppe – Bass and growls
Mikael – Drums

CARBON TOMB „Passage to a Neutron Star“ Tracklist
1. Chanting Spells I (Audio bei YouTube)
2. A Hidden Creature (Audio bei YouTube)
3. From the Giant’s Snout
4. The Dog Hunter
5. Of God’s Neglect
6. Gogoffmagog
7. Tritons of Ichthyology
8. Reversed Head Renewal
9. Passage to a Neutron Star

Source: Vampster

Die Technical Death Metal-Band GOREWORM hat einen Labeldeal bei Transcending Obscurity Records unterschrieben. Im Zuge dessen werden die Kanadier am 12. Juni 2026 ihr neues Album „Miasmic Solitude“ veröffentlichen. Es ist nach „Prodigy of the Grotesque“ (2020) das zweite Album der 2017 gegründeten Band aus Ontario. Vorab gibt es mit „No Reprieve“ nun einen weiteren Track zu hören.

GOREWORM Line-Up:
Robert Miller – Vocals
Jordan Estrela – Guitars
Brent Moerschfelder – Guitars/Bass
Robin Stone – Session Drums

GOREWORM „Miasmic Solitude“ Tracklist
1. Conjuring
2. Monuments to Murdering
3. The Enthralling Grave (Audio bei YouTube)
4. Orbweaver
5. Amor Vincit Omnia (Audio bei YouTube)
6. No Reprieve (Audio bei YouTube)
7. Eve of Flagellation
8. Jarrell
9. Strelly (Audio bei Bandcamp)
10. Miasmic Solitude

Source: Vampster

Als 'Genfärd' im Jahr 2017 erstmals als Kassette über das Label 'Styggelse' erschien, war es genau das, was man von einem solchen Format erwartet: limitiert, roh, kompromisslos...

Source: MedienKonverter

Im Juni veröffentlicht 'Schnallo' die neue EP „doom generation“ – und macht dabei kurzen Prozess mit allem, was am Vorgänger „White fluffy“ noch geschniegelt wirkte. Statt polierter...

Source: MedienKonverter

„Musick“ stellt das erste Studio-Album von LAIBACH seit 12 Jahren dar und auch wenn man dies mit etwas Stirnrunzeln kommentieren mag, ist diese Aussage wirklich so korrekt. Denn alles was nach „Spectre“ im Jahre 2014 von dem slowenischen Künstler-Kollektiv kam, waren Soundtracks, Theater-Produktionen, Musicals, Live-Alben, wie umfangreiche Diskografie-Revisionen. Mit „Musick“ sind LAIBACH jetzt aber wieder brandaktuell am Puls der Zeit und sicher wird man damit insbesondere die eigenen Anhänger polarisieren, wie damals 1992 schon mit dem „Kapital“-Album. Auch für mich als großer Freund von LAIBACH war „Kapital“ seiner Zeit eine Enttäuschung, die jedoch meine Faszination für die kontroverse Formation nicht abschwächen konnte und ich LAIBACH weiter die Treue gehalten habe. Keine Band habe ich in den letzten 35 Jahre mehr Live gesehen und seit 1991 auch jede Tour von ihnen zum Teil sogar mehrmals besucht. Mit „Kapital“ habe ich allerdings erst viele Jahre später meinen Frieden gemacht bzw. dieses visionäre Werk verstanden und richtig schätzen gelernt. Deshalb höre ich nun „Musick“ sicher mit etwas anderen Ohren und hatte eigentlich eher ein weiteres Cover-Album erwartet, da ein solches ja die digitalen Singles „The Future“ (Leonard Cohen), „Strange Fruit“ (Billie Holliday) „I Want To Know What Love Is“ (FOREINGER) oder „Die Kanone“ (BIJELO DUGME) suggerierten. Dafür enthält „Musick“ jetzt 10 komplett neue Tracks, welche den wohl bisher eingängigsten und kommerziellsten Moment von LAIBACH darstellen und sich völlig schamlos bei Hip Hop, R&B, Trap, Eurodance, Trance, K- und J-Pop bedient. Das Ganze natürlich nicht ohne doppelten Boden und dem hintergründigen LAIBACH’schen Sarkasmus, wenn man KI, verzerrte Realität, Social Media und der damit einhergehenden Übersättigung thematisiert. Musikalisch blicken hinter all den wummernden Beats und knalligen Dance-Rhythm auch immer wieder KRAFTWERK durch, was ja eine stetige Konstante der Slowenen ist, wie ebenso die prägnante Brumstimme von Frontmann Milan Fras. Mit Richard X unterstützte übrigens ein versierter britischer Pop-Produzent (SUGARBABES, M.I.A., ERASURE) das Kollektiv von LAIBACH beim Song-Layout und stimmlich brillieren Donna Marina Martensson, Wiyaala, Senidah, Manca Trampus und Gregor Strasbergar mit einigen wirklich catchy Hooks. Die Krönung dieses Konzeptes war dann noch der Plan, das LAIBACH mit dem Song „Allgorhythm“ beim diesjährigen Eurovision Song Contest ins Rennen gehen sollten, was durch den Rückzug von Slowenien aus diesem Format leider nicht passieren wird. Die große Frage wird letztendlich jetzt sein, wie „Musick“ von den alten Fans aufgenommen und ob der Algorithmus auf Instagram oder TikTok LAIBACH einer völlig neuen Generation vorschlagen wird. Man darf ebenso auf die Live-Umsetzung des „Musick“-Konzeptes gespannt sein, was man auf ausgedehnten Tour überprüfen kann, welche ab Mitte Mai starten wird. Doch schon jetzt dürfte „Musick“ eine gültige postmodernen Bestandsaufnahme zur aktuellen Welt-Lage darstellen und wieder einmal LAIBACH ihrer Rolle als provokanter Kommentator der Zeit gerecht werden! (Marco Fiebag)

Source: BLACK Onlinemagazin

Wir haben uns 'Bravo Hits Vol. 133' am Tag der Arbeit komplett reingezogen. Ohne Skippen. Großer Fehler. Ein Algorithmus in Audioform, Ohrwürmer mit Presslufthammer-Charakter und die ernsthafte...

Source: MedienKonverter

Der Frühling ist da, alles blüht – und 'Heilung' graben weiter in der Vergangenheit. Klingt widersprüchlich, funktioniert aber erstaunlich gut: In ihrer neuen Podcast-Episode widmet sich das...

Source: MedienKonverter

Mit 'City Of Fear' treffen 'Baarhus' ohne Umwege ins Schwarze: drückende Gitarren, kalte Synths und ein Bariton, der sich wie dichter Nebel über alles legt – moderner...

Source: MedienKonverter

In our May/June issue, we take an in-depth journey through time with Peter Spilles to mark the 35th anniversary of Project Pitchfork’s debut album“Dhyani”. He tells us about the shoes he wore back then, his dance style as a clubber, the unusual hairstyle he wore in elementary school, how young he was when he was […]

Source: Orkus

Lots of interview stories await you in our March/April issue, and there’s sure to be something for everyone! Interesting facts about Tally Spear, Stairway to Violet, Incandescent Trance Ritual, Jeannde d’Arte, Cyhra, Jonas Kolb, Keops, Liminal Sky, KMFDM, Ghosther, In Mitra Medusa Inri, Antrisch, Elli Berlin, Love Ghost, Ocinn, photophor, Hocico, Pinknoise, Klez.e, Saline Grace, […]

Source: Orkus

There are albums that tell stories – and those that create states. “Physics Universal Love Language (Pull)” by KÁRYYN clearly belongs to the second category. Released on May 29, 2026, it is not a classic pop statement, but an attempt to understand emotions as a physical system. “It was never separate for me,” she says, […]

Source: Orkus

Rain Diary released their first album “The Lights Are Violent Here” in 2013. The Finnish band themselves describe their music as “Winter Wave”. We continue the interview with Joonas and Joni and talk about their third album “Night Church”. Missed the first part? No problem! You can read it here . Orkus: You live in […]

Source: Orkus

TOXIKULL entwickeln sich Album für Album weiter, weshalb das aktuelle Album der Portugiesen nun auch die Lorbeeren einheimsen kann. Denn auf „Turbulence“ präsentiert sich die Band recht gefestigt in ihrem klassischen Heavy Metal und liefert auch den einen oder anderen Hit ab. So spielen TOXIKULL gleich zu Beginn mit „Midnight Fire“ einen Trumpf in Sachen Ohrwurm aus. Während sich der folgende Titeltrack – ähnlich wie „Burning Spark“ – mir persönlich dann etwas zu unbedeutend und langsam auf den 80er-Jahren-Wellen treiben lässt, animiert „Dragon Magic“ dann wieder zum Mitsingen und das flott startende „Strike Again“ sowie das abschließende IRON MAIDEN-eske „Flames of Glory“ rüttelt den Hörer endgültig wieder wach.

Highlights auf „Turbulence“ sind die vom guten Gesang geprägten Ohrwürmer
Besonders angetan kann man von der hohen, aber leicht rauchigen Stimme von Alexandre „Lex Thunder“ Carrapiço (ALASTOR, Ex-MIDNIGHT PRIEST) sein, der in der Ballade „Dying Star“ auch in Sachen Volumen einer „normalen“ Gesangsstimme sein Potenzial aufzurufen vermag. Aber auch die Gitarrenarbeit weiß – insbesondere in den Lead- und Solo-Passagen – etwa in „King of the Hammer“ – zu gefallen. Dies alles wurde in eine gute und passend zum Stil warme Produktion eingefangen, für welche Jamie Gomez Arellano verantwortlich zeichnet.

Veröffentlichungstermin: 24.04.2026

Spielzeit: 38:54 Min.

Line-Up:
Lex Thunder – Guitars, Vocals (lead)
Michael Blade – Guitars
Infernando – Bass
Tommy 666 – Drums

Label: Dying Victims Productions

Mehr im Netz: https://www.facebook.com/toxikull
Mehr im Netz: https://toxikull.bandcamp.com

TOXIKULL „Turbulence“ Tracklist
1. Midnight Fire (Video bei YouTube)
2. Turbulence (Video bei YouTube)
3. Dragon Magic (Lyric-Video bei YouTube)
4. Blessed By The Night
5. Dying Star
6. Strike Again
7. Hard To Break
8. Burning Spark
9. King of the Hammer
10. Flames of Glory

Source: Vampster

Die Melodic Power Metal-Band KINGCROWN hat mit „Moonfall“ ein neues Album angekündigt. Es ist das vierte Album der Franzosen aus Nizza rund um die Brüder Joe und Davide Amore (NIGHTMARE) und wurde von Simone Mularoni gemixt und gemastert. Release-Termin ist der 4. September 2026 via Rockshots Records. Vorab gibt es mit „Lost Horizon“ ein Lyric-Video.

KINGCROWN Line-Up:
Joe Amore: Vocals
Ced Legger: Guitars
Bob Saliba: Guitars
Seb Chabot: Bass Guitars
David Amore: Drums

KINGCROWN „Moonfall“ Tracklist
01. Moonfall – 05:05
02. Nothing – 04:35
03. We Are Kingcrown – 03:54
04. A Thousand Years – 03:48
05. Rise Of Machines – 04:24
06. All United – 04:19
07. Lost Horizon – 04:22 (Lyric-Video bei YouTube)
08. Oblivion/Resilience – 04:25
09. Back To The 80’s – 03:38
10. Beyond The Stars – 04:46

Source: Vampster

Die Progressive Death Metal / Grindcore-Band DEFECT DESIGNER hat mit „Scorching The Rival Pogonomyrmex Burrows“ einen weiteren Track ihres kommenden Albums „Depressants“ veröffentlicht. Es ist das vierte Album der in Norwegen ansässigen Band und wird am 15. Mai 2026 via Transcending Obscurity Records erscheinen. Das Cover-Artwork stammt aus der Feder von Ian Miller.

DEFECT DESIGNER Line-Up:
Dmitry Sukhinin – Guitars, vocals, music, lyrics
Martin Storm-Olsen – Bass, vocals, lyrics, sound engineering
Eugene Ryabchenko – Drums

DEFECT DESIGNER „Depressants“ Tracklist
1. Daily Dose of Gloom (Audio bei YouTube)
2. Butterfly Juice Straws
3. Repeated Aversive Stimuli Inducer (Audio bei YouTube)
4. Carte Blanche (Audio bei YouTube)
5. Expiration Deferral Request Denied
6. Scorching The Rival Pogonomyrmex Burrows (Audio bei YouTube)
7. Body Count Of My Cow Tail
8. I Heard Robespierre Screamed Like A Bitch
9. Peons Before My Drabbing Wings
10. As The Terracotta Dust Settles
11. Awaiting The Return Of The Golden Age
12. The Inevitable Mad Composite
13. Wrong Future Forecast

Source: Vampster

Mit „Motivated By Death“ wird am 29. Mai 2026 via Eclipse Records das neue Album der Couture Symphonic Metal-Band ANA erscheinen. Das neue Album der Australier wurde von Chris Themelco in den Monolith Studios aufgenommen und gemixt und von Thomas „Plec“ Johansson gemastert. Es ist nach der 2024er-EP „The Art of Letting Go“ das erste Album der 2023 geründeten Band aus Melbourne.

ANA Line-Up:
Anna Hristenko: Vocals
Josh Mak: Guitar
Cody Lamb: Bass
Mark Shi: Keyboards
Andres Felipe Martinez Osorio: Drums

ANA „Motivated By Death“ Tracklist
01. Hate Me (Video bei YouTube)
02. Shadow Of Life (Video bei YouTube)
03. You Loved Me More Than I Love Myself
04. Following The Wind
05. Eyes Of A Child
06. Sick Love
07. Papa
08. Aerials (SYSTEM OF A DOWN Cover)

Source: Vampster

Die Hard Rock-Band HARSH hat einen Labeldeal bei Fireflash Records unterschrieben. Dieser Vertrag sieht den Release des neuen Albums „Feels“ vor. Das nach „Out Of Control“ (2022) zweite Album der Franzosen wurde von Hannes Braun (KISSIN‘ DYNAMITE) gemixt und gemastert. Release-Termin ist der 3. Juli 2026. Reinhören ins Album kann man nach dem Video-Clip zu „Back To Life“ nun auch mit dem Song „Don’t Mess With Me„.

HARSH Line-Up:
Albert Arnold – Lead vocals & guitar
Séverin Piozzoli – Guitar & backing vocals
Julien Martin – Bass & backing vocals
Léo Löwenthal – Drums & backing vocals

HARSH „Feels“ Tracklist
1. Break Your Way
2. All I Ever Wanted
3. Fuel to The Fire (Audio bei Bandcamp)
4. Offer You A Rome
5. Don’t Mess With Me (Audio bei Bandcamp)
6. Forever Yesterday
7. Back To Life (Video bei YouTube)
8. Maniac (Audio bei Bandcamp)
9. Losing My Mind
10. Dancing Dancing
11. Never Gonna See Me Fall
12. When We’re Together

HARSH, THE NEW ROSES Tourdaten 2026
13. November – Rosenhof – Osnabrück (DE)
14. November – Kantine – Köln (DE)
19. November – Colos Saal – Aschaffenburg (DE)
20. November – Z7 – Pratteln (CH)
21. November – Garage – Saarbrücken (DE)

Source: Vampster

Die britische Post-Rock-Band A-TOTA-SO hat mit „Form of Mass“ eine neue Single mitsamt Video-Clip veröffentlicht.

„In „Form of Mass“ geht es darum, dass es sich gerade so anfühlt, als würde die Welt um uns herum auseinanderfallen, und dass wir alle ständig darauf warten, dass sich die Dinge zum Besseren wenden, was aber nie geschieht. Deshalb stecken wir in einem endlosen Kreislauf aus Angst und Stress fest, weil wir eigentlich nichts tun können, um die Situation zu ändern“, sagt Sänger und Gitarrist Marty Toner.

Im März hat die Band die Single „Death Rattle“ mitsamt Video-Clip veröffentlicht. Der Song folgt auf das 2022er-Album „Lights Out“.

„Der Song handelt davon, wie man das Gefühl hat, die Kontrolle zu verlieren, während das Leben in rasendem Tempo weiterläuft. Es geht darum, sich dem Chaos, dem Lärm und dem Druck um uns herum zu stellen und zu erkennen, dass niemand davon verschont bleibt, aber dass wir trotzdem weitermachen, auch wenn wir dazu neigen, uns selbst zu hinterfragen und alles, was auf uns einströmt, übermäßig zu analysieren“, sagt Frontmann Marty Toner.

A-TOTA-SO Line-Up
Marty Toner – Guitar/ Vocals
Jamie Cattermole – Drums
Chris Marsh – Bass

A-TOTA-SO „Death Rattle“ (Video bei YouTube)

A-TOTA-SO „Form of Mass“ (Video bei YouTube)

Source: Vampster

Die Punk / Stoner Rock-Band THE FREQS hat mit „Chainsawman“ einen zweiten Track ihres kommenden Albums „No God On The Gold Coast“ veröffentlicht. Es ist nach einer Reihe von EPs das erste Album der US-Amerikaner aus Massachusetts und wird am 29. Mai 2026 via Gum Cuzzler Records erscheinen.

„No God On The Gold Coast“ wurde von Alex Allinson bei The Bridge Sound & Stage Music produziert und von Keith Gentile gemastert. Das Cover-Artwork stammt von Ellis Roundy. Vorab gibt es zum Opener „John Travolta“ ein Video.

„‚John Travolta‘ wurde von einem aufkommenden digitalen Zeitalter inspiriert, das von wieder zum Leben erweckten toten Gesichtern überschwemmt wird. Von Hologramm-Konzertreihen über posthume Gastauftritte von Stars mittels KI bis hin zu Facebook-Profilen verstorbener Freunde – es scheint, als würden wir in eine Welt eintreten, in der niemand sterben und ruhen darf, solange sein Bild noch Gewinn abwirft“, sagt Frontmann Seth Crowell.

THE FREQS Line-Up:
Seth Crowell – guitar, vocals, short-wave manipulation
Ian Mandly – bass
Zack Fierman – drums

THE FREQS „No God On The Gold Coast“ Tracklist
1. John Travolta (Video bei YouTube)
2. Chainsawman (Audio bei Bandcamp)
3. Low IQ
4. CLEARANCE WRECK
5. It Might Be Rabies
6. Secondhand Jesus
7. Short King
8. Nite Hag

Source: Vampster

Die Electronic Deathcore-Band DISFIGURING THE GODDESS hat mit „Bloom“ ein neues Album angekündigt. Es ist das zehnte Album des Projekts von Cameron Argon und wird am 31. Juli 2026 via Seek & Strike erscheinen. Vorab gibt es zu „Low Slam Low“ einen Video-Clip.

DISFIGURING THE GODDESS „Bloom“ Tracklist
Samba of the Faceless
Echoes Fade, I Remain
Deathcore Song
AWOL
Mask Off (feat J Figure)
Sweet Dreams (feat Four Stroke Baron)
Low Slam Low (Video bei YouTube)
Goddess Box (feat Bodybox)
Deep Sway
Permission to be Claimed
Kiss the Dice
Black Widow Spider
Dapper (feat Four Stroke Baron)
Pleasure Island
Old Man’s Bones
Lose the Head
Penance

Source: Vampster

Die Sleaze / Horror Metal-Band SLEAZYZ hat nach „Cowboy in Space“ nun auch den Titeltrack ihrer kommenden EP „Rock n‘ Roll Digger“ als Video-Clip veröffentlicht. Die Scheibe folgt auf das zweite Album „Glitter Ghoulz from Hell“ (2023) nach und wurde von Thierry Velly gemixt und gemastert. Release-Termin ist der 29. Mai 2026 via M&O Music.

SLEAZYZ „Rock n‘ Roll Digger“ Tracklist
1. Dead in Rock n‘ Roll
2. Rock n‘ Roll Digger (Video bei YouTube)
3. Cowboy in Space (Video bei YouTube)
4. Monster in My Closet
5. See you in Hell
6. Blitzkrieg Bop

Source: Vampster

Mit „Stenahoria“ wird am 29. Mai 2026 via Ardua Music (cd) / Tartarus Records (vinyl) / Breathe Plastic Records (tape) das neue Album der Blackened Doom / Post-Black Metal-Band THE FIFTH ALLIANCE erscheinen. Es ist das vierte Album der Niederländer aus Breda und folgt dem 2019er-Album „The Depth of the Darkness“ nach. Es ist aber auch der erste Release mit der neuen Sängerin Natalya Thelen.

„Stenahoria“ wurde gemeinsam mit Lander Cluyse im Hearse Studio aufgenommen und von Mendel bij de Leij gemixt und gemastert. Das Cover-Artwork stammt aus der Feder von F.S. Rekker.

THE FIFTH ALLIANCE Line-Up:
Natalya Thelen: Vocals
Niels Termote: Guitar
Matthijs Keuvelaar: Guitar
Puck Wildschut: Bass
Peter Scheffer: Drums

THE FIFTH ALLIANCE „Stenahoria“ Tracklist
01. Phoenix (Lyric-Video bei YouTube)
02. Benandanti
03. The Fool On The Hill (Audio bei Bandcamp)
04. Battle Of Barnet
05. Jakob

Source: Vampster

Heavy Metal aus Schweden: MASTER MASSIVE stellen nach „Blood On The Floor“ mit „Islands And Bells“ die zweite Single ihres kommenden Studioalbums „White Shadows“ vor. Erscheinen wird das Werk am 10. Juli 2026 via Fireflash Records.

Für das fertige Album versprechen die Skandinavier Großes:

„Wir hatten große Ambitionen für das Album. Wir beschlossen, dass es keinen einzigen schwachen Song oder eine einzige bedeutungslose Note geben sollte. Trotzdem hat es unsere Erwartungen übertroffen. Eines der Gefühle, die wir in unserem Sound einfangen wollten, war ein natürlicher Groove, wie man ihn bei älteren Künstlern und in der klassischen Musik hört. Um dies zu erreichen, haben wir uns dafür entschieden, das Album komplett ohne Click-Track aufzunehmen. Johan war der perfekte Schlagzeuger für diese Herausforderung, und als alle, die auf dem Album spielen und singen, ihre Parts beigesteuert hatten, wurde das Ergebnis weitaus flüssiger, lebendiger und dynamischer, als wir es uns hätten vorstellen können.“

MASTER MASSIVE Line-up 2026
Tony Niva – Lead-Gesang
Marcus „Masken“ Karlsson – Lead-Gesang
Viktor Gustafsson – Lead-Gesang
Jan Strandh – Lead-Gitarre und Gesang
Max Warnby – Bass
Johan Hautajärvi – Schlagzeug

MASTER MASSIVE „White Shadows“ Tracklist
1. Noah’s Cross
2. Islands And Bells (Video bei YouTube)
3. Jonah And The Whale
4. Blood On The Floor
5. Tantrum Rebellion
6. Silver Bullet
7. White Shadows

Source: Vampster

Die Alternative Metal-Band WIDTHOUT hat mit „Dear Old Me“ eine neue Single mitsamt Video-Clip veröffentlicht. Der neue Song der Italiener aus Rom soll Teil eines dritten Albums der Band sein, welches noch 2026 erscheinen soll.

WIDTHOUT „Dear Old Me“ (Video bei YouTube)

Source: Vampster

Die britische Alternative Rock-Band VERSUS hat mit „This Is Everything“ eine neue Single mitsamt Video-Clip veröffentlicht.

„Dieser Song beschäftigt sich mit den Folgen einer zutiefst toxischen Beziehung, in der langjähriges Gaslighting und Manipulation plötzlich deutlich werden. Dieser Moment der Erkenntnis zwingt dazu, den angerichteten Schaden anzunehmen, die gesamte Denkweise neu zu gestalten und den Weg anzutreten, sich der Vergangenheit zu stellen, die Kontrolle zurückzugewinnen und auf eine ehrlichere, selbstbestimmte Zukunft hinzuarbeiten“, sagt Sänger Shortie.

VERSUS Line-Up:
Shortie (Salt-Short) – vocals
Rob Kewley – rhythm guitar
Calvin Sargeant – drums

VERSUS „This Is Everything“ (Video bei YouTube)

Source: Vampster

Mit „Stillborn“ wird am 28. Mai 2026 das neue Album der Gothic Metal / Dark Rock-Band KILLING SUZY erscheinen. Es ist nach „Everybody Dies, Darling!“ (2017) das zweite Album der Deutschen aus Köln. Vorab gibt es den Opener „Forbidden Fruit“ zu hören.

KILLING SUZY Line-Up:
Ambra: Vocals
Ralf: Guitar
Jens: Bass
Sebastian: Keyboards
Gerd: Drums

KILLING SUZY „Stillborn“ Tracklist
01. Forbidden Fruit (Audio bei YouTube)
02. We Will Have It All
03. A Pointless Legacy
04. Zombies From Outta Space
05. Phoenix (Rise From The Ashes)
06. Trial And Error
07. Dance With The Devil
08. Cherryblossoms In The Snow (The Revenge Of Suzy)
09. Driftwood
10. Still Sleeping

Source: Vampster

Die Metalcore / Melodic Death Metal-Band AS OCEANS DIVIDE hat eine selbstbetitlte EP angekündigt. Es ist der erste Release der Kanadier und ist dem im März 2026 überraschend verstorbenen Bassisten Dale Burrows gewidmet.

„As Oceans Divide“ wurde von Gitarrist Thomas Ireland (Battlesoul) produziert und wird am 9. Juli 2026 erscheinen. Vorab gibt es zum Opener „Into The Dying Light“ ein Lyric-Video.

AS OCEANS DIVIDE Line-Up:
Tom Emmans – vocals
Eric Camilleri – guitar
Thomas Ireland – guitar
Matt McGuire – drums

AS OCEANS DIVIDE „As Oceans Divide“ Tracklist
1. Into The Dying Light – 4:04 (Lyric-Video bei YouTube)
2. White Noise – 3:31
3. World Collapse – 3:16
4. Cursed Oblivion – 3:59
5. One Of The Herd – 3:25

Source: Vampster

The rich have always wanted a better view of the blast: a penthouse perch above the panic, a chilled glass in hand, the city glittering beneath them while the rest of us wait for the atomic flash. On “High Society,” Los Angeles new wave provocateur Blone Noble turns class contempt into couture catastrophe, lampooning the one percent while greeting nuclear apocalypse with a poisoned grin and the lethal little come-on: “Love Me. Atom Bomb.” 

Taken from the forthcoming Dominator EP, out May 29, 2026, via Mystic Transfers, “High Society” moves with a sleek, predatory bass-synth strut, bubbling electronics, smoky vocal seduction, and house accents that feel like an early-’90s runway show held during the last cocktail hour on earth. Produced by James Matthew Seven and mixed by Mike Kriebal, the single finds Blone Noble turning end-times arrogance into art-school attack posture, challenging billionaires and warmongers with the insolent charge of someone making spectacle without a war chest.

“I’m running the world ragged with the same level of enthusiasm as the war mongers and billionaires—but I’m doing it with art instead of bombs…and no funding,” says Blone Noble. It is a fittingly grandiose mission statement for an artist chasing rock-and-roll immortality across stage, page, and screen, as if only the final fireball of nuclear holocaust could interrupt his swaggering performance.

Directed and edited by Redamo Rosa, with colour by Ian Herz, the video was shot during Blone Noble’s December 3, 2025 opening set for Wang Chung at The Belasco Theater in Downtown Los Angeles, during the 40th anniversary celebration of To Live and Die in L.A. Bathed in blue and bruised red stage light, Noble stalks the microphone while dancers along with dancers Megan Stogner, Mariana Jaccazio, Ana Ming-Bostwick Singer, and Dasha Leidy cut across the stage like nightclub phantoms, turning the live performance into a decadent little doomsday pageant.

Watch the video for “High Society” below:

Beyond the stage lights and end-times glamour of “High Society,” Blone Noble arrives with momentum already wired for detonation. In 2025, he released his debut album, Life’s New Adventure, via San Francisco label Industry Standards, alongside his autobiographical novel Festum Stultorum; both sold out within their first month of release. The album’s title-track video has since passed 50,000 views on YouTube, while the record earned notice for its sharp new wave theatrics, literary bite, and high-drama sense of self-invention. Noble spent the year taking the project across North America, sharing bills with Light Asylum, David J. Haskins of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, and Wang Chung.

Between tours, Noble collaborated with Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based producer James Matthew Seven on Dominator, which features remixes by Kontravoid and Tony Price, with EP art photos by Hedi Slimane. His sophomore album, ICONOCLAST, written and recorded during the same period with producer Dakota Blue, is currently seeking a home.

The Dominator EP is out May 29, 2026, digitally and on 12-inch vinyl via Mystic Transfers / Kuroneko Distribution.  The five-track release features “High Society,” a Kontravoid remix of the single, the new cut “Body Fascination,” the title track “Dominator,” and a Tony Price remix of “Dominator.”

Pre-order and pre-save here.

Blone Noble will take Dominator on the road this spring and summer, with dates across North America:

Blone Noble — Dominator Tour 2026:

May 21 — Salt Lake City, UT — International
May 22 — Orlando, FL — Iron Cow
May 23 — Miami, FL — Las Rosas
May 28 — Seattle, WA — Central Saloon
May 29 — Spokane, WA — The Big Dipper
May 30 — Portland, OR — Coffin Club
May 31 — Vancouver, BC — Cobalt Cabaret
June 5 — San Clemente, CA — Knuckleheads
June 6 — San Diego, CA — Tower Bar
June 19 — Culver City, CA — The Actors’ Gang Theater
July 16 — Corpus Christi, TX — Studio B
July 17 — McAllen, TX — Flying Walrus
July 18 — Laredo, TX — Jardin X Contreras
July 19 — Austin, TX — The 13th Floor

Follow Blone Noble:

Instagram
Bandcamp
Spotify
YouTube

The post “Love Me. Atom Bomb” — LA New Wave Provocateur Blone Noble Roasts the Billionaire Class in Video for “High Society” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Source: Post-Punk.com

But I’m drained white and shellshocked and going blind
From staring at this funeral pyre
But I’m by your side to burn
If that’s what it comes to in the end 

Billy Sigil, the restless force behind Seattle’s Hot Hail!, writes like a kid who stole the keys to the apocalypse and tore down the hillside in eyeliner, heels, and a heap of chrome with the radio jammed forever on 1985. On Hope In Hell, Sigil blows the doors off the claustrophobic dread of All The Blood You Wanted and lets in more color, more chorus, more plastic fantastic pop heat, while keeping the fear underneath like a knife taped beneath the dashboard. This is synthpop as emergency broadcast, queer survival manual, glitter-bombed panic attack, political séance, breakup autopsy, and back-alley joke told while the sirens get closer. Sigil calls the record a desperate act of survival, which sounds about right: a search for light, humour, community, and kindness while fascism, tech-capitalist rot, and general psychic garbage pile up outside the club door like bad weather with a badge.

In this wide-ranging interview, Billy Sigil gets into the blood, wires, jokes, and bad dreams behind Hope In Hell, a record that pushes glossy synthpop until it becomes a flare fired from the edge of collapse. Sigil talks about chasing bigger hooks and brighter 80s pop gestures after All The Blood You Wanted, while still dragging fascism, queer fear, burnout, grief, and the sorry old question of what art can do when the world starts chewing through its own leash. The conversation moves track by track through AI desire, vampire camp, breakup wreckage, magical practice, Seattle’s tech-capitalist corrosion, and the stubborn little candle of hope that keeps burning in spite of itself. Sigil also opens up about collaboration, guest vocals, Patrick Nagel-inspired visuals, gender presentation, formative influences, and why joy, for Hot Hail!, can feel less like comfort than a kiss blown at oblivion with one hand on the detonator.

Hot Hail!. Photo by Lain
Hope In Hell feels bigger, brighter, and more openly anthemic than All The Blood You Wanted, but the dread hasn’t gone anywhere. What changed in you between those two records that made this new shape feel necessary? The gaze seems wider and more social, even civic. Did the outside world start crowding the inside world more aggressively this time?

It’s funny, I had basically two entire albums’ worth of material finished, pretty quickly after All The Blood came out. One was an even darker, more experimental / industrial concept album thing, and the other was this, and it was really down to the wire which one I was going to do first.

There are a number of reasons why I went in this direction right now – one is that I think I simply get bored easily with the music I make, and so doing something that was too close to ‘All The Blood’ wouldn’t have felt interesting or challenging. I joke that I’m basically speed-running the pipeline from 30 Frames A Second Simple Minds to Don’t You Forget About Me Simple Minds in the space of two albums.

But more than that, this album is really a desperate attempt at survival. The album is called Hope In Hell, but I do not know what hope is right now. Hope may be an illusory thing, like the near death experiences manufactured by the dying synapses of our last moments.

I am old enough to know better than to think that Art is going to save us. At a certain point, the art of revolutionary posturing becomes a placebo against actual action. Hope, without strategy and hard work, can easily become magical thinking handwaving that keeps us from seeing reality. Joy, on its own, is not a revolutionary act if it’s not backed up by actual actions that, at this point, are probably going to have to be pretty damn ugly and unjoyful if they’re going to have any chance of fighting what is happening. So I have mixed feelings right now about making art about Everything That Is Happening. But at the same time, we make what we make because we are compelled to make it, so I don’t feel like I have much of a choice. All I know is that the idea of making an album of “fist in the air revolutionary slogans” right now makes me literally want to vomit. We’re so far past that. It’s just self-aggrandizing nonsense.

But I also don’t want to wallow in self-obsessed gloomdark or ultrahorny skronk. Those things have their moments, for me, but right now it feels just utterly empty. And if I had to make an entire album of Horrifics or My Own Private Weimars, just hitting people over the head with “The Fascists are Coming! The Fascists Are Here! The World Is Fucked”, which they already know, it wouldn’t help anything, and the process of making it would just drag me down with it. In some ways, this album feels like a somewhat frantic act of oppositional defiance – like I’m backward-leaping out the window, just double middle finger blasting towards all of it.

I also think I wanted to write something that was musically comforting to me in some way. I’m old enough that the first albums I owned and listened to obsessively were Cyndi Lauper, WHAM!, and Weird Al Yankovic. The pensive or triumphant songs that played during training or thinking or driving montages during 80s movies were formative parts of my musical education. The pre-90s equivalent of ‘mainstream alternative’ New Wave bands like Tears For Fears, Simple Minds, New Order, and even The Replacements (which all make appearances here) are loaded into the DNA of me hearing music on the radio that made me feel something for the first time. Nostalgia can be a very dangerous thing, but there’s been a lot of comfort in finding the sonic palette of that formative stuff.

There’s also a kind of glee in making an entire album that would probably run completely counter to where anyone professionally guiding my career would point me right now. I’ve often felt, in the past year, like I’m maybe a bit Too Much for the world of Darkwave / EBM – it’s currently a very reserved genre, in a lot ways, and I just don’t know what else to do as a musician or a singer or a lyricist other than sort of slice myself open and dump everything out, on album or on stage. And I’ve got a bad feeling that this album is going to be too over the top pop for the Darkwave scene and too dark and weird for everyone else, but we’ll see I guess.

But my overall hope, on this album, is that I create at least some moments of even the faintest light and joy and humor, something real and relatable, and a feeling of those things that we are fighting for, or at least surviving for.

There’s a fascinating contrast between the sweetness of the hooks and the bitterness of the subject matter on this album. Do you think pop is sometimes the best disguise for rage?

I am, at my absolute core, a pop fan, and a pop musician. I’ve been a musician for 30 years, and in every iteration of my musical existence, I’ve ultimately been making pop music. For me, what makes any genre interesting, from punk to goth to industrial, is how it weds intelligent songcraft and hooks to overdrive and discord. I can find musicians with no connection to pop intellectually interesting and admirable, but I’ll never find them viscerally compelling in the same way.

And I think, in particular, that pop is absolutely necessary for effectively transmitting sociopolitical rage. When you can sort of slide the bitter pill under the cultural door in this candy-flavored envelope of hooks and melodies, it’s much more dangerous in a lot of ways. One of my favorite songwriters of all time is Elvis Costello, and that was always what appealed there – you think you’re listening to this sort of classic pop song, and then you read the lyrics and it’s just this brutal, acidic, gut-wrenching socioeconomic commentary.

I think, also, that when you are dealing with these incredibly huge, looming, dark things, which are particularly looming right now, you’ve got to leaven that kind of heaviness somehow, with some degree of sweetness or the ability to move to it.

(The title track, Hope In Hell, is probably the best example of this – That’s basically the music for an ‘End of third act walking around / thinking’ montage from an 80s teen movie under lyrics about the collapse of democratic society which is so ridiculously incongruous it gives me a small measure of joy just in and of itself.)

Article of Faith reflects a harrowing reality for those in the LGTBQ community. It reminds of how little has changed between the bigotry of Anita Bryant during the 80s, and the MAGA movement now. And you can even compare those two to the Nazis’ response to the Weimar culture in Germany. I also see some of these ideas throughout the album and your work. Is this something you considered when writing the song and album?

I hesitated in writing that song, because in some ways it’s just the most obvious thing, you know? I still feel like I couldn’t articulate everything I wanted to in writing that. That song, and the title track…are really just kind of laying it out.

This country has been overtaken by a significant number of people who will literally watch us being shot in the street and come up with a reason why it is excusable. They will watch us march off to camps or just be shot by drones, and they will pretend it isn’t happening. The real problem is that Trump is just the oozing white head on the huge sebaceous cyst that these people represent. We will never win their hearts and minds, and they will happily exterminate all of us if given the chance. They will start with Trans people, but they won’t end there. We won’t vote our way out of that. We won’t march our way out of that. We won’t cleverly meme our way out of that. We certainly won’t write clever, heartfelt pop songs our way out of that. That’s a reality that we should probably really start thinking about. I don’t have a solution to this. It is not impossible that this reality will eventually kill me and the people I love. Writing a song is somewhat useless, but it’s really the only thing I’m gifted at in any kind of unusual way.

So if I’m going to make art about it, all I can really do is make something honest. And the honest truth is that I’m scared and I’m tired and I do not know the way out of this, and I can’t seem to see anybody who does. I’ve been a leftist my entire adult life. The functional, compassionate world I dreamed of in my twenties has always felt very far away, but now even the deeply flawed world I thought I would have to settle for has been stomped into dust. So neither song is a fist-pumper of defiant slogans. But I hope it captures something that a great many of us feel in a way that helps us feel less alone, at least. Maybe the kindness and patience and grace we are still able to show each other is the best hope we have.

Are there any other songs on the album that reflect an important part of the queer experience in 2026?

You know, oddly not really, in any sort of specific sense. I’m a queer person, so that’s baked into a certain degree, but it didn’t end up as big a part of the lyrics on this album as it did on the last one, on songs like Wyrd, etc. If we survive past November, though, I have no doubt I’ll get back to it!

Photo by Gr4ves
“Flesh” is one of those titles that immediately opens up questions of eroticism, embodiment, rot, and power. What kind of body were you writing about on that song — personal, political, gendered, digitized?

It’s interesting, because that’s one of my very few sort of ‘fictional narrative’ songs, in that it’s about the idea of a world in which humanity has died and our only legacy is AI pornbots, who are the POV of the song, and they are just realizing nobody is gonna log in, and realizing that they’ve been built to be these fantasies of the flesh, but flesh doesn’t exist anymore and they’ll never have it, and also ohmygod humanity completely fucked up. So there is a lot there. But one element I’ve thought about since the song came out, in conversation with other people who’ve listened to it, is just the overall way that our development and experience of desire has become so intrinsically wrapped up in technology at this point.

Not to be grandma, but I’m 46 years old, and I feel extremely lucky to have had some years of emotional and sexual development before the ever-present Internet. For anyone born after, you know, 1995 or so, there has not been a single moment of their sexuality that hasn’t been at least partly shaped by the pretty easy availability of literally every kind of sexual material imaginable. More than that, though, so many people’s ideas and presentation of their own sexuality have been shaped from a frighteningly young age by the demands and reinforcement of this faceless audience on the internet.

And I’m not counting myself out of that! I mean, obviously, I am out here milking every pretty year I’ve got left, and I enjoy the positive reinforcement! But I’m also very glad I had some period of my life where that wasn’t really a thing.

But I think there is this aspect of that where, especially if you are femme, you are sort of expected to present yourself as a sex doll to get anywhere, especially in any part of the entertainment industry – and, like, don’t get me wrong, that can be fun as hell, that can absolutely be something that someone chooses to do and works that for what it is worth – but there’s an exhaustion that comes with that over time, and I’ve seen that in people I love who do sex work or sexualized performance, and I think in some ways that song is about that too, without me realizing it consciously. Just the burnout and exhaustion of having to perform your sexuality for people constantly, until you’re just left sitting there thinking, “Is this even fun anymore? Do I want something more than this? Do I want to rip my skin off and become terrifying so that no one sexualizes me again so I can, like, write or draw or bake a fucking cake without it having to make it sexy somehow?”

“Silver Sliver” sounds like it belongs to a glamorous, dangerous tradition of pop surrealism. Was that track a release valve for camp, seduction, and style?

Part of the therapeutic quality of this album was allowing myself to just kind of give myself over to a ‘just vibes’ approach a bit more, but also have a bit more fun. I think I may have been attempting something Cyndi Lauper-ish here, musically, but that probably got away from me.

Lyrically speaking, it’s sort of the oldest trick in the book to write a “vampirism as metaphor” song, but here we are. I feel like the interesting thing that this one ended up being about is the way that the idea of vampirism extends to people who sort of willfully victimize themselves to it. Like, there are people who just seem to be absolutely, transparently dysfunctional in so many walks of life, but the number of people running to latch on to them is just unsettling. It’s like a daisy chain of vampirism.

But also, I’ll admit something extremely dorky: part of what I had in mind when I wrote this was a book series called Anno Dracula by Kim Newman, which is a favorite of mine. I kind of wanted to write a song that would be a #1 hit in 1985 of that reality. These are the bizarre thought experiments I subject myself and the listeners to.

The outro nod to Material Girl started as a bit of an inside joke, but at a certain point, I just said, “Fuck it. Why not?” I genuinely believe that we need to take ourselves a bit less seriously in this genre, especially since the world is literally collapsing. Also, Weird Al is a massive influence on me, and I am not in any way joking.

So, it’s kind of hilarious – it’s this very sinuous, sexy, glamorous-sounding song, but good god, every square inch of it is just hosed down in dorkiness, in reality. Shh. Don’t tell anyone.

“Needle” suggests precision, pain, medicine, fixation, maybe intimacy. What emotional terrain did that song open up that the more overtly political songs couldn’t?

This is probably the only song on the album that doesn’t have any political dimension to it. Ultimately, it’s just a breakup song, but it sort of reflects something positive along with emotional pain.

We have this unfortunate tendency to pathologize the end of romantic relationships. We need somebody to be the villain. We have all of these cultural forces telling us that it’s our right to villainize; if we’re hurting, it must be somebody’s fault, and due to some malicious defect in them. As somebody with BPD, I see this as particularly dangerous, because it sort of enables the worst aspects of that.

But sometimes things just don’t align. It doesn’t erase the good of something. But it is also, in some ways, more difficult: when something was full of joy, growth, and goodness, yet it still ended, there isn’t that place of anger or accusation to run to in order to erase what we loved and paper over the hurt of its loss. So there is a heart of this song that’s really about the idea that if something wasn’t as good as it was, and didn’t matter as much as it did, then its loss wouldn’t hurt so much. And the hurt is worth it for the connection to someone, and being able to move through it in order to keep that connection in a new form.

Hand in hand with that, though, I am old enough to have gone through so many relationships that ended for one reason or another, that, after a while, it’s put a sizeable dent in my ability to fully trust – both that other people will stick around, and also trust myself that I’m not somehow repellent to lasting, stable partnership. So it’s also about the exhaustion of that – the feeling that the happiest, most loving moments of our life become tainted with the pain of loss, like a hundred tiny needles sticking into us, but if we remove them, we might bleed out.

(Musically, meanwhile, this is very much me trying to write a soundtrack for a non-existent Michael Mann film, circa 1986.)

“Joy” is an almost provocative title in a time like this. Did writing a song with that name feel sincere, difficult, embarrassing, defiant, or all of the above?

Yeah, I don’t think Joy is a revolutionary act, but it is kind of a “fuck you” right now, isn’t it? There is a sort of feral defiance to it. At the very least, it’s me being defiant of my own apocalyptic mindset. I have a mind that can see every angle of how things are going to go bad, even in good times, and at the moment, it’s having a very difficult time seeing how things will unfold in any way other than disaster. But I can only write so many songs about how fascism is coming, and we’re all fucked before, at a certain point, it becomes repetitive and even harmful. So this is kind of an attempt to break free of that, both personally and as a songwriter.

I’ve also written very few straightforward love songs in my life. I’m an expressively loving person, but something about my brain seizes up when I try to distill that into lyrics. This is very definitely a love song, in part, but it’s also, in a larger sense, a song about trying not to be pulled down into the mire of miserabilism, personally and creatively. And when you are in a loving relationship, that becomes even more important, so that the emotional openness with someone doesn’t just become dragging them into the depths of your fear and anxiety all the time.

And while a romantic relationship can’t codependently be the One Good Thing that we go on struggling for, it does mean a lot to have someone who is your partner, in the truest sense of that word, through difficult times.

Also, I don’t have anywhere near enough fans to have what might be called a ‘fan base’, but I feel like this song and ‘In Time’ are the two tracks on this album that represent a possibly self-destructive tendency on my part to alienate any fans I might have made on the previously released material. It’s kind of an unholy mashup of Modern English covering New Order covering The Replacements.

“In Time” sounds like it might hold some kind of reckoning or reconciliation. Is that one of the emotional hinge points of the record?

I very nearly didn’t put this on the album, but it really encapsulates that idea of hope in some ways. This song is a magical ritual. That’s not a joke. In magical practice, there’s an idea of a guardian angel that has nothing to do with some external celestial being. Instead, it’s the idea that we, in our times of happiness and strength, reach back to ourselves in our worst moments to keep us alive and pull us toward a better time. We don’t even realize that we are doing this, but we can also put intentional thought into it. When we are at our best, we can think back to our lowest moments and extend ourselves love and grace. When we are at our nadir, we can imagine a version of ourselves who has lived through it, keeping us alive and pulling us forward. We are our own guardian angel. I really love this idea. I’m not a big fan of supernatural literalism in my magical practice, and this feels like something much more grounded.

Roughly a decade ago, I went through a complete collapse of the life I’d built up to that point, for a number of reasons. I came very close to doing something very stupid and very permanent. I luckily did not, and instead started the long journey of mental health treatment and sobriety that allowed me to rebuild a better and more functional life.

Around that time, I experienced something that I’ve very rarely actually been able to pull off – I brought a piece of music back from a dream. Most of the time, if I dream of music, I don’t remember it. It’s gone or gobbledygook when I wake up. But in this particular instance, I heard a little melody in my dream, and remembered it when I woke up and hummed it into my phone. That melody is the main lead synth line that opens In Time. For a very long time, it felt so familiar that I was convinced I had unintentionally stolen it from another song.

I’ve built the music out in different versions over the years, but when I was recommitting myself to writing music again, this was the first song I wrote. And it’s a song I’m singing, now, in this place where my life is good, on a personal level, and I get to make art for people, and there are people who know me and love me; I’m singing it back through my own life to the me at that moment when I was about to take one step too many that couldn’t ever be taken back. This song is a spell to keep that me alive and keep them going. I actually realized recently I was maybe hearing the song on this album, from this moment, in that dream, and I’ve closed that loop. I like that idea quite a lot, from a storytelling perspective.

I thought for a long time that this song could never fit within the confines of Hot Hail!, but, as the themes of this album came together, I realized that this is exactly the place for it. It is the brightest, most hopeful light in the midst of the darkness. It’s a personal thing, but I hope that it tells anyone listening to it, in the midst of this absolute nadir of horror and darkness we’re all in, that we are all so much stronger than we think we are.

“Enough To Run” is such a loaded title. Is that a song about escape, stamina, burnout, survival, or the moment where you realize all of those things are tangled together?

In a way, it’s a song that knows it’s wrong, that’s just hoping against hope. “Maybe it’s enough to run.” Of course, it’s not enough. Is anywhere far enough away to be safe? But it’s also partly about the desire to run away from Seattle, specifically. There is a fantastic visual artist named John Criscitello who used to be based in Seattle, and my favorite piece of work by him was just a blank white wall with text that said: “We Came Here To Get Away From You.”

I’ve lived in Seattle since 1998. I came here largely to be in a place that was queer and artist-oriented and safer for people like us. Since then, I’ve watched the tech industry overtake the entire cultural and economic ecosystem that made Seattle a “Quirky Artsy City,” and dredge it like a wetland. They commodified the signifiers of that to sell it to hollow tech bros and woo girls who live in dorm-like studios, drink in bars that look like cafeterias, and work on “campuses” while they clutch their pearls about homeless people (as opposed to homelessness), stealth vote for fascism because it’s good for their capitalism, and desperately try to make AI do all the shit they promised the shareholders it could before the bubble bursts or the water runs out.

There are massive, overpriced apartment buildings in Seattle that are built directly over the graves of venues and other places that used to actually contribute to the cultural life of the city. If you look through the windows of many of them, you can see things like photos of Charles Peterson or artsy prints of Kurt Cobain’s guitar hanging in their pristine, ultra-modernist lobbies. THAT sums up current Seattle, right there. And these basic beige blank spaces with lanyards have the fucking gall to say shit like “Well, if you don’t like it, why don’t you move?”

Unfortunately, part of what this song is about is how it’s not possible to run from it anymore. It’s everywhere. This is the metastasizing cancer of late-stage tech capitalism. Every major city in America is dealing with some version of this. Even before we were dealing with the active resurgence of unvarnished Fascism in the West, tech capitalism was already smilingly trying to starve us out of even a tiny space to exist. Now it just feels like there is this massive ball of atrocity rolling through the world, picking up steam, and there’s not going to be anywhere safe from it, ultimately. In a weird way, there’s a sort of manic sense of freedom in all this collapse. I feel like that sort of seeps into the feeling of the album as a whole. If all the things we were told all our lives were the stable baseline of reality, that we needed to align ourselves with and settle for in order to survive, if all of that is now collapsing completely, maybe it was all an illusion in the first place, and we don’t owe it anything? But this is also another song about falling in love in the midst of all this, and the strangeness of finding this very stable and healthy thing in the midst of all of this collapse and dysfunction. And kind of clinging to the idea that maybe if we can just run far enough away together, that will somehow be enough to survive this.

Ultimately, I’m just wondering how long it takes for somebody to notice that this is a country song pretending to be synthpop.

You close the album with “Something Good,” the Paul Haig song. Why did ending on a cover feel like the truest final gesture for this record? What did Paul Haig mean to you in the context of this album specifically? Was that cover chosen for its melody, its emotional argument, its synthpop lineage, or its sense of wounded optimism?

In a way, it’s there because it’s the song I can’t write. If you look at the arc of the album, you start with Commitment, which is this intensely complicated, lyrically dense, weary song about the absurdity of reality, that essentially boils down to “Best I can promise you is ‘not gonna die,’ or at least not hurry that along myself.”

Even the most outwardly upbeat song on the album, In Time, really comes down to “Don’t jump off a building.” In a way, I had to turn to someone else’s song to bring this thing home, and there is just such an irrepressible quality to that song – it’s just a blast of unabashed joy and positivity that is still somehow wistful.

A former partner I’m still friends with introduced me to this song back in 2019, right before the darkness of Covid set in, and it ended up being a really meaningful piece of art for me through that time. Paul Haig’s lyrics are direct and straightforward in a way that I can’t ever seem to get at myself, but they are also deceptively simple. That central idea – Take something bad, and make it into something good. Good god, that’s what we’re all trying to figure out, every day right now, right?

It’s the simplest thing that has the most complicated thing imaginable hiding inside of it, even in good times. But especially right now, it feels like a call to arms, both personally and in the world. If something is broken, don’t just give up on it and discard it because it’s difficult, but do what you have to do to fix it. Live and fight for it and fix it however you can.

This album is about Joy and Hope, but not as some sort of wispy noncommittal thing, but more like a feral, twitching-eyed, chain-smoking goblin that we hitch ourselves to out of pure spite so that they can help drag us across this fucking ice flow.

So in some ways it is perfect to end on a song that marries its energy and hooks and pure pop to a hope and joy that just kind of punches you in the face.

Photo by Gr4ves
The guest voices on Hope In Hell make the album feel less solitary than the debut. Did bringing in Kim West, Henry Mansfield, Sammy Skidmore, Frankie Champagne, and Butch Avery Kanode influence the emotional architecture of the record?

I think the tone of both albums is so defined by their guest vocals, in some ways. On All The Blood, you’ve got that sort of feral snarl of Lerin Huntley (Repulsur) on Justice, and then Christianna Crabbe (Sprig) just absolutely completes all 3 of the songs they’re on; there’s this quality to their voice that is so simultaneously icy and impassioned and none of those songs would truly work without them.

On Hope In Hell, I think there is a sort of light and brightness that everyone brings to it that I couldn’t have ever done on my own. I very specifically reached outside of the scene I’ve primarily been in for vocalists on this, and brought in more people who create work in that brighter world of Indierock / pop. Kim West (Smokey Brights / Megacat) is actually an old friend going back over a decade to the old Cafe Racer community, and when I needed femme vocals on ‘Flesh’ that had a kind of ‘Blondie meets Donna Summer’ quality in my head, I thought of her immediately.

But the real surprise in some ways was what she added to the song Hope In Hell – the first time I heard her vocals mixed into that, I just burst into tears. There’s this grit and weariness and grandeur to it that makes that song what it is, and I didn’t even know it was missing. I enjoy what I do in Hot Hail!, but there is a lifeforce from collaboration that you’ll never entirely get working alone. She has an extensive discography at this point, but I greatly recommend anyone who enjoyed her voice to go look up the song “Different Windows” by Smokey Brights. It’s like the greatest disco song that Fleetwood Mac never wrote.

…Henry Mansfield’s voice just has this quality of pure joy to it. I don’t know how else to describe it. He is an absolutely amazing songwriter and performer in his own right, and seeing him live is like getting hit in the heart with this beautiful beam of light, so, you know, I immediately thought, “Oh, this would be a REALLY interesting contrast.” And what he adds to In Time, in particular… again, that is exactly what that song needs. I may be singing about the idea of a guardian angel on that song, but Henry actually sounds like one.

Sammy Skidmore (Dining Dead) also has a voice that is just so tonally different that it adds a whole different dimension. It’s interesting, from a process standpoint, because on many songs, I had multiple people sing the same harmonies, and then it was a matter, in mixing, of finding where each voice fit best and how they stacked. On Silver Sliver there’s this really interesting quality to the backing vocals because they all kind of ended up merged into one instrument – Sammy’s is on top of the stack there, but Frankie and Avery end up making it sound like this one, big weird vampire choir..

Frankie and Avery are both in Seaside Tryst, and their voices in that are just this beautiful, soothing, funny, sexy energy together, so I wanted to make sure there was one song that highlighted the two of them, which ended up being Enough To Run.

Both the opener, Commitment, and the closer, Something Good, had everyone but Kim on them, and I really love the way that adds to the message and energy of the songs and the album. When you hear all of them doing that big, ‘Tears For Fears’ “WE COMMIT!” or singing “Take something bad and make it into something good,” it both sounds better and means so much more than if it were just a Wall Of Billy doing it.

If the hope in Hope In Hell is the way we are kind and present for each other through this, then the backup vocals on this album really become an expression of this lovely community of artistic weirdos that exists here.

Hot Hail! Photo by Lain.
How did the visual world of Hope In Hell take shape with Lain, especially the Patrick Nagel-inspired styling and imagery? Were you building a character, an alter ego, a heightened version of yourself, or something that revealed parts of the album’s meaning the songs alone could not?

In some ways, the photoshoot with Lain made the album happen. I had the choice between 2 directions for this second album, and was trying to decide which. I did the photoshoot with Lain initially as just a “Wouldn’t it be fun to do a Nagel photoshoot?” I had a vague idea that I might use it for the more synth-poppy album, but nothing definite.

Lain has been a massive part of the aesthetic of Hot Hail! from the get-go – they did my first promo photoshoot, and those photos were on the singles from the first album. They are just a delight to work with, and they have this quiet way of seeing little angles of things that make the final picture really pop.

A lot of what we did was trying to emulate poses and outfits from specific Nagel pieces, but then doing some with our own spin on them. The hardest part was trying to get that Nagel face right – I tend to be very expressive, so the neutral face look was hard.

After Lain sent me the photos, though, it was like “There is no way I can do anything but the project that these are for.” Especially as I started figuring out how to do the retouching to make the photos look more like Nagel, there was just no question.

The photo that is the album cover, in particular, doesn’t emulate any particular Nagel, but it immediately grabbed me as the cover photo. It just looks like the title track should be playing over it. And when Lain started making the illustrated versions, I had the idea to use them as the single covers, which in some ways affected which songs I chose as singles – I feel like each of those illustrations matches the song it goes with perfectly.

In some ways, the album’s aesthetic mirrors the idea of pop music as a carrier wave for a political message. I love the idea of making an album that looks like it should be all clean lines and vibes and no substance, but then getting into it and realizing it’s this kind of bleak, messy commentary on the emotional landscape of a society buckling under fascism.

As for why the affinity for Nagel in the first place … I grew up in the 80s. I can literally remember sitting on the floor at the salon while my mom got her hair done, listening to Cyndi Lauper on the radio, and looking at reproduction Patrick Nagel prints on the wall. The Nagel I based the cover art for the ‘Article Of Faith’ single on was the first one I remember seeing in that context as a kid.

And when I looked at that print, with all its androgyny and glamour, I think it is one of the first times I remember thinking “That is something I’m attracted to,” but with this simultaneous, barely acknowledged thing under that of “That is something I want to be.”

So Nagel is this incredibly intrinsic part of my gender and sexuality. Which is, you know, also HUGELY problematic. Let’s not fail to acknowledge that Nagel’s art represents a literally impossible physical standard of beauty, as well as privileging quite literal whiteness. So, along with its encouragement of my gender fluidity, I also absolutely internalized those issues in ways that I’m still struggling with as far as my concept of my own attractiveness.

But, that being said, the idea of fully embodying my own ideal of that sort of genderqueer, high-Themme glamour for this album just felt like the perfect convergence. Especially given the fact that what the album is about is a situation in which, not too long from now, presenting oneself in that way, even if the parts of this country we like to tell ourselves are “safe,” might feasibly be a very dangerous thing to do.

And to be entirely honest, it also felt like the sort of culmination of a phase of my own journey with gender. I am trans and nonbinary. I joke that the nature of my nonbinary is like “Schroedinger’s Gender” – even I don’t know what’s going to be in the box until I open it. And for the last two years or so, I have run as hard as I can toward my femme aspect, both in my musical persona and my private life.

But, having done that, I’ve found that I’ve become more comfortable presenting more masc because it feels like one of many choices, rather than a presumptive expectation. So I’m finding myself in a place where my gender presentation is shifting. Like, I’ll always be Gina Gershon on the inside, but sometimes I’m Gina Gershon in ‘Bound,’ and sometimes I’m Gina Gershon in Showgirls. Lately, I’m feeling more like ‘Bound.’

So committing to this extremely hard femme Nagel aesthetic felt like a kind of a lovely capstone of my Showgirls period. And, in some ways, this whole album kind of represents the culmination of the journey of that little kid sitting on the floor, listening to Cyndi Lauper, and staring at a Nagel print.

Biographically, what were the records, books, films, clubs, or scenes that made Billy Sigil, Hot Hail!, and Hope in Hell, possible in the first place?

The name ‘Hot Hail!’ itself is a reference to Emperor Ming’s world-destroying weather machine in the 1980 Flash Gordon movie. I remember seeing that when I was maybe 5 years old, and there was some kind of brainstem understanding of “Oh! This is camp!,” and the idea that something doesn’t have to be “good” to be amazing. But also, the idea of burning hail as a sci-fi weapon of mass destruction kind of encapsulates the ethos of this project – it’s something unnatural and apocalyptic that still retains a certain quality of glamour and also absurdity. It’s winking at itself in the midst of all the horror. The “!” on the end of it serves both to render it all the more ridiculous, and also to make it legally distinct from the, like, 6 other bands called ‘Hot Hail’ floating around out there.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch will always be a massive influence, personally and artistically. That’s one of the few films I can say I went into a different person than I came out as. And Stephen Trask’s songwriting in that is also kind of the gold standard for something that’s catchy and cheeky and emotionally devastating, and it has remained a huge influence since then.

Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains – that’s a flawed movie in many ways, but it is jaw-droppingly complex and prescient in how it portrays the way that capitalism co-opts subcultural rebellion. Also, the exchange between Diane Lane and Ray Winston in that, where she says “You’re so jealous of me. I’m everything you ever wanted to be.” And he just barks back, “A cunt?” and she says “Exactly.” is one of the single most devastating, insightful, actually punk rock things ever put on film. The first time I saw that, I literally gasped. I wasn’t able to clear the rights for the sample on the album, but I always play that at the beginning of live performances of WYRD.

Cabaret is so obvious, it almost doesn’t warrant comment at this point. But it’s still heartbreakingly effective. I think there’s a certain degree of overall cinematic aesthetic to the albums so far – All The Blood You Wanted feels very German Expressionist to me, both in direct ways like ‘Caligari Dance Party’ but also just the overall vibe is this kind of sweeping, high-contrast grand guignol. I wanted that album to sound like Chernobog’s shadow spreading down over the valley in Fantasia.

Hope In Hell feels simultaneously lighter, but also more grounded. There’s a large influence from those 80s movies like Less Than Zero, where the synth score has both this lightness and crushing sadness at the same time. It presents as a teen movie, but it’s actually a study of dysfunction, both individually and societally. Both the songs Hope In Hell and Needle have music that you could put under scenes in those kinds of movies, and that’s very intentional. Honestly, if I could move in any direction as a musician, it would be soundtracks, but it’s very hard to break into that world right now.

Musical influences include:

Tears for Fears. I remember hearing “Shout!” as a kid and being, like, transfixed. There’s such an aching, angry quality to it. I think it was the darkest music I’d ever heard at 5 years old and I became obsessed with it. And their other work also has that quality of just being so laden with hooks, but also having this weariness and complexity.
Cyndi Lauper. My sister got “She’s So Unusual” on cassette when I was maybe 4 years old, and that’s the first album I remember listening to front to back, over and over. When I hear the opening of “All Through The Night” or “Time After Time,” I still get this, like, blood-deep sense of comfort and safety. I don’t know if anything on this album exactly sounds like her, but it’s deep in the DNA.
Millionaire by Mekons. This is kind of their piss-take on 80s pop, but I adore it. They are still one of my favorite punk bands, and Sally Timms is one of my favorite vocalists of all time.
Simple Minds. Obviously ‘Once Upon A Time,’ though I love their first 3 albums best. I think, in some ways, the jump from something like “Changeling” to “Don’t You Forget About Me” was an influence more than any specific song.
Siouxsie & The Banshees. Always an influence. Seeing the “Face To Face” video from Batman Returns as a 12-year-old almost certainly infected me with Goth. On this album in particular, the feel of songs from Tinderbox, Peepshow, and Superstition were in my heart, even if the sound isn’t the same.
Roxette. No shit. Again, just a band whose music sparks joy, and fuck anyone who’s too cool for it.
Sparks. Again, nothing specific, but I don’t think I could possibly write an album of synthpop without the ever-presence of “Angst In My Pants,” “When I’m With You,” or “Tryouts For The Human Race” in my brain having an effect.
New Order. I mean, what needs be said? ‘Power, Corruption and Lies’ era was probably the most present.
The Replacements. It’s not an insistent presence, but I was listening to “Tim’ a lot while I was working on this, and I think it’s more the raw, wrung out humanity of the general vibe than anything specific in the music. Except for maybe in one spot, which I’ll let listeners see if they can pick up on.
Bowie, Scary Monsters. Always my favorite album overall. Always an influence on Hot Hail!, and songs like Teenage Wildlife have the grandiosity I’m going for on this.
Weird Al. Honest to God, I think I learned more about songwriting from him than almost anyone, especially his deconstructionist “stylistic parodies” like “Dare to Be Stupid.” To be brutally honest, I often feel like I could point to a lot of my songs and tell you which bands each one is the “Weird Al Stylistic Parody” of. I mean, I’ve got at least 4 Depeche Mode ones at this point.

Books … Honestly, nothing very specifically literary in this album. I could give a HUGE section on this for All The Blood, but for some reason, nothing I was reading really feels like it bled into this.

Looking back now, what does All The Blood You Wanted understand about you that Hope In Hell no longer does?

Oddly enough, even though Hope In Hell is so informed by anxiety around where we are and where we are heading, I think, in some ways, that the person who wrote All The Blood You Wanted was more afraid. Hot Hail! is the first project I’ve made art and performed really publicly with for a very long time, and that in and of itself was quite terrifying, for a number of reasons. And I think that, while everything on that album is coming from a very genuine place, I still had this underlying feeling that I needed to keep it stylistically in a place that would be more likely to be enjoyed by a certain scene or certain people

To be clear, there’s some fun in that. I’m someone who could run off in so many directions, genre-wise, that it’s helpful to have a reason to keep focus – it’s an interesting intellectual exercise.

But now, with everything heading in the direction that it’s heading in the world, I just can’t be arsed not to do whatever I feel like doing. I don’t have time not to be slightly ridiculous, or to try to predict what most people are going to gravitate towards. I mean, I do NOT have a large fanbase. I just crossed 1000 followers on Instagram. My listener numbers on the various platforms are lovely to me, but they’re not anything that would impress anyone. I’m probably not supposed to say any of this out loud, but good god, how could I possibly give a fuck at this juncture in history, you know? What the fuck are we doing still curating our expression down to its last inch when every aspect of the world we live in is about to collapse?

So it’s slightly freeing to just go, “The likelihood of this being hugely popular is just about nil anyway, so I’m going to haul up whatever is genuine in me at the moment and dump it out musically in whatever form feels right for it. If that resonates with people, then those are the people who needed it, and if it doesn’t, then I don’t need to convince them.”

Ultimately, I’ve felt like I’m on borrowed time in all this, for a lot of reasons. Every moment I get to make this music and put it out into the world and have that mean something or resonate with even a few people, that’s my reason to keep going.

I’m just happy and lucky to be here at all. I think that’s a feeling I’ve very keenly developed since I made the last album, and I think it informs a lot of Hope In Hell.

Was there anything you were afraid to say on this record and said anyway?

The fears I had were less around any lyrical statements, and more around just the sheer scope of the Big Shiny Pop quality of it all. Which is kind of hilarious, because we may be entering an era in this country where making anti-Fascist art might actually get you put on some kind of list, but here I am, just blithely slinging that out while I’m worried about whether “Joy” or “In Time” will be too poppy for the Goths. That realization in and of itself was probably enough to get me over any fear around that.

Did any song feel dangerous to finish?

Somewhat. I wanted to go in some lyrical directions with Article Of Faith that ultimately felt too complex to tackle effectively in a ‘2 Verses, 2 Choruses, 1 Outro’ pop song.

And there was one more original song that I intended for the album, but I just couldn’t crack. It was called Immateria, named after an idea in Alan Moore’s Promethea comic series, and it was about that idea of human creativity and the intangible worlds of art, literature, and music as the thing that makes our species special, and that truly endures. Kind of the bright twin to ‘Flesh’s narrative.

Musically, kind of fittingly, the thing was operating on the same wavelength, as, like, The Neverending Story theme by fucking Limahl. It was just an absolute, high-key, ultra-positive, inspirational 80s movie music to a point that was almost self-satirical. And again, I just couldn’t crack the lyrics. Because that subject is actually massively important to me on an incredibly formative level. It’s, like, the baseline of a lot of my approach to spirituality and other stuff. And I couldn’t find the way into it that didn’t feel sort of forced or like a statement of philosophy rather than a human-scale thing. I finally was like, if this thing is going to be this ridiculous, musically, then the lyrics have to absolutely crush, and if I can’t crack that right now, then now isn’t the time for it. That was actually when I decided to add Something Good to the album instead, and that really suddenly brought everything together.

What does “hope” sound like to Hot Hail!, if it isn’t softness in the face of cruelty?

In some ways, I’m still not sure. In some ways, the album is more about the question of Hope than the answer of Hope. The song came before the album title, and really what that song is about is, “I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s any hope, I don’t know what it looks like right now.”

I think, for me, that softness and grace and compassion and kindness are definitely a large part of Hope, though. Which is also part of that song – all of the lyrics that are reaching for hope are identifying it with connection, community, emotional intimacy, even if we’re doomed. If we burn, we’ll burn together. The thing that kills my hope most isn’t the halfwitted, venal cruelty of the people who are obviously out to get us. They’ve always been there; they’ve just been given license to be their unvarnished, authentic selves. What kills my hope is the way that those of us who are over here in this sort of amorphous blob of people – the Left, or Progressives, or whatever you want to call us – we are … SO MUCH BETTER … at hurting each other than we are at hurting the thing coming at us with a mouth full of butcher knives. We’re like the children of abusive parents who can’t fathom the possibility of actually attacking the parent, and so instead they abuse each other, or, like, their pets or something. We’re just hitting what we can reach half the time, and grabbing on to anything that gives us the opportunity to do that, that lets us feel righteous about it. We have no strategy. We have no overarching tactical approach. We’re fractious and laughably infiltratable. I feel like the French Resistance wouldn’t have even trusted any of us with washing their dishes. If we burn, we’ll all burn separately in our highly proscribed categories.

On the macro level, when dealing with the people who are living with the same horror as us, then the ability to be kind, to give grace and room for growth, and room to identify the overlap of our Venn diagrams, rather than viciously attacking the variances, when I see that, that gives me hope, though sometimes it seems rare. The horror itself, to be clear, deserves no softness at all. My greatest hope is that we are able to get our shit together on this end of things and do some stuff that I definitely shouldn’t put in print because I’m pretty sure that’s our only way out of this. Barring that happening, there is still the micro level, which is all I can really have any faith in right now, and is really more of what the Hope on this album is about – that we can still be kind, and patient, and thoughtful, and present, even in the face of this thing bearing down on us. It’s the hope that we’ll be there for each other, whatever that means for each of us.§

Listen to Hope In Hell below and order the album here.

Hope In Hell by Hot Hail!

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The post “I’m By Your Side to Burn” — An Interview with Seattle Synthpop Chanteur Hot Hail! on “Hope In Hell” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

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Violent empathy

Bloodline destiny

Obsession atrocity

Murder ideology 

BLXCKFLAMINGO’s latest single, Last Rites, arrives like a black car idling outside an abandoned church, engine coughing, headlights sickly, somebody in the back seat muttering prayers they no longer believe. The Jersey City duo: Kevin Garetz on vocals, guitar, and synth, Roberto Miranda on bass, vocals, and synth, work in that cold corner where darkwave gets its coat collar up and walks straight into the pea soup fog.

Last Rites is a song built on drum-machine insistence, with bass that moves like a threat in a hallway, and synths that spread out in pale, poisonous sheets. Garetz’s baritone comes through with priestly rot and club-bathroom menace, whispered from behind a locked door. The track has the black-glass polish of Drab Majesty, the funereal romance of Clan of Xymox and Lebanon Hanover, the western-goth dread of Fields of the Nephilim, and a touch of Molchat Doma’s Brutalist apartment-block chill, but BLXCKFLAMINGO keep the ritual close to home. Jersey City never sounded so much like a candlelit basement under a collapsing republic.

The lyrics are all appetite and alarm: morbid curiosity, erotic violence, obsession turned into ideology, ritual desire repeating like a curse someone keeps enjoying too much to break. There is a political sickness implied here, a sense that power has its private ceremonies and its polished knives, while the rest of us get the sermon, the spectacle, and the bill. The song leans into occult imagery; its altar is psychological as much as ceremonial, a place where lust, control, dread, and devotion get smeared together until the difference stops mattering.

Last Rites refuses to tidy up the ugliness where modern anxiety has gone feral. The news cycle already feels like ritual abuse performed by men in expensive rooms; BLXCKFLAMINGO simply turns that atmosphere into a coldwave cut with enough bite to leave a mark. The beat keeps pushing forward, strict and sleepless, while the guitars and synths blur into a fevered haze around it.

By the time the final invocation lands, Last Rites feels less like a song about death than a song about what people will do when they think the old gods, old laws, and old moral brakes have stopped working. Decadence sounds dangerous, which is rarer than it should be.

Listen to Last Rites below and order the single here.

Last Rites by BLXCKFLAMINGO

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The post “Ritual Desire” — NJ Coldwave Duo BLXCKFLAMINGO Unveil Morbid New Single “Last Rites” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

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Brighter than the night that’s leaving
We were never there, inseparable, always, didn’t even care

Astari Nite’s new EP, Medications In Bloom, arrives like a lipstick-smeared mirror, and a flyer peeled from a 1991 club wall: part goth romance, part alt-rock fever dream, with one boot still planted in the cemetery and the other lacing up its Docs beside a pile of faded band tees ready for wear and tear in the mosh pit at Lollapalooza. The Miami band’s roots remain black-clad and theatrical, but these six songs lean harder into the cracked guitars, crooked hooks, and beautiful bad decisions of the early ’90s alternative underground.

Formed in 2013 by vocalist Mychael Ghost and drummer Illia Tulloch, with guitarist/producer Howard Melnick and keyboardist/bassist/producer Danny Ae completing the line-up, Astari Nite have always treated alternative rock as a mirror you might kiss, crack, or leave smeared with lipstick and bad decisions. Their history runs from Stereo Waltz on Danse Macabre Records to support slots with Peter Murphy, The Damned, Clan of Xymox, Cold Cave, Peter Hook and The Light, The Psychedelic Furs, She Past Away, and others, which makes sense: they sound like a band raised on mascara, melodrama, and the magnificent bad decisions of the beautiful and doomed.

Medications In Bloom, comes loaded with validation, self-preservation, romance, glamour, and decay, but Astari Nite never turns those themes into some cheap velvet-rope self-help seminar. The record is too strange, too vain, too funny, and too bruised for that. What began as a smaller idea grew into something fuller and stranger, shaped by instinct, revision, and lived experience rather than fussy overthinking. The band revisits older material with a sharper alt-rock bite, lets new songs find their own crooked posture, and follows feeling over formula. Personal upheaval, shifting emotional weather, and a renewed appetite for change all seep into the seams, while the studio brings out hidden colors the band may not have known were there. This is courage in the mirror after the party has gone sour: choosing your rain, painting your mouth, and wearing the wreckage like couture.

Why Are You So Lame opens the album like a flirtation already sick of itself, all beauty, rejection, magazine lust, and emotional lateness—but now wired with a jittery, industrial-tinged alt-rock tension that recalls pre-Pretty Hate Machine abrasion rubbing against warped pop instinct. Illia Tulloch’s arrangement keeps everything slightly off-balance, as if the song is circling the same unresolved conversation over and over. Ghost sings from inside the rotten ritual of wanting someone who treats care like a delayed train. Desire blushes, then bites its lip, then pretends it meant to bleed. “In Bloom,” blooming right there in the EP’s title, the wit comes off nonchalant but pointed: romantic, irreverent, and ridiculous, wandering wherever the mood decides to take it.

Dry Shampoo X is the breakup in aisle five, heartbreak under cheap fluorescent lights, but at its core is the bruised brightness Astari Nite leaned into while writing: shoegaze jangle in the orbit of Lush and Ride, a flash of Suede-style glam, and a sweetness that keeps curdling at the edges. Built from a fragment Melnick once treated like a jingle, the track drifts into something stranger, shaped by instinct rather than precision, as if it found its final form by accident. The song keeps calling love back into the room after the door has already clicked shut: ridiculous, wounded, and fully aware that bodies remember the people that the mind is trying to evict.

Lennon Yellow Tangerine spins 4AD-tinted post-punk psychedelia into something bouncy, bent, and theatrical, its angular guitar riff giving the song a rubber-legged melody while Ghost threads gothic theatrics through its Day-Glo dark daze. Lyrically, it’s a cracked pop séance of missed calls, slippery devotion, and surreal, voicemail-like fragments stitched together without second-guessing. There’s a looseness here, with lyrics guided more by mood than fixed meaning, as if affection wandered into a room full of funhouse mirrors and forgot why it came in.

Unisex Games, in its revamped form, hits harder: the guitars are thicker, the edges less polite, pushing the song further into that early-’90s alt-rock snarl while keeping its theatrical bite. Friendship curdles into a carnival of jealousy, sex, and petty guilt, its old intimacy now sharpened into ammunition, newly restored from its former “mono” haze into something fuller and more confrontational.

Miss Rain On My Parade arrives with that same renewed weight, its reworked form leaning into a more immediate, guitar-forward punch while still dressed in gothic attitude. It lands as the EP’s black-lipstick credo: keep your sunshine, I’ll keep my storm. The song turns bad moods into wardrobe, validation into poison candy, and gloom into a private weather system worth defending.

Finally, I Lack Nutrition closes with the band’s most overt tether to their post-punk lineage, its skeletal bassline and cold air recalling that older gothic core even as the EP around it stretches outward. Romance collapses into need, memory, and absence—something bodily, depleted, unresolved—aching toward someone already gone, still searching for warmth in the wreckage of attachment.

Astari Nite know glamour is funniest when it hurts, and Medications In Bloom transforms that pain into stained glass. This is one hell of an album.

Listen to Medications In Bloom below and order the album here.

Medications In Bloom by Astari Nite

Mychael Ghost spoke extensively with Post-Punk.com about the nitty gritty of the album, providing some insight to this masterpiece of melodrama, and giving us some clues to his inspiration.

Medications in Bloom is described as Astari Nite’s latest “fashion of music,” rooted in alternative dark glam rock. What does that phrase mean to you at this point in the band’s evolution, and what kind of world did you want these six songs to open up?

A world full of peace and love comes to mind! As an artist, it can be rather scary releasing music into the universe. In the past I’ve had people say to me, “can you get sad again, your prior music was so dark.” Imagine that. People being so cruel as if they get paid to do so. Medications In Bloom is by far some of my most favorite songs written by Astari Nite. Change is wonderful and it is okay to be happy. Wear the brightest lipstick, laugh the loudest, be brave and find courage to stand up for yourself. Find positivity in negativity. Open the door and say good morning to strangers. That is what I hope for in this fashion of music, that it will inspire and motivate acceptance. Everyone deserves to be loved.

The EP feels like it carries the hope and romance of a mixtape played loud through a cassette deck or stereo, but filtered through something more bruised, adult, and strange. When you think about this era of Astari Nite, what songs would belong on a mixtape that represents it?

For sure, here’s my mixtape. Check it out. …Often, I would play them for inspiration during the time of writing Medications In Bloom.

Trash — Suede
Sappy — Nirvana
How Deep Is Your Love — Bee Gees
Sometimes Always — The Jesus And Mary Chain featuring Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star)
Ruiner — Nine Inch Nails
Computer Blue — Prince and The Revolution
Babies — Pulp
Then He Kissed Me — The Crystals
Ghost of You — Rosegarden Funeral Party
Nancy Boy — Placebo
C’mere — Interpol
Ladykillers — Lush
Cherry Bomb — The Runaways
Jackie Down The Line — Fontaines D.C.
I’ll Fall with Your Knife — Peter Murphy
Daniel — Elton John
Nightshift — Commodores

Tell us about the revamped versions of “Miss Rain On My Parade” and “Unisex Games.” What led you back to these two songs in particular, and what did you want to bring out in them this time around? To my ears, the differences are subtle but meaningful, with a slightly more alt-rock edge.

Originally, Medications In Bloom was meant to be only four songs! Once we listened to how the progress of the EP was coming along, we thought to ourselves, those two other tracks need to be revamped and saved from sounding like they caught mono. I mean, I totally was digging the original versions, however, now that we saved them both, I kind of feel like they love me.

There’s a feeling of early Lollapalooza alt-rock magic running through parts of the EP: that collision of glamour, weirdness, distortion, romance, and outsider confidence. If you had a time machine and could attend one of the festival’s early years, which edition would you choose, and who would you make sure to see?

Oh geez, 1992 was a proper year for Lollapalooza, yea that would be the one I would travel to. Checking out Lush, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Pearl Jam for sure. I would totally be purchasing those band T-Shirts.

Gothic rock has always had roots reaching back into the 1960s: The Doors, Nico, psychedelia, theatrical pop, and then into glam through Bowie and Roxy Music. The late-80s and early-90s alternative era seemed to reconnect with a lot of those origins in a rawer way. Do you feel Astari Nite is consciously reaching back toward the source material of alternative music rather than simply referencing later goth or darkwave formulas?

Happily, I blame the universe for inviting Astari Nite into our 90’s alternative era. It’s just where my band is at in life. Exploring all these new thoughts and feelings is pleasant. Change is a necessity! Can you imagine all of Basquiat’s art being the same, over and over again?

Mychael, I’ve always felt your vocal style taps into a theatrical 60s lineage—the kind of tradition Bowie absorbed through Anthony Newley, and that later found its way into singers like Rozz Williams. How conscious are you of that theatrical history when you sing, and how has your approach to performance changed over the years?

I believe that we never really know what we sound like. We just sort of have a slight clue that resonates to us when thinking about it or maybe that’s just me, tone-deaf and in denial. We all have someone special that we admire. Some people praise the Devil while others pray to Bowie! As a child, often my grandmother would sing songs from The Beatles loudly, perhaps something sparked interest hearing those tunes throughout my home.

There’s a surrealism to the lyrics on the EP, at times evoking Bowie’s cut-up approach, Oblique Strategies, or even The Beatles’ use of the sound and feel of words as part of the melody. But there’s also real narrative poetry here, with lines that feel funny, wounded, glamorous, and bleak all at once. How did you approach lyric writing on this record?

Very nonchalantly! Nothing was second best. What originally was written lyrically, never vanished.

“Why Are You So Lame” has a strange and infectious tension to it: industrial-tinged alt-rock, pre-Pretty Hate Machine rock-driven Wax Trax energy, synth-pop, and psychedelic alternative music all rubbing shoulders. It feels nostalgic without sounding like a direct copy of any one past era. What can you tell us about the writing and production of that track?

Yes, this is one of my favorites, everything about this song is beautiful to me. I’ll have you know that Illia (Co-founding member of Astari Nite) orchestrated the music. Simply magical. As far as lyrically, the song is deeply personal exploring feelings of being let down by friends, people that I love. Conversations that seem to be never-ending and yet, always the same. You know, everything that is just peachy for my mental health.

“Dry Shampoo X” has a bright, bruised pop quality, but the lyrics carry this oddball heartbreak—“Broke apart at the super mart / Sort of strange how you broke my heart.” How did that song come together, and what made it the right track to receive a video?

My guitar player Howard Melnick had a jingle he was working on some time ago! Last year when he introduced it to me, I had a vision as to where it should gravitate towards. During this time, I was big into Pulp and Suede and then we kind of lived happily ever after. As for the video, Danny Ae (keyboardist – bass player) and I were on vacation in North Carolina, messing around with the magical mushrooms, we thought to ourselves, this song rules, lets make a video and so we did. Him and I together, with no care at all. Friends in a mansion, running around fields of grass. Saying hello to animals on a farm! Yep, life is strange and we are here to live it!

Can you tell us about the video for “Dry Shampoo X”? It has a nostalgic early-90s feeling to it, almost like something discovered on late-night cable or a worn-out VHS tape. What visual references or emotional atmosphere were you chasing?

Exactly, all of that is true that you mentioned! I like to think Danny was influenced by horror films while playing director. Sort of a low budget 90’s quality film. For the most part, I think we were chasing rainbows in the sunlight and then into the dark.

“Lennon Yellow Tangerine” is one of the most playful titles on the EP, but the song itself feels slippery and strange: part psychedelic pop séance, part glam nursery rhyme, part romantic shrug. What sparked that song, and how did the imagery begin to form?

So, once again my beloved Danny Ae and Howard made magic musically! The song was originally intended for their side project – Snow Bros. After indulging a little bit more, they realized what they created was an Astari Nite song. A sucker for wild mood swings, I imagined what it would be like to leave someone a proper voicemail.

“I Lack Nutrition” may be the most overtly post-punk and gothic track on the EP, with that Cure-like bassline, icy synth pads, and a lyric that turns heartbreak into something almost bodily: lack, hunger, absence, depletion. Do you think it’s important to keep a darker emotional anchor like this in the Astari Nite vocabulary, even as the sound evolves?

I think as an artist it’s important to act upon what comes naturally! I’ll always have something sappy to write / sing about, it’s just the life I lead.

The title Medications in Bloom is such a strong phrase: beautiful, clinical, funny, and a little doomed. What does it mean to you, and how does it connect to the EP’s recurring ideas of validation, romance, glamour, decay, and self-preservation?

My mother has not been doing well for quite some time. My life for the past four and a half years consists of doctor visits, chatting with nurses, buying her flowers that make me sneeze, my mind wandering about childhood memories while holding her hand. I do my best to stay healthy mentally. Sometimes it can be such a drag doing this alone. Nevertheless, whenever her prescription is re-filled, I’m quickly notified. One day I received that reassuring alert and thought to myself, YAY, “Medications In Bloom” again.

The record was mixed and mastered by Hillary Johnson at Kale Shelter Studios. What did Hillary bring to the final shape of the EP, especially in balancing the band’s darker atmosphere with this more immediate alt-rock and glam-rock energy?

Hillary is a genius! In fact, New York City should have a parade named after her. The love that she poured into the Medications In Bloom EP will never leave my heart. I explained to her how stupid I am though I would like my songs to sound like this and she did just that. Melodies I never knew existed were brought to light. Her creativity levels are fascinating. Her pure honesty is what shaped the EP and colored it wonderfully.

You have several shows coming up, including New York’s Red Party, a return to Wave-Gotik-Treffen in Leipzig after previous appearances in 2015 and 2022, Florida dates, Bats Over Indy, and Absolution Fest. What does returning to WGT mean to Astari Nite, and how do you imagine these Medications in Bloom songs changing the energy of the live set overall?

WGT is self-expression! For Astari Nite to be invited to play for a third time makes me feel brighter than a rainbow. Coincidentally, it seems that Astari Nite has always introduced our new era in Leipzig. So, we will play the Täubchenthal on Saturday, the 23rd. Evidently, I am still gloomy, just a little more colourful and outrageous in my poetry.

After Medications in Bloom, where do you feel Astari Nite is headed next? Does this EP feel like a doorway into a larger era, or more like a strange, glittering snapshot of where the band is right now?

Story telling in the form of music videos for a few more songs off Medications In Bloom has my attention. We also begin recording this summer for our future album. In the meantime, I would love to get back to celebrating the life of my puppy Frankenstein. You know, he was my best friend for eleven years. I miss him so much!

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Photo: Alice Teeple. Taken at A Murder of Crows Festival, 2025
The post “Forgive My Mystique Gaze” — Astari Nite Shares Video for “Dry Shampoo X” and Dives Into the Irreverent Alt-Rock Romance of “Medications In Bloom” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Source: Post-Punk.com

-> >;Auf ihrem Zweitwerk "Écailles de Lune" ("Moon Scales") besannen sich ALCEST wieder stärker auf ihre Herkunft aus dem Black Metal, wobei sie ihre auf dem Debütalbum "Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde" entwickelten Markenzeichen jedoch keineswegs vernachlässigten. Die französischen Post-Black Metal Pioniere schufen auf ihrem Erstling einen schimmernd, träumerischen Sound, dessen andersweltliche Schönheit sie gleichzeitig definierte – und den sie seither stetig verfeinert haben. -> >;
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Auf der musikalischen Ebene, verschmelzen ALCEST in sich ruhende, halbakustische Passagen, sich wiederholende hypnotische Muster und eingängige Melodien mit Ausbrüchen von schroffen Gitarrenriffs und heftigen Schlagzeugattacken. Einen ähnlichen Kontrast und komplementären Effekt wendet Bandkopf und Gitarrist Neige bei seinen Stimmeinsätzen an. Während sein Klargesang zwischen einem warmen, dunklen Tonfall und einer sanften höheren Stimmlage pendelt, brechen immer wieder unvermittelt verzweifelte Schreie und wütende, geschwärzte Kehllaute durch – bis sich die weicheren Gesänge wie eine unaufhaltsame Welle wieder durchsetzen. -> >;
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"Meine Inspiration für dieses Album floss besonders aus dem Meer sowie der Energie und dem Hochgefühl, welche sich einstellten, als ich in den Nächten vor dem Ozean saß", offenbarte Neige zum Schaffensprozess von “Écailles de Lune”. "Die See erscheint dann schrecklich faszinierend, geheimnisvoll und ebenso schön wie furchteinflößend." -> >;
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Über die Jahre wurde die Musik von ALCEST mit diversen Etiketten versehen, von denen Post-Black Metal, Post-Rock, Shoegaze und Blackgaze die gängigsten sind. Doch wie immer man die ursprünglich in Avignon beheimatete und nun in Paris ansässige Band kategorisieren möchte, ihr Sound ist bis heute einzigartig geblieben. Ein weiteres typische Element ihrer Alben besteht in Konzepten oder thematischen Motiven, die sich durch die jeweiligen Songs ziehen. Auf "Écailles de Lune" handelt es sich um eine Geschichte der Wandlung. "Die Geschichte dieses Albums stellt keine Metapher für den Tod dar", schrieb Neige. "Für mich dreht sie sich im einen Mann, der sich wortwörtlich dafür entscheidet, seine Welt für eine andere zu verlassen. Es geht mehr um einen Übergang in einer andere Realität oder Existenzebene."-> >;
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Für all jene, die den Fußspuren diesen Mannes auf der Reise zu einem anderen Ort folgen wollen, bieten ALCEST den Schlüssel an. Wer seine Augen schließt, um "Écailles de Lune" zu lauschen, reist in eine Welt voller musikalischer Wunder und atemberaubender Schönheit – aber Vorsicht: Auch die Rosen der Anderswelt tragen Dornen.-> >;
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LP (lim. blau-marmoriertes Vinyl) inkl. bedruckter Innenhülle, Schutzhülle und Poster

Source: Prophecy

-> >;Nach ihren frühen EPs "My Angel" (1991) und "Constellation" (1994) veröffentlichten ARCTURUS im Jahr 1996 endlich ihr sehnsüchtig erwartetes Debütalbum "Aspera Hiems Symfonia". Ihren Bandnamen hatte die Norweger vom hellsten Stern der nördlichen Hemisphäre abgeleitet, und auch ihr Sound war offenkundig von der explodierenden Black Metal Szene ihres Heimatlandes beeinflusst. Während berühmte Protagonisten wie ULVER-Leitwolf Garm und MAYHEMs Hellhammer weiterhin mit von der Partie bleiben, musste Emperor-Gitarrist Samoth auf "Aspera Hiems Symfonia" durch den Saitenzauberer Carl August Tidemann ersetzt werden. Außerdem stieß auch ULVERs herausragender Bassist Hugh "Skoll" Mingay zur Band. Trotz ihrer hörbaren schwarzen Wurzeln wagten ARCTURUS musikalische Experimente wie ein seltsam sonorer Gesang, der mit durchdringenden Schreien kontrastiert wird. Sverds cineastische Keyboards, technisch anspruchsvolle Gitarrensoli und weitere avantgardistische Elemente, lassen die Band aus Oslo bis heute als progressive Innovatoren gelten.-> >;
-> >;
Tracklist:-> >;
1. To Thou Who Dwellest In The Night-> >;
2. Wintry Grey-> >;
3. Whence lt; Whither Goest The Wind-> >;
4. Raudt Og Svart-> >;
5. The Bodkin lt; The Quietus (...To Reach The Stars)-> >;
6. Du Nordavind-> >;
7. Fall Of Man-> >;
8. Naar Kulda Tar-> >;
-> >;
Gatefold-LP (hellgrün/schwarz marmoriert) inkl. Beileger, gefütterter Innenhülle und Schutzhülle

Source: Prophecy

-> >;Besonders reichhaltige und vielseitige Musik entzieht sich oft einer einfachen Kategorisierung. Auf ihrem sechsten Album "Acou" begeben sich MOON FAR AWAY auf eine musikalische Entdeckungsreise auf den Spuren der magischen Natur der Töne. Die Band aus der subarktischen Stadt Archangelsk im Norden Russlands erforscht den mythologischen Kreislauf des Universums, indem sie jeder Phase seiner Existenz bestimmte Klangwelten und Stile zuordnet – die von archaischer und folkloristischer bis hin zu liturgischer, klassischer und sogar experimenteller Musik reichen. MOON FAR AWAY wurden von der Erkenntnis inspiriert, dass die Welt in vielen alten Legenden sowohl mit einem Klangereignis beginnt als auch endet – von der Äußerung eines Wortes, über wahrhaftige Musik, bis hin zum Urknall der Wissenschaft. Auf "Acou", was auf Altgriechisch "höre!" bedeutet, sind das Wort (lógos) und die Musik (mousÄ�kḗ) ebenso grundlegend für die Substanz des Universums wie die klassischen Elemente Erde, Feuer, Wasser und Luft. MOON FAR AWAY werden mitunter als "das Herzstück des russischen Gothic Folk" oder "die russischen Dead Can Dance" bezeichnet – was auch für "Acou" als eine durchaus plausible Zuordnung erscheint. Ihre Musik wirkt bei einer oberflächlichen Betrachtung leicht und sogar verträumt, sie strahlt aber gleichzeitig eine Gravität, Würde und leidenschaftliche Ernsthaftigkeit aus, die diese Songs von einfachem Pop trennen – obwohl sie ebenso eingängig wie melodisch klingen. Mit "Acou" legen MOON FAR AWAY ihr bisher reichhaltigstes und komplettestes Album vor, das alte ebenso wie neue Freunde aus einem breiten Spektrum stilistischer Vorlieben ansprechen wird. Dazu zählen sicherlich Fans von DEAD CAN DANCE, ALCEST, WARDRUNA und vielen anderen – obwohl sich diese einzigartige Band aus dem Norden Russlands von den zuvor genannten eindeutig unterscheidet. Um festzustellen, ob es auch dem eigenen Geschmack entspricht, gibt es nur einen Weg: "Acou"! Höre!-> >;
-> >;
Tracklist:-> >;
01. Acou (Prelude)-> >;
02. Acou-> >;
03. Steel, Light, Love-> >;
04. Look, The Human Flocks...-> >;
05. Soulofkey-> >;
06. 17 Years-> >;
07. To Count Her Names-> >;
08. Turquoise-> >;
09. What Way Your Rose Grows?-> >;
10. How Do The Moons Walk On Grain-> >;
11. Acou (Coda)

Source: Prophecy