The third solo album by New Orleans D.I.Y. musician Urq (Spllit, W-9), This Dismal Village marks his Exploding in Sound label debut.
It’s his first to be recorded entirely on a four-track cassette Portastudio, almost ditching any digital elements in the process (although some chords from a phone app were looped into “Kings in Bed,” for instance). A dingy, lo-fi blend of playful prog-pop, druggy psychedelia, angular punk, and alternate tunings, it’s a dystopia-themed concept album that travels through time with stops in the Dark Ages, the 1950s, and the present, and each track represents a location in the village. While not recommended for those in a dour or earnest mood, cynicism is welcome.
Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have…
Category: post-punk
Liberation Hall delivers a compelling archival release with Live ’81–’85, a double LP celebrating the legacy of Romeo Void for Record Store Day. The collection presents the band in its natural habitat on stage capturing performances across Ann Arbor, Albany, London, and Berlin.
The album functions as both a time capsule and a reaffirmation of Romeo Void’s distinct place in early 1980s new wave. Across its 17 tracks, Live ’81–’85 draws material from all phases of the band’s short but influential career, including It’s a Condition (1981), Nvr Say Nvr (1981), Benefactor (1982), and Instincts (1984). The performances feel immediate and unpolished in the best sense—raw, urgent, and driven by the band’s signature fusion of post-punk tension, saxophone accents…
Released at the end of the initial period of Wire’s 3rd Act – after Aend and before the band’s post-Bruce Gilbert re-invention – Read & Burn 03 never quite got the attention it deserved. However the opening track 23 years too late, with its tour narrative text and motorik rhythm stands as one of the band’s finest achievements of any era in the view of both core fans & the band. The original ep, 3rd in the read & burn series and the one not compiled on to the send album, was the last non-historic release by the original wire line up of colin newman, graham lewis, bruce gilbert & robert grey and has never been properly released on vinyl. The 2026 version brings the original 4 tracks and adds 3 more. While some of the tracks originated as part of the 2021-2022 sessions…
“Learn to hate in the light of day,” is the refrain from the first track of Station Model Violence’s totemic, self-titled punk record. Right off the bat, the band parlays the stakes and tone of their work, grinning their teeth through a quarter smile, but not the gums; not all of their fleshy parts displayed at once.
Whether a subconscious or overt homage to the patriarchs of post-punk, a twelve string guitar intones unceasingly, familiarly, on “Learn to Hate.” Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” — with its clanging opening 12-string and prophetic ’80s punk production — lures the listener for only so long before the synth hook snags on. The twelve string and driving beat on “Learn to Hate,” by contrast, announces that the melodic shifts…
…What makes ‘Rare & Deadly’ truly unprecedented is that every format tells a different story. The CD, cassette, vinyl, and digital editions each feature their own unique tracklisting, a fractured release strategy that is almost unheard of. No single version contains the “complete” album.
A Place to Bury Strangers return with Rare and Deadly, a collection of ‘B-sides, abandoned experiments and forgotten fragments’, pulled from front man Oliver Ackerman’s “personal archive of late night recordings, blown out tapes and half finished sessions”.
It is their first full-length release since 2024’s Synthesizer, and given the consistency of the sound and the fluency of the songwriting on the digital version, it is easy to listen to it as…
May the spring of amazing music sourced from the original UK DIY scene never run dry. Similar to other widespread, years-long U.S. macro-scene equivalents like mid-’60s garage rock or early 1980s hardcore punk, the well of UK DIY seems to be an inexhaustible resource. We owe a debt of gratitude to labels like Minimum Table Stacks, whose first foray into archiving UK DIY yielded a superb EP from long-lost Welsh group Violin Sect. It’s not an easy process tracking down band members, securing the rights, digging up unheard material, remastering the audio and presenting it with just the right amount of reverence — but not too much. After all, this cheeky, arch music was made by a generation that grew up watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus and…
The basic elements of This House’s sound will be familiar to anyone who followed G.W. Sok’s career before. A furious clangor of box-y drums, barbed wire guitar play and hoarse, poetic shouted lyrics all point towards the Ex, the long-running art-punk band that Sok left in 2008. His partner, Ignacio Córdoba, adds electronics here, in line with his own work, but the music mostly lurches and spasms with fierce, rhythmic punk intelligence. A couple of shadowy interludes — acoustic “Introduction to Poetry” and the ominous title track — hint at a less frenetic iteration of This House, but mostly these cut rattle with whip-sharp, multi-layered rhythms. Every element, not just drums, builds a beat architecture, jittery, not-quite comfortable setting for the songs.
Rennes-based, self-described feminist punk trio Île de Garde have an unusual configuration; synths (Cécile Aurégan), drums (Morgane Poulain) and low-key, mostly spoken word vocals (Klara Coudrais), but it proves to be a flexible and mostly powerful one. This six-track EP or mini album is their first release and it’s promising and varied enough to wish it was a full album, though not all its strands are equally thrilling.
Looking analytically at their songs, it becomes clear that Poulain is central to Île de Garde’s appeal. The synths are generally retro-‘80s flavored and provide the melodies, and the vocals range from delicate to imperious, but it’s the drums that seem most of all to determine the character of each song, with one exception that proves…
If you could distill the guiding philosophy of Robber Robber’s second album down to a single word, it would be the one that appears about a minute into “Avalanche Sound Effect”: “upend.”
With a frenetic, trash-can-clanging backbeat ricocheting behind her, singer and guitarist Nina Cates calmly repeats that word as if reciting her daily-affirmation mantra, transforming a word synonymous with upheaval and disorder into a source of strength and possibility.
Certainly, the Burlington, Vermont band can appreciate the value of a good coping mechanism: In January 2025, the building where Cates and drummer/partner Zack James resided caught fire. Though the couple’s apartment was spared any major structural damage, every…
Adult. have tracked the existential dread of late-stage capitalism, since Anxiety Always, but they’ve rarely done it with as much righteous anger as on Kissing Luck Goodbye. Following the more personal perspectives of Becoming Undone, Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus look outwards once again, decrying consumption, corruption, and creeping fascism as only they can. To meet the occasion, they pare down and sharpen up their music. Working with producer Nolan Gray and a new library of sounds, the duo offer some of their most cleanly recorded music with Kissing Luck Goodbye. The results, however, are far from commercial. Much like the forces they’re fighting, Adult.’s intent is disruption. “The chaos is what they want,” Kuperus growls on “R U 4 $ALE,”…
The “post-tour musings” album should be a privilege to make. It typically arrives a few years and releases into an artist’s career — that is, if they’ve been fortunate enough to be able to go out on the road. This is the very moment we find the Chicago-based trio, Stuck, in now. Off the back of 2023’s Freak Frequency, the band ventured overseas to perform their frenetic entanglement of janky post-punk guitar riffs across Europe and the UK, a prospect that’s becoming increasingly challenging for the majority of artists today. It seemed as though Stuck’s stock was rising. Therefore, it might come across as odd that within the first five minutes of their contagious new record Optimizer, we hear frontman Greg Obis exclaim, “My life was in decline!”
It’s instructive that The Twilight Sad’s first album since reducing to founding duo James Graham and Andy MacFarlane yields the most powerful version of the band’s cathartic soundworld. Perhaps the subject matter helped: It’s The Long Goodbye documents Graham losing his mother to dementia while simultaneously becoming a father, a real-life crossroads detailed with unsettling candour from the first line of the opening song (“And we slowly watch you go”).
To counterpoint the singer’s mournful Scots folk timbre, MacFarlane’s euphoric post-punk schemes roughen the shiny patina of 2019’s It Won’t Be Like This All the Time for a transcendent blend of New Order, My Bloody Valentine and, inevitably, The Cure. He’s previously covered…
…features the original album as well as sessions, B-sides, a live show from the time and a complete disc of demos from Chapel Studios.
Having exorcised enough bile for two bands on their rickety release Interim, The Fall loosen up their attitude, tighten up their delivery, and squeeze out a rocking album that relies heavily on its highlights. Fortunately, there’s plenty, most hitting with the thwack of the “Sparta FC” single or the Light User Syndrome album. “Pacifying Joint” is a punchy exercise in hooks and sheen, “What About Us” is snide Mancabilly of the highest order, and “Blindness” hypnotizes and chugs its way into the Top 25 original Fall tracks ever. Flashiest of the lot has to be a soaring cover of the Move’s hippy anthem “I Can Hear the Grass Grow,”…
It’s taken Sealed records more than five years to put this release together but finally it’s here. The one and only Bikini Mutants. The Bikini Mutants were from Yeovil, Somerset and part of the All the Madmen world. In their short life as a band they recorded two demos at Monitor Studios, Milborne Port in Somerset in 1982.
Let’s Mutate collects these two demos on one LP, along with a 20 page booklet featuring photos, lyrics, reviews, interviews and much more. The band played mostly in Yeovil and the West Country along with the Mob and the Review, and even though they were part of the West Country anarcho scene, the sound was a mix of scratchy post punk and indie pop. Members of the band went on to be in My Bloody Valentine and the Chesterfields.
Why it’s volume two from the Rotting Tapes series that’s being given a vinyl reissue, rather than volumes one, three or four is anybody’s guess, but why not? All four tapes contained two tracks each, all were recorded live in Tokyo in the first half of 1982, and all feature the duo Michio Kadotani (1959-1990, vocals/guitar) and Nanjo Asahito (bass), this time joined by an uncredited drummer. The group was well-named; although the music at times seems like impenetrable, formless sludge, there’s often a real beauty and poetry to it, too. When Rotting Telepathies performed together, there was, perhaps fitfully, a unique alchemy, and when it works, it’s glorious, presaging the more fully formed music of noisy, doomy Japanese bands like Gallhammer, but it’s also…
If we’re going with the Our Band Could Be Your Life framing, then Boston’s Black Beach are something like this installment’s Big Black-sinister, heavy and pummeling, steeped in industrial menace as much as punk or hardcore.
At times their abrasive post-punk reminds of Bambara’s more belligerent moments, but what’s so fascinating about their aesthetic is how much it shares in common with the early pioneers of noise rock-Scratch Acid, Jesus Lizard and the like-without going full-blown metal in their low-end or distortion boost.
Every searing and scalding guitar riff is made to draw blood, but still carries a vintage jangle to it-Black Beach are relatively restrained when it comes to actual noise, which is, frankly, pretty refreshing.
The most exciting and terrifying parts of dreams (or nightmares) are the ones we recognize. Familiar fragments collide and reassemble into something strange. Things we thought we knew are turned upside down or ripped apart and sewn together backwards. That unnerving thrill – the shiver of recognition followed by disorientation – is at the core of Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1, the latest collection of covers from prolific music provocateurs Xiu Xiu. Jamie Stewart, Angela Seo and David Kendrick warp and distort classics spanning decades and genres – from 1950s rock n’ roll to new wave, Robyn to Throbbing Gristle.
Xiu Xiu are no strangers to interpretation. Since the group’s inception in 2002, they’ve regularly paid homage to artists they revere – from…
The lyrics for Diagonale des Yeux’s debut album were written in the style of an exquisite corpse game, with members Laurène Exposito and Théo Delaunay taking it in turns to patch together ephemeral thoughts and themes in a mix of French, German, English and Spanish. The bizarre, multilingual stories that emerged match the French duo’s ramshackle, home-recorded sound, which features everything from toybox percussion to farmyard sound effects.
Their whimsical approach is anchored in the outsider pop and post-punk of ’80s Europe, which embraced discordant instrumentation and disaffected vocals. These 12 tracks are charmingly lo-fi, built around rudimentary synth and guitar melodies that often careen into…
Dog Chocolate, from London, make a fractious, fragmented racket, swarms of stinging discordant guitar notes pinging over the thrash of indeterminate drums. The singing, or rather chanting, is likewise agitated, like Tyvek or, perhaps, Uranium Club.
Bands like Dog Chocolate can write songs about anything, from potatoes left to sprout in the basement to ill-advised bushwacking expeditions next to the highway. One cheery punk song is all about treatments for facial blemishes (“Fungal Free 2023”). But the thing is, you don’t really notice what these songs are about; you follow them breathlessly as they pogo around the room. The band, too, often seems enamored of their juddering stuttering grooves. “You can’t just be…
When Hey Colossus released their debut album Hey Colossus Hates You in 2004, they turned heads, as one of the few bands experimenting with a sound that was both psychedelic and hardcore. Planting themselves at the heart of the noise rock scene, the group made it known that they were a product of roaring guitars and hellish screams. Their sound was raw, completely authentic and oozing with pure passion. Now over two decades into their craft, Hey Colossus has shifted a fair bit into the alternative space, leaving behind the helter-skelter punk that was once ingrained in their early work. After a two-year break, on Christmas Day last year, the psychedelic six-piece announced a brand new record Heaven Was Wild alongside a mini documentary.