…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,”…
Category: post-punk
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.
Holyoke, Massachusetts post-punk outfit Landowner aren’t the type to sit still. Their sound is agitated and animated, their relentless rippers rife with taut basslines, manic shouts and wiry guitar riffs. And, fittingly for a band that’s always in motion, they’ve returned with another new album, Assumption, which is out via Exploding in Sound, and rife with abstract meditations on modern life, surging rhythms and a hypercaffeinated and infectious jangle-punk sound that’s as fun as it is anxious.
Landowner guitarist and vocalist Dan Shaw went long, breaking down each of the songs on the group’s latest album, explaining some of the origins of the songs—like how a handful of them were written during paternity leave…
Much has been written about the Transatlantic fallout of punk rock, with every crevice of the era meticulously scanned in the hope of a lost classic. Whilst Circle X’s fractious run, two albums and two EPs, over a span of seventeen years, might not signify complete unknown status to seasoned crate-diggers, their minimal place in the history books belies their brilliance.
Formed in 1978, in Louisville, Kentucky – by brothers Rik and David Letendre, alongside Tony Pinotti and Bruce Witsiepe – Circle X emerged from the ashes of the city’s very first punk bands No Fun and The I-Holes, surfing the shockwaves created by punk rock. The band swiftly relocated. First to New York, then Dijon, and back to New York again, all the time evolving and mutating…
Two years on from their ambitious debut, Hysterical Strength, the North Yorkshire-born but now London-based six-piece DEADLETTER return with their sophomore album, Existence Is Bliss. Across twelve tracks, their evolved, multi-layered sound underpins lyrics that explore what it means to truly live, rather than merely exist, in an increasingly tumultuous world where life can be extremely challenging.
Shortly after recording their previous record, the band faced challenges of their own. A line-up change that came mid-album campaign saw saxophonist Nathan Pigott, who has a background in jazz, step in to fill the boots previously occupied by Poppy Richler.
In recent years especially, saxophone has had…
Joseph Oxley has long made music that feels like tuning in to a pirate radio station broadcasting from the 1990s. As TVAM, his go-to staples are saturated guitar, acid keys, dreamy shoegaze-frayed vocals, and beats like the stamp of a thousand Doc Martens.
Ruins, however, flicks the dial towards something far more personal, its once-bright palette now refracted to near-monochrome.
The emotional shift is immediately obvious. “Comfort Collar” opens with a heavy-footed pulse and a smear of synth like blue neon through rain-streaked glass. It’s oddly comforting in that slightly seamy way a goth disco can be. From there, the record moves through titles like “The Gloom,” “In Memory” and “The Haunted,”…
Ceremony returns with their thrilling new live album, Live at the Hollywood Palladium. Relapse Records drops the live album on February 24th, 2026 – marking the 2 year anniversary of the band’s hallmark performance to the very day with this special release.
The album sees the seminal punk/hardcore band headlining at The Palladium in Los Angeles. The sold-out show celebrated the anniversary of 2010’s critically acclaimed, and sought-after Rohnert Park LP. Live at the Hollywood Palladium captures the sheer intensity of Ceremony’s presence through a full set list and encore of Hardcore, Punk ragers that span the band’s years as revolutionary force in the scene.
Featuring Rohnert Park played live, and choice…
In the beginning, there was This Heat. Charles Hayward and co traversed the disused pie factories and damp warehouses that suffused South London, and the resultant music was something seriously challenging: dread-laden, perversely fun, janky, dancey, genre-collapsing. Some believed it encompassed post-punk.
…Based in South London, MPTL (‘My Pussy Tastes Like’) Microplastics describe themselves as an “8 person industrial folk collective playing chronoplastic ballads of the future / folk music for a polymer people / stiob-eulogies arranged in the canon of the desecrated harp / crisis songs for the exploding (micro)plastic inevitable” (or 8PIFCPCBOTF / FMFAPP / S-EAITCOTDH / CSFTE(M)PI, for short). They are also…
Golden Toad is the solo project of Al Brown, former co-creator of indie-psychers Japanese Television. He’s also made music videos for the likes of UNKLE, Lambrini Girls, Idles, and Deap Vally.
His solo debut Unite the Worms happens to be released twenty years after the extinction declaration of the Costa Rican Golden Toad, the last confirmed sighting of which occurred all the way back in 1989. This Golden Toad, however, decided to hole himself up in a garage in the Garden of England last summer and set about concocting a psychedelic passage through shifting time, riding kosmische grooves and electronic festoonery along the way.
You can picture Al Brown, hunched over his guitar, lost in the hammer ons of eighth…
The original lineup of LA post-punks Wall of Voodoo are one of the most unsung groups of their era. Marc Moreland rivaled Gang of Four’s Andy Gill for his ability to pack tension into minimal riffs — and added Morricone flourishes that set him apart from all the other angular guitarists of the time. Joe Nanini was an equally inventive drummer with a massive arsenal of percussion instruments and rhythm boxes at his disposal. And frontman Stan Ridgway brought a distinct noir element, thanks to his use of synthesizers, paranoid lyrics, and a vocal style like no one else’s. Together, nobody sounded like them, and their debut EP — with its spine-chilling cover of “Ring of Fire” — and first two albums are all great.
Wall of Voodoo had a breakthrough with…
Backtracking a bit from previously issued volumes of the series, Musik Music Musique 1979: The Roots of Synth Pop functions as a sort of prequel, mapping out the blueprint of the new wave revolution of the ’80s, from synth-heavy post-punk and art rock to some of synth pop’s earliest chart-toppers. It’s not as if electronic instruments weren’t prominent in popular music before 1979, but synthesizers were clearly well on their way to being a defining characteristic of the musical landscape. The set starts with the Buggles’ “Technopop,” proposing a name for the music of the future — Kraftwerk would later give a song a similar title on 1986’s Electric Café, which originally had the working title Techno Pop as well, and decades later, a reissue retroactively bore…
…remastered 40th Anniversary Edition originally recorded and mixed by the lauded British sound engineer Ian Burgess.
One of the first major bands on the Chicago punk scene, the Effigies arrived as first-era punk was being supplanted by hardcore, but their sound reflected little of either. The band was less interested in speed than impact: their songs were simple but intelligently constructed, their lyrics were angry but artful meditations on urban alienation with shout-along choruses, and their performances were muscular and made clever use of dynamics with the guitars grinding and slashing. The Effigies’ influence in the Midwest (especially in their hometown) was significant, and one can hear the faint echo of their early work…
Black Doldrums’ set at the 2025 Fuzz Club Festival is being immortalised on wax with this super-limited live album release. The London-based band founded by Kevin Gibbard and Sophie Landers fall somewhere between dark neo-psych intensity and gothic post-punk melancholy that’s all the more powerful live on stage.
Their first appearance at the Fuzz Club Festival – which takes place every year at the Effenaar in Eindhoven, the Netherlands – was in support of their latest studio album ‘In Limerence’, released in late 2024. Their discography-spanning set comprised five tracks from the new album (‘Hideaway’, ‘In Silence’, ‘Dying For You’, ‘Tarantula’ and ‘Painting Smiles’), two from their 2022 debut full-length Dead Awake…
A journey through the musical life of Gary Young, the subject of the SXSW-winning documentary Louder Than You Think and the wild polymath best known as the original drummer for indie royalty Pavement: from early hardcore punk and post-punk recordings to the merry chaos of Hospital, whose ‘Plant Man’ ended up being an improbable MTV favorite.
Original music created by Noah Georgeson and Edward W. Dahl is presented alongside ultra-rare Pavement live tracks and something quite special: a Gary Young-penned oddity that Gary’s old friend Scott ‘Spiral Stairs’ Kannberg turned into a suitably trippy musical track (spiced with some Stephen Malkmus feedback yowls), recorded for the movie shortly before Gary’s passing in August 2023.