There’s something about trees and storms in Iti Eta No. Heimat’s third album is an exploration of collage and landscape – not just the physical landscape of the French countryside where Olivier Demeaux (Cheveu, Accident du Travail) and Armelle Oberlé (The Dreams, Badaboum) moved after lockdown, but it’s visceral, emotional imprint. A violent storm left trees scattered across the road, and that image inspired the atmosphere of Iti Eta No. Heimat’s early records were a deliberate exploration of ‘Eastern’ tonalities, but Iti Eta No sees the group moving away from that kind of orientalist imagery. It feels more refined, like deviant pop made dance-floor accessible thanks to Krikor Kouchian’s (L.I.E.S, I’m a Cliche) mastering. There is a distinct sense of…
Category: post-punk
30th anniversary remaster. Included is a second disc with 7 bonus tracks from the era, some unreleased, some remixes and reinterpretations.
It’s been observed that while the bleeding edge of what’s cool continues onward, there are always plenty of people still exploring styles long deemed outdated, sometimes finding something new and exciting as a result. Such is the case with Pittsburgh’s Lowsunday, led by open fan of ’80s British post-punk rock Shane Sahene. Drawing inspiration from such pioneers of emotional, thrilling music as the Sound, Bauhaus, the Chameleons, and Echo and the Bunnymen, vocalist/guitarist Sahene originally formed and led the group in the mid-’90s as a quintet called Low Sunday Ghost Machine.
It’s a great time to be an indie band making anything that sounds post-punk. Dry Cleaning and Black Country, New Road have outlasted their initial hype cycles and begun chugging toward longevity. Geese have invited a stunning amount of breathless adulation from prestige media who were indifferent to indie rock five seconds ago. Poptimism’s cultural capture is over! Everyone grab a delay pedal and arpeggiate a sus chord! People who watch Saturday Night Live will know who you are!
It’s funny, then, to consider “Careers in Acting,” the opening salvo of A-Rhythm Absolute. On it, Sunday Mourners frontman Quinn Robinson disavows the trappings of success, swearing off an acting career and internet fame and instead promising to “make it big in the parking lot.”
A band always keenly attuned to the nihilistic undercurrents of life in Hong Kong, David Boring has returned after a seven-year hiatus with their second album and a darker, harder, more machinic sound. Their 2017 debut, Unnatural Objects and Their Humans, was a ragged collage of delicate yet crushing post-punk poems driven live by the urgent, confrontational delivery of vocalist Janice Lau. It captures the band’s brash early period, which has morphed as Hong Kong has also fundamentally shifted in recent years, weathering political unrest, a pandemic, and economic pressures that reshaped daily life and the cultural landscape.
Liminal Beings and Their Echoes, released by Damnably and UN.TOMORROW, documents…
Throughout history, most religions and cultures have a rough idea about how the world might end. Abrahamic ones, like Christianity, Judaism and Islam prophesy their own individual doomsdays, fronted by damning omnipotence, while Dharmic religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism believe a new world will replace ours when it kicks the bucket. For Sleaford Mods, though, the world has already been diagnosed as terminal.
This decline is precisely what drives Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn’s latest studio album, The Demise of Planet X. In Britain’s slow pitch drop towards the £9 meal deal, don’t expect any large-scale Armageddon, nor a spiritual rebirth: The apocalypse has already happened, and all we’re left with is Fred Again, artisan…
There’s a moment on ‘Cruise Ship Designer’, one of the more playful tracks on Dry Cleaning’s third album, where it seems like singer Florence Shaw is finally getting something off her chest, something that might be deeply relevant to the band’s creative process. It’s a declaration that she makes just as the song clangs to a standstill, almost obscured by the grinding guitars: “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work,” she states boldly.
Ever since the London four-piece released their debut EP Sweet Princess in 2019, there has been a temptation to approach Dry Cleaning’s records as a puzzling cryptic crossword or surreal Wordle cut-up, turning each song into a breadcrumb trail (as their distant spoken-word ancestors Slint might have it). “It’s a Tokyo bouncy…
Few bands capture the absurdity of modern life with as much grotesque glee as Viagra Boys. On their feral fourth record, Viagr Aboys, the Swedish outfit distil their signature blend of scuzzed-out post-punk, sharp observational humour, and dance floor-ready grooves into their most refined – and deranged – work yet.
The album kicks off with ‘Man Made of Meat’, one of the band’s catchiest offerings to date. A more danceable, less scuzzy lead single, it retains the sleazy lyrics and absurdist humour as Murphy sneers his way through lines about your mum’s OnlyFans and scoring free women’s sweaters from LL Bean. He even lets out a full-throated burp halfway through the first verse for good measure. As Henrik Höckert’s bass and…
Vazz formed in Glasgow during the early ’80s, and initially consisted of vocalist/lyricist Anna Howson and multi-instrumentalist Hugh Small. With Howson’s ethereal harmonies floating over Small’s sparse drum machines and mysterious guitar hooks, the duo’s music fell somewhere between coldwave, post-punk, and dream pop. The five-song mini-album Your Lungs and Your Tongues (released in 1986 by Cathexis Recordings, also home to records by Fini Tribe and Pink Industry) was one of a handful of vinyl releases the pair made before splitting up near the end of the decade. As Small resurfaced during the 2010s with solo piano and ambient compositions, Vazz’s scant ’80s discography was rediscovered and revived in several different configurations…
The progressive post punk ramble and rock of Infinite Games, by Consumables, the fierce NYC-based art punk quartet, is a big bass laden banger with funky sax embellishments, with snappy free form drumming, layers of guitars and a super dense vocal patter expanding the sonic narrative more as the song pushes forward, rolling and picking up intersecting musical layers as it goes.
Razor-cut licks, shout-along choruses and surprising bouts of vulnerability — this new project produced and co-written by Ben Hozie shares much with his other outfit, Bodega. The band, formed around the dual guitars of frontman Kyle crew and Dylan Joyce, bassist Miles Fox and Hector Guillen on drums sweetens mayhem with a touch of melody. A sax floats through, blearily,…
For The Unutterable, Mark E. Smith settled in with the (mostly) new lineup that debuted on 1999’s The Marshall Suite and recorded yet another gorgeous, rambunctious, only occasionally scrutable masterpiece. Though it’s not overly chocked with new ideas (especially for those already well-versed in the Fall canon), The Unutterable benefits from excellent songwriting and the crisp production of soundman extraordinaire Grant Showbiz, on loan from Billy Bragg.
The far-too-short opener “Cyber Insekt” immediately launches the listener into a dense, chaotic sound world that’s only amplified throughout the album. The heavy rockabilly guitars and pummeling drums heard on The Marshall Suite are practically overwhelmed…
Beggars Banquet has opened the archive once again, letting a familiar duststorm roll through the room as Fields of the Nephilim’s Dawnrazor rides again.
The timing feels almost fated: the UK band will soon carry their peculiar strain of Gothic Americana and occultism back into the West for the first time in years, appearing in Houston for Dark Ceremony in April 2026. For a group whose entire aesthetic grew out of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns—that widescreen collision of dust, danger, and myth, their return out West lands like a vision completing its long arc. With that rare appearance on the horizon, this remaster sharpens the album’s grain, tension, and frontier grandeur back into present focus.
There’s a particular brand of madness that occurs when an artist gets bored of their own tricks. Jake Brooks didn’t experience some dark night of the soul; he just got sick of guitar and ran out of cassette tapes. Sometimes the most radical artistic shifts have the most mundane origins, and Factory Reset, Retail Drugs’ third full-length record in fifteen months, is what happens when rage gets funnelled through a laptop instead of a four-track: the sound of someone taking an industrial drill to a server room mid-breakdown.
The album imagines a near-future where you can erase your past self. “Which I guess you can kind of do on the internet, sort of,” Brooks notes with characteristic understatement. This dystopian premise hangs over the record’s…
For the first time on vinyl, a lost gem of 90’s garage punk for the darkly inclined. Recorded in 1997 by Greg Talenfeld (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Pavement, The Walkmen) and never released before, The Night Has Eyes is a hidden treasure unearthed from the fertile end-of-the-century NYC underground scene.
In Ally Pankiw’s recent documentary, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, we’re reminded that Sarah McLachlan’s all-women tour once found itself in the crosshairs of televangelist Jerry Falwell, who condemned Lilith’s proto-feminist folkloric inspiration-and, by extension, the festival’s pro-choice/queer-positive mandate-as a paragon of demonic depravity. If the charges seemed absurd at the time, they’re absolutely hilarious…
There are few bands like Sand. Borrowing from jazz, industrial, techno and post-punk, somehow everything is mixed up to produce some seriously bowel-shifting grooves. Their 1999 debut Beautiful People Are Evil sees the York band still working on their formula which had been perfected by the time of 2002 follow-up Still Born Alive.
Sand musically walk the line between different worlds. They have played with, on the one hand, dance artists such as Robert Hood, Patrick Pulsinger, Andy Weatherall and Carl Craig and on the other hand with groups such as God Speed You Black Emperor, Squarepusher , Add N to X and ESG. Sand play diverse live events. They have performed on stage with the Karas Dance Company in Tokyo (where they played onstage with…
Available for first time in over 35 years, Clock DVA’s White Souls in Black Suits – originally released in 1980 as a limited-run cassette on Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records – now returns in a newly remastered edition, reissued via The Grey Area of Mute and expanded with four bonus tracks from the same era.
Led by the visionary Adi Newton, Clock DVA remains one of the most enigmatic and shape-shifting acts to emerge from Sheffield. Their catalog spans mutant funk, noir jazz, and coldwave electronics, with White Souls in Black Suits, paired with the additionals tracks, offering an insight into the early morphology of their sound. The album features a lineup including Newton (voice, synth, clarinet, bowed electric guitar,…
The album features the film’s original songs by the post-punk band Idles, as well as the movie’s original score composed by Rob Simonsen (Deadpool & Wolverine, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, The Way Back, It Ends with Us, The Age of Adaline, (500) Days of Summer, Nerve, Foxcatcher) and performed by Idles. The soundtrack will released digitally by Pertoza/Partisan Records. As previously reported, a first song (Rabbit Run) has already been released as a digital single last month.
Aronofsky enlisted Idles to capture the energy of the 1990s New York punk scene that colors Caught Stealing. “I built Caught Stealing to be a roller coaster of fun and wanted to supercharge the film by main lining a punk sensibility,” the director said in a press statement.
After more than a decade away from European stages, legendary Australian rock outfit The New Christs are finally returning. To celebrate this long-awaited comeback, Wild Honey Records and FOLC present The Burning of Rome: Selected Works, a career-spanning double vinyl compilation personally curated by frontman Rob Younger.
Rob Younger, best known as the voice of Radio Birdman and a defining figure of the Australian underground, formed The New Christs in the early 1980s as an outlet for his darker, more intense musical visions. Over the years, the band has become an essential part of the global rock’n’roll landscape, blending raw garage energy with post-punk menace, sophisticated songwriting and a ferocious live presence.
“Some people only exist to prang me the fuck out,” decrees the softened Scouse accent of Unreal’s unreliable narrator Ned Green amidst the hurley-burly of early album highlight ‘Sleepers, Awake’. Amidst the catharsis of its geometric, interlocking guitar rhythms, and bee-in-yer-bonnet brass maelstroms, Green’s spoken-word narrations are cut-glass, surgical observations that glimmer with the same wry wit that scaffolds the best work by Richard Dawson, Neil Blackwell, Chris Morris, etc. He searches for deeper meaning in the commonplace; wants ecstasy in the everyday; and, should his ultimate goal be to be the first rock and roll singer to reference the ‘Shaver Only’ plug socket, he succeeds on all counts.
Legss have pottered along nicely in…
Avant-garde DIY project Kling Klang are one of the most exciting acts emerging from Liverpool’s underground scene right now. Toying with a concoction of experimental sounds, the collective has spent the last four years reinventing itself through the melodies of frantic keys, bassy electronica, buzzing synths and gothic arrangements.
Originally founded by Joe McLaughlin, Amy Corcoran and Peter Smyth, over the years, King Klang has shape-shifted its lineup and is currently composed of Part Chimp members McLaughlin and Jonny Hamilton, alongside a selection of other contributors.
Half Life, explores post-punk through a different lens. In a tracklist of ten beautifully…
This is Independent Project Records’ own take on digging deep and unearthing revelatory treasures from its 45-year history. A trip through the past, present and future of a label that since 1980 has made the most prominent part of its name, that resounding “Independent”, not a trendy epithet but a mission. This two-album compilation is an invite to join the dots and find out what makes Afterimage – the early ’80s band the Los Angeles Times once called “LA’s own Joy Division” – and Alison Clancy – the artist making ethereal ambient dream pop in the basement of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, where she works as a dancer – kindred spirits. You’re invited to find similarities in the way The Ophelias reclaimed San Francisco’s unfettered psychedelic rock roots…