…remastered from original tapes, and comprises three previously-unreleased tracks, two rare cuts, and live version.
A milestone in post-punk experimentation, Desire captures Tuxedomoon at their most cinematic and atmospheric. Its mood of haunted romanticism and its category-defying blend of music have kept it influential among generations of musicians exploring the intersections of rock, electronic music, cabaret, minimal, jazz and classical music.
Desire was written just before the band’s relocation from San Francisco to Europe. It was recorded in the UK and released in 1981 on Ralph Records, The Residents’ own label, before being reissued in 1987 on CramBoy, the imprint created by Crammed Discs to host the band’s output.
Category: post-punk
About two minutes into “Burn,” the second track on Black Eyes’ Hostile Design, Daniel Martin-McCormick yelps “Kill your shitty parents/let their blood flow free”: a signal that, in the two decades since the band last released new music, it has lost none of its anger. Born at the start of the century in the D.C. punk scene, Black Eyes — with two drummers, two bassists, two singers, and a guitar that sounded like Rowland S. Howard possessed by the ghost of Sonny Sharrock — upended the genre’s norms, melding no-wave noise and funk, percussive assault, and obtuse but guttural screeds against Bush-era America. By the time their second album, Cough, came out, a free-jazz influence had taken center stage, with songs that sounded like the work of a band ripping…
Recorded live in their hometown of Nottingham on 30th November 2024 to a sold-out crowd, this incredible show was part of the 25th anniversary celebrations of the iconic Bodega venue. It’s rare for Sleaford Mods to perform for such a small crowd, which made this show feel even more intimate and memorable.
Combining the revolutionary fury of punk and hip-hop with the bleakness of austerity-era Great Britain, Sleaford Mods capture the spirit of their time with blunt eloquence. Andrew Fearn’s minimalistic, intentionally cheap-sounding loops, guitars, and keyboards provide a fitting backdrop as Jason Williamson rants about politics, injustice, and pop culture with outrage, scathing humor, and occasionally, rough-edged poignancy.
“When it’s looking dark, punch the future in the face,” Kurt Vile advised us many years ago. Few bands have taken on this challenge with more gusto than Home Front, the fearless synth punk duo from Edmonton whose sophomore album, Watch It Die, arrives with the violent catharsis of landing a haymaker to the teeth of death.
“In this time of madness / How does this beauty survive?” Graeme MacKinnon shouts on the album’s soaring title track. The answer, it seems, is to cram into a studio with your best friends and crank up your instruments until they’re about to give way.
It’s a formula that MacKinnon (vocals, guitar and bass) and his bandmate Clint Frazier (synths, key, drums and programming) first explored on Home Front’s acclaimed 2023 debut,…
Swiss label Bongo Joe has been an unstoppable force of cosmopolitan post-punk gems this year, and perhaps no single-artist release encapsulates their 2025 sound more cleanly than 2, the trilingual sophomore release from Yalla Miku.
The lineup has shifted since their first album. However, the sonic scope remains very similar, as the group trace their roots to the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and North Africa, as well as the Genevan scenes that the group’s members curate and populate regularly.
What they do within that scope, though, has more complexity and texture than the debut. As with so many of Bongo Joe’s recent releases, 2 gives the distinct impression of being the audio equivalent of a zine: it’s multivocal, unpredictable,…
Missionary Girls have been gaining traction in the local Portland scene, described as a promising new band that is “doing something off the wall and unique”.
The debut album “Bleeding Out” by the Portland, Oregon-based post-punk band Missionary Girls was released on September, 2025. As the album is very recent, extensive reviews in major music publications are limited at this time; however, snippets from local Portland sources and specialized music sites offer an initial impression of the album’s sound and style.
The album is firmly rooted in the post-punk genre, incorporating elements of dark pop. The sound is characterized by a “gritty, high-energy” feel and “raw hooks”.
This 12-track companion album to the documentary about the band features 2023 remasters of such songs as “Whip It,” “Girl U Want,” and “Beautiful World” plus covers of “Working in the Coal Mine” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
Acclaimed filmmaker Chris Smith (Wham!, Fyre, 100 Foot Wave, and Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond) captures the gloriously radical spirit that is DEVO – a rare band founded by a philosophy; a Dada experiment of high art meets low, hellbent on infiltrating American popular culture. Through never-before-seen archival and interviews with Mark Mothersbaugh, Bob Mothersbaugh, and Jerry Casale, DEVO relishes in the highs, lows, surreal moments and incredible performances of a 50-year career, embracing the spectacle…
On Virtue Falters, Ritual Howls made a significant leap forward, pairing their sweeping gestures with songwriting that was just as compelling. They continue their evolution on Ruin, delivering a set of even more tightly constructed songs that reestablish pounding, pulsing industrial beats as the backbone of their sound.
From the first notes of their sixth album, it’s clear Ritual Howls’ mastery of atmosphere remains. The glowering twang of “Follow the Sun” conjures images of long black leather jackets and swirls of clove cigarette smoke, but it also boasts hooks that claw their way into listeners’ heads and stay there. Ruin is also a showcase for Paul Bancell’s increasingly commanding baritone: on “In the Morning,” his booming delivery…
“Ladies Night,” the third song off Crippling Alcoholism’s epic new LP Camgirl, is the best song the harrowing Boston sextet has put to tape – so far. It’s not the post-punk-inspired group’s most carefully crafted composition to date. Or its darkest. Or most intricate. Or even its best performed. But the tune, somehow the second-shortest offering on the new 15-song outing, embraces the subversiveness Crippling Alcoholism has always toyed with (and, yes, proudly continues to toy with) to tremendous effect. And we don’t just mean the subversiveness of frontman Tony Castrati’s lyrics, which often teeter among the morose, the horrific or, simply, the NC-17-stamped. But the group’s ability to co-opt musical phrasings or timbre, especially from…
“I don’t wanna go where I can’t feel a thing,” pines Just Mustard frontwoman Katie Ball on ‘Dreamer’, the intricate and skittering track at the heart of the forever-rising Irish indie kids’ third album. “I just wanna make it feel good.”
From their shoegaze-leaning lowkey 2018 debut ‘Wednesday’ to the more industrial yet kaleidoscopic breakthrough-threatening 2022 follow-up ‘Heart Under’, the Dundalk five-piece have traded in a genre haze that lands somewhere around ‘noise rock’ but always dabbles in darkness. This time, they’re looking for something more.
Always a gut-punch hidden in an enigma, they’ve found fans in and support slots with their globe-conquering countrymen Fontaines D.C. and gothfathers themselves The Cure…
It feels an indictment to label someone’s work as gloomy, as though it’s something that happens and not something that’s chosen. But on her latest album, Sabbatical, Rosa Anschütz leans into goth as a genre in a deliberate way. And it’s not only because she features the cawing of crows on a track. Sabbatical is deeply atmospheric with a gloom often enveloping it.
While opening track ‘Eva’ is awash with swampy dissonance, it is a misdirect, for the gauzy effects and layers of wordless vocals hide the sharper edged sounds lower in songs.
Anschütz’s previous work touched on a variety of electronic genres from a dark folktronica to vibrant techno, now replaced by the hard thud of her post-punk bass lines and a voice pulled…
The Sheer Action of Fini Tribe is a colossal retrospective anthology curated and designed by the band. Compiled from the years 1982 to 1987, it includes a wealth of archival photographs, an essay by original member Andy McGregor, who also designed the sleeve, and essays by longtime friend Shirley Manson (Garbage, Goodbye Mr. MacKenzie) and author Alastair McKay, an early champion of the band. The release features the first legendary John Peel Session, produced by Dale Griffin and originally broadcast in May 1985. “This compilation was a long time in the making, a labour of love for the band, showcasing our most productive years as a six-piece. The compilation of tracks – from professional BBC recordings to live performance and rehearsal room demos – gives as…
After getting back home after touring behind their 2023 album Datura, the duo behind Lorelle Meets the Obsolete found themselves in a tough spot. Low on funds and lacking inspiration, they pondered giving up music entirely. Eventually the spark began to flicker again, and they began to work on new songs. What they came up with was different enough from previous work — both the dreamlike psychedelic waves of the early records or their corrosively experimental more recent sounds — that they thought maybe they would change their name. They decided to keep the name the same and with the help of Suuns’ live mix engineer Antoine Goulet recorded 2025’s Corporal. The record certainly covers some new ground for the duo — many songs have…
While their debut album, Howling at a Concrete Moon, was drenched in modern anxieties and struggling to find one’s place in today’s society, London indie rock foursome Pynch are looking more inward on their second record together, trying to decipher what it really means to be an indie band in the confusing world they attempted to paint a picture of two years ago.
Sadly, Beautiful Noise doesn’t do a great deal in answering these pertinent questions. What Pynch have attempted to do across the ten songs on this follow-up is explore a greater variety of sounds, bringing in shimmering synth textures and occasional glitchiness that layers over the walls of guitar noise that pervade through the majority of the record.
The brainchild of drummer Connor Cummins and vocalist Blair Tramel is the epitome of speed. Snooper‘s songs run at a blistering pace, with angular riffs sneaking in one ear and out the other, propelled by frenzied percussion. The Nashville five-piece – completed by bassist Happy Haugen, drummer Brad Barteau, and guitarist Conner Sullivan – squeeze in as many ideas as possible in tunes shy of two minutes, this off-the-cuff musicianship making their 22-minute 2023 debut album, Super Snõõper, feel twice as long and substantial. The wild silliness of abandoning a groove for a totally different one halfway into a barely minute-long song, just for the sake of it, is what makes them addictive.
On Worldwide, Snooper have smoothed out…
There are no half-measures in the do-or-die world of VLURE, whose uncompromising first two singles (‘Shattered Faith’, ‘Show Me How to Live Again’) set this precedent back in 2021. Blurring the lines between jagged post-punk, euphoric synth melodies and an industrial heart, the intensity of the Glasgow five-piece is a product of the catharsis that shapes it, spearheaded by Hamish Hutcheson’s thick, tough vocals.
Four years later, their debut album Escalate supercharges those founding principles to the maximum. After touring non-stop until 2023, the band took most of last year off to write, a sign of their extreme dedication to this body of work. Nosediving further into electronic soundscapes, Escalate still retains the core fact…
Los Angeles-based trio Automatic are known for playing synth-based, danceable post-punk with dystopian lyrical themes. Is It Now?, their third album, expresses the same sort of late capitalist paranoia and dark, subtle humor as their previous efforts. However, the three bandmembers have undeniably improved as musicians, and the record is easily their best-sounding and most accomplished effort to date. While their music previously resembled stripped-down, ESG-style dance-punk with droning Suicide synths and occasional New Order-esque basslines, here they’ve streamlined their sound a bit, coming closer to ’90s alternative dance. Opener “Black Box” has shuffling bongos and buzzing, swooping synths along with coolly detached, echoing vocals.
Since Dublin’s Sprints exploded out the gate with the stunning Letter to Self at the start of last year, they’ve proved a relentless force across the live touring circuit.
Matching their furious off-kilter racket with an equally poignant and powerful performance, their schedule recently climaxed with an early afternoon set at Glastonbury, fittingly pairing their political punk with matching backdrops calling the amped up crowd to action. Time on the road, it seems, has done little to quash their outrage – a time that has also birthed All That Is Over, their second album in two years and one that carries much of the visceral frustration that its forebearer began, rolled out at breakneck speed.
One significant change sees founding guitarist…
With the band garnering more and more acclaim with each album as Ian Devaney and associates expanded their somber synth pop sound to include more experimental ’70s touchpoints alongside vintage inspirations ranging from goth to the New Romantics, Nation of Language’s third album, Strange Disciple, became their most highly lauded yet, even topping Rough Trade’s list of best vinyl albums of 2023. The group re-enlisted Strange Disciple producer Nick Millhiser (Holy Ghost!) to record their Sub Pop label debut, Dance Called Memory. Still experimenting with recording techniques as well as their style spectrum – Strange Disciple, for instance, found them incorporating more live instrumentation than before – Dance Called Memory includes what Devaney…
If you dare to enter the void, expect to hear Heartworms soundtracking the journey. Jojo Orme has set the UK DIY circuit aflame with her singular performance style, while NME hailed her as “your new favourite band of the year” upon the 2023 release of her debut EP A Comforting Notion. Now, teaming up again with Speedy Wunderground producer Dan Carey, Heartworms has unleashed her tightly written, pulse-raising debut album, Glutton for Punishment.
In this survey of man’s most masochistic impulses, Heartworms expands on the gothic dance-punk that first garnered her acclaim. Let’s be clear, she can still absolutely rip a riff like she did on ‘A Comforting Notion’ – the sheer physicality of the guitar on ‘Jacked’ will have…