Morning Star finds Këkht Aräkh arriving at a truer, more refined version of himself. Recorded between Berlin and Stockholm, the album emerges from a period of intense personal and artistic growth, blending aggressive black metal passages with immersive, textured soundscapes that feel both intimate and vast.
Since his origins in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, Dmitry (a.k.a. Crying Orc), the sole mastermind behind the project, has sought a distinctive path within black metal. This vision unfolded through his debut Through the Branches to Eternity EP (2018) and the albums Night & Love (2018) and Pale Swordsman (2021), establishing a signature tension between ferocious, visceral black metal and delicate, introspective ballads.
Tag Archive: Sacred Bones
The Vancouver-based musician Ora Cogan exists in liminal spaces, or, rather, her music does. It transcends anodyne signifiers — folk-gaze and psych rock — to reach an indeterminate realm, where her prayer-like songs float like mist. Ephemerality prolongs. Her songs are the stuff of dreams until they morph into a nightmare: the nymph-like Cogan will lure you to a river for ablutions before drowning you like Omie Wise, or something like that. Yet you’re happy to bear witness — in fact, ecstatic.
Yes, Cogan has a similar folksy gothic aesthetic to PJ Harvey‘s White Chalk era. You know, full of witchy incantations, where ghosts linger in the shadows. Spirits in the ether — all that normal stuff. Yet being a mystic will only…
Whenever Lust for Youth‘s Hannes Norrvide and Malthe Fischer collaborate with Croatian Amor’s Loke Rahbek, the results are dramatic. Rahbek was a member of the band when they transformed their music into sweeping synth pop on albums such as 2014’s International, and though he departed after the release of 2016’s Compassion to concentrate on Croatian Amor’s fractured yet flowing soundscapes, they never truly stopped working together in some form.
Sparked by a 2023 performance at the Sydney Opera House, All Worlds presents the next phase of Lust for Youth and Croatian Amor’s partnership. For inspiration, Norrvide, Fischer, and Rahbek looked to the field recordings and traditional music launched into space on Voyager 1 and…
While working on their second album, two members of Mandy, Indiana — the Mancunian quartet fronted by a French valkyrie named Valentine Caulfield — were faced with their own corporeality. Drummer Alex Macdougall underwent surgery for a hernia and, after doctors found a lump, had half of his thyroid removed. Caulfield lost most of her vision in one eye. The 10-hour days that comprised the recording sessions could have broken them. Instead, the band’s distinctive sound — an alloy of industrial, post-punk, and ’80s neo-noir soundtracks — emerged titanium-plated and electrified. URGH is both headier and more visceral than anything Mandy, Indiana have made before. This isn’t body music or brain music; it’s spine music, homed in on the bony…
By the end of 1980, after 10 years waiting for the world to catch up with them, things were looking bleak for Suicide. The pioneering New York electronic project of keyboardist Martin Rev and vocalist Alan Vega had released a sinister self-titled debut in 1977; the album was met by hostility from crowds and mocked as “puerile” by Rolling Stone. Playing on tour with Elvis Costello, the Clash, and the Cars, they’d been pelted with shoes, coins, and even knives. ZE Records had backed May 1980’s glitzier follow-up, Suicide: Alan Vega and Martin Rev, putting the duo in the expensive Power Station studios with the Cars’ Ric Ocasek on production. But the label had hoped for a dance-pop record, telling Ocasek to think of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” for reference, and Vega felt it…
Winner of the Golden Lion Best Film prize at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, Father Mother Sister Brother is the eagerly-awaited new film from Jim Jarmusch, featuring the collaborative soundtrack by Anika and Jim Jarmusch. Funny, tender and astutely observed, this is an intimate exploration of the universal intricacies of family dynamics. Starring Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat.
Jim Jarmusch and Anika first crossed paths at the Sacred Bones 15th Anniversary celebration in 2022, where both Anika and SQÜRL performed. Jim was immediately struck by Anika’s performance, while Anika admired Jim as a mentor who had stayed true to his unique vision throughout his career.
Night CRIÚ evokes clandestine ceremonies in forest glades, covert rituals taking place in the depths of a cave. Crepuscular and ghostly, this is a realm where an intoned, reverberant voice meshes with ritualistic choirs, undulating brass, methodically bowed strings and unhurried percussion.
Musically, the lineage could be the solo work of Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard or Anna von Hausswolff at her most reductive. If the fifth solo album from the Ireland’s Hilary Woods were employed as the soundtrack to the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová or Werner Herzog’s 1976 Herz aus Glas, it would be a seamless transposition – this music exists beyond place and time.
For Woods, getting to this point has not been linear. From 1999, she was the bassist of…
…includes 25 never-before-released cues.
When Halloween Kills appeared in the midst of John Carpenter‘s renaissance in the 2010s and 2020s, it was clear that the creative juices between him, his son Cody Carpenter, and godson Daniel Davies were in full flow. As with their soundtrack to Halloween [2018], which kicked off a new trilogy of films in the venerable horror movie franchise, the music for the second installment is classic Carpenter, albeit fuller and richer-sounding than it was on 1978’s original Halloween.
Carpenter and his team find even more ways to reinterpret Halloween’s classic theme, whether piling mountains of synths on it (“Halloween Kills Main Title”), setting it to a four-on-the-floor beat (“Halloween Kills End Titles”), and…
A band made up of longtime players on the U.S. Northeast D.I.Y. punk and hardcore scene, Brooklyn’s Lathe of Heaven instead explored dingy, goth-inflected post-punk on their debut album, Bound by Naked Skies, a record that was also immersed in sci-fi themes. (The quartet is named for the Ursula K. Le Guin novel.)
While still revealing cited influences like the Cure, Musta Paraati, and A Flock of Seagulls, the follow-up, Aurora, finds them dipping their toes into the more melodic-harmonic, romantic side of these influences — at least on songs such as “Just Beyond the Reach of Light,” “Kaleidoscope,” and the title track — while also slightly expanding subject matter along similar lines. With its bouncy chorus and jangly echo, and lyrics…
“I will fly around the world just to forget you” are the opening words of “It Hits Harder,” the first track on New Radiations. The song is about a farewell. The album ends with “Sad Satellite,” where the titular heavenly object is used as a metaphor for distance, when the gap is increasing between the narrator and the subject: the latter a character who is “sucking me dry” and “took me for ride”.
It’s not hard, then, to construe the tenth album from the Nashville-based Marissa Nadler as one permeated with partings – cleavages which create distance. If analysed, detachment can bring perspective and understanding. But Nadler’s lyrics instead seem to be a form of reportage, oblique vignettes setting-up New Radiations as a commentary on disconnection.
John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, Daniel Davies – Lost Themes 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (2025)
…featuring two previously unreleased tracks from the original recording session — “Cruisin’ With Mr. Scratch” and “Dominator.”
Upon its initial release, Lost Themes was praised for its evocative soundscapes ranging from horror to science fiction, each track conjuring a distinct atmosphere without the need for accompanying visuals. The expanded edition of Lost Themes not only celebrates a decade of John Carpenter’s standalone musical journey but also enriches the album’s legacy with new material that captures the spirit of its original sessions.
Whether revisiting this masterpiece or experiencing it for the first time, listeners will find themselves immersed in Carpenter’s hauntingly beautiful worlds once again.