The dark folk artist Marissa Nadler first met Stephen Brodsky, frontman of the heavy Boston bands Cave In and Mutoid Man, at Saint Vitus, the Brooklyn metal enclave that finally just reopened at a new location. Back in 2019, they released the collaborative album Droneflower and toured together. Now, it looks like they’re back and they’re using Droneflower as their band name.
The post Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky – “Sky Burial” & “Drive It In” appeared first on Stereogum.
An ache moves forward
He steps back
I step forward
It all turns black
He steps forward
I step back
Some relationships develop their own terrible choreography: one person advances, the other retreats, and a moment of contact sends both back through the same steps. On Annihilate, underground post-industrial producer and vocalist Lana Del Rabies gives that exhausted dance a setting of metallic percussion, dissonant strings, and voices that seem to drift through the walls. The prospect of closeness carries a threat of disappearance, as though reaching for another person might cost you the outline of yourself.
Released through her own Feral Crone Recordings, the single revisits the gothic industrial territory of her 2023 album STREGA BEATA. Among her most accessible recordings to date, Annihilate brings its melody into clearer view within a dense, unsettling arrangement, with echoes of mid-career Nine Inch Nails, early Chelsea Wolfe, Dead Can Dance, and Godflesh. Written and produced by Lana Del Rabies, the track features bass, guitar, and additional instrumentation from Zach Wise, formerly of experimental black metal band Hissing.
Deeply reverberant string tones open the song, their discord setting the room askew before a soft metallic beat begins carrying it forward. Creaking noises punctuate the haze, while thudding distortion stays buried beneath the mix, suggesting a heartbeat accelerating at the approach of something unwelcome. Her singing is soft, breathy, and eerily close; farther away, wails stretch across the recording like cries attempting to reach the living. The whole thing suggests a deserted Victorian factory, its decaying rooms still occupied by machinery and something considerably harder to identify. That dusty, corroded atmosphere recalls the gothic industrial aesthetics of the 1990s, with every small sound acquiring an uncomfortable physical presence.
The lyrics begin with images converging in reverse and a moment suspended in time. From there, the exchange becomes a sequence of opposing movements: his withdrawal prompts her advance, his approach sends her backward. “Push pull fade” reduces the relationship to its recurring mechanism. Hearing her name briefly promises recognition, but the next attempt at contact leaves her grasping in vain. By the time the title enters the refrain, desire reads as a force capable of wearing away the person who feels it.
Directed and edited by Lana Del Rabies/Sam An, the video translates that instability into grainy woodland footage, overlapping figures, and close-ups that dissolve before they can offer much certainty. Pale dresses and fabric catch the light against dense foliage; raised arms, blurred faces, and bodies close to the ground recur through successive layers of exposure. Black-and-white images give way to smeared color, turning the setting into something resembling a damaged reel of folk horror. The footage was shot by Jane Slater, whose video credits include Dildox, Brood Faye, and Sacred Skin, and Vox Porter of Sleek Teeth.
Watch the video for Annihilate below:
Lana Del Rabies began with early experiments sampling female pop musicians into noise tracks, a practice reflected in the project’s name. An has since developed a body of work spanning industrial music, gothic electronics, and experimental heaviness, examining human brutality and the prospect of apocalypse. Her recordings have earned attention from The Quietus, Metal Hammer, and Anthony Fantano, while her live performances have taken her to festivals including Roadburn, Coldwaves, Sled Island, Prepare the Ground, Northwest Terror Fest, and Soulcrusher. She has toured with Author & Punisher, 3TEETH, Pharmakon, JPEGMAFIA, and John Wiese, and opened shows for artists including clipping., Midwife, HEALTH, and Bell Witch.
In 2025, An founded the art-focused label Feral Crone Recordings and released Le Temps Viendra and Omnipotent Fuck. She is currently working on a studio record with former members of Hissing, due in 2027.
Listen to Annihilate below and order the single here.
Lana Del Rabies joins gothic rock vocalist Echos for a West Coast tour this October. See the dates below:
Follow Lana Del Rabies:
The post “It All Turns Black” — Lana Del Rabies Explores Desire and Self-Erasure in Ghostly Video for “Annihilate” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
Amon Amarth have just released their new album, The Allfather Awakens, via Metal Blade Records, and this time the Swedish Viking metal institution did something it had never really committed to before: it wrote and recorded the album one song at a time, start to finish, before moving on to the next.
Guitarist Johan Söderberg sat down with Rodrigo Altaf to walk through the process, and he wanted to clear up a misconception right away. The band did not simply record differently in the studio; it treated every song on the album like its own single from the moment it was written.
“We said we’re going to treat each song as a single,” Söderberg said. “We wrote many songs at the same time, but every song should get the same focus and treatment. That’s how we said it. And then when we came to the studio, we also recorded them fully before we moved to the next song. So we finished the whole song and then moved to the next song.”
That meant no stacking drum takes across the whole record before circling back for guitars, a method plenty of bands lean on. Amon Amarth did each song top to bottom before touching the next one.
Treating every track like a standalone single changed how Söderberg and co-guitarist Olavi Mikkonen approached hooks and choruses too, since nothing could lean on momentum built by the songs around it. It also fed into a bit of friendly rivalry between the band’s two riff writers: “I think definitely we have a little different styles, but it’s not that different,” Söderberg said of writing alongside Mikkonen. “I think that Olavi is a really good songwriter, and that makes me want to become better too. It’s like we have a little competition between us. We want to top each other.”
The album’s second single, “Eight Legs of Thunder,” pulled its title and chorus straight out of Söderberg‘s amp before a single lyric existed. The riff came first, and it came loud: “I was playing with my real amp, with a big 412 speaker,” he explained. “When you play a galloping rhythm like that, it really sounds like a big horse is running right next to you because of the punch from the speaker. So then I thought, we need to make a song about Odin’s horse.”
There was just one problem. Odin’s actual horse is named Sleipnir, and Sleipnir does not exactly beg to be shouted in a chorus: “That’s not very catchy if you want to sing Sleipnir in the chorus, right?” Söderberg said. “So I started to think, what can I call the horse instead of Sleipnir? I just started humming this melody like, ‘Oh, eight legs, yes, eight legs, oh, eight legs of thunder.’ That’s catchy. That’s a good chorus.”
He recorded a rough version himself, the band signed off on it, and when vocalist Johan Hegg wrote the actual lyrics, he built them around Söderberg‘s original chorus idea. The song’s video takes a detour from the band’s usual Norse mythology visuals into a cowboy setting, which was not the original plan. Söderberg wanted a modern racetrack, complete with a competition horse sporting eight legs instead of four to explain the winning margin. The crew could not pull off the racetrack concept, so the cowboy angle came in as a replacement.
“Some fans are like, well, what the fuck are the cowboys, this is not working,” Söderberg said with a shrug in his voice. “But we just do it to amuse ourselves.”
The Allfather Awakens also includes “Upphaf,” Amon Amarth‘s first entirely acoustic track in its 13-album history. The band had wanted an acoustic number for its live set for years, and the melody itself dates back to roughly 1998, but nobody could figure out how to record it properly.
Söderberg said an early demo overcomplicated things badly: “He made a demo of it, but he recorded it in a super complicated way, every note by itself in layers and layers,” Söderberg said. “When we were in the studio and listened to his demo, it’s like, oh, this is gonna take forever to re-record it like that. Then we just thought, let’s simplify it. I played strumming chords on one guitar, you play the melodies on the other guitar, and then add some orchestral elements and choirs to build it up more.”
Stripped of distortion entirely, the song still sounds unmistakably like the band that wrote it, a point Söderberg did not argue with: “That’s always been our approach too, that we need it to have catchy, memorable melodies and riffs,” he said.
Sonically, the band swapped its more recent 5150 amps for a return to Marshalls on most of the record, chasing a more organic, old-school guitar tone. Not every song got the same treatment, though. Downtuned cuts like “Die With a War Cry” leaned on Engl and Peavey amps instead for a heavier edge. Live, none of that distinction survives, Söderberg said, since the band runs through a single Kemper profile for the whole set, adding a delay for leads and a separate clean tone as needed.
The album’s title track, “The Allfather Awakes,” almost did not exist. Söderberg said the band considered the record finished until producer Jacob Hansen asked for one more song, something he called a “stadium song.” Mikkonen had a batch of unused riffs sitting around, showed them to Hansen, and the track came together fast in the studio. Söderberg still is not entirely sure how it ended up as the title track: “I don’t even know why you want to make that the title track,” he said. “I think it was just coincidence, probably.”
“Ascending Like an Eagle” closes the album as a lyrical continuation of “The Serpent’s Trail” from 2022’s The Great Heathen Army, and Söderberg said the connection runs musically too, both songs sharing the epic, slower style the band typically saves for album closers.
Asked whether decades of a locked-in identity ever feels limiting, Söderberg admitted there are ideas that simply do not fit under the Amon Amarth banner, though he has an outlet for them: “When I write Amon Amarth songs, I try to keep it in the Amon Amarth style, and it’s kind of difficult to get away from that,” he said. “But I also make songs just for fun on my free time, and then I try to make different genres like doom metal or goth music, just for fun.” He and his wife have several just-for-kicks bands, with one released song between them so far, and no plans to turn any of it into a proper release.
Söderberg also weighed in on the band’s arena-level status, something it reached without softening its extreme vocals or overall heaviness: “We definitely think our music should be crowd-pleasing and should be sing-along friendly and memorable,” he said. “I think that’s why we have attracted a bigger audience. Now we can play arenas even though we are still a growling death metal band. There aren’t many bands with growling vocals that reach this kind of audience. I think we’re kind of like a gateway band for people who don’t like growling vocals. Then they hear us, and they start to like the melodies, and then they get into the growling.”
Amon Amarth heads out on the road this October alongside Orbit Culture and Soilwork across Europe, debuting an entirely new stage production the band has not even seen in full yet: “It’s going to be massive, and everything is new,” Söderberg said. “That’s going to be really cool to see how that takes place when we actually see it.”
As for a North American run, Söderberg confirmed it is coming, just not this year.
The post AMON AMARTH’s Guitarist JOHAN SÖDERBERG Breaks Down “The Allfather Awakens” Album, One Song At A Time appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.
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