Category: news

Vesperian is very happy to announce the signing of Hamburg-based power duo THE HEBRIDEAN SHEEP. The band first made a name for themselves with their wild clips on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. They built a strong following without releasing a single full track, only song snippets, and that was enough to catch the attention of […]

Lord Of The Lost frontman Chris Harms is following up his solo debut with Aporia, due January 22, 2027, through Napalm Records. That date happens to be his birthday, which says plenty about how personal the record is.

His first solo outing, 1980, arrived in February 2025 and landed in the Top 10 of the official German album chart. The Hamburg-based musician, producer and songwriter used it to make good on a long-held ambition to record an album entirely with 1980s equipment. Aporia builds on that groundwork, shifting toward modern electronics, eclectic soundscapes and synth-driven territory that sits outside the sound of his main band.

Harms has also released “Find What You Love And Let It Kill You,” a moody, dark track about passion exacting a toll, a blaze that may end up swallowing you whole. It is available on all streaming services.

Aporia will come in several physical formats, including a limited box set that adds a special bonus CD in a digisleeve.

It is also the first album Harms produced at his new base, Boogie Park Studios in Hamburg, after leaving Chameleon Studios in spring 2026 following several years there. The title comes from an Ancient Greek word for facing a problem with no solution. In philosophy and rhetoric, it marks the point where reasoning smacks into a wall, a purposeful kind of uncertainty. The cover art by VDPictures shows a Penrose Triangle, an optical illusion that breaks the rules of geometry, which suits an album built around paradox and ambiguity.

On Aporia, Harms opens himself up more than ever, and that exposure is what turns the album into a sonic diary and one of the more important entries in his catalog.

For Harms, the record is a chance to look back, confront himself honestly and connect with the present. The material tackles questions that would be far more comfortable to dodge. He instead faces his past mistakes, their consequences and the people who may have been hurt along the way. The outcome is a sincere record that needs little explanation and speaks for itself when given room.

Musically, Aporia follows Harms‘ habit of doing whatever feels right instead of following anyone. The 1980s flavor of his debut gives way to something darker and more reserved, or perhaps something that digs deeper because of that. Opener “U† I†” (You Die, I Die) sets the mood with a pulsing industrial beat beneath grim lyrics. The direct “Skipped A Beat” features Erk Aicrag of Hocico and Rabia Sorda, the first of three guests. Ryan Shuck of U.S. synth-rock outfit Julien-K, the successor to the legendary Orgy, appears on “You Are Not What You See.” Fellow Hamburg artist Swiss of Swiss + Die Andern joins for “Hallo Depression,” the only song sung in German. “On A Dreamless Night” summons inner demons, and closer “Dear Time” plays like an honest letter, looking back on mistakes and begging for a chance to rewrite them.

Aporia is available to pre-order here.

The post LORD OF THE LOST Frontman CHRIS HARMS Shares “Find What You Love and Let It Kill You” From Upcoming Album “Aporia” appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

Melbourne vocalist Karly Jewell’s has released Check Out, the final single from her second full length album, There’s A Jewell In Town, which on release debuted on the ARIA Australian Artists Chart at Number 3! Born from the deepest corners of grief, Check Out is an anthem for anyone who has ever felt like giving […]

The group’s album of the same name will be out tomorrow, October 02nd.

The post Descape’s “True Colors” Music Video Debuts appeared first on Theprp.com.

Swedish guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen has released the video for “Beyond Zeta Reticuli,” the second single off his new studio album, Hell Or High Water. The record is due Nov. 13 through Music Theories Recordings/Artone Label Group.

Malmsteen comments, “Inspired by my fascination with alien life, this instrumental combines big, heavy themes, strong melodies and intricate counterpoint — pure neoclassical fire.”

Press materials slot Malmsteen alongside Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Edward Van Halen as one of the players who built a new sound on the instrument from scratch.

The nine songs on Hell Or High Water were written with care and with the world kept at arm’s length. He first tried that approach on 2021’s Parabellum, partly because of how things were in the world at the time. The results were strong enough that he made it his standard method.

Malmsteen explains, “When I started making records, I would just take the songs I had lying around. Later on, I fell into a schedule — make a record, tour the record and then write the next record. Over the pandemic, I realised it was better to focus completely uninterrupted, so I stayed at home to write this album over the course of eight months. I had around 80 or 90 tracks finished, and then I had to decide which ones were the strongest.”

Writing, by his own account, is hardly a struggle. He leans on the building blocks of music and says he can build whatever a person asks for.

“Even without a guitar in my hands, the music just comes to me,” Malmsteen says. “It’s like that movie Amadeus. Mozart was getting music given to him in complete form. I understand the building blocks and can therefore build you anything you like. If you asked me to write you a death metal song, call me back in five minutes, and I’d have it ready for you. You want country and western or reggae? No problem. I can give you whatever you want. The language of music is simple. There are certain notes that belong together in whatever stylistic direction and sound pleasant to the ear. The ideas don’t come all the time, but when they do, it’s like an avalanche.”

“The pieces I choose for my records are like gifts that I capture because they amaze me. I’m very lucky in that sense.”

Lead single “Now Or Never” packs palm-muted riffing, baroque counterpoint melodies, soaring vocals and absurd dexterity into one track. It is Malmsteen in a nutshell, and the instrumental “Am Caprice/Hell Or High Water” in the second slot follows suit. “(On The) Battlefield” and “Eye For An Eye” carry some of his best vocal work to date. The instrumentals “Antikythera” and “Beyond Zeta Reticuli” take their names from scientific discoveries.

The closing track, “Father,” is the emotional high point. Malmsteen wrote it for his dad, who died last year.

“He was an amazing man,” Malmsteen remembers. “I was proud to have him as a father, and I loved him. I wanted to dedicate all of this to him, and that one particular track is for him. I wanted others to feel what I felt when they hear it. Niccolò Paganini once said, ‘One must feel strongly in order to make others feel strongly.’ It’s one thing to be a typewriter and another thing to be someone who writes stories that can touch people. That was always the point.”

After years of working with some of the top hard rock vocalists around, Malmsteen now handles most of the lead singing himself. His band includes keyboardist Nick Marino, bassist Emilio Martinez and drummer Kevin Klingenschmid.

Malmsteen put out the live album Tokyo Live in April 2025 through Music Theories Recordings. It was recorded at Zepp DiverCity in Tokyo on May 11, 2024, during his 40th-anniversary world tour.

The post YNGWIE MALMSTEEN Shares Music Video For “Beyond Zeta Reticuli” From Upcoming Album “Hell Or High Water” appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

In 19th-century colonial India, a girl’s future could be decided before she was old enough to have much say in it. Child marriage was common, and girls could be married years before they were old enough to understand what marriage would mean for their adult lives. Once the marriage had been performed, however, the question of what happened when the girl grew up was considerably less simple. Could a marriage entered into during childhood bind a woman who had never chosen it for herself? In the 1880s, that question found its way into a courtroom through the case of a young woman named Rukhmabai.

Rukhmabai had been married at eleven to Dadaji Bhikaji, who was nineteen. She did not immediately move into his household. Instead, she remained with her mother and continued her education, becoming an unusually well-educated young woman for the time. She read widely and followed the social reform debates taking place around her. As she grew older, Dadaji expected her to join him and begin married life. Rukhmabai had other ideas. She did not believe that a decision made for her when she was a child should decide where she lived, whom she lived with, or what happened to the rest of her life.

Dadaji took her refusal to court. He filed a suit for “restitution of conjugal rights,” a legal remedy inherited from English law and used in the colonial Indian courts. In practical terms, he was asking the court to order Rukhmabai to live with him as his wife. The case therefore involved more than a disagreement between two people. It raised an uncomfortable question about what a childhood marriage actually meant once the child had become an adult.

In 1885, Justice Robert Pinhey ruled in Rukhmabai’s favor. He concluded that the court could not simply force her into a marital relationship she had not consented to as an adult. Dadaji challenged the decision, and the dispute continued through further legal proceedings as the courts wrestled with Hindu marriage law and the colonial doctrine of restitution of conjugal rights. Eventually, Justice Farran issued a decree ordering Rukhmabai to live with her husband. If she refused, she faced six months in prison.

She refused.

Rukhmabai made it clear that imprisonment was preferable to being forced into a marriage she had never chosen for herself. She also took the argument outside the courtroom. Writing under the name “A Hindu Lady,” she published letters in the press about child marriage, women’s education, and the idea that a marriage arranged during childhood should remain binding for the rest of a woman’s life. The case attracted attention in both India and Britain, drawing social reformers and the press into an increasingly heated debate about marriage, consent, and the rights of women.

The dispute finally ended in 1888. Dadaji agreed to give up his claims in return for Rs. 2,000. Rukhmabai did not have to move into his household, and she did not serve the prison sentence that had been threatened. By then, however, the woman who had spent years fighting over the right to decide her own future had another plan for that future. With financial support from people who had followed her case, she went to England to study medicine.

She enrolled at the London School of Medicine for Women and trained at the Royal Free Hospital. Becoming a doctor was hardly an ordinary path for a woman at the time, and completing her medical education required further study in Edinburgh. Rukhmabai eventually returned to India as one of the country’s early women physicians. In 1895, she became Chief Medical Officer at the Women’s Hospital in Surat and later held the same position at the Zenana Hospital in Rajkot. She spent decades treating women and children and continued working as a doctor until retiring around 1930.

Her case also became part of the larger debate surrounding child marriage and marital consent that contributed to the passage of the Age of Consent Act in 1891. The law did not outlaw child marriage. Instead, it raised the age at which sexual intercourse with a wife was legally treated as rape under the Indian Penal Code. Rukhmabai’s case was one of several developments that pushed the subject of child marriage and the legal rights of girls further into public discussion.

The India in which Rukhmabai lived had laws and customs very different from those of today. Still, there is something unsettlingly straightforward about the problem she faced. A decision had been made about her when she was eleven, and years later, the legal system was being asked to make that childhood decision binding on the adult woman she had become. Rukhmabai spent years arguing that it should not. Then she went on to become a doctor, treating women and children in a country where women had only recently begun entering the medical profession. The marriage that had been chosen for her did not disappear from her history, but it did not get to decide what happened next.

The post She’s In Charge | Rukhmabai: Defying Tradition Through Education and Courage first appeared on FemMetal – Goddesses of Metal.

She minced no words in doing so either.

The post Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale Speaks Out Against Sexual Abusers In The Wake Of Reopened Cornell University Gang Rape Case appeared first on Theprp.com.

Recorded and released during the second half of 1965, Rubber Soul is probably the most pivotal album of the Fab Four catalog. At this stage in their career, The Beatles were the biggest act in the world. And they weren’t about to lay down their arms and get all comfy. Their success fueled a desire to improve, to make better records, to go where no recording artist had gone before. After Help!, this is exactly what they did.

Until Rubber Soul, Beatles singles were more revered than their albums. The UK and US catalogs were also mismatched, sometimes confusing. Aside from A Hard’s Day Night and Help!, UK Beatles albums had different titles than US Beatles albums, which were loaded up with A- and B-side singles. While the trend continued with having a different track listing between the UK and US versions of Rubber Soul, the Beatles certainly set about recording a proper album, not just a collection of hits. As a nod to the influences around them, it was given its name by the Beatles. Its cover was especially photographed and stretched to reflect the album title. To smooth the transition and keep the brass happy, they opted to release a double A-side single of “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out” alongside Rubber Soul. Fans scooped up both in copious quantities.

The music on Rubber Soul show tremendous growth in terms of songwriting and innovation. John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s individual personalities became more recognizable and distinctive from one another. There was McCartney the sunny-side up optimist and Lennon the acerbic cynic — perfect temperaments to spark a creative flame. For every “Nowhere Man,” there’s “Michelle.” Then again, McCartney’s anguish with then-girlfriend Jane Asher seeps through on “You Won’t See Me,” “I’m Looking Through You,” “Wait,” and even “We Can Work It Out.”  The trademark cheerful disposition was neatly tucked away for those numbers.

Without his tongue firmly in his cheek, Lennon wrote one of his greatest songs for Rubber Soul — the timeless “In My Life.” It’s well-known he wrote songs mostly about himself, and “In My Life” certainly encapsulates the “friends,” “lovers,” and “places” who passed through his life. Thematically, it transcends the silly little love songs that lifted the group to the “toppermost” of the pop charts. Blossoming into world-class songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were now rated in the same league as Rodgers and Hammerstein.

George Harrison was also upping his game as a songwriter, bringing “Think for Yourself” and “If I Needed Someone” to the table, as well as making major contributions to the arrangements and instrumentally. We can all agree his sitar work on “Norwegian Wood” defines the entire mood of the song. You can also thank the guitarist for the tambourine and middle eight waltz idea in “We Can Work It Out.”

In addition to writing better songs, the Beatles were also intent on making their records sound better. Though they reportedly favored mono over stereo, they unanimously pushed for more volume and bass. At the same time, their imaginations were pushing the technology to its limits. Revolver would, of course, take it even further.

Fast forward to 2026, and the tech has come of age. This is apparently what it took to finally give Rubber Soul its due as an expanded Super Deluxe Edition box set, available in four CD and five LP configurations. The folks behind Beatles reissues  haven’t always followed a particular strategy. Maybe they could have gotten a jump on both Revolver and Rubber Soul for their 50th anniversaries, but the ball didn’t get rolling until 2017 — 50 years after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, whose half-century birthday could not be overlooked. And it went from there with The Beatles (aka The White Album), Abbey Road and Let It Be all getting expanded makeovers 50 years after their release.

Even though it came out in 1966, Revolver had to wait for expansion until 2022. Which means that Rubber Soul, the only remaining Beatles album of any consequence, was, thanks in part to the 1962-1966, 1967-1970, and Anthology reissues, also delayed. Just in time before the holidays, it’s finally happened and the Rubber Soul box set is here.

Of course, recording technology has made giant strides, especially in the last few years. Old four-track tapes can not only be digitized, cleaned up, and broken down; now, through the use of AI technology developed by Peter Jackson’s WingNut Films, instruments and voices once recorded together can be separated, tinkered with, enhanced where necessary, and mixed across stereo and multichannel spectrums.

Expanded Special Editions of Rubber Soul enable audiophiles to hear a 2026 stereo and Dolby Atmos (on a Blu-ray that’s sold separately) mix, while purists can revisit the original mono mix and the original Capitol US release. The 2026 stereo mix taps into the depth and musicality of all the songs with a brighter return than your earbuds deserve. The hot tip is to play back the high-resolution stereo and Atmos mixes on a high-end system to uncover the real profundity of the music.

Aside from the mixes, there are extras for hardcore Beatles fans to embrace and soak up. This includes 24 early session recordings (20 of which are previously unreleased takes) and three previously unreleased home demos of “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out,” plus “Little Girl,” a lost John Lennon song pieced together by Giles Martin. It’s a simple little ditty, but enough to percolate Beatles circles for the time being.

What fans might find most fascinating are the segments of the Beatles — mostly Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison — talking among themselves, working out arrangements, making suggestions, and, of course, cracking jokes and goofing off. Hearing them labor through the vocal harmonies on “Think For Yourself” is a priceless fly-on the-wall experience. At one point, Lennon, focusing on a part, declares, “I know…I get something in me head, and all the walls of Rome couldn’t stop me.” Later, venting frustration, he mutters: “I’m sorry, sometimes I feel less than useless at these sessions. I really do…” You hear McCartney reel him back into the fold and they continue. Once they nail it — and beautifully so — it’s on to the next one. No doubt, there’s gold in these rough takes any fan, passing or dedicated, will savor and appreciate.

The Original Mono Master of the 14 tracks on the UK release and the Original Capitol US release of 12 tracks complete the Special Edition. While these are available in other Beatles box sets, they’re certainly nice-to-haves, in addition to the fabulous 88-page hardbound book with comments from both John Lennon and Paul McCartney on Rubber Soul, plus a song-by-song analysis, insights into the writing, recording, and reception of the album, notes on the updates, plus the usual array of rare photographs and other eye candy worthy enough for the coffee table. The 2026 stereo mix can also be had on a single CD and LP. As if that wasn’t enough to cure the fever, there’s limited-edition orange vinyl and D2C exclusive Zoetrope vinyl editions of Rubber Soul for that special someone (or yourself).

Now that Rubber Soul has been brought up to spec, one has to ask: What’s left? All the albums are covered. The hits and unreleased bits (save for a couple so-called unsalvageable outtakes and one-offs) are widely shared and shared again. Have we hit a Beatles wall? Something tells me, there’s more to come. The 60th anniversary of the Summer of Love can’t possibly pass by without the Beatles, so maybe, just maybe…we’ll just have to see.

~ Shawn Perry

Purchase Rubber Soul (Special Edition)

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