They’re called Letterbombs, and yes, it’s always explosive when their Bandcamp notifications hit my inbox. The Finnish screamo band’s latest trick: teaming up with Boston comrades Heaven Through Violence on a high-concept split LP called PALLA. I’m gonna let these bands explain it. As written on Bandcamp: “palla” is a concept album whose libretto is…
The post Stream Screamo Bands Letterbombs & Heaven Through Violence’s High-Concept Split LP <em>PALLA</em> appeared first on Stereogum.
There’s a dirty little charge running through Someone To Blame, the kind that starts in the nerves, moves through the bloodstream, and winds up somewhere shameful. Holy Death Temple have made a track about power, appetite, coercion, performance, submission, and the awful old human habit of dressing domination up as comfort, then selling it back to the willing and the weary as a form of pleasure. It sounds academic on paper, but the song itself is no lecture. It lurches in with too much poise to be innocent, too much muscle to be casual, and from the first seconds it knows exactly where it wants your attention: somewhere between your hips and your conscience, with the skull rattling along behind trying to file an objection.
Holy Death Temple (Bryan Edward, Amy Tung-Barrysmith, and Jon Barrysmith) have stalked nearby ground before, especially on Algo-Rhythm Is Gonna Get You, but Someone To Blame tightens the focus and sharpens the blade. The trio’s style fuses the icy gloom of Joy Division and Bauhaus with the irreverent rage of Sex Pistols, then jolts the whole affair with a strain of digital decadence that calls to mind Daft Punk and Justice.
The song arrives with a breathy female voice that opens the door in a manner that feels warm, intimate, almost coaxing, and then, with a kind of calm cruelty, that invitation gives way to command. A presence steps forward and begins spelling out what it wants, how it intends to proceed, and what role it has already chosen for you. It moves with the slow authority of machinery built to press, stamp, crush, and keep going while the poor soul caught inside is still deciding whether this is ecstasy, terror, or some grubby alliance of the two.
Amy Tung-Barrysmith handles synth duties with the kind of force that turns the floor into a pressure plate, while Jon Barrysmith’s drumming keeps the track driving forward with a hard, relentless exactness. Over that foundation, the guitar cuts clean and sharp, spring reverb giving it a cold gleam without blunting the edge.
“There’s something for everyone on the dance floor,” says frontman Bryan Edward. “If you want an S&M-fueled goth club banger, we got you. If you want an intellectual parallel between S&M and the descent into fascism, we also got you.”
That line could have landed like a clever pitch, some quick bit of black-lipstick copy meant to sell the song’s angle, but in practice it feels like a statement of method. The oldest systems of control work, because they seduce before they subjugate. They offer structure. They offer intensity. They offer release from the burden of thinking, deciding, resisting, carrying your own hurt. Then they hand your pain back to you with better packaging and a stricter dress code. Someone To Blame is written from the perspective of a Dom who knows how to turn damage into devotion. It is nasty work, and the band play it with enough clarity to make you laugh, wince, and squirm.
By the time the outro finally lands on “someone to blame for your pain,” it feels like a lock clicking into place somewhere behind your ribs. That’s the song’s ugliest insight: there are people who ache for deliverance, and there are sadists who learn to market themselves as the answer by becoming the warden.
“It’s coming from a place of disgust with people that get off on watching ‘less thans’ suffer,” says Edward. “It’s not about kink-shaming, but if anyone deserves to be kink-shamed, it’s them.” Good. That bluntness serves the material. Too many songs with this sort of subject matter get coy and start admiring their own leather gloves in the mirror.
Even the cover art gets in on the scheme, taking the old Uncle Sam image and turning it into something masked, armored, depersonalized, with authority standing there as role and costume at once. The face is hidden; the function remains. That’s the point. Systems survive because the individuals inside them can swap out while the gesture stays the same. New mouth, same order. New mask, same appetite.
Listen to Someone To Blame below:
Follow Holy Death Temple:
The post Seattle’s Holy Death Temple Shares Their Disgust for Bootlicking Sadists With “Someone To Blame” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
Beartooth was originally published on HM Magazine by Zak DeFreze.
Beartooth was originally published on HM Magazine by Zak DeFreze.
Kid Cudi is back. A few days ago Cudi announced a new EP titled HAVE U BN 2 HEAVEN @ NITE. It was created over the past 10 days, with Cudi streaming the recording process on Twitch, calling the episodes “Someone Cooked Here.” Now those four songs are packaged into a self-released EP full of…
The post Kid Cudi Shares New EP <em>HAVE U BN 2 HEAVEN @ NITE</em> appeared first on Stereogum.
When I go swimming in the North Sea
burning ships are guiding me.
You can hear the room tightening around Dry Skin‘s new record, Dead Wood, from the start, like the walls have decided they’ve heard enough excuses and would now prefer a beat. This post-punk act from Dresden possesses a kind of wiry conviction with this offering: nothing here feels overly fussed with; the pleasure comes from how directly it moves, and how casually it slips a knife between the ribs of modern life.
Robert E. Smith has been dragging this project through various states of existence since 2007, first under the gloriously dubious name I’M YOUR STALKER, later through a long interruption imposed by money, work, and the general insult of adulthood. Then the world shut down, live music temporarily vanished, and the band finally had time to become…a band. He was joined by drummer Simon Herzog, synth aficionado Bernd van den Broedericken, and bass virtuoso John Köhler. Dead Wood carries that feeling of delayed gratification as it finds its proper form. This is not the sound of people discovering themselves; it is the sound of people deciding to get on with it.
Dry Skin describes their coordinates with a wink: “Somewhere between Factory Records or Daniel Miller’s Mute Records, Captured Tracks or Mexican Summer. Between Talking Heads and The Cure. Between James Murphy and the Muppets.” Good line. Better still, the EP earns it. These songs have the clipped drive of stripped-down new wave, the odd little smirk of post-punk, and the occasional bounce of something that might have once stumbled out of Manchester at 3 a.m. with its shirt half untucked and its head full of ideas.
Again and Again opens the EP by staring straight at the tidy little coffin of adult aspiration: work, mortgage, inherited fantasy, fear on a loop. The song moves with a pared-back insistence that brings Suicide, Fad Gadget, and The Normal to mind, almost like doo-wop got locked in a concrete room with minimalist post-punk and came out with its tie hanging loose and its faith shot through. It’s funny…until you realise it’s also your life.
The video for the song is as minimalist as the song itself, with a charming DIY choreography video starring dancer Cindy Hammer. “I am really happy to have found a visualization of the forever returning stupidity of human behaviour the lyrics are about,” Smith reflects.
So Clean is the sound of social performance turned rancid. Everybody’s composed, everybody’s respectable, everybody’s standing on a nice clean street while the ugly business gets filed somewhere out of sight. The refrain lands like a command barked by a culture obsessed with presentation and allergic to conscience. Its energy has that jumpy, needled edge that calls up LCD Soundsystem and Dan Deacon, though Dry Skin sound less interested in catharsis than in exposing the stench underneath the deodorant.
The title track Dead Wood is one of the EP’s best turns, a warped little travelogue through environmental collapse, lifestyle vanity, and cheerful self-involvement. Burning ships, hiking crews, photographs in the firelight: the world is caving in, but at least the picture came out nice. There’s real humor here, black and bracing, which makes the song hit harder.
No Tears slips into estrangement and bad ideas with a cool stare and a slow, fuzzed-out, glitchy pace, moving like a late-hour comedown through streets that no longer feel familiar. There is a sly nod to Tuxedomoon in the way it holds emotion at arm’s length, letting alienation pool quietly rather than boil over. The song captures that peculiar state of feeling unmoored in your own life, where temptation, disconnection, and self-protection all start speaking in the same voice.
Reach Your Hands Out To The Lost shifts the EP into more guitar-driven territory, channeling traces of The Horrors, The Smiths, and Pulp through Dry Skin’s scrappier post-punk frame. There is uplift in it, but not the kind that arrives wrapped in platitudes. Instead, the song reaches toward solidarity with real feeling, extending sympathy without sermonizing, which is rarer than most bands seem to realize. It understands that compassion carries more weight when it sounds lived-in, slightly battered, and entirely sincere. Backseat handles romantic wreckage with a surprising degree of grace, filtering heartbreak through a lo-fi haze that makes the song feel intimate without becoming overly polished or precious. There is tenderness in the way it sits with memory, with movement, with the awkward persistence of love after the fact.
Just A Thought Is A Way Worth Living closes the EP with a bruised kind of wisdom, turning over questions of honesty, love, self-regard, and the daily labour of staying awake inside your own life. It feels restless, searching, and deeply aware that clarity is less a revelation than a practice.
Listen to Dead Wood below and order the album, out now via Blood Service, here.
For an EP named Dead Wood, this thing is very much alive. It knows the world is ridiculous, expensive, cruel, and often cosmetically clean in all the wrong places. It also knows that a sharp song, played with purpose, can still make that mess feel briefly legible.
Follow Dry Skin:
The post “Burning Ships are Guiding Me” — Dresden Post-Punk Outfit Dry Skin Navigate the Ashes With “Dead Wood” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
There’s a lot you can say about the direction of WWE. The creative has been uninspired. The matches are few and far between amidst a sea of commercials. Ticket prices are out of hand. And perhaps worst of all, it’s just not as good as AEW has been lately. So how are people going to get hyped for an upcoming Wrestlemania when consumer happiness has gone down precipitously?
You get the Canadians, of course. Well, a certain group of Canadians performing as a rock group under the name Nickelback, anyway.
According to a post from WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque, the massive wrestling promotion has chosen Nickelback’s song “Bones for the Crows” as the theme music for this year’s major pro wrestling event.
“They’ve rocked with us for over 20 years, and their new song will soundtrack the Grandest Stage of Them All.”
This isn’t the first time the Canucks have been tapped to promote and hype up a wrestling event. Back in the day, Nickelback provided a theme song for their weekly show Monday Night Raw. For the last six years, the promotion has relied on pop artist The Weeknd for the Wrestlemania theme, so this is an upgrade as far as we’re concerned…
The post Nickelback’s “Bones for the Crows” is the Official Theme Song for Wrestlemania 42 appeared first on MetalSucks.
The inevitable cancellation has finally occurred. The LA punk/metal/hardcore festival CY Fest is officially not happening after at least 20 bands dropped off the lineup due to sexual misconduct allegations against the promoter.
The post CY Fest Canceled After 20 Bands Drop Off appeared first on Stereogum.
After bringing some of Australia’s best independent rock bands to Queensland for the Rock is Not Dead festivals, Dunnwell Touring and Promotion are proud to present Brisvegas Rocks. This is the show you don’t want to miss. FIVE amazing bands, ONE night only, together rocking the stage for what is set to be one of […]Blues Rock Weekly highlights new music from Duane Betts, Mike Zito, Marc Broussard with Joe Bonamassa, Reckoners, and Lily Vakili.
The post Blues Rock Weekly – 3/20/26 appeared first on Blues Rock Review.
Lo peor ya pasó. Sin ti, volveré a disfrutar.
Ex Lover’s latest single Lo Peor has the kind of ache that sneaks up behind a good beat and taps you on the shoulder. You let the body keep time while the heart gets worked over in the back room. Aramara Quintos Tapia and company understand that little arrangement perfectly, and they play it with style, nerve, and a clear-eyed sense of emotional mess, all in Spanish.
Coming out of Omaha, Ex Lover pulls together post-punk bass pressure, bright guitar lines, and the candy-coated ache of early-2000s Mexican pop into something lean, sad-eyed, and built for motion. Lo Peor (The Worst) lands right in that sweet spot where break-up music stops pleading for dignity and starts admitting how ridiculous people become when love slides out the door and leaves one shoe behind. The singer keeps trying to talk herself into recovery, keeps reaching for air, pleasure, distance, the usual self-help brochure words, then doubles back and asks for one more minute, one more explanation, one more scrap from the table. That push and pull gives the track its kick, as it breathes in acceptance.
You can hear points of contact with French Police, Belgrado, and Deceits in the taut rhythm section and cool romantic tension, while the sweeter melodic instinct and emotional directness bring to mind Dark Chisme, Future Nobodies, and Blood Club. Those reference points help sketch the frame, but the band’s real appeal lies in how naturally they move between ballroom bruise and bedroom plea.
The lyrics are straightforward with a refreshing lack of grandstanding. Nobody is trying to sell you a spiritual awakening. The feeling is raw in the best way: confused, bruised; still vain enough to want answers, still romantic enough to imagine a tidy ending. That emotional contradiction is the whole engine. The bass keeps things moving with a cool, clean insistence, the guitars gleam without fuss, and the vocal carries that delicious strain between composure and collapse. It feels like dancing in nice clothes while your life quietly catches fire near the coat check.
Then there is the video, directed by LeMarc, which pushes the song into another dimension of delirium. Shot in black and white with a moody, damaged glamour, it plays like a surrealist soap opera dragged through Super 8 and left out overnight with a stack of old film reels by Maya Deren, Luís Buñuel, and David Lynch. Faces drift in and out, desire goes sideways, time folds up like cheap linen, and the whole thing has the perfume of a dream you almost enjoy until you wake up feeling indicted.
Lo Peor is a lovely little catastrophe: catchy, wounded, and smart enough to know that getting over somebody rarely arrives in a straight line.
Watch Lo Peor below:
Listen to Lo Peor below and order Made In Heaven here.
Follow Ex Lover:
The post “The Worst Part Is Now Over” — Ex Lover Leaves Heartbreak in the Rearview Mirror in Video for “Lo Peor” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.