Category: news

Ambient experimental avant-garde duo Pulsar1081 from Athens have just released their first full-length album L’inizio Della Fine, meaning the beginning of the end, in digipack format, having originally released it last May in digital format only. One year later, this hard copy features an extra and very symbolic track, Dead Star, one of many pre-production pieces the duo had prepared. The track has been released as a tribute to one half of the duo, Eterno, who sadly passed last August.

Pulsar1081 – L’inizio Della Fine

Release Date: Out Now

Words: Jools Green

The duo Eterno and Momento had, over the years, played significant roles in shaping the underground DIY scene in Greece, never caring about the commercialisation of art, only the journey of creation and awakening consciousness. They have participated in dozens of releases with bands covering the entire spectrum of rock, Metal, Hardcore, dark wave, post rock punk, etc.

So the purpose of creating this Pulsar1081 project was the experimentation in musical paths that they had not explored, having collaborated, in around the same time frame, with the cult Norwegian Avant garde / Black Metallers Dodheimsgard on extra material for three tracks for their Black Medium Current album.

This culminated in appearances at Inferno Festival (Oslo/Norway) and at Roadburn Festival (Tilburg/The Netherlands). “I remain with Vasilis’ last words in my mind,” Momento said, “words that I will never forget. ‘This trip was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. This whole experience is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever had.’”

Regarding this Pulsar1081 album, Momento and Eterno said last April, just before the original release of L’inizio Della Fine, “In the dark times we are going through as humanity, we take you on an astral journey where everything is magical. The clarity of mind, the purification of the soul, and the inner peace help to emerge the power that we all hide deep within us.

“Over the centuries, mankind has proven countless times that it can become destructive to an unimaginable extent. On the other hand, we observe its resilience after unbearable situations. This proves our endurance within the universe.

“We suggest, if someone wants to fully immerse and comprehend our effort through this project, to be in a relaxed mental state and listen to the album through headphones. Enjoy.” 

L’inizio Della Fine is a seven-track offering spanning forty-nine reflective and contemplative minutes, in which you can completely immerse yourself.

Opening with Dyp Samptale, an eerie, crawling noisescape ebbs and builds, delivering an icy, dark feel that intrigues as much as it unnerves. With a fade out that is subtle and gradual, allowing the next piece, Darkness, to fill the empty void that has been left.

Here, a hypnotic drone, eerie echoes, whale song and haunting distant voices, reminiscent of monk chants, can be heard along with other sounds that build and seem to get closer. The sudden explosive element in the latter part pulls you out of any reverie you might have slipped into. 

Inferno builds gradually into a raging wall of sound permeated with a mix of drone, strange, unearthly vocalisations and tolling bells. It is expansive, all-encompassing and fascinatingly dark and disquieting. 

Album monster at around fourteen minutes, Aglaf has a more contemplative and meditative mood as it opens. As it progresses, there is a sense of a dark side and a light side, a yin and yang, moving together across the duration of the piece. With gentle ebbing and building, twisting and turning, but in perfect balance, this makes it eerily harmonious.

In the second half, there is a brief reflective swathe of distant bluesy rock guitar and a hypnotically repeating note pattern. An excellent listen. 

From the offset Maerd has a very celestial and soaring atmosphere with a haunting vocal undercurrent. It is a very engulfing piece that wraps itself around you and is, at times, almost overwhelming to your senses. A hugely powerful listen.

The following piece, 0, is more of a straightforward thinking musical piece, mixing electronics and vocal samples, some spoken and some sung, and despite being the shortest piece at two and a half minutes, it feels very full in terms of content.

The final piece, Dead Star, Momento, explains “one of its two meanings reflects the personality of Eterno (Vasilis). A truly enormous talent and a pure soul. The second symbolism is between his death and, at the same time, the birth of one of the two Pulsars that make up this particular project. Let’s not forget that Pulsars are created from the death of other stars.”

As you might expect, it is a very astral and hypnotically reflective listen, musically keyboard-led, and a beautiful tribute to Eterno that reflects his energy as it soars and floats through the cosmos.

I do like these pieces. They make a fascinating, different and thought-provoking listen, and there’s also a dark quality to them which appeals to me.

L’inizio Della Fine is available via FYC records in limited Digi CD Deluxe Format, along with merch (T-Shirts, Patches, Logo Pin). Pulsar1081 will continue as a solo project, as prior to Eterno’s passing, they had already prepared a lot of material.

“Music was his whole life,” Momento said. “It was his outlet, his oxygen and his breath. So, I will continue to create for him, too.”

RIP Eterno.

The post Pulsar1081 Honour Eterno with Expanded L’inizio Della Fine first appeared on MetalTalk – Heavy Metal News, Reviews and Interviews.

“It doesn’t matter at all that she did not know who we are”

Eyes wide weary to a midday sun
Oh! what could have been
The Monolithic slab of this endless drab
We’re living, in the cracks between 

NAUT’s latest single, Liberation, comes barging out of Bristol as both a warning flare and a love letter to the goth club as a sanctuary: a room set against the technocratic nightmare of compliance, optimization, surveillance, and dead-eyed productivity. Outside, the world measures, manages, and flattens the self into data. Inside, under low light and heavy sound, outsiders gather, move, and become whole.

That opposition sits at the heart of goth itself. Gothic romanticism has always been the enemy of clean systems and obedient surfaces, answering utility with mystery, control with desire, productivity with ritual, and rational order with the unruly intelligence of grief, beauty, fear, and longing. For NAUT, this is no abstract pose. The band were born on goth dancefloors around the world, forged in the spaces where the strange find recognition, and where night offers a freedom the day cannot authorize.

Liberation treats the night as a force of release: the hour when fear loosens, false selves fall away, and the dark night of the soul becomes a kind of transformation. The track confronts both personal darkness and the wider machinery of control and compliance, treating inner turmoil and outside pressure as parts of the same struggle. Its death-rock heft comes across as disciplined rather than gaudy, with coldwave restraint folded into a thicker, more physical frame. The guitars descend in heavy black planes, sharpened at the edges, while the synthesizers sit at a glacial remove, throwing the bass into relief. Beneath it all, the drum machine advances with bureaucratic menace, each strike suggesting the dull violence of systems that never need to raise their voice.

The lyrics to Liberation aim their anger at the systems that shape modern life: work targets, digital metrics, managed desire, and the dead-screen obedience of a world lived through devices. NAUT set private ambition and historical burden inside that same tightening mechanism, where the self is measured, monitored, and made useful until little remains but exhaustion and performance. The song treats the daylight world as a monolithic slab of endless drab, a regime of polished surfaces, shrinking choices, and constant compliance, where the human soul is expected to survive in the cracks between.

Against that machinery, the club becomes a counter-institution: a place where the body is no longer something to discipline, optimize, or make productive, but something to release. The chorus rises with the severe grandeur of a vaulted ceiling, while the bassline keeps the song locked to the floor, reminding us that transcendence can begin with movement, with hips, shoulders, boots, and bodies finding freedom together before anything reaches the heavens.

The DIY video, filmed in Bristol, sharpens this idea by refusing elaborate explanation in favour of pressure, performance, and nocturnal momentum. It carries the charge of a horror film opening in real time, less through plot than through atmosphere: bodies caught in artificial light, faces moving through darkness, the band appearing as both witnesses and accelerants.

Watch the video for Liberation below:

Following the release of Hunt, and after tours alongside Creeper, The March Violets, She Past Away, and Katatonia, NAUT sound tighter, meaner, and more club-minded here. Liberation is gothic post-punk built for boots on sticky floors, for mascara running by choice, and for freedom from the status quo.

Listen to Liberation below, and order the single here.

Follow NAUT:

• Instagram
• Facebook
• Bandcamp
• Spotify
• YouTube
• Linktree

“`

The post “Night Will Transform You” — Bristol Goth Rockers NAUT Celebrate the Dark in Video for “Liberation” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Posted on June 5th 2026, 11:01a.m.

Evanescence are rock survivors. Despite the internet rumour that the entire band died years ago, they are very much alive, and after five years of soul-searching, have emerged from the studio with a stronger, bolder sound in the form of their sixth album, ‘Sanctuary’.

It’s a record that firmly feels like frontwoman Amy Lee went to therapy, came to terms with a lot of her negative experiences which occurred in her MTV darling era, and then decided to re-do the sound that characterised her peak fame but on her own terms. It’s the sound of second chances and taking on the world when you’re ready to do it, with more than a dash of heavy fuzz courtesy of roping in the producers behind BMTH. Will this be the record to convert those who aren’t already into Evanescence? Maybe not, but it’s a solid statement about not caring about that crowd anyway. 

“I don’t belong to you, so don’t tell me what to do.” If ever an opening line summed up a record, it’s the first salvo of ‘Beautiful Lie’. Feminine strength and the distorted, open beats which have characterised Evanescence’s recent sound are out in force, instantly reminding us that they aren’t here to mess around. In fact, if we’re judging by the first single, ‘Who Will You Follow’, Lee and co are out for karmic retribution against some unnamed oppressor and giving voice to the desire to win. The force of pulling yourself back up from a pit of your own making feels like the main inspiration behind this outing, and it’s satisfying on a truly cosmic level. 

Of course, it wouldn’t be an Evanescence album without a candle-lit piano ballad, and ‘Sanctuary’ drops two just to keep the average up. First up is the desperate ‘How Do I Heal’, tender and plaintive in its evocative heartbreak, but the more interesting is the second. ‘Forever Without You’ contains the rarest of all Evanescence emotions; acceptance. There’s no wailing, raging or hoping here, only a golden warmth and calm which flows through the entire song, and this sense of peace marks a new turn for the band after two decades. They’re finally at peace with the twists and turns of life in the spotlight, and it feels good for both us and them.

Ironically, the title track is the opposite of the contemplation on the ballads, despite the name. ‘Sanctuary’ is the vanguard of the updated side of the Evanescence sound that we’ve got on this album. Glitching, anguished and with only the lightest twinkle of piano, they’ve put everything they’ve got into guitars and poised, elegant rage. The serenity amid whirling emotions which has always characterised Evanescence has been turned up too, especially on tracks like ‘Tell Me When You’ve Had Enough’. What could easily have been teenage posing back in the day has now been distilled into graceful fury at its finest.

There’s a reason that Evanescence have survived this long, far beyond the expiration date that gets stamped onto superstars that earned their stripes in a specific time or era. Rather than retreat into nostalgia, they’ve taken a look back at what made them great in the first place and given it a spruce up with even more impassioned screams, more ballads and more fuzz in far higher doses. It’s one for the fans, sure, but it’s also a lesson for the rest of us on how to rise above the turmoil with rage in your heart and grace in your step. 

KATE ALLVEY

Picture this, brah brah: You’re out enjoying a nice meal with the in-laws. It’s a pleasant setting—a beach vacation, let’s say. The sun gently peeks above the horizon, illuminating the tides as they roll in and wash away the footprints in the sand. 

Another golden hour with the family.

After a long day at the beach, constructing sandcastles, and throwing the pigskin with your father-in-law, you’ve developed quite the appetite. You’re scarfing down shellfish ever so quickly. Your significant other leans over with a crooked smile, slightly embarrassed, and asks you to chill out on the gluttonous display. You look up, oyster juices dripping down your face, and nod your head like the supportive partner you are. Despite that small misstep, your beautiful day treks on. 

Moments later, a familiar bubbling rises from the pits of your stomach. But the moment is too perfect. Hues of purples, pinks, and blues sit above; you’re telling your in-laws about how well your 401K is performing. So you continue cramming food into your fat mouth. This time, lobster. Lovely. 

Your significant other begins touting your work around the house—how nice the yard looks, the way the pictures hang so level on the walls. You wrap your arm around their shoulders and crack a proud smile of your own, a few remnants of ocean critters planted between your incisors. 

You start listing off your partner’s accomplishments. The lovely decor. The flower garden. The bird bath. The work promotion. But you stop momentarily—the stomach ailment rears its head again. As a distraction, you start picking at the shrimp cocktail on the table. Your mother-in-law, directly across from you, giggles and says, “Hungry today, are ya?”

She raises for a toast. 

You begin projectile vomiting. 

Chunks of lobster, oyster, and shrimp hurl towards the family. The white tablecloth is now stained orange and red by way of that tasty cocktail sauce. Now, food chunks sit atop your father-in-law’s noggin. Your mother-in-law’s new dress? Ruined. 

But, the meal? 

Awesome.

And an awesome allegory for this disgusting new Pharmacist album Vertebrae After Vertebrae.

I’m a tad younger than the OG Carcass fans. Sadly, I missed out on the worldwide debut of the vomit-inducing Reek of Putrefaction, Symphonies of Sickness and Necroticism. But those records stand the test of time and inspire new bands year over year. Look no further than today’s subject. Japan’s new-school-old-school grind purveyor Pharmacist does Carcass worship right. Catchy riffs, disgusting atmosphere, medical terminology, etc., etc. And unlike most worship bands today, the Carcass necromancy doesn’t necessarily copy and paste Necroticism, Symphonies or Reek riffs. Instead, there’s a mashup of each era. So, if you can’t decide which record to pull off the shelf, Pharmacist offers a modern smorgasbord of each, dating back to Medical Renditions of Grinding Decomposition and Flourishing Extremities on Unspoiled Mental Grounds. 

Vertebrae After Vertebrae, the project’s third LP, is the most well-produced Pharmacist record, ironically similar to the trajectory of…you guessed it…Carcass. The opener, “Propelling Inwards” pops like a sebaceous cyst, steering away from the more melodic offerings found later on — see “Vertebrae After Vertebrae” and “Endogencia” — but it still leans into the Symphonies of Sickness sound. The snare rattles under the pitch-shifted vocals and groovy riffs, following a similar formula to something like an “Exhume to Consume.” The two melodic points, the title track and “Endogencia,” revel in a more “Empathological Necroticism” or “Corporal Jigsore Quandary” flow. 

“Lazure Sphacelation” does a nice job of transitioning back into nasty grind. And that’s a critical element here. The bouncing back and forth between the completely off-the-wall relentlessness and more earworm melodies keeps Vertebrae After Vertebrae from becoming too bogged down with sheer brutality. You can also hear a little Jeff Hanneman on “Lazure…” — perhaps akin to a “Behind the Crooked Cross” or something of the like. Whereas “Mimicring the Organics” is chunkier, especially during the power chord-heavy verse riffing. While I appreciate maneuvering between downright heavy and catchy, the song, as a whole, is a tad on the lengthier side, approaching the six minute mark. It takes a bit away from the track, which had the potential of being a standout if a little meat was taken off the bone. The interlude around the 3:35 mark could have been trimmed, for example. It just kind of falls flat there, not adding much to the song. But they bounce back quite well in the final minute and a half. 

The album closes on a high note with “Zenith of Mnemonic Forensication,” which briefly carries over the melodic sensibilities of its predecessor, “Bubonic Malacia Bloom,” before weaving in ideas and motifs from across the record. It’s something Pharmacist does particularly well—they have a knack for giving their releases a satisfying ending. While “Zenith…” is plenty catchy on its own, several moments recall the chaotic intensity of a “Propelling Inwards” or “Lazure…” Look, it’s full of blastbeats, tremolo riffs, chunky riffs, and even a breakdown. It’s good, okay?

All in all, Pharmacist continues their streak of gnarly grinding tunes that perfectly pay homage to the mighty Carcass. And while that remains their primary influence, fans of ‘80s thrash might take a liking to some — KEY WORD HERE: SOME — of this, too. That is, if you also enjoy bile-soaked vocals in the style of the great Jeff Walker. Nonetheless, I really love these Pharmacist records. Each album has slightly eclipsed the previous, and that’s really all you can ask for.

Now, back to that beachside dinner. Yeah, the evening concluded with a crustacean-powered geyser coating your in-laws from head to toe, but let’s not lose sight of what really matters here: the meal was incredible. And much like Vertebrae After Vertebrae, the path to utter disgust was an absolute blast. Pharmacist once again stuffs every nook and cranny of its music with melodic riffs, grisly imagery, and enough gore to make even seasoned pathologists wince. But, it’s one you’ll gladly revisit after the cleanup crew clocks out.

The post Pharmacist – Vertebrae After Vertebrae Review appeared first on Last Rites.

The stratospheric rise of Wham! from a couple of school friends playing youth clubs in Hertfordshire to one of the most commercially definitive pop acts of the 1980s remains a pinnacle moment in British music history. Formed in 1981 by the charismatic songwriting force George Michael and his multi-instrumentalist partner Andrew Ridgeley, the duo brought an unmatched blast of youthful energy, sun-soaked hooks, and fashionable soul-pop to a bleak economic landscape. With their brightly colored aesthetics, infectious dance choreography, and groundbreaking 1985 tour of China, the first ever by a major Western pop group—Wham! didn’t just top charts; they defined

The post Complete List Of Wham! Songs From A to Z appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

New haircuts, new sound, new Metallica: was Load the sound of metal’s biggest band trolling the world?

Ready for a night of porn-funk, psych-metal, Krautrock, Afrobeats and demonic disco doom? Of course you are

After announcing the details of their new album ‘Loving and Losing’, Honey Revenge have now showcased another track set to appear on it.

It’s called ‘Butterfly Effect’, and is as energetic and electrically charged as you can get. Melodies and thrilling chords hit the ear at breakneck speed, sitting somewhere between mid 00s rock and modern thrill-filled pop. It’s an extra string to the band’s bow, showcasing that their sound has multiple layers ready and waiting to be unearthed. It also possesses a thoughtful and important message at its core.

Vocalist Devin Papadol had this to say about it:

“The Butterfly Effect is a concept where small, seemingly insignificant initial changes in events can lead to drastic and unpredictable consequences in the grand scheme of things. There’s an illusion that we as human beings have a choice in our own fate. Try as we might to be in control of every little thing in our lives, sometimes the universe has other plans in mind. This concept is explored in our new single ‘Butterfly Effect’. It can be comforting in tough times to lean into the idea that our destiny is somewhat predetermined. It makes transitional periods easier to power through. This song and its message embody the themes we’re looking forward to elaborating on and sharing on our sophomore album, ‘Loving and Losing’ out September 18th!”

As Devin said, ‘Loving and Losing’ will be released on September 18 via Thriller Records.

The artwork looks like this:

Whilst the tracklisting is a bit more like this:

1. Intro
2. Technicolor
3. Run Your Mouth
4. Sunday Scaries
5. Poison Apple Baby
6. Hot Commodity
7. Jealousy Monster
8. Trust Issues
9. Sorry Much
10. Freaks of Nature
11. Risk
12. Butterfly Effect
13. Superstitious
14. Inevitable
15. Loving and Losing

Here is previous single ‘Run Your Mouth’ to whet the appetite even more:

The post Honey Revenge Share Electric New Track ‘Butterfly Effect’ appeared first on Rock Sound.