D.O.C the Practitioner deliver sharp social awareness and old-school lyrical conviction on pay to play, a conscious hip-hop cut rooted in substance, realism, and streetwise perspective. Built on grounded production and direct, purposeful bars, the track explores systems of power, survival, and the transactional nature of modern life without losing its rhythmic momentum or raw authenticity. D.O.C the Practitioner balances thoughtful commentary with confident delivery, bringing a classic East Coast spirit into a contemporary setting. Honest, focused, and driven by message as much as flow, pay to play proves meaningful hip-hop still hits hardest when it speaks from lived experience.
bufr. make an impressive debut with don’t call, a tense and hypnotic tech-house burner built for smoke-filled clubs and late-night momentum. Anchored by a dark rolling groove, fragmented vocal chops, and tightly controlled rhythmic pressure, the track thrives in the space between anticipation and release, constantly pulling listeners deeper into its immersive pulse. Rather than relying on oversized drops, don’t call builds intensity through repetition, texture, and emotional tension, creating a sleek after-hours atmosphere that feels both futuristic and deeply physical. Stylish, addictive, and relentlessly propulsive, this is underground club music with real emotional weight beneath the surface.
Christopher Jack channel pain, vulnerability, and emotional confrontation into Watch you Cry, a dark and hypnotic alternative rock track that feels both intimate and unsettling. Built around haunting repetition and moody atmosphere, the song explores the fragile line between emotional connection and emotional destruction, transforming raw confession into something strangely magnetic. Beneath its shadowy textures and slow-burning intensity lies a deeply human sense of struggle and catharsis, made even more poignant by the personal circumstances surrounding Christopher Jack’s solo emergence. Heavy, melancholic, and emotionally exposed, Watch you Cry lingers long after the final note fades.
Mikrobe dives deep into shadowy warehouse territory on Storage Box, a pounding acid-techno weapon built for concrete floors, flickering strobes, and after-hours intensity. Driven by relentless grooves, corrosive synth pressure, and hypnotic repetition, the track locks into a mechanical pulse that steadily escalates without losing control. Distorted textures and rumbling low-end give Storage Box a gritty industrial atmosphere, while its tightly wound momentum keeps the energy simmering from start to finish. Raw, immersive, and unapologetically underground, this is late-night techno engineered for dark rooms and heavy systems.
Devin Townsend is a master of his craft. Whether with Strapping Young Lad, Casualties of Cool, or his various solo projects, Townsend has consistently raised the bar for music that goes beyond off-the-shelf sounds. With “The Moth” the Canadian singer, guitarist and producer adds another special chapter to his rich back catalogue. Townsend has always… Continue Reading →
L’Avenir has ushered in their latest album, Secrets, with the video for Animism, a coldwave séance of mineral calm and occult motion, where the air seems to have been left under overnight under a full moon, and returned with new intelligence. The Baltimore project, led by Jason Sloan, treats electronic music as architecture as much as emotion: a corridor of blue light, a stairwell descending beneath memory, a voice arriving from somewhere just beyond the visible wall. On this first single from the project’s eighth album, Sloan works with a familiar vocabulary: patient drum-machine pressure, icy synthesizers, distant singing – but the result feels newly charged, as if each element has been placed glowing under glass.
Animism takes its title with admirable seriousness. The song imagines a world in which matter has memory and the inanimate keeps counsel. The earth, the tree, the old room, the object handled too often by human longing: all seem to possess a private pulse. Sloan’s voice sits inside the track rather than above it, less a guide than a presence caught in the same current as the listener. The effect is intimate and estranged, the sound of someone speaking from within a thought that has become physical.
The track brings to mind the elegant austerity of Eleven Pond, the dusky romanticism of Clan of Xymox, the severe European mechanics of Parade Ground, and the cerebral chill of Trisomie 21. These references move through the song like figures glimpsed in frosted glass, recognizable but never allowed to dominate the room. The arrangement advances with a measured hand, giving each synth line and percussive motion enough space to breathe before the next cold gleam arrives.
The accompanying video, directed by Soleil Noir Studios, deepens the spell. Shot by Jason Sloan, with Sloan also handling video synthesizer programming and both analogue and digital hardware, the clip turns the forests of the mind into a prismatic terrain. Bright colours bloom against mirrored images; faces and forms double, dissolve, and reassemble in a kind of psychic woodland. The imagery suggests a psychedelic passage through inner nature, where branches become nerves, light becomes thought, and perception starts to behave like a living organism.
Animism presents L’Avenir as a project still devoted to solitude, mystery, and nocturnal design, but newly attentive to the strange life hidden inside surfaces. Sloan makes darkwave feel porous here, open to trees, stones, ghosts, and the quiet intelligence of everything we mistakenly believe is still.
Watch the video for “Animism” below:
Secrets is out now via EINS:ZWEI:ACHT on vinyl, CD, digital, and streaming formats. Listen to Animism below and order Secretshere.
You wanna know your problem is? Well, don’t ask me. I’m not your Shrink.
Spike Hellis returns with No Bite, and the joke is already grinning at you before the first beat has exploded. The Los Angeles duo’s second preview of Successor, due August 7 via Over-Pop, arrives like a chrome-plated insult with a cigarette burn on its tongue: lean, clipped, mean, and menacing.
They ain’t your therapists, that’s for sure. This is body music, with its teeth filed to points, though the title would have you believe otherwise. No Bite rides a soft jackhammer groove, sparse, minimalist industrial EBM, and dry, mechanical funk. Cortland Gibson and Lainey Chang refrain from overpacking the track by letting the empty space do some of the dirty work. The beat hits, withdraws, hits again, and every pause feels like somebody waiting for you to flinch.
There is a special cruelty in restraint. Plenty of bands in this lane mistake volume for violence, pile on distortion until everything becomes an expensive blur, and then wonder why nobody looks afraid. No Bite‘s power comes from precision: the bassline’s blunt insistence, the synths’ clipped little wounds, the vocal delivery moving around the track like a bored predator tapping the glass. You can hear the old EBM gods rattling around in the pipes, but this is no Wax Trax! museum march. It has the nasty modern confidence of a duo that has spent time in real rooms, under real lights, with real bodies pressed against the pit fence.
Gibson and Chang have shared stages with Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb, and No Bite channels that lineage, evoking a room where fog juice hangs in your hair, and the dancefloor has absorbed enough questionable decisions to qualify as a legal witness. The track is compact, confrontational, and just a little unstable, thudding away in the dark on spite alone.
Listen to No Bite below and order the single here.
Spike Hellis will release their second studio album, Successor, on August 7 via Over-Pop, with No Bite serving as its second preview after By God. The roadwork begins just ahead of the album’s release, kicking off July 31 in Santa Ana before stretching across the Southwest, Texas, the South, the East Coast, Canada, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest, eventually circling back to California for an October 24 hometown-area close in Los Angeles.
They’ll be joined along the way by MVTANT, Auragraph, Belly Hatcher, Nuxx, and Normal Bias.
Tour Dates:
July 31 — Santa Ana, CA — La Santa — w/ MVTANT
August 1 — San Diego, CA — Casbah
August 2 — Pomona, CA — Lopez Urban Farm — w/ MVTANT
August 6 — Las Vegas, NV — Backstage — w/ MVTANT
August 7 — Phoenix, AZ — Club Contact — w/ MVTANT
August 8 — Tucson, AZ — The Rialto Theater — w/ MVTANT
August 10 — Albuquerque, NM — Longhair Records — w/ MVTANT
August 14 — San Antonio, TX — Paper Tiger — w/ Auragraph
In the distance I am cold In the distance We’re growing old
Casket Cassette’s Show Me a Sign is a song that illuminates the soul like a busted strip of Los Angeles nightlife, all neon nerves and cheap salvation. Constant Laval Williams has made a fine little art out of sounding stranded in public, which is harder than it sounds. Plenty of singers can do lonely. Fewer can do lonely while the beat is still carrying everybody’s boots across the dancefloor.
This is the third new song from REDUCER, out June 12. Show Me a Sign is all reduction: emotion boiled until it stains the pan, desire shaved down to the bare request, survival turned into something blunt enough to fit in one hand. There is no grand cathedral of misery here, no velvet cape dragged theatrically through dry ice. The song wants a signal, a room, a body, a way back from whatever distance has turned the song’s protagonist cold and old before his time.
Show Me a Sign channels the Medusa, Twist of Shadows, and Creatures era Clan of Xymox in its dusky romantic architecture, Cold Cave in its sleek black propulsion, and the frozen passion of The Danse Society and Pink Turns Blue, but Casket Cassette is smart enough to understand that influences should behave like a ghost at the bar, present but never picking up the tab. And the track moves with the clean, severe confidence of a dark priest descending inward into an icy sanctum, torchlit and severe, conjuring unspeakable visions as Williams’ voice cuts through the darkness.
Lyrically, the song circles distance, exhaustion, and the stubborn will to continue after comfort has abandoned the room. The plea for a sign feels less like romantic longing than a last candle held against the cold, a small act of devotion made under pressure. Casket Cassette turns that ache into body music for the damaged and devout, for people who have been through Hell and back again and lived to tell the tale.
Mixed by Matia Simovich at Infinite Power Studios and mastered by Stefan Brown at Abbey Road Studios, Show Me a Sign has a polished chill; every element has been placed with surgical precision: the beat advances, the synths flare and recede, and the vocal keeps its eyes open. The song’s desperation lands because it is sharpened rather than softened, with the production giving the plea force, shape, and urgency.
Listen to Show Me a Sign below and order the single here.
Casket Cassette will take The Reducer Tour across North America in summer 2026, with support from Stare Away and special guests. The run opens in Southern California before cutting through the Southwest and Texas, heading up the East Coast, crossing into Toronto, then moving through the Midwest, Mountain West, Pacific Northwest, and back down the West Coast, with a final date in California in November.
Tour Dates:
July 25 — San Diego, CA
July 26 — Phoenix, AZ
July 29 — Houston, TX
July 30 — San Antonio, TX
July 31 — McAllen, TX
August 1 — Dallas, TX
August 3 — Atlanta, GA
August 5 — Washington, DC
August 6 — Philadelphia, PA
August 7 — New York, NY
August 11 — Toronto, ON
August 12 — Chicago, IL
August 13 — Minneapolis, MN
August 15 — Denver, CO
August 16 — Salt Lake City, UT
August 18 — Seattle, WA
August 19 — Portland, OR
August 21 — San Francisco, CA
August 22 — Fresno, CA
November 14 — Huntington Beach, CA (Darker Waves Festival)
