I’m about to go Pepe Silvia on Olivia Rodrigo; her new single has given me plenty of enough thread to do it, to completely unravel. (If you don’t know Pepe Silvia, you should. It’s one of TV’s best moments from the legendary It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.) Anyway, this post is about Olivia Rodrigo and…
The post Olivia Rodrigo – “The Cure” appeared first on Stereogum.
There’s a particular kind of dread that comes with a long-awaited comeback. You want it to be good. You need it to be good. And the longer the absence, the higher the stakes. Marmozets have been away for eight years; long enough for an entire generation of festival-goers to know them only by reputation. Long enough for the word “legendary” to start getting thrown around a little too casually. Long enough, frankly, for the pressure to become almost unfair.
Pressure? Pressure is for tyres! ‘CO.WAR.DICE.’ doesn’t buckle under it. It doesn’t even acknowledge it. It just gets on with being an excellent record. What’s immediately striking is how little the band seem interested in playing it safe. A lesser comeback would have chased the energy of ‘Move, Shake, Hide’ and called it a day. Instead, Marmozets have arrived as a leaner, stranger version of themselves. Four people rather than five, drawing from a weirder, wider pool of influence. There’s DNA here from post-punk’s jagged early days, from the jerky, irreverent spirit of Devo, to the swaggering weirdness of The Cramps. There are several moments on this record where Becca MacIntyre’s vocal has a dreamy, almost Siouxsie-esque quality. Their sound has evolved, but not so much that it’s not quintessentially Marmozets.
A voice so distinctive and instantly recognisable is like being born with a third nipple. You either have it, or you don’t, and MacIntyre has it. Opener ‘A Kiss From A Mother’ wastes absolutely no time making that case. It’s tight, urgent, and sets the tone for an album that refuses to let you drift through its 11 tracks. ‘Cut Back’ is a force of nature. Relentless and immediate, it’s the kind of song that burns itself into your brain on that first listen and doesn’t look like it’s going to leave any time soon. ‘New York’ crackles with excited, spontaneous energy, capturing the feeling of a band rediscovering the joy of simply playing together in a room. It’s loose and alive in ways that expensive production often inadvertently kills.
‘You Want The Truth’ is perhaps the album’s most direct moment – the title alone tells you what you’re getting, and Becca delivers it with a confrontational clarity that feels both thrilling and galvanising. ‘Swear I’m Alive’ and ‘Running With The Sun In Your Eyes’ keep the momentum rolling in the album’s midsection, the latter swinging with a groove reminiscent of the early 2000s that sits in completely unexpected but brilliant territory. Even the more restrained moments pull their weight; ‘Mes Désirs’ adds texture and breathing space, while ‘Like Last Night’ has an almost nostalgic warmth to it that catches you off guard.
The album earns its ambitions in its quietest moments too. ‘Dandy’ strips everything back to something fragile and exposed, demonstrating a confidence that now extends beyond volume. Closer ‘Keep Going Darling’ is a slow-burn builder that takes its time before arriving somewhere moving – loops layering and shifting beneath MacIntyre’s vocal until the whole thing feels like it’s about to lift off. It’s a perfect closer in that it recontextualises everything before it.
Thematically, the record is unafraid to look outward. War, cowardice, the paralysis of watching a fractured world and wondering what one band from Yorkshire can actually do about any of it. The title itself, ‘CO.WAR.DICE.’, ties all of that into one anxious, playful knot. But the album never tips into despair. Its conclusion, and its whole emotional architecture, is stubbornly hopeful. That’s harder to pull off than fury, yet Marmozets do it with ease. It was a long wait but this comeback has more than made up for it.
KATHRYN EDWARDS
When Rivers Meet have released a new single, “Caught In The Middle,” ahead of the release of their upcoming album Rhythm Rust & Static, which is now scheduled to arrive June 19.
The band also announced that the album’s release date was pushed back slightly due to vinyl manufacturing delays.
“We’re sorry for the delay and truly appreciate everyone’s patience and support, we promise it’ll be worth the wait,” the band said.
“Caught In The Middle” is the third single released from Rhythm Rust & Static and follows previously released tracks “The Script” and “The Tide Is Turning.”
“Caught In The Middle is about being pulled between knowing you should walk away from something and still feeling drawn back to it,” explained Grace Bond.
“It sits right in that tension between your head and your heart. Part of you knows the danger but another part keeps moving towards it anyway.
“The song leans into that restless feeling of being stuck between two choices and not quite knowing which way you’re going to fall.
“Caught In The Middle asks the uncomfortable questions and debates unsound judgement, against the backdrop of another biting, barbed wire riff.”
Aaron Bond added, “This one is really about that feeling of being pulled in two directions. You tell yourself you’re going to walk away but somehow you end up back there again.
“I think everyone has experienced that moment when what you know is good for you and what you feel are completely different things.
“We wanted the music to mirror that tension. The groove keeps pulling you back in, almost like you can’t quite escape it. It feels dark and hypnotic at the same time.”
The duo said the upcoming album takes a different direction from 2025’s Addicted To You.
“With our previous album, Addicted To You, we leaned into a much bigger, more produced sound,” explained Grace.
“When we started thinking about the next album, though, we felt drawn to something a little more raw and intimate.”
Aaron added, “When Rivers Meet has never followed the music industry rulebook. We’re proud to go our own way and our new album is a manifesto for doing just that.”
The duo have won three consecutive Band Of The Year honors at the UK Blues Awards and continue to build on the momentum from 2025’s Addicted To You, which reached the top four on the UK albums chart.
2026 Rhythm Rust & Static Tour Dates
July 23 – Colchester, UK – Arts Centre
July 24 – Tunbridge Wells, UK – Forum
August 7 – Barnard Castle, UK – The Witham
August 8 – Newcastle, UK – The Cluny 2
August 21 – Cardiff, UK – Acapela
August 22 – Guildford, UK – The Boileroom
September 3 – Huddersfield, UK – The Parish
September 4 – Galashiels, UK – MacArts
September 5 – Edinburgh, UK – Voodoo Rooms
September 6 – Aberdeen, UK – Lemon Tree
September 17 – Bristol, UK – The Fleece
September 18 – Norwich, UK – Norwich Arts Centre
October 1 – Newbury, UK – Arlington Arts
October 2 – Northampton, UK – Black Prince
The post When Rivers Meet release “Caught in the Middle” appeared first on Blues Rock Review.
You speak beautiful lies,
A fool cowers behind eyes
Your skin covers a mistake
My love gives, Yours just takes!
On the seductive new dark dance LP THROB, Bustié, Angelika Padilla’s (aka Pogo Pope) project turns club music into a sensual pressure valve. The album, delayed for six years and dedicated to Padilla’s late mother, arrives with grief in plain view and its body already moving. Padilla calls the project “Anarcho Body Music,” a phrase that lands with unusual precision: the record gathers freestyle, electro, UK punk, acid, disco, and new jack swing into songs built for dancing through fury, devotion, sex, and loss. “This is music for the minorities, this is Anarcho Body Music.” The sentence sounds like a mission, yet THROB is too bruised, lusty, funny, and vengeful to settle into mere manifesto. It keeps slipping from doctrine into appetite.
Perimeters of Love opens the album as a vow made in a room where sex and salvation share the same bed. The language is florid in the old Catholic-goth way, full of flame, moon, death, and reunion, but the track’s romance gains force from Padilla’s treatment of devotion as an act of mutual possession. The body becomes a chapel with a bass line; love becomes a pact with teeth. By the time Negative Approach hits, the vow has soured. The lover who once held cosmic value becomes a taker, a drain, a slick executor of false tenderness. Padilla writes breakup music with the heat turned toward judgment. Self-respect here has a blunt rhythm; escape arrives as overdue bookkeeping, the settling of an account.
Cruel Intentions makes desire grand and carnivorous. Padilla stages sex as rescue, threat, and collision, with bodies pressed together while inner beasts come alive. The song’s drama comes from scale: a kiss can save a life or end one, romance can grow into war, and pleasure can carry the charge of a blade held close to skin.
Smile Now, Cry Later lands with the rude snap of an old LA backyard party, drawing on freestyle drama, Miami booty-bass lift, and electro bite. Revenge often shrinks singers; here it enlarges the room. The track works because its cruelty has motion, and its motion has communal memory.
Miami pulls the album into a more wounded register. It name-checks the phrase “Anxious avoidant,” and Padilla treats the diagnosis as a polished excuse. The love song becomes a scene of abandonment by degrees: rings without vows, water rising, a partner mistaking explanation for absolution. The writing is plain where plainness hurts most. Bruise Control turns damage management into propulsion. Padilla understands the afterlife of a bad bond: the way one learns to bandage, perform health, recite morality, and keep moving through ruin. The song has a grim patience, as though healing were a machine task assigned to someone already exhausted. Its title is almost comic, which makes the pain sharper.
W.I.L.T. (Will Infatuation Last Tonight) gives the album one of its best jokes and one of its ugliest graves. Infatuation wilts into betrayal; a kiss travels where it should never have gone; roses, serpents, salt, and fire gather around a love that has been stripped of grace. Padilla’s gift, here and elsewhere, is her ability to make private humiliation feel theatrical without flattening its ache.
Lady of Dread is the album’s public nightmare. Truth is falsified, bodies pile up, and a fearsome feminine power presides over state violence, control, and confession. The beat takes Hi-NRG disco through dark electro pressure, giving the song a grim sort of civic theatre. Bubastis gives the album’s most grotesque tenderness. Obsession reaches the point of spoilage; desire crawls, then curdles; the beloved prince becomes compost. Few artists write rotting romance with such bodily precision, fewer still can make it feel ready for a crowded floor.
Across THROB, Padilla treats the dance track as a survival technology: a drum pattern can hold a grudge, a hook can shelter grief, a synth line can flirt with violence, and a chorus can turn pain into shared stamina. The record’s pleasures are blunt without being crude, theatrical without feeling overstuffed, political without becoming flaccid. Bustié has made an album about bodies under pressure, bodies in love, bodies in panic, bodies under law, bodies at the mercy of memory – and then gives those bodies somewhere to go. For a record born from delay, loss, and rage, THROB moves with enviable clarity: straight to the hips, straight to the wound, straight to the door of whatever system still expects quiet.
THROB is out now via Psychic Eye. Listen below and order the album here.
Bustie has shared stages with artists such as Das Ich, Xiu Xiu and Linea Aspera, and continues to expand its live presence, with a U.S. tour scheduled shortly after the album’s release.
Tour Dates:
May 22nd NYC, NY – TV Eye
May 30th Portland, OR – High Water Mark
May 31st – Oakland, CA – Eli’s Mile High Club
June 4th – Los Angeles, CA – Escondite
June 6th – Phoenix, AZ – Linger Longer Lounge
June 7th – Albuquerque, NM – Blackwall Gallery
June 8th – El Paso, TX – The Rosewood
June 10th – Austin, TX – Whiplash
June 11th – Houston, TX – The Way Up
June 12th – New Orleans, LA
June 13th – Chattanooga, TN
June 14th – Knoxville, TN – Cactus Club
June 15th – Asheville, NC – Static Age
June 16th – Charlotte, NC – Snug Harbor
June 17th – Richmond, VA – Fallout RVA
June 18th – Pittsburgh, PA – Rock Room
June 19th – Philadelphia, PA – The Catacombs
June 20th – Easton, PA – Club Coven
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The post “Whispers in the Night” — NYC Anarcho Body Music Project Bustié Turns Loss and Lust Into Dark Dance Sensuality on “THROB” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
Posted on May 22nd 2026, 1:42p.m.
Australian Extreme Metal outfit King Parrot have announced a no-holds-barred UK headline tour for September 2026 following their huge arena run supporting Pantera and Power Trip across Europe in 2025.
The band recently wrapped a 39-date US tour alongside Gwar and Soulfly and will head into the UK dates firing on all cylinders. Veteran bassist Derek Engemann (Scour, Philip H Anselmo and The Illegals, ex-Cattle Decapitation) will once again perform with the band.
“We’re really excited to be returning to the UK after our massive run with Pantera and Power Trip last year,” vocalist Matt Young said. “We can’t wait to bring our full headlining set out, and we’ll be delivering cuts from every album, including a whole swag from the new record. Looking forward to seeing our UK mates this September.”
The UK tour will hit Bridgwater, Swansea, Derby, Birmingham, Liverpool, Southampton, London, Norwich and Glasgow throughout September 2026. Tickets are available from kingparrot.net.
King Parrot will also appear at several European festivals including Summer Dying Loud, Metal!!! 2026 and Get Lost Fest.
Posted on May 22nd 2026, 1:23p.m.