Since their great 2023 album Death Is Nothing To Us, Fiddlehead have been doing lots of festivals, guesting on friends’ records, and forming side projects. But the post-hardcore band is back today with the announcement of a new EP called Baby I’ll Change, out this week.
The post Fiddlehead Announce New EP Out Friday: Hear Title Track “Baby I’ll Change” appeared first on Stereogum.
Massachusetts post-hardcore lifers There Were Wires have never been a band interested in repeating themselves, and they seem even less inclined to do so now. More than 20 years removed from the cult status of Somnambulists and their influential run through New England’s chaotic hardcore underground, after a long period of inactivity, the reunited veterans return with Vessel, their first new full-length since 2003. Rather than chasing nostalgia, the album finds the band expanding on the atmospheric weight, crushing heaviness and emotional depth that made their earlier material resonate long after their initial run ended.
Written and recorded over a period of almost two years by the band themselves, Vessel balances caustic post-hardcore intensity and noise rock sharpness with moments of reflection and restraint. The result is a record that feels shaped by the passage of time, informed by loss, grief, friendship and persistence, but delivered with the same urgency that made There Were Wires such a formidable force in the first place.
Today, Decibel is proud to present the full-stream premiere of Vessel ahead of its June 26 release via Iodine Recordings.
“I did not think Vessel would ever see the light of day,” singer Jaime Mason told us. “A 20-year absence from any and all activity, a greying spread across time zones, and the inexhaustible amount of obstacles set in the pathway of this record kept me in constant doubt. There Were Wires was a band formed in some other lifetime – almost in another universe from where we are now. I’m adjusting my reading glasses as I type this, nestled into my big grey couch with my dog Henry resting on my knee. I’m 3,000 miles away from the rest of my bandmates, watching a nearly finished video of ourselves performing “The Carousel of Sickening Bliss”. It’s visceral, angry, and visually beautiful for such an aggressive song. The video and entire record will be released later this week, delivered to the ether of the internet for scrutiny, applause, or indifference. I have feelings about it. Feelings on top of feelings on top of feelings, that’s what this record is drowning in.”
He continues, showing the undeniable emotional charge behind this record: “We all have lived a lot of life as the years evaporated before our eyes, and the discomfort of having to try so hard to regain the pieces of what we have lost was overwhelming at times. I’m not the same kid I used to be, and I don’t think anyone else is, either. Working on this piece of music with my friends — some of the most brilliant, stubborn, hilarious, and confounding people I’ve ever known – was not just a series of over-practiced riffs and fine-tuning choruses. Vessel was created in the face of laughter and despair. It bloomed through trust and loss. It was terrible and amazing at every turn — incomprehensibly frustrating and sometimes downright infuriating. Despite it all, I’m grateful for the chance to be a part of something that was so hard fought. It’s time to free this vessel we hold dear into the current of algorithms – it’s no longer ours now.”
Listen to Vessel in full below.
You can preorder Vessel here.
The post Album Premiere: There Were Wires – <i>Vessel</i> appeared first on Decibel Magazine.
Paul Verlaine did not merely write about melancholy, emotional instability, intoxication, doomed love, and spiritual collapse. He lived inside them. Few nineteenth-century poets embodied the emotional contradictions of noir and Gothic aesthetics as completely as Verlaine himself.
His life unfolded like a tragic black-and-white film decades before cinema existed: absinthe, scandal, obsessive love, violence, prison, Catholic guilt, erotic ambiguity, emotional fragility, and artistic brilliance collapsing together inside one restless consciousness.
Paul Verlaine sitting in a rain-soaked Victorian Paris interior surrounded by candlelight and noir shadows in a cinematic Gothic atmosphere.
Long before modern noir cinema explored damaged antiheroes wandering through morally ambiguous worlds, Verlaine transformed his own emotional instability into poetic atmosphere. His work helped shape Symbolism, Decadence, Gothic melancholy, and the emotional aesthetics that later influenced noir culture itself.
Understanding Verlaine therefore means examining both the poetry and the damaged psychological landscape from which it emerged.
Born in 1844, Paul Verlaine emerged during a period when French poetry increasingly moved away from rigid classical structures toward emotional suggestion, musicality, ambiguity, and psychological atmosphere.
Unlike earlier Romantic poets who often emphasized dramatic declaration and emotional intensity openly, Verlaine cultivated fragility, nuance, uncertainty, and tonal melancholy.
His poetry frequently feels less like narrative and more like emotional weather.
Rain, dusk, distant music, fading memory, autumn streets, blurred desire, and emotional exhaustion drift through his verses with hypnotic softness. Rather than describing emotion directly, Verlaine often allows atmosphere itself to communicate psychological tension.
This artistic approach strongly anticipates later noir aesthetics, where shadows, silence, smoke, rain, and visual ambiguity reveal emotional states more powerfully than explicit explanation.
Verlaine famously declared in his poem Art poétique:
“De la musique avant toute chose.”
“Music before all else.”
That statement became foundational for Symbolist poetry because Verlaine believed emotional suggestion mattered more than rigid clarity or intellectual precision.
Rather than constructing poetry like logical argument, he approached language atmospherically through rhythm, sound, emotional ambiguity, and tonal movement.
This philosophy later influenced not only Symbolist writers such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud, but also modern Gothic music, darkwave, noir cinema, and melancholic songwriting traditions where atmosphere frequently carries emotional meaning more powerfully than narrative itself.
Verlaine’s poetry therefore feels remarkably modern because it prioritizes emotional immersion over explanation.
Verlaine’s personal life became almost inseparable from his artistic mythology.
His alcoholism, emotional volatility, destructive relationships, and psychological instability increasingly shaped public perception of him as both tragic artist and self-destructive antihero.
The most infamous episode of his life involved his relationship with Arthur Rimbaud, the younger poet whose emotional intensity and rebelliousness transformed Verlaine’s life catastrophically.
Their relationship combined obsession, artistic admiration, erotic tension, emotional dependence, and violence. Together they wandered through Paris, Brussels, and London while descending increasingly into alcoholism, instability, and conflict.
In 1873, during a violent argument in Brussels, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist with a revolver. Although the wound was not fatal, Verlaine was arrested and sentenced to prison.
The episode feels strikingly noir because it combines doomed romance, addiction, emotional collapse, guilt, crime, and psychological self-destruction within one claustrophobic emotional narrative.
While imprisoned, Verlaine experienced a partial religious conversion that intensified the contradictions already dominating his life.
His later poetry frequently oscillates between spiritual longing and emotional despair, Catholic guilt and sensual desire, redemption and self-destruction.
This tension became central to Decadent and Gothic aesthetics because Verlaine understood morality psychologically rather than simply socially.
Sin, guilt, pleasure, shame, desire, intoxication, and spiritual exhaustion all coexist simultaneously within his work.
Modern noir storytelling often explores similar contradictions. Characters seek redemption while continuing destructive behavior. Emotional vulnerability coexists with moral collapse. Desire becomes inseparable from ruin.
Verlaine lived those contradictions personally long before noir cinema transformed them into visual archetypes.
Few poets influenced the emotional atmosphere of melancholy as profoundly as Verlaine.
His famous poem Il pleure dans mon cœur transforms rain itself into psychological condition:
“It rains in my heart
As it rains upon the town.”
This connection between weather and emotional interiority later became fundamental to noir aesthetics.
Rain in noir cinema rarely functions merely as weather. It externalizes loneliness, guilt, alienation, memory, exhaustion, and emotional ambiguity visually.
Verlaine helped establish that emotional language poetically decades earlier through atmosphere rather than direct confession.
His melancholic landscapes feel psychologically immersive because external reality mirrors internal emotional fragmentation continuously.
Verlaine’s influence extended far beyond French poetry.
Symbolism, Decadence, Gothic Romanticism, darkwave aesthetics, melancholic songwriting, and noir emotional atmosphere all inherited aspects of his artistic philosophy.
Artists across literature, music, cinema, and visual art continued exploring the emotional territory Verlaine helped define: loneliness, fragile beauty, intoxication, doomed desire, emotional ambiguity, spiritual exhaustion, and the seductive atmosphere of melancholy itself.
His work also helped legitimize emotional vulnerability artistically. Rather than presenting fragility as weakness, Verlaine transformed emotional instability into poetic texture.
That psychological honesty continues resonating deeply within Gothic culture today.
Modern audiences still recognize themselves inside Verlaine’s emotional contradictions.
Anxiety, addiction, unstable identity, loneliness, obsessive relationships, emotional exhaustion, and the search for beauty within sadness remain profoundly contemporary experiences.
Verlaine’s poetry survives because it captures emotional fragility without simplifying it into moral lesson or sentimental comfort.
His work drifts between beauty and collapse, tenderness and destruction, spiritual longing and emotional ruin with unsettling honesty.
Long before noir detectives wandered through rain-soaked streets beneath cigarette smoke and broken neon lights, Paul Verlaine was already living inside that emotional darkness poetically, transforming his own fractured life into one of the earliest true noir atmospheres in modern art.
Explore Edgar Allan Poe apparel, Gothic aesthetics, noir-inspired fashion, and psychological darkness inside the official Edgar Allan Poets Noir Store.
Explore Gothic music, cinematic tension, psychological darkness, and immersive noir atmosphere through the official Edgar Allan Poets playlist.
Paul Verlaine was a nineteenth-century French poet associated with Symbolism and Decadent literature whose emotionally atmospheric poetry profoundly influenced modern Gothic and noir aesthetics.
Verlaine emphasized musicality, emotional suggestion, melancholy, and atmospheric ambiguity rather than rigid poetic structure or direct explanation.
Verlaine helped establish emotional atmospheres centered on rain, loneliness, guilt, emotional fragility, doomed desire, and psychological ambiguity that later became central to noir culture.
Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud shared an intense and destructive relationship marked by artistic collaboration, emotional obsession, alcoholism, violence, and psychological instability.
The post Verlaine and Darkness: The Poet Who Lived His Own Noir Story appeared first on Edgar Allan Poets – Noir Rock Band.
I spent most of May at a sprawling state park, striding down dirt paths beside billowing meadows, through insect-ridden trails in the woods, and along the entire shore of the beach two miles from the parking lot: a glittering reward for the long, sweltering walk. When I listen to the gentle, sunlit songs of Tasha’s new album You Are Spring!, I’m transported back there, plucked into the scene of astonishing yet humble beauty, amongst blue skies, subtle breezes, and quiet revelation.
The post Album Of The Week: Tasha <em>You Are Spring!</em> appeared first on Stereogum.
The multi-platinum alternative metal landscape is braced for an seismic structural shift after Bad Wolves officially confirmed a massive, highly anticipated global announcement locked in for Monday, June 29. Following a devastating rolling lineup exodus that completely fractured the previous iteration of the band, founding drummer John Boecklin has successfully rebuilt the group’s infrastructure from the ground up—striking back against a staggering seven-figure buyout bid from ex-frontman Tommy Vext to unleash a fiercely independent, star-studded heavy music reboot.
STREAM THE METAL BREAKDOWN DAILY NOW:Want an immediate, unfiltered industry analysis of the massive Bad Wolves internal power struggle, the secret studio clues linking a internet icon to the microphone, and where the former members have landed? Host Scott Penfold breaks down the entire June 29 disclosure roadmap, investigates the seven-figure legal battle, and analyzes the potential sonic shift of the group on today’s episode of the Metal Breakdown Daily! Catch the full broadcast by streaming directly inside the free Loaded Radio App available on Apple iOS and Google Play.
The alternative metal community has spent months tracking the quiet, internal collapse of Bad Wolves. Following the completion of their touring cycles behind their fourth studio outing Die About It, the band was quietly rocked by an extensive wave of personnel departures that ultimately stripped the group of several key members. With the future of the multi-platinum brand hanging in the balance, a massive financial power play took place behind closed corporate doors.
Insiders have revealed that controversial ex-vocalist Tommy Vext actively submitted an aggressive, seven-figure financial bid to buy the legal trademark and naming rights to the Bad Wolves brand outright. Vext, who split from the group under highly publicized legal conditions in January 2021, aimed to reclaim the moniker for his own touring purposes.
However, founding drummer and primary songwriter John Boecklin flatly rejected the millions. Refusing to surrender the identity of the band he co-founded in 2017, Boecklin instead hunkered down inside Los Angeles recording studios to single-handedly construct a brand-new, highly evolved alternative metal blueprint.
LIVE & LOUD: Stream the World’s Hardest Radio Station 24/7 Below:On June 22, Bad Wolves broke their long social media silence by deploying a cryptic, high-velocity video teaser that starkly displayed the numbers 06.29. While management has maintained absolute radio silence regarding the specific identities of the incoming musicians, cyber-sleuths and Reddit tracking grids have already piece together a staggering prospective roster.
The most shocking rumor centers around the band’s new lead vocalist. Internet sensation and highly acclaimed alternative pop-rock solo artist Sara “Killboy” Skinner is widely expected to be named the official new frontwoman of Bad Wolves.
The rumor caught serious fire after fans cross-referenced online studio updates. Killboy publicly shared that she had covertly joined a major heavy rock unit, subsequently naming her new pet spider “Wolfie”. Weeks later, the exact matching enclosure for the exotic pet was spotted sitting in the background of a recording studio photograph posted by current Bad Wolves guitarist AJ Rebollo.
Compounding the hype is the rumored involvement of progressive metal titan Javier Reyes, renowned for his intricate, eight-string mastery in the instrumental outfit Animals As Leaders. Should Reyes be confirmed alongside returning guitarist AJ Rebollo—whose status was validated via recent session tracking imagery—the new Bad Wolves will possess an unparalleled level of technical guitar prowess.
As Boecklin readies the public for the debut of the group’s highly anticipated fifth studio album—which has been deep in active production across all of 2026—the former components of the Bad Wolves machine have rapidly pivoted into new corners of the industry.
Vocalist Daniel “DL” Laskiewicz, who stepped in to front the band following Vext’s 2021 departure, has officially transitioned into a premium live role, landing a highly coveted gig as a touring member for the stadium-level juggernaut Falling In Reverse. Acclaimed guitarist Doc Coyle has fully resurrected his foundational metalcore engine God Forbid while simultaneously pulling double-duty on the road handling touring guitar slots for alternative icons Snot.
Meanwhile, Tommy Vext and former Bad Wolves guitarist Chris Cain have pooled their respective resources to launch a brand-new alternative rock outfit dubbed With A Vengeance. Backed by a high-caliber backing line featuring tech-metal wizard Angel Vivaldi and Chimaira drum powerhouse Austin D’Amond, the group is reportedly preparing to deploy their inaugural debut single, “Shared Light,” this July.
The competitive landscape of alternative metal is heating up to an absolute boiling point, but on June 29, John Boecklin and his newly assembled wolfpack are officially prepared to reclaim their territory.
Who is rumored to be the new singer of Bad Wolves? Viral alternative rock artist Sara “Killboy” Skinner is heavily rumored to be taking over the lead microphone, supported by extensive social media tracking and shared studio photographs.
Did Tommy Vext try to buy back the name Bad Wolves? Yes. Industry sources indicate Tommy Vext submitted an official seven-figure financial bid to purchase the rights to the group, which was flatly denied by founding drummer John Boecklin.
When will the new Bad Wolves music be released? While an exact single drop date has not been formally scheduled, the band’s official announcement on Monday, June 29, is expected to provide the tracking timeline for their fifth studio album.
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The corporate bids have failed, the old chapter has been burned to the ground, and a bold new era of progressive alternative metal is creeping out of the California shadows.
What is your honest assessment of this massive creative reboot? Do you think bringing in a female pop-rock force like Killboy combined with the progressive technicality of Javier Reyes will propel Bad Wolves to heights they’ve never seen before, or are you still holding onto the classic sound? Sound off with your tracking thoughts and lineup predictions in the comment section below!
The post Bad Wolves Tease Monumental June 29 Lineup Reveal and Studio Album Milestone Following Multi Million Dollar Rights Battle appeared first on Loaded Radio.
Mark Menghi’s Chris Cornell tribute project have taken on a pivotal early Soundgarden single.
The post Halestorm, Testament, Ex-Pearl Jam, Etc. Members Unite On King Ultramega’s Cover Of Soundgarden’s “Loud Love” appeared first on Theprp.com.