Category: news

There is a point in every band’s evolution when it becomes necessary to strip everything back and ask a simple question: What is it that makes us who we are? For UK death metal force, CELESTIAL SANCTUARY, that question became the foundation for Cradle Of The Rotten, Shrine To Those Most Foul, a bold and […]

MIDNIGHT is pleased to present a visualizer for Violence On Violence live. The track comes off the band’s Satanic Attack Live! recording set for release on November 6 via Metal Blade Records. Reigning in hell, screaming like a storm, MIDNIGHT’s obscenely intense aural display of lust, filth, and sleaze ripped the Los Angeles faithful a […]

Bay Area thrash icons HEATHEN make a triumphant return, announcing their forthcoming magnum opus Lifetime in Hell, dropping February 19, 2027, via Napalm Records. Alongside the album news, they have unleashed the explosive first single, Escapegoat. Opening with a classic Let’s go! rallying cry, the track storms forward with delicious two-stepping thrash excellence, before blossoming […]

Last year, trap metal progenitors DROPOUT KINGS dropped Yokai, the final record featuring enigmatic frontman Adam Ramey following his untimely passing. After bringing together a career-spanning lineup of Kings current and past, the band took this celebration of Ramey’s life on the road to share with fans as everyone tried to heal from the shock. […]

It’s a good time for Rick Wakeman to be returning to deep space and the surface of Mars. If only he can get there before Bezos or Musk land in a cloud of red dust and plant some sort of flag to claim dubious mineral rights.

They’re not the only ones aiming for the stars. Phobos – the oddly shaped moon that orbits Mars and was once thought to be hollow or some alien craft – will be visited by spacecraft next summer and have some of its soil flown back to Earth for analysis, which will be the first time that samples from the Martian system have been collected. Has no one seen the TV show Alien: Earth, which is looking more like a documentary by the day?

Thankfully, Wakeman’s follow-up to his acclaimed 2020 album The Red Planet is a more genteel journey, filled with the fantastical and musical notes that conjure up blazing sunsets across the Red Planet and hazy clouds of crimson dust as he once more trains his gaze on a world that has inspired countless films, books and music; more a love letter to Mars, and less things with teeth.

Talking of inspiration, Wakeman gives a nod to his late friend and musical contemporary on David Bowie’s Vision, vocalist Mollie Marriott (daughter of Steve) imagining the moment where the actual Spiders from Mars descended towards Earth, played out against a towering wave of church organ and amassed choral voices. To say it’s quite the thing is to understate it a bit.

For his part, Wakeman immersed himself in planetary research, data and mission reports from Mars before a single note was written. “Once I started looking at the new data and photographs, I realised there was an entirely new album waiting to be written. There was simply too much more to say about Mars – musically and spiritually,” he says. Which might suggest that this new-found geological spin on the Red Planet is lacking in romance or emotion.

Not a bit of it. Wakeman’s ardour for the celestial body hasn’t dampened a bit. Take the charged Noctis Labyrinthus – harried along by the excellent English Rock Ensemble band – or the swirling, epically felt The Epochs Of Mars, which encapsulates Wakeman’s wildly ranging musical highs in less than eight minutes. Positively deft by his standards.

What a trip.

Today, Jackson pays tribute to the players who helped define heavy metal with four new signature models inspired by iconic instruments originally built for the artists: Limited Edition Legend Series Signature David Ellefson CB V Concert™ Bass, Limited Edition Legend Series Signature Marty Friedman Kelly™ KE-1, Limited Edition Legend Series Randy Rhoads CD1 and Legend […]

Symphonic power metal has a natural home in Italy, with bands like Rhapsody of Fire being among the genre’s best-known exports. Temperance are another band firmly operating in this territory. With Arcani, the Italians deliver their eighth studio album, adding another chapter to a story that has been steadily evolving since 2014. Tarot is the album’s… Continue Reading →

By the time you’ve paid the rent, topped up your Oyster card, purchased a sandwich of increasingly questionable value, and surrendered eight hours of your life to somebody else’s idea of productivity, the average Londoner has approximately enough money left to contemplate the benefits of organized crime. The great British promise of upward mobility has become a practical joke played on people whose principal ambition is to make it through Thursday without checking their bank balance. Somewhere between the landlord, the boss, and the creeping suspicion that life has become one enormous direct debit, a man might reasonably begin to lose his patience. Fortunately, frustration makes excellent material for pop music, particularly when accompanied by a bassline that sounds capable of talking its way into an after-hours club.

Leicester-born, London-based Jamal Bucanon has plenty to say about the absurdities of ordinary existence, and his latest single, Spill It, released through Tropics’ new record label Modern Entity, finds him cultivating a wonderfully crooked corner of British indie rock and post-punk. There’s something gloriously disreputable about the groove, with a muscular backbeat, funky bass movement, and guitar work that seems to have wandered out of some particularly eccentric corner of the 1990s alternative underground. The guitars have a wiry, restless personality, occasionally sounding as though they’re arguing among themselves while the rhythm section carries on with the business of getting everybody moving. Fans of Australian oddballs Regurgitator will recognize a similar appetite for elastic rhythms, eccentric guitar figures, trip-hop and the gleeful collision of alternative rock with danceable funk.

Bucanon belongs to that fine British tradition of turning social irritation into entertainment, following a lineage that stretches through The Streets, Hak Baker, and Headache, with a considerable debt to the louche conversational mannerisms of Baxter Dury. His delivery suggests a man who has spent far too much time observing other people’s ridiculous behaviour to remain entirely polite about it. There’s humour in that resignation, and a wonderfully English capacity to make existential exhaustion sound like something overheard between pints.

Spill It‘s beat invites movement while the guitars keep matters deliciously askew, conjuring the days when alternative rock could be funky, funny, faintly menacing, and magnificently strange without worrying about which record-shop divider it belonged behind.

Bucanon’s music inhabits the uncomfortable territory between ambition and disillusionment, where the desire for change rubs against the exhausting mechanics of survival. And if the modern metropolis is determined to squeeze every last penny and remaining ounce of patience from its inhabitants, at least somebody has had the good sense to give the resulting irritation a decent backbeat.

Listen below:

Follow Jamal Bucanon:

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The post Jamal Bucanon Gives London’s Daily Grind a Crooked Groove on “Spill It” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Following the explosive release of their debut track, Heavy Metal Heaven, Gold Coast, Australia based metal madmen, Boner Contention, are back to soundtrack your worst hangover with their crushing new single, Death March. While their debut Heavy Metal Heaven explored the physical toll of the mosh pit, Death March tackles an even more brutal reality […]

As of October 2026, DC Steffe has announced that he has left the Snake Bite Whisky camp to pursue his new metal band Boner Contention, making way for Jackson Marshall (Jackson Marshall’s Redemption) to take over lead duties on guitar. “After years of listening to the Snake Bite Whisky lads, it’s pretty surreal to get […]