(written by Islander) Like many other ardent fans of melodic death metal, we were first drawn to Fimbul Winter last fall by the musical pedigrees of their lineup: The band was formed by Amon Amarth co-founders Anders Biazzi and Niko Kaukinen, along with longtime Amon Amarth drummer Fredrik Andersson, and they were joined by venomous […]
The post AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: FIMBUL WINTER — “WHEN THE SUN COMES OUT AT NIGHT” appeared first on NO CLEAN SINGING.
Welcome to Prog‘s brand new Tracks Of The Week! This week we’ve got seven more new and diverse slices of progressively inclined music for you to enjoy.
Congratulations to New Jersey prog duo Datura Lodge, whose up-tempo Stone won last week’s Tracks Of The Week, narrowly pipping Venezuelan quintet Changing Places In The Fire and with Japanese psych trio Maya Ongakku in third place.
The premise is simple – we’ve collated a batch of new releases by bands falling under the progressive umbrella, and collated them together in one post for you – it makes it so much easier than having to dip in and out of various individual posts, doesn’t it?
The idea is to watch the videos (or listen if it’s a stream), enjoy (or not) and also to vote for your favourite in the voting form at the bottom of this post. Couldn’t be easier, could it? We’ll be bringing you Tracks Of The Week, as the title implies, each week. Next week, we’ll update you with this week’s winner and present a host of new prog music for you to enjoy.
If you’re a band and you want to be featured in Prog‘s Tracks Of The Week, send your video (as a YouTube link) or track embed, band photo and biog to us here.
The currently slimmed-down Haken have just announced they will release a new EP, in a fever dream (styled lowercase, before the grammar police are on our backs!), which they’ll release through InsideOut Music digitally on July 17 and physically on September 18. They’re helped out on bass by both The Aristocrats’ Bryan Beller and Periphery’s Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood, and new single, delirium, is a proper prog-rocking banger!
“This EP was born from a period of reflection and rediscovery,” the band say. “Over the last few years, we’ve faced challenges that forced us to look inward, both as musicians and as people, and the songs on this record are the result of that journey. This EP captures a moment in time of us finding our feet again – moving forward, taking risks, and creating from a place that feels as genuine as we have ever been.”
There have been quite a few musical labels attached to Chicago quartet REZN, but ‘dreamlike’ is the word we’d attach to the band’s new single, Aerial Birth. It’s taken from their upcoming album, Cycles In The Infinite Dream, which is out through Sargent House on July 24, and which offers a sound that binds together prog, psych and something a little more muscular. We’re certainly liking what we’ve heard so far…
“We moved towards the dream and subconscious state as a lyrical concept and melodic theme,” the band explains. “The pseudo-waking state is a reflection of a second existence—something that you can flee to or be imprisoned by.”
Norwegian prog metallers Enslaved continue to explore new musical territory light years away from their original black metal sound with the release of Spirit Helper, a collaboration with Kevin Kicking Woman (his family’s spiritual tribal name), an Elder of the Blackfeet Nation. Although it echoes the band’s immense Havenless from 2003’s Below The Lights, Spirit Helper shows the band in a whole new musical light
“Ultimately, Spirit Helper is a song about connection – between past and present, traditions and people, and the spiritual and human worlds,” says guitarist Ivar Bjørnson. “For Enslaved, it stands as one of the most meaningful musical journeys we have undertaken.”
“Songs are the Blackfoot way of knowing,” adds Kevin. “Expressing relationship and responsibility, belonging and accountability. The purpose of this song is having the performative expression giving meaning to life. Connecting to the universes through the cosmos, earth beings, water beings and spirit beings. Spirit helper is the physical documentation in this process.”
US prog rockers Happy The Man have shared a video for their brand new single, The Fourth Of July: An American Suite, the first new music from the band in over 20 years! It comes courtesy of drummer Ron Riddle, originally created in the 2000s during his years as composer for the television series Detonators. It also features a nucleus of original Happy The Man members who have continued collaborating musically in recent years, including bassist Rick Kennell and guitarist Stanley Whitaker.
“This project feels strangely inevitable,” says Riddle. “The original piece already carried the DNA of Happy The Man inside it. What’s exciting now is hearing those ideas finally realised by the musicians who inspired that side of the writing in the first place.”
Stick Men really should need no introduction to Prog readers, featuring as they do King Crimson’s Tony Levin and Pat Mastelotto along with multi-instrumentalist and composer Markus Reuter. The trio are releasing their first new album in a decade with Let’s THRAK Again, a Robert Fripp-sanctioned homage to King Crimson’s THRAK, out via their Bandcamp page on September 4, and from which comes new single, Swimming With Tea.
“Let’s THRAK Again is 60 minutes of pure, kinetic energy,” notes the band. “We didn’t just write 12 new compositions; we designed an entirely new sonic vocabulary for them. Our audience listens deeply. They don’t just want to hear the notes; they want to understand the architecture of the sound. It’s a roll of the dice, a sonic triptych, and a tribute to the heavy, mechanical impact of the original THRAK era.”
Multi-national proggers Playgrounded have announced that they will release their new album, A Flower To Water, through Pelagic Records on September 18. An eclectic bunch at the best of times, the band’s new single Snow is a catchy yet brooding and meditative slice of proggy electronica that could easily win the band an army of new fans.
“We slightly lift the veil to uncover the themes of A Flower To Water in black and white,” the band state. “We speak of grief as a process, its marks on time, the anticipation of the new. So… we let it go, inside the snow, today.”
Norwegian art rock artist Susanna is celebrating 15 years of running her own label, SusannaSonata, and will release three new albums through the label of artists she “deeply loves to listen to”, as well as sharing her own video of a live performance of A Swallow, which was originally from her recent Meditations On Love album.
The video features just Susanna, her voice and Finnish/Norwegian composer, musician and producer Juhani Silvola for a sparse and haunting rendition.
Forty years since NYC synth-pop band Book of Love released its acclaimed debut album, vocalist Susan Ottaviano’s on a big creative kick.
The post Book of Love’s Susan Ottaviano on Mom Life, Creativity, and the 2026 Reunion Tour appeared first on Rockmommy.com.
Earlier this month, Rico Nasty and Kenneth Bloom, who will always be Kenny Beats in our hearts, teamed up for the brisk single “Rituals.” It’s so great, we named it one of the best tracks from that week. It feels me with great joy that, officially, Rico Nasty and Bloom have another album on the way, titled RX, out in just three weeks. Despite the name pivot, there should be no shortage of “Kennyyyyyyy!” unless Rico has amended her ad-lib, which I would still love to witness if true.
The post Rico Nasty Announces New Album <em>RX</em>: Hear “Cupcake” appeared first on Stereogum.
There was no listing in Seattle’s essential alt. culture weekly newspaper The Stranger for the gig scheduled at The Boathouse on February 19, 1995, no fliers being handed out outside the venue on Mercer Street, no mention at all of the show on any of the college radio shows dedicated to promoting left of the dial outsider art in the Emerald City. It was almost as if the four-piece band who’d booked the show didn’t want anyone to know about it. Which wasn’t too far from the truth.
“There was a lot of interest right off the bat,” their frontman told Rolling Stone 20 years on. “and that scared us because we hadn’t done anything yet.”
Except, of course, all four musicians had done things before, and that was precisely why they were deliberately choosing to manage expectations for their first public appearance. The rhythm section – bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith – had spent the previous three years playing together in local alt. rockers Sunny Day Real Estate, Seattle’s best-known post-hardcore band, signed to the city’s Sub Pop label. Guitarist Pat Smear was an American hardcore legend, a founding member of nihilistic Los Angeles punks Germs, and most recently, Nirvana’s touring guitarist, until Kurt Cobain’s April 1994 death by suicide brought that new opportunity to a definitive end.
The ‘face’ of the band might never have fronted a group before, but it was always going to be his presence that would ensure that the band would be under the spotlight from day one, as he was only too aware.
“I was always going to be “that guy from Kurt Cobain’s band” and I knew that,” he admitted.
‘That guy from Kurt Cobain’s band’ was Nirvana drummer turned Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl.
In the weeks and months after Cobain’s death, Grohl, by his own admission, was “about as confused as I’ve ever been”, and utterly unsure as to his future plans. But between October 17 and 23, 1994, at Robert Lang Studios not far from his Seattle home, Grohl committed 15 songs to tape, playing every note himself, except for some guitar on X-Static contributed by The Afghan Whigs frontman Greg Dulli. Within two months, word had leaked that Grohl had a new project, but at that point, he didn’t yet have a band. As Foo Fighters were assembled, for their own reasons, each man was looking to start a fresh chapter.
“We wanted to do something new and we wanted to feel new again,” Grohl told Rolling Stone in 2015. “So, the loft party seemed like the perfect place to start.”
Cheered on by supportive friends and family members, Foo Fighters’ first gig was never really going to be as “terrifying” as Grohl had feared. But it’s easy to understand why the band’s leader elected to wait until everyone in attendance was “wicked fucking drunk” before they debuted a set of songs that almost no-one had ever heard.
“I remember it being such a huge relief that we just made it to the end,” Grohl reflected 20 years on, “and then it was maybe a month later that I heard the recording of it – and I was fucking mortified.
“I thought we sounded great and I heard the recording like, Ohhh . . . that’s the Foo Fighters? We’ve got to practice.”
Twenty years on, Grohl had hoped to release a cassette of the show for Record Store Day. The only problem being that no-one seems to know if one exists, its semi-mythical status making it “some Raiders of the Lost Ark shit” as he told Rolling Stone. Don’t hold your breath.
My fellow elder millennial Charley Crockett has been a prolific force in country music over the past decade or so. Since 2015, Crockett has released 17 studio albums, including Clovis, an album re-released today, concluding a months-long saga.
The post Charley Crockett’s Pulled Album <em>Clovis</em> Just Got An Official Release appeared first on Stereogum.
I just wanna see some palm trees. I will try and shake away this disease.
When Art Alexakis of Everclear sang those words in “Santa Monica,” he tapped into one of popular music’s oldest fantasies: that somewhere beyond the cold, beyond the routine, beyond whatever is weighing us down, warm weather, the sun, hell, summer might make things better. The idea is simple: change the weather, and perhaps you’ll change yourself.
But what if the disease doesn’t shake away?
Throughout the 1990s, many alternative rock and metal bands seemed to challenge that very idea. Summer wasn’t presented as freedom but as something oppressive, surreal or even decaying. The sun didn’t heal – it distorted. Heat became suffocating. Brightness became blinding or unsettling. Rather than embracing one of popular culture’s most enduring myths, bands like Soundgarden, Deftones, Danzig, and Type O Negative headed for the shade and turned summer inside out.
“Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden is one of the clearest examples of this reversal.
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Soundgarden vocalist Chris Cornell has said the song began with a misheard phrase from a news broadcast, “black hole sun,” which immediately suggested both its title and atmosphere. From there, the song was built around that image, with structure, melody, and lyrics forming through a stream of consciousness association rather than a fixed narrative idea.
The result is a sequence of fragmented impressions rather than a literal account of anything. Images of heat, decay, disguise, moral unease, and distorted nature appear without settling into a stable meaning. Summer is present, but it is not liberating. “Boiling heat / summer stench / ’neath the black, the sky looks dead” turns the season into something oppressive and lifeless, where even the sky loses its familiarity, looking more violent and extraterrestrial than like Earth’s.
Musically, it carries a strange contrast. It is melodic and almost soothing in places, but it moves with a humid, sweltering weight. There is a sense of warmth, but it is sickly, closer to something overripe than something refreshing. In that sense, it’s like an anti-Beach Boys song. Where classic sun-drenched pop presents warmth as ease and clarity, on “Black Hole Sun,” it’s warped and unstable, as if brightness itself has turned heavy.
The music video, directed by Howard Greenhalgh, extends the same logic visually. Tim Burton-esque suburban life is rendered as exaggerated performance, with faces, gestures, and domestic scenes pushed beyond natural behaviour. Nothing is subtle or hidden beneath the surface. As the video progresses, that world is soon sucked into this oppressive sun, which has become a black hole, pulling everything into dissolution as it “washes the rain away.”
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“My Own Summer (Shove It)” by Deftones sounds, by the title, personal at first, as if it is describing an individual experience of summer. It carries a sense of optimism in isolation, but the “shove it” part quickly changes that tone once the lyrics and delivery set in. Lines like “the shade is a tool, a device, a saviour” and “I try to look up to the sky but my eyes burn” make that shift explicit. Shade is something imperative in this heatwave. The sun, causing burning retinas, is an inferno to resist.
The Dean Karr-directed music video shows the band performing on top of shark cages in the middle of the ocean. Beneath them, great white sharks circle and tear into chunks of meat thrown into the water. There is a constant tension, as if the band might fall in along with the swimming pig with goggles on, only to be torn apart. The shade cannot save you here.
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“Summer Breeze” by Type O Negative reframes the idea of summer again, but in a different way. Before October Rust, before autumn, the song sits in that uneasy space where warmth is still present, but already feels like it is fading into something else.
Originally by Seals and Crofts, “Summer Breeze” is built on comfort, lightness, and domestic calm. In Type O Negative’s version, that same material becomes slower, heavier, and more ambiguous. Summer is still there, but it feels distant, like a memory being replayed through a different emotional filter. The song was also featured during the opening credits of I Know What You Did Last Summer, setting the tone for hook-handed bloodshed during the summer season.
The lyric “Flowing like the jasmine in my mind” carries a strange softness, but it is not clean or carefree. It’s imagined, something drifting rather than settling. In this sense, summer breeze becomes another kind of shade–a retreat into something cooler, and darker.
The imagined setting shifts with it. You can picture Type O Negative in a grassy field, dressed in black, sweating under the sun, not celebrating it but enduring it. The oppressive, late August heat weighs heavy, and then the slight breeze comes in.
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“Dirty Black Summer” by Danzig arrives after Type O Negative leave the field. Danzig and his band set up a picnic. Summer is still here, but it has changed shape again.
“No summer in the winter time / will keep you warm like a funeral pyre.” The line carries a strange, familiar lyricism, almost Doors-like in its phrasing, where opposites collapse into each other and emotional heat becomes literal flame. “And our love become a funeral pyre. Come on baby, light my fire.” The echo is there, but inverted–the warmth now consumes as it burns rather than igniting romance.
On that note is the line, “And nothing like an August night / drenched in your loving.” The word “drenched” evokes sweat more than romance. It carries over the physical memory of heat from the previous section–that same late-summer heaviness, the kind of night where the air feels soaked. It connects back to the “summer breeze” that came before it, except here the breeze no longer feels light. It feels humid, saturated, stuck to writhing bodies.
Around the picnic, the idea of this dirty black summer emerges from the soot and ashes of that earlier “funeral pyre.” Summer here is now nothing but residue.
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California, the album by Mr. Bungle, feels like satire on California itself–the place, the idea of it, and the “Californication” of things. The Beach Boys version of California sits in the background here: safe-sounding melodies, sun-drenched harmony, the promise of ease and clarity. But in California, that surface never stays stable. It keeps revealing something unnerving underneath.
The album moves through a sweltering, artificial, concrete summer, overheated and theatrical. Songs like “Retrovertigo” and “Sweet Charity” lead through this space, where nostalgia and romance are warped, with odd but memorable lyrics like “Even the bombs and scarecrows will sing.”
“The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” comes from author Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, where American comfort and modern life are described as a kind of spiritual suffocation. Here, even relief from heat feels artificial. “Get me out of this air-conditioned nightmare. Rots your brain just like a catchy tune” turns pleasure itself into contamination, where happiness feels engineered.
Like “Black Hole Sun,” the album shares that anti-Beach Boys sensibility, but takes it further into artificiality. Instead of sun-drenched clarity or even distorted heat, California presents something manufactured. Still, Patton asks in earnest or maybe naivety, or maybe while suffering heatstroke, “Where’s my rainbow?” This ties back to the innocuous fantasy Everclear brought up earlier about just wanting to see some palm trees. Even the visage of something summery is all the hope the hapless human needs. But that same impulse keeps mutating across the decade: into distortion, into residue, into something artificial.
Across the horizon of these bands, summer stops being a destination and instead becomes distorted, suffocating, ritualized, or synthetic. Each version unpacks another piece of luggage from the original promise of palm trees. By the end, “Santa Monica” doesn’t feel like something that can shake away this disease anymore. It could very well be the pathogen.
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Purchase Ryan Dyer’s book, The Underground in China: Metal, Punk, Hardcore and Noise 2013-2021, here.
(Kyle Doerksen is a very good photographer of varied scenes and subjects, as you can see here. He also has a taste for metal, and that led him to The Regent Theater in Los Angeles last weekend to witness performances by Monolord, Acid King, and Mizmor. We are greateful that he sent us the following […]
The post SHOW REVIEW: MONOLORD, ACID KING, MIZMOR – LIVE IN LOS ANGELES, JUNE 27, 2026 appeared first on NO CLEAN SINGING.
Internationally acclaimed guitarist, composer, and FIREWIND mastermind Gus G. released his fifth solo album ‘Steel Burner’ on April 24, 2026. Marking his first solo offering […]
The post GUS G. RELEASES “CONFESSION”, THE FIFTH VIDEO SINGLE OFF NEW ALBUM ‘STEEL BURNER’ appeared first on Metal-Rules.com.