(Andy Synn is back with a recommendation from the Indonesian underground today) It’s perhaps not entirely surprising to note that the majority of bands we write about tend to be located on one of two continents, Europe or North America. That’s not to say we don’t try our best to cover bands from other locales – […]
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Last month, post-punk group Do Nothing announced their sophomore album Friend World with the lead single “Stars.” It’s eerie and a bit corroded, leaning into squirmy electronic blemishes, and sounding nothing like what Do Nothing showcased on 2023’s Snake Sideways. Today, they’ve returned with another peak at the forthcoming album via the single “Act Natural,” which is also very weird and comes with a ridiculous video.
The post Do Nothing – “Act Natural” appeared first on Stereogum.
What comes to mind when you hear of a band called Rectal Wench, and that they are from China? For most people, the answer comes in two layers. The first is the name itself. “Rectal Wench” triggers a reaction before any context has time to form. It sounds provocative, even confrontational, in a way that suggests parody or shock value. For some listeners, that is enough to file the band away as a joke, or at least as something not meant to be taken seriously. The second layer is the country. China carries its own set of assumptions that sit on top of the music before anyone has heard it. For many outside observers, China is not automatically associated with underground metal scenes in the same way that parts of Europe or North America might be. Instead, it is often imagined through broader political and cultural frameworks first, and artistic subcultures second.
Now, pretend you are me, first arriving in China in 2013 after a long flight from Canada. Alone, suffering from major culture shock, I searched for a sense of familiarity–punk and metal shows. At a nearby venue, 13 Club, I scanned the upcoming shows on their website. I saw the name then for the first time, “Rectal Wench.” It instantly excited me. I knew of some bands in China. Torturing Nurse–the noise artist from Shanghai who wore a strange mask. Suffocated, the thrash band who played Wacken. Ritual Day – black metal. I knew these things could exist here. So what was Rectal Wench? Something gory. Something sexual. Maybe goregrind, pornogrind. Who knows? The band was playing something called the Gore Feast. I got more excited. This was my sphere of interest–gore, possibly metal, rectums, wenches. My imagination went crazy thinking of what would happen.
Backed by an inhuman drum machine, men in ski masks and butcher outfits took the stage at the Gore Feast. The songs were as I had expected: goregrind. They, along with the band Cave Have Rod (who also appeared on the Gore Feast and organized it with Rectal Wench), became representative of true underground metal to me in China. It wasn’t that these bands were heavy and had strange, sexual names and wore dresses or maxi pads on their faces on stage. It’s that they created, organized, and brought together bands and fans for this mini-festival, which in its small way, represented a form of artistic freedom. You didn’t need a VPN to see Rectal Wench. It came uncensored and explicitly in your face.
Even though I hadn’t seen Torturing Nurse yet, I imagined the scene at his shows would be similar: the performance itself being an expression of musical freedom through noise with the crowd being like-minded individuals. I would eventually investigate the Shanghai scene, and these Torturing Nurse shows at a later time.
After the Gore Feast, I contacted Rectal Wench and Cave Have Rod, along with The Dark Prison Massacre, who also played the show, doing interviews with all three of them. I used these interviews and the show as a real basis for what would eventually become The Underground in China: Metal, Punk, Hardcore and Noise (2013-2021). The event and these bands pried open my perception and expectations about the Chinese underground music scene, and I couldn’t have asked for a better set of ushers than the Rod, the Wench and the Massacre.
Within the interviews, I learned that the name Rectal Wench came from the Lividity song of the same name. Rex (guitar) explained how he first encountered pornogrind after reading an article describing Lividity as “the most niubi (Chinese word for fucking awesome) brutal death/pornogrind band on the planet.” The first song he heard, “Pussy Lover,” became a reference point in itself, “which made me aware of the many colors of pussy.” The name “Rectal Wench” arose directly from that early listening: “Rectal Wench was my favorite song. This name is very appropriate – the implications, style, everything that we want to represent, so we took the name.” At the time, I wanted to understand whether this kind of extreme sexual imagery was simply part of the aesthetic of the genre, or whether it connected in any way to the environment these bands were actually living in. I also wanted to know if pornography itself played any role in how these ideas circulated.
Linkfy (vocals) and Rex (guitar) both spoke about pornography in the same matter-of-fact register as the music. Linkfy described interests in “fetish, rape, foreign addiction and Bang Bros.” Rex described having to look across different countries’ sites depending on access, preferring “the United States or Russia or South America, where the women are more wild.” Rex also described his influences in the same direct way, naming German goregrind bands like Gut and Cock and Ball Torture, and stating simply: “Impetigo is our God.”
Across the interview, nothing is softened for an outside reader. Even when the conversation shifts away from porn or gore, the tone stays the same: “I don’t care. Human nature. Working every day is torture.” What came through is the consistency of how they speak. There is a bluntness, a passion for the bands and style that influenced Rectal Wench, and an awareness of the rather absurd concoction that the band is. With Rex himself being a teacher, there is also the notion of living a double life – working during the day and putting on a butcher’s apron to perform goregrind at night.
Cave Have Rod, whom have a more absurd, friendly, often stupid aesthetic compared to the other bands, performed at Obscene Extreme in 2013, which spotlighted China in the extreme music world somewhat. I caught the bands once again at another Gore Feast on New Year’s Eve that year. Both Wench and Rod would go in and out of hiatuses in the years thereafter, though the return of this scene became official in 2019 with Rectal Wench making a huge return with an updated form of the Gore Feast, the Filthy Party. Their album Judgement Of Whore Labia From The Sewer Throne was announced as a 73-minute goregrind record, described by the band as an extreme step even within their own genre. “We all knew that doing a 73-minute album was so fucking extreme for goregrind music, because goregrind songs are usually short,” says guitarist Rex.“It’s like a toilet–it’s only exciting when the shit overflows.”
Alongside the album came a continuation of the live format they had built years earlier, now referred to as the Filthy Party. The same visual language remained in place — lucha masks, inflatable dolls, gore imagery–but it was now attached to a more defined release and touring cycle. What surprised me in this later phase was not just the scale of the release, but the way Rex began to describe the band’s intent. In earlier interviews, Rectal Wench spoke almost entirely in the language of goregrind, porn, humour, and influence. “We want to use music to save humanity. We want to be the heroes of mankind. For humanity!” In the same material, the album’s story frames the band as figures inside its own fiction, fighting against inflatable beings in a world overtaken by them. The imagery is consistent with what had already been established on stage and in earlier Gore Feast performances, but it now extends into a kind of internal mythology where the band occupies a central role. Even the production process is described with the same mix of absurdity and seriousness. Recorded at S.A.G. Studio in Beijing with producer Zhao Xiaodong, the band describe sending reference material from groups like GUT and Satan’s Revenge On Mankind in order to shape the sound. “Then we attempted to imitate their production effects from a professional perspective.”
What felt, in 2013, like a shock-value entry point into a small underground scene now appeared again in a more structured form–still extreme, but also more self-defined, with its own mythology, scale, and way of describing what it was doing. The string of Filthy Party shows saw Rectal Wench team up with Impure Injection, a one-man grindcore unit started by Gore Geng, the “Godfather of Chinese Grind.” These shows saw a toilet on stage, those blow up dolls as described in their album being tossed around the audience along with various toys and objects. The crowd dressed or undressed as they pleased, making these shows feel like mini Obscene Extreme concerts within China.
In 2024, Rex described a further continuation of the project with the album Alliance of Anal Surfers, recorded largely live and framed as part of an ongoing series that began with Judgement Of Whore Labia From The Sewer Throne. The title, he explained, carried a personal cultural residue rather than a direct musical reference. “When we were young in China, around 2002… there was a book that almost every kid who liked rock and roll had read, and this book was called the Rock Bible.” He recalled seeing references to bands like Slayer, but being struck by the name Butthole Surfers: “The name was very impressive… Maybe when I grew up I wanted to be a Butthole Surfer, but I had never heard the band’s music.” He described the album title as something shaped by that early impression rather than actual influence: “Of course we’re a little more fucked up…it is likely that it is a memory of not escaping the shadow of childhood.”
He also reiterated that the releases now exist within a continuous narrative framework, extending the fictional world introduced in earlier albums. In his description, the story has moved deeper into the sewer concept: “This album is the official entry of humanity into the world of the sewer, and the human sewer is the asshole.” Alongside this fictional continuity, Rex repeatedly returned to the physical reality of performance as the central motivation. Recording in a studio, he said, often felt detached from the energy of live music: “I really like the feeling of playing with passion… recording is like doing fucking homework or going to work.” The album, in that sense, becomes less a fixed object than an excuse to generate the conditions for performance. He also reflects more directly on the structure of his working life outside the band. “Of course, you may know that I am a lecturer. My job is to give lectures every day, but I have no chance to perform music. People pay to see me perform, so I have to perform well. Thank you so much for paying to see our shit.”
The communal feeling brought by the Gore Feast and refined through the Filthy Party remains in the world of Rectal Wench. In recent years, fellow anal surfer Andrew Lee, with his Houkago Grind Time project, played with the band across China, further bridging the connection to potential sewer throne sitters in the West. Rectal Wench doesn’t really resolve into a clean conclusion. The shock is obvious at first, but what stays is the fact that they built something that people actually gathered around. Rex being a lecturer during the week and a guitarist at night isn’t framed as a contradiction in his own words, it’s just how things are. The Filthy Party, the sewer mythology, even the talk of “saving humanity,” all sit inside the same ongoing structure: a reason to keep playing, keep performing, keep pulling people into the same room. And that’s where the phrase starts to mean something beyond irony. In a scene this small and this specific, “saving humanity” reads less like a statement and more like what happens when people who think the same way finally meet.
…
Purchase Ryan Dyer’s book, The Underground in China: Metal, Punk, Hardcore and Noise 2013-2021, here.
Facebook Paulie Boy is on a mission to spread the blues, but is this album of six songs recorded rough, ready and live, the blues, or is it psychedelic rock? It’s certainly channelling Hendrix, and it’s certainly covering classic blues … Continue reading
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How Charli XCX’s new album going to work in a live setting? Charli released the excellent Music, Fashion, Film last week, and it marks an intentional step back from the anthemic force of the whole Brat situation. Her new tracks are inward-looking and idiosyncratic, but they’re going to have to fill up big venues. Charli will play a headlining set at Lollapalooza on Friday, and then she’ll head off on an arena tour with Underscores. It’ll be fun to see how it all plays out. Last night, Charli gave a bit of a preview when she played a bunch of those new songs live for the first time.
The post Charli XCX Gives <em>Music, Fashion, Film</em> Songs Their Live Debuts At Nashville Spotify Show appeared first on Stereogum.
Lenny Kravitz developed his musical identity by refusing to separate rock, soul, funk, rhythm and blues, psychedelia, and pop into isolated categories. Raised in New York and Los Angeles, he absorbed music through his family, formal training, church choirs, jazz, classic rock, and the records he studied while learning to write, arrange, produce, and play multiple instruments. Let Love Rule arrived in 1989 with “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” “Mr. Cab Driver,” “I Build This Garden for Us,” and its title song. The album introduced the self-contained studio approach that remained central to Kravitz’s work, with longtime collaborators Henry
The post Complete List Of Lenny Kravitz Songs From A to Z appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.
We’re nearing the end of July and rapidly approaching the dog days of August, which means by now you should have some music attached to your memories of this season. It also means the time has come to vote for that music.
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Tupac Shakur developed his performing skills through theater, poetry, dance, and the Baltimore School for the Arts before joining Digital Underground as a roadie, dancer, and rapper. His appearance on “Same Song” introduced his voice to a national audience and led into a solo career that lasted only five years but produced one of hip-hop’s most influential recorded legacies. 2Pacalypse Now arrived in 1991 with “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” “Trapped,” “If My Homie Calls,” “Words of Wisdom,” and “Rebel of the Underground.” The album established Tupac as a writer focused on police violence, poverty, misogyny, political neglect, and the lives
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Inspired by her parents’ divorce, Halestorm singer/guitarist Lzzy Hale penned a confessional anthem that tested her vocal talents and broke sexual taboos. In 2022, she told Hammer about the story of the song – and how it impacted the rockers’ relationship with their fans.
In 2011, Halestorm were still young guns on the scene. Two years prior, the Pennsylvanian rockers had emerged from playing local malls, marking themselves out as an exciting new noise with their self-titled debut. But it was their second album, 2012’s snarling The Strange Case Of… that would prove to be their turning point.
The record that introduced the masses to their bombastic hard rock, it contained their most career-defining songs, the sound of a band running wild and free, coming into their own and testing their own limits. The quartet would start the album’s cycle as hungry upstarts and emerge as Grammy-winning, festival field-filling ass-kickers.
“With that whole record, I feel like we crossed over into not proving that we deserve to be here, but proving that we deserve to stay here,” remembers vocalist and guitarist Lzzy Hale. “As time goes on, you know more about the inner workings of everything, and it becomes a little less magical. Whereas that was our purgatory: it was the second record, everything was still super-new.”
She describes the album’s recording sessions that took place at multiple studios in Los Angeles and during which the band moved into a house in the coastal community of Marina del Rey as a sort of summer camp.
“I never went to college, and my replacement for that was this second record,” she continues. “We would meet complete strangers, become best friends and go over and stay at their house until 4am. The four of us are close anyway, but this was like a household. The parents aren’t around so it’s the four of us like, ‘OK, who’s going out to get groceries today? Do we have enough beer?’ Priorities!”
Initially, the album’s breakout song was thunderous first single Love Bites (So Do I), which, to the band’s amazement, beat out Iron Maiden, Lamb Of God and Megadeth to bag the Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance in 2013 – their shock evident as they stumbled down to the podium, reading an acceptance speech hurriedly typed out on drummer Arejay Hale’s phone. Over time though, another track has firmly supplanted it as the record’s defining moment.
The larynx-shattering I Miss The Misery had been one of the tracks they’d started testing live before the album was released, and on seeing how the crowd reacted to its incendiary chorus, they decided to release it as its second single.
Ten years on, it’s become their most enduring song, a fan favourite that currently stands at 86 million views on YouTube, dwarfing the 28 million views of its award-winning predecessor. Belting out of the blocks with a banshee scream from Lzzy: ‘OOOOOOH! I miss the misery!’ the track immediately put the band’s greatest asset – her gale-force vocals – upfront.
“It was such a whim to start it that way. Originally we were going to start it with the riff and then we said, ‘Let’s do it in a different way, let’s start with the voice,’” she recalls. “And now 10 years later, that’s kind of become my thing.”
The song is the kind of balls-to-the-wall sonic assault we now expect from Halestorm: mountainous riffs, a huge chorus and raspy, life-affirming vocals all reflecting an escalating confidence that ripples throughout the album at large, but it’s Lzzy’s growing assurance as a vocalist that shines through. Certainly, it impressed bands like Black Stone Cherry and Shinedown, who asked her to lend her pipes on the duets Peace Is Free and Breaking Inside around that time.
“I was definitely pushing vocally, versus the first album,” says Lzzy, who says she “came into her own as a vocalist” during The Strange Case Of… recording sessions. “We’d been touring a lot, we were doing 11 days in a row at one point, so I really got to know where my limitations were and where they weren’t.”
It was producer Howard Benson (Motörhead, Sepultura, My Chemical Romance) who challenged her to go one step further with each vocal take.
“He’d say, ‘Nope, I think you can sing higher than that,’” she laughs. “That was a huge confidence builder for me with my vocals because I started to not only expand my range, but find that control and that attitude that goes with it. It really laid the ground for literally everything I do vocally now.”
I Miss The Misery was also the moment Lzzy established herself as a true force of a nature, a figurehead whose confessional, resilient lyrics would be adopted by fans as emotional armour. It was written during a period of turmoil for the Hales – while the band partied and recorded in LA, back home in Pennsylvania, Lzzy and Arejay’s parents were in the midst of a divorce.
“I remember having a conversation with my mom about my dad,” says Lzzy. “They had been together for so long, the basis for [the] relationship is the arguments and the fights and the disagreements. That turned into, I don’t miss you, I actually miss the misery. I thought that was hilarious. I think it was my way of turning something that was negative into something positive.”
My mom and dad had been together for so long, the basis for the relationship was the arguments and the fights
Lzzy Hale
For Lzzy, the song also had a deeper, personal meaning, chronicling her break from a past toxic relationship.
“A guy cheated on me a couple of times and I swore I’d never go back,” she recalls. “There was that pull to go back and I never did, but I remember that feeling. It’s almost like you’re being a masochist in some way, it’s comfortable to live in those feelings.”
She considers I Miss The Misery to be her first anthem of empowerment, something that has since become her calling card. “I discovered I have this ability to write a song about how something sucks and try to maintain that hope or that attitude and control.”
One particular lyric, which was intended to force people outside their comfort zone, really ruffled feathers at the time: ‘I miss the rough sex / Leaves me a mess.’
“2012 wasn’t that long ago but it was in terms of women and evolution,” she says, noting that just 10 years ago a woman owning her desire and sexuality was considered “taboo”. “That almost made me want to double down on that kind of stuff too. By the time we made our fourth album, I’m talking about Do Not Disturb and threesomes and really getting people red in the face but to me, it’s fun.”
Building an open and frank relationship with the fans has been incredibly rewarding for Lzzy.
“I’ve had parents tell me that they hope their girls are as sexually confident as I am when they grow up,” she reveals. “That wasn’t something I expected. I expected to get angry parent letters – it’s been the opposite.”
Ten years after the song’s initial release, following #metoo and in light of increasingly transparent conversations around abuse in the music industry, she recognises that the meaning of the song has evolved for some fans.
“It’s really beautiful how people can take this song with me being a little tongue in cheek, and actually find that deeper meaning in it. Somewhere where I wasn’t even looking,” she says. “I know that song has helped so many people get over so many of those types of relationships, move on and find some type of superpower within themselves to walk away.
“In a lot of abusive relationships, the hardest thing is to break away from it. That song has helped break that stigma a little bit, or at least helped someone say, ‘This is the final straw and it’s OK if I miss it, but I’m not going back.’”
The Strange Case Of… was released on April 10, 2012 and changed the band’s lives. Armed with an arsenal of new anthems that were resonating with the fans, Halestorm headed into the 2012 summer festival season and found themselves being bumped higher and higher up the bills.
But more importantly, the album would secure the band an identity and longevity they’ve built on ever since. And while Love Bites (So Do I) won the Grammy, and the album’s third single, Freak Like Me, released in January 2013, was the band’s first single to reach No.1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Chart, I Miss The Misery has proven to be the track with the most staying power.
“I feel like the people have spoken and so it’s almost more rewarding for us than Love Bites and the Grammy,” considers Lzzy. “If you had told me, even in 2012, that I’d be standing onstage today encouraging young people to own their weird, to empower young women… that song was the groundwork for us being able to say that is what we do, and that is what people see when they look at me. It’s such a beautiful thing.”
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 369, December 2022. Halestorm support Babymetal across North America in September and October.