“…Upon their findings, I am a trans, OnlyFans, bitch. Now unfortunately, only one of those things is true.”
The post Sara “KILLBOY” Skinner Speaks Out After Christian Band Skillet Drop Bad Wolves From Their Tour Due To Apparent ‘Trans’ & ‘OnlyFans’ Accusations appeared first on Theprp.com.
Jann Klose 2026 Globetrotting storyteller embraces album conceptuality to escape temporal snares and come up trumps. Taking an audience on a trip has been one of Jann Klose’s strongest suits for three decades, yet whereas such records as 2008’s or … Continue reading
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You know it felt like a war, hungover on a parquet floor
But now it’s like I hardly think about you anymore
Adulthood is an exercise in presentation. We learn the correct expressions and develop plausible explanations for why the compromises we once feared are now signs of wisdom. On Desperate Journalist‘s Terrible Years, the lead single from the London quartet’s sixth album, Gilding the Lily, lead singer Jo Bevan turns that performance into a social comedy, complete with escape, panic, and the suspicion that maturity may simply be youth with better excuses.
The song begins with Rob Hardy’s verse progression and expands into three minutes of crowded guitars, orchestral synths, and a rhythm section that keeps pressing forward as though hesitation might expose somebody. Simon Drowner’s bass and Caz Helbert’s drums give the track an eager gait, while Hardy’s guitar has the bright edge and density that made Desperate Journalist recognizable. After the sparse, industrial cast of No Hero, the arrangement feels luxuriant and busy, capped by a chiming middle eight whose sweetness sharpens the song’s mockery rather than softening it.
“This is one of the last songs we wrote for the album,” Bevan explains. “Rob had a kernel of an idea for the verse chord progression and we all goaded him into basically writing all the rest of the music one day at rehearsal. Lyrically it’s from the perspective of a character who’s cashed in and moved to LA or somewhere exotic, and is mistakenly under the impression that they are now blissfully balanced (and definitely not in denial about how much they miss the chaos and excitement of their youth). It’s sort of sympathetic but also caustic, as they’re lording it over the people they used to know whilst still clearly being a bit of a mess and scared of how old they’ve become. A lot of this album is about the horror of becoming aware of your own mortality – but, you know, in a fun way.”
Bevan sings from inside a personality built to advertise success, allowing vanity and fear to occupy the same immaculate room. The character has escaped, cashed in, moved somewhere sunny, and achieved the balance everyone else failed to find. Yet every boast carries the faint desperation of a holiday photograph posted for an audience of former friends.
Jez Leather’s performance video, filmed with warm lights in a white room, gives the song an uncluttered frame. The band plays with a directness that suits its raucous construction, leaving Bevan’s words to supply the psychological mess.
Watch the video for Terrible Years below:
Desperate Journalist are a London post-punk quartet comprising vocalist Jo Bevan, guitarist Rob Hardy, bassist Simon Drowner, and drummer Caz Helbert. Across five albums, the band have paired richly layered guitars and propulsive rhythms with Bevan’s incisive lyrics, gradually incorporating the electronic and industrial textures heard on 2024’s No Hero. Their forthcoming sixth album, Gilding the Lily, continues that evolution while preserving the melodic force and emotional candor at the heart of their work.
As an introduction to Gilding the Lily, due out on November 20 through Fierce Panda Records, Terrible Years suggests Desperate Journalist are fascinated by the humiliations hidden inside self-possession: the older we become, the more elaborate our methods for pretending we have arrived.
Listen to Terrible Years below and pre-save Gilding The Lily here. Order the album from Rough Trade here.
Catch Desperate Journalist live throughout the UK this winter! Get tickets here.
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The post Desperate Journalist Mourns the Messiness of Youth in Video for “Terrible Years” — New Album “Gilding the Lily” Announced! appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
There are places on Earth that seem to contain more world than geography should permit. A shoreline at dusk, an abandoned road, a drowned foundation beneath still water: each can suggest that reality possesses hidden rooms, inaccessible except through attention. On Illusion of an Inland Ocean, due October 30, Eric Angelo Bessel makes music for that suspicion, eighteen connected compositions in which ordinary terrain seems to open upon immensities.
Based in Portland, Oregon, Bessel works at the intersection of memory, landscape, and technology, subjects united by their peculiar relationship with time. His music, photography, and design all share an interest in the traces people and places leave behind: evidence that something existed, changed, disappeared, or continues beyond immediate perception. Across his various disciplines, he seems less interested in documenting the world as it appears than in examining how perception alters it, and how memory can transform a place into something larger, stranger, and almost limitless.
The first single, Pathways, released on August 25, offers an ideal entry point. Its patient, ambient movement recalls The Caretaker, William Basinski, Loscil, Stars of the Lid, and Faten Kanaan, yet Bessel approaches that lineage with a distinct sense of terrestrial mystery. The music feels cinematic and powerful because it enlarges perception. A familiar landscape begins to seem ancient; a road becomes a coordinate; water becomes an archive. Tiny details acquire the gravity of astronomical objects viewed from a distance.
Mellotrons, guitars, and layers of analogue processing become instruments of gradual revelation, with tones accumulating, dissolving, and returning in altered forms. Melody seems to come into focus by degrees, as though perceived across a great distance, while small shifts in texture can change the apparent dimensions of the entire piece. The music encourages sustained attention rather than movement toward some final point, rewarding repeated listening with connections that may have remained invisible before.
Its accompanying visualizer deepens that sensation by placing us underwater, where life passes through channels of static and unstable transmission. The images suggest cameras lowered into a region beyond human access, recording organisms, currents, and possible thresholds that our senses were never designed to comprehend. The ocean has always possessed this cosmic quality. We know its presence intimately, yet portions of it remain unseen, populated by forms of life so remote from daily experience that they can seem almost extraterrestrial.
Watch the video for Pathways below:
Written, recorded, mixed, and produced entirely by Bessel, Illusion of an Inland Ocean is expansive without becoming crowded. Tones gather slowly, suspended in spaces, while distant textures seem to recede beyond the edge of hearing. There is a frequency of peace running through the record, though serenity here is never simple. Silence becomes evidence, a faint indication that something vast continues beyond the narrow bandwidth of human awareness. Beneath it lies the awareness that the universe, and even our planet, remains filled with regions we cannot completely know.
Composed in the pale hours of early morning and refined deep into the night, the album occupies that uncertain territory where dreams, memory, and observation begin to lose their boundaries. Bessel has long been drawn to these transitional states, when the mind has loosened its allegiance to ordinary time and the familiar world can suddenly appear immense, remote, or newly discovered. Bessel treats mystery as a condition of existence rather than a puzzle awaiting solution. The album asks for stillness, the kind that precedes sleep, when the architecture of the waking world loosens and distances become difficult to measure.
Listening then can feel like drifting beyond the mapped edge of experience, not toward fantasy so much as toward a heightened awareness of how little we perceive. In that sense, Bessel has made an album about scale: the immense concealed inside the commonplace, the unknown beneath our feet, and the quiet possibility that every familiar place contains a portal to somewhere we have never been.
Listen to Pathways below and pre-order Illusion of an Inland Ocean here.
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The post Eric Angelo Bessel Drifts Underwater in “Pathways” — New Album “Illusion of an Inland Ocean” Announced! appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
You want someone to talk to
Somewhere to run to
In the dead of night
No answers
Lonely visions
Pittsburgh-based post-punk/shoegaze band Lowsunday (also known in some circles as Low Sunday Ghost Machine) released two stellar albums in the late 1990s, combining the blistering fury of post-punk and the wistful melancholy of shoegaze, with a dash of powerful arena rock and carefully considered electronics thrown in for good measure. For their sophomore LP, 1999’s Elesgiem, the band partnered with legendary label Projekt Records, which helped bring them to prominence just moments before the post-punk revival scene came to fruition. A series of digital reissues and remixes over the last few years sparked a surprise reunion, which found the band eager to reclaim their throne amongst a new crop of followers.
Stripped down to core members Shane Sahene and Bobby Spell, Lowsunday have since been hard at work in their studio, rekindling the flame which burned so brightly in the past. 2025 saw the release of The White EP, one of our absolute favorite releases of the year. In May of this year, the duo unleashed The Black EP, a shadowy sister release that continues the story on Projekt and sees the band picking right back up where they left off at the turn of the century. The five-track EP has been in constant rotation since it was released, with each track as potent as the last, a rare feat these days even for a short form release. The duo have already released a perfect pair of videos to accompany the EP, including “This is Not Heaven” and “You’re So Wired.” We’re honored to premiere a third, this time for “Someone to Talk To,” the EP’s searing centerpiece.
The track, no surprise here, is another barn-burner, through and through. Loud, eerie, and unforgiving, the track kicks off with a processed, pitch-bent guitar line that, along with a thunderous, steady rhythm, serves as the song’s anchor. The unsettling melody quickly blends in with an interlocking bass groove and Sahene’s cavernous, yet deeply emotive vocals. The song’s chilly, catchy exterior ties into the song’s underlying themes of aloneness and disconnection. The video, directed by long term collaborator Jer Herring, reflects the song’s energy with scenes of dimly lit commuter tunnels, winding staircases, statues of solitary eyes, and drawings of hearts on abandoned walls. Blink and you may miss it, but quick flashes of two strangers (or lovers, or perhaps even ghosts) at the foot of an apartment staircase subtly drive home the track’s inherent solitude.
“This video perfectly captures the delicate coldness, detachment and loneliness of this song,” offers Spell. “A theme frequently visited by us involves a feeling of isolation which seems to be increasingly common in modern life. The visuals in the video demonstrate this feeling in a variety of scenarios where separation, miscommunication or distance is implied throughout. Our creative partner Jer Herring has once again created a perfect visual counterpart for a Lowsunday song and we’re very proud of it.”
Check out the video and pick up a copy of The Black EP below:
Header photo by Christina Sahene.
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The fifth and final album in Bernie Marsden’s Inspirations Series, STAGE was released on 21st August 2026 via the award-winning independent label, Conquest Music. The 15-track record is available in a limited edition 2LP and 2CD Deluxe Digipack. The album represents the arena where perhaps Bernie shone the brightest… on STAGE. Each side of vinyl is dedicated to respective live performances that span across over two decades.
The first quarter of the album is a gentle acoustic presentation, accompanied by a strings ensemble. Recorded live at The Radcliffe Centre, Buckingham in 2008. Starting off with a folky acoustic guitar, “Til the Day I Die” slowly brings in the violin and a tambourine to keep the time. “The Time is Right for Love” continues in a similar fashion, with Bernie’s vocals ranging from warm and smooth to a tad more aggressive as the dynamics shift. Adding a touch of psychedelia with his guitar work, Bernie nods to Rory Gallagher with the rendition of a folk classic, “Out On The Western Plains”, before playing a laidback version of a fan-favourite “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City” highlighted by an incredible vocal performance.
On the flipside, Bernie switches styles with “Boss of the Blues”, a classic blues shuffle recorded in 2019 as part of his performance at Keeping the Blues Alive at Sea. The electric band sounds amazing, with a brass section adding further spice to the texture. As Steve Lukather aptly described Marsden: “Tone and touch and taste. That was Bernie.” – he truly lives up to those words in this performance. “Reconsider Baby” is a bit slower, but not any less swingy. Driving bass line leads the way into “Watch Out”, featuring killer guitar chops throughout, before sailing smoothly into a lazy-paced jazzy number that is “Worried Life Blues”.
Side C brings more heat in the shape of Marsden’s 1996 Nottoden Blues Festival performance that starts with a dirty version of “Down Home Blues” – is it the groove, the mean guitar tone, or Bernie’s gritty vocals? Probably the mix of it all. A truly fiery and memorable performance. Adding fuel to that fire is the upbeat Freddie King classic “I’m Tore Down”, before the band decides to bring it all the way down with a slow blues number “Love That Burns” that features stellar guitar work with feel that only Bernie could deliver. The band goes right back to the upbeat and dirty lane with a cool-as-you-like take on “Oh Well”.
The final section of the double album is a recording from 2020 at Under the Bridge, London, featuring a special guest, none other than Joe Bonamassa. Bernie kicks things off with a Whitesnake classic, “Walking in the Shadow of the Blues”, before moving on to Albert King’s “I’ll Play the Blues for You”. To wrap this amazing record up, Bernie plays a tune popularised by Gary Moore, “Walking By Myself” – this version however, features a jaw-dropping guitar duel between Marsden and Bonamassa that’s not to be missed!
This selection of songs recorded live across four different concerts spans different eras, different styles, different bands; it is made up of so many contrasts, but one thing stays the same throughout – the heart and soul that Bernie Marsden has put into his music and into his live performances. STAGE is not an album for casual listening – it requires the listener’s full attention and willingness to immerse themselves into the journey through time, across land and sea.
The Review: 8.5/10
Can’t Miss Tracks
– Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City
– Boss of the Blues
– Down Home Blues
– Walking By Myself
The Big Hit
– Down Home Blues
The post Bernie Marsden: STAGE Review appeared first on Blues Rock Review.
Soundgarden will return to the stage next month. The band have announced they’ll provide the halftime entertainment during the Seattle Seahawks’ NFC West season opener against New England Patriots at Lumen Field.
The band will be joined by Pearl Jam‘s Mike McCready and fronted by Taylor Momsen from The Pretty Reckless, who has performed with Soundgarden several times since the death of Chris Cornell, most recently when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last November.
Soundgarden have played four times since the death of Cornell. In 2019, they performed eight songs at the I Am the Highway: A Tribute to Chris Cornell show at the Forum in Inglewood, CA, with Momsen singing Rusty Cage, Drawing Flies and Loud Love. Three years later she joined them at the same venue to sing Black Hole Sun during the Taylor Hawkins tribute show.
In 2024, Soundgarden played a six-song set billed as Nudedragons at the 1100-capacity Showbox in Seattle, with local singer Shaina Shepherd out front. And last year Momsen returned to sing Rusty Cage with the band at the Hall of Fame induction in Cleveland.
“The reality is I’m here for anything they want or need,” Momsen said following the Hall of Fame ceremony. “If they call me, I’m there. It’s that simple.”
The Pretty Reckless were the opening band on Soundgarden’s 2017 North American tour, the dates that ended in tragedy when Cornell took his life after a show in Detroit.
The story of Helmet in the early ’90s isn’t one that can be effectively told through the usual checklist of music industry awards and accolades. There aren’t any easy-reference stats or figures that speak to their true status or impact. Instead, for a sense of where they were at, and what the world thought back then, it’s instructive to turn towards the era’s indubitable bastions of good taste and distinction, Beavis and Butthead.
In a 1993 episode of their hit MTV show entitled Beware Of The Butt, Helmet’s video for Unsung, the sole single from the New Yorker’s second album Meantime, was aired. Following some entirely predictable sniggers at the quartet’s chosen band name, our adolescent anti-heroes briefly fell silent in appreciation.
“If you, like, saw these guys in the street,” Butthead sagely noted, “you wouldn’t even know that they’re cool.”
“They look like normal guys… Like us!” Beavis giggled, the duo duly proceeding to air guitar and headbang as the song frantically raced to a finish.
Ignoring the fact that this insight and wisdom was preceded by a scene in which the pair had exposed their asses at the local drive-thru, alongside a rearranged marquee message reading, ‘Hello, look at our butts’, such a resounding endorsement was, um, not to be sniffed at. In the 1990s, if Beavis and Butthead said you sucked, you probably sucked. But if they decided you were cool, it was kind of a big deal.
For Helmet, this endorsement represented a new level of mainstream arrival, and approval. Scoring a double hit of horns-up appreciation on a TV show being beamed into the homes of untold millions of impressionable teens around the world left a cultural imprint, however archaic such influence might sound to anyone too young to have experienced life pre-internet.
The segment was a watershed moment for the quartet, another somewhat surreal milestone in a whirlwind couple of years, which saw them emerge, in the post-Nirvana goldrush, as one of the principal acts courted and coveted by major labels desperate to unearth the next big thing. Strange as it may seem in hindsight, Helmet were considered serious contenders.
There were legitimate reasons for this optimism too. The four piece – vocalist guitarist Hamilton, Australian guitarist Peter Mengede, bassist Henry Bogdan and drummer John Stanier – had notched-up impressive sales of 40,000 for their 1990 debut studio album, Strap It On. For context, that level of return ensured that the band’s parent label, Minneapolis-based indie Amphetamine Reptile, could continue to do business throughout the decade, releasing glorious noise-rock records from Melvins, Today Is The Day, Chokebore, Cows, Cosmic Psychos and more.
With the buzz of that breakthrough came the inevitable A&R clamour. At its height, it’s rumoured that there were as many as 22 labels involved in the bidding war for the band’s signature. In the end, Interscope Records would be the victors, thanks to a reported one million dollar signing fee and by virtue of their overtures pre-dating the bandwagon-hopping opportunists.
“They were interested in us before Nirvana even broke,” frontman Page Hamilton told Spin magazine in September 1992. “And that’s good because we’re obviously not it [the next big thing]. I actually had an A&R guy at one label tell us that we were the next U2. At a certain point it just becomes ludicrous.”
Helmet being hyped as the next anything, let alone big, underlined a fundamental misunderstanding of what made them such an intriguing prospect in the first place.
When they emerged at the tail end of the ‘80s, long hair, denim and leather was still the unofficial uniform of hard rock and metal true believers. Grunge would go some way towards breaking down those image-centric norms, but inevitably, the so-called Seattle scene’s own look soon became codified and co-opted into new cliches. It wasn’t until Helmet came along that image became somewhat optional. Suddenly, four regular guys with short hair, T-shirts and work pants were awkwardly vying for stardom. Even if they hadn’t intended to.
It wasn’t just image archetypes that changed either. Until then, the guitar solo was still of central importance to a lot of popular rock hits. Eschewing all such extraneous frippery, Helmet favoured a no-nonsense, almost workmanlike approach to their art. No frills, no fat, no fucking about. The cover for Meantime fell in line with this aesthetic, borrowing a 1979 image from urban documentarian photographer David Plowden, entitled Puddler In Blast Furnace Cast House, Steel Mill. East Chicago, Indiana. Just as hard-bitten and industrial was the sound of the music contained therein.
Clocking in at a shade under 37 minutes, its 10 tracks are both economic and blistering, kickstarted by the rolling, tumbling stomp of the Steve Albini-engineered In The Meantime.
At first it’s the rhythm section that hits. From start to finish, John Stanier’s drums and Henry Bogdan’s bass work in tandem with a piston-like precision. Then there’s the riffs. The endless, bludgeoning riffs. Jazz-trained Hamilton’s staccato style synergised with Peter Mengede’s rhythm guitar perfectly, bulking out the duo’s drop-D tuned blunt force power. An employee at CBGB’s once approvingly likened the result to “icepicks to the forehead”.
In full flow Helmet were a quartet to be reckoned with, virtuosic in an entirely new and different way that would spark inspiration that fired off in a multitude of musical directions. Although rarely celebrated for his vocal ability or lyrical contributions, the full-throated bark of Hamilton’s delivery and occasionally caustic barbs (‘To die young is far too boring these days’) played their part too. As did Wharton Tiers’ engineering and the triggered samples and clinical style of Andy Wallace’s mixing job. Supposedly irked by his remix of In The Meantime, when Steve Albini was in negotiations to work with Nirvana on In Utero he insisted on a clause being added into the contract stipulating that Wallace would be forbidden from touching his recordings.
These disparate, combined disciplines worked a charm for Helmet. It might not have made them the next Nirvana, much less U2, but despite lacking even a sliver of commerciality, Meantime met with success, peaking at number 68 on the Billboard 200, and receiving, in 1994, RIAA classification as a ‘gold’ record in acknowledgement of 500,000 sales in the US alone.
Such numbers opened doors. In time, the band would go on to feature in big deal video games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and secure prime spots on Hollywood movie soundtracks like Judgment Night and The Crow.
Despite charting higher than its predecessor (hitting number 45 in the US) 1994 follow-up album Betty didn’t sell as well, but it was just as powerful, widening the band’s musical scope and producing a clutch of cult classics in its own right. Helmet would eventually breakup in 1997, only to return for a second stint in 2004, albeit with Page Hamilton the only founding member to have performed under the name since then.
That classic line-up of Hamilton, Mengede, Stanier and Bogdan undoubtedly captured something special on Meantime, however. Its influence and legacy can be found all over the alternative music and metal spheres. Through the years, Helmet songs have been covered by artists as diverse as Soulfly, former touring partners Faith No More, and Pig Destroyer. In 2016 a tribute album, Meantime Redux featured covers of the record (among other band tracks) by a range of underground noisemakers, from KEN Mode to Fuck The Facts. Listen closely and you can trace a line through artists such as Tool, System Of A Down, Far, Filter, Silverchair, Norma Jean, and a host of nu-metal acts, forever indebted to the sound and spirit of the New Yorkers. Without Helmet, Deftones might not even exist. As they started to come into their own on 1997’s Around The Fur, that influence couldn’t be clearer.
“Every band should wish to aspire to the originality and genius of Helmet,” the Sacramento band’s late bassist Chi Cheng once proclaimed. “[They are] an inspiration to fans and musicians alike.”
In saluting a band who defy easy classification, perhaps it’s best to defer to Beavis and Butthead, even 30 years on. Helmet are cool. And Meantime will forever remain an ice-cold classic.