You can also check out the first taste of it now in the form of ‘Free Yourself’, a blink-and-miss-it piece of pop-punk brilliance that slams you with bright and breezy positivity and wholehearted joy. It showcases not just Karen’s love for a spiky chorus but also for her music carrying a message that can be lived by. It’s a step up to the plate in a big way and will be lodged in your head almost instantly.
She had this to say about the tune, explaining, “Funnily enough, Free Yourself is a song that I dreamed of. Most of the time I unfortunately forget the songs by the time I’m awake, but I’m glad I remembered this one. Later the same day, I decided to work on it and the melody of the chorus immediately came. When I showed the embryo of it to Matt (Bigland of Dinosaur Pile, Karen’s husband and writing-partner), he immediately was like, ‘That’s a hit!’ so we started to write the rest.
During the whole process of writing Free Yourself we would remind ourselves to be completely free with our creativity and, to be honest, to try being ridiculous sometimes. One of my favourite parts of the song came from an improvisation where I said “Jeans are dangerous,” and Matt thought it was great, but he thought I said “Genes are dangerous.” We loved both quotes, but we decided to go with “Genes are dangerous” because it felt more provocative.”
Karen is set to hit up plenty of festivals in the coming months. Here is where you will be able to see her: JUNE
27 – ABTSWIND Abgeht die Lutzi Festival
JULY
02 – WERCHTER Rock Werchter Festival 08 – CHELTENHAM 2000trees Festival 10 – MADRID Mad Cool Festival 25 – PLOVDIV Hills of Rock Festival
AUGUST
01 – GRÄNICHEN Open Air Gränichen 06 – GEISELWIND Hütte Rockt Festival 07 – HAMBURG Amplifire Vol. 1 Festival 08 – ESCHWEGE Open Flair Festival 09 – ROTHAUSEN Taubertal Festival 14 – BUDAPEST Sziget Festival 27–29 – TORREMOLINOS Canela Party Festival
SEPTEMBER
04 – COPENHAGEN Omega Festival 07 – GLASGOW King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut 08 – MANCHESTER The Deaf Institute 09 – LONDON 100 Club 12 – BRIGHTON Green Door Store
Melrose Avenue are back with another big track, extending their 2026 hot streak, and it finds them toying with the macabre.
Titled ‘Cemetery Friend’, it finds them blending curiously dark tones with frantic pop-rock melodies and metalcore leaning intensity. It further showcases just how chameleon-like the band are, able to master whatever sound or style is put before them, whilst also managing to make it completely their own.
The track also serves as a collaboration with The Funeral Portrait, of which vocalist Vlado Saric explains how they met:
“We met The Funeral Portrait last year whilst out on tour with Ice Nine Kills and there was just an immediate connection that saw us all radiate towards each other. They have this awesome ability to make darkness feel theatrical and when we wrote Cemetery Friend we immediately knew that was what it needed, We essentially wanted this song to feel like a car crash between the 2 acts and we are pretty sure that’s what we’ve achieved here!”
The tune follows on from the previously released ‘Bad Guy’, which sounds like this:
The band are due to take over Europe at the start of 2027 with an extensive tour across the continent. Here are all the dates:
JANUARY
27 – DUBLIN Academy 28 – BELFAST Limelight 2 30 – GLASGOW The Garage 31 – LEEDS The Key Club
FEBRUARY
01 – MANCHESTER Club Academy 03 – BIRMINGHAM Institute2 04 – LONDON Electric Ballroom 06 – UTRECHT TivoliVredenburg Pandora 07 – ANTWERP Kavka Zappa 09 – PARIS Trabendo 10 – COLOGNE Live Music Hall 11 – HAMBURG Gruenspan 12 – COPENHAGEN Hotel Cecil 13 – OSLO John Dee 14 – STOCKHOLM Kollektivet Livet 16 – HELSINKI Tavastia 17 – TAMPERE Olympia 18 – TALLINN Paavli Kultuurivabrik 19 – RIGA Palladium 21 – WARSAW Proxima 22 – BERLIN Columbia Theater 24 – PRAGUE Rock Café 25 – VIENNA Flex 26 – BUDAPEST Analog Music Hall 27 – BOLOGNA Locomotiv Club
MARCH
01 – ZURICH Dynamo 02 – MUNICH Technikum 03 – BARCELONA Razzmatazz 3 05 – MADRID Revilive 07 – LISBON República da Música
There is a painting on the cover of Graveyards of Joy — Ruïnes (1865) by Catalan artist Lluís Rigalt that tells you nearly everything you need to know before the first note sounds. Stone arches are consumed by vegetation. Desolation wears beauty like a second skin—something dead, something growing, the two indistinguishable from a distance. The Anglo-Spanish duo at the heart of TodoMal didn’t choose it by accident. They recorded this album in the same terrain: a crumbling stone house in the depopulated interior of Eastern Spain, near Teruel, where abandoned railway stations decay quietly in the sun, and the air carries what Chris Wildman has called the silence of “godforsaken areas.” That environment isn’t a backdrop — it is an argument. Graveyards of Joy insists that landscape and interior state are the same thing, and for forty-three minutes, it proves the case.
TodoMal emerged in 2020 from the partnership of Wildman and Javier Fernández Milla, two veterans of the Spanish underground with careers spanning projects from thrash to ambient. Their 2021 debut, Ultracrepidarian, evoked the moorlands of northern Alcarria with the deliberate patience of a band with nothing to prove. A Greater Good (2023) deepened the palette — denser, less classifiable, landing on multiple year-end lists and selling through its first pressing. The band that made those records is gone, not through dissolution but through expansion: a live five-piece now includes guitarist Javier Félez (Teitanblood, Graveyard), drummer Javier “Bud” Martínez, and vocalist and keyboardist Cecilia Tallo, whose contributions prove decisive on this record. Graveyards of Joy closes what both band and audience have recognized as a trilogy, and it does so with the weight that implies — a final statement rather than a next step, a reckoning rather than an evolution.
The concept is autobiographical and unsparing. Wildman has said outright that across the span of these three albums, the duo lost three next of kin. The grief is not metaphorical. What’s remarkable about Graveyards of Joy is what it does with that grief — it transmutes rather than wallows, channels rather than displays. The philosophical underpinning is quietly Epicurean: don’t fear death; find peace in community and shared presence. That structure shapes the entire record. “Graveyards of joy,” Wildman explains, are places where joy doesn’t disappear — it gets buried. It becomes archaeological. The album is the dig.
That framing pays off across nine tracks that move from emergence to rupture to exhaustion to acceptance. Opener “Mare Ignis” rises slowly from darkness — layered keyboards, dual vocals interweaving above a rhythm section content to hold the piece in suspension while the atmosphere expands. Tallo’s choral contributions in the finale give the track its emotional weight and establish the dual-vocal dynamic that structures much of what follows. “Lucid Nightmare” introduces heavier territory: a load-bearing bass line, time signature shifts, and a choral texture that builds toward one of Wildman’s more commanding vocal performances. The descent continues through “Point of Coalescence,” the album’s heaviest moment — interlocking guitar and bass riffs, a vocal that cuts through the density — evoking precisely the kind of silence that sits over an abandoned village when the wind stops.
The record’s philosophical and compositional core arrives at track six. “Deliverance” is seven and a half minutes of melancholic acoustic arpeggios giving way to heavy electric passages, building into orchestral terrain that briefly touches the edges of prog without losing its identity. The lyric maps grief onto geography: the Isle of Juno (mythological), Anthemoessa (the island of the Sirens), Oenoanda (a real ancient city in Turkey, where an Epicurean inscription was carved into a public wall — a detail that is almost certainly not coincidental). “I thought I heard your voice in the isle of Juno / But I was wrong, they just led me on.” The dead don’t disappear in this song — they become places to travel toward. “Blood is thick as stone.” It is TodoMal‘s finest track to date.
“For Mercy” offers a moment of stark contrast: acoustic guitar, synth, a 70s psych-folk sensibility that feels almost out of time. Eight lines, lyrical repetition turned incantatory. Exhaustion given exact form. It lands between the album’s two heaviest sections like a necessary breath.
The title track closes the record and the trilogy simultaneously. Atmospheric doom at full extension — winds cutting through ruins, wells gone dry, children drifting through spaces the living have left behind. “We’re fortunate,” Wildman sings, buried in the middle of the desolation, and the Epicurean move is complete: gratitude located inside ruin, not despite it. The song zooms out to near-apocalyptic scale and lands, finally, on “I want you by my side” — the smallest possible statement made enormous by everything that precedes it.
Self-produced by Wildman and Fernández Milla, with guitar engineering handled by Félez at Moontower Studios and mastering by Jaime López Arellano at Arda Recorders in Portugal, the album is dense and cinematic without sacrificing the organic core that has defined TodoMal from the beginning. Electronic elements appear, integrated rather than imposed. The Hammond-driven passages carry genuine weight. Strings — courtesy of Manu Clavijo — open space rather than fill it. The cover art was chosen first, and the music developed in its shadow; you can hear that logic in every arrangement decision.
Graveyards of Joy is not a record for the impatient, and it doesn’t apologize for that. It asks for something — time, attention, willingness to sit with discomfort — and it returns considerably more than the investment. TodoMal have built something in these three albums that few atmospheric doom acts achieve: a body of work with genuine emotional continuity and a philosophical argument that sharpens from one release to the next. This is the argument’s conclusion, and it holds.
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Finnish melodic metal powerhouse ARION continue the rollout for their forthcoming fifth studio album with the release of their brand-new single and music video, “Into The Fire”, out now via RPM. Following the explosive first taste delivered by “Hurricane”, the band return with another high-energy anthem that combines towering melodies, crushing riffs, and an emotionally charged message about courage, trust, and stepping into the unknown.
Built around furious riffs, huge arrangements, intense vocals and a fiery guitar solo, “Into The Fire” captures the moment of overcoming fear and finding strength through connection. Guitarist and songwriter Iivo Kaipainen explains:
“A jump into the unknown may feel scary, yet sometimes there’s no option but to go. If only there was someone to help you make that decision, to take that leap and jump with you: You close your eyes, take their hand and now you feel strong enough. That’s what ‘Into The Fire’ is about.” The result is a powerful melodic metal track that further showcases ARION’s ability to blend modern heaviness with arena-sized hooks and heartfelt storytelling.
About ARION: ARION are among Finland’s most exciting modern melodic metal exports. Known for their high-impact songwriting, technical skill and engaging stage presence, the band continues to bridge the gap between classic and modern metal.
Over the years, ARION have toured extensively across Europe and Japan with acts such as Dream Theater, Gloryhammer, Battle Beast, Bloodbound and Sonata Arctica. They have also collaborated with renowned vocalists including Elize Ryd (Amaranthe), Noora Louhimo and Melissa Bonny (Ad Infinitum / Kamelot).
With tens of millions of streams to their name, including the standout track “At The Break Of Dawn” surpassing 20 million streams and achieving gold status in Finland, ARION have firmly established themselves as one of the most important new wave metal export acts from the country. Their continued evolution and international presence underline their growing importance in the global metal scene.
