Rock act MAXILLA has released a new single titled “Spirit In The Flame.” Coinciding with the arrival of the new track, the fast-emerging group has officially signed with CB Entertainment for exclusive artist representation. The new partnership will focus on expanding the band’s reach across touring, marketing, and national exposure as they enter the next phase of their career.
Fronted by vocalist and guitarist MAXILLA, the group blends raw intensity with melodic power to create a high-energy modern rock sound. “Spirit In The Flame” highlights this dynamic approach, serving as the latest addition to their growing catalog as they continue to build momentum and establish their presence within the heavy music landscape.
To support the new single and recent signing, MAXILLA has scheduled two prominent live performances in Cleveland, Ohio, this upcoming July. On July 10, the group will perform at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s outdoor concert series for the “Ladies of Rock” event, sharing the stage with Halestorm frontwoman Lzzy Hale. Shortly after, the band will join Detroit hard rock quintet Eva Under Fire for a special one-off performance on July 16.
Boutique software company MixWave has officially partnered with Covet frontwoman and guitar virtuoso Yvette Young to release a new exclusive signature plugin. The software accurately recreates Young’s specific studio and live setup, functioning as a complete digital rig that includes nine of her preferred effects pedals alongside her chosen amplifier and cabinet combination. Notably, this release marks a significant industry milestone, representing the first time a female guitarist has launched her own dedicated signature plugin.
Widely recognized as a defining voice in modern guitar, Young developed her signature fingerstyle and two-handed tapping techniques from an extensive classical foundation in both piano and violin. The multi-instrumentalist, composer, and visual artist holds a BFA from UCLA and was recently recognized as number 155 on Rolling Stone’s list of the Greatest Guitarists of All Time. Her highly specific playing style, heavily utilized within the math-rock genre, serves as the direct sonic blueprint for the architecture of this new software release.
Founded in 2021, MixWave has built a reputation within the music production industry for creating meticulous, artist-driven software that directly translates specific physical hardware chains into digital formats. Prior to this release, the company has successfully collaborated with prominent rock and metal acts such as Sleep Token and Spiritbox to develop specialized artist suites. The new Yvette Young signature plugin, along with official walkthrough videos detailing the software’s capabilities, is currently available.
Bosnian symphonic metal project Dolia has released a new single and accompanying music video titled “Duet.” The track serves as the second chapter in an ambitious planned trilogy of releases from the group, combining heavy orchestral arrangements with cinematic visual storytelling.
Led by vocalist Sara Vojicic, whose background includes work in rock and metal as well as Croatian musical theatre productions of Les Misérables and Six, the project blends dynamic vocal expressions with grand symphonic soundscapes. Thematically, “Duet” and its surrounding trilogy draw direct inspiration from Slavic mythology, exploring concepts of personal identity and the darker aspects of human nature.
The new single was mixed and mastered by Simon Jovanović, known for his previous production work with artists such as Joe Lynn Turner and Jelusick. To capture the project’s visual narrative, the official music video for “Duet” was directed by filmmaker Tarik Hodžić, recognized for his work on the internationally acclaimed documentary Scream for Me Sarajevo. The new track and its music video are currently available to stream across all major digital platforms.
Finnish progressive melodic death metal band Numento has released a new single titled “One With The Void.” The track is currently available to stream and download across all major digital platforms. This new release serves as the latest preview of the group’s upcoming EP, which is scheduled to arrive later this year.
Thematically, the new song draws direct inspiration from the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus, a biological parasite that infects and manipulates the behavior of carpenter ants before inevitably killing its host. The band utilizes this phenomenon as a metaphor to explore broader concepts of agonizing death, loss of autonomy, and psychological deterioration. The narrative also operates as a reflection on human behavioral patterns, specifically exploring the dynamics of manipulation found within cults and criminal environments.
Musically, the track represents a brief return to the band’s earlier sonic roots while maintaining their established progressive approach. The five-piece lineup—featuring vocalist and kantele player Katri Hiovain-Asikainen alongside guitarists Atte Asikainen and Aleksi Vehmassalo, bassist Johnny Grinds, and drummer Mikko Virtanen—builds the composition on sharp contrasts. The arrangement blends oppressive, heavy instrumentation and brutal vocal expressions with underlying melancholic elements and driven guitar melodies.
Los Angeles punk rock band Mermaid Island has officially released their self-titled debut album via Anxious and Angry on vinyl and No Dad Records digitally. Coinciding with the album’s arrival, the group has also shared a new music video for the track “Freaks.” The release serves as the culmination of the band’s recent promotional cycle, following the earlier arrival of the singles “Perfectly Happy,” “He Started It,” and “Panic Button.”
Founded in late 2022 by vocalist and guitarist Alex MacDonald, the band blends high-energy punk rock with early 2000s pop-punk elements and folk-tinged chord progressions. To capture the raw, chaotic energy of their stage performances, the band opted to record the majority of the new album live off the floor over a two-day period. Thematically, the record explores concepts of alienation, addiction, escapism, bodily autonomy, and nihilism.
To support the new full-length release, Mermaid Island is currently embarking on a run of summer live performances across California and Nevada. The schedule includes a series of headlining club dates alongside prominent supporting slots opening for established punk acts Dillinger Four and Off With Their Heads throughout August. The self-titled debut album and its accompanying music videos are currently available across all major digital platforms.
Norwegian heavy metal band Triosphere has released a new single and official music video for “Oceans Above, Stars Below.” The song serves as the title track and latest preview for the group’s upcoming fourth studio album, which is scheduled to be released later this summer on August 28 via Frontiers Music Srl.
Exploring themes of momentous life changes, deception, and navigating new paths forward, the new track highlights the band’s complex blend of hard rock, progressive power metal, and thrash elements. Production for the upcoming record was handled at Fascination Street Studios, where engineer Alexander Backlund recorded the drums and vocals, and mixing duties were completed by Jens Bogren. The album’s visual artwork was created by Giannis Nakos of Remedy Art Design.
Fronted by bassist and vocalist Ida Haukland alongside guitarists Marius Bergesen and Tor Ole Byberg, and drummer Kenneth Tårneby, Triosphere has built a steady international presence since their 2006 debut, sharing stages with acts like Arch Enemy and Kamelot. Oceans Above, Stars Below will mark the band’s first full-length studio release since 2014’s The Heart Of The Matter. The new title track and its accompanying music video are currently available to stream across all major digital platforms.
Although it currently gets a lot of flak from the Right-wing critics that no one reads but still get paid well, postmodernism offered a simple upgrade to modernism: what if relativity influenced perspective, as well?
While this has a smiley hippie side, it does not say that all perspectives are equally accurate, only that all are part of the picture, like the five blind men who each touch a different part of an elephant and describe it.
After all, like all literature, it believes in holistic external consistent reality in which we are winding our own personal paths through relative perception. Sometimes what we do works, sometimes it fails; we can learn.
There is also a Vlad the Impaler side of this. “Of course they are lying,” he would say. “They are Turks and they want to bully and con you into laying down your weapons so that they can kill you!”
Or maybe your grandmother, who would tell you that of course poor people always have a sob story because it is how they get free stuff from the middle class when they cannot outright steal it. Postmodernism is eugenics, too.
However, following the work of early-1900s artists like Pablo Picasso, modern consciousness embracing the rising theories of relativity from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who wrote just thirty years before.
Postmodernism properly reigned from the 1920s through the 1970s and then fizzled out as it was replaced by ideological literature and bourgeois self-help style navel-gazing novels. Literature was pretty much as dead as metal at that point.
James Joyce – Dubliners
He experimented with style after this, but never content; the basic idea here is that people exist outside of the nice format of equal, and instead are these little trails of experience through a world with not only uneven but infinitely varied topography where animal ideals of self-interest and intellectual abstractions like self-image prevail over practical concerns, mainly because those are out of the control of the everyday person anyway. Filled with characterizations both compassionate and cruel at the same time, this book shows us humanity trying to leave behind mass conformity and find its soul in individual experience.
William S. Burroughs – Naked Lunch
Postmodernism peaked with this, a book that demonstrated the predominance of reality through many fractal views that converged on a thermodynamic reality, namely that all things seek a perpetuation of energy but the sad tired controlling human mind wishes to monopolize that possibility. A cry for the liberation of the human species, this book shows us horrors in order to paint in negative space the opposite potential, and in doing so, reveals to us the chains and the cave so that we might leave. Other than Jane Austen, the most influential author in my experience.
Thomas Pynchon – The Crying of Lot 49
Internet hipsters will tell you to read V or Gravity’s Rainbow, knowing that the chances you will wade through seven hundred pages of dense text in order to punch them out are slim, but this book contains all of Pynchonian theory and technique in a short and hilarious volume that contains a melancholic Romantic longing unmatched in the rest of his work. Expect to look into the modern soul and find the abyss of meaning created by human projection, plus intimations of a metaphysics of order that encloses and manipulates physical reality. It helps us escape modernity in order to see what it might have meant all along.
Don DeLillo – White Noise
Alex Jones thinks he knows paranoia, but this book shows us the tragicomedic nature of living in modern society where paranoia is the norm because every person acts in self-interest without much knowledge beyond their material desires within the next pay period. This book shows us what the Misfits and postmodern literature wanted us to see, which is that beneath the chrome and good wishes, modern society is comprised of subtexts formed of stultified desires and suppressed naturalism. We are prisoners in a gilded cage because reality must be denied for the human individual to become our new god.
Michel Houellebecq – The Possibility of an Island
Building on a tradition that even predates Mary Shelley and Aldous Huxley, The Possibility of an Island shows us human existence taken as a reduction to extremes: what if we truly were free, independent, and accountable to nothing? The bleak existential crisis that confronts us when we get everything that we want reveals the emptiness of our wants, and shows us where there may be more hope of finding something interesting to do. Even more, it captures the hollow solipsism we impose on ourselves by mutual individualism, which makes the human more important than nature, logic, history, culture, or eternity.
William Gibson – Pattern Recognition
Gibson broke into the scene with Neuromancer, but that was really a visual gloss on the themes he wanted to expand upon from Pynchon and Burroughs, namely the hidden order invisible beneath all events that might be both divine and scientific. In this book, a mystery encoded in everyday events, characters must confront the lack of meaning in their lives in order to discover inner heroism and through it, grow up to be able to see reality as something like what it is.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Chronicles of a Death Foretold
“Magical realism” may not technically (“eckshyually”) be postmodernism, but it uses the same device, namely the elevation of individual perspective above universal perspective in order to affirm a reality alien to both. In this case, we move steadily into the metaphorical framework of individual minds as they try to adapt to events beyond their comprehension, in the process revealing a poetry, rhythm, and order to reality.
William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury
Faulkner, a Romantic with the heavy heart that study of history brings, read Joyce and realized he could expand this by reducing the sympathetic fallacy to simple synchronization, and so you get this magical world where the trees bend to the wind which weaves with the twists of the tale, a story based on the restoration of order in a time of inversion where insanity is so popular that people routinely drive themselves insane just to fit in.
William Blake – The Complete Illustrated Works
Absolutely no one will like this, but meso-Romantic author William Blake invented postmodernism: the telling of a centralized story from decentralized fragments. Each character, like a subroutine, has its own memory, limits, and imperatives, and when they come together, we see a richer world underneath the smoothing-over (like concrete) that civilization does by treating us as a fungible horde of equal individuals. Instead, through Blake, nature blooms in all of its ambiguity and infinite potential.
Norwegian AOR artist Issa has released a new single and official music video for “Pay The Price.” The track serves as an early preview for her upcoming full-length album, Fire And Ice, which is scheduled to be released later this summer on August 28 via Frontiers Music Srl.
Written and produced entirely by brothers Tom and James Martin, the new record draws heavy inspiration from 1980s melodic rock. The latest single highlights this sonic direction by combining layered synthesizers, prominent choral arrangements, and driving guitar work. The accompanying music video for “Pay The Price” was directed by Kris Barras.
Operating under her real name Isabell Øversveen, the vocalist continues to build her catalog within the European melodic rock scene. The forthcoming eleven-track album, Fire And Ice, will feature a mix of classic arena rock instrumentation, synthwave influences, and modern production, incorporating diverse stylistic elements across songs like “Bullet On The Road” and “Running From The Night.”
