New Video/Single Now Playing + Pre-Orders Available
Watch/stream NORTH SEA ECHOES’ “Enjoy The View” HERE
NORTH SEA ECHOES – featuring progressive metal pioneers singer Ray Alder and guitarist Jim Matheos of Fates Warning – are back with a new studio album, How To Cast A Shadow, set for release on July 24th on Metal Blade Records!
On NORTH SEA ECHOES‘ critically acclaimed 2024 debut, Really Good Terrible Things, Alder and Matheos garnered rave reviews for songs that possessed, “liberating sonic space and emotional vulnerability… from somnambulant electro-fog to gritty, overdriven disquiet, to the quietly devastating (Blabbermouth).“
Photo by Jeremy Saffer
With this year’s How To Cast A Shadow, the band’s identity is further explored and expanded. Matheos explains, “this record is a bit heavier, with several more songs featuring real drums, played by Dennis Leeflang. It wasn’t necessarily intentional or planned, just the way things shaped up and how they emerged this time.”
Alder concurs. “[A track like] ‘I’ll Leave A Light On’ is much heavier than anything on Really Good Terrible Things. It has a darker, melancholic feel that fits well on this album. I loosely based the lyrics on a character from my favorite sci-fi series. I won’t say which, but they do use the quote ‘out there in the black.’“
From the radio-ready rock of “All That Comes After” and the intimate, escalating “A Time Of Innocence And Purpose” to the powerful, timeless ballad “Villains Or Saints,” How To Cast A Shadow cohesively crosses genres and challenges aural preconceptions.
The duo’s shared and separate histories help to forge a fresh creative opus. Alder has been the vocalist and main co-writer for prog metal heroes Fates Warning for 37 years, recording ten albums between 1988 (No Exit) and 2020 (Long Day Good Night). Rounding out his discography are seven albums with Redemption, two solo records, and the band A-Z, which debuted in 2022.
Revered guitarist and producer Matheos is a cofounder of Fates Warning, the lineup debuting with 1984′s Night On Bröcken on Metal Blade. In addition to thirteen albums with Fates Warning, Matheos launched several solo albums, four LPs alongside former Dream Theater keyboardist Kevin Moore under the name OSI, and Kings Of Mercia, which launched in 2022.
Of NORTH SEA ECHOES‘ sophomore album, the team says, “You could say that there are elements of everything we do or have done on this album, yet Fates and our various other projects are totally different types of music.” How To Cast A Shadow ups the promise of its predecessor with provocative words of hope, sorrow and consciousness, paired with Matheos’ equally emotive, varied and deeply moving guitar work.
In advance of the release, today the band unveils the lead single, “Enjoy the View.” Comments Alder, “The guitars and drums have this great drive that builds throughout the song. The combination of quiet verses and heavy choruses made me think (lyrically) of a darker side to some people. Those who would choose numbness over pain.”
Watch NORTH SEA ECHOES‘ “Enjoy The View” video HERE.
How To Cast A Shadow Track Listing:
01. A Time of Innocence and Purpose
02. Enjoy the View
03. Good Enough
04. I’ll Leave a Light On
05. All Fall Away
06. Revenge
07. Villains or Saints
08. What Is and What Was
09. All That Comes After
10. How to Cast a Shadow
Creeper will be heading back out on the road across the UK later this year for their ‘Off With Their Heads!’ headline tour.
Southampton’s finest will bring their bloodthirsty live show to rooms across the UK this October, with a run including a huge show at London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town.
The announcement comes after the band delivered two extraordinary sets at Download Festival over the weekend, and it seems there are plenty more surprises in store for these upcoming shows.
On the announcement, William Von Ghould has shared:
“This Halloween season, join us for four special shows set in the world of ‘Sanguivore’. The performances will feature a new stage production following the vampire rock band on tour as they are pursued by The Mistress of Death. Blending live music with theatrical storytelling, the show will bring the characters and themes of the current era to life on stage. Come immerse yourself in the flesh and the fantasy with us this October, just watch out for your head!”
With support on all dates coming from Calva Louise and Starbenders, take a look at the full list of dates below:
OCTOBER
8: CARDIFF Tramshed 9: LONDON O2 Forum Kentish Town 10: MANCHESTER Academy 11: GLASGOW SWG3 Galvanisers
Two more legendary classic-rock acts return with new music, just weeks after fellow stalwarts Paul McCartney, Yes, and Peter Frampton. Continue reading…
You wait until tonight Diversion of the trace Get ready for the vamp The stage, the other face
Some things are monuments: raised in stone, fixed in place, built to instruct the future on what must be remembered. A trace is different. It is smaller, stranger, more unstable: a smear of light on glass, a footprint in dust, a pulse still moving beneath the surface. A trace does not announce itself from above. It survives at the edge of disappearance, carrying proof that something passed through, resisted, or remained. On their third full-length album, Trace, Athens dark synth duo Incirrina follow those marks through the maze of the “seeming real,” where what is imposed, cruel, and inhumane presents itself as inevitable truth.
Here, the night is not merely a setting. It is a stage, a shelter, a ritual chamber, and a corridor of escape. Cold analogue electronics flicker like neon over wet stone; basslines gallop and coil; drum machines strike with martial insistence; voices rise from the fog like warnings, spells, accusations, and prayers. Trace is a record of movement, but also of refusal: a dance through dread, memory, alienation, and defiance.
With Trace, George Katsanos and Irini Tiniakou expand the distinctive sonic universe they established with Lip Led Scream in 2022 and 8.15 in 2019, experimenting with instrumentation, rhythm, and vocal approach. The album gathers 11 songs written between 2023 and 2025 and shaped through the discipline of a 24-channel console, exploring the boundaries of dark electronic, synthwave, coldwave, minimal synth, and darkwave without reducing itself to the tropes of any of these genres.
Thematically, the songs explore the uniqueness of human experience and the struggle to preserve inner freedom and individuality in dystopian times. Celebrating diversity and self-expression while continuing to connect, create, and work with others becomes a way out of the false order. The album itself is the result of such a process: its creators consider themselves, against the odds, artisans and friends who make music, share it, and reinvent themselves. As its title indicates, Trace is the imprint of searching for wondrous, meaningful diversions, novel transformations, and transitory acts of care and defiance.
Katsanos brings analogue synthesizers, octapad, drum programming, electric bass guitar, kantele, alto melodica, samples, waterphone, and vocals into Incirrina’s sonic architecture, while Tiniakou’s synthesizers and unmistakable voice give the duo much of its spectral charge. Her delivery can feel whispered, wounded, commanding, or ritualistic, cutting through the electronic framework with theatrical force. On Trace, that chemistry is central: machinery and voice, pulse and poetry, body and alarm.
“Mutate” opens the album with drones that sound like metal being cut, before a galloping bass synth melody pushes the track forward with immediate force. Katsanos’ analogue electronics and drum programming give the song its relentless propulsion, while Tiniakou’s voice begins close, dark, and breathy before sharpening into an old-school goth edge. Buzzing synth sighs gather around the pulse, and when the drums lock into a dance beat, the track surges with classic 80s synthpop and darkwave energy. It churns, glows, and moves with the confidence of an opening manifesto.
Through its lyrics, “Mutate” frames the night as a ritual of self-remaking, where performance, fashion, fire, and the dance floor become weapons against conformity. The lyrics reject fixed identity, social obedience, faceless control, and dull authority, choosing eruption over submission. Through theatrical reinvention, the song turns mutation into survival, style into armor, and the transformed body into a radiant act of defiance.
“Find” begins with an ascending synth loop that feels almost mystical, rising and falling like a coded signal in the dark. Cinematic synth sighs drift beneath the melody, while Katsanos’ spare electronic framework leaves enough empty space for tension to gather around every repetition. Tiniakou’s vocal sounds haunted, sad, and resigned, drawing from the emotional severity of classic 80s minimal synth without slipping into pastiche.
The song’s lyrical structure reads like a minimalist inventory of growth through pressure. Time, wrongdoing, pain, courage, thought, and speech become stages in the difficult work of self-recognition. The song suggests that fear is not defeated by silence, but by naming it; even in isolation, the act of speaking proves that something has passed through the void and been heard.
“Alexia” opens with crackling, popping percussion before dark synth pads enter, followed by a sharp wail, a simple bass synth figure, and a buzzing melodic line. Katsanos’ programming keeps the track grounded in pulse, while the surrounding electronics feel vaporous, nocturnal, and lunar. Tiniakou’s reverbed vocal arrives with a witchy, dreamlike aura, giving the song the feel of a darkwave/minimal synth apparition.
The imagery in “Alexia” follows a spectral woman through night, landscape, dream, and city before she disappears into morning. The words move through sand, mirrors, snow, memory, and the senses, turning the title figure into a myth of escape. She is present everywhere and unreachable at once, making reality feel briefly fragile, sensual, temporary, and unfinished.
“She Is In The Dream” opens with an ominous weight, led by a thicker EBM-style bass synth and droning, cold, wind-like pads. Compressed claps snap through the atmosphere as Tiniakou’s vocal moves from gauze to witchy clarity. Midway through, a Kraftwerk-like synth pulse enters, shifting the track toward a hypnotic blend of synthpop, darkwave, and minimal synth. Katsanos’ low-end pressure and rhythmic architecture give the nightmare a dancefloor skeleton, while the vocal performance turns the dream into accusation.
Lyrically, “She Is In The Dream” turns desire, guilt, shame, and punishment into a recurring nightmare. The song’s words conjure a woman as judge, accuser, and wounded image, forcing the lyrical narrator into a confrontation with dread and bodily pain. Erotic fixation and religious torment blur together, and waking offers no real escape; the dream remains lodged in the body.
“Region” begins with rustling, clockwork-like sounds before giving way to a deep bass synth and cinematic pad. A wistful keyboard melody enters, then a hi-hat beat, and Tiniakou’s voice carries the song toward something almost folkloric. There is a fairy-tale quality here, like a legend told in a cottage on a windswept moor, but the atmosphere is private, wounded, and strange. Katsanos’ palette of analogue synths and unusual textures gives the track an antique mechanical shimmer.
The lyrics for “Region” recount the return to childhood as a half-lit emotional geography. Dollhouses, trains, books, toys, sealed crimes, and unhealed time gather into a place where memory stays open. The words address someone lost inside a soundless internal territory, offering devotion and protection as if love might still survive fear, absence, and remembrance.
“Always Here” opens slowly with misty, faint droning before a pulsing bass synth enters like a rapid heartbeat. A quick bell-like warning flickers through the atmosphere, and Tiniakou’s whispered delivery heightens the sense of threat. When the beat locks in, Katsanos’ programming gives the song a darkwave dancefloor charge, with the deep bass melody pushing forward like blood under pressure. As the bell motif returns more frequently and becomes more melodic, Tiniakou’s voice cracks through the layers like a command.
Lyrically, “Always Here” is a stark meditation on emotional survival. The song presents laughter, tears, thought, and dreaming as necessary acts against numbness and surrender. Without feeling, imagination, and reflection, the lyrics warn, people fade into the false reality of the “seeming real.” Renewal begins by rediscovering what was present all along, beneath fear and resignation.
“Diver” sets itself in motion with a machine-gun percussion beat, a dull warning synth, pulsing electronics, and icy cinematic pads. Katsanos’ drum programming turns the track into a piece of urban machinery, while the synths move like rails, screens, and locked doors. Tiniakou’s voice carries an electroclash edge while remaining rooted in darkwave, adding human volatility to the mechanical enclosure.
The lyrical terrain of “Diver” transforms public transit into a claustrophobic descent through anxiety, compulsion, and sensory overload. The words move through trains, tracks, crowds, voices, bodily signals, and the pressure of routine until motion itself becomes a cage. Maps and routes fail to locate the heart; the body keeps traveling, but the self remains trapped inside noise, metal, and panic.
“Presence” is built around a deep, dark synth melody that rises and falls in repeated melodic beats, building tension until layers of icy pads gather beneath it. Katsanos’ electronics create the sensation of moving forward through a storm, while Tiniakou’s vocal begins with almost melancholic restraint before the song’s drama tightens around her. The result is cold but not empty, severe but not distant.
In its lyrical arc, “Presence” turns perception into a borrowed, compromised act. The song moves through urban machinery, denial, surveillance, and mass anonymity until one figure breaks the spell. Beauty becomes a disruptive force that strips away false sight, forcing blindness before clarity. Freedom does not arrive through comfort, but through confrontation with reality.
“Sometimes” is the vocal exception on Trace, carried by George Katsanos. His sorrowful delivery has a gravity reminiscent of Brendan Perry’s deeper, mournful register in Dead Can Dance. Misty synths and a piano-like melody give the track a slightly folky darkwave character, while the snare drumbeat moves like a despondent march forward. The arrangement does not overstate the pain; it simply walks with it.
The confession at the center of “Sometimes” is one of emotional collapse. The words cycle through tears, death-wish imagery, longing, helplessness, suffocation, despair, and emptiness without dressing the pain in abstraction. Its repetition gives the song the force of a private admission, capturing depression not as a single dramatic event, but as waves that keep returning.
“Alien Room” moves on a pulsing bass synth, witchy vocal wails, cold harmony effects, and a dance beat that keeps the room spinning. Katsanos’ low-end movement and programming give the song its hypnotic structure, while Tiniakou’s voice turns the domestic setting into an incantation. The atmosphere feels ritualistic, almost brushing against dungeon synth in places, but the track remains physical, tense, and strange.
In the song’s strange domestic vision, “Alien Room” turns ordinary space into a paranoid science-fiction chamber. Couches, windows, drinks, stained floors, broken objects, and living-room details become signs of invasion. The words mix pulp cosmic imagery with everyday dread, suggesting that the end-times charge may arrive not through spectacle, but through ordinary collapse inside the home.
“ΚΡΥΦΟ (Hidden)” closes the album with a propulsive darkwave beat, whoops and wails, smoldering Greek-language vocals from Tiniakou, and a catchy guitar riff. Katsanos’ rhythmic drive gives the finale its bodily force, making the track one of the album’s most dancefloor-friendly moments. After so much dread, memory, pressure, and transformation, the closer does not retreat into shadow; it moves through it.
Sung in Greek, “ΚΡΥΦΟ (Hidden)” centers on concealment, self-address, and unheard voices. The song connects private suffering with children, sand, earth, sea, breath, betrayal, dawn, and the first cry of awakening. Hidden knowledge becomes both a burden and a force pressing toward revelation, turning secrecy into motion and suppressed pain into sound.
By the time “ΚΡΥΦΟ (Hidden)” fades, Trace has completed a circuit through mutation, fear, memory, transit, perception, collapse, invasion, and disclosure. Incirrina’s third album is not merely a genre exercise in dark electronic, synthwave, and coldwave form. It is a document of friendship, craft, and resistance: the work of artisans who make music together, share it, and reinvent themselves against the odds. Its title becomes its method. Trace leaves behind the imprint of searching for wondrous diversions, meaningful transformations, and small, transitory acts of care and defiance.
Incirrina’s Trace is out now via Cold Transmission Music. Listen to the album below, and order it here.
George Katsanos and Irini Tiniakou’s journey as Incirrina began in Athens in late 2017. The duo released 8.15 in 2019 through Geheimnis Records, followed by the digital maxi single Utter in 2020, the split maxi single Devastations / R.Daneel with The Man & His Failures in 2021, and Lip Led Scream in 2022 via Cold Transmission. They later released Immersion in 2024 and the singles “Only One Smile Alone” and “ΚΡΥΦΟ (Hidden)” in 2025.
They have appeared at numerous gigs, live stages, and festivals across Greece and Europe, including Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Croatia. Their festival appearances include Death Disco Open Air Festival, Wave-Gotik-Treffen, Athens Music Week, Metavasis Festival, Japan Festival, schwarts + Bruits De La Cave Festival, Athens Digital Arts Festival, Pliisken Festival, Cold Transmission Festival, and Morphic Festival. They have also opened in Athens for Front 242, Soviet Soviet, Die Selektion, and Potochkine.
Beyond the club and concert stage, Incirrina have also moved into theatre. In 2024, they composed music for Andrew Keatley’s Alligators, directed by Giannis Laspias at Gloria Theatre in Athens, with the music performed live on stage. They also composed soundscapes and orchestrated songs for Little Women, adapted, translated, and directed by Athina Hatziathanassiou at Alambra Theatre.
Their unique blend of analogue electronic instrumentation, distinct vocal quality, and band chemistry has made their live performances especially powerful, described as having emotional melodies that stick in the mind, heavy and strong beats that impel the body to dance, and vocals that cut through the musical layers, leaving a lasting impact.
Upcoming Live Dates
10 July 2026 — TBA
24 October 2026 — Sounds From The Heart Festival, Dynamo / Werk 21, Zürich, Switzerland
25 October 2026 — Lovataraxx & Incirrina, Die Stadtmitte, Karlsruhe, Germany
New York’s The Velvet Underground left an impact not just on punk rock but on music in general. Consisting of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, they played music for four years and seemed to go unnoticed until Brian Eno pointed out that the few who had formed a band were fans and had bought their record. Author Ritchie Unterberger has put out a massive book on the band with Do What You Fear Most: The History of the Velvet Underground, released by Omnibus Press. At over 800 pages, the book is the ultimate resource on The Velvet Underground’s lasting legacy.
The book starts with chapters on Lou Reed and John Cale, in relation to the page count they don’t spend long in their pre-Velvet Underground lives. It details Reed and Cale’s meeting at a party in NYC. While we don’t get a lot of info about their childhoods, we get an idea of their defiant views from their time in college and how it informed their music. There’s even a chapter on the pre-Velvet Underground band The Primitives that Reed and Cale played in after they met, but also proto-Velvet Underground collaborations, The Falling Spikes (also known as the Warlocks), and the additions of Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker to form the Velvet Underground.
Unterberger mostly sticks to the band members’ professional lives unless it applies to something in the band. The author is very meticulous about the info, even if the citation is decades after the event takes place. Some of the descriptions jump around in time a bit, as it allows connecting the earlier experiences and germinations of the songs to the versions of them we already know. Teases are sprinkled throughout the book about the band’s eventual releases and even the collaborations with Andy Warhol and their hesitant acceptance of taking Nico into the band. There’s this dichotomy that tethers the band to these people, almost making them the supporting cast in their own story. Unterberger can keep these grating moments bittersweet, but recognizes them as tentpoles.
The book is super detailed, but the prose moves fast. There has been so much written about the Velvet Underground that a lot of words are spent on particular subjects, such as recording sessions and gigs. There are numerous accounts of the song recordings, their differences, and what they evolved into, and where they would end up being released whether while the band was active or on a special edition. At such a high page count, it’s clear that there wasn’t much of a limit on how much Unterberger was able to pile on. The book gets a little too meta as it talks about the numerous sources it pulls from in the prose, but this is understandable with a book this massive. If you are a stickler for details, this book has it: shows, demo recordings, relationships, tension, and eventual disbandment.
Before the internet, many stories coming out of the scene seemed like myths. People could only get interviews and stories with bands from magazines or books, but there wasn’t nearly as much documentation as there is now. That’s not including whether the subject was willing to be interviewed or not and how cooperative they would be. Eventually, the internet made it easier to find and catalog these interviews, leading to where we are now. We get these giant books on the things we love, no matter how undesirable they may have been to the general public during their time. Unterberger’s undertaking and choice of the Velvet Underground as his subject reflect this shift and show how far the acceptance of this genre has come.
Do What You Fear Most: The History of the Velvet Underground. is the most comprehensive book covering the Velvet Underground, compiling almost every resource into one compendium. While the band’s trials and tribulations are on display, the book mostly focuses on the minutiae. While minutiae sometimes get a negative connotation, here it should be celebrated as much as the band itself. Unterberger’s research and Omnibus Press’s release of this book are proof that the Velvet Underground is still relevant in conversations about genre-defying music and its history.
You can pick up Do What You Fear Most: The History of the Velvet Underground by Richie Unterberger at you local bookstore or through Omnibus Press.
The spirit of metal has always been transgressive. Even though the genre can no longer be epitomized by a group of men with long hair, wearing all black, screaming about Satan and death,1, there remains an element that threatens an established order or sensibility. This is most obvious in the sound itself, which apparently turns a majority of listeners away even as it attracts weirdos like us. But while we may roll our eyes at metal of any kind being dismissed as ‘just noise’ and ‘horrible’, there are some cases where we can acknowledge that the music in question really is very inaccessible. Then we’re confronted with that same transgressiveness non-metalheads face when they listen to less-extreme metal, and enjoyment—let alone qualitative assessment—becomes complex. So it was when I was faced with Dhrupad Anutpada (ধপদ অন$ৎপ&দ): Apophatic Ragas Of Non-Origination, the debut of Indian/Canadian act Nirriti whose intense blackened noise is paired with a philosophical theme that denies the occurrence of creation. Its heresy is every bit as transcendentally horrifying as it sounds.
Nirriti are fully committed to their unorthodoxy. As members of black/noise circle Kolkata Inner Order Propaganda—along with Tetragrammacide, Necrodeity, among others—the trio demonstrate a level of nightmarishness worthy of the circle’s proclaimed “esoterrorism.” Not only is the lyrical theme bizarre yet intriguing, but the music is some of the most oppressive I’ve ever heard. For context, after finishing my first play-through of Dhrupad Anutpada, I decided to listen to Portal to “wind down.” Nirriti’s use of guitar as something from which to make a shuddering wall of sound, from which the occasional dissonant tremolo scale creeps out, is somewhat similar to Portal’s. Here, this wall feels still more monolithic due to Dodecahedron-on-steroids percussive violence that breaks away from a cacophonous blast, only to smash any hint of quiet with cymbals. Omnipresent vocal reverb, that iterates nigh on every hellish roar into a multiplicity of frightening confusion and chaos, becomes the final smothering layer in Dhrupad Anutpada’s impenetrable shroud of horror.
Up to this point, everything I’ve said about Dhrupad Anutpada could be taken positively or negatively—a quirk of how we often discuss extreme metal. This cognitive dissonance is as central to the proper experience of the album as literal harmonic dissonance. Nirriti’s take on noisy brutality approaches the hypnotic as they infuse passages with a sense of repetition through just-audible repeating scales and the aforementioned flickering echoes of vocals (“Mandukya…,”2 “In the Hallways…”). This creates a viscerally chilling sense of a tape skipping or playing backwards, or of the dizziness you feel just before you faint. It’s strange, but such passages grip the listener more powerfully than those where the reverb and blackened sensibility soften to allow the riffs breathing room (“One Foot…,” “Glissando…”), though the latter do reset the sempiternal rhythm, and inject needed jabs of urgency at their best (“One foot…,” “Golden Yolk…”). The relentless drumming, often more prominent than the guitars, serves primarily as a propeller to churn up these waters, such that it becomes a perverse relief when it settles into a battering, crashing attack (“In the Hallways…,” “Golden Yolk…,” “Vilambit Laya…”); because you can at least count the blows.
Dhrupad Anutpada maintains a consistent level of intensity thanks to these constant, if sometimes subtle, fluctuations. Creeping guitar ascents (“In the Hallways…,”), a rhythmic syncopation between roars and drums (“Mandukya…”), and the sudden breaks into noise (“Glissando…”) or the comparative ease of dissonant death metal (“One Foot…”) keep one hooked, straining one’s ears to catch the nuances in this chthonic chaos. Nirriti display an impressive command of their craft, turning harsh vocals into a weapon of horror, wielding guitars like percussion and percussion like punishment. It’s clearly intended to overwhelm and unsettle its audience. The problem is that it’s perhaps too successful, Dhrupad Anutpada being so exhausting that it can make one feel physically nauseated. After many listens, once the initial shock has passed, it’s easier to spot the places Nirriti reuse their tricks, and the corresponding movements lose a little potency (“In the Hallways…,” “Vilambit Laya…”).
I want to believe Dhrupad Anutpada is as profound as it presents itself. There is something to be said for an album that so powerfully confronts and terrifies its listener—it is the very essence of metal and the heart of philosophical unorthodoxy. Yet Nirriti tread a touch too far into the formless abyss to reach all but the most dedicated acolytes of the heretical metal underground. Dhrupad Anutpada may open your mind, but it’s just as likely to send you scrambling, horrified, away from the nightmare Nirriti have unleashed.
Rating: Mixed DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3 Label: Iron Bonehead Productions Websites: Bandcamp Releases Worldwide: June 19th, 2026
The spirit of metal has always been transgressive. Even though the genre can no longer be epitomized by a group of men with long hair, wearing all black, screaming about Satan and death,