Wollongong metal legends Segression haven’t only spent the year making a glorious comeback, they’re now headlining their own self-curated festival next year!
With the line-up to be revealed on October 13, Segfest will be Wollongong’s first heavy metal music festival.
To be held on May 15, 2027 at Waves, the show will run all day and pre-sales for tickets will kick off on October 14. Stay tuned via their socials!
Music icon to be honoured for a half-century of sound innovation, raw expression and landmark studio collaborations
Joins 2026 award recipients Bogdan Kondradcki and Ziemowit Kosmowski
Soundedit International Music Producers Festival returns in its 18th year from 23-27 October 2026 in Łódź, Poland
Łódź, Poland; The godfather of punk rock, a music icon, and one of the most influential artists in history, Iggy Pop is going to be awarded the prestigious “Man with the Golden Ear” award. The ceremony will take place at the 18th edition of the Soundedit International Music Producers Festival in Łódź, Poland.
For over five decades, Iggy Pop has been doing what he does best: playing his own way. As the lead singer of The Stooges, he helped define the raw sound of punk rock. In his solo career, he has created songs that have become permanent fixtures in the musical canon. His collaboration with David Bowie and subsequent projects with leading artists have cemented his status as one of the most charismatic figures on the global music scene.
The Man with the Golden Ear Award is an honour bestowed upon creators who boldly reshape the face of music: producers, sound engineers, and artists who pioneer new sonic directions. Iggy Pop will receive it for his exceptional expressiveness, artistic uncompromising spirit, and immense influence on the history of recording.
Reflecting on the announcement, Maciej Werk, director of Soundedit Festival, said: “This is a historic moment for us. After all, we’re talking about a man who defined the raw essence of punk both in the studio and on stage. His collaboration with David Bowie has become an absolute classic of music production. By awarding him the Man with the Golden Ear, we’re paying tribute to a giant whose legacy resonates perfectly with this year’s other honorees: Bogdan Kondracki and Ziemowit Kosmowski. Each of them, in their own way, proves that what matters most in music is one’s own inimitable style.”
Iggy Pop is the third honoree announced for this year’s festival. Bogdan Kondracki and Ziemowit Kosmowski were previously honoured. Bogdan Kondracki is a highly regarded music producer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and sound engineer. His body of work includes more than fifty albums by Polish artists, including Dawid Podsiadło, Brodka, Kortez, and sanah. Ziemowit Kosmowski, frontman of the bands Brak and Rendez-Vous, is one of the most important figures in Łódź’s punk and new wave scene. For decades, his work has combined musical rebellion with independence and a unique style. Three winners, three different musical journeys. What unites them is their courage in exploring new sounds and the unmistakable character of their work.
The “Man with the Golden Ear” Award has been presented since 2009 at the Soundedit International Music Producers Festival in Łódź. Past recipients include Brian Eno, Sir George Martin, John Cale, Daniel Lanois, Tony Visconti, Grzegorz Ciechowski, and Wojciech Waglewski.
The 18th edition of the festival will take place October 23–27, 2026. The program will include concerts, a gala, workshops, and lectures. There will also be sessions focused on music production and new audio technologies.
Passes covering three days of festival concerts and events cost 499 zł. Single-day tickets for select days are also available.
Day tickets, full festival passes, and workshop registration details are available now via Ticketmaster, Eventim, and official ticketing partners.
Visit the festival website for more information: https://soundedit.pl/en/home/.
Follow the event on Facebook and Instagram.
About Soundedit
Soundedit is the only festival in the world that celebrates the hard work and creativity of the people behind the final sound of the songs we listen to: music producers, sound designers and sound engineers.
Since 2009, Łódź has been the gathering place for the biggest stars of the global and Polish music scenes, as well as thousands of enthusiasts for whom sound is a true art form. It is a place where studio and live sound technology meets artistic vision, and a passion for sound becomes a shared language.
The festival was established by music producer, composer and radio broadcaster, Maciej Werk, who is best known as the founder and frontman of pioneering Polish rock band Hedone. Using his decades-long experience, he set up the festival to bring the focus of attention to the creators of music records.
Source: 3nation
An obsession, exaggeration
Lust, desire and adoration
Lose yourself in someone else
Limerence closes every door
Robots In Love have the sort of name that promises chrome-plated heartbreak, and their latest single Cease and Desist delivers an emotional sucker punch. The New Zealand dark electronic duo of vocalist-producer Elenor Rayner and drummer-producer Alex Burchell builds the song around obsession gone feral: attraction narrowing into fixation, fixation hardening into dependency, and reason getting shoved somewhere beneath the furniture. There is no polite exit once the appetite starts feeding on itself.
The guitars come down hard, with hardcore licks driven right up against industrial metal without quite falling into Ministry cosplay. There is some of SINE’s bruising electronic pressure here, along with the blackened mechanical weight of latter-day Gary Numan, while the bigger synth architecture brushes against HEALTH, Nine Inch Nails, Sirus, and V.A.S.T. Burchell’s drumming has the clipped exactitude of somebody who has spent years learning how machines think, while Rayner sings from inside the mess those machines could never clean up.
Desire behaves like bad wiring in the skull, making sleeplessness feel necessary and self-erasure almost reasonable. The chorus grows huge enough to suggest somebody shouting through concrete, yet the verses keep dragging the listener back toward the private humiliation of knowing exactly what is happening and remaining unable to stop it.
“I recently discovered the word ‘limerence’ and started thinking about extreme obsession,” says Rayner. “Hence the line “limerence closes every door” where no amount of reasoning can get through. Musically, it’s got dark, heavy riffs, cinematic synths and an epic chorus.”
The video, directed by Lichen Sorrel and Rayner, places the band inside a rain-soaked environment where reality keeps slipping sideways. Their movements feel slowed and strangely detached, as though the performers have wandered into somebody else’s private hallucination and decided to finish the set anyway.
Watch the video for Cease and Desist below:
Rayner has been working toward this collision for decades. She began playing Australian pubs on bass at fourteen before moving into electronic production on an Atari computer, “which opened up a universe of creating sounds and moulding them into rhythms and melodies until they evoke the exact feeling I need.” Her history runs through Soulscraper, Sobriquet, Snog, and The Crystalline Effect before Robots In Love took shape in New Zealand in 2017. Joined by Burchell in this current powerhouse incarnation, the project has developed a nasty elegance that can turn technical precision into emotional damage.
With second album OVERRIDE ahead and guitarist Henry Flynn Wall joining the record, Cease and Desist makes obsession feel less romantic than chemical, compulsive, and absurd in the terrible way our worst impulses often are. Love may open doors, but limerence bolts them shut from the inside.
Listen to Cease and Desist below and pre-order OVERRIDE here.
Follow Robots In Love:
The post “Limerence Closes Every Door” — Obsession Rains Down in Robots in Love’s Video for “Cease and Desist” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
From the billon-dollar success of her Eras tour to the feverish clamour surrounding the release of her new single, Patient Zero, Taylor Swift is in no danger of being deposed from her throne as the most successful music star of the 2020s. But even pop megastars need a helping hand somewhere along the way – and in Swift”s case , that came from Def Leppard.
Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott was sitting in his band’s dressing room when someone walked in and placed a laptop in front of him, telling him to watch the video clip on it. It was 2008, and the Sheffield group were touring in support of their recently released album Songs From The Sparkle Lounge. The video on the laptop featured an interview with a rising young country-pop singer who had been garnering headlines recently.
“It’s Taylor Swift,” Elliott told Rolling Stone in 2018. “She’s doing this interview and she said there was only one band that she would ever do a Crossroads with and it was Def Leppard.”
Crossroads was a hugely popular American TV show airing on the CMT network that paired country music stars with artists from other genres. The musicians would jam together, playing each other’s songs as faithfully or differently as they saw fit.
And Taylor Swift? At the time, she was one of the most talked-about new singers in the US. Her self-titled 2006 debut album had topped the Country Charts and reached No.5 in the main Billboard charts. The album didn’t betray an affinity for the kind of stadium-sized hard rock that Def Leppard were best known for purveying, but her mother, Andrea, had been a huge Leppard fan in the 80s, and the young Taylor had grown up in a house where Leppare’s classic 1987 album Hysteria was on heavy rotation.
“Taylor Swift’s [2014 album] 1989 is called 1989 because that was the year she was born,” Elliott told The Irish Times. “Throughout 1988 she heard our music in her mother’s womb, non-stop. Her parents are big Def Leppard fans.”
Leppard were keen to take her up on her offer. “We’ve always been that poke-noses-out-of-joint kind of band,” Elliott told Rolling Stone. “I loved the idea of something that’s gonna either piss people off or they go, good for you for doing something different. If you’re gonna do collaborations, I don’t see the point in us doing a song with Bon Jovi.”
And so Def Leppard’s team reached out to Taylor Swift’s camp – something presumably made easier by the fact that Leppard drummer Rick Allen’s brother Robert was her tour manager at the time. A couple of months later, they were in rehearsals together in preparation for recording the Crossroads show. Given that Swift was in her late teens, some minor lyrical tweaks were necessary, not least on Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar On Me.
“Me and Taylor sat down, and she says, ‘I can’t sing that line,’ cos it was a bit too risqué’,” Elliott told Rolling Stone. “So we’d swap things around. And the fact that I was actually singing from the male point of view in some of her stuff, like in [Swift’s] Love Story.”
The Crossroads performance was recorded over two shows at the Acuff Theater in Nashville in early October 2008. The finished episode, which broadcast on CMT on November 8, three days before the release of Swift’s second album, Fearless, saw Leppard and Swift collaborating on 11 songs, with the American singer’s own band providing extra backing, including acoustic guitar and fiddle.
The show opened with Swift duetting with Elliott on a version of Leppard’s 1983 single Photograph, the teenager adding some swagger to the song’s opening lines. The rest of the set was an even split between the two artists’ songs with Swift’s Picture To Burn, Love Story, Teardrops On My Guitar, Should’ve Said No and Our Song and Leppard’s Hysteria, When Love And Hate Collide (apparently Swift’s favourite Def Leppard track), a raucous Pour Some Sugar On Me, Love and Two Steps Behind getting the collaborative treatment.
The show was an immediate hit, notching 4.5 million viewers in its initial airings. Swift’s career was already rocketing upwards at the time but it certainly didn’t hurt for her music to be exposed to modern rock audiences. For Def Leppard, it placed them in front of an audience who might not have listened to them since their 80s heyday – if at all.
Speaking to Classic Rock in 2019, Leppard guitarist Phil Collen acknowledged the bonus, stating, “The Taylor Swift thing probably did expand our audience. It was great mixing those genres of music.”
Ultimately, the Crossroads performance showcased the strengths of both artists – as well as some unlikely similarities. It proved so successful that Leppard and Swift re-teamed the next year to close the 2009 CMT Music Awards with Pour Some Sugar On Me.
“People were looking at us like we had three heads when we announced we were going to do this TV show with Taylor Swift,” Elliott told Classic Rock in 2023. “The point is to get two extremely opposite artists performing on it… We just saw it as an opportunity to do something different. And it was phenomenal fun.”
Grab your tickets at buffaloironworks.com
Numa Echos has worked across fashion, television, and heavy music, bringing a pretty unusual mix of experiences into her career as an artist. We had the chance to chat with her about her background, working across different heavy music genres, and the challenges women continue to face in the industry.
Reuel
Hello Numa! I’m very happy to chat with you. How are you doing?
Numa
I’m very happy to be talking with you, too. I’m in a reflective phase and looking toward the future.
Reuel
When I was reading your bio, I was stunned by the variety of things you’ve done. I mean, cycling, fashion, TV, radio… And more! Do you feel that this colorful background has affected the way you see and present music?
Numa
Every little detail and nuance of my life helps define who I am, so I’d say yes, definitely.
Reuel
Aside from the variety of professions and forms of art you’ve explored, you’ve also been making music in a variety of heavy genres. Is there a genre you’ve worked in where you feel more like yourself, or does each genre represent a different side of your personality?
Numa
I believe that the genres that influence my music are closely intertwined, just as the different sides of my personality coexist-sometimes clashing, but then unequivocally seeking a compromise to establish a state of balance that transcends balance itself.
Reuel
Your last album was released in 2023, I believe. I guess the question your fans would like me to ask is: is there a plan to release any new music soon?
Numa
Absolutely. During my live shows, I’m already performing some new material that will be included on my next album. I’m particularly proud of the work that’s taking shape, which features several collaborations with other artists, and I hope it will be released before the end of the year or early next year.
Reuel
You’ve already collaborated with some incredible musicians. If you could perform or work with any musician, dead or alive, who would you choose?
Numa
There isn’t any one artist in particular with whom I’d like to collaborate; there are many with whom I’d like to exchange thoughts and opinions-whether they’re alive, dead, or haven’t even been born yet.
Reuel
With everything you’ve done, is there a certain form of art you’re still curious to try or explore?
Numa
I’m curious about the world in general, about everything I don’t know-even though there are some things I’d rather never know.
Reuel
We have readers from all around the world, including women who still face barriers and even persecution in the music industry. What message would you like to share with those who dream of pursuing a music career?
Numa
I would like to convey a message of freedom. We are free, and no one-and no social convention-should prevent us from proudly showing ourselves as we are. I condemn all forms of oppression and call on everyone to fight against it including through art and music.
Reuel
Thank you for your time, Numa! Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Numa
Thank you, and thank you to everyone who follows me. I’d like to add: “Strive for the infinite.”
The post Interview | Numa Echos: “I’m curious about the world in general, about everything I don’t know” first appeared on FemMetal – Goddesses of Metal.
Catch them live at Buffalo Iron Works on October 21st!
Grab those tickets today at buffaloironworks.com
So, is anyone buying?
The post Megadeth Launch Expansive “Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying” 40th Anniversary Briefcase Set appeared first on Theprp.com.
The latter will be out in January.
The post Scary Kids Scaring Kids Solidify Their Lineup With New Single “Something In The Water” & Album “RISE” appeared first on Theprp.com.