The inevitable cancellation has finally occurred. The LA punk/metal/hardcore festival CY Fest is officially not happening after at least 20 bands dropped off the lineup due to sexual misconduct allegations against the promoter.
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After bringing some of Australia’s best independent rock bands to Queensland for the Rock is Not Dead festivals, Dunnwell Touring and Promotion are proud to present Brisvegas Rocks. This is the show you don’t want to miss. FIVE amazing bands, ONE night only, together rocking the stage for what is set to be one of […]Blues Rock Weekly highlights new music from Duane Betts, Mike Zito, Marc Broussard with Joe Bonamassa, Reckoners, and Lily Vakili.
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Lo peor ya pasó. Sin ti, volveré a disfrutar.
Ex Lover’s latest single Lo Peor has the kind of ache that sneaks up behind a good beat and taps you on the shoulder. You let the body keep time while the heart gets worked over in the back room. Aramara Quintos Tapia and company understand that little arrangement perfectly, and they play it with style, nerve, and a clear-eyed sense of emotional mess, all in Spanish.
Coming out of Omaha, Ex Lover pulls together post-punk bass pressure, bright guitar lines, and the candy-coated ache of early-2000s Mexican pop into something lean, sad-eyed, and built for motion. Lo Peor (The Worst) lands right in that sweet spot where break-up music stops pleading for dignity and starts admitting how ridiculous people become when love slides out the door and leaves one shoe behind. The singer keeps trying to talk herself into recovery, keeps reaching for air, pleasure, distance, the usual self-help brochure words, then doubles back and asks for one more minute, one more explanation, one more scrap from the table. That push and pull gives the track its kick, as it breathes in acceptance.
You can hear points of contact with French Police, Belgrado, and Deceits in the taut rhythm section and cool romantic tension, while the sweeter melodic instinct and emotional directness bring to mind Dark Chisme, Future Nobodies, and Blood Club. Those reference points help sketch the frame, but the band’s real appeal lies in how naturally they move between ballroom bruise and bedroom plea.
The lyrics are straightforward with a refreshing lack of grandstanding. Nobody is trying to sell you a spiritual awakening. The feeling is raw in the best way: confused, bruised; still vain enough to want answers, still romantic enough to imagine a tidy ending. That emotional contradiction is the whole engine. The bass keeps things moving with a cool, clean insistence, the guitars gleam without fuss, and the vocal carries that delicious strain between composure and collapse. It feels like dancing in nice clothes while your life quietly catches fire near the coat check.
Then there is the video, directed by LeMarc, which pushes the song into another dimension of delirium. Shot in black and white with a moody, damaged glamour, it plays like a surrealist soap opera dragged through Super 8 and left out overnight with a stack of old film reels by Maya Deren, Luís Buñuel, and David Lynch. Faces drift in and out, desire goes sideways, time folds up like cheap linen, and the whole thing has the perfume of a dream you almost enjoy until you wake up feeling indicted.
Lo Peor is a lovely little catastrophe: catchy, wounded, and smart enough to know that getting over somebody rarely arrives in a straight line.
Watch Lo Peor below:
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The post “The Worst Part Is Now Over” — Ex Lover Leaves Heartbreak in the Rearview Mirror in Video for “Lo Peor” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
Picture “black metal.” What do you see? Frigid wastelands illuminated by burning churches? Damp crypts beneath gothic cathedrals? Varg’s stupid backyard vlogs? One band would have you consider the picturesque slopes of Tuscany’s sunbathed Calvana mountain region. The anonymous duo of Italy’s Calvana have raised hell in the name of their treasured namesake mountains for over a decade and across two records, delivering belligerent blackened arts they describe as “trend-free,” “rough and robust,” and “never recalling anything remotely modern nor much else from the darkest past.” Their latest opus, Sub Janus, aims to continue this mission of esoteric aggression and deepest darkness, sounding older than even the oldest black metals do. Can Calvana bring defiant pride to their mountains, or should Sub Janus be left in the present-past?
I don’t buy the claim that Calvana are especially enigmatic in sound, but Sub Janus sounds distinct regardless. Evoking Celtic Frost darkness, serrating it with Venom rawness and supercharging it with Immortal aggression, Calvana play simple compositions brought to life by deep atmospheres and overwhelming force. Torrents of classic black metal tremolo blasts are a staple of Sub Janus, and songs like “My Prayer to Diana” and “Meine Süße Sternenkriegerin”1 rage with a take-no-prisoners attitude that showcases this mode of Calvana at their best. When not frothing over maddening speed, Calvana are practitioners of the slow and menacing, evident on the solemn death march of “Summer Storm” or the sinister, bowed string intro of “Carnivore.” Vocally, Calvana’s frontperson sounds like an old Universal monster, groaning and snarling slurred and theatrically all over Sub Janus, and accompanied by searing guitars and bottom-heavy bass Calvana sit in a niche thoroughly theirs while still playing within the tropes of the sub-genre.
Calvana draw from a refined selection of tricks for Sub Janus, lending the album both focus and, unfortunately, a feeling of déjà vu. Most songs move between two modes: starting slow and ending fast or starting fast and ending slow. Both “Twilight Song” and “Death of Pan” open with brief fanfare before bringing the hurt, folding arpeggios over cascading blast beats and walls of guitar before shifting halfway to a halftime pace. This approach is most effective on “Fear Makes You Tame,” where the slow turn sees most of the band drop out entirely while doomy strums and haunting tremolos ring out amidst a discord of tortured wails and screams. It’s silly, campy, but fun. Calvana’s approach of slow-to-fast works usually better, however, as “Summer Storm” and album-highlight “Sorry” build tension through subtle progression and eccentric rhythms that make their rise to full-speed riffage all the more cacophonous. This small playbook makes Sub Janus a repetitive affair. Songs with especially little going on, like “Meine Süße Sternenkriegerin,” “Twilight Song,” and the closer “Sub Janus,” feel substantially longer than their runtimes suggest. Calvana have something working with Sub Janus, but I wish that it had a little more going for that something.
But if Sub Janus is hampered by songwriting woes, then Calvana saved it with lively production and performances. Calvana’s analog production and emphasis on giving the full band a spotlight lends Sub Janus an earthy, full-bodied sound defined by enormity and dynamism. Everything feels just right in the mix, especially the bass guitar, which sounds burly and substantial. Black metal demands furious showmanship and Calvana deliver mightily, spitting hellfire on “Fear Makes You Tame” and lathering “Carnivore” in horror-film dread. This is especially true of the drummer, who plays out of their damn gourd on Sub Janus, pummeling lightning-fast fills on “Death of Pan,” exacting punishment upon their hated crash cymbals on “My Prayer to Diana” and thumping out one gnarly drum groove on “Sorry.” All of this, more than anything on Sub Janus, makes Calvana seem as ancient as they aimed to feel. Sub Janus feels like a relic lost to time, dug from the Earth, bearing an archaic dread and untamed vitriol still vital today.
Tuscany is a beautiful place, but Calvana would have you believe the sun never once shone there on Sub Janus. Its songwriting issues limit the replay value of Sub Janus, and my feelings toward the album have dimmed somewhat over the weeks, but the fire Calvana brought to it definitely makes me want to keep this band on my radar. A fun, dark, and decently paced romp, Sub Janus is worth the time of black metal fans who prefer their tunes musty and damp. Visit sunny blackened Calvana today!
Rating: Good
DR: 8 | Format: 320 kbps MP3
Label: Adirondack Black Mass
Websites: calvana.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/calvana
Release Date: March 20th, 2026
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If you thought Ice Nine Kills was done with the horror movie tie-ins for 2026, then think again. These guys know how to leverage their music — or in this case if you’re keeping up with the lore, their fathers’ music — for a buck. Hence the release earlier today of Ice Nine Kills’… I mean Grave Diggler’s hit song “Hell Or High Slaughter”.
Yes, this is INK dressing up glam and writing a better song than modern day Mötley Crüe could dream of writing. According to the story, this song and accompanying music video is actually Ice Nine Kills’ fathers in a band called Grave Diggler. That’s actually how the members of Ice Nine Kills met, if you’re following the lore surrounding this single drop.
Apparently Scream (2022) and Scream VI co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett were working on their black comedy horror flick Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come when they decided they needed something old school. They then realized they wanted a Grave Diggler song and since they worked with Ice Nine Kills for their tie in with Scream VI, they reached out to the band again to see if they could secure the rights to their fathers’ songs. INK frontman Spencer Charnas said the process of getting the rights to “Hell Or High Slaughter” became a family issue.
“I’ve been estranged from my father for a long time. But this movie, and this song, while bringing a lot of complicated feelings to the surface, also brought us back together.”
Despite that his band’s song will play in an early scene in the movie and during the closing credits, Grave Diggler’s frontman Sonny Charnas had some choice words about his son Spencer’s path to rock stardom.
“You call my son shrieking into a microphone like a meshuggah mental patient ‘singing’? That’s not heavy metal. I’m heavy metal.”
As a result, we now have the single available everywhere and a NSFW music video to watch on the internets. You can check out the clip below.
The post Ice Nine Kills Go Glam for “Hell or High Slaughter (Grave Diggler: Pt. 2)” appeared first on MetalSucks.
Emerging in 2020 from Austin, TX, United States, Braeker blends rock, metalcore and pop into a genre-defying sound. Braeker is a solo independent music artist originally from Dallas Texas. Currently living in Austin Texas, he songwrites, produces, mixes and masters all the music his self. “I create Pop infused Metal music, for people who need […]All these Prism Shores tracks are so appealing! The Montreal band has thus far previewed new album Softest Attack with “Kid Gloves” and “I Didn’t Mean To Change My Mind.” Now comes “Magical Thinking,” which applies some shoegazey guitar moans to Prism Shores’ pristine jangle. If you are feeling like you can’t listen to the…
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Meg Remy is a music-making machine. The Toronto-based artist always has something cooking; her most recent album as U.S. Girls, Scratch It, came out last year. Her latest is from her first foray into film scoring. She collaborated with filmmaker Grace Glowicki on her new surreal horror-comedy Dead Lover. It’s about “a lonely gravedigger who goes…
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That record was once again recorded live in front of an in-studio audience.
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