The masters of doomed heavy metal have finally broken their silence. Khemmis, the Denver-based powerhouse that has consistently redefined the boundaries of the genre, has officially announced the details for their upcoming fifth studio album, simply titled Khemmis. Set for a worldwide release on June 12, 2026, via Nuclear Blast Records, the album promises to be their most energized and profound work to date.
To celebrate the announcement, the band has unleashed the lead single and official music video for “Invocation of the Dreamer”. The track is a perfect distillation of the Khemmis sound: crushing riffs, soaring dual-guitar harmonies, and the hauntingly powerful vocals of Phil Pendergast. “This album is a culmination of everything we’ve learned as a band,” Pendergast shared. “It’s about finding light in the darkest of places.”
“Forsake The Light” World Tour
Alongside the album announcement, Khemmis has revealed the dates for their massive 2026 “Forsake The Light” World Tour. Kicking off in North America this spring and heading to Europe and the UK in the fall, the tour will see the band performing their most ambitious stage production yet. Known for their flawless live execution, this tour is set to be one of the highlights of the 2026 metal calendar.
As the band prepares to take their new sonic journey across the globe, the excitement in the metal community is palpable. Khemmis has always been a band that rewards deep listening, and their self-titled effort looks to be a landmark release for the decade.
Khemmis is available for pre-order now in various limited-edition formats. The journey into the Everblack continues.
The masters of doomed heavy metal have finally broken their silence. Khemmis, the Denver-based powerhouse that has consistently redefined the boundaries of the genre, has officially announced the details for their upcoming fifth studio album, simply titled Khemmis. Set for a worldwide release on June 12, 2026, via Nuclear Blast Records, the album promises to be their most energized and profound work to date.
To celebrate the announcement, the band has unleashed the lead single and official music video for “Invocation of the Dreamer”. The track is a perfect distillation of the Khemmis sound: crushing riffs, soaring dual-guitar harmonies, and the hauntingly powerful vocals of Phil Pendergast. “This album is a culmination of everything we’ve learned as a band,” Pendergast shared. “It’s about finding light in the darkest of places.”
“Forsake The Light” World Tour
Alongside the album announcement, Khemmis has revealed the dates for their massive 2026 “Forsake The Light” World Tour. Kicking off in North America this spring and heading to Europe and the UK in the fall, the tour will see the band performing their most ambitious stage production yet. Known for their flawless live execution, this tour is set to be one of the highlights of the 2026 metal calendar.
As the band prepares to take their new sonic journey across the globe, the excitement in the metal community is palpable. Khemmis has always been a band that rewards deep listening, and their self-titled effort looks to be a landmark release for the decade.
Khemmis is available for pre-order now in various limited-edition formats. The journey into the Everblack continues.
The reaper has been lurking in our round
And I heard him whispering in my ear,
Long before he visited you,
He was trying to make me disappear
Melanculia’s post mortem begins from a place that is both geographic and psychic: a childhood split between the sunlit northern coast of Portugal and the industrial Ruhr, a life marked by relocation, return, and the private architecture of loss. In a small studio in Essen, Nine Sable writes, plays, records, produces, and designs everything himself, and the album bears the mark of that total authorship. It feels handmade in the oldest sense of the word, as though each chord has been sanded down, stained, and left to dry under a low German sky.
Melanculia is not a new mask so much as a return to an earlier self. Before his band Aeon Sable, and prior to its sixteen years of gothic rock grandeur and wide-screen lamentation, there was this rawer instinct from Sable: voice, guitar, atmosphere, and the kind of lyric that prefers the exposed nerve to the ornamental flourish. post mortem pares the room down to acoustic guitar, spectral keyboards, spare percussion, and Sable’s bruised, theatrical baritone. The result is a record of endings that keeps searching, often stubbornly, for some small aperture of grace. Its lineage runs through Nick Cave’s graveyard romanticism, Peter Murphy’s dramatic poise, the devotional weight of Dead Can Dance, the desolate elegance of Rowland S. Howard, and the bruised grandeur of early Placebo and Katatonia.
Dark Days begins with bright synths, acoustic guitar strumming, and heartfelt vocals, resembling a letter sent across distance. Sable describes watching rain fall as he shares a message with someone far away. The rain acts as the album’s first symbol of mercy—bringing pain but also cleansing. Sable addresses upcoming challenges with a calm confidence, having endured enough to understand their form. Its lonely guitar and passionate singing evoke a touch of Bowie’s later style—marked by elegant exhaustion and cosmic solace.
On the Western-tinged folk-ballad The Tower, Sable walks through an old town and finds the past already condemned, “declared dead and gone.” A solemn synth line gives way to a hypnotic guitar figure, suggesting a desert road, a church bell, a horseman without a horse. The song has a Nick Cave-like sense of moral dust and theatrical distance, yet Sable’s preoccupation is less with damnation than self-invention.
Runaways brightens the palette without losing the album’s ache. Its romance is brief, fragrant, already touched by departure. Love here is a shared route out of a collapsing world. The track has a little psychedelic sweetness at the edges, with vocals that hover above the guitar like heat over pavement. At moments, it brushes against the woozy pop drift of the Dandy Warhols, though Sable’s sense of flight is more desperate, less decadent. The world, he tells us, “is made for ghosts to consume.”
The Healer follows with a darker kind of seduction. Sable arrives as doctor, lover, and flame, carrying “a bottle of unicorn blood” under a black coat. The image might buckle under a lesser singer, but he delivers it with enough old-world conviction to make it feel like a secret love note. A mournful accordion curls around the voice, and the song becomes a strange pact of care and possession. Healing, in Sable’s hands, is intimate, theatrical, and slightly dangerous.
Emptiness deepens the album’s gothic-ballad mode and draws near the romantic fatalism of Rowland S. Howard. Its beauty lies in restraint, in the way Sable allows space to do some of the speaking.
We Are Only Human turns from the beloved to the cosmos, addressing “Old sister moon,” “Old mother earth,” and “Oh great helios” with the humility of a man who knows scale is not on his side. Tears, light, fire, and thought are offered upward and outward. The song moves slowly, almost like a hymn overheard from a chapel at the edge of town.
Confessions and I Just Wanna Be a Good Guy form the album’s moral center. In the first, Sable insists that he has been kind, that he has tried, while demons inside him push to get out. It’s slow, devotional atmosphere recalls Dead Can Dance as filtered through the skeletal tension of Bauhaus, solemn but still alive with dread.
In I Just Wanna Be a Good Guy, all escape routes collapse into one blunt desire. The song has a Bowie-esque quality in its grave theatrical poise, the sound of someone singing from the end of his rope while still trying to keep his collar straight.
Sunboat Ascension lifts the record into mythic heat. Fever, summer blaze, red skies, vultures, dawn, and falling wax all gather around an image of ascent that feels both ecstatic and doomed. The drums move with a trance-like sway, and the atmosphere suggests a psychedelic sea shanty pulled into a solar ceremony. Sable’s language grows grander here, but the song remains rooted in bodily sensation: burning, sinking, lifting, surrendering. Its drama comes from the tension between flesh and release.
In a Forest of Stars takes up death directly, imagining the reaper first as a presence circling the singer and then as the visitor who finds someone else’s door. Sable turns grief into a vision of reunion beyond the grave. The guitar has an Iberian lilt, simple and sturdy, while the percussion keeps the song close to the earth even as its gaze rises. It has the folk-grave elegance one associates with Nick Cave when he lets the room go still. By the time Falling Into the Sun arrives, love has become the final shelter before sleep, collapse, or disappearance. The bass moves with an ominous steadiness, almost as if a motorik pulse had wandered into a folk lament. Its eerie synths bring Dead Can Dance to mind again, though the song’s propulsion gives it a stranger edge, a devotional march toward brightness.
For a Better Future offers one of the album’s clearest images of endurance. The singer climbs cliffs for a better view, falls into unknown waves, and swims underground with rats for “many many years.” The absurdity of the image only makes it more affecting; survival, after all, is often humiliating before it becomes noble. Once again, there are echoes of Dead Can Dance in the solemn architecture of the song, while Sable’s impassioned vocal keeps it grounded in personal ordeal rather than pageantry.
Saboia returns to Portugal with a blood moon over the hills of Luzia, stars brightened by love and presence. The Portuguese lines give the song the quality of a private vow: “Ofereço-te a ti, meu amor / A chave dos meus sonhos.” The key to dreams, the flame of the soul, the instruction to use both with precision – these are romantic gestures, certainly, but they are also acts of trust. The track feels dreamy, almost Lynchian, a love song glimpsed through red curtains and rural moonlight.
Imago then closes the album like a strange lullaby, placing rebirth inside a circle of fire, storm, wet earth, and chosen sisterhood. After so much flight, confession, mourning, and cosmic address, the ending feels unexpectedly gentle, like being gathered into someone’s arms after a long passage through bad country. It is a soft landing, though not a simple one.
post mortemis a record about aftermath, but it rarely mistakes pain for depth. Its best moments are plainspoken, even when the imagery turns lunar or mythic. Sable’s voice carries the gravitas of someone standing at the end of a long corridor, unsure whether the door ahead opens to a room, a chapel, or the open air. He has made an album of small arrangements and large feelings, a work that treats grief as a geography one must cross by foot, with a guitar in hand and a little light saved for the road.
Listen to post mortem below and order the album here.
LEFT TO DIE has signed to Relapse Records and today announce their debut full-length, Initium Mortis, set for release on July 17th!
Death alumni Rick Rozz and Terry Butler joined forces with gore metal pioneer Matt Harvey and Gruesome drummer Gus Rios to form LEFT TO DIE. Their new album, Initium Mortis, pays homage to the brutal beginnings of Death.
Initium Mortis sees the supergroup – including original Death members Terry Butler (Obituary) and Rick Rozz (Massacre) – joining Harvey (Exhumed, Gruesome) and Gus Rios (Gruesome) to capture the morbid depths of Death‘s early catalog.
Members of LEFT TO DIE comment on the new album:
Matt Harvey: “After Gus and I performed Spiritual Healing in its entirety with Terry and James [Murphy], Rick wondered if people might want to hear something similar, but with him joining the three of us to perform Leprosy. Of course, I leapt at the chance to do it, and we quickly threw together a tour which surpassed everyone’s expectations, especially in terms of how much fun we were having playing together.”
“As we continued to tour throughout the US, Europe, Latin America, Australia, and Asia, people kept asking if we were going to record or write anything. After going back and forth on the topic, we felt that (ahem) exhuming some of these old tracks made the most sense for us, after all, we’re not gonna top Leprosy.”
“I gleefully combed through the myriad Death/Mantas demos and rehearsals looking for stuff that would make sense for a record, and we ended up going with tunes that we felt would make the most cohesive album, hence why ‘Skill To Kill’ and ‘Back From The Dead’ sadly didn’t make the cut. I look at Initium Mortis as a kind of ‘alternate-universe’ version of the Scream Bloody Gore track list, as so many of these tunes were circling around the many Death lineups and rehearsals from ’83-’87.”
“In fact, Chuck [Schuldiner] and Chris [Reifert] recorded a version of ‘Legion Of Doom’ for Scream Bloody Gore that never got completed. In revisiting these songs, it was crystal-clear to me that Rick’s fingerprints are all over the Mantas stuff and tunes like ‘Slaughterhouse,’ so with that connection, the songs where his style really shone through immediately made sense to include on Initium Mortis.”
Terry Butler: “Left To Die went from a thought to doing a full US tour in about three months! Pretty remarkable. We wanted to play the early material for the fans that couldn’t see the first albums in a live setting. There are many young fans at our shows that are hearing the foundation that Death stands on to this day live for the first time! With Matt channeling the best Chuck Schuldiner out there and Gus playing the material perfectly and respectfully, we hit the road and haven’t looked back!”
“For Initium Mortis, we wanted Death fans who never heard these demo songs to hear them with good production. Most of these early demos were recorded on a boom box, so by the time someone got their demo through tape trading it was almost inaudible!”
“We think these tracks are a good representation of the birth of Mantas/Death. This is ground zero, where it all started: three 15-year-old kids creating Death Metal history, and even within these choice cuts from the demo days you can hear the evolution of the music. ‘Archangel’ is a great way to introduce this album. It’s controlled chaos at its finest, catchy and riffy with a killer evil-sounding middle section!”
Rick Rozz: “First, I would like to thank Gus, Matt, and Terry for making LEFT TO DIE happen. It’s been an honor and pleasure working with them for the past few years and beyond. It’s really cool to be able to hear these tunes from 1984 properly! The old school Death fans are going to dig this release.”
Gus Rios: “The band started simply because Rick called me and asked if I’d be into it… Which I very promptly replied by referencing bears, shit, and woods. I then called Matt and Terry and the rest is history. Death’s Leprosy record is my favorite death metal album, let alone Death album. To be given this unbelievable opportunity to play those songs with Rick and Terry across the globe is an honor and a blessing I find hard to put in words. Matt and I are living our 14-year-old selves’ death metal fantasy!”
“And now, to make an album with the guys, is flat out surreal. I’m a pretty solid Death fan if I do say so myself, and yet these songs were all new to me. I never really gave the Mantas stuff much of a listen because I’m just not a ‘demo’ production fan. To hear these songs with clean and solid, yet classic analog style production for me is like getting new Death songs… Which rules!”
Featuring tracks like “Archangel,” “Witch Of Hell,” and “Legion Of Doom” expertly executed in the now, Initium Mortis is a must-have for Death fans and collectors alike. Ultimately, LEFT TO DIE celebrates a seminal band and the camaraderie of the genre’s most extreme corner of music.
Initium Mortis will be released on CD, LP, cassette, and digital formats. Find preorders at Relapse.com HERE.
Initium Mortis – Track Listing:
1. Legion Of Doom
2. Archangel
3. Power Of Darkness
4. Zombie
5. Witch Of Hell
6. Rise Of Satan
7. Summoned To Die
8. Mantas
9. Slaughterhouse
10. Death By Metal
See LEFT TO DIE live throughout Europe this August and Latin America in September! A full list of confirmed dates is available below. Stay tuned for more tour announcements in the weeks to come.
LEFT TO DIE w/ Livlos: 7/31/2026 Rockstadt Extreme Festival – Brasov, RO 8/02/2026 Colosseum – Kosice, SK 8/03/2026 Drizzly Grizzly – Gdansk, PL 8/04/2026 Hype Park – Krakow, PL 8/05/2026 Zescianek – Berlin, DE 8/06/2026 Alcatraz Festival – Kortrijk, BE 8/07/2026 Bastard Club – Osnabrück, DE 8/08/2026 Brutal Assault Festival – Jaromer, CZ 8/09/2026 Backstage Halle (Free & Easy) – Munich, DE 8/10/2026 Colos-Saal – Aschaffenburg, DE 8/11/2026 Turock – Essen, DE 8/12/2026 Bahnhof Paul – Hamburg, DE 8/13/2026 Dynamo Metalfest Pre-Party– Eindhoven, NL End Tour 9/02/2026 São Luis, BR 9/03/2026 Teresina, BR 9/04/2026 Fortaleza, BR 9/05/2026 João Pessoa, BR 9/06/2026 Recife, BR 9/09/2026 São Paulo, BR 9/11/2026 Puerto Montt, CL 9/12/2026 Santiago, CL 9/13/2026 Concepción, CL 9/15/2026 Montevideo, UY 9/17/2026 Rosário, AR 9/18/2026 Buenos Aires, AR 9/20/2026 Córdoba, AR 9/22/2026 Lima, PE 9/24/2026 Medellín, CO 9/25/2026 Pereira, CO 9/26/2026 Bogotá, CO 9/27/2026 Cali, CO 9/29/2026 San Salvador, SV 9/30/2026 Ciudad de México, MX
Songwriter icon Harlan Howard came to love country music as a kid listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio. When he came up with the phrase, “three chords and the truth”, the truth he was referring to was that life in rural America was hard. World War II was over, but prosperity was […]
With you calmness regains and the ticking is no more, is no more
Waves Crashing, from Olympia, Washington, make guitar music with a firm belief in the old virtues: the right chord arriving at the right moment, a bass line with some bite, drums that know when to push, and a voice that sounds as if it has been carried through several bad decisions and one good dawn. Since their first EP in 2021, the trio (Josh Calisti on guitar and vocals, Bryce Albright on drums, and Zach Olson on bass) have become a steady presence in the Pacific Northwest alternative scene, releasing music at a patient clip and sharing stages with Wavves, Ringo Deathstarr, Sun Atoms, The Veldt, and Cigarettes For Breakfast.
The reference points are legible without becoming a costume. There is some Pixies tension in the way the songs can move from sweetness to abrasion without warning, some Lemonheads plainspokenness in the melodies, a little Eels-like bruised humour in the emotional posture, and a Jesus and Mary Chain fondness for guitars that arrive with a narcotic haze and a hidden blade. Waves Crashing aren’t here to reinvent the wheel; they’re here to let it roll fast, skip a curb, and spray you with whatever’s left in the puddle.
Their new eight-track collection, In The Blur, finds the band sharpening its blend of shoegaze haze, post-punk momentum, and melodic alternative rock. The title is apt: these are songs about states of suspension, about being caught between who one was and who one might become, between escape and acceptance, between the tug of memory and the plain need to keep moving. The album has the shape of a private weather report without ever overexplaining itself. It is anxious, bruised, romantic, and frequently generous.
Feel The Glow, with gauzy vocals, bass groove, and melodic guitar overdrive, opens with reassurance rather than triumph. Its emotional world is one of survival after uncertainty, the quiet relief of making it through, and the strange tenderness that can arrive when a person stops trying to master every fear. Calisti sings from somewhere near the threshold between collapse and recovery, and the band wisely lets the song breathe. Its warmth comes through restraint; the glow is suggested rather than forced.
Circles, swirls its shoegaze tempest, gives the record a sharper edge, with lyrics that turn toward systems that raise people up just long enough to cut them down: scenes, markets, institutions, little gods with clipboards. The song’s circular structure suits its complaint, setting frustration against a churning sense of repetition. It is about the exhaustion of chasing approval from machines built to keep the chase alive.
Marine Garden softens the guitar, with a gentle paring down of effects, feeling less Shoegaze deluge and more alt-rock via The Cure and The Ocean Blue. Lyrically, it steps outside the previous track’s cul-de-sac trap and floats upon tranquil waters. The song is a seaside meditation on memory, love, and bodily presence, with the beach serving less as scenery than as a temporary reprieve from psychic clutter. Salt air, sunlight, and open blue become a modest cure. Waves Crashing are especially good at this kind of emotional geography, where a physical place becomes a way of thinking.
The lyrical tension returns on Divide, one of the album’s more pointed tracks, whose tight, drum-led rhythm section and jangled guitar drive the point home. Fear, loyalty, indecision, and fractured friendship press against one another until the act of choosing begins to feel almost impossible. The song understands a familiar modern paralysis: the compulsion to watch conflict unfold, the dread of taking a side, the knowledge that neutrality can become its own form of damage.
Out & Away again mixes college-rock jangle with shoegaze crash. Lyrically, it sees through lies and polished authority, reaching the point where departure becomes the cleanest remaining language. The track has a clipped urgency, as though the band is packing a bag while the room fills with smoke. By contrast, “Coming Up For Air” is less about flight than recovery. Sitting between the sound of The Charlatans and Slowdive, the song moves through confusion, endurance, and the desire to become one’s better self, or at least a less wrecked version of it.
The album’s surprise is its cover of Creep. Taking on Radiohead’s most burdened song is always a risk, since the original has been flattened by overuse and cultural familiarity. Waves Crashing find a useful route around that problem by sending it through a dreamy shoegaze treatment, almost as if the Dandy Warhols had wandered in with sunglasses, delay pedals, and a sly grin. It is absolutely magnificent, because it allows it to drift, loosen, and become strange again.
The breezy Ride-esque closing track Next To Me gathers the album’s central concerns – time, regret, love, legacy – and turns them toward intimacy. The song feels aware of hours slipping away, of chances missed or mishandled, yet it finds steadiness in another person’s nearness. After an album preoccupied with cycles, division, escape, and survival, companionship becomes a kind of shelter. In The Blur ends there, with a hand extended in the haze.
Listen to In The Blur below and order the single here.
Yes recently announced Aurora, the band’s 24th studio album, due June 12 via InsideOut Music/Sony Music. The album is preceded by the new single “Turnaround Situation,” which arrives alongside a visualizer created by Matt Hutchings, whose previous work includes visuals for Greg Lake, Oasis, and Iron Maiden. Aurora features artwork by Roger Dean and Freya Dean.
Vocalist Jon Davison, who has fronted Yes since 2012, said of “Turnaround Situation”: “The lyric came about from the feeling that things can become impossible and inflexible, and that sometimes the only option is to do a complete U-turn. The music itself grew from the incredible openness that the band had to be collaborative and explorative. There’s an emotional and sonic dynamism in the piece that I love.”
Aurora began taking shape following the “Classic Tales of Yes” 2024 tour. The band worked with a modern workflow, with guitarist Steve Howe and keyboardist Geoff Downes serving as the creative axis. Howe produced the album. “It’s the album we needed to make right now,” Howe said. “We each brought our individual voices to the table, and the result is something that genuinely surprised us all.”
The current Yes lineup is Howe (guitar), Downes (keyboards), Davison (vocals), Billy Sherwood (bass), and Jay Schellen (drums). Sherwood was hand-picked by original bassist Chris Squire; Schellen worked closely with drummer Alan White in the band’s later years.
Aurora will be available as a Limited Deluxe 180g Light Green 2LP+2CD+Blu-ray Artbook & Poster, as well as a Ltd Deluxe 2CD+Blu-ray Artbook, both featuring the stunning artwork of Roger Dean and Freya Dean, as well as a bonus disc of instrumentals, and a blu-ray featuring Dolby Atmos, 5.1 Surround Sound & 24bit stereo mixes (by Curtis Schwartz). The album is also available as a Gatefold 180g 2LP + LP-booklet, Special Edition CD Digipak & as Digital Album. It can be pre-order now here.
When Yes first began sketching out ideas for what would become Aurora, the process was loose and exploratory. There was no preconceived concept at the start, just a collection of musical fragments that gradually began to find one another and take form. Among these early sketches was a piece titled “Aurora,” and it quickly became clear that the name carried certain gravity. It suggested light, emergence, and a sense of vastness, qualities that resonated deeply with the band. Jon Davison remembers how “the title immediately resonated with Steve Howe and sparked visual inspiration for artist Roger Dean, setting a conceptual tone that would guide the project.”
Work on Aurora began almost as soon as the Classic Tales of Yes tour ended in 2024. The idea of a new album surfaced quickly and with the label’s encouragement, the band had the time to develop material organically. Rather than gathering in a single studio for months, they embraced a modern workflow; ideas were born in home studios, shaped independently, and then woven together through constant collaboration. Downes and Howe often acted as the central creative axis, with Howe, as producer, serving as the point through which all ideas eventually flowed.
Across Aurora, each track carries its own character. Some echo the classic Yes approach, others push into new territory, but together they form a cohesive whole that honors the band’s heritage while embracing forward motion. With their 24th studio album, Yes demonstrate not just longevity, but a sustained curiosity, a desire to keep exploring, keep refining and keep discovering their capacity to create.
Johanna Samuels is back. The LA singer-songwriter returned with “White Limousine” featuring Courtney Marie Andrews in March, followed by “Two People, The Moon” last month. Now she’s announcing a new album titled Sorry, Kid to follow 2023’s Bystander. The third single, “Circles” with Tyler Ballgame, is here today. “This is another song off the record…
Brisbane’s premier heavy music and dark arts event, the Dead of Winter Festival, is officially rising from the ashes. Dubbed The Resurrection, the festival is locked in for Saturday, 27 June 2026, marking its first return since 2019. Originally launched in 2009, the iconic gathering was forced into a multi-year hiatus following the pandemic. For […]
Pop Montreal is ready to bring another assemblage of sophisticated musical artists to the venues of La Métropole. The music festival’s 2026 edition — also its 25th anniversary edition — will take place Sept. 23-27, and its initial lineup is out now.
Brisbane’s premier heavy music and dark arts event, the Dead of Winter Festival, is officially rising from the ashes. Dubbed The Resurrection, the festival is locked in for Saturday, 27 June 2026, marking its first return since 2019. Originally launched in 2009, the iconic gathering was forced into a multi-year hiatus following the pandemic. For […]