In a genre often saturated with the predictable, a new masked entity has emerged to shatter the mold. President, the anonymous collective that has been the subject of intense speculation across the metal underground, has officially announced their highly anticipated debut studio album, Blood Of Your Empire. Set for release on September 4, 2026, the album is already being hailed as a landmark for the “masked metal” movement.

Coinciding with the announcement, the band has unleashed their latest single, “Doom Loop”. The track is a haunting masterclass in atmosphere, blending crushing progressive riffs with pop-metal sensibilities and a vocal performance that is as vulnerable as it is powerful. It’s a sonic journey that explores the cycles of self-destruction, delivered with a cinematic flair that few bands can match.

The Rise of a New Empire

Since their first appearance, President has drawn comparisons to giants like Sleep Token and Ghost, yet they maintain a distinct, darker edge that is uniquely their own. The mystery surrounding the identities of The President, Heist, Protest, and Vice only adds to the allure, forcing the listener to focus solely on the art. “We are not the story; the empire is,” the band shared in a rare, cryptic statement.

With a North American tour already on the horizon and Blood Of Your Empire set to dominate the charts this fall, President is not just a band to watch—they are the new standard for modern heavy music. The “Doom Loop” has begun, and there is no escape.

Blood Of Your Empire is available for pre-order now. Join the empire before the world wakes up.

You know how when you first got into underground metal, your parents and friends were like, “All these bands singing about Satan, they’re just doing it for the money, you know?”

They were wrong, then. Now, they are half-right. These bands are not doing it for the money, but the labels, blogs, promoters, and streaming services certainly are in cahoots and serving you up some truly mediocre garbage.

At this point, the people getting fleeced are the bands. The fans pay virtually nothing; they stream via services that pay out fractions of cents to any band. The labels make money by having anything to stream.

But the bands, they pay. Forty bucks a month for a promotion company. Pay-to-play at clubs and blogs. The label makes them pay for their own recording. The practice space for $300 a month.

The metal economy is entirely a fake, based upon assumptions from the mid-to-late 1990s that are no longer real. You are being conned, but the bands are even more conned, by the perception of an audience that is not there.

Seriously, new bands get what, two hundred listens on a new track or whole album release? That goes up to a couple thousand when the promoters ask their friends to tune in, but still… these numbers are nonsense.

Back in the 1990s, when America was under two hundred million people and the majority were above 98 IQ points, having five thousand people buy a release was huge, but if a thousand bought it, ten thousand listened.

Now there is a neverending flood of new music that all sounds the same, has biographical quirks to make each band stand out, but is basically pure aesthetics and not any kind of purpose. It is equal, all right. Equally empty.

Metal is in heat-death, and while it has been heading this way for some time, it has finally hit that point. These releases are fungible, which is why people listen to them on streaming. They are distractions, not enjoyments.

The few people who hang around metal are poseurs pretending to like one boring release over another because it gives them street (suburb) cred. None of these releases are good at all; they are mediocre, but no one can tell anymore!

We are in exactly the place hardcore music hit after a few years of intensity. Everyone had to have “their” share, so everyone made a hardcore record, and because people were imitating aesthetics and not ideas, they all sounded the same.

Sure, you can add a piccolo or weird vocals, but it does not make a difference in the long term. Your band is still mediocre and musically similar to everything else because you have no artistic ideas and are just emulating the aesthetics of the past.

When aesthetics rules — that is akin to effect in cause-effect, or means in means-over-ends — you get music that is imitating the past and trying to spice it up, all by changing surface appearance.

Contrary to what you believe, music is not how it sounds, but the shapes it forms in your consciousness and how those tell a metaphorical story about life. The sound is the surface, but the music is the structure and patterning.

Naturally, the offends every mediocre person on Earth, most of whom believe that their mall-grade riffs will somehow become magic with the right production, vocals, catchy rhythm, or label support.

All labels in fact believe this. It helps them see their product as an assembly line: take in raw materials (demos), shape with styles and production, then put out a finished product which is worth lotsa money.

Except… this is not working. It may have never worked. Metal has become a jobs program for label stooges, hipsters, carnies, bean-counters, yes-men, eggheads, and failed liberal arts graduates.

They mimic the aesthetics, revive the old conventions, and inject “unique” stuff, but like conservatives or any System, really, they are imitating means not ends, and so nothing holds together. These are songs about nothing.

That is the problem with systems: once you set up a procedure and a checklist, you have a System, and people will do it without regard to whether it is achieving its aims.

Forget the “the only constant is change” blather and all the talk about people “progressing,” because both are nonsense, but focus on this: the task is no longer achieving a goal, but going through a liturgy or methodology.

You can see the same problem in jobs. If your job is to file the TPS reports, you do that whether they are gibberish or not, and if they are doing nothing for the business or humanity, you do it anyway. It’s your job after all.

Black metal has become a job. It has become a System. It has become conservatives flogging on about the Church, abortion, Flag, and property rights while voting for Keynesian entitlements and surveillance states.

Methods are not goals. Only goals determine if what you are doing is consistent as a whole and if it achieves any kind of excellence, beauty, realism, or gradual improvement.

When we talk about commercialization in music, we are speaking of the same thing… music made to fit the expectations of the audience offers them nothing new, but it sells more copies because it is easier to understand.

In human history, our sole problem has been Crowdism, or the tendency of groups to pursue what is popular, which are things that deny the requirements of reality and instead embrace symbols, icons, feelings, or idols.

For this reason, it is not uncommon to find a population in the grips of a famine dedicating its time to sacrifices to gods, ideological purity, drum circles, or redistributing wealth. We cannot fix reality, so we change what we can.

What is commercial is based in popularity, itself a distraction from reality, not re-engagement like art is: art takes the scary sides of life and intertwines them with the beauties, so we see one produces the other.

All the “change is the only constant” people hate the idea that life is cyclic more than oriented toward infinite, linear, and unconstrained “change.” These cycles involve the mutual interplay of destruction and creation.

Those who pursue the transcendent are looking for this frame of thinking where the result of the darkness and light sustaining each other, like natural selection or mental clarity, is more important than our fear of the darkness.

Our ancient ancestors understood that finding the beauty in darkness, more than human judgments about it and emotions shared with a popularity group, determined the strength of our spirit. Survival has purpose.

As Lilou & John opine on their latest album:

Vígríðr is the field where Ragnarök’s final battle shall take place. It is there that Óðinn, Þórr, Lóki, Fenrir and Jörmungandr all shall die the day the world tree burns to ash.

Nietzsche knew well the mentality that rules in this final clash between gods and giants. In the battle lay the meaning of existence—the same insight that Heraclitus formulated more than two thousand years earlier: the world is created from conflict.

When we started our indie band in 2016, we were driven by the conflict between order and chaos—the ancient rhythm’s beauty and the moment’s flashing intensity. Life is a struggle between opposites.

Album after album, we explored the world from this starting point: change and flow drive time—nostalgia and utopia are the blind man’s way of trying to see. We switched styles, instruments, themes, and tones—but never our viewpoint.

With time, we understood—just as Nietzsche did—that culture was our antithesis: a collective drive toward the simplest theses, regardless of cultural belonging. The ideological superstructure’s foundational texts—from the Bible to Capital and The Communist Manifesto—all presented the same simple division into wish-dream and nightmare. Nowhere was the authentic awareness of existence: the ego as the psyche’s gravity, the primal force from which nothing can escape.

On the album Black River Butcher, we plunged into Nietzsche’s, Heraclitus’s, and Charles Bukowski’s poetic excesses—among serial killers and rapists, we found a description of man’s destructiveness and one ego’s inevitable struggle against another ego. We also found death as existential collapse, the terror that drives modern man into short-term pleasures in flight from the fear of his own dissolution.

But our Nietzschean rage and Heraclitus’s thundering rapids demanded that we go even deeper.

The next step became Stríð—and it is there we brought the spiritual combat that marks all our music.

The album is a tribute to the Old Norse culture—perhaps the most human of them all—and its eternally inherent contradictions between choice and fate, life and death, order and chaos. A religion where nothing is permanent and where concepts like goodness and evil are meaningless, empty casings from rifles fired at the stars.

Stríð consists of sixteen poems set to pulsating drums and a voice that hacks into the soul with its mindless refusal to yield. It is a portrayal of the myth of Ragnarök, from Óðinn’s binding of Fenrir to the fate-laden silence on the battlefield when Niðhögg’s glowing wings rise over Niðafjöll’s dark mountains.

In a time when people flee from themselves, from their own experienced existence as water drops on a window, it is more important than ever to reconnect to one’s origin. On Vígríðr’s vast field—where ice and fire shall be annihilated and born anew—all answers exist.

The struggle—not the victory, for death seizes the all-father’s neck with its mighty jaw—is in itself the meaning of life. All beyond it is slave morality’s cloying voice that seeks to make us accept our fate as victims of “the good.”

In the struggle between Óðinn and Fenrir lies an even deeper insight. Óðinn sacrifices himself—but always to his ego: “I sacrificed myself to myself.”

The meaningful sacrifice is that which is made to gain insight. At the final battle, he nevertheless meets the one stronger than him—the glorious wolf Hróðvitnir, Vánagandr, Fenrisúlfr.

Óðinn’s sacrifices were meaningless, says the one who lazily scrolls on TikTok. No. His sacrifices—both the hanging in Yggdrasil (where he became Fimbulþulr), and the offering of his eye (where he became Einöygdr)—were profoundly meaningful. Herein lies the deepest truth of all:

The selfish sacrifice transforms us to merge with our own will to power—which in turn leads us to embrace the struggle as the principle of life.

Stríð leads us against culture, forward to ourselves.

***

Nedgravd – Ascension: these guys love Infester, but are like most bands, watching a museum diorama of underground metal and trying to imitate what it had, without what holds it together, which is an artistic vision of alienation from overgrown humanity and a desire for pure structuralist logic (death metal) or Romanticist natural selection (black metal) that cannot be distilled to a formula of riffs, only the transcendental mystery of how they interact to tell a story of evolving awareness in the face of obvious but denied events.

Fimbul Winter – “Crowned in Ash”: death metal played with the sentimental appeal of power metal and melancholic pop like Joy Division or the Misfits, this indulgent track gets rid of some of the more ridiculous aspects of “melodic death metal” (really: ATG/Dissection fan-bands) by stripping the music down to present itself with power, but with too much emphasis on vocals/lyrics, this has minimal repeat listening potential. Deport.

Monolord – “It’s Neverending”: surely you wanted to hear Red Fang covering King Crimson with a Britpop twist, but if not, that is what you will get, but it has zero relevance to metal.

Ana – Motivated By Death: female-fronted BritPop mixed with emo and gospel, this album full of swelling choruses and noisy verse riffs is not functionally distinct from a Joydrop album.

Midnight Odyssey – A Mass of Fallen Stars – Live in Toulon: this is basically synthpop without the good hooks and a trudging industrial rhythm while some diva blurts out black metal vocals at indie rock pace; basically, if you loved The Smashing Pumpkins but wanted edgier, you are going to love this until you wake up and realize it is samey and boring.

Junon – The Golden Citadel Of The Astral Sphere: label guys think it is a strong beneficial trait to say “hey these guys have been inb ands for twenty years” because label guys are all ex-hipsters, but what you should read this is that these guys never produced anything of interest and are desperate for some claim to fame so they get half-price IPAs as the local HITW brewpub, and this droning garbage should show you why that is a bad plan.

Lorn – Searing Blood: this is just emo with extra steps. It pretends to be black metal, but like the “Italian-flavored” sauce, is the product of rote formula.

Domjord – Morgonglöd: if you really liked Wardruna and other ritual stuff, this might appeal with its electro-acoustic manipulation and industrial beats in a tribal ritual context, but really, it is not designed for listening; it is designed for you to put it on for friends and explain it and why it is important, which is different from actually enjoying it for having made its weird attributes into cool music.

***

Consider that music captures consciousness and therefore, animates life with its own narrative:

More than half of the students (54%) reported regularly listening to music when reading for study, while 46% preferred silence.

Among those who listened to music, almost all believed it helped their reading.

Students described using music to boost motivation, enhance focus, or block out external noise, with Classical and Rock emerging as the most common genres. Many preferred non-lyrical, slow music to support concentration.

Underground metal aimed for semi-lyrical, meaning that the words are not discernible, and instead of slow, created pulsing ambient waves of sound that move more like the wind or a running jaguar than the usual happy upbeat rock.

Music feeds the mind in other ways, including concentration:

The findings revealed consistent advantages for musically trained individuals across nearly every measure tested. Regardless of their age, musicians responded roughly 36 milliseconds faster on average than their non-musician counterparts—a small but reliable difference that held across the entire age range studied. They were also less prone to lapses in attention—often described as “zoning out”—and showed more stable response times on tasks designed to assess sustained vigilance.

Maybe bashing out those old Deicide covers has actually made you more intense, or at least, more able to notice intensity and remember it. Maybe this is why music featured so heavily in ritual; people retained more of it.

Speaking of ritual, the ancient touched the modern as King Charles reached out to Sharon Osbourne after the passing of Ozzy:

“He [Charles] knew Ozzy. He knew we met him several times, and he’s always been so gracious with Ozzy, and they would always laugh together… He got Ozzy. He got him,” she told Piers Morgan’s Uncensored.

The King was not the only head of state to send their tributes, with US President Donald Trump also leaving the family a voice message.

Battling the tears, Sharon continued: “When you look at King Charles, and you look at Donald Trump, whatever anybody might think about them, it’s their business, but their days, you know, how full their day is?”

It is unclear whether this influenced her decision to attend the Unite the Kingdom rally:

Sharon Osbourne has announced her intention to attend the Unite the Kingdom demonstration scheduled for May 16 in London.

The television personality, 73, publicly declared her support beneath a social media clip posted by Tommy Robinson, writing: “See you at the march.”

The rally will take place at Trafalgar Square, with Mr Robinson stating in his promotional video the date marks when “Britain rises and reunites” against mass immigration and government tyranny.

Guess black metal was not that far off the mark, then. The day it embraces the Kings and adualistic, Platonic spirituality we might be getting somewhere, since all the third world stuff like Christianity is just Arabic gibberish.

***

Why do you do this to me?
I can’t afford to concede
But oh, how I long to let go

The newly minted MODISTE comes strutting out of Louisville with a rack of old machines and a taste for theatrical trouble. The trio’s new single, Shadows, is all temptation under glass: a synth-pop fever dressed in post-punk poise, industrial bite, and the kind of glossy danger that used to make parents worry about eyeliner, imported records, and vague Saturday night plans.

The setup is simple enough to be lethal. Sydney Sleadd sings as if she has already read the scandal sheet and decided the headline is worth it. Her voice carries the song’s central tension with a cool, coiled charge. Around her, Dennis Stein’s synths do what old analogue equipment does best when handled by somebody who knows how to make it misbehave: they breathe, wobble, stalk, and glow with a kind of vintage menace. Kyle Stallings’ guitar slips in with enough restraint to keep the track from turning into period-piece cosplay, adding a wiry edge that keeps the whole affair on its feet.

The lyrics to “Shadows” move through temptation as a kind of theatrical surrender, framing desire as both danger and delicious ruin. Sleadd’s words turn flirtation into a moral melodrama of scandal, reputation, and appetite, where restraint is less a virtue than a fragile door waiting to be kicked open.

“Shadows delves into themes of longing, forbidden love, repressed desire, and surrender,” says Sleadd. “We wanted it to feel like a slow descent, similar to giving into temptation, with the synths and rhythm building a kind of hypnotic gravity around the words.”

Lust in pop music is powerful when it has consequences. The lyrics circle a private collapse with the drama of someone trying to keep one hand on the doorframe while the room tilts toward ruin. The repeated pull into Shadows becomes the sound of manners losing a fistfight with appetite. Shame is powdered and perfumed with a couple of spritzes of Tabu.

The band’s reference points are obvious in all the best good ways: Depeche Mode’s chrome ache, Siouxsie’s theatrical nerve via Supersistion, Book of Love’s synth-pop sweetness, New Order’s romantic machinery, and a flash of Strange Boutique’s art-school gloom. Yet MODISTE’s chemistry keeps the single from sinking into tribute-band taxidermy.

The accompanying video, directed by MODISTE and Misha Kidwell, with dancer Minh-Tuan Nguyen, promises 1980s FX-inspired kinetic movement, dreamy choreography, silhouettes, analogue-styled visual play, and the kind of fashion-conscious spectacle that understands synth-pop was always as much about the eye as the ear.

Watch below:

With a full-length album due in August 2026, Shadows makes MODISTE feel less like a new band introducing itself than a rumor already learning how to travel.

Listen to Shadows below and order the single here.

Follow MODISTE:

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The post “To Hell With Being Pure” — Louisville Trio MODISTE Casts a Glowing Silhouette in Their Video for “Shadows” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Armored Saint has never been a band to stand still, and Emotion Factory Reset, their new album, is no exception. The title alone does a lot of work. Vocalist John Bush broke it down in a recent conversation with Rodrigo Altaf, and it turns out there are layers to it; some conceptual, some deeply personal.

“I always think of Armored Saint as a band that kind of touches into various emotions for people when they’re listening to our music,” Bush said. “And then a reset is kind of like when you make a record, you’re regrouping, resetting in a sense to come up with different ideas for some new product that you’re wanting to put out for the public.”

The factory part of the title comes from how Bush sees the modern recording process: each member handles their piece of the puzzle in sequence, building something together from separate contributions. “Sometimes factories can be a little cold,” he acknowledged, “but I think of this as a warm factory.”

Bassist Joey Vera had described every Armored Saint album as a new skin. Bush appreciated the analogy but pushed back slightly on the implication that the band is shedding or dismissing what came before: “Every record should be different. Every record should feel different. It’s a different time in life,” he said. “I mean, I know people love March of the Saint, 1984, Symbol of Salvation, 1991, Revelation, 2000. But the reality is this is 2026. So it’s just a different time, a different time in your life, all these different feelings and things that you’re going through personally. You kind of put that into making a record at that time.”

With no label constraints and no commercial pressure dictating the direction, Bush said the band approaches the writing with full creative latitude, within reason: “I always joke, today we’ll be in hip hop, death metal, reggae. We’re not going to put a record comprised of those three styles of music and go, ‘here’s the new Saint, man.’ We know what we kind of are — heavy metal, hard rock — and that’s the roots of it. But that being said, I think we feel like we can do whatever we want for the most part, and that helps us keep broadening our sound.”

One noticeable shift on Emotion Factory Reset is how much more Vera is singing. Bush noted it with a raised eyebrow and a grin: “Joey‘s singing his butt off. I don’t know if he’s vying for the lead vocal position in the band now or what, but he’s singing great.”

Guitarist Jeff Duncan also contributes background vocals, and bassist Phil Sandoval has been flexing his voice in a blues side project. “I don’t know if these guys are all trying to get in on my job here,” Bush deadpanned. “But it just broadens the Armored Saint sound, which is cool.”

The lead single, “Close to the Bone,” dealt with the tension of swallowing disagreement rather than confronting it, and Bush sees it as something bigger than a personal grievance: “It’s that fine line of how much do you get into battles and you pick your battles,” he said. “The Internet and the digital world we live in — you can go into comment sections and write whatever you want. Nobody really knows you. You’re kind of hidden behind this veil, which to me is almost cowardly.” He paused, then widened the lens. “What I’ve been telling people lately is we’re struggling as a society where people just don’t want to listen that much. Everybody wants to throw out their thoughts, but how many people are stopping and saying, let me hear what you’re saying?”

The follow-up single, “Hit a Moonshot,” came with a video that Bush described as funny, stunt-filled, and cool in equal measure. True to form, the song borrows a sports metaphor: a Bush trademark stretching back to titles like “Left Hook from Right Field” and “Punching the Sky.” Here, the baseball term gets repurposed to describe someone who always manages to land on their feet regardless of how badly things go sideways.

“It kind of has a little sarcastic drive to it,” he said.

“Every Man-Any Man” operated in similar territory, examining the idea that everything has a price and someone is willing to pay it. Bush was careful to frame it as an observation rather than a lecture: “My objective is not to tell people what to think. Too many people are trying to do that. My idea is just to raise thoughts and go, ‘take a look at this perspective — what are your feelings on it?’” He added that the ambiguity is intentional. “Sometimes I write a song, and then 10 years later it means something completely different. It makes it timeless.”

The album’s most personal moment is “Buckeye,” written about his daughter leaving for college in Ohio. Bush was visibly proud of it: “I love the intro and the intro is the outro — it’s full circle. It kind of has a Zeppelin-y style to the beat and the groove. Big vocals, big chorus.” Despite the specific trigger, he sees the song as open-ended enough to resonate beyond its origins. “It could be about the void of people leaving, separation, or somebody dying. That void of separation — it could be various emotions. Because that’s how I felt with her leaving: I was very sad, but at the same time very proud. I had some anxiety. All those things.”

His daughter has since gone on a semester abroad in Rome, which the family visited a few weeks before the interview. “To see her growth,” Bush said. “It was awesome.”

On the album’s artwork — the Armored Saint mascot rendered against an industrial backdrop — Bush explained that the band deliberately wanted to avoid repeating the purely medieval aesthetic of earlier covers. “It’s hard to beat March of the Saint — that cover is spectacular,” he said. The solution was to combine eras: the armored knight set against a factory landscape, collapsing centuries into one image. Vera oversaw the art direction, working with an artist in Europe. “The knight came out great,” Bush said. “The guy did a spectacular job.”

Beyond the new album, Bush has been gradually activating his catalog from his Anthrax years. Three shows in December went over well enough to confirm that he wants to do more, though the timing has to work around Armored Saint commitments: “It was a lot of me talking about it for years,” he said. “So yeah, it was good to say, okay, I’m not talking anymore about it, I’m doing it. And it was so fun. The fans were just very, very excited and emotional about hearing those tunes.”

He’s equally sanguine about the online debates that inevitably pit different Anthrax eras against each other: “If you’re negative towards me, you’ve got to be funny. If you’re funny and disparaging, I’ll think it’s amusing. ‘That guy sucks’ — come on, you can’t come up with anything better than that?” He shrugged off the tribalism altogether. “You can like both. You don’t have to pick a side. Heaven and Hell is pretty much a flawless record, but so is Paranoid. So what are you gonna do?”

Category Seven, his heavier side project, is also stirring. Bush said he’s been working on new material, though he’s making a point of clearing his head of the Armored Saint sessions first: “I have to exercise all the work I did with Armored Saint to kind of get it out of my system, see something new from a fresh perspective. Otherwise, I’m going to phone it in, and that’s the last thing I want to do with anything.”

As for live plans, Armored Saint has a packed stretch ahead: a show at the Rainbow Bar & Grill parking lot party in Los Angeles, the Milwaukee Metal Fest, a date outside Mexico City, and a run of European dates that includes Sweden and Poland; the latter alongside Sabaton and Testament. Some dates with Metal Church are also on the schedule, a prospect Bush welcomed, given his friendship with vocalist Dave Ellefson. North American touring is still being worked out, but Bush was clear that Canada is on the list: “Montreal and Toronto — some of the best cities in the world for metal, for sure.”

Emotion Factory Reset is out now. Grab your copy here.

The post JOHN BUSH: ARMORED SAINT’s “Emotion Factory Reset” Proves “We Can Do Whatever We Want — And That Keeps Broadening Our Sound” appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

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Following the St Arnold penchant for amber beers, this IPA tastes more like a dark beer and lets the malt bring out the flavor of the hops, resulting in a musky aromatic spice that perfuses the otherwise gentle flavor of this beer.

For those who like extreme IPAs, this beer will fall short from a lack of the bitter grapefruit juice flavor of the post-hipster IPA, but it has a warmth to it that balances the hop extremity which results in a depth of flavor.

This also feels more like a dark beer in that it is heavy in flavor and requires a moment to savor. It has more sweetness than most IPAs, but more texture of different flavors which makes it perfect for contemplative drinking.

MALWAVE, an Ontario duo with a taste for electro, post-rock, dark dance, vapour haze, and experimental drift, land with their second single, Forever Chemical. The single belongs to the year’s ongoing MALWAVE rollout, and it carries itself like a transmission from some damp, ecstatic corner of the future where Mogwai, Daft Punk, and Darkside have all been shoved into the same flooded elevator and told to make peace before the power cuts out.

The track starts with experimental electro beats that twitch and roll with a strange aquatic logic, neither settling into club comfort nor collapsing into art-school drift. Synthwave keyboards spread across the frame in glossy sheets, while the cold post-punk guitar riff supplies the human ache: melody-filled, beautiful lines that bend through the track with a wounded elegance, trading cheap prettiness for something stranger and more bodily. Then come the experimental leads, little shards of nervous light, and layered vocals that appear less like a singer stepping forward than voices caught in the tank, moving around the listener in warped, weightless circles.

Forever Chemical moves with purpose, even when it wanders into vapourous passages and post-rock sprawl. It has the patience of people who understand the value of an idea being allowed to mutate, grow fins, and swim off into the briny deep. The track’s dystopian mood feels akin to the nauseous thrill of staring at a screen too long.

The video pushes that feeling into full psychedelic absurdity: an underwater performance populated by groovy jellyfish and schools of fish moving through the frame. In the context of a song called Forever Chemical, those fish carry more than visual charm. They suggest the first casualties of poisoned water, tiny bodies at the front line of damage, humans prefer to keep abstract until it turns up in the glass, the bloodstream, the child, the shore. The clip’s aquatic beauty becomes a warning with fins: all that colour, all that motion, all that life suspended in a fragile blue world we keep treating like a sewer drain.

Forever Chemical suggests MALWAVE are chasing a peculiar future: dance music with saltwater in its lungs, post-rock with a mutant pulse, electronic music that keeps asking whether the machine can still feel panic. The schools of fish serve as a reminder of what is at stake before the damage becomes headline, lawsuit, bottled-water advisory, or family secret. MALWAVE dress the warning in motion and strange light, but beneath the psychedelic glow is a blunt little fact: the future always reaches the water first.

Watch the video for Forever Chemical below:

MALWAVE’s new single, Forever Chemical, is out. Listen below and order here.

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The post Ontario Duo MALWAVE Share Video for Experimental Alt-Synth Single “Forever Chemical” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Rob Base, the New York rapper best known for his timeless hit “It Takes Two,” has died. Per Variety, Base, born Robert Ginyard, passed away today, just four days after his birthday, after a private cancer battle. He was 59.

The post “It Takes Two” Rapper Rob Base Dead At 59 appeared first on Stereogum.

Now I realize, all that I have known
It’s always what we had to find
I see your breath tonight
The air is pure and cold
It feels just like another life 

You wake from a dream, and the song is there, whole and trembling, as if some hidden room of the mind had been lit all night without your knowing. It has arrived carrying the strange authority of things discovered rather than made. For a moment, you are less its author than its witness, holding this fragile visitation before daylight, duty, and doubt begin their slow erasure. This is what happened to Chris Huggett of Modele one Christmas Day, ultimately resulting in the band’s new single Under The Starlight, from their upcoming album, Divine Surrender.

The chorus comes in low enough to shake the fillings loose, a subterranean throb that seems less sung than hauled up from some cellar under the heart. Then the guitars start climbing, bending themselves into long black arcs, reaching for a dirty little glimmer somewhere past the smoke, the debt, the dead romances, the whole busted museum of old salvation.

Huggett sings like he has swallowed the ache whole and decided to make it useful. There is weight in the voice, sure, but also hunger: the sound of a man still pawing through the wreckage for meaning after all the easy answers have curdled in the glass. Modelo does the smart thing and stays there. They do not sprint for catharsis or throw glitter over the bruise. They lean into the pressure, let the song breathe heavily, let the feeling get stranger and deeper.

The bloodline is there if you know where to look: The Mission in the big-shouldered sweep, Clan of Xymox in the midnight hypnosis, Cold Cave in that sleek, nocturnal drag. But Modele are not playing dress-up in somebody else’s black coat. They know how to set beauty beside dread and let the two stare each other down. That tension is where the song bites.

The lyrics feel like waking up on a freezing platform with somebody else’s ghost still warm in your coat. Love is here, but it has the sickly glow of a memory that will not stay buried: breath in the cold, flowers under the moon, a last train heading straight into the beautiful bad idea at the end of the line. This is a love followed down to the water’s edge like every doomed fool who ever mistook eternity for a second chance. Streets disappear, promises hang around like old debts, and death gets treated less like an ending than a lousy revolving door.

The video, filmed by Leann Weston and edited by Kuba Rygal, carries that same ache to a mysterious shoreline, rendered in glorious black and white like an old photograph. Modele wander the beach as if they have washed up inside their own memory, chasing a ghost, a lover, a loss, or some shape of the past that keeps moving just ahead of them.

It is a lovely metaphor for the song: bodies crossing sand, water waiting at the edge of everything, the band caught between pursuit and surrender. The shore becomes a borderland where romance, death, and remembrance all blur together, and the black-and-white imagery gives the whole thing the feel of a dream you wake from with salt on your tongue and somebody’s name still caught in your throat.

Watch below:

Listen to Under The Starlight below and order the single here.

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The post “It Feels Just Like Another Life” — Toronto Post-Punk Duo Modele Unveil Video for “Under the Starlight” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

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The post Blues Rock Weekly – May 22, 2026 appeared first on Blues Rock Review.