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.
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.
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.
Blues Rock Weekly highlights two new Rory Gallagher covers from Joe Bonamassa, a new album announcement from Danielle Nicole, plus new music from Samantha Fish, When Rivers Meet, and Datura4.
Thom Yorke was honored at Thursday night’s Ivor Novello Awards, taking the podium after an introduction by surprise presenter Harry Styles, who called Radiohead his favorite band and announced he lost his virginity to “Talk Show Host.” In interviews surrounding the ceremony, he talked about what he’s been up to, which includes finishing up the solo album mentioned by Radiohead bandmate Ed O’Brien (whose own solo album Blue Morpho is out today). It sounds like he worked on it with Sam Petts-Davies, the producer and engineer who has helmed Yorke’s recent albums with the Smile.
Check out a new official music video for Dimmu Borgir‘s brand new single, “As Seen In The Unseen”. The latter is taken from their upcoming album Grand Serpent Rising. Read more…
Ryan Porter, a trombonist who became a beloved fixture of the Los Angeles-based West Coast Get Down jazz scene and played on key albums by Kendrick Lamar and Kamasi Washington, has died, the Los Angeles Times reports. Porter passed away Saturday after injuries sustained in a severe car crash April 28. He was 46.
