Tony Salomone bring explosive energy and emotional urgency to Rush, a dynamic alt-rock anthem driven by sharp songwriting, soaring hooks, and restless momentum. Balancing gritty guitar power with melodic intensity, the track moves with the adrenaline of late-night overthinking and emotional overload, while still leaving space for vulnerability beneath the surface. Tony Salomone’s knack for blending classic rock instincts with modern alternative punch gives Rush a timeless yet immediate feel, equally suited for headphones or full-volume speakers. Bold, cathartic, and packed with cinematic lift, this is an indie rock release that hits with both heart and force.
frau capture emotional uncertainty with striking honesty on what do you want?, a shimmering alt-pop confession balancing vulnerability, longing, and quiet tension. Built around warm guitar textures, glossy production touches, and deeply earnest songwriting, the track explores the disorienting feeling of being loved while still questioning whether that love is real or temporary. Rather than chasing dramatic catharsis, frau let the emotion simmer naturally, giving every lyric and melodic turn an intimate emotional weight. Tender, reflective, and beautifully understated, what do you want? feels like the sound of learning how to trust connection without losing yourself in the process.
D.O.C the Practitioner deliver sharp social awareness and old-school lyrical conviction on pay to play, a conscious hip-hop cut rooted in substance, realism, and streetwise perspective. Built on grounded production and direct, purposeful bars, the track explores systems of power, survival, and the transactional nature of modern life without losing its rhythmic momentum or raw authenticity. D.O.C the Practitioner balances thoughtful commentary with confident delivery, bringing a classic East Coast spirit into a contemporary setting. Honest, focused, and driven by message as much as flow, pay to play proves meaningful hip-hop still hits hardest when it speaks from lived experience.
bufr. make an impressive debut with don’t call, a tense and hypnotic tech-house burner built for smoke-filled clubs and late-night momentum. Anchored by a dark rolling groove, fragmented vocal chops, and tightly controlled rhythmic pressure, the track thrives in the space between anticipation and release, constantly pulling listeners deeper into its immersive pulse. Rather than relying on oversized drops, don’t call builds intensity through repetition, texture, and emotional tension, creating a sleek after-hours atmosphere that feels both futuristic and deeply physical. Stylish, addictive, and relentlessly propulsive, this is underground club music with real emotional weight beneath the surface.
Christopher Jack channel pain, vulnerability, and emotional confrontation into Watch you Cry, a dark and hypnotic alternative rock track that feels both intimate and unsettling. Built around haunting repetition and moody atmosphere, the song explores the fragile line between emotional connection and emotional destruction, transforming raw confession into something strangely magnetic. Beneath its shadowy textures and slow-burning intensity lies a deeply human sense of struggle and catharsis, made even more poignant by the personal circumstances surrounding Christopher Jack’s solo emergence. Heavy, melancholic, and emotionally exposed, Watch you Cry lingers long after the final note fades.
Mikrobe dives deep into shadowy warehouse territory on Storage Box, a pounding acid-techno weapon built for concrete floors, flickering strobes, and after-hours intensity. Driven by relentless grooves, corrosive synth pressure, and hypnotic repetition, the track locks into a mechanical pulse that steadily escalates without losing control. Distorted textures and rumbling low-end give Storage Box a gritty industrial atmosphere, while its tightly wound momentum keeps the energy simmering from start to finish. Raw, immersive, and unapologetically underground, this is late-night techno engineered for dark rooms and heavy systems.
Devin Townsend is a master of his craft. Whether with Strapping Young Lad, Casualties of Cool, or his various solo projects, Townsend has consistently raised the bar for music that goes beyond off-the-shelf sounds. With “The Moth” the Canadian singer, guitarist and producer adds another special chapter to his rich back catalogue. Townsend has always… Continue Reading →
L’Avenir has ushered in their latest album, Secrets, with the video for Animism, a coldwave séance of mineral calm and occult motion, where the air seems to have been left under overnight under a full moon, and returned with new intelligence. The Baltimore project, led by Jason Sloan, treats electronic music as architecture as much as emotion: a corridor of blue light, a stairwell descending beneath memory, a voice arriving from somewhere just beyond the visible wall. On this first single from the project’s eighth album, Sloan works with a familiar vocabulary: patient drum-machine pressure, icy synthesizers, distant singing – but the result feels newly charged, as if each element has been placed glowing under glass.
Animism takes its title with admirable seriousness. The song imagines a world in which matter has memory and the inanimate keeps counsel. The earth, the tree, the old room, the object handled too often by human longing: all seem to possess a private pulse. Sloan’s voice sits inside the track rather than above it, less a guide than a presence caught in the same current as the listener. The effect is intimate and estranged, the sound of someone speaking from within a thought that has become physical.
The track brings to mind the elegant austerity of Eleven Pond, the dusky romanticism of Clan of Xymox, the severe European mechanics of Parade Ground, and the cerebral chill of Trisomie 21. These references move through the song like figures glimpsed in frosted glass, recognizable but never allowed to dominate the room. The arrangement advances with a measured hand, giving each synth line and percussive motion enough space to breathe before the next cold gleam arrives.
The accompanying video, directed by Soleil Noir Studios, deepens the spell. Shot by Jason Sloan, with Sloan also handling video synthesizer programming and both analogue and digital hardware, the clip turns the forests of the mind into a prismatic terrain. Bright colours bloom against mirrored images; faces and forms double, dissolve, and reassemble in a kind of psychic woodland. The imagery suggests a psychedelic passage through inner nature, where branches become nerves, light becomes thought, and perception starts to behave like a living organism.
Animism presents L’Avenir as a project still devoted to solitude, mystery, and nocturnal design, but newly attentive to the strange life hidden inside surfaces. Sloan makes darkwave feel porous here, open to trees, stones, ghosts, and the quiet intelligence of everything we mistakenly believe is still.
Watch the video for “Animism” below:
Secrets is out now via EINS:ZWEI:ACHT on vinyl, CD, digital, and streaming formats. Listen to Animism below and order Secretshere.
You wanna know your problem is? Well, don’t ask me. I’m not your Shrink.
Spike Hellis returns with No Bite, and the joke is already grinning at you before the first beat has exploded. The Los Angeles duo’s second preview of Successor, due August 7 via Over-Pop, arrives like a chrome-plated insult with a cigarette burn on its tongue: lean, clipped, mean, and menacing.
They ain’t your therapists, that’s for sure. This is body music, with its teeth filed to points, though the title would have you believe otherwise. No Bite rides a soft jackhammer groove, sparse, minimalist industrial EBM, and dry, mechanical funk. Cortland Gibson and Lainey Chang refrain from overpacking the track by letting the empty space do some of the dirty work. The beat hits, withdraws, hits again, and every pause feels like somebody waiting for you to flinch.
There is a special cruelty in restraint. Plenty of bands in this lane mistake volume for violence, pile on distortion until everything becomes an expensive blur, and then wonder why nobody looks afraid. No Bite‘s power comes from precision: the bassline’s blunt insistence, the synths’ clipped little wounds, the vocal delivery moving around the track like a bored predator tapping the glass. You can hear the old EBM gods rattling around in the pipes, but this is no Wax Trax! museum march. It has the nasty modern confidence of a duo that has spent time in real rooms, under real lights, with real bodies pressed against the pit fence.
Gibson and Chang have shared stages with Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb, and No Bite channels that lineage, evoking a room where fog juice hangs in your hair, and the dancefloor has absorbed enough questionable decisions to qualify as a legal witness. The track is compact, confrontational, and just a little unstable, thudding away in the dark on spite alone.
Listen to No Bite below and order the single here.
Spike Hellis will release their second studio album, Successor, on August 7 via Over-Pop, with No Bite serving as its second preview after By God. The roadwork begins just ahead of the album’s release, kicking off July 31 in Santa Ana before stretching across the Southwest, Texas, the South, the East Coast, Canada, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest, eventually circling back to California for an October 24 hometown-area close in Los Angeles.
They’ll be joined along the way by MVTANT, Auragraph, Belly Hatcher, Nuxx, and Normal Bias.
Tour Dates:
July 31 — Santa Ana, CA — La Santa — w/ MVTANT
August 1 — San Diego, CA — Casbah
August 2 — Pomona, CA — Lopez Urban Farm — w/ MVTANT
August 6 — Las Vegas, NV — Backstage — w/ MVTANT
August 7 — Phoenix, AZ — Club Contact — w/ MVTANT
August 8 — Tucson, AZ — The Rialto Theater — w/ MVTANT
August 10 — Albuquerque, NM — Longhair Records — w/ MVTANT
August 14 — San Antonio, TX — Paper Tiger — w/ Auragraph
