Not as immediate as previous output, but carrying on with his blues as devils music, this single is unmistakably Ross Harding. The voice, the sparse arrangements, the atmospherics, Ross has his brand down to a tee. A song about sacrifice … Continue reading
The post Single review: ROSS HARDING – Graveyard Blues appeared first on Get Ready to ROCK!.
If they handed out awards for album-title wordplay, Bay Area rapper Sha Ray and NY-based producer DJ Haram would have to clear off some shelf space. Later this week, the two of them will release their collaborative LP Critical Thot, which has the best title I’ve seen in a minute. The two new tracks that they’ve shared are good, too.
The post Sha Ray & DJ Haram Announce New Album <em>Critical Thot</em>: Hear Two Songs appeared first on Stereogum.
‘Part deux’ starring Tony Hawk will be out later this month.
The post Ice Nine Kills Team With Tony Hawk & ‘Dead By Daylight’ For The Premiere Of Their “Play Dead” Music Video appeared first on Theprp.com.
Black Sabbath bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler appeared alongside Foo Fighters’ Nate Mendel in episode two of Fender’s “Lowdown on the Low End” video series, a forum for bass players to trade stories about the Fender Precision Bass and their lives in bands.
Butler recalled (transcribed by Blabbermouth) the moment that inspired him to take up the bass: “The one player that totally showed me what you could do with a bass was Jack Bruce. When I went to see Cream, everybody was going, ‘You’ve gotta see this incredible guitarist. His name’s Eric Clapton.’ And back then, it was like they used to play little clubs around Birmingham. I stood right at the front of the stage. Jack came out with his Fender, and it was like, ‘What the hell?’ I couldn’t believe that people could do that with a bass. And that was it. I went, ‘That’s what I wanna do. I wanna play bass.’”
Asked by Mendel what drew him to the Fender Precision Bass specifically, Butler recounted the origin of Black Sabbath: “I was a rhythm guitarist at first. When I was 15, I had a group called The Rare Breed, and I used to think I was John Lennon and play rhythm guitar. Then the singer left, so we looked around and got this guy called Ozzy Osbourne in the band. And we did a few gigs with Ozzy, and he says, ‘This is terrible. I’m leaving the band.’ We wanted to form a different band, and we both lived around the corner from each other in Aston. And Ozzy says, ‘Well, I know this guitarist called Tony Iommi. I used to go to school with him. Let’s go and see what he’s doing.’ Well, actually, we were looking for a drummer. We didn’t really think about bassists back then. And we asked Tony if he knew any drummers, and he says, ‘Well, it just happens Bill Ward’s here in the house.’ So Bill Ward came out, and me and Ozzy told him what we were doing, and he says, ‘Well, I’ll join you if Tony comes along.’ So Tony says, ‘Yeah, I’ll give it a go.’ He says, ‘But I’m not playing with a rhythm guitarist.’ So I said, ‘Well, I’ll switch to bass then.’ And, of course, I didn’t have a bass. I only had a Fender Telecaster. I swapped me Fender Telecaster for a Precision bass. I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got a Fender, so the next thing I wanna get is another Fender.’ Nothing had the balance of a P-Bass. It had perfect balance. A lot of other basses, the neck was too heavy. So this was perfect ‘cause I got fat fingers as well, so the wider neck is great for me… Plus there’s only two knobs, which is great for me.”
A founding member of Black Sabbath and the lyricist behind such classics as “War Pigs,” “Iron Man” and “Paranoid,” Butler and the original Sabbath lineup — Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward — made their final appearance together at last year’s “Back to the Beginning” charity concert at Villa Park in Birmingham, England. In a tribute article for The Sunday Times following Osbourne’s death on July 22, 2025, Butler wrote: “Nobody knew he’d be gone from us little more than two weeks after the final show. But I am so grateful we got to play one last time together in front of his beloved fans. God bless, Oz, it has been one hell of a ride! Love you!”
The post BLACK SABBATH’s GEEZER BUTLER Says CREAM’s JACK BRUCE Was “The One Player That Totally Showed Me What You Could Do With a Bass” appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.
It’s hard to find a dose of heavy metal more pure and true than what you’ll hear on Eternal Dagger, the new album from German outfit Iron Kobra. Formed in 2008, Iron Kobra have maintained a steady stream of releases, honing their approach for the third album, which you can stream below.
Always keeping with themes of the fantastical and/or mythical, Eternal Dagger sees Iron Kobra take a more sci-fi approach to the lyrics and presentation this time around, compared to the dungeon crawler themes of previous albums. Paired with the soaring melodies and ripping solos of songs like “Forbidden Fruits” and “Treacherous Tyrant,” it gives Iron Kobra something fresh without straying too far off the path.
“It is great to finally release a new album after 11 years with no full-length,” Iron Kobra tell Decibel. “From our perspective, Eternal Dagger is our most refined work yet, while still offering the rough and eccentric songs you expect from Iron Kobra. We never tried to stick to a certain style of heavy metal, which made all our albums in the past really varied and unique sounding and we stayed true to this attitude with our upcoming record. Eternal Dagger offers everything from thrashy speed metal tracks, double-lead-ridden heavy rockers in the vein of the NWOBHM and epic hymns to pump your fist and sing along to.”
Eternal Dagger is out on June 19 via Dying Victims but you can listen now.
The post Full Album Stream: Iron Kobra – “Eternal Dagger” appeared first on Decibel Magazine.
Long before Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis, Edgar Allan Poe was already exploring fractured identity, repression, obsession, compulsive behavior, buried guilt, irrational desire, and the unstable architecture of the human mind. Poe did not use clinical terminology, yet his fiction repeatedly dissected psychological mechanisms that psychoanalysis would later attempt to formalize scientifically.
Freud transformed psychology by arguing that unconscious forces shape human behavior beneath conscious awareness. Decades earlier, Poe’s stories had already dramatized that terrifying possibility through narrators who lose control over memory, perception, morality, and identity while believing themselves rational.
A cinematic Gothic artwork exploring the psychological connection between Edgar Allan Poe and Sigmund Freud through horror, repression, and the unconscious mind.
Although Poe and Freud worked in entirely different disciplines, both became fascinated by hidden mental processes operating beneath well-mannered behavior. Their connection reveals how Gothic horror often anticipated psychological theories long before modern neuroscience or psychoanalysis existed.
Inside Poe’s fiction, terror rarely emerges from external monsters alone. Fear grows from unstable consciousness itself.
Freud’s psychoanalytic theories centered around the unconscious mind: desires, fears, memories, impulses, and emotional conflicts hidden beneath conscious awareness yet still influencing behavior. Repression became one of his most important concepts. Traumatic emotions or forbidden desires do not disappear when suppressed. Instead, they return indirectly through dreams, compulsions, anxiety, distorted behavior, or psychological symptoms.
Poe’s fiction repeatedly dramatizes precisely this psychological structure decades before Freud formally theorized it.
In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator attempts obsessively to prove his sanity while unconsciously exposing guilt through compulsive repetition, hypersensitivity, paranoia, and emotional instability. The famous heartbeat does not function merely as supernatural horror. It externalizes buried guilt erupting into consciousness as the narrator’s carefully controlled reasoning gradually collapses beneath emotional pressure.
Freud would later describe similar mechanisms through repression and symptom formation, where hidden emotional conflict returns indirectly despite conscious denial.
One of the strongest psychological connections between Poe and psychoanalysis appears through the motif of the double. Freud later explored this phenomenon extensively in his essay The Uncanny, where familiar realities become disturbing because they expose hidden aspects of identity.
Poe repeatedly explored divided consciousness through characters confronting alternate versions of themselves. In William Wilson, the protagonist becomes haunted by another figure sharing his name, appearance, and voice. The double increasingly functions as moral conscience, psychological mirror, and suppressed self simultaneously.
The horror emerges not from supernatural spectacle alone, but from psychological fragmentation. Wilson attempts repeatedly to escape the figure, yet the double persists because it represents aspects of identity he cannot psychologically destroy without destroying himself.
Freud later argued that the uncanny often emerges when repressed psychological material returns in distorted form. Poe dramatized this mechanism artistically long before psychoanalytic language existed.
Freud became fascinated by compulsive behavior that individuals repeat despite obvious self-destruction. Poe’s fiction similarly explores characters trapped inside irrational behavioral patterns they cannot control even while recognizing their own deterioration.
In The Black Cat, the narrator repeatedly commits violent acts while attempting intellectually to justify them afterward. He introduces the concept of “perverseness,” describing an irrational impulse driving humans toward destructive actions precisely because they know those actions are wrong.
The narrator explains:
“We perpetrate because we feel that we should not.”
This psychological insight strongly anticipates Freud’s later fascination with unconscious drives, compulsions, and self-sabotaging behavior. Poe understood that human beings often act against their own rational interests for reasons they themselves barely comprehend.
Rather than portraying evil as purely external, Poe located terror within ordinary human psychology itself.
Freud viewed dreams as symbolic expressions of unconscious desire and emotional conflict. Poe similarly blurred boundaries between reality, hallucination, dreams, memory, and distorted perception throughout his fiction.
Stories such as The Fall of the House of Usher unfold with dreamlike instability where architecture, emotional atmosphere, physical illness, sound, and psychological collapse become inseparable. The decaying mansion reflects Roderick Usher’s deteriorating mental condition while simultaneously functioning as physical reality.
This fusion between environment and internal emotional state resembles the symbolic logic Freud later identified inside dreams, where external imagery often represents hidden psychological conflict.
Poe’s Gothic environments therefore operate psychologically as much as physically. Haunted spaces become manifestations of fear, grief, repression, decay, and emotional collapse.
Both Poe and Freud became deeply preoccupied with mortality. Freud later developed theories surrounding death anxiety and destructive drives, while Poe repeatedly returned to premature burial, decay, mourning, and psychological confrontation with death itself.
In poems such as The Raven, grief becomes psychologically endless because memory refuses closure. The narrator remains trapped inside repetitive emotional fixation while language itself gradually breaks down under emotional pressure.
Freud’s essay Mourning and Melancholia later examined similar psychological territory, exploring how grief can become pathological when emotional attachment cannot detach from loss.
Poe intuitively recognized that horror often emerges not from death alone, but from the mind’s inability to process emotional suffering rationally.
Modern psychological horror continues relying heavily upon ideas Poe explored long before psychoanalysis emerged formally. Unreliable narration, fragmented identity, obsessive behavior, distorted perception, buried trauma, compulsive repetition, paranoia, and emotional repression remain central to contemporary horror cinema and literature.
Films centered around fractured consciousness, memory instability, psychological doubles, dream logic, and collapsing perception all inherit aspects of Poe’s literary method.
What makes Poe remarkable is not simply that he anticipated psychoanalytic concepts intellectually, but that he transformed those invisible mental processes into emotionally immersive artistic experience. Readers do not merely observe madness inside Poe’s fiction. They experience the destabilization of consciousness directly from within.
Poe’s importance therefore extends beyond Gothic literature because his fiction revealed how terror often originates inside ordinary human psychology rather than supernatural evil alone. Freud later attempted to explain many of those hidden mechanisms scientifically through psychoanalysis, while Poe had already dramatized them artistically through atmosphere, symbolism, emotional fragmentation, and unstable narration.
The connection between Poe and Freud demonstrates how Gothic horror frequently functions as psychological exploration disguised as supernatural fiction. Long before psychoanalysis entered universities, clinics, and intellectual discourse, Poe’s stories were already wandering through the unconscious mind with terrifying precision.
Explore Edgar Allan Poe apparel, Gothic aesthetics, noir-inspired fashion, and psychological darkness inside the official Edgar Allan Poets Noir Store.
Explore Gothic music, cinematic tension, psychological darkness, and immersive noir atmosphere through the official Edgar Allan Poets playlist.
Although Poe died before psychoanalysis existed formally, his fiction explored repression, obsession, fragmented identity, guilt, and unconscious psychological conflict decades before Freud developed similar theories scientifically.
Both Poe and Freud focused heavily on hidden mental processes beneath conscious awareness. Poe dramatized these ideas artistically through Gothic fiction while Freud later attempted to explain them psychologically through psychoanalysis.
William Wilson explores divided identity and the psychological double, themes later associated with Freud’s concept of the uncanny and fragmented consciousness.
Poe’s fiction frequently explores guilt, paranoia, obsession, repression, unstable perception, compulsive behavior, grief, identity fragmentation, and emotional collapse.
The post Poe and Freud: How Gothic Horror Predicted Psychoanalysis appeared first on Edgar Allan Poets – Noir Rock Band.
photo by Blanka Slana Heine (written by Islander) The Slovenian black/death metal band Cvinger will have a new album named Rites ov Flesh released on August 20th by Void Wanderer Productions. It adds to a discography that began to take shape in 2013 and now includes three previous albums and a few shorter releases. Void […]
The post AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: CVINGER — “RITE III – MASS INCINERATION FOR THE DIVINE RESURRECTION” appeared first on NO CLEAN SINGING.
Yngwie Malmsteen has announced that his new studio album, Hell or High Water, is finished and slated for a November release. He discussed the record in a new interview with Jimmy Kay of The Metal Voice.
“It’s done,” Malmsteen said (transcribed by Blabbermouth). “It’s in the can. I’m really happy with it. I think it’s really, really good.” The album contains nine songs plus one bonus track and runs exactly 46 minutes — a length Malmsteen said he engineered deliberately: “I made it so that it fits on vinyl. I had a lot more ideas, a lot more songs, but I made it so it’s exactly that.” Four of the tracks feature vocals; the rest are instrumental. “The instrumental stuff,” he said, “is really, really nuts.”
On the album’s overall character, Malmsteen said: “This is gonna be very neoclassical. I go in when I’m inspired, I come up with maybe a hundred ideas and I use nine or ten — and this particular album is gonna be very neoclassical. I feel very, very strongly about that.” He invoked Niccolò Paganini’s philosophy on creative expression as a parallel: “If you feel strongly, if you feel something, then it will come across. It’s not a matter of how many notes you play, but of what you feel.”
Asked how to approach the record as a listener, Malmsteen was emphatic: “You can’t just take one song and say, ‘Oh yeah, this is a good track.’ You have to hear it as an album — it’s made as an album, like a movie. I think about tempos and key signatures… they all complement each other, and I’m really happy with it.” He added that while the record is not a concept album in the traditional sense, “you could probably make a concept out of it if you analyze it.”
Malmsteen first teased the project at the 2026 Monsters of Rock festival in São Paulo in April, telling interviewers he had “just finished recording a new album” after spending “almost five months straight” in the studio. He confirmed at the time that the record would be four vocal tracks plus instrumentals and was designed to run exactly 46 minutes for a vinyl format.
Touring plans for the remainder of 2026 include European dates in June and July, Asia in September, and North America in October and November. Malmsteen’s current live band features Nick Marino (keyboards), Emilio Martinez (bass) and Kevin Klingenschmid (drums). Hell or High Water will follow his 2021 studio album Parabellum and his 2025 live release Tokyo Live (Music Theories Recordings), recorded at Zepp DiverCity, Tokyo in May 2024 during his 40th anniversary world tour.
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