Following the recent release of their stirring acoustic version of Horizon, Australian symphonic folk metal torchbearers VALHALORE have unleashed an epic new live video for The Storm, a track taken from the band’s latest studio album, Beyond The Stars. Capturing the power and energy of VALHALORE on stage, The Storm (Live) brings one of the […]
A moment in adulthood arrives, sooner or later, when your childhood neighborhood starts looking like a movie set built from memory: the curb seems smaller, the houses fake, the corner store guilty. NYIKO’s Neighborhood lives in that unnerving dislocation, where leaving home turns out to be less dramatic than realizing another place has become home while life made other plans.
The song has the good sense to keep its hands off the panic button, though. Guitars jangle with a tone that brings Echo and the Bunnymen to mind, while NYIKO sings with a wounded restraint that brushes against The Smiths and Choir Boy. The arrangement gives the melody room to wander, lets the bass and drums hold their ground, and trusts the ache in the vocal to do more work than production could.
NYIKO has moved through hip hop, piano songwriting, emo, hardcore, and electronic music, and you can hear the benefit of that restlessness in the way Neighborhood sidesteps purity tests. The song feels pop-minded without becoming smug about hooks, emotionally direct without begging for sympathy. Somewhere in its DNA sits the plainspoken intelligence of Magnetic Fields and Divine Comedy, that knack for taking a condition and phrasing it as though you overheard the right sentence at the wrong time.
Directed and edited by Sabrina Gimenez, the video for Neighborhood follows people moving separately through a residential area before their bodies begin slipping into rhythmic glitches. A twitch here, a repeated gesture there, then these isolated figures start syncing up, as if the neighborhood itself has found a tempo and decided everybody ought to obey it. At golden hour, they converge in a brief group movement before the pattern breaks apart. Everybody disperses, except one person who keeps going. NYIKO, who produced and choreographed the video, turns belonging into something halfway between comfort and contagion. Community looks beautiful for a second, then faintly sinister once you notice how easily individual behavior can fall into step.
Watch Neighborhood below:
That idea runs straight into Fate, NYIKO’s sophomore album, released September 16 through Trailing Twelve Records. Across ten songs, he considers desire, identity, attachment, politics, memory, and the unseen systems nudging people toward choices they swear are entirely their own.
“I wanted to write an album about the invisible forces that shape our lives,” says NYIKO. “Whether it’s the internet, politics, nostalgia, celebrity culture, or our own attachment patterns, we spend so much time believing we’re making independent choices without realizing how much we’re being pulled by things outside ourselves. Every song asks the same question from a different angle: how much of our lives is fate, and how much is choice?”
Opening track O Primate sets chiming synthesizers against jangling guitars, its wavering electronic tones giving the brighter riffs an agreeable instability. Warm bass anchors NYIKO’s phrasing, which has something of The Smiths’ conversational elasticity: a melody that seems to discover its own argument as the sentence unfolds. Beneath that inviting surface sits a consideration of animal rights, human power, and the ease with which cruelty becomes ordinary. When clipped, piano-like keyboard notes enter midway through, they sharpen the arrangement without disturbing its composure. His measured delivery gives the subject room, keeping the listener close enough to sit with an uncomfortable question.
On Stay Young, hazy synthesizers and a gentle bass figure make way for a new wave vocal over unhurried drums. Its wish to suspend youth carries the knowledge that adulthood keeps changing the people and places we count on. As the bass grows fuller, guitars broaden into the generous shapes of 1980s pop-rock, with vocal harmonies adding lift. There is an appealing ease to the way these parts gather around the melody, each arrival making the song feel a little more expansive. For a few minutes, NYIKO makes holding on sound effortless, even as the title betrays how much effort might be involved.
The piano-led opening of camgirl brings Corey Hart’s earnest new wave balladry to mind, with soft vocals and small harmony accents lending the first stretch an almost private scale. Inspired by the psychological thriller Cam, the song follows a lonely fan who mistakes a sex worker’s paid attention for a romance. NYIKO lets us hear the tenderness that makes the misunderstanding persuasive to the person having it. Midway through, a funkier bass line, firmer drums, and more expressive guitars enlarge the arrangement, carrying his fantasy toward the proportions of a grand declaration. The musical uplift makes his certainty feel alarmingly easy to share.
Sugar brings a cooler, more physical tension, somewhere between Mareux’s controlled darkwave and Provoker’s bruised intimacy. Angular guitars interrupt the synth swells, while a substantial bass line gives the track weight and a certain weary grace. The album’s notes place it within the complexities of loving someone who works in the sex industry; desire, emotional distance, and control all bear on the relationship. NYIKO’s delivery catches that difficult balance between wanting another person and recognising how much of yourself you are surrendering to the arrangement. The rhythm keeps moving with an assurance the relationship seems unable to sustain.
“To me, Sugar is about temptation and control,” NYIKO confesses. “It’s what happens when lust overrides logic – when something looks sweet on the surface but rots you from the inside.”
Rippling synths introduce SUPERFAN, where a wistful vocal gradually acquires momentum from the drums and bass. Its apparent love song exposes the possessiveness that can turn celebrity admiration into entitlement. Chiming synthesizers and changes in pace give the arrangement a restless shape, repeatedly raising its emotional temperature before allowing it to settle. Those returns to relative calm are especially effective: NYIKO gives the melody enough breathing room for its sweetness to register. At each subsequent swell, the voice seems ready to make an enormous promise, leaving us to wonder who has actually agreed to receive it.
An extended guitar melody holds Shelter steady while warm bass and drums establish a more welcoming momentum. Here, the search for home settles on the emotional security another person can offer. NYIKO’s pop-rock delivery has room to open up, and the bright, bubbling synthesizer that introduces the chorus supplies a welcome burst of pleasure. The beat becomes easier to dance to as the song expands, giving its optimism a physical expression. After the fraught attachments of the preceding tracks, that sustained guitar line sounds particularly reassuring, carrying the tune through its changes with an unforced sense of continuity.
After Neighborhood, the title track Fate draws the album into darker territory. A compressed synthpop beat gradually comes into focus, revealing a wiry rhythm beneath NYIKO’s smooth delivery. Layered vocal harmonies lend the melody a slightly baroque elegance. The song explores an avoidant relationship, with desire repeatedly renewed by a lover’s retreat. Metallic keyboard tones and sighing synth pads enter around the midpoint, followed later by rippling melodic figures that make the arrangement feel increasingly unsettled. There is something rueful about how gracefully the vocals move through all this activity, as though the pleasure of singing could briefly make the uncertainty bearable.
Drifting synthesizers give Victim of No Consequence an airy entrance before a buoyant bass line and gently floating drumbeat take over. NYIKO returns to a Smiths-like cadence, surrounded by jangling acoustic guitar and bright electronic accents. It is among the album’s most immediately memorable songs, with a tune that almost supplies its own invitation to sing along. The lyrics follow two young men drawn toward incompatible realities through pandemic misinformation and conspiracy culture. That inviting arrangement becomes an especially pointed setting: a melody capable of bringing voices together accompanies a song about people losing the ability to agree on what is real.
Closing track Summer of Outrage opens out around warm bass, acoustic strumming, and a sustained guitar figure whose long, expressive reach recalls The Chameleons. The riff returns between verses, giving the song a recognizable center as NYIKO’s broad radio-pop vocal and bright synthesizers fill the space around it. Written in August 2020, the song holds the urgency of the Black Lives Matter protests alongside the isolation of lockdown and the exhausting churn of social media. Its public concerns eventually give way to a more personal grief over time apart from friends. A late passage of piano and voice brings that feeling into focus before the closing guitar expansion. The generosity of the melody makes a fitting conclusion to Fate: even after ten songs spent examining what draws people together and pulls them apart, NYIKO can still make connection sound possible.
KrashKarma are back. The duo formed by Ralf Dietel and Niki Skistimas are entering a new chapter with the release of “Welcome To The Shitshow”, a new single that arrives alongside an extensive European tour and leads the way towards their upcoming studio album, Enter The Exit.
Released on September 10, 2026, “Welcome To The Shitshow” puts the band’s distinctive identity front and center once again, with their two-piece format remaining one of their defining characteristics. Their sound moves between rock, alternative metal, hard rock and punk.
The title of the new single is a statement in itself. The English expression shitshow is commonly used to describe a chaotic, out-of-control, absurd or disastrous situation. KrashKarma turn that idea into a direct invitation: “Welcome To The Shitshow.”
The new track arrives at an important moment for the band as they prepare the release of Enter The Exit, their upcoming studio album, scheduled for fall 2026. The album title itself plays with contradiction: Enter The Exit. A combination of opposing concepts that fits a band accustomed to breaking conventional structures.
Fans will also have the chance to pick up a limited-edition 7-inch vinyl of “Welcome To The Shitshow,” available at the band’s live shows.
The release of the new single will be followed by an extensive tour taking KrashKarma across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria, before concluding with a special date in Gran Canaria, Spain. The tour begins on October 1 and continues throughout October and November, with the final announced date taking place on December 5.
One of the highlights will be the October 9 show in Breda, Netherlands, where KrashKarma will share the stage with Queen Of Spades, a Dutch band, at Poppodium Phoenix.
Global rock heavyweights Architects return today with their brand new single, Machine, out now via Epitaph. The track marks the band’s first new music since the release of their acclaimed 11th studio album, The Sky, the Earth & All Between. Written by Dan Searle and Sam Carter and produced by Searle, Architects push their sound […]
Metallica have announced another run of North American M72 dates for 2027. The quartet will play a dozen stadium shows in May and June next year, kicking off at BC Place in Vancouver, Canada, on May 8, and concluding on June 19 at the Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The support acts for the 12 dates – which are in addition to Metallica’s previously announced residency at Sphere in Las Vegas and a pair of shows at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut, this November – will be nu metal legends Limp Bizkit and Swedish stars Avatar.
Avatar previously supported Metallica on this year’s European leg of the tour, which ended in July, when Metallica took to social media to sing their praises.
“Master of ceremonies Johannes [Eckerström, frontman] and the crazy Swedes from Avatar brought something completely new to the #M72 stage,” they wrote. “Every night was a spectacle. Thank you so much for raising the bar and keeping the audiences in Europe and the UK thrilled!”
Fan Club presales for the newly announced shows will begin on Monday, September 21 at 10am local time, with additional presales running throughout the week before the general onsale begins on Friday, September 25 at the same time.
Oct 01: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Oct 03: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Oct 08: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Oct 10: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Oct 15: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Oct 17: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Oct 22: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Oct 24: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Oct 29: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Oct 31: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Nov 05: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Nov 07: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Nov 19: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT Nov 21: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Jan 28: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Jan 30: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Feb 04: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Feb 06: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Feb 18: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Feb 20: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Feb 25: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Feb 27: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Mar 04: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Mar 06: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Mar 11: Las Vegas Sphere, NV Mar 13: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
May 08: Vancouver BC Place, BC May 13: San Diego Snapdragon Stadium, CA May 18: El Paso Sun Bowl Stadium, TX May 22: San Antonio Alamodome, TX May 26: Fayetteville Razorback Stadium, AR May 29: Kansas City Arrowhead Stadium, MO Jun 02: Raleigh Carter-Finley Stadium, NC Jun 05: Indianapolis Lucas Oil Stadium, IN Jun 08: Buffalo Highmark Stadium, NY Jun 12: Madison Camp Randall Stadium, WI Jun 15: Cleveland Huntington Bank Field, OH Jun 19: Salt Lake City Rice-Eccles Stadium, UT
It is difficult to imagine what ordinary life looked like inside Nazi Germany in the early 1940s. The government controlled the military and the laws, but also the radio, the newspapers, and the schools. Suspicion had become part of everyday life. A neighbor could report you for listening to a foreign radio station. A coworker could decide that you did not sound enthusiastic enough about the war. Speaking against the government could have deadly consequences. In a country where silence was often the safest choice, a 21-year-old university student looked at what was happening around her and decided that silence was no longer something she could live with. Her name was Sophie Scholl.
Sophie was a biology and philosophy student at the University of Munich. She was not a politician, a soldier, or a spy. She was a young woman who had come to understand the reality of the regime around her, including the deportation of Jewish people and the brutality of the war. While much of the German public was being kept in the dark or choosing not to look too closely, Sophie, her brother Hans, and a small circle of friends decided to act. Together, they formed a secret resistance group called the White Rose.
Their goal was simple and incredibly dangerous: write, print, and distribute leaflets calling on ordinary Germans to wake up and resist the Nazi government.
Even obtaining the materials they needed could attract suspicion. In a wartime economy, paper, postage, and other supplies were rationed and monitored. A hand-cranked duplicating machine, large quantities of paper, and stacks of postage stamps were not exactly the sort of things a group of university students could buy without raising questions. Somehow, Sophie and the others managed to gather what they needed and began producing thousands of copies of their anti-Nazi essays.
Printing the leaflets was only part of the problem. Someone still had to get them into people’s hands. Sophie took on some of the most dangerous parts of that work. She packed suitcases with the papers and travelled by train across Germany and Austria. She mailed leaflets from different cities, knowing that her bags could be searched at military checkpoints. The idea was to make the White Rose appear much larger than it really was, giving the impression of a nationwide resistance network rather than a small group of university students working in secret.
By February 1943, the group had produced its sixth leaflet. On the morning of February 18, Sophie and Hans entered the main hall of the University of Munich carrying a suitcase filled with copies. They placed stacks of leaflets outside the lecture halls just before classes ended. There were still some left when they reached the top floor. Sophie carried them to the balcony and pushed the remaining papers over the edge. They fell into the open atrium below, scattering across the students gathered there.
A university custodian saw what she had done. The doors were locked, the Gestapo was called, and Sophie was arrested.
For days, she was interrogated. At first, she calmly denied involvement. Then the Gestapo searched the apartments and found evidence that made denial impossible. Sophie changed her approach completely. She took responsibility for her actions and tried to protect the others involved. More importantly, she did not apologize. She had known the risks when she printed those leaflets, and even with execution now waiting for her, she continued to stand behind what she had written. Sophie was beheaded on February 22, 1943.
There is something particularly striking about Sophie Scholl’s story because nothing about the beginning of it sounds extraordinary. She was a university student studying biology and philosophy. She had no army behind her, no political office, and no great institution protecting her. She had a small group of friends, a hand-cranked printer, and a suitcase full of leaflets. The scale of what she was up against was enormous, and she knew exactly what could happen if she was caught. Yet she still walked into that university hall carrying those papers. Four days after her arrest, she was dead. The White Rose was small, but for a brief time, it managed to put words of resistance in front of people who were being told that there was no alternative.
We live in a very different world, and most of us will never face anything remotely comparable to what Sophie faced. But the smaller parts of her story still feel familiar. We have all watched people stay quiet because speaking up might cost them a job, a friendship, a place in a community, or simply the comfort of not getting involved. We have also seen how quickly falsehoods can spread when enough people decide that challenging them is someone else’s responsibility. Sophie Scholl’s story does not need to be turned into a grand lesson for our time. Sometimes it is enough to remember that she was once just a university student standing in a room with a suitcase, deciding that there were some things she could no longer quietly accept.
It’s been three years since Slauson Malone 1 (aka Jasper Marsalis) released EXCELSIOR, but experimental music’s premier one-man ensemble is back today with his first new music since then. Improbably, it’s a Red Hot Chili Peppers cover.
The legendary Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath 'Back to the Beginning' concert is now coming via a concert film to movie screens worldwide. Continue reading…
Following the recent release of their stirring acoustic version of Horizon, Australian symphonic folk metal torchbearers VALHALORE have unleashed an epic new live video for The Storm, a track taken from the band’s latest studio album, Beyond The Stars. Capturing the power and energy of VALHALORE on stage, The Storm (Live) brings one of the […]
Global rock heavyweights Architects return today with their brand new single, Machine, out now via Epitaph. The track marks the band’s first new music since the release of their acclaimed 11th studio album, The Sky, the Earth & All Between. Written by Dan Searle and Sam Carter and produced by Searle, Architects push their sound […]