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Tear a piece of this and
shove it hard into your mouth 

A lilylicker sounds like a particularly devoted suck-up, someone whose admiration has become a full-time occupation. Put the word beside Oscar Wilde’s fascination with actresses Lillie Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt, and a whole society of worshippers comes into view: flowers, flattery, beautiful women placed upon pedestals. Wilde was a cunning linguist, of course, though Patriarchy have a few suggestions about putting that talent to more practical use. The lily remains a lovely flower, of course, though its innocence becomes somewhat harder to maintain once somebody starts licking it.

The Los Angeles snuff-pop duo of Actually Huizenga and AJ English, otherwise known as The Drummer, premieres the video for Lilylicker, taken from their new EP, Appendices. Written and produced by Huizenga and English, the song takes its initial inspiration from Wilde’s devotion to those celebrated performers, then puts the woman receiving all that attention in charge of the proceedings.

A menacing bass synth and a blunt kick drum set the terms, leaving Actually’s near-whispered vocal close enough to feel conspiratorial. Her poetic purr slips between the beats before the track opens into a metallic industrial-techno rhythm, bringing the hard physicality of ’90s industrial into contact with contemporary darkwave. The bass keeps its grip while crushed guitars tear through the chorus, making the move from intimate persuasion to open command feel deliciously abrupt.

The words play a similar game. Wanting to be liked becomes wanting to be licked; affection, appetite, and obedience get tangled in the same exchange. Actually moves from seeking approval to prescribing exactly how it should be delivered, with an impatience that gives the song its humor. For all the literary ancestry, the central proposition is straightforward: admiration should have practical applications.

Directed by Patriarchy and shot by Hazel Hill McCarthy, the video makes that business of putting people on pedestals unusually literal. Figures revolve on small platforms against an almost uninterrupted black background, their costumes and gestures exposed by direct light. Actually appears in a white gown holding lilies, in a pale pink dress draped with chains, and in a metallic corset with enormous gold wings and a guitar. English handles a skull while wearing little white wings; their young son appears in family tableaux and as a cherub perched on a classical column. The arrangements suggest devotional statues brought to life by people with their own ideas about sainthood.

There is an affectionate absurdity to these living ornaments. The solemn poses give way to movement, expressions change, and the family portrait keeps interrupting the fantasy of immaculate statuary. Against all that black space, the slightest human detail becomes conspicuous. Even the insects have supporting roles.

The setting came about through necessity. According to the band, the owner of their original studio location objected to the proposed content and the presence of their son, who was also appearing in the video. With the shoot abruptly displaced, the crew relocated to the Angeles woods and rethought the production outdoors. Huizenga subsequently edited the footage “happily alone and for many hours,” describing editing as “one of my secret pleasures.”

“I decided not to retouch anything either. So all razor bumps, dark circles, cellulite, and sock lines are fully visible if you wish to judge me physically… I had a baby, so kill me! The boys are perfect though. A lot of the things that went ‘wrong’ ultimately added to the beauty of it, like having to shoot outside, where moths kept flying in front of our lenses, drawn in by the bright lights”

For Huizenga, leaving those imperfections intact also connects to Patriarchy’s larger, apocalyptic view of power:

“Patriarchy has never been about perfection, it’s about realizing we are the last remnants of human existence before AI enslaves us all; that’s why the project is called Patriarchy after all, patriarchy is the final human ruling order. Our next masters wont be women or men or human in any form, so we need to embrace our chaos and imperfections while we can.”

Watch the video for Lilylicker below:

Released in the wilting days of this past Summer, Appendices brings together five songs developed across different periods of the band’s life, reaching back to The Unself sessions and forward through the aftermath of 2025’s Manual For Dying. These recordings have survived abandoned versions, rewrites, and changes substantial enough to turn industrial tracks into orchestral ballads and minimal synth into metal. Alongside Lilylicker, the EP includes Bite Marks, Servile, Ode (to an Apprehensive Tyrant), and Hate Fuck, with additional production and mixing contributions across the record from Ben Chisolm and Matia Simovich.

Huizenga’s reading supplies another connection between these otherwise unruly songs. Wilde, Marchesa Luisa Casati, Emperor Tiberius, and the Manson family furnish starting points for examinations of sexuality, submission, obsession, and violence. Across three full-length albums, a live record, and numerous remixes, Patriarchy have pursued those interests through industrial electronics, synth-pop, metal, and performance art. Appendices also documents Huizenga and English becoming an increasingly self-contained production team, with Lilylicker pointing toward the club without surrendering their taste for theatrical excess.

That appetite for the personal and the unruly carries into Actually’s Sex and the Pity, Huizenga’s new podcast and livestream concept, whose pilot is announced for this Friday at 10 p.m. Pacific. Pitched as Elvira meeting Gore Vidal, it promises secret guests, fireside conversation, and previously untold stories from Patriarchy’s tours and beyond, forming a living journal for a future film project.

“I can only really seem to recount these hilarious stories properly when I’m talking one-on-one with a cute gay at a party; so I’m gonna try to recreate that free-form energy for the podcast.”

Listen to Lilylicker below and order the Appendices EP here.

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The post “Love Me Better” — Patriarchy Stage a Tableau of Floral Worship in Video for “Lilylicker” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Good Kid have become a favourite over the years for a few reasons, including getting me through some seriously rough times and, at points, being one of the only things helping to push back spiralling thoughts, trying to stay composed at work while dealing with background internal turmoil. I’d put them on, and things would … Continue reading Gig Review: Good Kid / Last Dinosaurs – Galvanizers SWG3, Glasgow (17th September 2026)

Yesterday Slipknot announced their (sic)est Stadium 2027 World Tour, which heads to Wembley Stadium on 3 July (and will be their only European show of 2027). Featuring a brand new set, new staging and a setlist spanning across their career, these shows will be the ultimate Slipknot experience to date. Marilyn Manson, Lorna Shore and … Continue reading Slipknot announce Wembley Stadium show for 2027 by setting 30-foot logo on fire

Their third album “Punk Ruins” will be out next month.

The post Fake Names (Refused, Bad Religion, Etc.) Debut “If You Could See Me Today” appeared first on Theprp.com.

Sleeping With Sirens will also be swinging through Southeastern Asia for shows on their own.

The post Sleeping With Sirens Announce Australian Tour With State Champs & Boston Manor appeared first on Theprp.com.

Album Review: Sépulcre – Cryptic Temple Of Otherworldly Abhorrations

Reviewed by Sam Jones

Sepulcre are an act I’ve had my eyes on for a while now. Originally formed in 2012 out of Brittany, France, the band first went by Demonic Oath releasing a Demo and then a Split in 2014 with Cadaveric Fumes, and were initially a one-man band. At some point there’s been a change of mind as Demonic Oath folded and Sepulcre was born as of 2020. A Demo out the same year, their Cursed Ways Of Sheol EP released in 2022, and after four long years we will finally get their first full length album: Cryptic Temple Of Otherworldly Abhorrations through Invictus Productions for an October 16th release date. Sporting ex members of Skelethal too, the band is spearheaded, as was Demonic Oath, by Destroyer 666 drummer Kev Desecrator who takes up bass, guitar and vocals duties here. I’ve had my eye on this record for a while and it’s always good to dive into more French extreme metal.

With sonorous cellos and foreboding atmosphere Sepulcre open their record. It’s far from rampant but it sets the mood immediately, and then the primary songwriting comes into play. With a hail of blast beats and searing guitar work Sepulcre indulge our desires for wanton slaughter with a soundscape torn straight out of Dante’s circles of hell. This essence is more than mere burning, it is the promise of endless, unrepentant malice over and over again until time immemorial. The pace at which Sepulcre perform is extraordinary for whilst others have certainly played faster than them there’s this sense of momentum, and direction, driving the band on to greater depths of depravity.

It’s not enough to simply describe this record as vying for evil intonations; the guitar tone, its wails and languishing strings, the ease by which it snaps into frenzied soloing, paints the record as one enamoured by the most despicable, the most deplorable states of evil early Christendom devoutly feared. In addition, this record throws down every wall and ceiling in its bid to destroy you; the drums are simply fierce, even the simplest strike carries power due to how taut its sound feels. They aren’t struck as much as they crash with rapturous discord throwing all things out of balance. These bass drums are massive and when things get going that foaming, rabid-eyed, berserk nature could distort planetary orbits. The energy is tremendous and once the tidal wave of that opening track is done you’ll come to learn the entire record is besotten with chaos. You are in no comfortable position herein, you’re in their domain. God have mercy on your soul because Sepulcre won’t.

Like some bygone and faraway spectre the vocals traverse the band’s sound with ease and zero difficulty, wafting over the guitar work, colossal it already is, and carry the harrowed zeal with nightmarish efficacy. With the semblance of banshees in their death throes, to the reminiscence of souls mourning their harried beloved, these vocals cry with higher pitch than most acts will demonstrate, providing a blackened quality I wasn’t expecting. The vocals could have been easily drowned out due to the frantic, blitzing style of songwriting Sepulcre sport, therefore the mix has done a great job at keeping these vocals above the guitar work, preventing such sonic conflict from marring the audience’s capacity to interpret what’s happening in the moment.

The production is perfect for the kind of atmosphere Sepulcre clearly wanted to craft. Every single instrumental and vocal component they needed to balance has been done so exquisitely, whether they need to impart a savage riff sequence or a vocal section hearkening the next virile stage of a track, a slower and insidious pace, moments where the guitar work goes off kilter and defies the rest of the band to lament. There’s a lot happening at once and none of grows overbearing nor does its oncoming, successive string of hellish songs grow daunting to endure. There’s a moment where the band drop their entire arsenal on you at once, a true instrumental bomb if there ever was one, towards the end of “Katabasis” and I tell you now I haven’t been bowled over by a band like that, my entire body tingling, in a very long time.

In conclusion, what Sepulcre have accomplished in a single album is sensational. They’ve gone from a name I wasn’t faintly familiar with to a force finely at the forefront of recognition. This is an evil, morbid record, the kind that seeks your death only after the last vestiges of hope and prospect have long departed your soul. Cryptic Temple Of Otherworldly Abhorrations lives up to its hellish, Dante-inspired comparisons with ease, imbuing us with these depictions of infernal and boiling cesspits. It’s an eviscerating, noxious, suffocating experience that’ll take you to the very brink of sanity, then kick you over into that blackened abyss before reeling you back in, teasing you with the promise of a forgone and perverted salvation. There is nothing mercyful with these record, every single riff, drum strike, vocal delivery is so written and performed to deglove the skin from your body and thus set your bloodstreaked flesh aflame. There’s no doubt in mine, it’s an Album Of The Year contender. If Sepulcre stay this course they are onto something extraordinary and are worth every pair of eyes locking onto them. This is the death metal bands today should be taking notes from; ferocious, unyielding, a glimpse unto something dwarfing biblical wrath. Give me October 16th, I need this record in my life at every possibility.

For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.

The post Album Review: Sépulcre – Cryptic Temple Of Otherworldly Abhorrations appeared first on The Razor's Edge.

It’s tough to classify exactly what’s going on throughout Ogives Big Band and POHL‘s new split, largely because neither band seems particularly concerned about making music that is classifiable in a straightforward way. For most of the new split, which you can stream below, Ogives Big Band dwell in the low end, summoning up sharp doom, harsh sludge, tinges of psych rock, prog metal and even hints of metallic hardcore. They throw so many ideas out at once that you’re bound to like at least one!

POHL return fire with just one song, “Flayed Lord Prayer.” It’s long, cacophonous (is that a saxophone?) and full of sharp edges, while the underlying tension baked in continues to build and build to a satisfyingly-heavy climax.

“Will (Pohl) and I have known each other for many years,” Ogives Big Band guitarist Ben Harris tells Decibel. “I’ve been a fan of Pohl since they started. I wanted to release these four new tracks separately as they were going down a new path for us and some kind of collaborative project seemed more exciting than an EP. Both bands put out debut albums at around the same time, so I messaged Will to see if they were up for doing a split together and the timeline worked for them and they were super keen! Before writing anything I knew that I wanted things to be considerably heavier, to try and make use of space more and to have a more open kind of sound. There’s still some chops in there but they’re a little more covert! For the most part the songs were more intuitively written than before and I mostly jammed out the ideas in what turned out to be something like the final structures. Then tidied up the arrangements where bits were maybe pointing out awkwardly here and there. Things were further refined in the practice room with the rest of the band adding their parts. I also wanted to write stuff that would be easier and more fun to play live! This was the first time I was writing with the intent of leaving space specifically for vocals, which inevitably influences the arrangements and the shape of the songs in general.”

If you dig what you hear, you can grab the split below via Bandcamp and you can get tour date info here.

The post Full Album Stream: Ogives Big Band / POHL – “Split” appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

‘If We Could Make The World A Better Place’ releases early next year

Source

Which of course, still holds Fear Factory ties.

The post Ex-Fear Factory Members Have Rebranded Their ‘Angst Fabrik’ Project As ‘Machines Of Hate’ appeared first on Theprp.com.

Album Review: Thronehammer – Slay | Kill | Erase

Reviewed by Rick Eaglestone

When Thronehammer finally delivered their debut full-length, Usurper Of The Oaken Throne, in 2019, the German British alliance was already fluent in the old language of epic doom, a dialect built on Candlemass reverence and Bathory grandeur and delivered at lengths that made most of their peers look positively timid. Incantation Rites followed in 2021, before 2023’s Kingslayer widened the lens again, letting death metal aggression and flickers of post-rock melancholy creep in around the edges. Three records, three steady steps upwards and now a fourth full-length – Slay | Kill | Erase looks to become the centre of the picture.

At the heart of it all stands Kat Shevil Gillham, a stalwart of the UK underground whose voice has become the band’s most distinctive weapon, while behind the kit Markus Ströhlein locks in with Uwe Void’s bass to give even the most spacious passages something you could comfortably build a cathedral on. Up front, West is now flanked by fellow guitarists Tobias Utz and Daniel Ringl, and that three-guitar line gives the arrangements far more room to layer and sprawl. The palette has broadened too. The battlefield heaviness is still there in the bones of these songs, but this time it shares space with a good deal more gloom and grief, and the result is the most emotionally layered thing Thronehammer have yet put their name to.

Slay | Kill | Erase opens proceedings with a title that reads like a battle order, and the track obeys it to the letter. It begins in brooding, almost reluctant fashion before the riffs arrives like siege engines rolling over a ridge, slow, deliberate and utterly unstoppable. Gillham owns the song from the first line, somewhere between a war cry and a lament, and the way the band let the tension build rather than rushing to the payoff tells you immediately that patience is going to be the currency here. A mighty opening that sets the tone for everything that follows.

To Never Return is where the record first reveals its wider horizons. Clean, chiming guitars drift in and hang in the air like mist over a battlefield at dawn, and for long stretches the band seem content simply to let the atmosphere breathe. It is the clearest early sign of that post-rock pull, yet when the weight does return it lands all the harder for having been held back. There is a genuine ache running through this one, a sense of mourning rather than menace, and it proves Thronehammer can wound just as effectively with melody as with mass.

Rise Of Resistance sees the album at its most direct, a rousing, fist-aloft doom anthem driven by a marching rhythm from Ströhlein and a riff that lodges itself in the skull on first contact. If the opening pair are about scale and mood, this is about momentum, and it scratches the classic epic doom itch in a way long-time followers will instantly recognise. Expect it to become a live staple on the band’s October run of German dates; it practically demands a room full of raised horns.

Destroyer Ov Light closes out the first half in expansive style, and it may well be the most atmospheric piece in the band’s catalogue to date. Layered guitars shimmer and swell, the rhythm section pulls back to a slow heartbeat, and Gillham shifts register to something more haunted and spectral. The arrangement conjures vast, empty landscapes, but the heaviness is never far beneath the surface, and when it finally breaks through it does so with real force. A towering, immersive centrepiece.

Blade To The Heart wastes no time reminding everyone where Thronehammer came from. After the reflective breadth of the preceding tracks, this is a proper bruiser, the riffs thick and punishing, the groove grim and grinding, with Void’s bass rumbling like distant artillery. Gillham sounds positively ferocious here, spitting out each line with venom, and the whole thing carries a stubborn, old-school conviction that recalls the band’s earliest material. Short on subtlety by design, and all the better for it.

Thrown Into The Abyss drags the listener down into the bleakest corner of the record. The tempo slows to a funereal crawl, the atmosphere thickens with dread, and there are moments where the whole song seems to buckle under its own weight. It is the kind of track that demands headphones and a darkened room, a slow suffocation rather than a sudden blow, and the way melancholic leads flicker through the gloom stops it from ever becoming one-dimensional.

Dethroned feels, fittingly for a band carrying this name, like the Thronehammer identity distilled to its essence. Heavy-footed and relentless, it balances that crushing doom weight with a sense of storytelling grandeur, the riffs rising and falling like the fortunes of some doomed monarch. It is traditional in the best possible sense, and by this stage of the album that familiarity feels less like a retreat and more like a band reclaiming home ground before the final push.

Onwards To Oblivion brings the curtain down, and it does so in spectacular fashion. The second single, it welcomes Motorowl’s Max Hemmann as guest vocalist, and the interplay between his voice and Gillham’s adds a rich new dimension, the two trading lines across a sweeping, melodic backdrop that builds towards a genuinely stirring climax. It is the most openly epic moment on the record, all soaring leads and slow-burning emotional release, and a fitting end to such a long journey. A magnificent closer. Crushing, sorrowful and strikingly bold, this is Thronehammer at the peak of their powers.

For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.

The post Album Review: Thronehammer – Slay | Kill | Erase appeared first on The Razor's Edge.