Winter Sect have discovered one of goth’s better-kept secrets: graveyards can be funny places. Not funny in the sitcom sense, unless your sitcom happens to involve velvet sleeves, low fog, marble angels, and a bass player turning cemetery dirt into a dance floor, but funny in the grand old rock-and-roll sense that the concept of memento mori has always looked a little less terrifying once somebody places a wreath of backbeat on the coffin.
Made up of Sister Ex alumna Claudia Neuman on bass and vocals, guitarist Anthony Piazza, keyboardist and vocalist Heather Wayward, and drummer Darryl J. Dardenne, the DC/Baltimore group have previously favored the colder end of Gothic psychedelia and glam rock. Graveyard Girl, however, loosens the corset. Funk, garage rock, indie pop and even bossa nova slip into the bloodstream, bringing a loose, easy groove beneath the song’s ’60s pop whimsy while the band keeps one boot planted firmly in post-punk soil.
Neuman’s bass is responsible for the initial crime, strutting around with the casual confidence of someone who has found the liquor cabinet during a wake. Wayward’s keyboards add splashes of color around Piazza’s guitar, while Dardenne keeps the song moving with a lightness that gives its cemetery imagery room to grin. The melody has the cheeky charm of a vintage pop single, its tuneful bounce making the invitation to wander among the graves sound suspiciously like a proposition for a Sunday afternoon date. Siouxsie and the Banshees, March Violets, Strange Boutique and more hover somewhere in the family tree, although Winter Sect sound especially amused by the possibilities of their own material here.
According to Wayward, that playful turn happened almost accidentally during rehearsal: “The song pretty much started with Claudia grooving out on a bass line,” she says. “It was catchy and I thought let’s do something completely different and not so serious and macabre. First the hook was discovered and we built from there. So with that funk of a groove my mind started walking. Where? Through the graveyard of course. It came together in a cool way and a little twist at the end just makes it fun.”
That sense of fun carries into the video, which sends the band wandering through the necropolis in slow motion among candles, veils and fog. Somebody communes with the departed, everybody looks appropriately dressed for the occasion, and the solemn machinery of Gothic imagery gains a sly little wink. You half expect one of the headstones to start keeping time.
Watch the video for Graveyard Girl below:
Winter Sect began in late 2023 when California native Neuman and Piazza formed the project around feedback-heavy goth, New Wave, industrial and psychedelic influences. Mystic Twin and Haunted House followed in 2024, with Say Goodbye appearing in 2026.
Graveyard Girl, taken from the forthcoming EP Offering, suggests Winter Sect have figured out that darkness becomes far more interesting when somebody remembers to leave room for mischief and a tune you can hum on the way home.
Listen to Graveyard Girl below and order the single here.
Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, better known as SMKC, has announced its fifth studio album, Flying Blind, and released the title track with an official music video. The record is due worldwide February 26, 2027, via Gibson Records. It lands 15 years and five albums into one of modern rock’s longest-running partnerships.
The album was tracked mostly live with longtime producer Michael “Elvis” Baskette at Studio Barbarosa in Florida. Its 12 songs feature Slash on guitar and pedal steel, Myles Kennedy on vocals, Todd Kerns on bass, Brent Fitz on drums and Frank Sidoris on rhythm guitar. The band finished the bulk of the record in roughly a week, often cutting two songs a day with everyone playing in the same room.
“It’s a really fun, kind of spontaneous rock ‘n’ roll record,” says Slash of Flying Blind. “It’s very straightforward and down-to-earth and raw.”
The “Flying Blind” single is out now on all digital platforms. The video was shot at The Viper Room in Los Angeles and directed by John Harvatine IV.
The song was born during pre-production, when Slash floated a riff as the band got ready to rehearse. It came together fast, pairing SMKC‘s usual hard-rock drive with a big melody and a hook that made it the obvious choice to lead off the album.
Slash explains, “Created in the studio while we were standing there in pre-production, a riff came to me and started developing. I had nothing of that song prior to those guys coming in, and then we started up a night of rehearsal and played that riff. It came together really quickly. As for it being the first single, you never know what the first single is going to be until you’ve recorded it. When I started thinking about it, “Flying Blind” just seemed to have the right kind of melodic sensibilities and a hook to make it single material.”
Kennedy says the lyric deals with people looking for shortcuts on the road to fulfillment. “I really enjoyed putting a melody to this song. The way the chord progression starts in the beginning had a nice flow to it. The lyric is about how sometimes people try to take shortcuts and try to find the easy way to achieve happiness or enlightenment.”
To mark the release, SMKC has teamed with Fandiem on a charity sweepstakes. The winner gets a trip to Wales to meet Slash backstage at Cardiff Castle. Proceeds go to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). The winner and a guest receive round-trip travel to Cardiff, a three-night hotel stay, guestlist tickets to the Cardiff Castle show, a backstage meet-and-greet, front-of-house viewing, access to preshow soundcheck, a Slash merch pack, a South Wales sightseeing tour and a pre-show dinner. Fans can donate and enter at www.fandiem.com/slash.
SMKC still works the way it did at the start: get in a room, play and see what happens. That approach shaped Flying Blind, the band’s first full-length since 2022’s 4. Some songs grew out of Slash‘s demos and fragments, and others took shape on the spot with the players jamming together.
Slash brought the early material to Kennedy, who wrote vocal melodies and lyrics before the tracks were built out into full-band arrangements with Kerns, Fitz and Sidoris.
“He’s an incredible riff writer,” Kennedy says of Slash. “He also comes up with simple chord progressions that are very compelling for melodies. It works, and it’s timeless.”
Earlier SMKC records often had their riffs and arrangements shaped by nightly soundchecks and long tours. Flying Blind instead came together in concentrated bursts between the members’ other commitments. Slash developed his material while touring with Guns N’ Roses, recording his blues album Orgy of the Damned and launching the S.E.R.P.E.N.T. Festival. Kennedy started on the songs during a break from Alter Bridge and while working on his third solo album.
“Our schedule is tight, and you have to abide by it or everything else starts to get affected. Now it’s just a given that you’re always creating. It’s a muscle thing. The creative part of your brain doesn’t have time to atrophy, and you just keep going,” Kennedy says.
The band returned to Baskette, who also produced World on Fire in 2014 and Living the Dream in 2018, at Studio Barbarosa. Living and working together through the sessions made the group’s musical and personal chemistry part of the recording itself.
Slash gave Baskette two instructions: keep it as live as possible and don’t overwork the performances afterward. “He really adhered to that,” Slash says. “It worked out great.” Arrangements were mostly set before tracking but loose enough to leave room for ideas that popped up in the studio. With everyone playing at once, the band kept the interplay and energy of each full take. Kennedy cut his vocals several months later and calls the finished album a high point in the band’s catalog.
“Out of all the records, the sounds and performances on Flying Blind are my favorite. It’s very present. It’s right there,” Kennedy says.
The 12 tracks cover a wide range without drifting from the band’s hard-rock base. “Good Time Girl” mixes a talk box hook with a heavy country twang inspired by guitarist Jimmy Bryant and steel guitarist Speedy West. “Sweet Kill” is brash, riff-driven rock that Slash calls “probably the most ’80s thing I’ve done in a while.”
“One of Your Kind” churns in a down-tuned groove, while sharp, punk-leaning chords power “Here in Babylon.” “Thrill Seeker” rides a dizzying descending riff that stays deep in the pocket. “Rev My Heart” is a classic rock ‘n’ roll rave-up with a memorable progression and a lyric inspired by the night Kennedy met his future wife. The instrumental “Living the Dream” keeps up an SMKC tradition and gives Slash room to improvise.
“I’ve done one of these instrumentals on every Conspirators record except Apocalyptic Love,” Slash says. “It’s fun to have something that I can open up and improvise on, where I don’t have any specific guidelines or guardrails. It’s nice to do a new one every record, so that live you don’t have to do the same one all the time.”
The biggest departure is “Looking for a Miracle,” the first song Slash has written on pedal steel and the first to include a recorded pedal steel solo from him. He worked out the idea on pedal steel, adapted it to guitar so the band could rehearse it, then went back to pedal steel in the studio and built the solo at Studio Barbarosa.
“I love pedal steel,” Slash says. “It’s one of these instruments that is so unbelievable in what you can do with it. So it’s become a thing for me. But it is a commitment. It’s a pretty complex instrument.”
Kennedy and the rest of the band have watched that relationship grow.
“For a long time, we would go and rehearse for tours or do pre-production, and then we’d leave, and Slash would stay at his studio and practice to all hours on mastering pedal steel,” Kennedy recalls.
The album closes with “Stem the Flow,” a sweeping finale about disillusionment with institutions and systems once believed unbreakable. Hard-hitting, spontaneous and varied, Flying Blind finds SMKC as loose, raw and locked in as ever.
The band’s roots go back to Slash‘s star-studded self-titled solo album in 2010, where Kennedy was one of several guest vocalists. The musical and personal bond that followed turned into a permanent band.
“I got into working with the Conspirators as a happy accident from doing that first solo album,” Slash says. “I established a relationship with these guys on a musical and personal level that I wasn’t about to give up when Gunsrestarted.”
What started with no long-term plan has become a 15-year partnership with five studio albums and plenty of world tours.
“It blows my mind that 15 years has moved this fast,” Kennedy says. “It’s been the blink of an eye. But as they say, time flies when you’re having fun, and we have a lot of fun. It’s a pinch-me kind of thing.”
Fifteen years in, SMKC keeps sharpening its sound while holding to immediate, unvarnished rock ‘n’ roll. For Slash, the driving force behind Flying Blind and the band is the simple joy of playing.
“When we started, we didn’t have anything,” Slash says. “We weren’t setting out to conquer the world. It was just for the pure pleasure of it. So now, we get together and play, we have a really good time, and then we go out and tour and do it again the next time,” Slash laughs. “As long as there’s electricity, we’ll keep plugging in.”
SMKC has also revealed the Flying Blind world tour 2027, a long international run. It starts in Latin America in April, reaches North America on April 23, then moves through the United Kingdom and Europe. The North American leg includes two nights at The Wiltern in Los Angeles, plus stops at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tenn., Citizens House of Blues in Boston and the Fillmore Auditorium in Denver, among other well-known rooms.
Fans can sign up for early ticket access here. General sales begin Oct. 9 here.
The instrumental music trio Silk Fence brings together musicians with a long history of attention from this blog. Arian Shafiee, best known as a member of Guerilla Toss, plays electric guitar. Booker Stardrum, from SML and Play Time among other projects, handles drums and percussion. Justin Frye from PC Worship is on double bass and tapes. Together they’ve cooked up four lengthy excursions into the foggy, foreboding unknown.
The dark folk artist Marissa Nadler first met Stephen Brodsky, frontman of the heavy Boston bands Cave In and Mutoid Man, at Saint Vitus, the Brooklyn metal enclave that finally just reopened at a new location. Back in 2019, they released the collaborative album Droneflower and toured together. Now, it looks like they’re back and they’re using Droneflower as their band name.
An ache moves forward
He steps back
I step forward
It all turns black
He steps forward
I step back
Some relationships develop their own terrible choreography: one person advances, the other retreats, and a moment of contact sends both back through the same steps. On Annihilate, underground post-industrial producer and vocalist Lana Del Rabies gives that exhausted dance a setting of metallic percussion, dissonant strings, and voices that seem to drift through the walls. The prospect of closeness carries a threat of disappearance, as though reaching for another person might cost you the outline of yourself.
Released through her own Feral Crone Recordings, the single revisits the gothic industrial territory of her 2023 album STREGA BEATA. Among her most accessible recordings to date, Annihilate brings its melody into clearer view within a dense, unsettling arrangement, with echoes of mid-career Nine Inch Nails, early Chelsea Wolfe, Dead Can Dance, and Godflesh. Written and produced by Lana Del Rabies, the track features bass, guitar, and additional instrumentation from Zach Wise, formerly of experimental black metal band Hissing.
Deeply reverberant string tones open the song, their discord setting the room askew before a soft metallic beat begins carrying it forward. Creaking noises punctuate the haze, while thudding distortion stays buried beneath the mix, suggesting a heartbeat accelerating at the approach of something unwelcome. Her singing is soft, breathy, and eerily close; farther away, wails stretch across the recording like cries attempting to reach the living. The whole thing suggests a deserted Victorian factory, its decaying rooms still occupied by machinery and something considerably harder to identify. That dusty, corroded atmosphere recalls the gothic industrial aesthetics of the 1990s, with every small sound acquiring an uncomfortable physical presence.
The lyrics begin with images converging in reverse and a moment suspended in time. From there, the exchange becomes a sequence of opposing movements: his withdrawal prompts her advance, his approach sends her backward. “Push pull fade” reduces the relationship to its recurring mechanism. Hearing her name briefly promises recognition, but the next attempt at contact leaves her grasping in vain. By the time the title enters the refrain, desire reads as a force capable of wearing away the person who feels it.
Directed and edited by Lana Del Rabies/Sam An, the video translates that instability into grainy woodland footage, overlapping figures, and close-ups that dissolve before they can offer much certainty. Pale dresses and fabric catch the light against dense foliage; raised arms, blurred faces, and bodies close to the ground recur through successive layers of exposure. Black-and-white images give way to smeared color, turning the setting into something resembling a damaged reel of folk horror. The footage was shot by Jane Slater, whose video credits include Dildox, Brood Faye, and Sacred Skin, and Vox Porter of Sleek Teeth.
Watch the video for Annihilate below:
Lana Del Rabies began with early experiments sampling female pop musicians into noise tracks, a practice reflected in the project’s name. An has since developed a body of work spanning industrial music, gothic electronics, and experimental heaviness, examining human brutality and the prospect of apocalypse. Her recordings have earned attention from The Quietus, Metal Hammer, and Anthony Fantano, while her live performances have taken her to festivals including Roadburn, Coldwaves, Sled Island, Prepare the Ground, Northwest Terror Fest, and Soulcrusher. She has toured with Author & Punisher, 3TEETH, Pharmakon, JPEGMAFIA, and John Wiese, and opened shows for artists including clipping., Midwife, HEALTH, and Bell Witch.
In 2025, An founded the art-focused label Feral Crone Recordings and released Le Temps Viendra and Omnipotent Fuck. She is currently working on a studio record with former members of Hissing, due in 2027.
Listen to Annihilate below and order the single here.
Lana Del Rabies joins gothic rock vocalist Echos for a West Coast tour this October. See the dates below:
October 8 — Portland, OR — The Off Beat
October 9 — Seattle, WA — The Funhouse
October 10 — Spokane, WA — The District
October 11 — Bend, OR — Domino Room
October 13 — San Francisco, CA — Above DNA
October 14 — Sacramento, CA — Cafe Colonial
October 15 — Fresno, CA — Strummer’s
October 17 — Las Vegas, NV — The Griffin
October 18 — Anaheim, CA — The Parish at House of Blues
Amon Amarth have just released their new album, The Allfather Awakens, via Metal Blade Records, and this time the Swedish Viking metal institution did something it had never really committed to before: it wrote and recorded the album one song at a time, start to finish, before moving on to the next.
Guitarist Johan Söderberg sat down with RodrigoAltaf to walk through the process, and he wanted to clear up a misconception right away. The band did not simply record differently in the studio; it treated every song on the album like its own single from the moment it was written.
“We said we’re going to treat each song as a single,” Söderberg said. “We wrote many songs at the same time, but every song should get the same focus and treatment. That’s how we said it. And then when we came to the studio, we also recorded them fully before we moved to the next song. So we finished the whole song and then moved to the next song.”
That meant no stacking drum takes across the whole record before circling back for guitars, a method plenty of bands lean on. Amon Amarth did each song top to bottom before touching the next one.
Treating every track like a standalone single changed how Söderberg and co-guitarist Olavi Mikkonen approached hooks and choruses too, since nothing could lean on momentum built by the songs around it. It also fed into a bit of friendly rivalry between the band’s two riff writers: “I think definitely we have a little different styles, but it’s not that different,” Söderberg said of writing alongside Mikkonen. “I think that Olavi is a really good songwriter, and that makes me want to become better too. It’s like we have a little competition between us. We want to top each other.”
The album’s second single, “Eight Legs of Thunder,” pulled its title and chorus straight out of Söderberg‘s amp before a single lyric existed. The riff came first, and it came loud: “I was playing with my real amp, with a big 412 speaker,” he explained. “When you play a galloping rhythm like that, it really sounds like a big horse is running right next to you because of the punch from the speaker. So then I thought, we need to make a song about Odin’s horse.”
There was just one problem. Odin’s actual horse is named Sleipnir, and Sleipnir does not exactly beg to be shouted in a chorus: “That’s not very catchy if you want to sing Sleipnir in the chorus, right?” Söderberg said. “So I started to think, what can I call the horse instead of Sleipnir? I just started humming this melody like, ‘Oh, eight legs, yes, eight legs, oh, eight legs of thunder.’ That’s catchy. That’s a good chorus.”
He recorded a rough version himself, the band signed off on it, and when vocalist Johan Hegg wrote the actual lyrics, he built them around Söderberg‘s original chorus idea. The song’s video takes a detour from the band’s usual Norse mythology visuals into a cowboy setting, which was not the original plan. Söderberg wanted a modern racetrack, complete with a competition horse sporting eight legs instead of four to explain the winning margin. The crew could not pull off the racetrack concept, so the cowboy angle came in as a replacement.
“Some fans are like, well, what the fuck are the cowboys, this is not working,” Söderberg said with a shrug in his voice. “But we just do it to amuse ourselves.”
The Allfather Awakens also includes “Upphaf,” Amon Amarth‘s first entirely acoustic track in its 13-album history. The band had wanted an acoustic number for its live set for years, and the melody itself dates back to roughly 1998, but nobody could figure out how to record it properly.
Söderberg said an early demo overcomplicated things badly: “He made a demo of it, but he recorded it in a super complicated way, every note by itself in layers and layers,” Söderberg said. “When we were in the studio and listened to his demo, it’s like, oh, this is gonna take forever to re-record it like that. Then we just thought, let’s simplify it. I played strumming chords on one guitar, you play the melodies on the other guitar, and then add some orchestral elements and choirs to build it up more.”
Stripped of distortion entirely, the song still sounds unmistakably like the band that wrote it, a point Söderberg did not argue with: “That’s always been our approach too, that we need it to have catchy, memorable melodies and riffs,” he said.
Sonically, the band swapped its more recent 5150 amps for a return to Marshalls on most of the record, chasing a more organic, old-school guitar tone. Not every song got the same treatment, though. Downtuned cuts like “Die With a War Cry” leaned on Engl and Peavey amps instead for a heavier edge. Live, none of that distinction survives, Söderberg said, since the band runs through a single Kemper profile for the whole set, adding a delay for leads and a separate clean tone as needed.
The album’s title track, “The Allfather Awakes,” almost did not exist. Söderberg said the band considered the record finished until producer Jacob Hansen asked for one more song, something he called a “stadium song.” Mikkonen had a batch of unused riffs sitting around, showed them to Hansen, and the track came together fast in the studio. Söderberg still is not entirely sure how it ended up as the title track: “I don’t even know why you want to make that the title track,” he said. “I think it was just coincidence, probably.”
“Ascending Like an Eagle” closes the album as a lyrical continuation of “The Serpent’s Trail” from 2022’s The Great Heathen Army, and Söderberg said the connection runs musically too, both songs sharing the epic, slower style the band typically saves for album closers.
Asked whether decades of a locked-in identity ever feels limiting, Söderberg admitted there are ideas that simply do not fit under the Amon Amarth banner, though he has an outlet for them: “When I write Amon Amarth songs, I try to keep it in the Amon Amarth style, and it’s kind of difficult to get away from that,” he said. “But I also make songs just for fun on my free time, and then I try to make different genres like doom metal or goth music, just for fun.” He and his wife have several just-for-kicks bands, with one released song between them so far, and no plans to turn any of it into a proper release.
Söderberg also weighed in on the band’s arena-level status, something it reached without softening its extreme vocals or overall heaviness: “We definitely think our music should be crowd-pleasing and should be sing-along friendly and memorable,” he said. “I think that’s why we have attracted a bigger audience. Now we can play arenas even though we are still a growling death metal band. There aren’t many bands with growling vocals that reach this kind of audience. I think we’re kind of like a gateway band for people who don’t like growling vocals. Then they hear us, and they start to like the melodies, and then they get into the growling.”
Amon Amarth heads out on the road this October alongside Orbit Culture and Soilwork across Europe, debuting an entirely new stage production the band has not even seen in full yet: “It’s going to be massive, and everything is new,” Söderberg said. “That’s going to be really cool to see how that takes place when we actually see it.”
As for a North American run, Söderberg confirmed it is coming, just not this year.
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