Armored Saint has never been a band to stand still, and Emotion Factory Reset, their new album, is no exception. The title alone does a lot of work. Vocalist John Bush broke it down in a recent conversation with Rodrigo Altaf, and it turns out there are layers to it; some conceptual, some deeply personal.

“I always think of Armored Saint as a band that kind of touches into various emotions for people when they’re listening to our music,” Bush said. “And then a reset is kind of like when you make a record, you’re regrouping, resetting in a sense to come up with different ideas for some new product that you’re wanting to put out for the public.”

The factory part of the title comes from how Bush sees the modern recording process: each member handles their piece of the puzzle in sequence, building something together from separate contributions. “Sometimes factories can be a little cold,” he acknowledged, “but I think of this as a warm factory.”

Bassist Joey Vera had described every Armored Saint album as a new skin. Bush appreciated the analogy but pushed back slightly on the implication that the band is shedding or dismissing what came before: “Every record should be different. Every record should feel different. It’s a different time in life,” he said. “I mean, I know people love March of the Saint, 1984, Symbol of Salvation, 1991, Revelation, 2000. But the reality is this is 2026. So it’s just a different time, a different time in your life, all these different feelings and things that you’re going through personally. You kind of put that into making a record at that time.”

With no label constraints and no commercial pressure dictating the direction, Bush said the band approaches the writing with full creative latitude, within reason: “I always joke, today we’ll be in hip hop, death metal, reggae. We’re not going to put a record comprised of those three styles of music and go, ‘here’s the new Saint, man.’ We know what we kind of are — heavy metal, hard rock — and that’s the roots of it. But that being said, I think we feel like we can do whatever we want for the most part, and that helps us keep broadening our sound.”

One noticeable shift on Emotion Factory Reset is how much more Vera is singing. Bush noted it with a raised eyebrow and a grin: “Joey‘s singing his butt off. I don’t know if he’s vying for the lead vocal position in the band now or what, but he’s singing great.”

Guitarist Jeff Duncan also contributes background vocals, and bassist Phil Sandoval has been flexing his voice in a blues side project. “I don’t know if these guys are all trying to get in on my job here,” Bush deadpanned. “But it just broadens the Armored Saint sound, which is cool.”

The lead single, “Close to the Bone,” dealt with the tension of swallowing disagreement rather than confronting it, and Bush sees it as something bigger than a personal grievance: “It’s that fine line of how much do you get into battles and you pick your battles,” he said. “The Internet and the digital world we live in — you can go into comment sections and write whatever you want. Nobody really knows you. You’re kind of hidden behind this veil, which to me is almost cowardly.” He paused, then widened the lens. “What I’ve been telling people lately is we’re struggling as a society where people just don’t want to listen that much. Everybody wants to throw out their thoughts, but how many people are stopping and saying, let me hear what you’re saying?”

The follow-up single, “Hit a Moonshot,” came with a video that Bush described as funny, stunt-filled, and cool in equal measure. True to form, the song borrows a sports metaphor: a Bush trademark stretching back to titles like “Left Hook from Right Field” and “Punching the Sky.” Here, the baseball term gets repurposed to describe someone who always manages to land on their feet regardless of how badly things go sideways.

“It kind of has a little sarcastic drive to it,” he said.

“Every Man-Any Man” operated in similar territory, examining the idea that everything has a price and someone is willing to pay it. Bush was careful to frame it as an observation rather than a lecture: “My objective is not to tell people what to think. Too many people are trying to do that. My idea is just to raise thoughts and go, ‘take a look at this perspective — what are your feelings on it?’” He added that the ambiguity is intentional. “Sometimes I write a song, and then 10 years later it means something completely different. It makes it timeless.”

The album’s most personal moment is “Buckeye,” written about his daughter leaving for college in Ohio. Bush was visibly proud of it: “I love the intro and the intro is the outro — it’s full circle. It kind of has a Zeppelin-y style to the beat and the groove. Big vocals, big chorus.” Despite the specific trigger, he sees the song as open-ended enough to resonate beyond its origins. “It could be about the void of people leaving, separation, or somebody dying. That void of separation — it could be various emotions. Because that’s how I felt with her leaving: I was very sad, but at the same time very proud. I had some anxiety. All those things.”

His daughter has since gone on a semester abroad in Rome, which the family visited a few weeks before the interview. “To see her growth,” Bush said. “It was awesome.”

On the album’s artwork — the Armored Saint mascot rendered against an industrial backdrop — Bush explained that the band deliberately wanted to avoid repeating the purely medieval aesthetic of earlier covers. “It’s hard to beat March of the Saint — that cover is spectacular,” he said. The solution was to combine eras: the armored knight set against a factory landscape, collapsing centuries into one image. Vera oversaw the art direction, working with an artist in Europe. “The knight came out great,” Bush said. “The guy did a spectacular job.”

Beyond the new album, Bush has been gradually activating his catalog from his Anthrax years. Three shows in December went over well enough to confirm that he wants to do more, though the timing has to work around Armored Saint commitments: “It was a lot of me talking about it for years,” he said. “So yeah, it was good to say, okay, I’m not talking anymore about it, I’m doing it. And it was so fun. The fans were just very, very excited and emotional about hearing those tunes.”

He’s equally sanguine about the online debates that inevitably pit different Anthrax eras against each other: “If you’re negative towards me, you’ve got to be funny. If you’re funny and disparaging, I’ll think it’s amusing. ‘That guy sucks’ — come on, you can’t come up with anything better than that?” He shrugged off the tribalism altogether. “You can like both. You don’t have to pick a side. Heaven and Hell is pretty much a flawless record, but so is Paranoid. So what are you gonna do?”

Category Seven, his heavier side project, is also stirring. Bush said he’s been working on new material, though he’s making a point of clearing his head of the Armored Saint sessions first: “I have to exercise all the work I did with Armored Saint to kind of get it out of my system, see something new from a fresh perspective. Otherwise, I’m going to phone it in, and that’s the last thing I want to do with anything.”

As for live plans, Armored Saint has a packed stretch ahead: a show at the Rainbow Bar & Grill parking lot party in Los Angeles, the Milwaukee Metal Fest, a date outside Mexico City, and a run of European dates that includes Sweden and Poland; the latter alongside Sabaton and Testament. Some dates with Metal Church are also on the schedule, a prospect Bush welcomed, given his friendship with vocalist Dave Ellefson. North American touring is still being worked out, but Bush was clear that Canada is on the list: “Montreal and Toronto — some of the best cities in the world for metal, for sure.”

Emotion Factory Reset is out now. Grab your copy here.

The post JOHN BUSH: ARMORED SAINT’s “Emotion Factory Reset” Proves “We Can Do Whatever We Want — And That Keeps Broadening Our Sound” appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

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Following the St Arnold penchant for amber beers, this IPA tastes more like a dark beer and lets the malt bring out the flavor of the hops, resulting in a musky aromatic spice that perfuses the otherwise gentle flavor of this beer.

For those who like extreme IPAs, this beer will fall short from a lack of the bitter grapefruit juice flavor of the post-hipster IPA, but it has a warmth to it that balances the hop extremity which results in a depth of flavor.

This also feels more like a dark beer in that it is heavy in flavor and requires a moment to savor. It has more sweetness than most IPAs, but more texture of different flavors which makes it perfect for contemplative drinking.

MALWAVE, an Ontario duo with a taste for electro, post-rock, dark dance, vapour haze, and experimental drift, land with their second single, Forever Chemical. The single belongs to the year’s ongoing MALWAVE rollout, and it carries itself like a transmission from some damp, ecstatic corner of the future where Mogwai, Daft Punk, and Darkside have all been shoved into the same flooded elevator and told to make peace before the power cuts out.

The track starts with experimental electro beats that twitch and roll with a strange aquatic logic, neither settling into club comfort nor collapsing into art-school drift. Synthwave keyboards spread across the frame in glossy sheets, while the cold post-punk guitar riff supplies the human ache: melody-filled, beautiful lines that bend through the track with a wounded elegance, trading cheap prettiness for something stranger and more bodily. Then come the experimental leads, little shards of nervous light, and layered vocals that appear less like a singer stepping forward than voices caught in the tank, moving around the listener in warped, weightless circles.

Forever Chemical moves with purpose, even when it wanders into vapourous passages and post-rock sprawl. It has the patience of people who understand the value of an idea being allowed to mutate, grow fins, and swim off into the briny deep. The track’s dystopian mood feels akin to the nauseous thrill of staring at a screen too long.

The video pushes that feeling into full psychedelic absurdity: an underwater performance populated by groovy jellyfish and schools of fish moving through the frame. In the context of a song called Forever Chemical, those fish carry more than visual charm. They suggest the first casualties of poisoned water, tiny bodies at the front line of damage, humans prefer to keep abstract until it turns up in the glass, the bloodstream, the child, the shore. The clip’s aquatic beauty becomes a warning with fins: all that colour, all that motion, all that life suspended in a fragile blue world we keep treating like a sewer drain.

Forever Chemical suggests MALWAVE are chasing a peculiar future: dance music with saltwater in its lungs, post-rock with a mutant pulse, electronic music that keeps asking whether the machine can still feel panic. The schools of fish serve as a reminder of what is at stake before the damage becomes headline, lawsuit, bottled-water advisory, or family secret. MALWAVE dress the warning in motion and strange light, but beneath the psychedelic glow is a blunt little fact: the future always reaches the water first.

Watch the video for Forever Chemical below:

MALWAVE’s new single, Forever Chemical, is out. Listen below and order here.

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The post Ontario Duo MALWAVE Share Video for Experimental Alt-Synth Single “Forever Chemical” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Rob Base, the New York rapper best known for his timeless hit “It Takes Two,” has died. Per Variety, Base, born Robert Ginyard, passed away today, just four days after his birthday, after a private cancer battle. He was 59.

The post “It Takes Two” Rapper Rob Base Dead At 59 appeared first on Stereogum.

Now I realize, all that I have known
It’s always what we had to find
I see your breath tonight
The air is pure and cold
It feels just like another life 

You wake from a dream, and the song is there, whole and trembling, as if some hidden room of the mind had been lit all night without your knowing. It has arrived carrying the strange authority of things discovered rather than made. For a moment, you are less its author than its witness, holding this fragile visitation before daylight, duty, and doubt begin their slow erasure. This is what happened to Chris Huggett of Modele one Christmas Day, ultimately resulting in the band’s new single Under The Starlight, from their upcoming album, Divine Surrender.

The chorus comes in low enough to shake the fillings loose, a subterranean throb that seems less sung than hauled up from some cellar under the heart. Then the guitars start climbing, bending themselves into long black arcs, reaching for a dirty little glimmer somewhere past the smoke, the debt, the dead romances, the whole busted museum of old salvation.

Huggett sings like he has swallowed the ache whole and decided to make it useful. There is weight in the voice, sure, but also hunger: the sound of a man still pawing through the wreckage for meaning after all the easy answers have curdled in the glass. Modelo does the smart thing and stays there. They do not sprint for catharsis or throw glitter over the bruise. They lean into the pressure, let the song breathe heavily, let the feeling get stranger and deeper.

The bloodline is there if you know where to look: The Mission in the big-shouldered sweep, Clan of Xymox in the midnight hypnosis, Cold Cave in that sleek, nocturnal drag. But Modele are not playing dress-up in somebody else’s black coat. They know how to set beauty beside dread and let the two stare each other down. That tension is where the song bites.

The lyrics feel like waking up on a freezing platform with somebody else’s ghost still warm in your coat. Love is here, but it has the sickly glow of a memory that will not stay buried: breath in the cold, flowers under the moon, a last train heading straight into the beautiful bad idea at the end of the line. This is a love followed down to the water’s edge like every doomed fool who ever mistook eternity for a second chance. Streets disappear, promises hang around like old debts, and death gets treated less like an ending than a lousy revolving door.

The video, filmed by Leann Weston and edited by Kuba Rygal, carries that same ache to a mysterious shoreline, rendered in glorious black and white like an old photograph. Modele wander the beach as if they have washed up inside their own memory, chasing a ghost, a lover, a loss, or some shape of the past that keeps moving just ahead of them.

It is a lovely metaphor for the song: bodies crossing sand, water waiting at the edge of everything, the band caught between pursuit and surrender. The shore becomes a borderland where romance, death, and remembrance all blur together, and the black-and-white imagery gives the whole thing the feel of a dream you wake from with salt on your tongue and somebody’s name still caught in your throat.

Watch below:

Listen to Under The Starlight below and order the single here.

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The post “It Feels Just Like Another Life” — Toronto Post-Punk Duo Modele Unveil Video for “Under the Starlight” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Blues Rock Weekly highlights two new Rory Gallagher covers from Joe Bonamassa, a new album announcement from Danielle Nicole, plus new music from Samantha Fish, When Rivers Meet, and Datura4.

The post Blues Rock Weekly – May 22, 2026 appeared first on Blues Rock Review.

Monolord’s “Neverending” finds the band refining their signature doom sound into something sharper, more focused, and unexpectedly alive.

The post Monolord’s ‘Neverending’ Feels Like Doom Metal Breathing Again — Review appeared first on Audio Ink Radio.

Thom Yorke was honored at Thursday night’s Ivor Novello Awards, taking the podium after an introduction by surprise presenter Harry Styles, who called Radiohead his favorite band and announced he lost his virginity to “Talk Show Host.” In interviews surrounding the ceremony, he talked about what he’s been up to, which includes finishing up the solo album mentioned by Radiohead bandmate Ed O’Brien (whose own solo album Blue Morpho is out today). It sounds like he worked on it with Sam Petts-Davies, the producer and engineer who has helmed Yorke’s recent albums with the Smile.

The post Thom Yorke Talks New Solo Album, Next Radiohead Tour, Music Industry Arseholes appeared first on Stereogum.

Check out a new official music video for Dimmu Borgir‘s brand new single, “As Seen In The Unseen”. The latter is taken from their upcoming album Grand Serpent Rising.
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