The post MISS MAY I Are ‘Highbrow Thieves’ + Share Video for New Single — WATCH appeared first on INFRARED MAGAZINE.
Posted on September 11th 2026, 11:23am
Wine Lips: TV Dinner (Stomp) LP | DL Iggy Pop-endorsed Toronto gonzo-fuzz-garage merchants Wine Lips return with TV Dinner; another cathartic blast to soothe your everyday frustrations. Last time we heard from Wine Lips, they were frying our already shrivelled brains on the excellent Super Mega Ultra after having blown up internationally on the garage-punk […]
The post Wine Lips: TV Dinner – Album Review appeared first on Louder Than War.
Russian Black Metal trio Theosophy return with their seventh icy studio offering, Line Before The Event Horizon, a six-track offering that this time goes further, lyrically, than past offerings. Theosophy have been inspired by the north, nature, fear and other social aspects. But this time, they are venturing out into space and the far reaches of our solar system, an aspect superbly expressed in the bleak cover art, which is a tantalising indicator of what this album actually delivers.
Release Date: 25 September 2026
Words: Jools Green
Opening on Path To The Void, this launches a full-frontal attack on your senses with waves of driving riffs. After a brief dramatic pause, they resume, accompanied by Phantom’s icily acidic vocal delivery. Between the waves of vocals and riffs, you get powerfully eerie, dark melodic swathes that course over the riffs, building in both the atmosphere and texture of the piece.
The pace of the waves of driving riffs elevates further from midway through, making a hugely exciting start to the album.
Hypnotic undulating repeat riffs interspaced with quieter swathes open Birds Under The Sky, with the pace rapidly ramping up to a blackened drive. As the acidic vocals arrive, the intensity and complexity build as the piece progresses, and you also get a haunting melodic element coursing over the driving riffs between the vocals. A great piece, fairly straightforward in construction but extremely well delivered.
Shadows On The Earth is the first of two pieces that take us away from this planet. It opens with the words of the late astronaut Scott Carpenter, the second American to orbit Earth and the fourth American in space, from which hauntingly ethereal guitars emerge.
These rapidly build in layers, ebbing and rebuilding repeatedly at the arrival of and in between the vocals. A hugely engaging, deceptively powerful and icy yet reflective piece that maintains your interest fully.
Neptune’s Aphelion takes us even further out into the icy outer reaches of our galaxy, billions of miles from the light and warmth of the sun. This is possibly my favourite piece of the album. The riffing is fast, intense, and the vocals are superb. They match and add to the dark, icy nature of the music perfectly.
From midway, it breaks briefly away from the intensity, with more melodic swathes repeatedly emerging from the fast riffing, which makes those icy, intense parts even more so.
The next piece, The Glow Of Uch-Sumer, is a superb listen and features guest vocals on the last verse courtesy of Groza’s P.G. With this piece we return to Earth, specifically to the slopes of Uch-Sumer, the local Altai name for what is more commonly known as Mount Belukha, the second highest mountain in Russia.
Musically, it is a hugely reflective and atmospheric piece, particularly as it opens. It is icily melodic. It builds slowly in intensity and density in waves as it progresses, but always maintains a superb, gently undulating flow to the delivery. Across this piece, much of the emphasis is on the music rather than the lyrics. Still, when they are delivered, it is with a superbly icy protraction.
Final offering Voice From The Black is a hugely atmospheric, pitch-black driver with the vocals delivered with powerful intent. It ebbs away towards the midpoint, turning clean and contemplative with reflective lead work, after which it gradually rebuilds to the former drive, delivering powerful, icily protracted vocals before a final reflective drop and fade. A piece that makes a massive statement.
Line Before The Event Horizon for me is an undisputedly excellent slab of Black Metal and will be available as a limited-edition vinyl, digipak CD, cassette, and in digital format.
Line Before The Event Horizon will be released on 25 September 2026 via Apocalyptic Witchcraft. For more details and pre-orders, visit Theosophy on Bandcamp.
Steven Wilson has announced that he will release his latest studio album, Requeim For A Village, through Fiction Records on November 6. He has also shared a video for the album’s title track.
Earlier this week Wilson telegraphed the release of the album with a seemingly cryptic website, also titled Requiem For A Village, changing the imagery on his social media pages and releasing a short video trailer which featured the Scottish actor David Tennant.
Tennant provides the narration on the new album, Wilson’s ninth, which steps back from the modern world and ventures into the unfamiliar, settling in a village that exists beyond time and place. He is joined on the album by former XTC man Andy Partridge, who has written the narration and some of the lyrics, multi-instrumentalist Randy McStine, drummer Russell Holzman (on the tracks Requiem For A Village, Now Departing, A Basket Of Bees and Wheel) and vocalist Katherine Priddy (Murmuration).
“I wanted to get back to a kind of music where you can hear the metaphorical thumbprints,” Wilson says. “Doubling down on the human gestures and flaws in the music, stuff that can’t be created using software. For example, using only analogue synths with all their unpredictability, or not having instruments perfectly in tune. But it also led to me picking up the violin, the oboe, or trying my hand on the drums – playing things I don’t really know how to play but getting something out of them that inspired me in ways I didn’t expect. Approaching the music with a sense of innocence and seeing where it took me. And where it took me was to the village.”
Wilson will be hosting a night at The Social in central London on September 22. Songs From The Village will act as an introduction to all the music that inspired the album, where Wilson will perform a DJ set featuring both songs from the album and the music that inspired it: “expect everything from the gauzy otherness of Boards of Canada and Demdike Stare, the haunted ragas of Third Ear Band, to the creeping dread found in British children’s TV and other broadcasts from the ’70s.” All proceeds from tickets will go to the Here 2 Belong charity, which provides first home kits for care-experienced young people stepping into independence.
Requiem For A Village will be available on CD, Blu-Ray, 140g two 12” black vinyl, oxblood coloured two 12” vinyl and as a boxset featuring 2 CDs, Blu-Ray disc packaged in a 96-page hardback book box. Limited amounts of signed CDs will be available through Amazon, and CDs with exclusive packaging will be available through HMV.
Wilson will play two sold-out shows at the Royal Albert Hall on October 28 and 29, accompanied by his band, the Parallax Orchestra & Sansara choir, conducted by Tom Richards, playing previously unheard orchestral arrangements of The Overview and more which have been prepared especially for these shows.
Steven Wilson: Requiem For A Village
1. Swirl In A Lark’s Eye
2. Requiem For A Village
3. The Same River Twice
4. Now Departing
5. Hiraeth
6. On Chapel Slope
7. Murmuration
8. Curcus Fingerprint
9. A Basket Of Bees
10. Great Green Map
11. Wheel
12. The Old God Is Buried
[Album artwork by THEE Travis Smith]
If you manage to get old(er)—and I sincerely hope you do—and you also happen to be music-obsessed and surrounded by like-minded chums, you will likely notice that at some point a number of people will either halt or at least significantly curb their exploration of brand new music. That’s not terribly surprising, really—if you’ve been mining new music for decades, eventually you begin to wonder if maybe you’d rather, you know, focus on the works you’ve accumulated, as opposed to the often exhausting task of throwing attention to the umpteenth Sabbath / Maiden / Opeth / [etc. ad infinitum] clones that fight for awareness in a massive sea of challengers. In other words, if the ever increasing pile of diminished returns begins to eclipse the gems, why not spend whatever free time you’re lucky to have enjoying the spoils instead of spoiling the joy?
That being said, I have long-since resigned to the fact that I will eventually die wheezing on a cold slab with that dreaded music miner’s lung, because my appetite for exploration hasn’t really waned much over the course of four decades of questing. That’s largely rooted in the following admission: I am incurably addicted to that blissful feeling one gets when a random record hits with zero warning and completely takes over your life—even better if you have no previous experience with the artist in question.
Plot twist: 90% of my more recent ~blown away and suddenly obsessed over~ album experiences have been connected to releases long-since in the rearview mirror. Discovering Concrete Blonde’s 10/10 Bloodletting 25 years after its release, for example. Or finally connecting with a previously self-panned record from a loved band many years later—that sort of thing. Point being, the phenomenon has become increasingly rare as it relates to modern works, but that only makes the rare occasions more special.
Pretty clear where this is going, yes?
Where the hell did Falling Together come from, who the hell is Advent Horizon, and why is this review so unbelievably late.
All great questions.
Answer number 1: It came from over there.
Answer number 2: They are a prog band from Salt Lake City, UT.
Answer number 3: Because I’m an idiot.
So, why spotlight a record that hit the streets four months ago and already has more than just a handful of extremely positive reviews floating around out there on the ol’ internet? Because: 1) I only just discovered it about two weeks ago, 2) If a person like me who spends quite a bit of time researching as many clefts and hollows as time allows for new albums somehow missed it, maybe someone putting eyes here did as well, and 3) It’s really fucking good.
In an effort to save some folks a little time, let’s get some defining characteristics out on the table.
The inclusion of new wave is a key element that helps separate Falling Together and Advent Horizon from their prog peers. Not that it’s never been done before in this specific realm—see Steven Wilson’s To the Bone, or the album I find to be the closest kin to this, musically: the eponymous (and excellent) Anubis Gate release from 2011. But coupling it with another fundamental Falling Together component, FAITH DECONSTRUCTION, and you end up with something that really does have a unique footprint. From the album’s liner notes:
“Falling Together is a record about holding your beliefs under a microscope and determining whether they are truly yours or whether they were planted by others when you were young and impressionable.”
I will likely fail in my attempts to dissect into plain terms the overall tone and unique allure that (with luck) flourishes when a certain form of blue music becomes paired with an introspective ‘theological teardown’, but suffice to say it connects with people, myself included. I wouldn’t necessarily say I had a religious upbringing, but it feels like if you were living somewhere in heartland of America in the ‘80s, you and your family probably went to some sort of church on a fairly regular basis. My family did, I eventually went through Confirmation (“A rite where a baptized youth—usually around 13 to 15 years old—personally affirms the baptismal promises and vows that parents and sponsors made on their behalf when they were infants”), and I definitely experienced a stretch as I became more independent where I questioned the shit out of ALL of it.
That sort of journey is notably thorny and deeply personal, and it can manifest in a peculiar sense of trepidatious-turned-confident freedom that really gets tested when things such as grief or isolation enter the picture. Religion’s safety net is a comfort, and it can eclipse its propensity for various failures and prejudices as a deeply flawed institution. Bands that manage to capture and convey some sense of that sentiment hit in a curious and singular way for those who can relate. Two random examples: King’s X and the way they’ve folded faith deconstruction into their records since day one, or the sadly defunct Crusades on the punk end of the spectrum that did similarly in a much darker way—both very important bands for me across the years that… shouldn’t feel this connected? [shrugs so hard my head falls off]
For its part, Falling Together seamlessly melds its manifest faith deconstruction narrative into a continually twisting, flipping and soaring progressive epic that very often nails that unique… ‘golden gloom’ atmosphere that can flourish when a band explores sovereignty from any given religious institution. And make no mistake, there is a sadness there—to have whatever sort of metaphysical connection you grew up with challenged in this manner can be as unsettling as it is freeing, and Advent Horizon’s resolve to attach that warm and familiar 80s’ new wave nostalgia to it all maximizes the tone even more. I feel a bit crazy for not first highlighting the incredible 19-minute opening salvo, but it was honestly the poppy follow-up “Faith’s Window” that first stopped me dead in my tracks.
Light stuff? Sure. But after swaddling the listener in that beautifully sympathetic melancholy for its first 3 minutes, “Faith’s Window” suddenly turns a hard corner into a much more assertive face that includes bits of harsh vocals and a much heavier stance. It’s a perfect collision between pop (not always a bad word!) and prog, and I have seriously lost count how many times that refrain and chorus have worked their way into my head while out and about and away from any sort of speakers.
As much as I appreciate the message and that ‘golden gloom’, though, I might argue that Falling Together’s greatest strength lies in how incredibly collaborative the full 47 minutes feels. The initial song structures are the result of founding members Rylee McDonald (vocals, guitar, keys, percussion) and Mike Lofgreen (drums, percussion, harsh vocals) taking umpteen trips into the wilds of Utah with an acoustic guitar and fishing gear in tow, but Falling Together is truly the textbook definition of a collaborative effort, where a tight-knit group of individuals—all of whom seem fully and equally invested—bring their ideas and A-games to the table. So, no one element ever really outshines them all, even if it does kind of feel like a guitar freak’s promised land. Consequently, leads are plentiful, but they’re notably lyrical in lieu of being unduly ostentatious. And, yeah, everyone and every instrument feels a moment away from adding immeasurably to a song’s overall footprint.
So, does our protagonist, Rylee McDonald, walk away from this twisty-turny emotional journey a dyed in the wool atheist? Based on the lyrics for closer “Animals,” I do not believe so. As it happens, it is quite feasible to withdraw from religion in its grossly broken institutional form and remain (hold onto your dreamcatchers) “spiritual.” Some Europeans actually have a pretty good word for that: “ietsism” (“somethingism”)—the belief in something bigger than ourselves but separate from any sort of specific doctrine or practice. Now, whether or not that’s the ultimate ticket for Falling Together is (and probably should be) open to interpretation, because, again, this sort of venture is intensely personal.
The record does, however, feel tailor-made for, but obviously not exclusive to, those who have experienced a similar trek, and I will confirm that its capacity for fellowship and commiseration in this regard is huge. Falling Together feels like the sort of album that will be there for you when you need it by design. It’s heavy, it’s light, it’s catchy, it’s complex, but above all else, it’s the textbook definition of a «thoughtful» album, both in terms of how it was constructed and in the way it inspires the listener to get comfortably lost as they contemplate their place in this turbulent and often inscrutable universe.
Would I have found Advent Horizon if I didn’t remain a tireless proponent of boldly going where I haven’t gone before? Probably not. Sure am glad I did, though, because obsessing over this record over the course of the last couple weeks has been one of the more rewarding musical endeavors I’ve had in 2026.
The post Advent Horizon – Falling Together Review appeared first on Last Rites.
Hackneyed is a death metal band from Germany: they were playing some special shows this year, including Wacken Open Air. That’s where we interviewed them!
Benedetta
I’m here with the amazing Hackneyed. How are you doing, guys?
Hackneyed
Fine, fine. We’re a bit tired here. Long journey. And also long journey beginning of the week. We’ve been playing in Romania at the Rockstadt. And so, basically, this week is being on the road. Four travel days and two show days. But we’re doing fine. At least I had ten years to save some energy. After ten years break, it’s only these ten shows. And so, I’m happy this guy did the booking. We’re playing really nice shows this year. So that you can rest again. Ten years resting after that. And then probably in ten years again.
Benedetta
And you’re playing in such a legendary anniversary edition of Wacken. How does it feel?
Hackneyed
Yeah, it’s great. It’s an anniversary for us as well. Like I said, ten years break in between. And sixteen years since we last played Wacken. It’s nice to be back actually. Of course, it’s an honor to play here too. In this special anniversary year. We just arrived five hours ago and walked around. The weather is nice. Looking forward to the show. But looking forward, we’re playing at night. So, we don’t have the sun burning us down, we don’t have to deal with the heat.
Benedetta
Do you think that we will ever have some equality between men and women in the metal world?
Hackneyed
Actually, we had a female bass player a few years back. Unfortunately, she had to quit due to jobs and whatsoever. She lived a bit of away from us. Especially, it was never a thing of gender. If you’re able to play in a band, if you have the energy on stage and whatsoever, there are a lot of qualities that have females that we cannot compete. It’s great to have this kind of diversity on stage. Because I think it’s also for women much easier to connect to a band. If there are five sweaty big dudes standing there or if there’s a female player as well. I guess that’s also something women often don’t get into the music because it’s such a man-dominated thing. Therefore, I think it’s great. It’s also very great to see how many new bands are coming up. For example, Spiritbox, Jinjer. Newer bands and modern bands especially. Up to the music scene. I think it’s a good development for the music scene. Let’s hope that the situation keeps on getting better. We’re playing directly after Guilt Trip today. I think it’s female musicians. Now it’s only us five guys again on the tour bus. But I’m missing the time when there was a girl with us on the tour bus, because we’ve been showering much more. And not drinking that much beer.
Benedetta
Guys, thank you so much for doing this interview. Is there anything else that you want to add to our readers?
Hackneyed
We’re looking forward to the show. Hope you enjoy it too. And keep up the work. I mean, it’s a really good topic. We don’t only have it into our society. We also have to bring it back into all the culture stuff we’re doing. I think it’s a good thing to have more women on every place. In politics, in music, we need them. Because the world is heading really straight forward to going down.
The post Interview with Hackneyed first appeared on FemMetal – Goddesses of Metal.
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Posted on September 11th 2026, 10:58am