The horn introduction to CALLIDER’s ‘One Note’ became substantial enough to earn a track of its own. On the newly released The Explorer, it appears as ‘Stars, Wind and Sails (Embarking of the Hōkūleʻa)’, immediately before the song it originally introduced. “The arrangement starts with a long horn section intro which we split off into […]
THEOSOPHY have unveiled a new video for ‘Birds Under The Sky’, filmed in Barnaul, southwestern Siberia. Eekseye directed the clip, which is now available through Apocalyptic Witchcraft’s YouTube channel. The song comes from Line Before The Event Horizon, released on 25 September 2026. The announcement highlights the track’s prominent melodies and powerful blast beats, presenting […]
(written by Islander) What are the odds? For the second week in a row one of our Friday premieres fell through at the 11th hour, leaving a hole in our schedule and free time I didn’t expect to have. As usual when these things happen, I have pivoted to pull together a roundup of new […]
Cam Cole made his name by seeing how much sound one person could make. Guitar, footdrums, a rough-edged voice and enough rhythmic force to make a street corner feel too small became both the music and the spectacle. The one-man-band identity carried him from years of busking into international touring, viral live clips, a cameo on Ted Lasso and the American Mileage documentary, where his path crossed with living blues figures including Bobby Rush, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, R.L. Boyce and Kenny Brown.
Lost In Creation arrives at the point where that description is no longer enough. The blues is still underneath everything, but the fourth Cam Cole album opens more doors: grunge, alternative rock, psychedelia, folk, stoner-rock weight, studio atmosphere and moments of real vulnerability all move through the frame. The important part is that the expansion does not make Cole sound polite. The distortion still bites, the rhythms still lurch, and the record is at its best when the music feels a little dangerous and a little strange.
Lost In Creation album artwork supplied with the press materials.
The Wall Gets Wider
Cole says the change was deliberate. His first three albums were largely built around capturing the thing people had already responded to on the street: one person playing everything at once, with only subtle overdubs used when necessary to make a guitar sound thicker rather than to create an obvious second part.
“It’s the fourth album now. I could either keep doing what I’ve always been doing, or I could paint with it a little more and express myself in a way people haven’t really heard before.” — Cam Cole
That word — paint — gets close to what Lost In Creation does differently. Cole still records the core guitar and drums live, usually choosing the second or third take when the feeling is right. But now he is willing to build around that foundation with additional guitars and sounds. The raw performance remains the cornerstone; the studio becomes another instrument instead of merely a place to document the show.
That also means being willing to throw the foundation away when it does not feel right. “Get Up Ya Honky Tonk” became the problem child of this album. Cole went back to it, remixed it several times and kept hearing something he did not trust. Now he can listen and hear nothing wrong with it. At the time, however, it was the one song that refused to arrive easily.
A Record That Keeps Changing Shape
The opening run makes the new range obvious. “Fee Fi Foe” comes in dark and dirty, with grungy slide guitar, heavy distortion and a vocal treatment that sounds pushed through an old PA. There is some Jack White abrasion in the attack, but the stranger rhythmic personality keeps it from feeling like imitation. It is blues-rock dragged through fuzz, grime and a modern alternative-rock filter.
“Rabbit (She’s What I Want)” leans further into alternative rock. There are flashes of Nirvana and Corrosion of Conformity in the weight and texture, but the heaviness does not bury the emotional center. There is real longing in it — not just a lyric about wanting someone, but the sound of wanting someone. “Chasing Dreams” changes the temperature again with a catchier, more immediate pulse. It is one of the album’s most accessible tracks, proof that Cole can make the sound easier to enter without sanding off his personality.
“Ur So Beautiful” is one of the record’s most revealing turns. On first listen it carries the dark acoustic weight of the 1990s unplugged era — Alice in Chains and Stone Temple Pilots are fair touchstones — but Cole confirmed that the grunge intention is absolutely there. Delta blues may be the foundation of his music, he says, but grunge, psychedelia and a little Josh Homme-style desert rock are major parts of his vocabulary too.
“Grunge is a humongous genre for me… I especially like mixing the blues with the grunge.” — Cam Cole
The song came from a more personal place than its darkness might suggest. Cole wrote it while caught in the honeymoon-stage infatuation of a relationship that ultimately did not last. He walked into the studio with the feeling already present, turned it into a song and, with Valentine’s Day approaching, sent it to her. His summary of the result is considerably less poetic: “That got me in there.”
Cam Cole. Official press image. Photo: Tomm Morton.
The middle of Lost In Creation gets rougher and more playful. “Tailgate” piles on distortion and gives Cole’s vocal a near-spoken, almost rap-like cadence. “Feeling Me Now” seems to drag itself into motion before snapping into a faster, heavier groove, with rhythm doing as much work as the riff. Cole says the song also represents another small technical breakthrough in his foot-drum playing: a four-to-the-floor feel and double tambourines he had not previously been able to execute the way he wanted.
Then comes “Get Up Ya Honky Tonk,” the track that best explains what happens when Cole lets the weirdness stay weird. To these ears, it sounds like blues wandered into a Primus rehearsal: crooked, funky, stomping and playful, with raw guitar and a distorted radio-like vocal cutting across the groove. Cole laughed at the comparison because other people have told him something similar — and because he has barely listened to Primus. He knows a little of the band, but not enough to have consciously borrowed anything. That makes the rhythmic resemblance more interesting, not less.
The record works best when Cole lets the weirdness stay weird.
Mississippi, Slide Guitar and “Shroom Swamps”
Cole’s American mileage matters here, but not as a convenient explanation for the whole record. In the interview, he connected Mississippi most directly to the way he heard new possibilities in slide guitar and to the value of looseness — influences that became especially concrete in one instrumental.
He has long felt that slide guitar can do more than remain inside familiar blues structures. In Mississippi he became interested in bridging the recognizable architecture of 12-bar blues with different scales and chordal movement. Then a particularly strange day in the cypress swamps turned that theory into a song.
At an earlier show, a fan had given Cole psychedelic mushrooms. He forgot them in a pair of jeans. Later, during time off in Mississippi, he found them again while wearing those trousers and visiting the swamps. He ate them, discovered they were much stronger than expected, became increasingly aware of the possibility of alligators and retreated to the pickup truck with a camper body he was renting. There, guitar in hand, the musical idea clicked.
“It is exactly what it says on the tin. It was a psychedelic adventure in the swamps of Mississippi, and it was a sound I was looking for.” — Cam Cole on “Shroom Swamps”
Cole put down his phone and recorded what he was playing. That sketch became “Shroom Swamps,” later expanded with drums. It happened during the same stretch in the States when he interviewed Bobby Rush. The instrumental is one of the album’s most vivid pieces: creepy Delta-flavored slide, psychedelic atmosphere and the feeling of walking through mud with every step resisting the next one. On the record it sits immediately before the title track, functioning like a murky passageway into the final statement.
The trip also sharpened another lesson. Around Bobby Rush and R.L. Boyce, Cole heard musicians who were not obsessed with perfect edges. He was struck by Boyce’s willingness to let the playing get messy if the vibe was right. The takeaway was not to become careless; it was to understand that precision is not the only kind of control. “If you can save it in time, it sounds in,” he said. That looseness is now part of what he wants to carry forward.
Cam Cole. Official press image. Photo: Tomm Morton.
The Work Is Part of the Show
Cole never planned to become a one-man band. The songs and the imaginary band in his head came first. After being repeatedly let down by drummers, he moved from a stomp box to adding a tambourine, then tried using both feet at once. Eventually he found the Farmer FootDrum and began the long process of teaching his body to do what his arrangements required.
The setup is now customized, partly because Cole hits it hard enough to break things. Pete, the builder, has helped modify the levers so they return properly, though Cole says he can still “break the bastard” and values having a tech nearby when that happens. Each record tends to bring a new beat or another piece of coordination he did not have before.
That difficulty is not something Cole wants to hide with electronics. He has considered simplifying his street and live setup into a smaller digital system, but he thinks doing so would remove one of the reasons people stop. He spent roughly seven years busking before the final three years became genuinely profitable. The difference, as he sees it, was not convenience. It was finally building a show where a passerby could look at the physical effort and immediately understand that what they were seeing was hard.
“People on the street don’t give you any time unless you’re giving them something. You’ve got to hypnotize them.” — Cam Cole
When that happens, the reaction still matters to him. Asked what it feels like to see someone in a crowd become completely absorbed, Cole answered without hesitation: he loves stopping people. “That’s what I live for.”
Away from the road, he is already writing again, working out the show for an upcoming February tour and continuing his “Sounds From The Van” videos. His restlessness reaches outside blues-rock too: he keeps an electronic dance-music project as another outlet for ideas that do not belong inside the Cam Cole sound. He talks about songwriting as capturing lightning in a bottle, and about the stage as something that can always be pushed further — even down to visual devices such as the large spiral wheel he uses behind him. The one-man-band concept may be expanding, but the instinct to make people stop and look remains intact.
Vulnerability, One Takes and the Rooms That Matter
The final three tracks deepen the record rather than simply making it louder. “You Shall Be Saved” begins stripped down and vulnerable, then widens without losing the exposed quality at its center. Cole wrote it in the same general batch as Unleash, but it was too singer-songwriter-oriented to belong comfortably on that heavier album. Lost In Creation gave it a better home.
The song dates to the pandemic period and the collective feeling of watching livelihoods, small businesses and ordinary stability disappear. Its message is not that music magically fixes any of that. It is that if some part of you can still sway to the rhythm, there is at least something to hold onto. Cole admits he may have been trying to pick himself up as much as anyone else.
The performance has another layer of significance: the main vocal, guitar and drums were captured together in one take, with only a few backing vocals added later. That raw ending, where the vocal seems to lose itself inside the song, is not studio theater. It is the core performance itself.
“You Shall Be Saved” was recorded at Rockfield in Wales, where Cole also recorded Unleash. He points to the studio’s history with artists including Queen and Oasis, but what he values most is the ability to live there for a stretch, wake up and immediately work rather than carry the outside world into the room. Most of Lost In Creation, however, was recorded at Dean Street Studios in London, with Markus Stretz producing and mixing, and Sean Magee mastering at Abbey Road.
“You only get to do this once with these songs. I could record them all at home on my laptop and a microphone, but there is a fucking difference.” — Cam Cole
For Cole and Stretz, that difference is the room. They are self-described music nerds who care about how drums, guitars and voices react to a physical space. Dean Street and Abbey Road are not status symbols in that telling; they are tools. Cole points out that sometimes the magic space is not even a studio — it can be a corridor, a staircase or any place where the sound suddenly becomes bigger than the walls around it. He cites the famous stairwell sound behind John Bonham’s drums on Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” as the kind of accidental acoustic discovery musicians spend their lives chasing.
Getting Lost Without Losing the Stomp
“Shroom Swamps” needs no lyric at all. The title track that follows it does. “Lost In Creation” turns the album’s outward experimentation inward: darker, more reflective and lyrically direct, it sounds like an artist confronting the quantity of ideas in front of him and the difficulty of knowing which direction deserves to survive.
That is also why the album’s breadth works more often than it does not. What could look like genre-hopping across ten songs gradually starts to feel like the point. Cole is allowing himself to chase sounds until they tell him where they belong. The one-man wall of sound has become a room with more doors in it.
The record is not flawless. Its breadth can occasionally feel restless, and the distorted vocal treatment appears often enough that what begins as a striking texture can become expected. “Chasing Dreams” is immediately likable but less idiosyncratic than the album’s strangest material. Those are modest trade-offs for a record that is clearly trying to grow instead of simply repeating a successful formula.
The standouts are “Get Up Ya Honky Tonk,” “You Shall Be Saved,” and “Lost In Creation,” with “Shroom Swamps” functioning as the odd instrumental detour that gives the album a world of its own. More importantly, Lost In Creation answers the question hanging over the project: Cam Cole can expand the palette without losing the stomp. The blues is still underneath everything, but it is no longer a fence.
At the end of the interview, Cole resisted telling listeners exactly what they should understand about him when the album ends. That, he said, belongs to them. What he hopes they hear is the journey — the different flavors, the things he is pulling in, and the work of creating each song on its own terms.
“I hope they understand the musical journey I went on to make the album… Anything else they take from it is a bonus. That part is up to the individual.” — Cam Cole
That is probably the right final word. Lost In Creation is not a clean arrival at a new identity. It is the sound of an artist discovering how much more the identity he already built can hold. Getting lost, this record argues, is not the same as being defeated.
And Cole does not sound finished with the journey. As the conversation ended, he said he expects to return to the United States soon. For a musician whose career began by forcing strangers to stop, the next chapter may be less about proving how much noise one man can make and more about seeing how far that noise can travel.
Stream and buy Wyrm Chasm on Bandcamp Dallas black metal quartet WYRM CHASM have released their self-titled debut album independently on vinyl, CD and digital formats. The eight-track record is out today, 23 October 2026. Physical editions include 180g black vinyl, listed on the band’s Bandcamp page as an edition of 100, and a jewel […]
SERPENT SKIES have shared ‘Where Is Your God’, the second and final single from their forthcoming album, Hollow Crown, due on 20 November 2026. Following ‘The Colors of My Truth’, the track turns towards faith, doubt and the collapse of previously dependable beliefs. The release announcement describes a song concerned with what remains when familiar […]
Thank god for the weekend! It’s feeling like winter is rapidly approaching this week, but we’re not quite at the end of year yet with plenty of brilliant new albums to sink our teeth into as we hit the penultimate week of October.
That in mind, here’s the results of last week’s vote! Blackgold brought glory to the nu metal revival with Killaz landing a top three position (and if you like that, check out the last two tracks this week!), while Aussie newcomers Nika landed at number two. But ultimately, the crown could only go to the original symphonic metal queen as Tarja teamed up with Apocalyptica for something truly epic in Tango.
We’ve got a diverse bag for you again this week with new singles from Floor Jansen and Delain, plus a surprise drop from Machine Head. There’s also a healthy showing from emergent and underground bands, so don’t forget to cast your vote in the poll below – and have an excellent weekend!
Floor Jansen – Everything Is Moving On
It probably would’ve been a bit on-the-nose for this to have come out with last week’s shock announcement that Floor Jansen had left Nightwish, but Everything Is Moving On feels like a perfect summation of the confident way the singer is approaching the future. More a pounding, triumphant old school metal track than the usual symphonic grandeur, it’s a great showcase of her powerful voice and shows how she’s expanding her repertoire on upcoming solo album Hytress, due January 15.
Delain – We Are Fire
Talk about a rough month for symphonic metal fans. Diana Leah has announced her departure from Delain after 2023’s Dark Waters introduced her as the new singer of the group. Rather than recruit a direct replacement, Delain have announced plans for a star-studded new album that will feature figures including Marko Hietala and Sharon Den Adel. First single We Are Fire sees bandleader Martijn Westerholt recruit Eluveitie’s Fabienne Erni, Italian singer Paolo Ribaldini and Noa Gruman of Sabaton’s Legendary Orchestra for a typically bombastic and grandiose song.
Evil Invaders – D.S.S. (Death Strikes Suddenly)
Get some thrash in you! Kicking off with a delightful Araya howl, Belgians Evil Invaders are leaning hard on 80s speed with new single D.S.S. (Death Strikes Suddenly). If you’re reeling from the recent death of Cronos, this might tackle the evil itch nicely, new album Weaponized Chaos set for a February 19 release, with the band touring the UK with Heathen the following month.
Vindicta – Idol(l)s
It’s been a year since the line-up of Dogma fractured, and a little under that since former members of the demonic nun group formed Vindicta. Now they’ve announced they’re signed to Napalm Records and put out new single Idol(l)s, a track that adds a spikier edge to the music they were making in their previous incarnation, seemingly poking fun at the situation its members found themselves in.
Machine Head – Sutures
Robb Flynn’s barely let the dust settle on the Unatoned era and is already teasing new music. Sutures is a surprise new single from Machine Head, and feels like an especially feral and vicious release from the group, its hardest edges only slightly blunted by some big, chest-beating melodic passages.
Zilqy – Misfit Toys
Zilqy continue to be one of Japan’s most difficult to pin down metal groups. On new single Misfit Toys the band mix hyperactive beats and heavy breakdowns with joyous, typically Japanese melodic choruses to great effect. Taken from the band’s debut Birth Of Riot – which came out earlier this month – it shows they’re another bright new voice to emerge from the island nation.
The Yagas – Runaway
It’s been almost exactly 18 months since The Yagas released their debut album Midnight Minuet, a gloriously dark alt. metal album that saw actress Vera Farmiga embrace her inner goth. Now the group are back with a new single in Runaway, going full 80s with heavy synth and beats that feel like they should’ve been threaded into the DNA of movies like Lost Boys or Near Dark.
Shooting Daggers – T.R.L.T.
A short, sharp blast of 80s style hardcore punk, London’s Shooting Daggers don’t really need to reinvent any wheels when they make music this viscerally satisfying. Belligerent in the very best way, it’s a great demonstration of this band’s infectious energy.
Defences – Death Of A Dream
Defences are going big on old school nu metal vibes on Death Of A Dream. Chunky, downtuned guitars that make you want to bound around a pit, little record scratches and even electronic effects on Cherry Duesbury’s vocals, it feels like a single that easily could’ve come right as the new millennium hit, but also doesn’t feel dated for the fact.
Dead Signal – Follow The Signal
Sticking in the realms of nu metal inspiration, Italy’s Dead Signal are combining the genre with explosive metalcore to great effect. Sounding like a collision of debut-era Slipknot and Impossibility Of Reasion-era Chimaira, Follow The Signal is the band’s debut single and has us excited to see where they go next.
