From Frontiers Music Srl X account:
PRETTY MAIDS ARE BACK!
“Frontiers Music Srl is proud to announce the return of Pretty Maids, who are officially working on a brand-new studio album, set for release in 2027.
Further details about the album will be revealed in the coming months.”
Where’s the joy in this all?
Where’s the light in the dark
My hands hide my tears, I feel so lost
This first day of Fall
Summer does not end so much as loosen its grip. The green world, having spent itself extravagantly, begins to remember that fullness and disappearance are partners. Leaves turn because life is not obliged to remain at its brightest. The air cools, light lowers, and what seemed permanent reveals itself as a passing arrangement. Autumn teaches without speaking: beauty depends upon change, and change upon loss. Yet nothing is truly lost; forms simply withdraw into other forms. The falling leaf is not a failure of the tree, but part of its rhythm. So too, perhaps, are we, within nature’s larger turning. Despair can still dance.
Since forming in Los Angeles in 2021, DECEITS (Kevin Moreno and Francisco Saenz) have dragged the music back toward blood, romance, and movement, pulling from the Spanish-language records that surrounded them growing up and letting those rhythms rub against basslines built for dark rooms.
The First Day Of Fall comes from a worse place. Moreno wrote it the day before his birthday, during a morning when the approaching occasion felt less like celebration than accusation. Birthdays carry the ridiculous expectation that happiness should report for duty on schedule, and the song turns that pressure inside out. Here is somebody staring at another year of existence and wondering whether disappearance might be easier. When Moreno sings, “I dream to be forgot,” the line lands with the ugly simplicity of a thought you wish you had never admitted to yourself.
The music, meanwhile, moves with enough force to keep despair from becoming static. Bass sits at the center with a cold, muscular authority, pushing against a hard drum pattern while guitars spread reverb across the track in broad, abrasive sheets. Gothic synthesizers hang behind the rhythm section, giving the song a sense of scale without smothering its punk impulse. There is a useful contradiction in hearing music this alive carrying words preoccupied with erasure, as though the body has decided to keep moving even while the mind is filing objections.
Moreno’s voice makes that conflict sharper. In the quieter passages he bends into a soft, almost romantic delivery, letting the words hover close to the ear before climbing toward a piercing upper register when the arrangement surges. The shift feels less theatrical than involuntary, like restraint finally losing the argument.
The production owes an obvious debt to the cavernous records of the 1980s gothic underground, though the mix has enough present-day weight to keep the references from turning archival. Reverb creates depth around the guitars and vocals, but the bass and drums remain immediate, physical, and slightly dangerous. Every element seems placed to preserve tension rather than polish it away.
Listen to The First Day of Fall below:
The First Day of Fall turns a private crisis into forward motion, carrying self-erasure, birthday dread, and the changing season inside a rhythm section that keeps pressing ahead. With the Hurt As Much As Me Tour 2026 on the horizon, DECEITS sound ready to take that contradiction straight into the room, where pain becomes volume and motion becomes temporary proof of life. Maybe that is DECEITS’ gift: making anguish feel communal without sanding down its teeth.
Listen to The First Day of Fall below and order the single here.
Hurt As Much As Me Tour dates (Get your tickets here!)
.𖥔 ݁ ˖ With Computer Kill. ☾ With Haunt Me
The band also has a full US + Australia headline run coming up this fall
Australia:
Follow DECEITS:
The post Where’s the Light in the Dark? — Los Angeles Romantic Post-Punk Duo Deceits Share “The First Day Of Fall” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
Reviewed by Rob Barker
UK Southerners i-Atlas bring forth their debut ep Beyond the New Horizon, presenting a mishmash of guitar-led space rock with dancefloor vibes thrown in for good measure. The trip, Dougy, Ondy and Marcus, are unashamedly making textured, layered sounds on their own terms without the confines of micromanagement or overseers to please. The creative quality of this non-restrictive approach shines through, showcasing BTNH as a short but strong release of energetic, sometimes nostalgic, always innovative rock.
Freak the Trance is the first track, starting off with grooves that are great to get lost in, a fine rhythmic base with strong instrumentation and catchy riffs, reminiscent of Austrian psychedelic rockers Mother’s Cake combined with the auditory-performative tendencies of Turbonegro. Touch the Sky comes in as song two, with Tom Morello’s Audioslave era style fluid and strong riffage, and a generally solid production.
Rather Me Than You displays a pretty cool darkwave feel to begin with, but also encompassing, in a very welcome way, a mainstream acceptability into its soundscape akin to bands such as The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. The EP’s single release, 3iAtlas, is next, with throbbing dancefloor vibes matching up very nicely indeed with a strong, Velvet Revolver style chorus. BTNH finishes off with No Time, a notably heavier and more domineering track that creates a nice finale to the release, with some really nice guitar tones and a Real Thing Faith No More era style feel which is always welcome.
i-Atlas have done well here with BNTH, five solid tracks that are worthy of bragging rights and the opportunity for people to spend a bit of time and effort taking a listen so. They seem as though they have a lot of potential going forward – being quite a new band forming as recently as 2025 – hopefully they’ll have a decent future amongst the UK DIY scene.
For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.
The post EP Review: iAtlas – Beyond The New Horizon appeared first on The Razor's Edge.
You may know Lou Turner as 1/3 of the brilliant rootsy/folksy Nashville indie band Styrofoam Winos or as a regular in Ryan Davis’ Roadhouse Band. She also has two solo albums to her name, and it’s about to be three when Strangels drops this fall. The newly announced LP kicks off with “Ants Underfoot,” which is out today as the lead single.
The post Styrofoam Winos’ Lou Turner Announces New Album <em>Strangels</em>: Hear “Ants Underfoot” appeared first on Stereogum.
Earlier this year, Paramore leader Hayley Williams headed out on her first-ever solo tour. It went well. Williams brought out a bunch of special guests and built her live show around Ego Death At The Bachelorette Party, the triumphant LP that she released last year. I saw her at Kilby Block Party, and she kicked ass. Back in May, while that tour was still happening, Williams announced plans for a completely different tour, this one called “The Hayley Williams Show,” promising “material across all three of the singer’s solo albums as well as some exciting surprises.” Now that the tour is underway, we have a better idea what that means.
The post Hayley Williams Gives Old Songs Their Live Debuts At Palm Beach Tour Opener appeared first on Stereogum.
Reviewed by Patrick O’Reilly
I first encountered Snet when they were playing in a support slot in a death metal show in Nottingham and was pretty much a fan straight off that, so you can imagine how excited I was to see a new album out and available for me to review!
Snet play dark, dingy, rough death metal, in fact the album title translates to ‘In the swamps of consciousness’ which is a pretty good description of the band to be honest. Sludgy, fetid yet with good songwriting and atmosphere.
Coming from Czechia and with song titles in their native language this could be a confusing release for many fans not conversant in that language, rest assured though, the language of death metal is universal and this album will sit right at home with the classics in your collection.
Obvious comparisons can be made to classic Entombed material but Snet are not just another HM-2 clone band, yes, they retain some of that punkiness that made Entombed so great but they also feel darker and more evil, with some riffs almost veering into black metal territory.
Standout track goes to ‘Apokalyptický smaragd budoucí doby’ with its amazing middle section and breakdown, what an incredible riff!
This album remains engaging throughout, absolutely reeks with atmosphere and is eminently headbangable, what more could you want from a death metal release?
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: Sněť – V bažinách vědomí appeared first on The Razor's Edge.
“I just needed more sparkle,” says Lzzy Hale on her new custom Epiphone Explorer guitar. “You can see it from the back of the arena.”
The post Epiphone and Lzzy Hale Unveil Sparkly Explorer Guitar appeared first on Rockmommy.com.
Stumbling down the walk of fame
Amanda Bynes is on my brain
Just wrote a letter to Josephine
She’s the girl who stole my dopamine
Desire is a rotten eyewitness. Give it enough darkness, dopamine, and unfinished business, and it will swear that the same face is waiting in every crowd. At three in the morning, recognition can become a confidence trick: a familiar cut of hair across the room, a profile caught beneath club lights, a stranger briefly assigned the identity of the person occupying your thoughts. The eyes supply fragments; obsession fills in the rest.
Los Angeles musician Andreas Emmanuel drags that perceptual error onto the dance floor in Hallucinations, the latest single from Sun Spoiler. Following Reek, his 101-second account of lovebombing, ghosting, and digital self-abasement, the new track returns to what he calls “delusional hyperfixation.” This time, romantic fixation has passed through the screen and begun altering the visible world. Every blonde in Hollywood becomes a suspect, memory starts impersonating sight, and the brain sends its face-recognition machinery into catastrophic overdrive.
“If you’ve ever had someone on the top of your mind you might be able to relate to the experience of thinking you see them everywhere you go, even if they’re not really there,” says Emmanuel. “I recently had this happen to me at a dimly lit nightclub in Hollywood at 3am. I still to this day have no idea if the person I thought I saw was really there, or if it was just another blonde girl, or even if it was Amanda Bynes, who I also seem to see everywhere I go in my neighborhood. It didn’t help that I was wearing a single colored eye contact that made it really tough to see.”
The song opens on a quirky, faintly giallo-esque synth-pop figure as a rhythmic bass line begins tightening the screws. Emmanuel enters in a low, smoke-dark register with an ’80s glamrock meets Electroclash, delivering each line with enough bounce to make the unraveling feel recreational. Guitar accents cut across the arrangement in brief, bright angles while synth-pop, darkwave, and dark indie pop squeeze into the same narrow corridor. The chorus breaks open around the cry of “Woah! hallucinating,” a splendidly direct hook that turns psychic disarray into something a crowded room can shout back.
Then there is the key change, arriving near the end like another dose administered just as the fixation should be wearing off. The lift pushes the final chorus further into delirium, tilting the floor beneath a song that has carried a funhouse-mirror distortion from its first synth notes. Emmanuel keeps the arrangement lean, allowing the hook, bass, and vocal attitude to do the heavy work.
The lyric’s sharpest joke places Napoleon beside Amanda Bynes, binding imperial history and Hollywood disorientation with the rhyme of “Josephine” and “dopamine.” Emmanuel explains:
“I try to include a line about a mythological, historical or fantasy figure in each of my songs, and this one is particularly potent in referencing Napoleon’s letters to Josephine. It really struck me that the powerful alpha-male emperor of Europe was essentially a simp for his wife Josephine.”
That collapse of self-respect lends Hallucinations much of its clever humor. In Emmanuel’s vision, the once-commanding military man transforms into a frantic correspondent, craving affection to regain his balance. “I see her face when I sleep / I see her face when I dream” propels the obsession through every ounce of consciousness before “I’m just a dog looking for a meal” snatches away the last shred of imperial dignity.
Hallucinations occupies the uneasy territory where a person can recognize his own absurdity without escaping it. “You say I’m crazy well yeah I know” functions as a confession, a punchline, and a singalong; self-awareness watches from the passenger seat while compulsion drives. Funny, lean, and catchy as hell, the track gathers a questionable nightclub sighting, one obstructed eye, Napoleon’s letters, and an Amanda Bynes apparition into a compact dark-pop spiral.
Self-produced by Emmanuel and mastered by Carl Saff, Hallucinations is out now.
Listen to Hallucinations below, or via the streaming service of your choice, and order the single here.
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The post “You Say I’m Crazy, Well Yeah I Know” — Los Angeles Dark-Pop Artist Sun Spoiler Chases a Dopamine Mirage in “Hallucinations” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.