Review: Gothenburg trio Amateur Hour is Hugo Randulv, Julia Bjernelind and Dan Johansson, and Gar I Kras is their fourth album. It builds on the expansive Krokta Tankar Och Branda Vanor from back in 2022, and though still experimental and out there, it might also be their most accessible and polished work yet. Dreamy lo-fi pop meets gritty electronics and sound collage throughout as damaged linger above humming basslines and grimy guitars underpin detached vocals. It's a haunting but beautiful soundtrack for outsiders who like music from the fringe but that retains a sense of human warmth and soul.
Review: Swedish EBM icon Celldod returns to Electronic Emergencies with a new album pressed on striking transparent magenta vinyl. Pa Liv Och Dod is a superbly emotionally charged release that channels the raw energy of D.A.F. and Front 242 while blending dark electronic beats with intense lyrical themes. It has collaborations with Leroy Se Meurt and Michael Zodorozny, plus Anders Karlsson's haunting Swedish vocals exploring death and life's meaning also appear across tunes that are both urgent and dance floor directed. Pa Liv Och Dod will force you to confront fear and chaos head-on while offering a soundtrack that offers some catharsis from it all.
Review: "Random, tense, scary and compulsively fascinating". That's how Chris Connelly describes the period in which the tracks on this album were originally written. As the main man behind some of the most iconic and influential industrial bands in history - Ministry, Revolting Cocks, Murder.Inc... - he's definitely well placed to make this kind of judgment. And it comes across even more understandable if you grasp the fact he's meaning all that in a good way. Throbbing Gristle should need no introduction, having pretty much written the blueprint for industrial musick in the nuclear age. A sound that screamed "get us out". Combine that oeuvre with this guy, then, and you have something which is uncompromisingly explosive and effective. Not to mention fitting, given half the people on the street seem convinced we're rushing headfirst into another atomic standoff, if not something much, much worse.
Review: Moony Tunes is one of five new 12" LPs recently unveiled by David Tibet aka. Current 93, mad witch doctor of the post-80s industrial continuum. An ever-morphing project, Current 93 always implies motifs of apocalyptic folk, dream logic, and esoteric revelations, and this volume, subtitled Preparing To Sleep In Menstrual Night, feels like a whispered dispatch from the edge of sleep and symbol. True to C93's nature, it resists easy description, lullabying eerily through hoveringly attentive drones and spellcasting vocals. Each pressing includes a riso print of Tibet's painting Moony Toons, hand-signed in pencil, thus hand-stamping an album best received as a kind of ritual, and shaped by the occult aurae of Tibet's performances in London and Hastings earlier this year.
Review: Dawn Yawns is one of five new 12" records released at the same time, documenting one or two - if not more - furtive live sets performed by Current 93 (David Tibet) between London and Hastings in early 2025. On this quintet of new transmissions, dream and daylight are heard in grisly merger, on the back of an umbral awakening from a polar slumber, where the blood moon never sets, known to C93 fans only as the "Menstrual Night". Be warned, however, these eerie recordings have a sure capacity to mark the soul in unprecedented ways.
Review: English experimental group, Current 93, was founded in 1982 by David Tibet and set out to explore industrial music with abrasive tape loops, droning noises and distorted vocals. As Real As ScareCrows is a haunting new chapter in Tibet's arcane vision, and it was released alongside four other LPs to mark recent Channellings in London and Hastings. Ritualistic and esoteric, the album feels like a spectral transmission or "ScareCrow scaring crows away after Menstrual Night," as Tibet describes it. It's a deeply unsettling and bleakly poetic work that is unmistakably C93 in its mood and mystique. Each copy includes a signed risograph print of Tibet's painting, making it as much an art object as a musical release. A beautifully eerie offering from one of Britain's most enduring and enigmatic cult acts.
Review: Another of five LPs by Current 93 (David Tibet) through his own audio-esoterica label Cashen's Gap, this brilliant yellow and green hued LP nods to the universally recognised colour of earth-ground wire, and comes in the wake of a recent two part set of "channellings" (live performances) in both London and Hastings. As ever, Tibet steers the dream ship through surreal poetics and creaking soundscapes, and offers us a risograph print of his artwork, titled MayBe Skeletal RainBow, or perhaps Building The RainBow PainBow Preparing For Menstrual Night (we're not sure).
Review: Ultra Point Of Intersection Exist is a landmark album in Japan's noise and industrial scene that was created by Ichiro Tsuji in 1987. All these years on, Dissecting Table still delivers a standout and relentless fusion of harsh electronics and mechanised rhythms that echoes the dystopian intensity of Whitehouse, SPK and Einsturzende Neubauten. Straddling noise, industrial and experimental extremes, the album captures the radical spirit of its era alongside peers like Controlled Bleeding and Ramleh and so has long been a highly anticipated reissue or noise fans. It comes with a new design that respects the artist's wishes to forgo the original layout.
Review: E-bony's Digital Dawn album is about "defining his identity as an artist" and it comes through INDUSTRIAS MEKANIKAS. This 12-tracker welds together electro and techno with plenty of personal sound perspective and dark textures that keep it decidedly underground. Collaborating with Noamm on four tracks, their creative synergy adds depth and elevates the record's complexity with the likes of 'Matrix Kod' getting gritty and eerie, 'Aurora Noir' bringing snappy kicks and coruscated acid lines and 'Data Delight' fizzing with pixelated synth sugariness.
Review: Nadah El Shazly returns with her second album and first on One Little Independent and Backward Music. The Egyptian-born, Montreal-based artist blends experimental sonics with Arabic roots and improvisation on Laini Tani, and crafts music that slips between worlds and takes you with it. The whole record pulses like a hot night stretching into morning. It's sweaty, surreal, and endlessly alive and each track is a vivid fragment: defiant, euphoric or quietly raw. El Shazly's lush vocals and layered metaphors weave a dreamstate of meaning and mystery that bold and chaotic yet controlled so is a record to get lost in, then hit repeat as you try to decode its hidden truths.
Review: Industrial legends Front Line Assembly return with bold reimagining of their sound on new release Mechviruses. It features ten tracks that remix, rework and reinvent with new instrumentation and vocals merged with the band's signature dark electronic edge. Traversing genres from darkwave to metal-industrial to synthpop, this one pulses with complex textures and relentless beats and has fine contributions from Artoffact labelmates ULTRA SUNN, Ayria, Bootblacks and others, plus collaborators like MVTANT and s:cage. It's a work that bridges past and future and is more than just a remix record, but instead serves as a reinvention, proving Front Line Assembly's relentless drive to push industrial music into new dimensions.
Review: Laibach and A/political present Alamut, a new, symphonic album inspired by Vladimir Bartol's 1938 novel of the same name. Recounting an 11th-century Persian tale - centered on the charismatic and enigmatic Hassan-i Sabbah, leader of the Nizari Ismailis and founder of the Order of Assassins - this is a shadowy, ninja-black-wax initiation into an esoteric order of spies. Laibach's work blends classical Persian poetry, minimalist orchestral textures, and industrial elements, reflecting both historical propaganda tactics and Bartol's critique of rising Fascism in 1930s Italy. Released on double vinyl and CD box set through Mute, the album was recorded in 2022 at a former Crusader castle in Ljubljana; it features the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra, Tehran's Human-Voice Ensemble, the Gallina Women's Choir, and the women's accordion orchestra AccordiOna, conducted by Navid Goharib.
Review: American guitarist, singer, and lead songwriter for legendary rockers The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed also had a distinguished solo career, including Metal Machine Music, which remains one of the most radical and controversial albums ever released. First issued in 1975, its wall of feedback and distortion defied all musical convention, splitting critics and fans but earning cult status for its uncompromising vision. Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, this landmark work returns for Record Store Day 2025, having once been described by celebrated critic Lester Bangs as "the greatest record ever made in the history of the human eardrum," and who are we to argue.
Review: Formed in 1975, the British industrial group Throbbing Gristle - Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter, and Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson - had pushed sonic and cultural boundaries over the edge, with their transgressive performances, experimental electronics, and confrontational aesthetics. After disbanding in 1981, TG's reunion in the early 2000s was met with both excitement and skepticism; rather than nostalgia, they continued evolving, creating new works like Part Two: The Endless Not (2007), which managed to scupper expectations beyond the mere expectation that they scupper expectations. This Berlin performance, on the cusp of a new year, captures their raw, improvised power, in the space of five tracks which would be released on the 2007 record. Haunting, mechanical, and utterly uncompromising.
Review: One of the most legendary female producers in history of electronic music brings out her sixth solo album - not to mention her numerous seminal recordings as part of Throbbing Gristle and Chis & Cosey - and the first in three years. 2t2 is an intimate yet electrifying statement, a dualistic journey through rhythmic propulsion and meditative introspection across nine tracks entirely composed, performed and produced solely by Cosey herself. With 2t2, she expolores personal loss and global upheavalm transforming them into a defiant sonic odyssey, weaving raw energy and introspective depth together. The beat-driven tracks pulse with kinetic urgency, echoing her industrial and electronic roots, while the ambient passages invite deep contemplation. Lead single 'Stound' exemplifies this balanceiCosey's overtone chanting evokes resilience and catharsis, grounding the record in both personal and universal strength. 'Threnody' pays tribute to Delia Derbyshire and Andy Christian, weaving echoes of past creative dialogues into Cosey's present explorations. Even in its darker moments, there's a lightness, a refusal to succumb to despair, in evidende and Cosey seemingly embraces sorrow as a path to joy, a reminder that resistance and resilience are acts of creation. With 2t2, Cosey Fanni Tutti once again defies convention, crafting an album that is personal and powerful.
Review: What planet were you born on? To be honest, it never really matters with Light Sounds Dark. Sent off in search of intelligent sounds from across the universe, the label has been amassing but never pillaging a vast array of tones from various corners of the known and unknown cosmos for time now, although the exact hour and date is really dependent on your relationship with the continuum. LSD 046 makes this point clear as ever. Numbered tracks are all your getting in terms of being able to catalogue and make sense of what's here, adding to the idea that your lost in a realm that's neither there nor there. Tunes fizzle and gargle, slow strings refrain, lo fi Kraut shouts beneath the crackle of analogue, intergalactic organs ring out into silence. And then we run out of words to possibly describe what's on the record long before the last episode.
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