Release Day Roundup: 10/3/25

Top Picks

AFI – Silver Bleeds the Black Sun... (goth rock, cowboy core?)

I don't know what I was expecting from a new AFI album in 2025, but it definitely wasn't Davy Havok rocking a 70's curly-fro and pornstasche combination, let alone actually making it kind of work—in certain (lacks of light). The darker, goth rock sound of Silver Bleeds the Black Sun... was perhaps more predicable, given the post-punk leanings of 2021's Bodies, but then I also wasn't prepared for the jangly, "Hut!"-inflected, Western opening of "Bord of Prey", nor how much of that oddly frontier-invoking sound would carry through the rest of the album. In some ways I feel like might have been Creeper-ed again, given both how promising the three lead singles "Behind the Clock", "Holy Visions" and "Ash Speck in a Green Eye" are, without their uniform goth rock sound really being representative of the overall record (not to mention Havok's sensual shadow silhouettes in the video below).

Silver Bleeds the Black Sun... is still very much a goth rock record, that finds its most immediate and obvious comparisons with the four Cure albums released between Pornography (1982) and Disintegration (1989). It just also contains way more Western cinematic conjunctures than I had hoped, or really wanted, which rear their whistling head again on mid-album "Blasphemy and Excess" and "Spear of Truth". I'm also not particularly fond of the Crazy Town belly-button-tattoo album art. Personally, I would have just used the still from the "Behind the Clock" video below, which features the band's formerly frail frontman looking a like a young(er) James Hetfield and oozing far more steamy sensuality than his otherwise muppet-like appearance should rightfully allow. That image alone captures something else that the album's packaging and promotion have perhaps failed to communicate, which is that this is that Silver Bleeds the Black Sun... is a much more traditionally "masculine" sounding album than anything AFI have put out since taking an extremely successful turn for more melancholic and melodic vulnerability on Sing the Sorrow (2003).

Despite all these unexpected and ill-sitting gripes, it's also probably the best AFI album since then as well. Dismissing Decemberunderground (2006)—on account of it being a complete pile of toss—Burials (2013) is probably closest, and remains a more consistent and aesthetically coherent record, but also a lot less remarkable one, and the mere existence of tracks like "Behind the Clock" and "Holy Visions" gives Silver Bleeds the Black Sun... an easy edge, regardless of their surrounds—which aren't actually that bad, for the record. Just imagine of the rest of the album was as good as they were...

Hooded Menace – Lachrymose Monuments Of Obscuration (gothy death-doom)

While I'm busy gothing out over here, I also want to take a moment to point you in the direction of the new one from Finnish death-doomers Hooded Menace, who have also upped the goth vibes considerably for their seventh full-length. Indeed Lachrymose Monuments Of Obscuration, is a lot more in line with what I was wanting from a new Paradise Lost album these days, including a very Paradise Lost-inflected cover of Duran Duran's "Save a Prayer" that owes as much to that band's cover of Bronski Beat as it does their very own Draconian Times (1995). This is, of course, balanced out by some top notch death-goth, including opener "Pale Masquerade", which borrows heavily from early Amorphis, and closer "Into Haunted Oblivion", which brings to mind Celtic Frost's flirtations with doomier, gothic textures (and obscure new wave pop covers) on Into the Pandemonium (1987). It's a much more natural fit than AFI's forays into Western orchestration and a sound I'd love to see them develop more in future, especially while it's progenitors are leaving its wrought iron gates wide open.