As important as first impressions can be, they’re often given more weight than they deserve. Lead singles often receive these types of extreme initial reactions, something exacerbated by the seemingly increasing number of pre-album tracks bands release these days. Sure, these songs can be a perfect outline for what listeners…
Uniqueness is often conflated with interesting ideas in our modern music consumption landscape. There’s plenty of experimental music that, while undeniably different, is pretty deniably good. I’ve encountered albums of all-acoustic black metal and blackened trip-hop on my travels, both of which defied the norms of their genres but were…
Foscor exist in a space among metal that I have a lot of time for. Their music feels both modern and nostalgic at the same time. Like it could be from the early 00s, yet with the veneer of modern needle-pushing metal. This expression is often used for music that…
As I covered in our video premiere for “Calm,” Secret Shame strike just the right balance of post-punk nostalgia and innovation. The group employs a “dark rock” kaleidoscope throughout Dark Synthetics that touches on elements of deathrock, darkwave, and goth rock. Yet, at their core, the band maintains the punk…
Effective post-punk seemingly always strikes a balance between genre ideals and young energy. Of course, the same can be said about a multitude of genres. But this feels especially true for post-punk, a style revolving around reverb and atmosphere that can easily result in airy, nondescript compositions. A little too…
One day after premiering Brady to the world, we’re back with another member of the Flesh and Bone Records roster: the Syracuse, New York shoegaze quartet Trench, who are debuting the video for “Liminal” from their record Ritual Love, which was released in September of last year. Since their formation…
In our romantic conception of music, as some sort of “pure” art form, we’d like to imagine that the external physicality of an album, like cover art or name, don’t matter or matter less than the music at hand. In addition, at first glance, you could argue that the digital…
Oh, shoegaze. Does anyone have one of those genres that is, on paper, a perfect storm of everything they want to hear, but rarely seems to come together in the way they are dreaming of? That is shoegaze for me. That delectable blend of heavy soundscapes and lush melodies, dreamy…
VOLA’s album from 2016, Inmazes, had the complicated pleasure of being a hit with a very specific subsection of the metal community. Far from the band’s first list, it was nonetheless their first release which put them on the map of the progressive metal scene. In fact, it sounded almost engineered…
Esben and the Witch have had an interesting career trajectory. Their debut, Violet Cries was a dreamy, melancholic mix of post-rock and dream pop that sat somewhere between those two genres without really being either one. It worked and worked well, and the band sounded hungry and ready for more. That was seven…
