As we entered our tenth year since the outbreak of Frankie and the Witch Fingers, tensions were high and nerves strung tight, bracing for the announcement of a seventh raid codenamed ‘Data Doom’.

With anchors lifted, Von Till’s ensemble led Le Petit Bain deep into the shoreless distance, where one’s faced with the anechoic chambers within our mind.

Day number three. The wild ride was nearing its conclusion, having lined up some its heaviest hitters for a real knockout of a grand finale.

Day number two at Pointu Festival held promise of a slightly heavier-hitting set of performances. I resurrected in a puddle of drool and crumpled notes scattered across the apartment floor, feeling sore but ready to face the last ten hours of a sunny festive Saturday in the south.

With its killer line-up and heavenly setting at the far end of France, Pointu Festival’s seventh edition seemed a fitting destination to question my life choices.

Twenty years of relentless gear-wrecking chaos have done nothing to pipe down New York’s most trusted harbingers of noise complaints, who busted no fewer than two fully functional guitars within the first three songs of their set. Dumbstruck and electrified, we were fortunate enough to meet the band shortly after their crushing performance to discuss their long-standing relationship with chaos.

From vulnerable to seductive within the span of a single note, Ana Moura’s voice swept feet and cracked hearts for an intense hour of Portuguese fado drama.

Laibach’s crusade will honour no boundaries or borders and will subvert and repurpose any cultural artefact to further their agenda of musical totalitarianism.

A mere half-week remains before Barcelona is to host the triumphant return of the sweet, heavy and blissful sounds of AMFest.

Last Wednesday, audiences proved their hard-earned loyalty to sinister sounds. After two years of pushbacks, the post-black outfit Regarde Les Hommes Tomber was finally able to hold its album release show to a sold-out crowd of hungry metal ghouls.

The Lurking Fear’s ‘Death, Madness, Horror, Decay’ simply does what others hope to recreate, and sounds as fresh as the genre has ever sounded. A few weeks before the Holiday season left our website some well-needed rest, Robin Ono caught up with guitarist Jonas Stålhammar to discuss the gruesome new record.

Mister Puciato belongs to that pesky breed of insolent artists whose medium relies not so much on set procedure as it does on the element of surprise, artists whose line of work thrives on the subversion of expectations.

With its extensive collection of photos, in-depth interviews and featured reviews, Wolves Evolve: The Ulver Story is a gorgeous volume, dense with information and trivia for avid fans to sink their teeth into.

Robin Ono caught up with vocalist and heavy metal wizard Trevor Strnad to learn more about the morbid passions that transpire into his work.

Built on a solid understanding of what made the band’s sound so distinct and effective, Verminous is a thrill-ride and daring new chapter written by The Black Dahlia Murder’s unwavering and highly contagious love for all things that lurk in heavy metal’s catacombic depths.

Like the previous year, this 2019 edition of the Pitchfork Music Festival proved to be as exciting as it was unpredictable, a fertile ground where unmet expectations on one end are inevitably traded off with amazing discoveries found not far elsewhere.

Devotees to the sounds of hipness, rejoice! The time has come for your sacred, yearly mass, for Pitchfork Festival will shortly return, bigger and bolder than ever, for its ninth consecutive year at the Grande Halle de La Villette in Paris.

Therein lies the magic of Miss Holter; hers is the voice of dreams, who effortlessly show the way through the majestic gardens of Alice’s Wonderland . . . as though we’ve always belonged in these strange new places.

The second evening of our grim summer of love at La Villette Sonique switched things up with some cutting edge talent from the alternative hip-hop scene. Most exciting of all was the long-awaited return of the psychotic rhyme-clown known as Danny Brown, promoting the acid-laced fever dream that is Atrocity Exhibition. . .

My first rendezvous was the lovely Cabaret Sauvage, set right along the Ourq canal running through the park, for an evening dedicated to ambient and experimental sounds. . .

Bound in unholy matrimony and devoted to spreading the dark gospel of God’s great Adversary, the duo known as Twin Temple may not sound the way your local church describes the ever-so-dreaded “Devil’s music”.