Escape With Romeo‘s return stopped being interesting simply as a comeback with 2024’s “Suspicious Bliss”. That album established that Thomas Elbern was not interested in reopening the band’s history merely to revisit it; there was new material to write and, increasingly, a present worth responding to. “Night After Night”, released on August 7, 2026 through Zeitklang, continues that trajectory with a harder, more immediate record built around guitars, electronics and a growing unease with the systems shaping contemporary life.

The circumstances behind it were different too. After forty years working as a music journalist for national radio, Elbern suddenly found himself with considerably more time, and sketches already sitting on his hard drive began turning into songs. At the same time, the world entering those songs had become increasingly difficult to separate into “online” and “real”: surveillance, AI, algorithmic behaviour, political extremism, digital dependence and the erosion of privacy all appear across the album. What interests Elbern, however, is less dystopia as spectacle than the moment when something previously intolerable becomes ordinary enough to be accepted as the “new normal.”

That tension also reaches the language of the record. Titles such as “Edit Me Out” and “Cancel Anytime” take expressions associated with platforms and subscriptions and apply them to people, while “New World Order” looks at the vulnerability created when increasingly large parts of everyday existence are handed over to digital systems. Musically, Escape With Romeo remain recognisably themselves, but the references continue to expand: “Wrong Side of Town Pt. 2”, for example, emerged after Elbern encountered Skeler and began imagining what EWR doing hardwave might sound like.

I spoke with Thomas Elbern about “Night After Night”, AI and what he calls “hijacked emotion”, why individuality can coexist with extreme predictability, independence after more than three decades, the practical realities of touring as a trio, and why Escape With Romeo still have reasons to move forward rather than simply preserve what they have already built.

Escape With Romeo interview

Karo: When I reviewed “Suspicious Bliss” for ReGen, the record seemed to exist in a productive contradiction: the music had become more physical and guitar-driven just as the lyrics were becoming increasingly preoccupied with technological intrusion, isolation and a reality that could no longer quite be trusted. “Night After Night” is harder, more emotional and more direct. Did “Suspicious Bliss” already contain the beginning of this record, or did something change in the two years between them that demanded a different degree of force?

Thomas: I would say that “Night After Night” follows the same path that “Suspicious Bliss” already craved. My personal situation was also different: my career as a music journalist working for national radio finally ended after 40 years. Suddenly, I had a lot of time, and all those sketches that were already on my hard drive began to form into songs.

The surroundings played a role as well. Watching catastrophic news and seeing more and more worst-case scenarios developing in the world encouraged me to make an album like this.

Karo: “Night After Night” is an interesting title because it suggests duration rather than catastrophe. Not one decisive collapse, but waking repeatedly into the same anxieties, systems and headlines until the exceptional becomes ordinary. Is that accumulation important to the album? Is the record concerned less with disaster itself than with what happens psychologically when people become accustomed to living inside conditions that would once have seemed intolerable?

Thomas: That’s a very good point. Yes, it is exactly the accumulation that is described here. It’s the thing people call “the new normal.”

What was intolerable in the past can become the new reality, and there seems to be no collective outcry. Instead, we see growing racism, homophobia, income disparity, hate speech and leaders who make everything worse.

Karo: “Edit Me Out”, “Cancel Anytime” and “Something That Lasts” almost form their own vocabulary of contemporary relationships. Words that belong to software, subscriptions and digital services have slipped very easily into the language of intimacy. Has that linguistic shift become interesting to you as a songwriter: the idea that people can now be edited, muted, cancelled, replaced or simply unsubscribed from?

Thomas: A lot of the titles on the album are “internet speech”: “Edit Me Out”, “Cancel Anytime”, or the song “What They Don’t Tell You”, which is not on the album. They all circle around things you read very often in blogs and publications.

It’s the idea that the intimacy you mentioned has stopped being genuinely private. It’s also the idea of masses becoming extremely predictable while still believing themselves to be individuals.

I got this idea while reading a lot of travel blogs. People travel through Bali or Laos and think they are doing something individual. People think that they are using a product, but instead they are the product. And yes, in that sense, they are all extremely replaceable.

Karo: Artificial intelligence was already present on “Suspicious Bliss”, while in our 2024 conversation you spoke about computer-generated voices and described the DAW itself as an instrument. The question feels different now. AI is no longer merely something an artist can use or write about; it increasingly influences distribution, visibility, recommendation and even judgments about value. Has the real concern shifted from what machines are capable of creating to the decisions we are gradually allowing them to make on our behalf?

Thomas: Again, a very good point. The DAW nowadays, or certainly in the foreseeable future, can create almost anything. Even the artist who was once needed to programme it and provide the input it needs can now be reduced to somebody writing a prompt while the computer does the rest.

To quote our famous song “Somebody”, with a wink, this is the “hijacked emotion.”

On the other hand, in combination with a great artistic vision and real skill, this technology could lead to something completely new. But most of what I currently hear and see online is AI-generated shit that feels like cosmic debris, or a bad idea of chart music, while consuming far too many resources.

Karo: “New World Order” enters territory where dystopian language has almost become exhausted through overuse. War, AI, surveillance, extremism and environmental collapse are no longer speculative vocabulary; they are part of everyday information flow. How do you stop a song about the present from merely reproducing that background noise? At what point does a general anxiety become specific enough to turn into music?

Thomas: With “New World Order”, everything started with the trance arpeggio you hear at the beginning.

Lyrically, it could be seen as a protest song about the possibilities of digital surveillance combined with greedy corporations that will enslave you and take over your digital existence.

“Your beautiful saviour will shoot you in the back” is a metaphor for how two-faced everything is in “New World Order”. It’s similar to the idea in the dark comedy film “Brazil”, where a simple typing error, changing the name Tuttle to Buttle, can ruin somebody’s entire life.

In 2026, it can be the deadly phishing email, a vicious Trojan on your computer or your social media account that turns your life upside down. The idea of “New World Order” is essentially: stop for a moment and think about what actually surrounds you in 2026.

Karo: “Wrong Side of Town Pt. 2” returns to “After the Future”, an album you have spoken about with considerable ambivalence, and which became connected, indirectly, to the period when you decided Escape With Romeo had reached an ending. Why reopen that particular door now? Is “Pt. 2” continuing the narrative of the original song, or are you also revisiting your own relationship with a period of the band you once wanted to leave behind?

Thomas: It’s actually neither of those things.

I always loved the atmosphere of the original, particularly the cinematic quality of the sounds involved. Then I went to a gig by Australian DJ and producer Skeler in Cologne the night before, listening to and enjoying all that wave, hardwave and phonk-related material being played there.

I went back to my DAW the next day and tried to recreate what I had heard through a follow-up to “Wrong Side of Town”, using new lyrics, guitars and beats.

It’s my idea of EWR doing hardwave.

Karo: “You Need the Drugs” is an unusual cover because the original already sits between musical worlds: WestBam and Klaus Jankuhn’s electronic language meeting Richard Butler’s unmistakable Psychedelic Furs presence. Escape With Romeo has occupied that border between electronics and guitars for most of its life. Did the song feel strangely familiar for that reason? And at what point in the rearrangement did it stop feeling like someone else’s material?

Thomas: The idea of doing “You Need the Drugs” was born and realised even before the album itself took form.

I heard the original at a New Year’s party and immediately heard the EWR version in my head. It was clear that our version would become very much Escape With Romeo.

Guitars, guitars, guitars were the key.

Karo: Frenzy Erl’s role here goes far beyond drumming: the two of you recorded, mixed and produced the album together, and he also mastered it. Does having a drummer involved at every stage alter the hierarchy of a recording? When the person responsible for pulse is simultaneously making decisions about density, space and final sound, can rhythm begin to determine the architecture rather than simply inhabit it?

Thomas: When I make a demo or even a final production, I also programme the drums that I hear in my head. Frenzy usually plays the drums when the song has reached its genuinely finished version.

During the final phase of production, we decide together where the aural journey should go. What is important is that we normally mix and master everything in Frenzy’s studio in Munich, where there are no distractions and we can finish the album together.

Karo: Stella Tonon’s contribution to “Suspicious Bliss” was already more interesting than straightforward backing vocals; you said in 2024 that she immediately understood where her voice belonged inside the material. On “Night After Night”, does the presence of another voice ever change the point of view of a song itself? Can a voice entering from outside destabilise the narrator and make you hear your own lyrics differently?

Thomas: Talking about the opening track, “Edit Me Out”, the female voice there is actually a sample. That is nothing new for me; my way of working has always been very hip-hop in that respect. If I find a great legal sample that I want to work with, I go for it.

So that female voice is a major part of “Edit Me Out”, but many of the other female voices and improvisations on the record are very much Stella.

She always brings her own particular idea into the music of EWR. She fully understands and feels both the sadness and the rough elements in the music, and she can respond to them with her unique voice.

Karo: You once described the audience as the place where a song is finally tested: only onstage do you discover whether its internal logic actually survives contact with people. Escape With Romeo is now taking these songs out as a trio, despite studio arrangements that can contain almost unlimited layers. Has that smaller configuration forced you to identify what is genuinely indispensable in a song? What remains once production is stripped away and three people have to make the idea physically convincing?

Thomas: Interesting point! We are studio nerds and take full advantage of every sound source we can get hold of.

But if you want to survive financially as a touring band, you have to make decisions that nearly every band makes nowadays. That is called backing tracks.

You have to decide which parts of the sound are the most important. Those are played live. The rest becomes like a parallel universe coming through the speakers. Making that distinction is always crucial.

But I also think that, as a trio, we cannot strip things down much further than we already do. Drums, guitar, bass and the main vocal always have to be live.

Karo: Escape With Romeo built a genuinely independent structure remarkably early, with label, studio and management gradually becoming part of the same ecosystem. But independence in 2026 is a peculiar condition: an artist may own the masters and finance the record while still relying on platforms, distributors and opaque recommendation systems to become visible. Has independence become less about escaping gatekeepers and more about choosing which gatekeepers one is prepared to depend on?

Thomas: Having been independent for more than three decades, I can say that the game is always changing.

The role of record companies has largely vanished for us; now everything is about live gigs and promoters. Yes, it’s also about numbers and streaming, but it is still, as it always was, about luck.

If your music gets used in a famous series or film, you automatically reach another level.

And today’s gatekeepers are tomorrow’s open doors. It’s a complicated music world and nobody is particularly happy about it. But in the end, connecting directly with your fans will always remain one of the main points.

Karo: There is something counterintuitive about making a record more direct after nearly four decades of accumulated technique, experience and musical memory. Young bands are often direct because they have relatively little to discard; an established artist has to decide what no longer deserves to remain. Is directness for you now partly an act of subtraction? And after 13 albums, is making something immediate actually harder than making something elaborate?

Thomas: I found working on the previous albums quite liberating.

From a production point of view, it is always a pain in the ass, because it’s the final 15 percent that creates most of the work. But it is liberating in the sense that we don’t have to prove anything to anyone.

We can evolve and do whatever we think is right for EWR.

Making an album is both elaborate and, in this case, immediate, so “Night After Night” feels like a natural step in our history.

Karo: And finally, where can people actually catch Escape With Romeo on the road in the coming months? Which dates or places are you particularly looking forward to, and is there any show on this run that matters most to you?

Thomas: We are touring mainly in Germany in 2026, and we plan to play more abroad in 2027, if the world is still standing. That includes Europe and South America.

Karo: Thank you very much for your time, Thomas.

Thomas: Thank you, Karo!

“Night After Night” is out now through Zeitklang. Escape With Romeo’s confirmed 2026 tour begins in Munich on 19 September and continues through Cologne, Essen, Karlsruhe, Bielefeld, Nuremberg, Rüsselsheim, Hamburg and Berlin, before crossing into Poland for the Shadow Dance Party at Pod Minoga in Poznań on 31 October. A December date in Rhede is also confirmed, while the band says further dates for 2027 are being developed.

About Escape With Romeo

Escape With Romeo were founded in Cologne in 1989 by singer, guitarist and songwriter Thomas Elbern. Before starting the project, Elbern had fronted the new-wave band Seltsame Zustände and had been a guitarist and songwriter with Pink Turns Blue. The first Escape With Romeo album appeared in 1989, and the early track “Somebody” became one of the songs most closely associated with the band, helping establish an audience beyond Germany. The band’s own historical account describes the project as growing from Elbern’s initial setup of Atari computers, drum machines, four-track recording, turntables, guitar and bass into a full live band after “Somebody” began circulating in clubs.

From the beginning, Escape With Romeo combined guitars with electronic production rather than treating rock and electronics as separate phases of the band. Their long-used description, “Post Punk meets modern Electronica,” remains a useful shorthand, although the catalogue itself has moved through considerably more territory: new wave, darkwave, alternative rock, electronic pop, acoustic work and, increasingly in the current period, elements of trip-hop, post-rock and contemporary electronic production.

The early album sequence included “Escape With Romeo,” “Autumn on Venus,” “Next Stop Eternally,” “Blast of Silence” and “How Far Can You Go?” Later records included “Come Here White Light,” “Love Alchemy,” “Psalms of Survival,” “Emotional Iceage,” “Samsara” and “After the Future.” From 2001 onward, releases were issued through Zeitklang Records, the label established and run by Elbern.

In 2017, Elbern announced that Escape With Romeo would come to an end. A farewell period followed, including the band’s final tour in 2018 and festival appearances in 2019. What was intended as an ending did not remain one. During the pandemic years Elbern began reconsidering the project, and Escape With Romeo returned in 2022, initially through newly arranged versions of older material and the double compilation “Based on a True Story – Best of Escape With Romeo.” The official notes to the 2022 versions of “Refuge” and “White Room” explicitly described those recordings as the beginning of the band’s return.

The more consequential step came with “Suspicious Bliss” in November 2024. Rather than continuing primarily through retrospective material, Escape With Romeo released an entirely new album. Its harder guitar sound, electronics and dystopian lyrical concerns established the direction that now continues into “Night After Night”. The band themselves described “Suspicious Bliss” as a fresh start following their 2022 reorganisation.

Released on 7 August 2026, “Night After Night” is Escape With Romeo’s 13th studio album. It contains fourteen tracks and was produced by Thomas Elbern and Frenzy Erl, with Erl also handling the mastering. “You Need the Drugs” is the album’s one outside composition, written by Klaus Jankuhn, Maximilian Lenz/WestBam and Richard Butler; the remaining songs are credited to Elbern. The record was preceded by 2026 singles including “Fear’s a Ghost” and “Sound and the Fury”.

Escape With Romeo currently perform live as a trio: Thomas Elbern on vocals and guitar, Tobias Schwartz on bass and vocals, and Frenzy Erl on drums. Stella Tonon remains part of the wider recording world around the band and contributed vocals to recent material, including the “Suspicious Bliss” period and subsequent recordings, but she is not part of the touring trio.

The current configuration is deliberately compact. Elbern describes guitar, bass, drums and lead vocals as the elements that must remain genuinely live, while additional studio layers are carried through backing tracks. That division is less an attempt to reproduce the recordings literally than a practical decision about which components constitute the physical core of Escape With Romeo onstage.

The band begin the “Night After Night Tour 2026” in Munich on 19 September, followed by Cologne, two Essen shows, Karlsruhe, Bielefeld, Nuremberg, Rüsselsheim, Hamburg and Berlin. On 31 October they cross into Poland for the Shadow Dance Party: Halloween Edition at Pod Minoga in Poznań, followed by a December show in Rhede. The official band site says further dates are being developed for 2027, while Elbern tells Side-Line that the plan is to return to broader international touring, including Europe and South America.

Interview by Karo Kratochwil.

Junovion is a new solo synthpop project by Jonathan Jun, a classically trained pianist and violinist who works as a physician, and it opens with the single “Fading Light”. Jun dates the debut EP to October 16, 2026; his own site currently gives a fourth-quarter 2026 window and does not name a title for it. He wrote, produced and mixed the material himself and is releasing it independently.

The track works with layered synthesizer arrangements rather than preset-driven production, and Jun describes “Fading Light” as a song built to carry two readings at once: devotion in the face of loss on one hand, and holding on when everything else goes dark on the other. His stated reference points are the melodic clarity of OMD, the restraint of Depeche Mode, the rhythmic drive of New Order and the cinematic sweep of Alphaville, alongside a classical background he says shapes the arrangement work under the synths.

Jun connects the two halves of his working life directly. “Outside music, I’m a full-time physician,” he stated. “I take the same care with my songcraft as I do with medicine.”

About Junovion

Junovion is the solo electronic project of Jonathan Jun, who trained classically on piano and violin before moving into synthesizer-based songwriting, and who practises medicine and spent a long stretch of that career in sleep medicine. The project’s public history is short. Jun opened a YouTube channel under the Junovion name and posted its first three videos on August 21, 2026: “Fading Light”, “Wish I Could Fly” and “Remember Your Dream”. A fourth and fifth piece, “Halfway to the Finish Line” and an acoustic version of it, appear alongside them on his site.

Jun handles writing, production and mixing himself, and the recordings have not been placed with a label. “Fading Light” is the lead track from the debut EP and is currently available through the project’s YouTube channel and SoundCloud page, with a pre-save link covering Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer. Beyond those, no streaming or physical availability has been confirmed. Jun has said he wants the EP out on October 16, 2026, which would make it the first Junovion release to reach the major platforms.

Hungarian artist Csalogány releases “F3160 (Reimagined)” on August 28, 2026, a second reading of her single “Peremvidék (F3160)”. The original appeared with a video in January 2026 and went on to win Best Experimental at the London Music Video Awards and take second place in the Best Performer category at the Berlin Music Video Awards 2026. It was also selected for the music-video competition at the Odense International Film Festival, held in Denmark from August 24 to 30, 2026.

The title comes from F31.60, the ICD code for a mixed episode of bipolar disorder, in which manic and depressive symptoms can be present at the same time. Csalogány builds her work around psychology and interior states, and sets herself a plainly stated aim: “I am Csalogány and my goal is to make people feel.” Rather than explaining an emotion, she said, her songs are meant to construct a landscape a listener can move through.

The new version comes out of the same premise. An emotional state that contradictory, in her account, cannot be approached from one angle, so “F3160 (Reimagined)” returns to the material from a second position while keeping its emotional core intact. She describes it as the start of a new phase, widening her musical language while keeping the translation of inner experience into sound at the centre of the work.

The video for the original single was directed by Péter Becz and produced by Beyond, with cinematography by Marcell Csillag. It follows a museum attendant whose routine is interrupted by a painting of a horse, after which she turns to dance as a way of building an identity. Dancer and choreographer Bettina Rose Jurák, who plays the attendant, is the performance the Berlin jury placed second.

About Csalogány

Csalogány is the project of Hungarian singer-songwriter and producer Tímea Pászkány. Her music combines electronic production, chanting and Central and Eastern European folk material with lyrics that work through psychological self-examination and religious thinking. She came to wider notice through Kikeltető, a Hungarian programme run by KERET that maps the country’s underground scene and connects emerging musicians with industry professionals and audiences; Csalogány took part in the 2025 edition.

Her recorded output so far includes the four-track EP “The First Thing I Remember, It Is Fire”, released on September 18, 2024, and the album “Szellemzaj, Hústenger” in 2025. The single “Peremvidék (F3160)” followed, with its video published on her official YouTube channel on January 12, 2026. She has played both Hungarian and international stages, and posts under csalogany_ on Instagram.

“F3160 (Reimagined)” arrives on August 28, 2026 and is the first release of what Csalogány describes as a new period for the project.

Berlin trio MNÆ issue their third single, “Drive”, on August 28, 2026, together with a video. The self-released track is the group’s first synthwave-leaning piece, and arrives four months after their debut. MNÆ bring an electronic body music and wave hybrid that mixes pulsing sequences, machine rhythms and pop hooks, and the band describe their sound as sitting “at the intersection of Wave, EBM, and modern electro”.

“Drive” is the third instalment in a run that started in spring 2026. The trio released the single “Hold The Tide” on April 29, followed by the two-track “The Lion” on June 11, which paired the title track with an EvvilKing club edit of “Hold The Tide”. All three releases are self-released, written, mixed and mastered by the band. On “Drive” the group turn towards a period-conscious synthwave palette without reproducing it wholesale; the band describe the track as a modern interpretation of, and homage to, the pioneers of electro pop.

MNÆ have not put “Drive” on Bandcamp ahead of release; the June single “The Lion” is the most recent release available there.

About MNÆ

MNÆ is an electronic trio formed in Berlin in 2026 by Arc Morten, Jan Wilking and Axel Tasler. All three arrived with a considerable amount of prior work behind them. Arc Morten sings and writes in Cyto, the Berlin duo he started with soundtrack composer Christoph Schauer in 2017 and which grew out of the Morphose circle. Jan Wilking and Axel Tasler have both been part of the German electro-industrial group Steril since its formation in Oldenburg in 1990, Wilking on keyboards and programming and Tasler on guitars and programming. Tasler also plays in Audiocall, whose recent records include “Know Your Murderer” in 2024, “A Different World” in 2025 and “Unintentional Presence – Part 2” in 2026. The EvvilKing alias, used for the club edit on “The Lion”, has appeared in the Steril camp since a remix credit on the 2002 single “I Get Closer”.

The band opened its discography on April 29, 2026 with “Hold The Tide”, a self-released single written and produced by all three members. “The Lion” followed on June 11, 2026, adding a second original and the EvvilKing rework. Both are on Bandcamp, and the group’s YouTube channel carries videos for “The Lion” and for both versions of “Hold The Tide”. “Drive” continues that release run and pushes the project further towards melodic electro-pop while keeping the sequenced, club-facing base of the first two singles.

Till Lindemann put out “Übers Meer (Live In Kraków)” on August 21, 2026, together with the full live video. It is the first single lifted from “Live In Kraków”, the concert album and film Out Of Line releases on September 25, 2026, and it arrives a month before the album while pre-orders are running.

The performance comes from the TAURON Arena in Kraków on December 1, 2025, one of the closing arena dates of the “Meine Welt” tour. The full show was captured with twenty 4K cameras, six GoPros, two 360-degree rigs and a drone, and mixed for stereo PCM, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and 7.1 and Dolby Atmos. “Übers Meer” sits sixteenth in the running order of the nineteen-track audio edition; the video formats add “Outro Home Sweet Home” as a twentieth item.

The studio version of “Übers Meer” first appeared on the “Meine Welt” EP, which Out of Line issued digitally on December 20, 2024 and physically on March 28, 2025. The live recording is the first of that material to surface from the Kraków tapes.

About Till Lindemann

Till Lindemann, born in Leipzig in 1963, has fronted Rammstein since the band formed in Berlin in 1994. His work outside that group began with Lindemann, the duo he started with Swedish producer Peter Tägtgren in the mid-2010s, which released “Skills in Pills” in 2015 on Warner and “F & M” on Universal on November 22, 2019. Tägtgren left the project in November 2020 and Lindemann continued under his own name, issuing the single “Ich hasse Kinder” on May 31, 2021 and the album “Zunge” on November 3, 2023, which he put out himself after suspending a planned Universal release.

He signed to Out of Line in early 2025. The “Meine Welt” EP followed, its CD edition carrying remixes by Aesthetic Perfection and by Megabot featuring Zacky Vengeance of Avenged Sevenfold. A Hocico remix of “Und die Engel singen” appeared in July 2025, and “Es brennt…” followed in March 2026 with alternate readings by Alex Terrible of Slaughter To Prevail and Greg Mackintosh of Paradise Lost. The “Meine Welt” tour carried that material into arenas across 2025, and the first edition of TILL FEST took place in Leipzig the same year. “Übers Meer (Live In Kraków)” is the first release drawn from the resulting concert recording.

For more than four decades, Ultravox have occupied a rather unusual position in British music history. They were pioneers of electronic music, yet never quite belonged to the electronic camp. They emerged from the post-punk scene, embraced technology early, and later became one of the most successful British bands of the early 1980s. Yet their reputation has often been reduced to a handful of familiar titles, most notably “Vienna” and “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes”.

Richard Evans believes the band deserves a good deal more recognition.

Following his 2022 book “Listening To The Music The Machines Make – Inventing Electronic Pop 1978-1983”, Evans has turned his attention to Ultravox with “Looking Backwards Towards the Future: The Story of Ultravox”, an authorised biography published by Omnibus Press on October 8, 2026. The 400-page hardback carries a foreword by Moby; North American, Australian and New Zealand editions follow on February 9, 2027. Evans has two book events confirmed so far: the Mowlem Theatre in Swanage on October 29, 2026, and Sound Affects in Brighton on November 4, 2026, both a talk, Q&A and signing.

For Evans, Ultravox was a natural subject because their story crosses several musical worlds at once. They were already active when his previous book began, and were still active when it ended. More importantly, they repeatedly moved ahead of musical fashion rather than following it.

We spoke to Richard about the origins of the book, John Foxx, the transformation brought by Midge Ure, the Blitz and New Romantic scene, the band’s unexpected connection with early Depeche Mode, the reunion years, and why he believes Ultravox are still waiting for the recognition they deserve.

‘All of a sudden I was writing a book about Ultravox’

Side-Line: Your previous book covered a whole musical movement. What made you decide that Ultravox should be your next subject?

Richard Evans: The exact moment was in a pub in London in 2024. I had gone into town to meet Omnibus Press, who had published my previous book, because they had got in touch to ask if I was interested in writing another one for them. “Listening To The Music The Machines Make” had sold well and they wanted to hear if I had any ideas for something else.

I had a small number of ideas, maybe four in total, which I told them about over a beer. They said they liked the sound of the Ultravox one the most and that was basically it. All of a sudden I was writing a book about Ultravox.

What interested me about the band was that they were one of only a small number of artists who were already active in 1978, at the start of “Listening To The Music The Machines Make”, who were still active in 1983, at the end of that book.

Also, I didn’t actually know that much about them. I had a few of their singles but I didn’t know much about the band beyond that. However, I had listened to a lot of their music while I was writing “Listening To The Music The Machines Make” and I really liked it, and the idea of finding out more about them was interesting.

Plus, of course, there wasn’t already a book about them. I don’t know why that was the case but it felt like a perfect opportunity.

A band that never quite fitted anywhere

Side-Line: Was there a particular question about Ultravox’s history that you wanted to answer?

Richard Evans: There wasn’t a particular question about Ultravox’s history that I wanted to answer. It was all of their history that caught my eye: the fact that they were a rare band who were so often ahead of musical fashions, who were true pioneers, but who were almost too far ahead of those curves to receive the credit for what they achieved.

They also interested me because they never made anything easy for themselves. They were always pushing themselves to explore new areas, often at the expense of easy commercial success, and I admired them for that.

Side-Line: That idea of Ultravox being difficult to categorise seems to run through their entire career.

Richard Evans: Ultravox are a funny band in that they never quite fitted anywhere. They were too rock for electronic purists, too electronic for rock audiences, too arty, too single-minded… all qualities that make them such an interesting band.

That is one of the things that became clearer to me while writing the book.

John Foxx: the beginning of everything

Side-Line: Your story goes all the way back to the origins of the band and John Foxx. How important was Foxx’s original vision?

Richard Evans: Incredibly important. Fundamental actually.

John Foxx actually conceived the idea of creating a band in response to a lecture he attended at art school, and in fact the formation of the band was a college project of sorts. That’s where the story starts, and none of the rest could have happened without that initial impetus.

Side-Line: Foxx is fascinating because his influence extends far beyond the years he spent as Ultravox’s frontman.

Richard Evans: John Foxx is a fascinating character, he deserves a biography dedicated to just him in fact.

He is incredibly articulate and innately curious and his career, which covers music, art, design, academia and more, is very interesting. He feels like a true maverick and a genuine innovator, but Ultravox! was the starting point for that.

If that hadn’t happened then he might have gone in an entirely different direction. An artist or an illustrator perhaps, or a writer or a teacher.

Ultravox! set him on a path to everything he has achieved and explored. It took a while for the world to catch up but I do think that his influence is now being realised and recognised.

‘Systems Of Romance’ and the DNA of electronic music

Side-Line: The first three albums occupy a fascinating place in electronic and post-punk history, with “Systems Of Romance” in particular becoming a reference point for later generations. Did researching them change the way you heard those records?

Richard Evans: They are indeed, and you’re right about “Systems Of Romance” in particular. That album represented a very special moment where creativity and technology were being explored in a new way and Ultravox were among the very first to start exploring that.

My research led me to listen to those records in a different way and they contain lots of idiosyncrasies and pieces of formative DNA which pointed to everything that came next, not just for the band, but for music in general.

That’s quite an achievement, isn’t it?

Side-Line: Did you deliberately avoid turning John Foxx’s later solo career into part of the Ultravox narrative?

Richard Evans: I don’t delve into John Foxx’s work after Ultravox in the book but I agree that “Metamatic” was a very important record.

Throughout “Looking Backwards Towards the Future” I tried to give equal weight to all the members of the various line-ups as best I could. They pretty much all had other projects going on outside Ultravox and if I explored one then I would have to explore them all, which would have taken focus away from the core Ultravox story and would have made the book much too big and unwieldy.

For what it’s worth though, I view “Metamatic” and John Foxx’s subsequent projects as being distinct from Ultravox rather than being extensions of it.

‘Vienna’, Blitz and the New Romantic moment

Side-Line: Ultravox’s relationship with the emerging Blitz and New Romantic scene is particularly interesting. How important was that environment to the band’s success?

Richard Evans: For the individual band members I don’t think it was particularly important, but for the success of “Vienna” it was crucial.

That period in time, those new electronic sounds, were incredibly new and startling, but it took Blitz and the New Romantics – none of Ultravox liked that name, although at the time they said they were more comfortable with being called Futurists – to create a world around that music by adding the dance-floor, the fashions and a compelling post-punk aesthetic to hang everything on to create a scene.

That scene in turn allowed all sorts of very diverse artists, Ultravox amongst them, to smuggle themselves into the mainstream under the cover of New Romanticism.

Side-Line: Depeche Mode were also part of that wider environment, although they quickly tried to distance themselves from the New Romantic label.

Richard Evans: It was a very fertile period and lots of bands who previously wouldn’t have been grouped together suddenly found themselves part of a movement, but the smarter artists already knew that fashions fade fast.

Having used the scene as the first steps on their career ladders, they were quick to try to distance themselves from it. Even at the time very few bands identified as New Romantics even though they were thrown together under that banner.

Depeche Mode could see that, I think, and didn’t want to be held back by it.

I think Ultravox were the same, but perhaps they played the game a little better!

When Ultravox and Depeche Mode almost crossed paths

Side-Line: There is also the story of Depeche Mode being offered an opportunity to support Ultravox around the period of the “Some Bizzare Album” and Stevo’s scene. What did you learn about that episode?

Richard Evans: It is something I touch on in the book.

You will be unsurprised to know that I was able to talk to Vince Clarke about Ultravox for “Looking Backwards Towards the Future” and we talked about exactly that.

It’s absolutely true, but although Stevo offered Depeche Mode a support slot with Ultravox as an incentive to sign with him, I don’t think that he was in a position to actually make that happen.

I think Depeche made the right decision!

Midge Ure and the creative chemistry of equality

Side-Line: When Midge Ure joined, Ultravox didn’t simply become a more commercially successful version of the same band. The entire musical and visual identity evolved. What made that line-up work so well?

Richard Evans: I think it was equality.

The previous incarnation of Ultravox was John Foxx’s project and he drove it, but with this new line-up everyone was equal and that led to a real creative connection.

Talking to the band about those sessions I get the impression they were having fun both creatively and personally, and they were very driven at that stage in their career, which was also an important factor.

Side-Line: They also resisted the obvious commercial option. After the enormous success of “Vienna”, they followed it with something as strange and eccentric as “Rage In Eden”.

Richard Evans: Initially I think they had fun with success.

It’s interesting – and very typical of the band – that following the massive success of “Vienna” they made an album as strange and as eccentric as “Rage In Eden” when the safe option would have been to simply capitalise on their success and do more of the same.

But I also think that as they moved forward, and as their success allowed them to explore other areas, internal dynamics did start to change and they got caught in a cycle of recording, releasing and touring album after album, which ultimately became unfulfilling and creatively challenging for them.

Beyond ‘Vienna’

Side-Line: Did researching “Vienna” itself reveal anything that changed the familiar story?

Richard Evans: The band have been asked about “Vienna” so many times over the years that I think everything that could be said about it has already been said.

That said, I did talk to the television promotions person from Ultravox’s label at that time, Chrysalis, and his memories of the band doing “Top Of The Pops” for the first time were interesting and new to me at least, so maybe I have added a little to the story of that song after all!

Side-Line: How much space did you give to the tensions behind the success?

Richard Evans: I think the public face of any band is never quite aligned with what is going on behind the scenes, but yes, those tensions are part of the story and so they have been included.

I was guided by the band members themselves as to how much they wanted to put in the public domain, but they were all very honest, I think.

Sometimes too honest, and sometimes that honesty made it into the book, and sometimes it didn’t…

Where does the classic Ultravox story end?

Side-Line: The “U-Vox” period is often regarded as the end of the classic Ultravox story. Do you agree?

Richard Evans: Warren Cann was already out of the band by the time “U-Vox” was released, so I would say that the end of the classic Ultravox story actually comes at the end of the “Lament” album project.

“U-Vox” was a tricky moment in the band’s career though.

That said, I always liked the album artwork!

Side-Line: And what about the Tony Fenelle and Sam Blue line-ups?

Richard Evans: I write about both of those line-ups but for me, and for a lot of other fans of the band, they aren’t true Ultravox albums.

They are interesting Billy Currie projects and there’s some good music to be found from both, but attaching the name Ultravox to them just doesn’t sit right for me looking at them in retrospect.

Sorry Billy…

Side-Line: So was the end of the band ultimately a creative, personal or musical problem?

Richard Evans: Definitely a combination of all three!

An influence still waiting for recognition

Side-Line: Ultravox’s reputation continued to grow through compilations and retrospectives. When did they become a genuine historical influence on new generations?

Richard Evans: That’s a really interesting question.

I talk to a couple of artists who claim Ultravox as a major influence on their own careers: Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran, who is a huge fan of the earlier incarnation of the band, and Moby, who is more of a fan of the later records.

But despite their respective flag-waving for the band, I don’t think that Ultravox have really ever been given the respect they deserve.

Hopefully the book will help remind people of what they achieved as another stepping stone towards that kind of recognition.

The reunion: serendipity rather than nostalgia

Side-Line: The reunion in 2008 seemed almost improbable. What brought the four classic members back together?

Richard Evans: It was such an unlikely thing to happen, which is typically Ultravox in itself and I suspect that was part of the appeal for them.

It was basically a case of good timing.

One of Ultravox’s former managers, Chris O’Donnell, sent each of them an email wondering if they might consider doing some shows, and on that particular day, and in those particular moments, all four of them thought that there might be something in the idea.

The stars just happened to align.

Serendipity.

Side-Line: And then came “Brilliant”.

Richard Evans: The band have mixed feelings about that title, but it’s a decent album in my opinion.

I think that by the end of the making of it a lot of the old tensions were back in the band, which took a lot of the joy out of the project…

Writing an authorised biography without losing independence

Side-Line: You had access to the surviving members, as well as former collaborators, archive material and people from the band’s wider circle. How did you build the research?

Richard Evans: I was lucky on the research because I had already gathered a lot of it for “Listening To The Music The Machines Make”, so that turned out to be unexpectedly valuable.

Once Omnibus Press agreed to the idea of an Ultravox book I approached the surviving band members to see if they would be comfortable with me writing about them, and also to sound them out on whether they might want to become involved.

I had interviewed John Foxx, Billy Currie and Midge Ure previously for other things, so I started with them and they all confirmed they were happy for me to write the book, and also that they would make themselves available to answer questions.

Billy connected me to Warren, who also agreed to be on board, and John Foxx’s manager introduced me to Robin Simon, who also said yes.

Nobody was still in touch with Steve Shears though, and tracking him down took some time, and when I did he decided that he didn’t want to be directly involved.

I told the band that I would only ask them about things that they hadn’t previously talked about, rather than making them go over the same things they have been asked a hundred times over the years. I think that helped my case.

I’ve worked in the music industry for long enough that I knew people who had worked with the band, or who could easily connect me with people who worked with the band.

And other people I talked to I just approached out of the blue, like Steve Lillywhite and Moby, or I already knew, like Vince Clarke and Nick Rhodes.

Conflicting memories and uncomfortable truths

Side-Line: Was there any archive material that proved particularly revealing?

Richard Evans: I think the most interesting archive materials were the interviews the band did for the Ultravox fanzine “Extreme Voice”, which eventually became their official fan newsletter.

Those interviews were not only very relaxed conversations with the band, but they also delved deeply into unexpected corners in the way that only true fans could have done.

If I had to choose one then it would be the very honest interview that Warren Cann gave to the “In The City” fanzine after being sacked from the band, which wasn’t published at the time but later appeared in “Extreme Voice”.

Aside from that, John Foxx hasn’t really talked about a lot of things I asked him about. In fact, he told me he dislikes talking about this part of his history, so there are some very interesting contributions from him and it seems I was lucky to get them.

Side-Line: How do you balance honesty with fairness when different members remember the same events very differently?

Richard Evans: Sometimes it was tricky.

As I got to know the various band members a little over the course of the project I got to like them all, and as a result I very much wanted to represent each of them equally.

Sometimes their individual recollections didn’t quite match, or were dramatically different, and in those situations I tried to present all views side by side.

Did I leave some things out?

Yes I did, but only if I felt that they were unfair, overly personal or unsubstantiated.

Side-Line: And did the fact that this is an authorised biography ever compromise your independence?

Richard Evans: Not really.

None of the band members asked to see any of the book while I was writing it, and at this exact moment in time they still haven’t. As soon as printed copies are available I will send a copy to each of them and I very much hope they approve of it.

Ultimately it’s my book rather than theirs, but the band were kind enough to trust me to tell their stories, so I did feel a responsibility to represent each of them properly and respectfully.

I don’t recall not asking a question I wanted the answer to in any of my conversations with them though.

Why Moby?

Side-Line: Your previous book had a foreword by Vince Clarke. This time it is Moby. How did that happen?

Richard Evans: I didn’t know Moby, although our paths had briefly crossed in the early 90s, but I did know someone who could introduce me to his manager, which is what happened.

I knew Moby was a huge fan of Ultravox and when I explained what I was writing he agreed to talk to me.

We scheduled a Zoom and we got along really well.

His enthusiasm for Ultravox was so infectious and so heartfelt that he seemed to be the perfect person to provide the foreword.

He’s another really interesting character with interesting things to say.

Looking backwards, towards the future

Side-Line: You are planning book events around the publication. What would you like these events to become?

Richard Evans: When “Listening To The Music The Machines Make” came out I did an event for Sound Affects in Brighton. It was my first ever time doing a book event and although it went well I knew in retrospect that I didn’t do as good a job on it as I should have done, so I asked them if I could come back and do another one for this book, and they very kindly agreed.

Swanage is the closest town to where I live and I did an event at the same venue for “Listening To The Music The Machines Make”, which went well, so they asked if I might like to do another one.

Beyond those two I’m also having conversations with a few other people about doing talks and events at the moment. Potentially some of them will be me talking about the book, some will be conversations with other people. It’s all being worked out at the moment.

Side-Line: Finally, after spending so long looking backwards towards the future of Ultravox, where do you think the band belongs today?

Richard Evans: I think Ultravox are long overdue some proper respect for their achievements, and for always achieving those achievements on their own terms.

If the book can help amplify that for the band then I would be very happy, and if reading it makes people discover aspects of Ultravox they weren’t previously aware of then that would be amazing.

If nothing else, reminding people of the breadth and quality of their catalogue and reintroducing them to those songs feels like a successful outcome.

About Ultravox

Ultravox formed in London in April 1974 around singer Dennis Leigh, who took the name John Foxx, together with Chris Allen on bass, Stevie Shears on guitar, Billy Currie on violin and keyboards and Warren Cann on drums. The group worked as Tiger Lily before adopting the name Ultravox! in October 1976 and signing to Island Records. Allen had by then become Chris Cross. Steve Lillywhite and Brian Eno co-produced the debut album “Ultravox!”, released in February 1977; “Ha! Ha! Ha!” followed later the same year. Robin Simon replaced Shears on guitar for “Systems of Romance” in 1978, recorded in Germany with Conny Plank and built on synthesizers, treated guitar and drum machine. Foxx left in March 1979 after a final American date and went on to release “Metamatic” in 1980.

Midge Ure, previously of Slik, The Rich Kids and Thin Lizzy, joined as singer and guitarist on November 1, 1979, having worked with Currie in Visage earlier that year. The Ure line-up signed to Chrysalis and released “Vienna” in July 1980; its title track reached number two in the UK in early 1981. “Rage in Eden” followed in 1981, “Quartet” in 1982 with George Martin producing, and “Lament” in 1984, which carried “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes”. Cann was dismissed in 1986, before the recording of “U-Vox”, released that October. Currie continued the name with two further albums fronted by other singers, “Revelation” in 1993 with Tony Fenelle and “Ingenuity” in 1994 with Sam Blue.

Ure, Currie, Cann and Cross reunited in November 2008, played their first show together in more than two decades at the Edinburgh Playhouse in April 2009 and released “Brill!ant” on May 28, 2012. Chris Cross died on March 25, 2024 at the age of 71. Chrysalis issued “The Collection (Deluxe Edition)” in December 2025. “Looking Backwards Towards the Future: The Story of Ultravox” is the first full-length book on the band.

Interview by János Janurik.

With “Realities”, Jan Dewulf does something more interesting than simply broaden Mildreda‘s sound. He removes one of the most recognisable elements of “Blue-Devilled” altogether: there is not a single sacred sample on the new album. The quasi-liturgical weight of its predecessor gives way to colder electronics, sharper industrial abrasion and passages that move considerably closer to noise. At the same time, the writing becomes more exposed, allowing tenderness, ageing, regret, loneliness and vulnerability into Mildreda without translating any of them into softness.

Scheduled for release on August 28 through Dependent Records, “Realities” is an 18-track double album, also issued as a limited 2CD artbook with 48 pages designed by Henk Willems. Recurring “Reality Checks” run through its structure; Constantin “Breñal” Warter of Calva Y Nada appears on “Rückwärts”, while Suicide Commando‘s Johan Van Roy joins “Virtual Goddess”. Where “Blue-Devilled” worked explicitly with Sartre, “Realities” turns towards Camus and Sisyphus: falling, rebuilding and the uncomfortable recognition that a life does not unfold inside one stable reality, but through successive versions of it.

In this conversation, that idea moves far beyond philosophy as an intellectual reference. Dewulf talks about reaching middle age and the lives no longer available to us, why the “Reality Checks” function like the seams in kintsugi, social media complicity, the strange persistence of gods after belief disappears, and why increased vulnerability pushed Mildreda towards more violent sound rather than away from it. The result is also a remarkably precise account of an artist who says he is no longer searching for Mildreda’s identity; he is now interested in finding out how far that identity can be stretched before it stops being Mildreda.

Mildreda interview

Karo: Jan, when we first spoke in 2021, you told me that maturity had finally allowed you to “come home” with Mildreda. I have followed the project ever since, through “I Was Never Really There”, “Blue-Devilled”, the concerts and now “Realities”, and this record gives me almost the opposite impression: you sound secure enough in Mildreda to start dismantling parts of the language you had established. How much did making “Realities” require you to question your own idea of what Mildreda is supposed to sound like?

Jan: You could argue that making music, playing in a band, writing lyrics and creating a story around it will always be a journey of exploration. But the nature of that journey has definitely changed. I’m no longer searching for Mildreda’s identity, and by now I feel I’ve figured out the DNA of the project as well. That foundation is there, and it’s solid. And precisely because of that, I can now embark on more adventurous quests: exploring the boundaries of the Mildreda sound, allowing for a broader emotional range, and seeing how far I can stretch things without losing what makes Mildreda what it is. I think that’s something you can clearly hear on “Realities”.

Karo: When you sent me the album, you described it as your most emotional work and said there were “more colours in the music than ever”. Having heard it, I think the interesting thing is that those colours are certainly not all softer ones. There is industrial abrasion, noise, harsher vocals, but also enormous electronic detail, space and moments of delicacy. When you speak about colour in music, what exactly does that mean to you? Is it timbre, emotional range, dynamics, harmonic language, or the freedom to allow contradictory emotional states to exist within the same musical vocabulary?

Jan: When I said it was my most emotional album, I also, and perhaps primarily, meant that on a lyrical level. I allowed myself to explore themes and emotions that are rather unusual within a genre like dark electro. I deliberately moved beyond the genre’s more traditional themes of pain, anger and darkness, making room for vulnerability and tenderness instead. That vulnerability sometimes finds its way into the music as well, in quieter, more emotional and delicate passages that are relatively new territory for Mildreda. But at the same time, I really pushed the boundaries in the opposite direction too, exploring noisier, harsher and more abrasive territory than before. So in that sense, those additional colours aren’t necessarily softer ones. It’s more about widening the entire emotional and sonic spectrum of what Mildreda can be.

Karo: The distance from “Blue-Devilled” is wide. That album had an almost architectural darkness, with quasi-sacral space, ritual weight and gothic grandeur, whereas “Realities” feels more corporeal, metallic and exposed. The church-like atmosphere has largely disappeared even though the philosophical conflict has not. Did the change in subject matter make that previous sonic language inappropriate, or had you simply reached the point where you no longer needed those symbols to create darkness?

Jan: Especially in Mildreda’s early days in the 1990s, that sacred element was an important part of the sound. I was heavily influenced by bands like Will, early Delerium and In Slaughter Natives, who incorporated bombastic samples of sacred chants into their dark electronic compositions. That whole wave of inspiration came back in full force while making “Blue-Devilled”, so much so that the album is packed with grandiose, sacral samples. One fan joked that if he took a shot of jenever every time he heard a monk singing on “Blue-Devilled”, he’d be completely drunk by the end of the album. He had a point: we may have overdone it a little. So with “Realities”, it was a very conscious decision not to use a single sacred sample anywhere on the album. This time, I wanted the darkness to come from a colder, more purely electronic sound.

Karo: “Blue-Devilled” entered into dialogue with Sartre, particularly his idea of hell in relation to the gaze and judgement of other people. “Realities” moves towards Camus, which changes the philosophical problem considerably: from the self confronted by another consciousness towards the collision between our need for meaning and a world that does not promise to provide it. Why did Camus become relevant to you now, and was that movement philosophical first or biographical first?

Jan: At its heart, “Realities” is about falling down and finding the strength to get back up again. Throughout our lives, we keep having to rediscover and rebuild ourselves after setbacks, whether they are small or life-changing. And we have to do all of that within the brief interlude we are granted in this universe: our finite lives. That is where Camus entered the picture. In many ways, “Realities” became a confrontation with the absurd. Echoing Camus and his comparison of the human condition to the fate of Sisyphus, the album revolves around that endless cycle of falling and rising, breaking and rebuilding, and forcing ourselves to create new versions of reality. We search for meaning even though the universe offers us no guarantee that there is any to be found. And yet we keep moving. That is also exactly what the title “Realities” refers to. We don’t live in one single, fixed reality, but in a succession of realities. With every setback, every decision and every new beginning, we become a slightly different version of ourselves and inhabit a slightly different world.

Visually, that journey is beautifully reflected in Henk Willems’ artwork, where nature slowly reclaims what was once broken. Moss spreads across abandoned ruins, while new growth gradually softens the scars of destruction. To me, it became a powerful metaphor for the album itself: not simply a story of collapse, but of renewal. Not of defeat, but of return.

Karo: Camus famously concludes “The Myth of Sisyphus” with “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”, but your Sisyphus in “End of the Line” carries something rather more specific: biography. “Forty-five, fifty-five / This is the time of your life”, followed by those “thousand lives you never led”, introduces age, memory and unrealised possibility into the cycle. Returning to the beginning at fifty cannot mean returning to the same beginning as at twenty because the person pushing the rock has accumulated knowledge, losses and consequences. Does your Sisyphus still arrive at something resembling Camus’s freedom through lucidity, or are you questioning whether accepting the absurd is enough once time itself has become part of the burden?

Jan: The initial spark was actually something very personal. Not that long ago, when I turned 45, someone told me, “You’re about to enter the ten best years of your life.” Whether that’s true or not is impossible to say, of course, but there was something strangely powerful about that thought. It almost felt like an obligation to make those years count. That naturally led me back to questions that have always fascinated me: the fact that life is finite, that our time is limited, and that with age comes an increasing awareness of all the lives we could have lived but didn’t. At twenty, there still seems to be an almost infinite number of possible futures ahead of you. Later in life, some of those possibilities have inevitably disappeared. Choices have been made, things have been lost, and time itself becomes part of the weight you carry. That is where Camus and Sisyphus became particularly relevant to “End of the Line”. Sisyphus keeps pushing his boulder despite knowing that it will inevitably roll back down. To me, that endless cycle of falling, getting back up and starting again is a very powerful metaphor for life. We all have our own rock to push uphill, and somehow we keep going. So can Sisyphus still be happy while carrying that rock up the mountain again and again? I think, with Camus, that he can. Despite our mortality and the intrinsic meaninglessness of existence, we still have the freedom to create our own stories, to find joy and to give meaning to the limited time we have. Perhaps age doesn’t contradict Camus’s idea of freedom at all; it simply makes it more urgent. We’d better start pushing, living and creating meaning now, because at some point, the time really does run out.

Karo: Musically, I hear more industrial language on “Realities” than on any previous Mildreda album, sometimes moving into very raw, almost noise-like territory. “Rückwärts” is particularly severe and fragmented, but that hardness runs through much of the record in the percussion, distortion, chopped structures and increasingly sharp vocal attack. What led you towards these harsher materials? Did you consciously pursue abrasion as part of the production language, and were there moments when you had to resist making a sound cleaner because its discomfort was exactly what the song required?

Jan: That direction actually emerged quite naturally. But it is true that, with this album, I consciously wanted the music to be less immediately digestible than on the previous record. Musically, “Realities” has far more sharp edges, rough textures and moments of genuine abrasion. Perhaps I had been a little too cautious before, whereas this time I allowed myself to go all the way.

There is a certain duality at the heart of the album in that respect: very harsh, abrasive music intertwined with vulnerability in the lyrics and themes. That contrast has always fascinated me. Nine Inch Nails taught me that industrial music can be layered with vulnerability without losing any of its power or aggression. If anything, the two can reinforce each other.

Karo: At the same time, reducing “Realities” to its aggression would completely misrepresent it because this is also an extraordinarily elaborate electronic record. Across the album, sounds accumulate, separate, change depth and move around one another; dense structures can suddenly open and allow a small sample, voice or electronic detail to occupy an enormous amount of psychological space. How differently were you thinking about density, depth and layering this time, and how do you know when complexity is intensifying an emotion rather than beginning to hide it?

Jan: First of all, thank you for describing our music so beautifully. I’m genuinely happy that I was able to take you along on that musical journey in that way. For me, every track is a new search for the right sound and the right balance. And I love that process. I find it incredibly rewarding to spend hours in the studio working with synths and samples, tweaking sounds and layers until they evoke exactly the feeling I’m looking for. There’s something wonderful about that moment when, after endless tweaking, the pieces of the puzzle suddenly fall into place. This time, there simply seemed to be more puzzle pieces than ever, all demanding their own space. That’s one of the reasons why “Realities” ultimately needed to become a double album. I secretly hope that listeners will surrender to that journey from beginning to end: eighteen tracks moving through very different moods, textures and sonic landscapes. For me, the complexity only works when all those layers ultimately serve that journey and the emotion behind it.

Karo: The “Reality Checks” are one of the strongest compositional ideas on the album. I do not hear them as conventional interludes because they do not merely separate the larger songs or give us recovery time. They make the whole record feel interwoven, almost braided: the substantial compositions form one strand, these smaller pieces enter between them, and gradually the relationship between the two becomes part of the album’s architecture. When did you realise that “Realities” needed this structure, and what makes an idea a “Reality Check” rather than something that develops into a full Mildreda song?

Jan: The idea of using interludes was there from the very beginning. I wanted something that would weave the individual songs together and make the album feel like one continuous journey rather than simply a collection of tracks. Albums like “Entities” by Project Pitchfork and “Galleries of Pain” by Placebo Effect were important references in that respect. Gradually, those interludes developed a character of their own and became the “Reality Checks”. I started to see them almost as the golden seams in kintsugi: they sit between the larger pieces, but rather than simply separating them, they bind the fractured parts into a new whole. Some echo or distort elements from the songs around them, some contain vocals, while others became little sonic adventures of their own. And perhaps that is what distinguishes a “Reality Check” from a full Mildreda song. It doesn’t need to arrive anywhere or tell a complete story. It can remain fragmentary: suggest something, disturb the balance for a moment and then disappear. Its incompleteness is part of its purpose.

Karo: Their placement also gives the album something almost physiological, like a heartbeat. Pressure accumulates, then comes a caesura, a moment of recalibration, and movement resumes. Yet the “Reality Checks” are not predictable moments of relief; sometimes they open the music and allow it to breathe, while elsewhere they make the footing even less secure. In ordinary life, a reality check is exactly such a moment: the narrative we have been living inside is interrupted and we are forced to take stock of where we actually stand. Afterwards the external circumstances may be identical, but our perception of them has changed. Is that also what these pieces are doing, repeatedly altering the position from which we perceive the music around them, and perhaps offering another way of understanding the plural title “Realities”?

Jan: Yes, very much so. I like your description of them as moments of recalibration, because that is exactly how I see a reality check in life as well. Something happens that briefly disrupts the story you have been telling yourself. The world may still be exactly the same afterwards, but your position within it has shifted. That connects directly to the central idea of “Realities”. We fall, we rise, we rebuild ourselves, and each time we do, we are forced into a slightly different version of reality. There is no single fixed perspective from which we experience our lives. Our perception constantly changes through loss, experience, decisions and new beginnings. “Reality Checks” translate that idea into the architecture of the album. They interrupt the flow and slightly reposition the listener before the next piece begins. And importantly, as you point out, they are not always moments of relief. Sometimes a reality check brings clarity; sometimes it only makes things more confusing. But either way, something has shifted. You continue the journey from a different position than before. And yes, in that sense they are very closely connected to the plural in “Realities”: there is never just one reality to return to.

Karo: You told me that the material grew into a double album, yet for you it still tells one story. That is a difficult structural problem: eighteen pieces, radically different degrees of intensity and a very broad electronic vocabulary could easily become abundance without coherence. At what point did you understand that you were not making two albums, or an album with supplementary pieces? What makes “Realities” one work for you: narrative, emotional continuity, musical recurrence, or something that only exists through the sequence itself?

Jan: There was also a very practical starting point. New albums on Dependent are nowadays released as beautiful, exclusive hardcover artbooks with two CDs. I’m a big fan of that format, but I’m not necessarily a big fan of the idea that the second disc automatically has to become a collection of bonus material. I didn’t feel like inviting a dozen remixers for this one. This had to remain my story. So in a way, I was quite happy to discover that I simply had too much to say for a single CD. There were so many musical ideas, moods and little sonic adventures that all felt integral to the same universe. Cutting them down just to fit the conventional length of an album would have felt more artificial than allowing the record to expand. And there was a reassuring precedent, of course. Nine Inch Nails showed with “The Fragile” that a double album can be an extraordinary work in its own right rather than an album plus an appendix. That record gave me confidence that abundance doesn’t necessarily have to come at the expense of coherence. For me, “Realities” is ultimately one big story. Despite the range of sounds, moods and emotions, everything belongs to the same conceptual journey: falling, rebuilding, shifting perspective and entering another reality. The “Reality Checks” help bind that journey together, but ultimately I think the coherence exists in the sequence itself. I hope the listener experiences those eighteen pieces not as separate destinations, but as chapters in one long journey through constantly changing emotional and sonic landscapes.

Karo: In our first interview you described songwriting as a way of exorcising your demons. “Realities”, however, seems less protected by symbolic architecture than some of the earlier material. “Damage Done”, “Clair-Obscur” and “End of the Line” allow loneliness, emotional asymmetry, ageing, regret and exhaustion to remain recognisably human rather than disguising them completely as theology or elaborate metaphor. Has becoming more personal also changed your relationship with abstraction? At what point does transforming an experience protect the song, and at what point does it protect the writer too much?

Jan: That is something that happened quite naturally and evolved over time. Initially, Your Life On Hold was the project where I allowed myself to reveal more of my soul and dig deeper into personal emotions, while Mildreda was primarily the place where I wanted to be loud, confrontational and channel aggression. But gradually, while writing new material, I found myself digging deeper with Mildreda as well. I started allowing a much broader emotional range into the project and became less dependent on abstraction or metaphor to express what I wanted to say. I think that also has a lot to do with becoming more confident as a songwriter. I no longer feel the need to hide behind anything. If there is something I want to say, I can say it openly and without disguise. And what changed with “Realities” is that I discovered I can do that within Mildreda too, without compromising what Mildreda is.

Karo: You mentioned Nine Inch Nails to me while explaining the direction of this record, particularly the possibility of allowing vulnerability and emotional depth to coexist with intensity and noise. On “Realities”, vulnerability rarely means making the music gentler; quite often exposure seems to make it more violent. Did that become a compositional principle in itself, that tenderness, humiliation, rage, longing and industrial aggression do not need separate musical languages because they can actually originate from the same emotional state?

Jan: What is vulnerable, fragile and delicate is also more susceptible to pain, and I think you can hear that throughout the album. There is a lot of sadness, underlying pain and unanswered longing on “Realities”. Those emotions don’t necessarily ask for gentle music. Sometimes vulnerability can be extremely violent precisely because there is so little protection around it. The best way for me to translate that duality into music was therefore sometimes to work with very dissonant, abrasive and explosive sounds. Tenderness and aggression don’t have to be opposites; they can grow out of exactly the same emotional state. That constant interplay between light and shadow runs through the entire album, I think. The fragile moments make the harsh ones more painful, and the harshness in turn makes the vulnerability feel even more exposed.

Karo: The collaborators introduce another interesting contradiction. In 2023 you told me that with “Blue-Devilled” you deliberately wanted to undertake the creative process yourself, partly because after previous collaborations you needed to demonstrate that you could stand alone artistically. “Realities”, which you consider much more personal, opens the door again: Constantin Warter of Calva Y Nada enters “Rückwärts”, while Johan Van Roy of Suicide Commando appears on “Virtual Goddess”. Why did the more personal album become the right place for other voices again, and how much of their own identity do you want a guest to bring into a Mildreda song?

Jan: That’s true: on “Blue-Devilled” I deliberately avoided collaborations for exactly the reason you mention. But that was an artistic decision rather than something dictated by the subject matter. I needed to prove to myself that I could carry an entire Mildreda album on my own. Once I had done that, there was no reason to keep that door closed. This time I wanted other voices on the record, and I’m incredibly happy with the people I managed to bring in.

The collaboration with Calva Y Nada was actually a blessing on a very practical level as well. “Rückwärts” was one of the first songs I wrote for the album, but after living with the demo for a while, I realised I was completely stuck. I loved the track, but I simply couldn’t imagine my own voice doing it justice. Constantin has such a unique and unmistakable voice that once I started fantasising about someone else singing it, I simply couldn’t hear anyone but him. Through mutual friends we got in touch, eventually met in person, and to my delight he connected with the idea. For me, it was a genuine full-circle moment. Calva Y Nada was one of the bands that defined my teenage years, so hearing Constantin’s voice on a Mildreda record still feels both surreal and deeply meaningful.

Johan Van Roy represents something very similar to me. Together with Dirk Ivens, he helped shape what dark electro sounded like in Belgium. With “Realities”, I deliberately wanted to reconnect with that cold, uncompromising Belgian industrial DNA, and “Virtual Goddess” immediately felt like the perfect track for Johan. He brought exactly the intensity and attitude I had hoped for. And I think that also answers the question of how much of themselves I want guests to bring. I don’t invite someone simply to perform a part that could just as easily have been sung by me. I want their identity to become part of the song. Constantin and Johan are unmistakably themselves on these tracks, while somehow still sounding completely at home within Mildreda.

Having them both on “Realities” is a real privilege. They are far more than guest vocalists to me: they are two artists whose music helped shape my own musical identity long before Mildreda even existed.

Karo: The remixes take that question of identity even further. Das Ich and Steril reconstruct “End of the Line”, while Flesh Field rework “Virtual Goddess”, and around a record called “Realities” the very act of remixing becomes conceptually appropriate: the same composition receives another body, another emphasis and another emotional temperature while remaining recognisable. Did any of those versions make you discover something in your own original that you had not consciously put there? More fundamentally, where does the identity of a song reside if rhythm, texture, atmosphere and structure can change so dramatically while we still perceive it as the same work?

Jan: I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with remixes. I love them when they have a genuine reason to exist, rather than simply being part of some endless process of squeezing more material out of a release. The occasion has to feel right, and so does the remixer. That’s why I’m quite selective about both. Mildreda hasn’t actually been through the remix machine that often, so having several artists reinterpret these songs was relatively new territory for Mildreda, and quite exciting.

Das Ich were genuine heroes of my youth. Their first two albums still give me goosebumps today, and remarkably, they haven’t aged at all. They were simply light-years ahead of their time. Having Bruno remix one of my songs was therefore a childhood dream coming true. And when I first heard the result, I actually did a little dance of joy. It sounds unmistakably like Das Ich, yet “End of the Line” is still clearly there. In a strange way, it feels like a true hybrid: half my song, half a Das Ich composition. Perhaps that is also an answer to your question about where the identity of a song resides. Apparently you can change an enormous amount and still preserve some kind of core that remains recognisable.

I’m equally happy with the other remixes. Steril are heroes of mine as well, and they transformed “End of the Line” into a wonderfully tight club track. Flesh Field, on the other hand, happened to cross my path at exactly the right moment, so involving him was almost an act of serendipity. I loved hearing “Virtual Goddess” thrown into his wonderfully mad industrial mixture of bombast, aggression and even a touch of dubstep. What fascinates me about all three is that I can still recognise my songs, but I’m hearing them through someone else’s ears. Maybe that’s what a good remix should do: not simply decorate the original, but reveal another possible reality that was somehow already hiding inside it. The Das Ich and Steril versions of “End of the Line” were released on the June 2026 EP, while the “Virtual Goddess” release includes the Flesh Field remix.

Karo: “Virtual Goddess” avoids one of the easiest traps in writing about digital culture because the narrator is implicated in the mechanism he criticises. There is a virtual goddess, but there is also a virtual god; desire becomes entangled with images, attention, views and projection, so nobody gets to occupy the comfortable position outside the system. Is complicity important here? Have we reached a point where criticising mediated reality while continuing to produce, consume and emotionally invest in it is itself one of the defining contradictions of contemporary life?

Jan: This is a difficult question because there are several things tangled up in it. There is the sheer amount of our day that social media consumes, but also the way it affects how we present ourselves and how we perceive other people. Both images are inevitably distorted. At the same time, however critical I am of social media, I can’t dismiss it as purely negative. It remains, whether we like it or not, an important way of discovering music and news, staying connected and sharing your own story with the world. And occasionally you even find a good joke there. So yes, complicity is absolutely part of it. I notice the contradiction in myself all the time. I can hardly keep away from my smartphone, call it an addiction if you like, while simultaneously being deeply irritated by the whole mechanism. I’m frustrated by all those pixel-perfect façades, yet at the same time I participate in creating one myself. I criticise the game while continuing to play it. And artificial intelligence is adding yet another layer of complexity to all of this. The boundaries between what is real, constructed, enhanced or entirely artificial are becoming increasingly difficult to define. We seem to be living inside a fascinating and slightly disturbing science-fiction film, except that none of us gets to sit outside it and simply watch.

Karo: “Götterfall” almost feels like an older Mildreda argument surviving inside an entirely different philosophical environment. We have discussed your atheism before, and the quasi-sacral architecture of “Blue-Devilled” has largely vanished, yet somebody is still firing at gods who remain silent, mocking and apparently impossible to kill. If those gods are no longer theological, what has taken their place? Are there ideas, institutions, authorities, memories or even people we consciously stop believing in while continuing to grant them enormous psychological power?

Jan: The ancient Greek historian Herodotus tells us that the Getae would shoot arrows into the sky during thunderstorms, threatening their god. I’ve always found that an incredibly powerful image, and I had actually used it before in a Your Life On Hold song. But it was simply too strong not to bring into the Mildreda universe as well: man, confronted with a reality he cannot accept, firing his arrows at the heavens. I also knew I wanted a song in German on the album, which allowed me to reshape the idea into something new. The arrows became bullets, and German inevitably gives the whole thing a very different weight and character. But the central idea remained the same: we are powerless and insignificant, raging against forces that are infinitely larger than ourselves.

Karo: “Reality” widens the scope dramatically at the end: headlines, war, mediated violence, environmental destruction, the repeated consumption of catastrophe through screens. Much of the album has dealt with extremely intimate realities such as desire, damage, loneliness, ageing and unrealised possibilities, and then the individual is placed inside this enormous informational environment. Is the movement outward suggesting that there is ultimately no purely private reality, because even our most intimate emotional lives are continuously penetrated and reorganised by images, narratives and catastrophes arriving from outside?

Jan: Despite what the title might suggest, this closing track is something of an outsider on the album in terms of content indeed. Where the rest of the album navigates my inner landscape, this song shifts its gaze to the world around me, our planet, and it isn’t doing well. Long-time fans who were with us back in the cassette days may recognise this piece. I wrote the first demo thirty years ago. I had always intended to give it a definitive version someday, and this album finally made that possible: new lyrics, new sound and a long-awaited rebirth.

Karo: Finally, you already have concerts around the new-album period, including NCN in Deutzen on September 6 and Fourscher Festival in Erfurt in November. What happens after those dates? Are further Mildreda concerts already being discussed, and is the ambition eventually to take “Realities” on a more extensive tour of its own?

Jan: I definitely hope to play a lot of shows with Mildreda in 2027. A few things have already been confirmed, but there’s still a lot up in the air. If the stars align, it could turn into quite an adventurous year!

About Mildreda

Mildreda is the Belgian dark-electro project led by producer, vocalist and songwriter Jan Dewulf. Its roots go back to the mid-1990s, when Dewulf, still in his teens and strongly affected by the cold Belgian electronics of acts such as The Klinik, began working with synthesizers and home-recording equipment. His self-released cassette “II Castrato” appeared in 1995, followed by “De Laffe Denker” in 1996. The latter circulated widely through the electro underground, and Mildreda subsequently shared stages with acts including Plastic Noise Experience, Terminal Choice, Covenant and VNV Nation.

Dewulf later put Mildreda on hold and concentrated on Diskonnekted, while also completing a degree in philosophy. He returned to Mildreda with the digitally released “Coward Philosophy” in 2016. After signing with Dependent Records, the project released “I Was Never Really There” in 2021, bringing the early Belgian dark-electro foundations into a substantially more detailed contemporary production environment. Guests on that record included Dirk Ivens, Cyan of The Eternal Afflict and Numb’s Don Gordon, while Claus Larsen of Leaether Strip handled mastering.

The concept album “Blue-Devilled” followed in December 2023. Built partly around Jean-Paul Sartre’s treatment of hell and the judgement of others, it expanded Mildreda’s melodic and atmospheric vocabulary while retaining its Belgian and Canadian dark-electro foundations.

“Realities”, released on August 28, 2026 through Dependent, contains 18 tracks across two discs and is available as a limited 48-page hardcover artbook designed by Henk Willems. The album features Constantin “Breñal” Warter of Calva Y Nada on “Rückwärts” and Johan Van Roy of Suicide Commando on “Virtual Goddess”. Its conceptual grounding shifts from Sartre towards Camus, while recurring “Reality Checks” connect the individual compositions into one continuous album structure. Mildreda’s official biography describes the project as led by Dewulf; the live incarnation consists of Jan Dewulf and Christophe “Salva” Salvatore. The single “Silk Skin” preceded the album in August 2026.

Interview by Karo Kratochwil.

Chilean producer and composer Santiago Nicolás released “Atrición” on 18 August 2026, the first release under the solo alias he took from his own name, Santiago Nicolás González Lihn. The five-track EP is self-released, digital, and runs a little over 21 minutes. He composed, produced and mixed all of it.

The tracklist runs “Todo Archivo Tiene una Grieta” (5:08), “Lo Primero Es la Contracción” (4:27), “Ensayo Continuo de Precisión” featuring Kimin Kim of the Korean band PCR (3:43), “No Todo lo que Arde Tiene que Morir” (5:15) and “Un Canto para el Herido” (2:48). Downloads are offered in MP3, FLAC and 24-bit/96 kHz at a name-your-price minimum of nine dollars.

Two of those tracks appeared first as singles. “Ensayo Continuo de Precisión” went out on 28 May 2026 and “Lo Primero Es la Contracción” on 4 June 2026, both mastered by the producer at Estudios 6AM in Santiago.

Where the Santiago Nicolás lyrics on ‘Atrición’ come from

The words did not start as lyrics. They come from a series of poems written in the waiting room of an oncology centre, and the record sets that material against political violence, borders, archives and inherited trauma. The EP mixes hard, exact drum programming with the forward motion of contemporary techno, and the mix keeps every impact audible rather than smoothing it into texture.

A physical edition is planned through the label Anything That Makes Light, collecting the poems alongside unreleased visual material, photographs and notes. It has not yet gone on sale, and no date has been given.

About Santiago Nicolás

Santiago Nicolás is the solo alias of Santiago Nicolás González Lihn, a producer, composer and artist based in Santiago, Chile. He has spent over a decade across electronic music, noise, experimental composition and post-punk, and opened the alias in May 2026.

He records and has recorded under several other names. As Access Device he released a run of albums on Bandcamp between 2021 and 2023, among them “Detrás del Paisaje”, “Nueve Variables”, “Ceremonias” and “Ori. Gen” in 2021, “Luminiscencia” in 2022 and “Eón Codex” in 2023, working from Mexico City for part of that period. With filmmaker Pedro Roca he forms the Chilean duo Ángel de la Guarda, whose “Sentencia” appeared in June 2022, followed by “Crimen” the same year and “Alfanumérico” in 2023.

His most recent band credit is The Deadly Affair, whose album “Visions Through The Sense of Silence” came out on 16 May 2025 through Anything That Makes Light. González Lihn wrote and composed every song on it and co-produced with Atom™, who also mixed and mastered the record; Diego Lorca played drums and Louise Schmidt Aguayo played bass and sang backing vocals.

The Santiago Nicolás alias began releasing in May 2026 with the two singles that now sit inside “Atrición”. The EP is his first full release under the name.

Los Angeles industrial artist Staytus released the video for “Secret Hand” on 21 August 2026 through Cleopatra Records. Vicente Cordero directed it, his second video for the project after “S + M” in May 2026. The track is Staytus’ second release since signing to the label.

Sam Grundemann, who records as Staytus, put the guitar and bass work at the centre of the track and described the video as a chance to perform it rather than illustrate it:

“Secret Hand has some of my favorite guitar and bass work I’ve done. I wanted the music to feel just as seductive as it is dangerous – something that pulls you in before you realize how intense it has become. The video gave me the opportunity to fully embody that energy and step into this fearless, unapologetic version of myself as an artist.”

Where Staytus recorded ‘Secret Hand’

The title is also the address. “Secret Hand” was recorded at Secret Hand Studios in Los Angeles, the room owned by drummer Jeff Friedl, whom Grundemann has worked with before. Cordero shot the video in a single black room streaked with neon and filled with fog, with the camera circling Grundemann throughout. Musically the track mixes hard guitar, bass and electronic pressure, with the arrangement kept open enough for individual hits to register.

No album has been announced around the single.

About Staytus

Staytus is the solo project of Sam Grundemann, a musician, producer, songwriter and audio engineer born in Arizona and now based in the Los Angeles area. The project mixes industrial, electronic and nu-metal elements.

Side-Line first covered the project in March 2022, when three tracks from the debut album appeared ahead of release. That album, “Disease Of The Mind”, arrived on 9 September 2022 with thirteen tracks, and the eleven-track “Wasteland Of Broken Hearts” followed on 27 October 2023, extended by a three-track bonus edition in November 2023.

A run of singles followed: “Can You Hear Me?” in September 2024, “68 KILL” in October 2024, “Suburban Gothic” in February 2025, “King Knight” in April 2025 and Staytus closes Twisted Frames series with industrial single ‘How To Be A Serial Killer’ in May 2025. Staytus drops ‘Headache’ single produced by Sean Beavan (Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Slayer) arrived on 17 July 2025 with Sean Beavan producing, then Staytus drops ‘Heart Attack’ single today, September 4, Staytus announces new single “Kiss N Tell” for October 23 and Staytus drops new single ‘The God, The Artist, & The Creator’ in December 2025. Collaborators across those releases include Matt McJunkins, Mikal Blue, Jeff Friedl, Anthony Laurie and Patrick “Embryo” Tapu.

The label deal was reported in Staytus signs with Cleopatra Records and announces ‘S + M’ in May 2026, and the digital single “S + M” arrived on 29 May 2026 with a Cordero-directed video. “Secret Hand” is the project’s first new material since.

Baltimore electro-industrial duo Pygmy Children released “Proof in Lies” on 21 August 2026 through Re:Mission Entertainment. The digital single carries two versions of the track, a short mix running 4:37 and a long mix running 6:42, and is the lead single from the brothers’ forthcoming fifth studio album “Into The Silence”.

Pete Roper wrote the words and music. He and his brother Brian Roper produced and mixed the single, Jeff Mortimer mastered it, and Brian Roper made the cover art. The download is offered in MP3, FLAC and 24-bit/44.1 kHz.

The song began with a notebook rather than a session. Pete Roper described the starting point as a set of lyrics he had abandoned years earlier: “I rediscovered some old lyrics in a notebook for a track that had never fully materialized. I still remembered the original chord progression, so I rewrote the lyrics, recorded the initial drum tracks, and the project began to take shape.”

How Pygmy Children built the ‘Proof in Lies’ video

The accompanying video sets live performance footage against public-domain animation produced in the 1940s, recut by the duo and layered with original visual effects. Pete Roper set out what the assembled imagery is about:

“The imagery in the video challenges our blurred perception of the boundary between reality and fantasy as we move through life increasingly disconnected from one another, following established paths without question and becoming desensitized to experiences beyond ourselves. The social acceptance of violence as a form of entertainment also emerges as a recurring theme. Finally, the unanswered question of what the recurring mysterious character possesses invites deeper interpretation.”

No release date has been announced for “Into The Silence”.

About Pygmy Children

Pygmy Children are an electro-industrial duo from Baltimore, Maryland, made up of brothers Pete and Brian Roper. Pete Roper started on drums at fifteen and played in a speed metal band; Brian Roper began remixing that material on tape decks, and the project grew out of those experiments.

The duo issued the “Face Down” EP in 1993 and the album “Malignant” in 1994 through No Name No Slogan, then signed to Cleopatra Records in 1995 for “Deconstruct”. A fourth release, “Low Life Dream”, followed in 1998 through the German label Out Of Line, with production input from George of Urania. Output stopped after that, and Pete Roper stated around 2005 that the project was over.

The duo returned in 2025 by signing to Re:Mission Entertainment. The single “I Have No Name” arrived on 29 August 2025 with remixes by Frontal Boundary and Slipjoint, as announced when Pygmy Children return with new album ‘Coincidental Strategies’, first single out August 29. The five-track Pygmy Children release ‘Signal Unknown’ single/EP followed on 17 October 2025 with reworkings by Fermion, Interface, Deekay and George Hagegeorge. The album “Coincidental Strategies” arrived on 24 October 2025 as a digital release and a limited-edition CD, the duo’s first physical edition since 1998. They also played an East Coast run billed as the Resurrection Tour alongside Mentallo & The Fixer.

Alongside their own catalogue the pair have taken on remix work for other Re:Mission Entertainment acts, including tracks on Frontal Boundary’s “Faith” EP and the album “Failure”. “Proof in Lies” is their first release of 2026 and opens the run-up to “Into The Silence”.

Washington, D.C. darkwave duo 2DCAT released the four-track EP “We’re Here” on 21 August 2026 as a self-released digital edition, together with a video for the title track. The EP is credited to Johan Hauck and HAEZL, and downloads are offered in MP3, FLAC and 24-bit/44.1 kHz.

The tracklist runs “We’re Here”, a Blue Rose edit of the 2024 single “Frames”, “Never Enough” and “Salvation Will Not Come”. No physical edition has been issued.

Who is speaking on the 2DCAT track ‘We’re Here’

The title track is written from the point of view of the dead, addressing the living. Hauck was direct about how the lyric should be read, and about the reassurance in the chorus line “We’re here to remind you you’re never alone”:

“We wouldn’t blame anyone for hearing this as hopeful. The gates being steeled, the door appearing, the path looking clear… that’s not hope. That’s dying. The dead are your guides because they’ve already made that walk.”

HAEZL, an opera singer, delivers the vocal without theatrical menace. Hauck builds and fabricates the synthesizers heard on the track himself, and designs analogue instruments and FPGA-based hardware from scratch. The arrangement draws on early European synthpop and darkwave, with measured tempo and severe textures. The video keeps the frame near-black, with unstable light and coarse grain.

“We’re Here” belongs to a run of recent singles pointing toward a next 2DCAT album, which has not yet been announced.

About 2DCAT

2DCAT are a dark synthpop duo based in Washington, D.C., built around analogue synthesizers and drawing on synth music of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Johan Hauck handles synthesizers, drum machines and arrangements and has played in electro-industrial bands for around two decades. HAEZL sings and plays theremin, and has worked as a backing singer for The Beach Boys, Patti LaBelle, Cynthia Erivo, Renée Fleming and The Filharmonic, with television appearances on VH1, TLC and The Today Show. Guitarist Ulf has also appeared in the lineup.

The project began releasing on Bandcamp in January 2019 with “Electric”, followed by “Summer, 1983” in April 2019 and “03:00” in September 2019. Three releases arrived in 2020: “Delaware is Burning” in February, “Modern Dystopia” in April and “Weeks Where Decades Happen” in November. “Fantastic Voyage” appeared in December 2022 and “Data Fusion” in September 2023.

Seven releases followed in 2024: “The Darkest Hour” in March, “Love and Life (Part 2)” in April, “Falling Down” in May, “Take My Hand” in July, the set “Covers” in August, the single “Frames” in September and “Elegy” in November. “Covers” included a version of Allie X’s “Off With Her Tits”, reported at the time in 2DCAT cover Allie X track ‘Off With Her Tits’ – Out now. A remix collection followed in January 2025, “This is not for you.” in July 2025 and “Eat The Rich” in May 2026. Every release to date has come out without a label.

The duo played their first German club dates in July 2026: Köln’s Club Volta on 24 July as part of the Echoes of Rebellion festival, Munich’s Theater Drehleier on 30 July and Leipzig’s Darkflower on 31 July. “We’re Here” is their first release since those shows.

Duisburg post-punk duo Mottek87 released “Kleinkunst” on 14 August 2026 as a self-released digital EP. It runs three tracks and just over nine minutes: the title track at 2:46, “Oszillation” at 3:16 and “Widerstand” at 3:00. Downloads are offered in MP3, FLAC and 24-bit/44.1 kHz at a name-your-price minimum of one euro, and no physical edition has been issued.

Zbigniew F. and Jürgen W. record as Mottek87 in a downtown Duisburg apartment with the shutters closed. The two mix post-punk guitars, cold synths and programmed drums, with Jürgen W. singing in German. Their own release copy describes them as “two long-time friends from Duisburg telling stories from a region in transition”.

What Mottek87 mean by ‘Kleinkunst’

The German title carries a double meaning: cabaret or variety performance on one reading, small art on the other. The duo set out what they wanted the word to do here:

“Kleinkunst is about realizing that change is not automatically freedom.”

They added a second line on the same point: “Sometimes something gets better, and you still need time to stop being angry about it.”

Their Bandcamp page places that reading in a region undergoing structural change, which is the setting the duo have used since their first upload in January 2025.

About Mottek87

Mottek87 are a post-punk duo from Duisburg in Germany’s Ruhr area, formed in 2024 by Zbigniew F. and Jürgen W., two long-time friends of Polish descent who decided to make a record after an evening of drinking beer and listening to records. Jürgen W. sings; the pair build their tracks from guitars, bass, programmed drums and sparse synthesizers, with lyrics in German.

The project’s first upload was the track “Grausamkeit” on 6 January 2025, followed a month later by the album “Wir kaufen und verkaufen alles” on 7 February 2025. The single “YOGTZE” arrived on 3 August 2025, the album “Zadamy Chleba” on 28 November 2025, and “Duisburger Schule” on 10 April 2026.

Every Mottek87 release has been self-released and digital-only, sold directly through Bandcamp at name-your-price. The duo have not signed to a label and have not announced live dates. “Kleinkunst” is their sixth release in nineteen months and their first since “Duisburger Schule” in April.

Swedish synthpop duo Page released the five-track EP “Ett Förslag” on Energy Rekords on 24 July 2026, in a CD edition of 200 copies in a gatefold cardboard sleeve. The digital version followed on 31 July. The EP holds two songs recorded in spring 2026, a 2026 version of an older track, a remix and a cover.

Eddie Bengtsson wrote the music and words. Christer Hermodsson produced, and Jonas Karlsson supplied the artwork.

What is on the Page EP ‘Ett Förslag’

The running order is “Ett förslag”, “Glizerstrahl”, “Om ett tag – Anymachine redux”, “Mia & Tom – 2026 Version” and “Ingenting som betyder någonting”. The first two are the new recordings. Track three is a rework by Anymachine, the project of Ulf Persson of Arachnophobia, of the title track of Page’s 2025 “Om ett tag” EP. The closing track is a cover by Compute, the Swedish producer Ulrika Mild, of a song from Page’s album “Inget motstånd”, which Energy Rekords issued on 3 October 2025. Compute has worked with Page before, remixing “Som ett skal 1” in 2013 and forming The Volt with Bengtsson for the 2016 album “Thirteen Men”.

The CD is sold through Hot Stuff Mailorder and at Swedish shows. The EP is also on Spotify and Apple Music. Energy Rekords describes the title track as a candidate for a Page album due after the summer; no release date for that album has been announced.

About Page

Page formed in 1980 in Malmö around Eddie Bengtsson on vocals, synths and songwriting, Marina Schiptjenko on synths and Anders Eliasson on synths, vocals and songwriting, with Jan Adolfsson on synth drums in 1980 and 1981. Eliasson left in 1983. The debut single “Dansande man” came out on Eskimo in 1983 in an edition of 300 copies, followed by “Som skjuten ur en kanon” in 1986, “Blå fötter” in 1987 and “Som en vind” in 1989 on Accelerating Blue Fish.

Energy Rekords collected the early material on a self-titled release in 1992 and issued “The Lost Tapes” in 1994. The first studio album, “Hallå! (Var tog månbasen vägen?)”, arrived the same year, with “Glad” in 1995. Schiptjenko left in 1996; Bengtsson carried the group through “Hur så?” in 1996 and “Helt nära” in 1998 before a farewell show at Kåren in Gothenburg on 1 April 2000.

Bengtsson and Schiptjenko restarted the group in 2010 with the album “Nu”, which reached number 34 on the Swedish chart. “Hemma” followed on Wonderland in 2013, then “Det är ingen vacker värld men det råkar vara så det ser ut” in 2017, “Fakta för alla” in 2019 and the LP “Aska under mitt skinn” in 2020. Side-Line covered the 2018 EP “Start”, which carried an Apoptygma Berzerk remix, the 2021 EP “Aska” and the 2023 album “En ny våg”. The band’s back catalogue of early singles reached digital platforms in October 2021.

Both members run projects outside the duo. Bengtsson has recorded as S.P.O.C.K with Alexander Hofman, as Sista Mannen På Jorden with Matts Wiberg since 1986, and in This Fish Needs A Bike and The Volt; he also reworked ten My God Damn Territory tracks for a vinyl release in 2016. Schiptjenko plays in Vacuum and in BWO. “Ett Förslag” is the pair’s second Energy Rekords EP in fifteen months, after “Om ett tag” in May 2025 and the album “Inget motstånd” in October 2025.

Swedish-Norwegian electronic pop duo The Sound Veil Society release their debut album “Things We Kept” on 11 September 2026 through Progress Productions. The record runs to eleven tracks and appears on CD with three bonus tracks, on a limited black and white splatter vinyl, on a MiniDisc edition capped at 50 copies worldwide, and digitally. Preorders are open.

Erlend Eilertsen and Hans-Olof Mattsson started the project in 2024 and put out three singles before the album. The pair bring an electronic pop that pairs wide synth arrangements with melodic vocal lines and mid-tempo rhythms.

Progress Productions describes the album as the delayed follow-through on that first single: “The wait has been long but ever since the band dropped their debutsingle “The River” they have been working hard […]”

Formats and tracklist for The Sound Veil Society album ‘Things We Kept’

The eleven-track running order is “Another Day”, “The River”, “Fishmonger’s Boy”, “Nothing to Say”, “Hunger for Light”, “OK”, “Bound In Circles”, “Track Record”, “Voices (feat. KÅRP)”, “The Longing” and “Epilogue”. Swedish act KÅRP guests on “Voices”. Bjørn Marius Borg of Xenturion Prime added guitar and bass to “Hunger for Light”.

The CD carries three extra tracks that rework the singles: “The River (Extended)”, “OK (Radio Edit)” and “Hunger for Light (Radio Edit)”. The MiniDisc holds one exclusive track of its own and is the format the label caps at 50 copies.

All three physical editions are on preorder through the Progress Productions shop, which lists the vinyl at 299 Swedish kronor, the MiniDisc at 279 and the CD at 139. The digital album is on Bandcamp, where the eleven-track version went up for preorder on 5 August 2026.

To open the preorder the label issued a video of “Nothing to Say” recorded at E-Only Festival in Leipzig on 13 March 2026, filmed by Alex Jung.

About The Sound Veil Society

The Sound Veil Society formed in 2024 around two musicians with long records in Nordic electronic pop. Erlend Eilertsen, from Tønsberg in Norway, runs Essence Of Mind and the cinematic project Lights A.M., and joined Xenturion Prime in 2024. Hans-Olof Mattsson, from Lysekil in Sweden, co-founded Code 64 in 2003, started Xenturion Prime roughly a decade later, and played in Essence Of Mind in its later years. The demo of “OK” was the first piece they wrote together.

Their debut single “The River” arrived on Progress Productions on 24 April 2025, paired with an extended version. It carried them to the midnight slot at Nocturnal Culture Night in Deutzen on 5 September 2025, their first German show. “OK” followed on 22 August 2025 and “Hunger for Light” on 6 March 2026, both with extended mixes and both with official videos. In March 2026 the duo played the warm-up party of the fifteenth E-Only Festival at Stadtbad Leipzig, the show the new live video comes from. Progress Productions states the pair is already confirmed for several 2027 festivals, among them Eastside in Halle (Saale).

Progress Productions, the Swedish label run by Torny Gottberg, has carried the duo from the first single onward and released all three preceding singles. Side-Line covered the label’s approach in a labels interview with Torny Gottberg. “Things We Kept” is the project’s first long-form release and its first physical release in any format.

Frankie Rose released the video for “Return To Dust” on 21 August 2026, the second single from her album “Hila”, which arrives on 18 September 2026 through Born Losers Records outside the EU and UK and through Night School Records in the EU and UK. The Brooklyn songwriter directed the clip herself.

“Return To Dust” sets Rose’s vocal high in the mix against drum machines, synthesizers and reverbed guitar, with the low end carrying most of the weight. Rose explains the song as a description of searching for the dead while asleep, and of failing at it.

“In my dreams I travel the cosmos and the astral realm looking for ones I’ve lost,” she stated. “But I’m a pretty bad receiver, and I am pretty sure I keep missing what they’re trying to tell me.”

The video follows that idea literally. Rose floats through star fields and planetary vistas in a homemade montage, drifting rather than exploring, and the cosmic scenery stays low-budget rather than cinematic.

Frankie Rose sets ‘Hila’ for 18 September

Rose announced “Hila” on 23 June 2026 alongside the first single, “Cant Be Wrong”. She describes the album as built around bereavement and the way it distorts perception.

“Hila. A record about loss,” she stated. “What persists beyond the range of ordinary perception? The place mourning keeps returning to – not quite transcendence, not quite doubt. The edge of what we can see.”

Rose produced the record herself at her home studio, with Justin Welch of Elastica and Lush on drums. She recorded it after touring with The Jesus and Mary Chain and Swervedriver. Night School Records describes the album as drawing on the darkness of later Coil, the production weight of Skinny Puppy and the vocal treatments associated with Cocteau Twins, with Robin Guthrie style guitar work on “Shadow Twin”. Saxophone and digital synthesis run through “Rainman” and the title track.

“Hila” runs ten tracks: “Olo”, “Cant Be Wrong”, “Return To Dust”, “Shadow Twin”, “Rainman”, “Hila”, “Manifest”, “Best Of Times”, “TV Star” and “Velvet Refrain”. Born Losers Records issues it on black vinyl, on clear vinyl with a green centre, on CD and digitally, with a vinyl and T-shirt bundle also listed. Night School Records handles the EU and UK editions.

Frankie Rose tour dates with The Charlatans

Rose opens a North American run on 5 September 2026 in San Diego, playing most dates in support of The Charlatans and headlining in Los Angeles and Minneapolis.

• 5 September 2026 – San Diego, CA, United States – House of Blues (with The Charlatans)
• 6 September 2026 – Los Angeles, CA, United States – Zebulon (headline)
• 7 September 2026 – San Francisco, CA, United States – Castro Theater (with The Charlatans)
• 10 September 2026 – Portland, OR, United States – Wonder Ballroom (with The Charlatans)
• 11 September 2026 – Vancouver, BC, Canada – Commodore Ballroom (with The Charlatans)
• 12 September 2026 – Seattle, WA, United States – The Showbox (with The Charlatans)
• 15 September 2026 – Minneapolis, MN, United States – Cloudland Theater (headline)
• 17 September 2026 – Chicago, IL, United States – Park West (with The Charlatans)
• 19 September 2026 – Detroit, MI, United States – El Club (with The Charlatans)
• 20 September 2026 – Toronto, ON, Canada – Danforth Music Hall (with The Charlatans)
• 21 September 2026 – Montreal, QC, Canada – Fairmont Theatre (with The Charlatans)
• 22 September 2026 – Boston, MA, United States – The Paradise Rock Club (with The Charlatans)
• 23 September 2026 – Philadelphia, PA, United States – Union Transfer (with The Charlatans)
• 25 September 2026 – Silver Spring, MD, United States – The Fillmore Silver Spring (with The Charlatans)
• 26 September 2026 – Brooklyn, NY, United States – Brooklyn Steel (with The Charlatans)

About Frankie Rose

Frankie Rose was born on 18 January 1979 and works out of Brooklyn, New York. She was an original member of Vivian Girls and played drums in Crystal Stilts and in Dum Dum Girls before moving to her own material.

Her first single, “Thee Only One”, appeared on Slumberland Records in 2009 under the name Frankie Rose and the Outs, and the band’s self-titled debut album followed on the same label in 2010. She dropped the group name for “Interstellar”, issued by Slumberland in February 2012, and released the “Night Swim” EP and the single “Know Me” the same year. Fat Possum Records put out “Herein Wild” in 2013. In 2014 she recorded “Careers” for Kanine Records as one half of Beverly.

“Cage Tropical” arrived on Slumberland in August 2017, the year Rose also released a cover of The Cure song “A Forest”. She extended that work in 2019 with “Seventeen Seconds”, a track-for-track cover of The Cure’s 1980 album, again on Slumberland. Her previous album, “Love As Projection”, came out on Slumberland in March 2023, after which she toured with The Jesus and Mary Chain and Swervedriver.

“Hila” is her first record for Born Losers Records and Night School Records, and moves her writing toward synthesizer arrangements and eighties production methods. “Return To Dust” is the second track released from it.

The Greek duo Incirrina, George Katsanos and Irini Tiniakou, formed in Athens in late 2017. On May 29, 2026 they released their third album, “Trace”, through the German label Cold Transmission Music on vinyl, CD, limited cassette and digital. Across three albums the pair have moved from darkwave towards minimal and electro-wave, built on analogue synthesizers, drum machines and Tiniakou’s vocals. I spoke to both of them about the record, the poet who writes their lyrics and what a two-person setup can carry onstage. (Courtesy by Inferno Sound Diaries)

Incirrina interview

Q: “Trace” is already your third full-length album. Looking back on everything you’ve achieved so far, how do you view your journey as a band? And how would you describe and introduce this new record to people who may not have heard it yet?

George: Indeed, after the releases of the albums “8.15” (2019) and “Lip Led Scream” (2022), we are happy to have our third LP “Trace” out by the label Cold Transmission, released 29.5.2026.

We consider the band as a space for exploration, experimentation, personal expression, also as an inner journey and diving into our souls. Incirrina has brought us the joy of sharing our music with people across multiple countries. Until now we have toured in 12 European countries and played in many gigs and festivals, which led to beautiful and completely new experiences.

Irini: In this album, we experimented with instrumentation, rhythm and vocal approach. We used a combination of analogue synthesizers, drum machines, octapad, electric bass guitar, electric piano and acoustic instruments such as kantele, waterphone, melodica. “Trace” includes 11 songs written between 2023-2025 in a 24-channel console, that belong in the genres of dark electronic, synth-wave and cold-wave. The minimal-synth and post-punk roots of our previous albums are still obvious, yet the new songs are enriched with dynamism, depth, and rhythmic diversity and we also explored new ways of delivering the vocals for this album.

Also we would like to note that this album is the result of the collaboration of many people who put their heart and talent into it, and we are grateful to them – these people are Dimitris Dimitriadis (mixing), Anestis Psaradakos (mastering), uBuDancer (artwork, analogue collage), Nestor Theophilopoulos (photography), Maria Deligiorgi/Infrared Media (layout) and Suzy Hermann and Andreas Hermann of Cold Transmission.

Q: If I’m not mistaken, you’ve been active for almost ten years now. How did Incirrina come into being, and how have both your collaboration and the band itself evolved over the years?

George: Our common journey as Incirrina started in late 2017. Since both of us are professional musicians and music teachers, we’ve been involved in numerous bands and projects and music has always been the center of our lives, but neither of us had ever been in a purely synth band before. It was a great pleasure to discover already in our first meeting, in September 2014, that we had the exact same taste in music – we were talking for hours about Jean Michel Jarre, Joy Division, The Cure, Kraftwerk and numerous others…

We became a couple, still the timing for forming a band wasn’t right yet – we were working hard in teaching and the other projects, and simply didn’t have the time to start something new together. But in 2017 life brought things together in such a way that conditions were created for something new to be born. Incirrina came into life with the aim to make music in the style we’ve deeply loved since we were teenagers.

Irini: The first tracks were written right in our living room. Although I do write lyrics, we chose to base our songs on the poetry of William Blake, an artist we both deeply adore. After recording 6 songs, and without thinking twice, we uploaded them on Bandcamp (this was the first EP “8.15”, in December 2018), and suddenly something clicked. We received an unexpected wave of enthusiasm from complete strangers. Essentially, we started with no expectations other than making songs that we liked. It was magical how this evolved.

One year later, in late 2019, the Greek label Geheimnis Records released “8.15” as an LP – the first 6 songs plus 5 new ones. Then COVID hit. During those strange years of isolation, we wrote the songs for our second album, “Lip Led Scream”, which was released by Cold Transmission in August 2022. One thing naturally led to another; some months before the lockdown, we had received an invitation to perform in Germany, in Slow Club Freiburg, a show that finally came to life in May 2022. That was the spark that started this beautiful adventure of European tours and live shows.

In the years leading up to this year’s release of “Trace”, we focused on live performances as well as exploring new sounds and we also scored two theatrical plays in Athens. We are quite strict with our music, even though we compose new tracks very quickly, the ones we choose to release are very few (for every track we release, about four or five others are left behind).

George: We really enjoy jamming and playing together, most of our tracks come alive through this very process. But there are also songs written entirely by one of us, then the other one enriched or reshaped them, regarding arrangement or structure. While we co-write the harmonic and melodic elements of our songs and handle the arrangements together, our individual roles are quite distinct. I focus on the rhythmic side, taking care of the live drums and drum programming, also the basslines and the riffs, while Irini handles the vocals.

Q: One of the defining characteristics of your music is your use of analogue synthesizers. That seems like a very deliberate choice. What is it about analogue synths that continues to inspire you, and how has this aspect of your sound evolved over the years, particularly on “Trace”?

George: Indeed, we have a great love for analog sound and analog synthesizers. Of course, there are plenty digital instruments we really like and also use. I adore Moog synthesizers, their rich harmonic sound fills the ear with very distinct frequencies. I love that you can never have the exact same sound. The instruments that I use do not have a “preset” or “save” possibility, so every time I make the sound from the beginning and I find this really thrilling. Analog synthesizers have personality; I feel like I’m using a sonic canvas when playing them, their sound has so many shades and details.

Irini: We’ve used analog synths on all of our albums. In “Trace”, we paired them with acoustic instruments and also some digital synths, like the AKAI MPC and the Yamaha PS-55. Even though the Yamaha is digital, it’s from way back in 1983, and its sound has this nostalgic warmth that really speaks to us. Our relationship with instruments is just like with people… we have great chemistry and love for some, while others we just can’t connect with at all! An instrument is a whole world of its own, and a single sound can inspire an entire song.

Some tracks started out just from a single sound, like the song “She Is In The Dream”. We also love building lots of layers and textures when it comes to orchestration, and our analog synths are perfect for mixing and layering in different ways.

Q: Are you essentially a duo or more of a trio? I ask because I noticed that your lyrics are not always written by the two of you. Could you explain how that collaboration works, and how the lyrical themes develop in relation to your own musical ideas?

Irini: Musically speaking, we’re definitely a duo; the two of us write and play all the music, and we handle everything that goes into running a band. But at the same time we also have a “secret” third member. This is the poet Konstantinos Londos, whom we are lucky enough to have in our lives as a very special and dearly loved friend. He wrote the lyrics for our last two albums (with the exception of two songs, one on each record).

Konstantinos puts what we feel and want to communicate into words in the most wonderful way. Working with him is magical. A lot of times we’ll discuss a topic that’s really on our minds, and then Konstantinos will write a poem about it… and just like that, we have the lyrics for a song. Other times, we picked some of his existing poems that spoke to our hearts, set them to music, and turned them into songs (like “Mutate” and “Alien Room”).

But either way, there’s always an incredible creative process between the 3 of us – we listen together to the musical ideas, discuss the meaning of the lyrics, how the words flow melodically, and their deeper impact. In the end, after plenty of changes and fine-tuning (and sometimes after a lot of tears) the song finally takes its true shape. Konstantinos has a rare gift for clarity, simplicity, humor, sensitivity and working together with him is really a pleasure. He is an explosive mix of a brilliant Renaissance man, a Homo Universalis, and someone who genuinely prefers to stay out of the spotlight.

Q: Speaking of the lyrics, “Trace” is an intriguing title that can be interpreted in many different ways. The album also explores profound and, at times, rather introspective themes. Could you tell us more about the concept behind the album? And to what extent do the lyrics shape the atmosphere of the music, or is it sometimes the other way around?

Irini: Finding the right album title is usually a tricky process, since it needs to capture a lot of different concepts in just a few words. But with “Trace”, things were easier – the title came about completely spontaneously from Konstantinos, right after a chat about what making this album meant to us. The word means “imprint”, and that’s exactly what this record is: the footprint of a collaboration between people trying to capture in sounds and words the things that spark their thoughts and haunt their nights. This is also stated in the album’s back cover: “Trace” is the imprint of “searching for wondrous, meaningful diversions, novel transformations and transitory acts of care and defiance”.

Thematically the songs deal with the uniqueness of human experience and the struggle of not losing one’s inner freedom and individuality in dystopian times – the “seeming real” where all that is imposed and inhumane presents itself as the inevitable truth (“Always Here”). Celebrating diversity and self-expression, but always connecting and creating with other people, is a way out (“Mutate”). And the album itself is the result of such a process; we consider ourselves, against the odds, as artisans and friends who make music, share it and reinvent ourselves. Other songs cover universal, age-old themes like love, loneliness, the fear of loss, pain of death (“Sometimes”, “Region”), also the relationship with oneself and the connection with the world outside (“Diver”, “Find”), themes like the dream element, the urban landscape, and mysterious, fairy-like figures are touched upon in the songs “Alexia”, “Presence”, “She Is In The Dream”; burning issues of our time like domestic violence (“Alien Room”); and how the “self” connects with today’s world, showing endless introspection but a lack of empathy, human pain, and the way we try to hide it even from ourselves (“ΚΡΥΦΟ”, which means “Hidden”, the only track in Greek language).

George: Since songwriting is a two-way street, as we described earlier, the atmosphere that is created depends on each individual song. When we start composing music for an existing poem, we are influenced by the content, the meaning of the lyrics, and the rhythm of the words and syllables. Conversely, Konstantinos would often listen to a musical theme we had composed and write lyrics over it, based on a topic that was on our minds and that we had been discussing. However, since the general vibe of our music and lyrics is already introspective and relatively dark, we take it for granted that we won’t stray from that… not out of principle, but because the darker element simply speaks to us emotionally and temperamentally.

Q: How do you approach your live performances? More specifically, how do you translate the layered studio recordings, and especially the analogue elements, to the stage?

George: Being a duo has a lot of advantages, like flexibility with rehearsals, the creative process, and traveling. But also has plenty of challenges… Practically speaking, if we wanted to perform our tracks live with their full studio orchestration, we would definitely need at least one more musician on stage. Our compromise is to use backing tracks for the drums, or a portion of them while I play the rest, and then we perform the melodic and bass lines live. We inevitably have to skip several elements from the album… still that’s not necessarily a bad thing for a live performance, because different things take priority on stage. Also, for gigs, we bring along smaller gear. It would be practically impossible for just two people to travel carrying the actual instruments we used to compose and record, so we adapt our sound to smaller, more flexible instruments, which are a mix of analog, hybrid, and digital instruments. When we play in our hometown, things are much easier and we can bring along some of the original (and heavy) instruments used in the recording. But when it comes to touring abroad, since we travel by plane and train, doing that would totally be out of the question for practical reasons.

Irini: Over time, we’ve rearranged some tracks for our live shows to such an extent that they end up sounding quite different from the studio recordings, in terms of orchestration, tempo, and also vocals. This is especially true for songs from our first album. Also, since we love improvisation, we play the tracks a bit differently at almost every gig. We add intros, change up some riffs, and basically transform them depending on the mood of the moment. It would be really interesting at some point to make an album with our older songs exactly as they are played live, in a live recording setup. This happened already with one song, the “Only One Smile Alone”; the original one is “The Smile”, and following the suggestion of Andreas Hermann, we recorded it again in the way we play it live.

Q: Finally, with an album title like “Trace”, it seems only natural to ask: what kind of trace do you hope this album, and Incirrina’s music in general, will leave behind? And what lies ahead for the band in the coming months?

Irini: What we truly want with all our hearts is this: for people who will listen to our music, to feel something, to be moved, to dance, to feel good, or to find a personal meaning in our songs. Through our music, we aren’t seeking self-expression as much as we are seeking connection and co-motion, sharing in something as beautiful as music. We would love for the music of Incirrina to leave a small imprint of beauty in this world. Everything is fleeting and surely everything fades into the oblivion of time, but we would be incredibly happy if, even for just a few moments, we could bring joy to some people… just as we experience the joy of making songs and playing together, in rehearsals or in live shows.

George: In the coming months, we will mainly focus on presenting “Trace” through live performances in Greece and Europe. We definitely want to work on producing some new songs as well, and we also plan to celebrate our 10th anniversary as a band with something special, which we will announce in early 2027…!

Thank you for this interview, and we wish all the very best to you and your readers! Incirrina

About Incirrina

Incirrina is a dark electronic and minimal synth duo based in Athens, Greece, formed in late 2017 by George Katsanos (analogue synthesizers, octapad, drum programming, electric bass guitar, kantele, alto melodica, waterphone, samples, vocals) and Irini Tiniakou (synthesizers, vocals). The pair had met in September 2014 and were already working as musicians and music teachers in other projects before Incirrina became one of their own. Tiniakou first appeared as a guest vocalist on a release by the Greek act Metal Disco before the duo started releasing under their own name.

Their first six songs, built on the poetry of William Blake, went up on Bandcamp as the EP “8.15” in December 2018. The Greek label Geheimnis Records issued “8.15” as an LP in late 2019, adding five new tracks to the original six. The digital maxi-single “Utter” followed in 2020, and in 2021 the duo shared a split maxi-single with The Man & His Failures, “Devastations / R.Daneel”, on Smash Records.

Their second album, “Lip Led Scream”, arrived in August 2022 and was their first record for Germany’s Cold Transmission Music, which has handled their releases since. Reviewing it for Side-Line in 2023, Inferno Sound Diaries described it as “a pure Cold-Wave production which is sometimes reinforced with harder, EBM, elements” and “a well-crafted and fully enjoyable work without any single cut to throw away”. In September 2024 the duo returned with the double single “Immersion”, pairing “Presence” and “Alien Room”, again on Cold Transmission Music.

Incirrina have performed in twelve European countries, including Greece, Germany, Belgium, Hungary and Croatia, with appearances at Plíísken Festival, Morphic Festival, Cold Transmission Festival, Death Disco Festival – The Warm Up, Athens Music Week, Metavasis Festival and the Athens Digital Arts Festival. Their live show began with an invitation to Slow Club Freiburg, a booking made before the pandemic that finally took place in May 2022. In the years between “Lip Led Scream” and “Trace” they also scored two theatrical plays in Athens.

“Trace”, the duo’s third album, was released on May 29, 2026 on Cold Transmission Music across black and crystal-clear vinyl, CD, a limited cassette and digital. Its eleven tracks were written between 2023 and 2025 and recorded through a 24-channel console. Lyrics are by the poet Konstantinos Londos, except “Sometimes”, written by Incirrina. Dimitris Dimitriadis mixed the album and Anestis Psaradakos mastered it, with artwork by uBuDancer, photography by Nestor Theophilopoulos and layout by Maria Deligiorgi/Infrared Media. “Mutate” and “Always Here” preceded the album as singles, and “Mutate” was issued with a video. Side-Line’s review of “Trace” rated it 8/10. The duo say the next months go to live shows in Greece and Europe, with a tenth-anniversary announcement planned for early 2027.

Dwayne Goettel, keyboardist, sampling and programming specialist for the industrial band Skinny Puppy, died on 23 August 1995 at the age of 31. He was found dead at his parents’ home in Edmonton, Alberta, of an apparent heroin overdose. Thirty-one years on, Goettel remains one of the defining figures behind Skinny Puppy’s sound between 1986 and 1995.

Dwayne Rudolph Goettel was born on 1 February 1964 in High Prairie, Alberta, Canada. A classically trained pianist, he grew up in Edmonton, where he played trumpet in his high school band before taking up piano and getting involved in the city’s small electronic music scene, including the groups Psyche and Water. He met cEvin Key in 1985 when Water opened for Skinny Puppy on their “Bites” tour. Key asked him to join the band the following year, replacing keyboardist Bill Leeb, who left to form Front Line Assembly.

Goettel made his first contributions to Skinny Puppy on the album “Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse” (1986). His technical knowledge of samplers and studio equipment, particularly the Ensoniq Mirage, helped steer the band away from its early synth-pop sound toward the more abrasive, sample-driven style of “Cleanse Fold and Manipulate” (1987), “VIVIsectVI” (1988), “Rabies” (1989), “Too Dark Park” (1990) and “Last Rights” (1992). cEvin Key later credited Goettel’s early command of the technology, calling him “the master of sampling.”

Alongside his work with Skinny Puppy, Goettel collaborated with Key on the side projects The Tear Garden, formed with singer Edward Ka-Spel, as well as Doubting Thomas, Hilt and Cyberaktif, which Key also shared with Bill Leeb. Goettel released solo material under the name aDuck and, in 1993, co-founded the label Subconscious Communications with Phil Western.

Skinny Puppy’s eighth studio album, “The Process,” was recorded in Los Angeles beginning in 1993, but the sessions were marked by drug problems and conflict within the band. Vocalist Nivek Ogre quit in June 1995, and Goettel and Key returned to Vancouver with the master tapes. Goettel entered a rehabilitation programme in Edmonton before returning to work on Download, a side project he had started with Key. He was later readmitted to rehab. On 23 August 1995, Goettel was found dead at his parents’ home in Edmonton; his death was attributed to a heroin overdose. “The Process” was completed by Key and producer Dave “Rave” Ogilvie and released in 1996, dedicated to Goettel’s memory, as was Download’s debut album, “Furnace.”

About Skinny Puppy

Skinny Puppy formed in Vancouver, Canada, in 1982 as a side project for cEvin Key (born Kevin Crompton), who was also drumming in the new wave band Images in Vogue. Key recruited Nivek Ogre (Kevin Ogilvie) as vocalist, and the pair adopted stage names to avoid confusion between two members both named Kevin. The band self-released the EP “Back & Forth” in 1983 and signed to Vancouver label Nettwerk the same year. The EP “Remission” followed in December 1984, and Skinny Puppy’s debut full-length album, “Bites,” arrived in 1985. Bill Leeb, performing as Wilhelm Schroeder, joined on bass synth and backing vocals during this period.

Leeb left the band in 1986 to form Front Line Assembly, and Dwayne Goettel replaced him, making his first contributions to “Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse” (1986). Skinny Puppy went on to release “Cleanse Fold and Manipulate” (1987), “VIVIsectVI” (1988) and “Rabies” (1989), the last featuring Ministry’s Al Jourgensen, followed by “Too Dark Park” (1990) and “Last Rights” (1992), the band’s final album for Nettwerk. In 1993 the group signed to Rick Rubin’s American Recordings and relocated to Los Angeles to record “The Process.” The sessions were affected by conflict and drug problems; Ogre quit in June 1995, and Goettel died two months later. Key and Dave “Rave” Ogilvie completed “The Process,” releasing it in 1996 in Goettel’s memory.

Skinny Puppy reunited for a one-off performance at the Doomsday Festival in Dresden, Germany, in August 2000, leaving the keyboard station on stage empty in tribute to Goettel. The band reformed as a full-time project in 2003 with producer Mark Walk, releasing “The Greater Wrong of the Right” (2004), “Mythmaker” (2007), “HanDover” (2011) and “Weapon” (2013). In a 2023 interview, the band confirmed it had split up for good after more than four decades together. Goettel’s death on 23 August 1995 remains part of that history: 31 years on, his contribution to albums including “Too Dark Park” and “Last Rights” is remembered as central to Skinny Puppy’s sound.

Front 242 released the album “05:22:09:12 Off” on 23 August 1993 through Red Rhino Europe, with Epic issuing the record in the United States that November. The seventh studio album by the Belgian industrial/EBM group turns 33 this year. Its title is a substitution cipher spelling out the word “evil,” each letter replaced by its position in the alphabet.

“05:22:09:12 Off” was produced and mixed by Daniel Bressanutti and Patrick Codenys alongside John Dubs and Eran Westwood, with Bob Ludwig mastering. The album marks the only Front 242 studio release built primarily around a guest vocalist: Kristin “99” Kowalski of the New York band Spill sings lead on most tracks, with Jean-Luc De Meyer appearing only on the remix “Melt (Again).” The CD edition runs 16 tracks, including “Animal (Cage),” “Modern Angel,” “Junkdrome,” “Serial Killers Don’t Kill Their Girlfriend,” “GenEcide” and “Crushed.” The album reached number 27 on the CMJ Radio Top 150.

About Front 242

Front 242 formed in 1981 in Aarschot, near Leuven, Belgium, founded by Daniel Bressanutti (electronics, production) and Dirk Bergen (graphic design). Patrick Codenys (keyboards, programming) and vocalist Jean-Luc De Meyer joined in 1982, and Richard “23” Jonckheere (electronic percussion, backing vocals) joined in 1983 as Bergen moved into design and management. The band’s 1984 album “No Comment” was among the first releases to use the term “electronic body music” in its liner notes. Front 242 signed to Wax Trax! in the US in 1984, then released “Official Version” (1987) and “Front by Front” (1988) via Red Rhino Europe/PIAS, and “Tyranny (For You)” (1991) via Epic, its highest-charting album in the US.

“05:22:09:12 Off” followed in 1993, released in Europe by Red Rhino Europe on 23 August and in the US by Epic that November. Drummer Tim Kroker joined for live performances in 2008. The band’s most recent studio album, “Pulse,” followed via XIII Bis/Metropolis in 2003. In 2023, Front 242 co-headlined the “Join The Forces” tour of Europe with Nitzer Ebb, alternating headline sets across dates including Berlin, Amsterdam, Oslo and Munich. Front 242 announced its farewell “Black Out” tour in March 2024 and played its final three shows at Ancienne Belgique in Brussels on 23-25 January 2025, retiring from live performance with a lineup of Bressanutti, De Meyer, Codenys, Richard 23 and Kroker. The live album “Black Out”, drawn from more than forty farewell-tour shows, followed via Alfa Matrix on 19 June 2026. “05:22:09:12 Off” now marks 33 years since its original release.

Brian Stillman is an American artist based in New York who is releasing his debut album, “Terminal Days”, featuring nine tracks. The album is politically engaged, with a raised middle finger directed at fascists, oligarchs, tech bros, A.I. fetishists, and human rights abusers.

The music sounds like pure, good old-fashioned Industrial-Metal. The guitar riffs leave no doubt about it, backed by hellish rhythms and vocals loaded with rage. Despite the sheer power of this Industrial-Metal assault, there are also a few more refined Pop arrangements to be found. This makes the whole thing highly accessible, but believe me, the album remains packed with adrenaline from start to finish. There is a fine balance between the guitar work and the synths, creating a powerful and dynamic sound. Ministry fans will undoubtedly appreciate this project.

“Terminal Days” sounds like a very promising debut album, and Negative Agent is undoubtedly a name to keep in mind. (Rating:7)-.

Listen to “Annihilation Kick”:

About Negative Agent

Negative Agent is the solo industrial-metal project of American musician Brian Stillman, who is based in New York. Stillman writes all music and lyrics and handles guitars, synth and percussion programming, sampling and vocals.

The debut album “Terminal Days” was self-released on 8 April 2026 in digital, CD and cassette formats. Steve Wiener plays a guest guitar solo on “Mind Wipe” and Greg Schwan plays guest bass on “Pain Control”. The record also carries a bonus remix of “Fascist Beatdown” by Voidscan. Stillman mixed the album and designed the cover art; Hillary Johnson mastered it at Kale Shelter Studios.

On the Bandcamp page for the release, Stillman states that “Negative Agent is 100% Human. No A.I. is used in any capacity, ever.” “Terminal Days” is the project’s first full-length and its first entry in the Side-Line archive.

Depeche Mode, the English electronic band from Basildon, Essex, released “Construction Time Again” on 22 August 1983 through Mute Records. The album turns 43 this year. It was the band’s third studio album and reached number 6 on the UK Albums Chart.

Daniel Miller produced the album together with Depeche Mode, with Gareth Jones engineering. Recording took place at the Garden studio in London, mixing at Hansa Mischraum in Berlin, and mastering at CBS Studios in London. The band built much of the album around sampled found sounds, recorded on a Synclavier and an Emulator, including metal being struck and other industrial noises. “Construction Time Again” was the first Depeche Mode studio album to feature Alan Wilder as a full member; he co-wrote two of the album’s songs. The nine-track album runs “Love, in Itself,” “More Than a Party,” “Pipeline,” “Everything Counts,” “Two Minute Warning,” “Shame,” “The Landscape Is Changing,” “Told You So” and “And Then…”

Mute released “Everything Counts” as the lead single on 11 July 1983, ahead of the album; it reached number 6 on the UK Singles Chart. “Love, in Itself” followed as the second single on 19 September 1983 and peaked at number 21. “Construction Time Again” followed “A Broken Frame” (1982) and preceded “Some Great Reward” (1984), the album that produced “People Are People.”

About Depeche Mode

Vince Clarke, Martin Gore, Dave Gahan and Andy Fletcher formed Depeche Mode in Basildon, Essex, in 1980, taking their name from a French fashion magazine. The band signed to Daniel Miller’s independent label Mute Records and released the synth-pop debut album “Speak & Spell” in 1981. Clarke left the band after that album to form Yazoo with Alison Moyet, and Gore took over as the band’s main songwriter. Depeche Mode continued as a trio for “A Broken Frame” (1982), then expanded to a four-piece with the addition of Alan Wilder for “Construction Time Again” (1983), the album that introduced sampled industrial sounds and engineer Gareth Jones to the band’s productions.

The Miller and Jones production team continued with Depeche Mode through “Some Great Reward” (1984), “Black Celebration” (1986), “Music for the Masses” (1987) and “Violator” (1990), the album that produced “Personal Jesus” and “Enjoy the Silence.” Wilder left the band in 1995 after “Songs of Faith and Devotion” (1993); Depeche Mode continued as a trio of Gahan, Gore and Fletcher, releasing “Ultra” (1997), “Exciter” (2001), “Playing the Angel” (2005), “Sounds of the Universe” (2009), “Delta Machine” (2013) and “Spirit” (2017). Fletcher died in May 2022, and Gahan and Gore released “Memento Mori” as a duo in 2023, touring behind a Mexico City concert film titled “M.” “Construction Time Again,” released 22 August 1983, marked the start of the band’s move from straightforward synth-pop toward the denser, sample-driven productions that shaped its subsequent albums.

Canadian netlabel Panospria released “I-II-III”, the debut album under the Silver Shadow name, on 15 July 2026. It runs to 26 tracks across three volumes gathered into a single digital set, sold in MP3 and FLAC from 15 Canadian dollars, and it moves between IDM, ambient, drone and minimal techno.

The release page presents the album as three distinct volumes compiled into one, and as the latest work of a long-standing name on the label. It never prints that name:

“Having recently relocated to France from Canada, keen listeners will surely deduce the identity of this mainstay on our label. New country, new alias, new directions in music.”

The label’s own announcement is less coy than the release page. It presents Silver Shadow as the new alias of the artist formerly recording as Silent Q and Gyges. Both of those names belong to Paul Keeley, a Montreal electronic producer whose Gyges album “Composite Massive” was Panospria’s second release in 2004 and who has issued deep and progressive house under his own name through Thinner, Epsilonlab and Anjunadeep. The Silver Shadow Bandcamp page gives the artist’s location as Paris.

What is on the Silver Shadow album ‘I-II-III’

The three volumes are not new to the same degree. Volume I is the eight-track album “I”, put on Bandcamp on 26 July 2022, and volume II is the ten-track “II” from 22 November 2024; the remaining eight tracks, from “Delores” to “Matte”, appear here for the first time.

Track titles run as compressed fragments throughout: “Aieesqvb96”, “nFU-VHToT”, “HshShsHs”, “HpnoTod”, “Grgwld”, “Dickenszs”. In order the album reads Aieesqvb96, Fulter, Plyurs, nFU-VHToT, Crunge, Duke, Spong, Purf, Ghosnen, AmbWks, Mmoonn, TheLab, Pull, HshShsHs, HpnoTod, Unstld, Grgwld, Roogah, Delores, KiBC8, NewWav, Sheets, Dickenszs, Krud, Thumb and Matte.

About Silver Shadow and Panospria

Silver Shadow first appeared on Bandcamp on 3 April 2020 with the five-track “A”, followed by “I” in 2022 and “II” in 2024, so the Panospria set is a label debut rather than a first release under the alias. Panospria itself grew out of the Canadian prairies around the turn of the millennium and put out its first offering, the “Alphaform” compilation, in 2002 with Dublin’s Psychonavigation. The label was properly established in Montreal that same year and was among the earliest to treat the MP3 as a release format in its own right.

It moved with its operators, running from Montreal until 2008, then Vancouver, then Saskatoon from 2022. Alongside the catalogue it ran two concert series: Textures in Montreal and Quiet City in Vancouver, the latter reaching 70 editions over a decade. In 2007 the Panospria catalogue was folded into the Montreal netlabel No Type, which has been active since 1998 and also runs Annexe, BricoLodge, Nishi and Sine Fiction; Panospria has operated as a No Type sublabel since.

Paul Keeley’s connection to the label goes back almost to the start. The Gyges record “Composite Massive” carried the second catalogue number in 2004, and he has since appeared on Panospria releases by Heart & Soul, Shoebomber, Arnau Sala and N4K3D D1G1TS. “I-II-III” is the first Silver Shadow release Panospria has issued, and by the label’s account the first since the move from Canada to France.

German EBM and electro label emmobiz records releases “V.A. 19. Elektrisch Festival” on 24 October 2026, the same day as the 19th Elektrisch Festival at Club Seilerstraße in Zwickau. The 10-inch is pressed on brown vinyl, limited to 222 copies, and sells for 16.99 euro through the label’s own shop. Six tracks from five acts fill the two sides.

The record continues an annual series that the label has run since the festival returned in 2024, following the red-vinyl 16th edition and the 17th edition 10-inch, and the 18th, which split across an EBM Edition and a Synth Pop Edition earlier this year. emmobiz describes the Elektrisch series as the only festival compilation of its kind carrying rare or exclusive tracks from the acts on the bill.

What is on the 19. Elektrisch Festival 10-inch

Four of the five acts on the record play the festival. Portion Control, this year’s headliner, does not appear on the compilation. The label fills the gap with two bonus tracks by acts outside the bill.

• A1: Escalator, “Utolsókor (Short)”, 3:47
• A2: Oszylayter, “we’re the noise”, 4:01
• A3: Cyborg Projekt X, “Native Terror” (Vinyl Edit), 3:49
• B1: Krieg-B, “kill the light” (V111 Mix), 5:20
• B2: Sabotage Q.C.Q.C., “Heidenangst” (Drumatic), 6:05
• B3: TöT, “Diers Irae” (Rough Mix), 2:27

The two bonus cuts on the B-side reach outside the festival line-up. Sabotage Q.C.Q.C. are a German electro act who released through Spin Records and EMI Electrola in the 1990s; “Heidenangst” first appeared on their 1996 album “Sexploitation Cinema” and returned in remixed form on the 1997 maxi-single “Schlager”. The version here is a new remake made for this record. Closing the compilation, the Marseille electro-punk and EBM band TöT contribute “Diers Irae”.

Escalator, the Budapest EBM band founded in 1988 by 2RT+TB, took their starting point from Kraftwerk and have released since 1989. Oszylayter bring electropunk and breakbeat from Germany. Krieg-B, the Franco-Belgian project Dominique Lallement and Benoît Buyse started in June 2023, follow their emmobiz debut “War Drums’ Resonance” with the album “Concrete Dominion”, which the label also dates to 24 October.

About the Elektrisch Festival and emmobiz records

The Elektrisch Festival ran five editions in Zwickau between 2007 and 2010, from the 11th to the 15th, at the city’s BPM Club. It then stopped for 14 years. emmobiz records brought it back in 2024 with the 16th edition at Club Seilerstraße, which sold out in advance behind Calva Y Nada, Cat Rapes Dog, Digital Factor and Accessory. The 17th followed in October 2025 and the 18th ran over two evenings in February 2026. The 19th takes place on 24 October 2026 with Portion Control, Escalator, Oszylayter, Cyborg Projekt X and Krieg-B; doors open at 19:00 and the music starts at 20:00.

emmobiz records is run by Jörg Freier from Oelsnitz in the Erzgebirge, Saxony, and specialises in industrial, EBM and synthpop. The label stopped operating at the end of 2017 and relaunched on 22 August 2024 with a vinyl reissue of Tyske Ludder’s “Bombt Die Mörder?”. Since then it has reissued the Calva Y Nada catalogue on picture disc, pressed Apoptygma Berzerk’s “Kathy’s Song XXV”, and put out records by Second Decay, Blind Passengers, Fairlight Children and Piston Damp. It organises the festival as well as documenting it, and the 10-inch goes on sale the day the doors open.

Chicago post-punk and industrial duo Bellhead play 14 United States dates between 28 August and 4 October 2026 on the “If I Can’t Break Your Heart Then No One Will” tour, announced on 21 August. The run opens at the Cactus Club in Milwaukee and crosses the Midwest, Great Plains, Southwest and South before closing at Club Area 51 in Salt Lake City. Tickets are sold by each venue.

The tour takes its name from “Threats (If I Can’t Break Your Heart)”, the John Weaver-directed video Bellhead put out in June 2026 and the first clip to show Karen Righeimer and Ivan Russia unmasked. The band have since posted two 2026 laurels for it: Best Low Budget Music Video at the Hollywood Best Indie Film Awards and Best Director Music Video at the Tokyo Film and Screenplay Awards.

Two dates carry a festival billing. The Albuquerque show on 4 September is part of New Mexico Goth Fest 2026 and shares a bill with eight other acts, and the Salt Lake City date on 4 October falls under The Dark Arts Festival of Utah 2026. On 19 September in Little Rock the duo appear on a bill with PIG and Cyanotic, a single overlap with PIG’s own Hurt People tour rather than a shared leg.

Bellhead tour dates for 2026

• 28 August – Cactus Club, Milwaukee, WI, with Spectra and Vic Dagger
• 1 September – Coven, Omaha, NE, with X-ID and Dread Portal
• 2 September – Kirby’s Beer Store, Wichita, KS, with Seven And A Switchblade and Evening Gown
• 3 September – Crypt, Denver, CO, with eHpH and Hypersomnia
• 4 September – Launchpad, Albuquerque, NM, New Mexico Goth Fest 2026, with Thief, Hex Cassette, Future Club, Zero Batz, Somno Profundante, Sndwavs, BB Doom and DJ Ordo Amoris
• 5 September – Resonant Head, Oklahoma City, OK, with Mechanical Flesh, Blood Bells, Othering and Later Laine
• 6 September – Kickback Bar, Houston, TX, with Polybius Cabinet and TRB
• 7 September – The Crypt, New Orleans, LA, with Livernois and Chasm Comfort
• 17 September – Rose Bowl Tavern, Urbana, IL, at Bat Factory
• 18 September – Hi Tone, Memphis, TN
• 19 September – Birdie’s, Little Rock, AR, with PIG and Cyanotic
• 20 September – Fubar, St. Louis, MO, with Spicy Kitty and Bitchface
• 2 October – Witches’ Brew O.M.G., Lincoln, NE, with Moon Pigeon, The Trauma Center and Bungee Jumping Jesus
• 4 October – Club Area 51, Salt Lake City, UT, at The Dark Arts Festival of Utah 2026

What Bellhead are touring behind

The current catalogue centres on “Threats”, first issued on 8 April 2025 and reissued in June 2026 as a ten-track expanded edition on yellow vinyl. Side A carries the five original songs, and side B collects remixes by Christopher Hall and Walter Flakus of Stabbing Westward, Clubdrugs, Frontal Boundary and the band themselves.

Their most recent standalone release is “The The Empty”, a cover of the Le Tigre song, put on Bandcamp on 14 February 2026 through Oppressive Sky Records. Neil Strauch recorded and mixed it, Carl Saff mastered it, and the artwork is Righeimer’s.

About Bellhead

Bellhead formed in Chicago in 2019 around a line-up of two basses and a drum machine, with no guitar. Karen Righeimer plays low bass and sings, and Ivan Russia plays high bass, sings and programmes the drums. The duo release through Oppressive Sky Records.

The discography opens with the 2019 track “Fire Control”, whose Ordinary Mammal remix Side-Line offered as a free download in the Face The Beat: Session 5 profile series. “Unicorn Bones” followed in 2020 and “Dead Lights” in 2021. The single “Nothing As It Seams” arrived in June 2022, the same summer the pair placed tracks on two compilations and toured heavily. The EP “Good Intentions” came out in May 2023 ahead of a US East Coast run with Clay People, and a Prince cover, “I Would Die 4 U”, sits in the catalogue alongside it.

“Threats” was announced in March 2025 and reviewed by Side-Line that June. The expanded vinyl edition and the title-track video were announced in June 2026. On the road the duo have supported Stabbing Westward, Clan of Xymox, PIG, Julien-K, Christian Death and Powerman 5000. On the autumn 2026 run they headline, with local and regional support billed at almost every stop.

Chicago industrial and darkwave artist I Ya Toyah released “Closer”, a cover of the Nine Inch Nails song, on 21 August 2026 through her own label Femme Fatale Records. It is a digital single, and it arrives with a video the same week. On Bandcamp the artist describes the release in a single line: “This is the cover of Nine Inch Nail’s song.”

The original was written by Michael Trent Reznor and appeared on Nine Inch Nails‘ 1994 album “The Downward Spiral”. I Ya Toyah produced this version with Johnny K, who also mixed it. Howie Weinberg mastered the track and Angelica Dulany supplied the artwork. Publishing runs through Leaving Hope Music and TVT Music, with the cover licensed through Easy Song Licensing.

“Closer” is the third single I Ya Toyah has issued through Femme Fatale Records this year, after the two-track “Feelings” on 1 May and “Apology” on 26 June. Johnny K mixed and produced all three, and Howie Weinberg mastered them. Her press release describes the run as a completed trilogy about the forces that shape identity.

The ‘Closer’ video

The video was filmed and directed by Alex Zarek, who edited it with I Ya Toyah. The concept is hers. Angelica Dulany handled production assistance and additional direction, Janet Debris did makeup and Allison Ciletti managed the location. It went up on her own YouTube channel on 21 August 2026.

The single is on Bandcamp and on the usual streaming services through a single smart link.

About I Ya Toyah

I Ya Toyah is the solo project of Ania Tarnowska, a Polish-born musician, producer and engineer based in the Chicago area. The name comes from Polish, where the spoken phrase reads as “it’s just me”. She trained on classical guitar, piano and voice as a child, studied music business and audio engineering at the SAE Institute in 2016, and started the project in 2017 with the single “Funeral For Love”. The debut album “Code Blue” followed on 26 October 2018, self-released, with the single “Farewell – Mirrors Don’t Lie” alongside it.

The catalogue after that ran quickly. “Code Blue Reloaded” and “Code Blue Revelations” both landed in 2020, the five-part EP “Out of Order” in 2021 and the acoustic EP “Ghosts” in 2022. “Panic Room” arrived in 2023, produced with Walter Flakus of Stabbing Westward, whose US dates she opened that year. Flakus also worked on the “I am the Fire” EP and the album “DRAMA”, both 2024, the year Side-Line covered her video for ‘Fraud’ and talked to her about the new album.

She has been a member of The Joy Thieves since 2019 and toured with Pigface the same year. Remixers and collaborators across the catalogue include Rhys Fulber, who remixed “Flashback” in 2019, Tim Skold, who remixed “Motion” in 2020, and Julian Beeston of Nitzer Ebb, whose “We The People”, “Higher Than The Sun” and “Crazy Horses” all feature her. She has also remixed PIG’s “The New Disorder”. In 2024 she toured the United States with Orgy and Cold and played her first European dates supporting Front Line Assembly, and she returned to Europe in February and March 2026 as direct support on KMFDM’s tour. Femme Fatale Records, her own imprint, has carried her releases since 2024 and now issues “Closer”.

Rammstein, the German Neue Deutsche Härte band, released their second studio album, “Sehnsucht,” on 22 August 1997 through Motor Music in Europe and Slash Records in the United States. The album turns 29 this year. “Sehnsucht” followed the band’s 1995 debut, “Herzeleid,” and includes the singles “Engel” and “Du hast.”

Rammstein recorded “Sehnsucht” between November 1996 and July 1997 at Temple Studios in St. Paul’s Bay, Malta, produced again by Jacob Hellner with the band and mixed by Ronald Prent. The eleven-track album runs “Sehnsucht,” “Engel,” “Tier,” “Bestrafe mich,” “Du hast,” “Bück dich,” “Spiel mit mir,” “Klavier,” “Alter Mann,” “Eifersucht” and “Küss mich (Fellfrosch).” North American and Japanese CD editions added English-language versions of “Engel” and “Du hast” as bonus tracks. “Engel” was released as the lead single on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May 1997; “Du hast” followed as the second single, entering the German singles chart at number five in August 1997. “Sehnsucht” reached number one on the German album chart within two weeks of release and later became the only entirely German-language album certified platinum in the United States by the RIAA. “Sehnsucht” streams on Spotify.

About Rammstein

Rammstein formed in Berlin in 1994. Guitarist Richard Kruspe, who had left East Germany in 1989, began working with bassist Oliver Riedel and drummer Christoph Schneider in 1993 and recruited Till Lindemann, then a drummer in the band First Arsch, as vocalist. Guitarist Paul Landers and keyboardist Christian “Flake” Lorenz, both formerly of the East German band Feeling B, completed the lineup in 1994. The band took its name from the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster, adding an extra “m.” Motor Music signed Rammstein and released the debut single “Du riechst so gut” in August 1995, followed by the debut album “Herzeleid” that September.

Rammstein began recording “Sehnsucht” at Temple Studios in Malta in November 1996 while still touring behind “Herzeleid.” Motor Music released the album on 22 August 1997, and its US release through Slash Records led to a four-year world tour, including a 1998 run on the Family Values Tour alongside Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit, and the live album “Live aus Berlin” (1999). Rammstein signed with Universal Music and released “Mutter” in 2001, “Reise, Reise” in 2004, “Rosenrot” in 2005 and “Liebe ist für alle da” in 2009, followed by a self-titled seventh album in 2019 and “Zeit” in 2022. Motor Music issued a remastered anniversary edition of “Sehnsucht” on 9 June 2023.

In 2023, German prosecutors opened an investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Lindemann and closed it later that year, stating no evidence was found to support criminal charges. Rammstein’s catalog has continued to draw outside attention: Swedish dark synth act Priest released a cover of “Engel” in 2023. Lindemann has continued to record outside the band, releasing the single “Es brennt” in March 2026. The anniversary of “Sehnsucht” places the album back in Rammstein’s timeline as the release that took the band from Germany to a global stage.

Hocico needs no introduction to any fan of Dark-Electro. The Mexican duo has been active continuously since 1993, delivering countless hits and brilliant albums. This new album took a little longer to arrive—around four years—and is available with an extra disc and/or vinyl featuring six additional tracks, including three remixes, one of them by Funker Vogt.

With “Unseen Horror Scenes”, Hocico takes aim at various aspects of our contemporary world. Our environment has been in decline for some time, providing a potent source of inspiration for the duo. Musically, the album contains classic, instantly recognizable Hocico tracks infused with a heavy dose of power and aggression. They remain relentless in this regard, yet highly effective in their compositions and rage-filled vocals. However, the album also seeks to introduce some innovation. We encounter various experiments, ranging from pure Electro-Punk and a breakbeat-driven track to Cinematic instrumentals and even a song featuring a touch of Rap. Notably, the main album contains only one Spanish-language track, which is a departure from their usual approach. Hocico has been trying to introduce some evolution into their work over the years, an effort I certainly applaud. Unfortunately, they do not quite succeed on this record. Despite a few strong tracks, I am left feeling somewhat unsatisfied.

“Unseen Horror Scenes” has merit on many levels, but it is certainly not the album I would choose to introduce Hocico to someone who has just discovered the Dark-Electro scene. Not every album can be the best. (Rating:7).

Listen to “The Screen”:

About Hocico

Hocico is the Mexican electro-industrial duo of cousins Erik Garcia (Erk Aicrag, vocals and lyrics) and Oscar Mayorga (Racso Agroyam, synthesizers and programming). The pair formed the project in Mexico City in 1993, taking their stage names as reversals of their given names, and played their first concert on 18 February 1994.

Early cassette releases such as “Autoagresión Persistente” and “Misuse, Abuse And Accident” in 1994 and “Triste Desprecio” in 1996 were self-released. The studio albums that followed include “Odio Bajo El Alma” in 1997, “El Día De La Ira” in 1998, “Sangre Hirviente” in 1999, “Signos De Aberracion” in 2002, “Wrack And Ruin” in 2004, “Memorias Atrás” in 2008, “Tiempos De Furia” in 2010, “El Último Minuto (Antes De Que Tu Mundo Caiga)” in 2012, “Ofensor” in 2015, “The Spell Of The Spider” in 2017, “Artificial Extinction” in 2019 and “HyperViolent” in 2022.

The duo records for Out Of Line. Recent releases on the label include the four-track “The Screen” EP in March 2025 and the collaboration with Prayers on “Hey Tú” in November 2025, expanded into a four-track EP in December 2025.

“Unseen Horror Scenes” arrives four years after “HyperViolent” and was announced by Side-Line in May 2026.

Berlin art-pop and indietronica artist Gene Sophia Bogolepov release “Slow Down Your Burning” on 3 September 2026 through MYCELM, the label and archive Bogolepov run from the same city. It is the first single from “Dråma”, a nine-track album set for 11 November 2026, and it carries the darkwave and experimental edges that have run through the project since its move to Germany.

The album will be sold through Bandcamp, Qobuz and the MYCELM platform. It will not appear on Spotify in full. MYCELM states that the omission follows the artist’s ideological beliefs, so the album is being kept off the largest streaming service by choice rather than by a licensing gap.

“Dråma” was assembled by a small group. Diego Ferri handled guitars, production and engineering, Volodymyr Nestryga played drums and percussion, Dimitri Klochkov contributed guitars, bass and synths, and Scout Hansen co-wrote. Piano parts came from Andrian Lebedev, who died in 2021.

How ‘Dråma’ began, four days before the invasion

On 20 February 2022, four days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Bogolepov was in the studio with Scout Hansen, working while anxious about what was coming. “Serpent Song” came out of that session, written from inside the mind of a psychopath, and the rest of the album grew around it over the four years that followed.

MYCELM describes the result as “an album about faith, justice, violence, and what happens when catastrophe becomes ordinary.”

The 2017 song “Mother Russia” drew enough hostility in Russia to push the artist into exile, and the move to Berlin reset the project. “Art Brut” followed in 2021.

Onstage the current line-up is a duo: Bogolepov with Diego Ferri, a Berlin musician and sound engineer who played guitar for and produced the Canadian lo-fi act Michelle Gurevich, and whose other credits take in BBC1 and work with Martin Bisi, the New York producer behind records by Sonic Youth and Swans. Recent appearances include Ms Artville Festival in Hamburg in 2021, Noorderzon Festival in Groningen and WORM in Rotterdam in 2022, Berghain in 2024 and LARK in Berlin in 2025.

MYCELM has also submitted the album to Wave-Gotik-Treffen 2027. No 2027 WGT line-up has been announced, so no booking is confirmed.

About Gene Sophia Bogolepov

Gene Sophia Bogolepov grew up in a working-class household in Saint Petersburg, surrounded by family instruments, and first performed in 2003. The early electropunk project T-Lazarus came out of that period, followed by the electro-rock band Gender ID, which played across Russia and Europe on bills with Ladytron, Placebo, Editors, Sparks and Apparat Band. Two further projects, Dukes of Betelgeuse and Ego Collider, ran alongside them.

In 2013 Bogolepov adopted the name 1314 and turned the work towards living with HIV, anxiety and queer isolation. The 2017 anti-authoritarian song “Mother Russia” produced a backlash that led to exile, and Berlin became the base from then on. “Art Brut” arrived in 2021, and the catalogue collected on the MYCELM platform now runs from “Ultrawhite” and “Home Kids & Bathroom Romance” through “[bodies] EP”, “Deviant Comedy”, the 1314 LP, “Art Brut”, “Long Awaited Silence Of Mind (坂本龍一に捧げる)”, the “Titanium” EP and the “Art Brut (Mycelium Edition)” reissue.

MYCELM itself began as Mycelium, a paywalled discography archive, and relaunched under its current name in February 2026 as what Bogolepov describes as an archive, community and label for underground and unsigned artists, most of them queer. It publishes as Mycelm Records and Mycelm Publishing out of Berlin, and it now handles both “Slow Down Your Burning” and “Dråma”.

Nocturnal Culture Night returns to Kulturpark Deutzen from 4 to 6 September 2026, with its traditional Warm-Up taking place on Thursday, 3 September. Now at edition number 19, NCN once again uses several stages to accommodate a programme that reaches well beyond any single definition of goth, industrial or electronic music.

The 2026 bill shows that range plainly. Nik Kershaw, Die Krupps, SKYND, Diary of Dreams, Peter Heppner & Band, L’Âme Immortelle, Girls Under Glass, Samsas Traum / Weena Morloch, Siglo XX, Esplendor Geométrico, Pankow, Actors, Sierra Veins, The Beauty Of Gemina, HORSKH, Mildreda, Melotron, Of The Wand & The Moon and Container 90 are the most familiar names on the bill, and they come from very different points in electronic and alternative music history.

The festival takes place in Kulturpark Deutzen, roughly 30 kilometres south of Leipzig. NCN stays small by design, with the festival shop describing a capacity of around 2,500 visitors. The programme is spread across the Amphibühne, Waldbühne, Parkbühne and Kulturbühne, alongside the separate Lesebühne.

From 300 people to NCN 19

The first Nocturnal Culture Night took place in 2005 with approximately 300 visitors. Holger Troisch had begun developing the idea two years earlier, and that first edition was much smaller than the present festival: one stage and barely a full day of concerts. The growth that followed did not turn NCN into a conventional large festival. Four music stages have been in operation since 2014, while different parts of the programme gradually acquired their own musical emphasis. The Parkbühne, for example, became associated with synth, coldwave, minimal and post-punk from 2016 onwards; the Kulturbühne developed a stronger relationship with neofolk, industrial and experimental work. 2026 is officially NCN 19, while the organisers regard 2027 as the twentieth jubilee edition. The chronology does not correspond directly to twenty consecutive calendar years because there was no regular second edition in 2006 and the pandemic period produced separate special editions. NCN is currently operated through NCN Event GmbH, based in Leipzig, with Holger Troisch remaining the festival’s organiser.

Holger Troisch and a festival with no single genre

Troisch’s approach to booking explains much of the 2026 programme. Years ago he summarised the balance: “The line-up, the festival lives by big and successful names, but also by insiders.” He followed it with an even simpler statement: “Versatility is important for me.” (Reflections of Darkness, 2017) His more recent comments say the same. Discussing NCN’s identity in 2026, Troisch said that the festival had become too broad musically to tie itself to a single genre, and that introducing new styles was necessary if the event itself was to continue developing.

The running order shows that principle more clearly than an alphabetical line-up. On Saturday alone, Nik Kershaw closes the Amphibühne, SKYND headline the Waldbühne, Actors occupy the evening Parkbühne slot, and Esplendor Geométrico close the live programme on the Kulturbühne. Those artists do not belong to one genre or even one generation. They share NCN’s long-standing remit: electronic, post-industrial, dark and alternative music in the broadest sense.

Nik Kershaw: an unusual headliner for NCN

The most conspicuous name this year is Nik Kershaw, who closes the Amphibühne on Saturday at 22:30. Kershaw’s breakthrough came in 1984, with “Wouldn’t It Be Good”, “I Won’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” and “The Riddle”. His official biography records 62 weeks on the UK Singles Chart across 1984 and 1985, and he performed at Live Aid in 1985. His later career took in songwriting and production for other artists alongside his own releases and performances. He is not a darkwave or industrial artist, and NCN does not try to redraw his history to make him fit. The festival has long treated the wider electronic and alternative culture of the 1980s as part of its remit rather than limiting itself to artists carrying a particular scene label. Kershaw sits at one end of the festival’s historical spectrum: highly crafted British electronic pop that entered mass culture in the 1980s. Only a few hours earlier, other stages will be presenting EBM, post-punk, industrial electronics and experimental music that developed around or against that same decade.

Die Krupps: the industrial line runs directly through Düsseldorf

On Sunday the Amphibühne closes with Die Krupps, whose place in this programme needs less explanation. The Düsseldorf group began with the industrial construction of “Stahlwerksinfonie” before “Wahre Arbeit Wahrer Lohn” and subsequent releases developed a hard electronic language closely associated with the foundations of EBM. During the 1990s, metal guitar was folded into that vocabulary, creating the electronic-metal combination that became another major strand of the band’s identity. Die Krupps marked 45 years of activity in 2025. Their current phase is not limited to anniversary performances: the band signed a multi-album agreement with Dependent Records, with a new album announced for 2026, and guitarist Marcel Zürcher returned to the group in June 2026. The band’s own announcement specifically lists NCN among the concerts following his return. There is also a long NCN connection. The festival archive lists Die Krupps in 2015, 2018, 2023 and 2026, making this their fourth appearance in Deutzen.

SKYND: industrial music through the architecture of true crime

SKYND close Saturday’s Waldbühne at 21:00 and represent a much newer form of industrial performance. The project is built around vocalist SKYND and producer/multi-instrumentalist F, with its catalogue structured around real criminal cases. Rather than using true crime as occasional imagery, the project has made it the organising principle of its music, videos and visual identity. Its own description is simply “TRUE CRIME MUSIC.” The project has released steadily through 2026. Material from “Chapter VII: Red Winter” has included pieces concerning Andrei Chikatilo, Tamara Samsonova and Mikhail Popkov, while the subsequent “Jimmy Savile” opened Chapter VIII: The Open Secret, shifting attention towards institutional protection and the mechanisms that allowed abuse to remain concealed. The NCN set lands in the middle of that run of releases.

Diary of Dreams: five appearances across the history of NCN

Diary of Dreams play the Waldbühne at 19:25 on Sunday. Adrian Hates’ project has run for more than three decades on electronic production, darkwave structures, guitars and inward songwriting. The current release is “Chapter 1: Dead End Dreams”, while the band continue touring extensively through 2026. Their NCN history is long. The official archive lists appearances in 2007, 2009, 2013, 2021 and 2026, making this their fifth visit.

Repeat bookings shape the festival’s history as much as new ones. Some projects come back at intervals long enough for NCN to have documented how their work and their audience changed.

Peter Heppner & Band

Peter Heppner & Band play the Amphibühne at 17:20 on Sunday, immediately before Die Krupps later that evening. Heppner’s own site confirms the full-band NCN appearance on 6 September 2026. It will be his third NCN, following appearances in 2014 and 2020.

Heppner and Die Krupps on the same main stage shows how NCN handles German electronic history. One represents a melodic, vocal-driven lineage closely associated with synthpop and dark pop; the other comes directly from industrial music and EBM. NCN does not collapse those histories into one genre, but it does recognise that their audiences have overlapped for decades.

L’Âme Immortelle and Girls Under Glass

Friday brings two other established names whose careers have repeatedly crossed the boundaries between electronics, goth and heavier music. L’Âme Immortelle, appearing at 21:25 on the Waldbühne, were founded in Austria in 1996 and are centred on Thomas Rainer and Sonja Kraushofer. The male/female vocal contrast has stayed central to the project while the music itself has moved between dark electronics, rock and more melodic material. The group will mark its 30th anniversary in 2027 with a dedicated concert series. This is their second NCN appearance after 2016.

Girls Under Glass, meanwhile, close Friday’s Amphibühne. Their history reaches back to the mid-1980s and encompasses wave, gothic rock, electronics and industrial influences rather than a single fixed style. NCN has hosted them in 2010, 2016, 2022 and now 2026.

Siglo XX, Pankow and Esplendor Geométrico: the historically important names are not all on the main stage

Some of the historically important bookings are positioned away from the Amphibühne.

Belgium’s Siglo XX, appearing at 21:25 on Friday’s Parkbühne, emerged in Genk in 1978 and became an important part of the austere Belgian post-punk and coldwave history of the period. The NCN archive lists 2026 as their first visit to the festival. Pankow, playing Friday on the Waldbühne, represent a different European trajectory. The Florence project developed from the Italian experimental underground into harder electronic and industrial territory and later became strongly associated with EBM. They return to NCN after a previous appearance in 2016.

Then there is Esplendor Geométrico, closing Saturday’s Kulturbühne at 22:45. The Spanish project dates to 1980, and its repetitive, physical combination of mechanical rhythm, noise and industrial electronics developed largely outside the Anglo-German narratives through which industrial music is often described. NCN 19 will be their first appearance at the festival.

That booking is the kind Troisch’s distinction between “big names” and “insiders” covers: historical weight and billing size are not the same thing.

Actors, Sierra Veins, HORSKH and the current generation

The contemporary programme

Several of the contemporary acts arrive with new material rather than a back catalogue.

Canadian ACTORS take the 21:00 Parkbühne slot on Saturday, returning to NCN after their first appearance in 2019. The Vancouver band have released steadily through 2026: “CTRL” appeared in February, followed by the DJ? Acucrack reworking “Dead Inside (Crackmix)” in March, “Left On Read” in April and “Youth” in July. The latter arrives while ACTORS are working on a new album, their first studio record since Acts of Worship and Reanimated. The singles keep the tightly constructed post-punk songwriting the band are known for, but the production hits harder: stronger electronic rhythm, more low-end pressure and a closer relationship with the dancefloor. NCN catches ACTORS mid-change rather than between records.

Sierra Veins closes the Parkbühne at 00:10 on Friday, a late slot that suits how far her work now runs past darkwave into techno and harder club music. Her second full-length album, “In The Name Of Blood”, was released on 7 November 2025 and made the change from SIERRA to SIERRA VEINS part of the record’s central subject: identity, inheritance and the traces carried within us. It also includes the collaboration “Memory Cells” with Ghost Dance. In February 2026 she followed it with “HypnoVizion 031: SIERRA VEINS (DJ Mix)”, a 46-minute mix for REZZ’s HypnoVizion series that places her own tracks and remixes beside material from artists including Gesaffelstein, Boys Noize, Matteo Tura and Ghost Dance. The album and the mix place her at NCN with one foot in the dark electronic scene and the other in a much wider club culture.

French trio HORSKH open the Parkbühne programme on Friday, three weeks before the release of their new ten-track album “MTNT” on 25 September 2026. Three pieces from this phase have already appeared: “Bad Glitch” in January, “Hyperhuman” in March and “Glow” in June. HORSKH themselves describe the project as neo-industrial / grunge / metal. The new material continues the collision between electronic programming, heavily processed vocals, distorted guitars and industrial rhythm that sets them apart from acts rebuilding an older industrial vocabulary. The NCN set is one of the last festival dates before MTNT is out.

Belgium’s Mildreda, appearing on the Waldbühne at 14:20 on Sunday, arrive in Deutzen even closer to a new record. “Realities” is released by Dependent Records on 28 August 2026, just nine days before the NCN performance. The eighteen-track double album follows Blue-Devilled and pushes Jan Dewulf’s dark electro past the colder boundaries usually associated with the genre. The structure expands too: recurring “Reality Check” pieces divide the album, while Johan Van Roy of Suicide Commando appears on “Virtual Goddess” and Constantin “Breñal” Warter of Calva Y Nada guests on “Rückwärts.” The first single, “End of the Line,” appeared in June, followed in July by “Virtual Goddess”; Dewulf has described the latter as a confession rather than a criticism of social media: the contradiction between seeking meaningful connection and still responding to the tiny rewards of digital approval. He also says the writing brought colours and emotions into Mildreda that had sat outside his comfort zone, rather than extending the sound of Blue-Devilled. The NCN set is one of the first chances to hear how that studio material works live, against a show built on Dewulf’s vocals and electronics and Christophe Salvatore’s keyboards.

Around them, The Foreign Resort, Mayflower Madame, Winter Severity Index, SIIE, Debdepan, Lovataraxx, Lone Assembly, Grundeis, Container 90, Ambassador 21, Menticide, AD and Intent extend the contemporary programme in very different directions. They are not one new generation of “dark music”. The schedule shows post-punk, EBM, industrial electronics, synth-driven music and club culture overlapping without becoming interchangeable, and the separate stages keep those distinctions visible.

The acoustic, ritual and experimental side

The Kulturbühne runs its own programme.

Of The Wand & The Moon close the stage on Sunday, while Corde Oblique, Cawatana, Darkwood, Paganland, Tears Of Othila, Nemuer, SIAMGDA ꕾ Marie, Supersimmetria and MS Gentur + Sven Phalanx occupy points between neofolk, ritual sound, experimental electronics, ambient and industrial music.

Those artists would lose their context between larger electro acts on a main stage. Splitting the site lets NCN stay broad without pretending all of its music is interchangeable.

Who plays when

Thursday, 3 September – Kulturbühne / Warm-Up

• 19:00 Doors
• 20:00 Bagger 258
• 20:40 MRDTC
• 21:35 Prager Handgriff
• 22:30 Tyske Ludder
• 23:30 DJ Team – quiet aftershow party

Friday, 4 September – Amphibühne

• 15:30 Doors
• 16:10 Vanguard
• 17:50 Melotron
• 20:05 Elinborg
• 22:45 Girls Under Glass

Friday, 4 September – Waldbühne

• 15:00 Doors
• 15:30 Extize
• 17:00 Jesus On Extasy
• 18:55 Pankow
• 21:25 L’Âme Immortelle

Friday, 4 September – Parkbühne

• 15:00 Doors
• 15:30 HORSKH
• 17:00 Hinfort
• 18:55 Atlas Bird
• 21:25 Siglo XX
• 00:10 Sierra Veins

Friday, 4 September – Kulturbühne

• 15:00 Doors
• 16:10 Frequen-C & TC75
• 17:50 Tears Of Othila
• 20:05 MS Gentur + Sven Phalanx
• 22:45 Nemuer
• 00:50 DJ Adler & DJ SPU Manne – quiet aftershow party

Friday, 4 September – Lesebühne

• 15:00 Doors
• 15:30 M. Kruppe
• 17:00 Christian von Aster
• 18:50 Torsten Low
• 21:00 Jessica Iser

Saturday, 5 September – Amphibühne

• 11:45 Doors
• 12:20 Ambassador 21
• 13:40 AD:Key
• 15:20 Schöngeist
• 17:30 Menticide
• 19:45 Samsas Traum / Weena Morloch
• 22:30 Nik Kershaw

Saturday, 5 September – Waldbühne

• 10:30 Doors
• 11:50 Aktion: Fiasko
• 13:00 Strikkland
• 14:30 The Awakening
• 16:25 Container 90
• 18:30 The Beauty Of Gemina
• 21:00 SKYND

Saturday, 5 September – Parkbühne

• 10:30 Doors
• 11:50 Rina Pavar
• 13:00 Ozibut
• 14:30 SIIE
• 16:25 Debdepan
• 18:30 Lovataraxx
• 21:00 Actors
• 23:50 Lone Assembly

Saturday, 5 September – Kulturbühne

• 10:30 Doors
• 12:20 Paganland
• 13:40 SIAMGDA
• 15:20 no artist is named in the current schedule
• 17:30 Darkwood
• 19:55 Les Chaussers De La Nuit
• 22:45 Esplendor Geométrico
• 01:10 DJ Bastard & DJ Tobi – quiet aftershow party

Saturday, 5 September – Lesebühne

• 10:30 Doors
• 13:00 Torsten Low
• 16:25 Christian von Aster
• 18:30 Markus Heitz

Sunday, 6 September – Amphibühne

• 12:00 Doors
• 12:30 Grundeis
• 13:40 Junkie Kut
• 15:15 Intent:Outtake
• 17:20 Peter Heppner & Band
• 20:45 Die Krupps

Sunday, 6 September – Waldbühne

• 11:00 Doors
• 12:00 Beyond Border
• 13:00 Lovelorn Dolls
• 14:20 Mildreda
• 16:10 Sturm Café
• 19:25 Diary Of Dreams

Sunday, 6 September – Parkbühne

• 11:00 Doors
• 12:00 Venin Carmin
• 13:00 Mayflower Madame
• 14:20 The Foreign Resort
• 16:10 Winter Severity Index
• 18:30 Hundreds

Sunday, 6 September – Kulturbühne

• 11:00 Doors
• 12:30 Cawatana
• 13:40 Corde Oblique
• 15:15 Supersimmetria
• 17:20 Of The Wand & The Moon

Sunday, 6 September – Lesebühne

• 11:00 Doors
• 13:00 Dirk Bernemann
• 14:20 Erk Aicrag
• 16:15 Markus Heitz
• 18:55 Christian von Aster

NCN 19

Warm-Up: 3 September 2026 Festival: 4-6 September 2026 Kulturpark Deutzen Arno-Bahndorf-Straße 12 Deutzen, Germany

Day tickets are currently listed at €75 for Friday, Saturday and Sunday, while several categories of weekend tickets are also available through the official NCN shop.

The running order shows Troisch’s booking method in practice. A British pop songwriter with a 1980s chart catalogue goes on one stage, Spanish industrial pioneers on another, true-crime industrial performance on a third and neofolk or experimental electronics elsewhere, with none of them redefined to make the combination work.

NCN’s identity rests on which strands still make sense for the same audience in the same weekend, not on holding a genre boundary. After nineteen editions that is still a booking question.

About Nocturnal Culture Night

Nocturnal Culture Night has been staged at Kulturpark Deutzen in Saxony since 2005, when Holger Troisch opened the first edition on a single stage for roughly 300 visitors. The site sits in the village of Deutzen, part of the municipality of Neukieritzsch, about 30 kilometres south of Leipzig, and its wooded amphitheatre and surrounding buildings gave the festival its four-stage layout from 2014 onwards. Troisch has run the event throughout, latterly through NCN Event GmbH in Leipzig, and the programme covers EBM, industrial, post-punk, coldwave, synthpop, neofolk, ritual and experimental electronics side by side rather than in separate weekends, with a Lesebühne carrying readings by German genre authors in parallel with the music.

The 2026 line-up reached its present shape after a change at the top of the bill. Marc Almond was announced as the first NCN 19 headliner in September 2025, then withdrew on health grounds; Nik Kershaw was booked in his place for the Saturday Amphibühne slot. Camping and non-camping weekend tickets and day tickets are sold only through the official NCN shop, and caravan and parking tickets sold out earlier in the year. The 2027 edition is the one the organisers count as the twentieth jubilee, which makes NCN 19 the last edition before that anniversary.

Dutch new wave duo Pol released the official video for “Sex Machines” on 21 August 2026. Fashion photographer and filmmaker Rémi Lamandé directed it. The single itself came out on 25 June 2026 as a two-track digital release on Bandcamp, pairing the 3:59 vocal version with an instrumental of the same length, and is also on streaming platforms.

Pol are the brothers Ruben and Matthijs Pol, who are based in Paris. They gave “Sex Machines” a single launch show during Paris Fashion Week in June 2026, two months before the video appeared.

How Pol built the ‘Sex Machines’ video

Lamandé built the clip as a street interview programme. Ruben Pol carries a star-marked microphone through a service alley and holds it out to a series of passers-by, each of whom lip-syncs the lyric instead of answering. The cast then moves into a concrete parking garage, and the closing section shows the duo performing to a packed room under hard white backlight. A final outtake shows the two brothers laughing.

The duo explained where the concept started:

“It started off with the idea of doing an interview style video with a diverse cast of characters. We liked the idea of ‘strangers’ singing the song, similarly how the two ex-lovers in the lyrics are acting like strangers. We shared the idea with director Remi Lamandé who brought the full script to life.”

The brothers wrote and produced the track themselves. Matthijs Pol plays drum computer, electric guitar, synths, xylophone and sings; Ruben Pol plays drum computer, electric guitar, synths, bass, vocoder and sings. Matthijs and Ruben mixed it with Paul D. Millar, and Gianni Peri mastered it. On their own Bandcamp page the duo describe the song as built on “twitching beats, serrated guitars and clipped vocals”.

About Pol

Pol is a duo formed by the Dutch brothers Ruben and Matthijs Pol, now based in Paris, France. Both play guitar, synthesizers and drum computer and both sing; Ruben adds bass and vocoder, Matthijs adds xylophone. The pair write, produce and mix their own recordings and handle their visuals, videos, merchandise and fanzines themselves.

The brothers issued a self-titled debut EP in 2023. Two singles followed on their own Bandcamp: “Masks” in June 2024 and “The Chameleon” in December 2024. Their first zine, which documents a Western European tour, is stocked by the Paris bookshop Librairie 1909, and the same multidisciplinary practice has produced sound-design work for Louis Vuitton and Miu Miu.

In 2024 the duo played their first headline show at a sold-out Bitterzoet in Amsterdam with Logan Sky of Visage, and have since performed in Europe, the United States and Japan. In early 2026 they opened sold-out Lebanon Hanover shows in London, Lille and Paris.

“Sex Machines”, released on 25 June 2026, is their first new music since “The Chameleon”. The Rémi Lamandé video, out on 21 August 2026, is the first visual the duo have released from it.

Ministry released “We Hate” on August 21, 2026 through Cleopatra Records, the second single from the industrial band’s final studio album, “Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery)“, due October 30. A video directed by Joshua Bradford premieres the same day at 18:00 Central European Summer Time.

The single takes Donald Trump as its subject. A press release from Red Sand PR states that Al Jourgensen and the band “felt it necessary to give ‘Trumplethinskin’ a dose of his own medicine”. Bradford, a former Revolting Cocks bandmate of Jourgensen, also directed the video for “Burned Out”, the album’s first single, issued in July.

Where ‘We Hate’ sits on ‘Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery)’

“We Hate” is track four of ten. The album closes with “We’re Still Here”, the only track to feature former Ministry bassist Paul Barker, his only appearance on the record. The rest of it was cut with Jourgensen’s current line-up: guitarists Monte Pittman and Cesar Soto, bassist Paul D’Amour, synth player John Bechdel and drummer Pepe Clarke Magaña.

“Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery)” arrives on vinyl in several variants, on CD, on cassette and digitally. Track seven, “The White Man Lied”, appears only on the CD and digital editions and is left off the cassette and vinyl pressings. The full tracklist reads:

1. Crickets
2. Voices of Hate
3. Clown Car
4. We Hate
5. Delete
6. Grifter
7. The White Man Lied
8. Singularity
9. Burned Out
10. We’re Still Here (feat. Paul Barker)

Ministry ‘Goodbye Europe 2027’ tour dates

The album is followed by a farewell touring cycle. The European leg runs to 21 shows with Die Krupps as special guests, opening in Utrecht on April 2, 2027 and closing in Helsinki on May 1. Meet-and-greet packages sold through soundrink.co include a photo opportunity with Jourgensen, a laminate pass, a silkscreen poster and a European tour coin.

• April 2, 2027 – Utrecht, Netherlands – Ronda
• April 3, 2027 – Saarbrücken, Germany – Garage
• April 4, 2027 – Brussels, Belgium – Ancienne Belgique
• April 6, 2027 – Manchester, UK – O2 Victoria Warehouse
• April 7, 2027 – Dublin, Ireland – 3Olympia
• April 9, 2027 – Nottingham, UK – Rock City
• April 10, 2027 – London, UK – Troxy
• April 12, 2027 – Paris, France – Bataclan
• April 14, 2027 – Madrid, Spain – La Riviera
• April 15, 2027 – Barcelona, Spain – Paral-lel
• April 17, 2027 – Lausanne, Switzerland – Docks
• April 18, 2027 – Munich, Germany – Tonhalle
• April 19, 2027 – Vienna, Austria – Gasometer
• April 21, 2027 – Prague, Czech Republic – Forum Karlín
• April 22, 2027 – Warsaw, Poland – Progresja
• April 24, 2027 – Berlin, Germany – Columbiahalle
• April 25, 2027 – Hamburg, Germany – Grosse Freiheit 36
• April 26, 2027 – Copenhagen, Denmark – Amager Bio
• April 27, 2027 – Oslo, Norway – Rockefeller
• April 29, 2027 – Stockholm, Sweden – Fållan
• May 1, 2027 – Helsinki, Finland – House of Culture

About Ministry

Ministry was formed in Chicago in 1981 by Al Jourgensen. The project started with synth-pop material issued as 12-inch singles on the newly founded Wax Trax! Records, followed by the debut album “With Sympathy” on Arista Records in 1983. Jourgensen moved the band toward a harsher, sample-driven sound across “Twitch” (1986), “The Land of Rape and Honey” (1988) and “The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste” (1989), then reached its widest audience with “Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs” (1992), which brought the first of six Grammy nominations. Paul Barker played bass and co-produced through that period and left in 2003.

Eight further albums followed before Jourgensen shut the band down in 2013. Ministry returned in 2018 with “AmeriKKKant”, then issued “Moral Hygiene” (2021) and “HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES” (2024). In March 2025 the band released “The Squirrely Years Revisited” on Cleopatra Records, a set of re-recorded songs from its early synth-pop catalogue, and followed it with first-ever official videos for “Everyday Is Halloween” and “I’ll Do Anything For You” and a Jurgen Engler remix of the live track “Dancing Alone” in March 2026. Alongside Ministry, Jourgensen has run Revolting Cocks, Lard, Pailhead and Surgical Meth Machine; Barker returned to recording as Lead Into Gold in 2023. “Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery)” is billed as the band’s 17th and last studio album, and “We Hate” is its second single.

Leipzig darkwave project Kalte Steine released “Drowning” on 20 August 2026 as a self-released digital single. The track runs 4:39 and is available on Bandcamp and on streaming services. It is the project’s sixth single and the second sung entirely in English, following “Crying Out” from June 2026.

Kalte Steine mix darkwave and post-punk: drum machine, bass, a spare guitar figure and vocals set well back in delay and reverb. On “Drowning” a field recording of waves opens the track before the rhythm section enters, and buzzing analogue synthesizers arrive about a minute in.

Where ‘Drowning’ sits in the Kalte Steine catalogue

The project’s first four singles, “Shattered”, “Dysthymia”, “Wüste aus Beton” and “Kinder der Nacht”, were sung in German and appeared on Bandcamp in June 2026. “Crying Out”, issued on 29 June 2026, was the first Kalte Steine track written and sung in English. “Drowning” continues in that language.

All six tracks are self-released. Kalte Steine has no label, no album and no Discogs entry, and sells its catalogue directly through Bandcamp at a per-track price. The digital track download is offered in MP3, FLAC and 24-bit/44.1 kHz formats.

About Kalte Steine

Kalte Steine is a darkwave and post-punk project based in Leipzig, Germany. The project releases under its own name without a label and has not published a lineup, so the number of people involved is not documented.

Recording activity began in mid-2026. Four German-language singles, “Shattered”, “Dysthymia”, “Wüste aus Beton” and “Kinder der Nacht”, went up on Bandcamp in June 2026, tagged by the project as alternative, darkwave, goth, gothic and post-punk. Those tracks set out the recording approach the project has kept since: drum machine, bass, single-line guitar, synthesizer, and vocals treated with delay and reverb rather than pushed forward in the mix.

“Crying Out” arrived on 29 June 2026 and switched the writing to English. “Drowning” followed on 20 August 2026 as the second English-language track and the sixth release overall. Both are available on Bandcamp and on streaming platforms, and no physical edition has been issued.

Todd Stephens’s 2001 goth road movie is back in United States cinemas as Gypsy 83: The Director’s Cut, restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative and re-edited to 138 minutes, against the 95 minutes of the version released in 2001. The new edition adds over 40 minutes of previously unseen footage and further goth soundtrack cues, including songs by The Cure, Cocteau Twins and Echo & The Bunnymen. Altered Innocence is handling the theatrical release, which opened at New York’s Quad Cinema on 14 August 2026 and continues across the country into September.

The restoration was assembled for the film’s 25th anniversary. Stephens recut the picture with editor Anderson Matthew, and the 35mm elements recovered for the project became the basis of the 4K scan.

What the ‘Gypsy 83’ director’s cut changes

The story is unchanged. Gypsy Vale, played by Sara Rue, and her younger friend Clive Webb, played by Birkett Turton, are goth outsiders and Stevie Nicks fans in Sandusky, Ohio. When they hear that a New York club is staging a Night of 1000 Stevies, the two drive east so that Gypsy can perform. Karen Black plays lounge singer Bambi LeBleau, and John Doe of the punk band X plays Gypsy’s father, Ray. Paulo Costanzo and Anson Scoville complete the principal cast.

What changes is length and music. At 138 minutes the director’s cut carries more than 40 minutes of material cut from the 2001 release, and the extra running time makes room for additional soundtrack placements. Alongside The Cure, Cocteau Twins and Echo & The Bunnymen, the expanded music bed draws on Ministry, Clan Of Xymox, Alien Sex Fiend and Switchblade Symphony, plus Diva Destruction’s cover of “Talk to Me” and Nobody’s Wolf Child’s reading of “Song to the Siren”.

Gypsy 83 was Stephens’s directorial debut. He had written and produced the 1998 film “Edge of Seventeen”, and returned to Sandusky, his home town, for “Swan Song” in 2021; the three films are grouped as his Ohio trilogy.

The trailer for the director’s cut is below.

‘Gypsy 83’ theatrical dates

• 14 to 20 August 2026 – New York, NY – Quad Cinema
• 21 to 27 August 2026 – Los Angeles, CA – Nuart Theatre (Q&A with Todd Stephens, Birkett Turton and cinematographer Gina DeGirolamo on 21 and 22 August at 7 p.m.)
• 26 and 27 August 2026 – Seattle, WA – SIFF Film Center
• 27 August 2026 – San Francisco, CA – The Roxie Theater
• 29 August 2026 – Houston, TX – River Oaks Theatre
• 31 August 2026 – Nashville, TN – Belcourt Theatre
• 3 September 2026 – Philadelphia, PA – PhilaMOCA
• 4 to 10 September 2026 – Howell, MI – Historic Howell Theater
• 10 September 2026 – Sacramento, CA – The Dreamland Cinema
• 11 to 17 September 2026 – Denver, CO – Sie FilmCenter

Blu-ray and DVD pre-orders are open through Altered Innocence, with the home video release set for later this year.

About Gypsy 83

Gypsy 83 was written and directed by Todd Stephens and produced in 2001, following his screenplay for “Edge of Seventeen” three years earlier. Shot on 35mm and set in Sandusky, Ohio, the film follows two goth outsiders driving to New York City for the Night of 1000 Stevies, an annual Stevie Nicks tribute event. Sara Rue plays Gypsy Vale, Birkett Turton plays Clive Webb, Karen Black plays Bambi LeBleau, and John Doe of X plays Gypsy’s father. Gina DeGirolamo shot the film.

The original 95-minute cut ran in cinemas in 2001 and later reached home video and streaming services. Its soundtrack placed goth and post-punk records at the centre of the two leads’ sense of themselves, and a 2003 soundtrack compilation collected part of that music.

Stephens returned to Sandusky twice more. “Edge of Seventeen” (1998) and “Swan Song” (2021) sit either side of Gypsy 83 in what he groups as an Ohio trilogy about queer lives in a Midwestern city.

For the 25th anniversary, Stephens and editor Anderson Matthew rebuilt the film from the recovered 35mm camera negative. The result, running 138 minutes, is the version now in United States cinemas through Altered Innocence, with a home video release to follow later in 2026.

Sentient Ruin Laboratories will issue Marca Diaboli’s debut EP “Labyrintomb” on vinyl on September 11, 2026, the first time the five-track record has been pressed. The Oakland label describes the project as a Chilean-Austrian occult rock, post-punk and black metal act, and the EP first appeared on October 31, 2025 as a cassette limited to sixty copies on the German label Sect Entropy.

The vinyl is a single-sided 12″ with the B-side silkscreened in metallic gold ink, housed in a matte sleeve printed black inside, with an insert inlay and a download card. Two pressings exist: a crystal clear edition of one hundred copies worldwide, sold direct by the label and not distributed to shops, and a standard black edition. Three of the five test pressings are also being offered, hand-numbered, signed, and packaged in a black fold-over cover silkscreened in gold.

“Labyrintomb” runs eighteen minutes across “Digging Graves”, “Nightfalls”, “Arsonists”, “Manifest” and “The Last Nail”. It was recorded and performed by a single musician credited as M.R.C. between May and June 2025 in Lower Austria, with Krsfrs mixing and M.R.C. mastering. Steven Henningsard cut the vinyl master and Svart Graphics handled the cover art and layout.

Sentient Ruin calls the EP “a grave-born spell book of primeval shamanic rock musick” and names In Solitude, Negative Plane, Bauhaus, Amebix and The Devil’s Blood as its reference points. The lo-fi production comes out of black metal, but the melodies and the pacing sit closer to post-punk and early-1990s underground rock than to anything in that genre.

About Marca Diaboli

Marca Diaboli was conceived in the forests of Lower Austria and dates its own founding to 2025. The label’s account puts the project’s first public step in the summer of that year, when the track “Nightfalls” was self-released digitally on Bandcamp, and its debut proper at the end of October 2025 with the “Labyrintomb” cassette on Sect Entropy.

The project works as a one-person operation on record: M.R.C. performs everything and shares the credits only with a mixing engineer and the vinyl and artwork staff. No member names have been published beyond those initials, and the Chilean side of the Chilean-Austrian description has not been detailed by the band or the label.

Its stated sources are late-1980s and early-1990s underground rock, post-punk and metal, the rawest end of second-wave black metal, and contemporary dark rock. Beyond “Labyrintomb” and the “Nightfalls” single, the project has released nothing else. The September vinyl is its first release for Sentient Ruin, a label that has spent a decade working the edges of black metal, doom, noise and post-punk out of Oakland, California.

Xasthur release “Open to Misinterpretation” on October 2, 2026 through Prophecy Productions. The nine-track album continues the acoustic, neofolk-leaning form Scott Conner adopted in 2015, and comes on CD digisleeve, black vinyl and digital.

The tracklist runs “Running From Silence”, “Put You Out Of Your Misery”, “Mantras Of Delusion”, “Impersonating The Impostors”, “Nothing In The Dark”, “Waste Of Eternity”, “Prisoner Of Your Past”, “Strategic Incompetence” and “Death Can Heal”.

The title is Conner’s answer to a long-running problem with how the project is read. Prophecy Productions describes the record as “a deeper and more developed version of what Conner already does”, made by an artist who has stopped trying to make the music easier to reach and has instead kept refining it. The label notes that the songs went through Xasthur’s touring on both sides of the Atlantic before they were recorded, and that the production is cleaner than on the previous albums while still aiming for a live, organic take.

Two tracks have gone out ahead of the album, both as visualizers on the label’s YouTube channel. “Put You Out Of Your Misery” came first in July 2026, followed by “Nothing in the Dark” in August.

About Xasthur

Xasthur is the solo project of Scott Conner, who also records under the name Malefic and started it in Alhambra, California in December 1995. For its first fifteen years it was a black metal project, and Conner built its catalogue through a long run of small labels and split releases before the albums “Subliminal Genocide” (2006), “Defective Epitaph” (2007) and “All Reflections Drained” (2009) appeared on Hydra Head Records. Southern Lord had reissued “Nocturnal Poisoning” as a remastered double LP in 2005, and Conner spent those years guesting with Sunn O))) and Twilight.

Conner retired the Xasthur name in 2010 and spent five years recording as Nocturnal Poisoning, releasing “Other Worlds of the Mind” in 2012, “A Misleading Reality” in 2013 and “Doomgrass” in 2014. On March 5, 2015 he announced that Xasthur would return, but as an acoustic project rather than a black metal one. The first album in that form, “Subject to Change”, followed on May 6, 2016 through Disharmonic Variations.

The Prophecy Productions run began with “Victims of the Times” in 2021 and continued with “Inevitably Dark” in 2023 and “Disharmonic Variations” in 2024, each also issued in a deluxe edition. Two archival split collections, “Vol. 1 Splits 2002-2004” and “Vol. 2 Splits & Bonus 2007-2009”, came out on Lupus Lounge in 2024, and the early album “A Gate Through Bloodstained Mirrors” was reissued on gatefold double vinyl in 2026.

“Open to Misinterpretation” is the fourth Xasthur album for Prophecy, and the label notes that its songs were road-tested before they were recorded.

New Jersey dark rock and post-punk musician Greg Bullock has finished “26EP”, a self-released four-track EP he built in public on Bandcamp. The page opened on June 12, 2026 and filled up one song at a time, closing with “Blu-Green Beauty” on August 13, 2026.

The running order is “In Other Words” (3:44), “Thirty Pieces” (3:50), “I Ain’t Goin!” (2:21) and “Blu-Green Beauty” (4:56). Bullock wrote, produced, performed and mixed everything himself, playing vocals, hardware and software synthesizers and arranging the drum tracks. He recorded at his own GABWorx, Studio B; Mark Trewella mastered at Full Circle Mastering. The cover and track photos are Bullock’s own.

The closing track is the plainest of the four in intent. Bullock sums it up in a single line on its Bandcamp page: “Our world is not the dump that humans treat it as.” The lead track, “In Other Words”, turns on ignorance, persecution and contaminated morality, subjects Bullock has called “ideas we may not want to think about.”

The EP is digital and carries no label. Bullock spreads it across goth rock, post-punk, synth rock and a strain of alt-country, so no two of the four tracks sit in quite the same place.

About Greg Bullock

Greg Bullock is a musician and producer based in Plumsted Township, New Jersey, where he runs the GABWorx studio. He is best known as co-founder, vocalist and keyboard player of Cyborg Amok, the duo he started in 2019 with his son Brydon Bullock on drums and vocals. The pair describe that project as gothic-infused synth-rock; their most recent album, “Pins & Needles”, came out in April 2025.

Bullock’s solo catalogue runs alongside it and shares the same Bandcamp page, which also carries Brydon’s own tracks. He gathered his earlier work on “Best Of … so far!” in September 2025, then released the standalone single “No Exit” the following month. A second Bandcamp account under the GABWorx name holds the albums “Etiam” and “The Language Angels Speak In The Darkness”.

“26EP” is his first multi-track solo release since that 2025 collection, and the first he assembled in the open rather than shipping complete. There is no video for any of the four tracks; the EP is available on Bandcamp and on the streaming services.

Neapolitan project Fiori del Male released “Allarme rosso nel golfo persico” on April 4, 2026, thirty-five years after Nunzio Ciccone wrote it. The five-minute track sets an anti-war lyric against post-punk guitars, alternative rock instrumentation and electronics, and had sat unreleased since 1991.

Ciccone wrote it in Scampia, in the northern outskirts of Naples, while the first Gulf War was being broadcast live. The lyric is about that broadcast rather than the fighting: propaganda, saturation coverage, and what happens when a war arrives in a living room through a television set.

Ciccone sings and Andrea Palazzo plays guitar, with Vincenzo Esposito on bass and Claudio Ciccone handling DJ work and production. The New York engineer known as MisterAC mastered it. The single is self-released under the Nunzio Ciccone Bros. imprint and distributed digitally; it is on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer and YouTube, and there is no physical edition and no music video.

About Fiori del Male

Fiori del Male formed in Scampia, Naples in the early 1990s around Nunzio Ciccone, who has led it under several names since. The group first worked as Flowers Of Evil, the English rendering of the same phrase, then as FlowerPeace after moving to Milan in 1998.

In 2000 the members relocated to London and stayed there until 2012, writing and recording in the city for twelve years before returning to Naples in 2014. The project is now spread between Rome, London and Naples, and works as a collective rather than a fixed lineup: Ciccone, his siblings Claudio and Alessia Ciccone, and a rotating set of players including Palazzo and Esposito.

Recorded output has been sparse. The single “E’ solo un giorno che non va, con la luna dentro gli occhi” appeared on April 30, 2020, credited to Ciccone with Alessia Ciccone, Vincenzo Esposito, Armando Vertullo, Danilo Napoli, Roberto Zincone and Fiori del Male. “Angeli Ribelli” followed on July 31, 2023. “Allarme rosso nel golfo persico” is the third release under the name in six years, and the oldest piece of writing among them by a wide margin.

Note for readers searching for the project: a separate Italian black metal duo from Brindisi also records as Fiori del Male, and several streaming services merge the two into one artist page. They are unrelated.

Buenos Aires project Sektor Voltage released “En otra dimensión” on June 6, 2026, an eight-track fourth album that mixes electronic body music rhythms with post-punk guitars and coldwave synths. Nicolás Pomilio, who has run the project on his own since 2020, self-released it in digital form.

The album is his first to build the songs around guitar rather than around the drum machine. Pomilio describes the shift as a return to what the project was for, not a departure from it: “En otra dimensión (2026) is born: the soul slips beyond the visible, traveling through astral realms. Driven by a motorik pulse, post-punk guitars, futuristic synths, and Nicolás’s cavernous voice, the tracks create dark, danceable atmospheres that hypnotize and transport. Returning to reality is up to the listener.”

The eight tracks are “Hojas Negras”, “En otra dimensión”, “In den Verborgenen Wäldern”, “Látigo”, “Cerebro reptil”, “Dornen und Splitter”, “Tu propia sombra” and “Ilusión”. Two carry German titles, and both point at the same reference: the German dark scene of the 1980s, which Pomilio names alongside the old Frankfurt sound and Belgian new beat.

He recorded the album on a Zoom R8 portastudio. Drums came from a Kawai R50e and bass from a Korg Monologue, both sequenced over MIDI, with a Yamaha QY10 bass patch used on “Látigo”. Korg Volca FM and Microkorg synths were played live, and percussion, backing vocals and strings were added by hand from a Casio SA keyboard. Guitars and vocals went into Ableton through the Zoom R8’s effects, and the master was finished there too.

The first single, “In den Verborgenen Wäldern”, came with a video directed by Damian Bentrón and Marcelo Moiola and filmed in Rafael Calzada, in the southern Greater Buenos Aires belt, in May 2026. It follows Pomilio alone through open country while the track’s machinery runs underneath.

About Sektor Voltage

Sektor Voltage is the solo project of Nicolás Pomilio, a producer, guitarist and singer from the southern zone of Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina. He started it in 2020 as an experimental sonic search after working as a DJ and producer in techno, new beat, EBM and darkwave, and turned it into a dark, danceable live set drawn from 1980s sources.

Three albums preceded the current one, all self-released and all eight tracks long. “Amor a mi negra lista” arrived on May 14, 2023, followed by “Animal en extinción” on February 11, 2024 and “Oscura noche del alma” on January 28, 2025. Across them Pomilio worked through darkwave, EBM and industrial textures, naming Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, early Ministry and Front 242 as the starting points. “Oscura noche del alma” also carries a cover of Youth Code‘s “Avengement” and the track “Sexo social” featuring Neuromi.

Pomilio has said he felt something was missing after that run, so he made the guitar his main instrument and reworked his voice around the hybrid it produced. The reference points changed with it: post-punk, coldwave and 1980s darkwave, from The Cure and Opéra de Nuit to Malaria!, X-Mal Deutschland and Siekiera. “En otra dimensión” is the first Sektor Voltage record built from that starting point, and it leans on coldwave, goth and post-punk where the earlier releases leaned on EBM and industrial.

Aggrotech and dark electro project Subliminal Code released “Behind the Mask” through Neon Retro Records on July 31, 2026, and expanded it on August 16 with a fifth track. The label edition carried four cuts; the version on the project’s own Bandcamp page adds a remix by Dominator.

The full running order is the title track (4:35), a People Theatre remix (5:01), an Elektroterapi remix (2:48), a club version (4:35) and the Dominator remix (3:15). Raúl J. Padrón wrote, produced and sang it and drew the artwork; Raúl Jr. Padrón handled synths and programming; Vitor Mancini mixed and mastered.

The source material is horror cinema, and the project says so plainly on the release page: “Inspired by the dark atmosphere of classic slasher horror films, Behind the Mask tells the story of an unstoppable killer lurking in the shadows, where every step could be your last. Cold synths, crushing beats, distorted vocals, and relentless aggression come together to create the soundtrack for your darkest nightmare.”

Three of the four extra versions push the track further toward the dancefloor than the original does, moving it from aggrotech and dark electro toward industrial techno. The release is digital.

About Subliminal Code

Subliminal Code was founded at the start of 2010 by Raúl José Padrón and Raúl Junior Padrón, drawing on EBM, industrial, metal and synthpop. The project began in Venezuela and is now based in Budapest, Hungary, where Raúl José Padrón carries it as the sole permanent member.

The first release, the “Soldier Of Hell” EP, appeared on December 23, 2011 through Engraved Ritual, followed by the single “The Beautiful People” in 2013 and “Another Day” on March 24, 2014. The debut album “Karma In Mortem” arrived on July 14, 2014 on the Hungarian label Advoxya Records, which then issued “Karma In Covers” on November 1, 2016 – a set of covers of Venezuelan metal bands – and “Soldier Of Hell, Reborn” three days later. In 2016 the project also appeared on Insane Records’ compilation “Terror Night Vol.2 Sound Of Dead Future”.

Side-Line covered the single “Malevolencia” when it appeared on February 29, 2020, trailing the second album. That album, “The Cancer Of The World Is Human Beings”, came out on May 1, 2021 on Advoxya with eleven tracks. Since then the project has worked mainly in singles and short releases: the seven-track “I Never” on September 1, 2022, “Push Me Down” that November, “Memento Mori” on October 10, 2023, “Your Wish” on July 20, 2024 and “Void Of Morgoth” on July 15, 2025.

“Behind the Mask” is the first Subliminal Code release to carry Neon Retro Records, a synthwave netlabel running since July 2019, and the first to be built out as a remix package rather than a standalone track.

Oslo duo Rule Of Two release the six-track EP “Restoring Balance to a Broken World” on August 27, 2026 through the Madrid label Polypiel Records. The record gathers the singles the pair have issued across 2026 and adds one previously unreleased track, “Decompression”. It follows their debut album, “Aiming For the Sun”, from November 2025.

The running order is “Call For Aid”, “All Time Low”, “Decompression”, “It’s No Good”, “Hole In The Ground” and “Afterlife”. Rule Of Two wrote and recorded the music, Ronny Flissundet wrote the lyrics, and the EP was mixed and mastered at Crystal Island Studios in Nesodden, Norway. “It’s No Good” is a Depeche Mode cover, reworked as darkwave and industrial electronics. The release is digital.

Five of the six tracks reached listeners first as standalone singles. Side-Line covered “All Time Low” in February 2026, then “Afterlife” on May 7, the duo’s first single for Polypiel. “It’s No Good” arrived on June 4 and “Hole In The Ground” on July 16.

That last single is the loudest thing on the EP. The band describe it on Bandcamp as “an intense yet catchy electronic blowout with punkrock mentality lurking in the background, describing an impossible situation and the overwhelming urge of escaping it, preferably through a hole in the ground.” Kristian Liljan directed its video.

About Rule Of Two

Rule Of Two are Ronny Flissundet and Kristian Liljan, formed in Oslo in 2023. Both came out of the Norwegian underground rock and metal scene through Damokles, KITE and Dunderbeist. Flissundet handles lyrics, vocals, guitars and synths; Liljan handles beats, loops, bass, synths, production and the band’s videos. On stage the project expands to a five-piece, and the duo have played a handful of Norwegian shows.

The band call themselves a cyberpunk-indie-electronic outfit with a darkwave edge, and name Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Carpenter Brut and Crosses among their reference points alongside hardcore punk and classical music. In practice that comes out as darkwave and synthpop with indie pop and post-punk running underneath.

They built the catalogue single by single from 2023 onward, releasing more than twenty of them plus the EPs “Drowning”, “Echoes” and “Dancing Drone”, the collection “Scraps & Pieces”, and covers of Nirvana’s “Something In The Way” and Ghost’s “Monstrance Clock”. Side-Line covered the arrival of the debut album “Aiming For the Sun”, issued on November 13, 2025.

The Polypiel run started in May 2026 and has produced three singles in ten weeks. “Restoring Balance to a Broken World” closes that sequence and puts it on one release, with “Decompression” as the track that has not been heard before.

KMFDM, the industrial and EBM group led by Sascha Konietzko, released “Tohuvabohu” on 21 August 2007 through Metropolis Records and the band’s own KMFDM Records. The album turns 19 this year. It ran to eleven tracks on CD and arrived between “Hau Ruck” in 2005 and “Blitz” in 2009. The title comes from the biblical Hebrew phrase “tohu va bohu”, meaning “without form and void”; KMFDM Records described the word as meaning “wild and chaotic”.

How KMFDM recorded ‘Tohuvabohu’ in Seattle

Konietzko and Jules Hodgson produced the album. The band recorded at Kommandozentrale and The Black Lab Studio in Seattle, mixed at Chicago Recording Company in Chicago and again at Kommandozentrale, and Brian Gardner mastered it at Bernie Grundman Mastering in Hollywood. The line-up was Konietzko on vocals, analogue synthesizers, bass and programming, Lucia Cifarelli on vocals, Hodgson on guitar, bass, synthesizer and programming, Steve White on guitar, synthesizer and programming, and Andy Selway on drums and programming. Amy Denio added alto saxophone to the opening track and Jim Knodle played trumpet on it. The eleven tracks are “Superpower”, “Looking For Strange”, “Tohuvabohu”, “I Am What I Am”, “Saft Und Kraft”, “Headcase”, “Los Niños Del Parque”, “Not In My Name”, “Spit Or Swallow”, “Fait Accompli” and “Bumaye”.

Two tracks carry outside material. “Superpower” is built around recordings made by KMFDM listeners, who called a phone line the band set up and taped what the group meant to them; further calls from the same line surfaced a year later as “What We Do For You” on the companion remix album “Brimborium”. “Los Niños Del Parque” is a cover of the Liaisons Dangereuses track written by Beate Bartel, Chrislo Haas and Krishna Goineau, and is the one song on the record not credited to the band.

The sleeve produced a public disagreement. Aidan Hughes, who works as Brute! and has drawn almost every KMFDM cover since 1987, posted to his blog in June 2007 that he was unhappy with the changes made to his submitted artwork: the red palette had been switched to orange, and the stylised buildings and cranes in the background had been replaced with a starburst. Metropolis Records reissued the album as a remastered digital edition in 2012.

About KMFDM

KMFDM began in Paris on 29 February 1984, as a performance art project between Sascha Konietzko and the German painter and multimedia artist Udo Sturm, staged at the opening of an exhibition of young European artists at the Grand Palais. Sturm played an ARP 2600 synthesizer, Konietzko played bass guitars through amplifiers spread through the building, and four Polish coal miners pounded on the building’s foundations. The name is an initialism of the deliberately ungrammatical German phrase Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid, usually given the loose translation “no pity for the majority”. Konietzko has called the band’s music “The Ultra-Heavy Beat”.

Sturm left early. Konietzko returned to Hamburg and joined Peter Missing in Missing Foundation, where he met drummer Nicklaus Schandelmaier, who took the stage name En Esch. The two left Missing Foundation before any recordings were made and resumed work as KMFDM with the Hamburg studio owner Raymond Watts. The debut album “What Do You Know, Deutschland?” appeared in December 1986, assembled from sessions running back to 1983, some of them cut by Konietzko and Watts before Esch joined. Skysaw Records gave it a second UK release in 1987, which brought Aidan Hughes to the band; he redesigned that cover and stayed.

Watts worked on three songs for “Don’t Blow Your Top” in 1988, then left to start PIG. That album was licensed to Wax Trax! Records for US distribution, and “UAIOE” followed in 1989. The band signed directly to Wax Trax! for “Naïve” in 1990, which introduced guitarist Günter Schulz. Konietzko moved to Chicago in 1991 and Esch followed a year later; “Money” came in 1992 and “Angst” in 1993. Konietzko relocated to Seattle in 1994, and in late 1995 the city became the band’s official headquarters. Watts rejoined for “Nihil” in 1995, which sold roughly 209,000 copies, the band’s best-selling album; Bill Rieflin played drums. “Xtort” in 1996 reached No. 92, the band’s highest chart placing, and Esch returned for “Symbols” in 1997, the year Tim Skold joined.

KMFDM broke up on 22 January 1999, with only Konietzko and Skold remaining. “Adios” arrived three months later and reached No. 189 on the Billboard 200. Schulz and Esch formed Slick Idiot; Konietzko and Skold regrouped as MDFMK with singer Lucia Cifarelli and released one album through Republic/Universal. Konietzko announced KMFDM’s return in early 2001, citing public demand, and “Attak” followed in March 2002 on Metropolis Records. Skold left after it to join Marilyn Manson. Selway first played drums on “WWIII” in 2003, the last album Watts performed on, and White contributed to “Hau Ruck” in 2005. The demo album “Opium” was reissued in 2002 as the first release on KMFDM Records, and Metropolis reissued the Wax Trax!-era studio catalogue in pairs and threes between September 2006 and May 2007.

“Tohuvabohu” closed that stretch. Two months after it came out, Konietzko announced he was moving back to Germany within three months; Cifarelli went with him while the rest of the band stayed in the United States. “Brimborium” followed in 2008, then “Blitz” in 2009, “WTF?!” in 2011, “Kunst” in 2013 and “Our Time Will Come” in 2014. White and Hodgson were unavailable for “Hell Yeah” in 2017, so Chris Harms of Lord Of The Lost recorded the guitar parts; when Lord Of The Lost could not obtain US work visas for the supporting tour, Andee Blacksugar took the touring guitar role and stayed until 2025. “Paradise” was released on 27 September 2019, with Watts guesting for the first time since 2003, followed by “Hyëna” on 9 September 2022 and “Let Go” on 2 February 2024, which marked forty years since the Grand Palais show. Esch, meanwhile, returned to his own catalogue, reported here in En Esch returns with first album in eight years: ‘Dance Hall Putsch’.

The band’s current record is “Enemy”, announced in KMFDM announce new album ‘Enemy’ on Metropolis Records and trailed by the remix covered in KMFDM releases ‘Enemy (Inhalt Geld ’88 Remix)’. The European tour built around it was pushed back, as reported in KMFDM postpone 2026 European tour, will still release ‘Enemy’. Nineteen years on, “Tohuvabohu” stands as the last KMFDM album completed before Konietzko left Seattle for Germany.

Melanculia is a project driven by Nino Sable, who released his first album in 2010 and has added several more albums to his discography over the years. The artist, who was born in Porto (Portugal) but is based in the Ruhr region (Germany), returned this year after an eight-year silence with his fourth album, consisting of fourteen songs. His musical universe lies somewhere between Chanson, Neo-Folk, and Balladry. The sound is primarily characterized by melancholy, which is transformed into beautiful, compelling songs, some of whose choruses are surprisingly catchy. A few synth sounds add an extra layer of melancholic atmosphere. The songs have a dreamy quality, yet remain consistently wistful. His deep, warm, and fitting voice is perfectly suited to the overall sound, with the acoustic guitar predominating throughout.

This is an album full of depth and emotion that completely convinced me and will undoubtedly appeal to fans of Rome. As far as I am concerned, it is a beautiful discovery. (Rating:8).

Sable recorded, produced, mixed and mastered the album himself in Essen between October 2025 and March 2026, playing all instruments and singing all vocals. Benno Schlicht added clarinet to “We Are Only Human”, and Sable also handled the artwork. Side-Line reported the release on the day it appeared, on 15 May 2026: Melanculia return with Nino Sable album ‘post mortem’.

Listen to “The Tower”:

About Melanculia

Melanculia is the solo project of Nino Sable, born in Porto, Portugal, and based in Essen, in the German Ruhr region. Sable writes, performs and produces the material himself, mixing indie and alternative rock with slowcore and dream-pop, with acoustic guitar at the centre of the arrangements.

The debut album “The Dazed Prophet” appeared on 18 October 2010, followed by “Paths” on 3 May 2013 and “Seventh Circle” on 10 December 2018. An eight-year gap separates that record from “Post Mortem”, the fourth Melanculia album, which was issued on 15 May 2026 and runs to fourteen tracks across roughly sixty-one minutes.

Twenty-five editions after a self-financed experiment in a bunker beneath Wrocław’s Wzgórze Partyzantów, Wrocław Industrial Festival reaches XXV. From 5 to 8 November 2026, Industrial Art brings another four days of industrial, experimental electronics, noise, ritual music, dark ambient and related forms to Stary Klasztor, Sala Gotycka and Sala Witrażowa at ul. Purkyniego 1, with Kino Nowe Horyzonty at Kazimierza Wielkiego 19a/21 also part of the festival infrastructure.

The anniversary line-up is appropriately difficult to reduce to one generation or one definition of industrial music. SPKtR / SPK, The Legendary Pink Dots, In The Nursery and Crash Course in Science bring histories reaching back to the formative years of post-industrial and experimental electronic culture. Around them sit artists from power electronics, ritual ambient, rhythm’n’noise, dark folk and contemporary noise, together with two collaborative performances created specifically around meetings between artists.

Good to know, because WIF has never functioned well as a nostalgia festival. Its history is built as much on juxtaposition as preservation: originators of industrial culture appear alongside artists who inherited, distorted or ignored its vocabulary completely.

From a bunker to the 25th edition

The first Wrocław Industrial Festival took place in 2001, founded by Maciej Frett and Arkadiusz Bagiński, both associated with Job Karma. Frett later recalled that the inaugural festival was financed from their own savings and held in the former bunker beneath Wzgórze Partyzantów. The early editions subsequently moved into Sala Gotycka, at that point still an austere, unheated space hardly designed for concerts; organisers have recalled hauling stage equipment through a second-floor window.

The first edition brought together ten friendly projects. By 2025, Frett estimated that well over 500 acts had appeared in Wrocław across the festival’s history, ranging from musicians directly involved in establishing industrial music to successive generations of experimental artists.

WIF has retained its identity as something broader than a sequence of concerts. Film, audiovisual work, performance, exhibitions, publishing and encounters between artists have repeatedly entered the programme. The festival’s own anniversary reflections have described it as a meeting point for an international community rather than a single-genre event.

In 2026, that history arrives at edition number 25.

SPKtR / SPK: not simply reopening an archive

The most historically important name on the bill is SPKtR / SPK. SPK dates back to Sydney in 1978 and became one of the defining projects of early industrial and noise culture. The present incarnation is centred on Graeme Revell and Robert J. Revell, but its stated purpose is explicitly not to reproduce the old project unchanged. The new SPKtR material is conceived as a continuation of SPK’s experimental logic through contemporary technology and composition.

There is an especially strong Wrocław connection here: SPKtR’s own official site describes its November WIF appearance as the point at which the harder, noise-and-rhythm-oriented SPKtR XXX direction will culminate in a major live statement. Robert Revell will additionally perform his own solo material at the festival. His debut solo album, “Torn Remnants of Nobility”, appeared in 2025; he is also part of the current SPK line-up.

The Legendary Pink Dots

The Legendary Pink Dots bring another extraordinarily long history to Wrocław, although from a very different branch of the underground. The group formed around Edward Ka-Spel and Phil Knight in 1980, subsequently relocating its centre of gravity from Britain to the Netherlands. More than four decades later, the project remains active rather than functioning solely around its catalogue; the official discography continues through 2026.

Their psychedelic electronics, experimental song structures and surreal, frequently unstable relationship between pop form and abstraction make them appropriate for WIF: recognisable enough to possess a long-established following, but historically resistant to fitting comfortably into a single scene.

In The Nursery: cinema becomes part of the festival

One of the most distinctive elements of XXV WIF will come from In The Nursery, the Sheffield project built around twin brothers Klive and Nigel Humberstone, active since 1981.

Rather than presenting a conventional concert, In The Nursery will perform their score to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc”. The music belongs to the duo’s long-running Optical Music Series, through which they have composed new scores for classic silent cinema; the Joan of Arc score itself was released in 2008. Their official site describes the work as following both the extraordinary intimacy of Renée Falconetti’s close-up performance and the escalating violence of the film’s final sequences.

Maciej Frett has specifically identified this as the special cinema concert opening the festival.

Crash Course in Science

Philadelphia’s Crash Course in Science provide another direct connection to the beginnings of electronic post-punk. Formed in 1979 by art-school students Dale Feliciello, Mallory Yago and Michael Zodorozny, the group developed a raw, percussive electronic sound whose influence subsequently travelled into both industrial music and techno.

Placed alongside SPKtR, they make the historical component of XXV WIF more interesting than a simple procession of “industrial pioneers”: these artists arrived at machine music from distinctly different cultural and musical positions.

Two collaborations made for the moment

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the programme is found in its collaborative projects.

N.U. Unruh & Meta Meat will bring together the co-founder and percussionist of Einstürzende Neubauten with French duo Meta Meat, itself built around Phil Von of Von Magnet and Hugues Villette of 2Kilos &More. Meta Meat describe their work as “tribal-industrial”, combining acoustic percussion, physical performance and electronic structures.

This is not simply two existing sets placed next to one another. Meta Meat have confirmed that the Wrocław performance with Unruh is a completely new work created specifically for the festival, while Frett has described it as the collaboration’s first public appearance.

The second collaboration, Flint Glass & Ah Cama-Sotz, joins Paris-based Gwenn Trémorin and Antwerp-based Herman Klapholz. Their latest album, “The Shadow of the Torturer”, was released by ant-zen in April 2026 and draws on Gene Wolfe’s “The Book of the New Sun”, combining cinematic electronics, ritual elements and darker rhythmic structures.

Wrocław matters for this project too: Klapholz has confirmed that WIF will host their first concert together.

From rhythmic force to ritual space

The rest of the international programme moves across very different understandings of industrial music.

Belgium’s Imminent, the project of Olivier Moreau, sits at the harder intersection of sophisticated rhythmic programming, industrial electronics and technoid force. His recent “Mythrality” material continues the combination of intricate rhythm, distorted sequences and colder atmospheric construction that has defined the project.

German project Apoptose moves in almost the opposite direction. Active since around the turn of the millennium, its work has long centred on dark ambient, ritual structures and field recording. The 2025 album “Die Zeit und die Dunkelheit” returned explicitly to forests, natural recordings, solitude and slowly unfolding electronic environments.

American Control, Thomas Garrison’s long-running project, occupies the territory between power electronics and death industrial, using aggression less as uninterrupted assault than as part of a carefully constructed atmospheric architecture.

Finland’s Halo Manash, active since 2003, takes ritual even further. Its recordings draw heavily on drone, elemental field recordings and ceremonial approaches to sound; some releases originate directly from private ritual performances recorded in northern Finland.

Belgian Empusae brings another organic and electro-acoustic interpretation of post-industrial music, moving through ritual, ambient, doom and soundtrack-like composition.

And Blood and Sun, formed by Luke Tromiczak in 2011, takes the programme into dark folk: voice, strings, percussion and a musical language concerned with myth, spiritual experience and human struggle rather than electronics alone.

Robert Revell, PFFFT…! and Espectra Negra

Alongside his work in the current SPKtR configuration, Robert Revell will perform separately. His 2025 solo album “Torn Remnants of Nobility” brings together his background across noise, metal, musique concrète and experimental composition.

Berlin’s PFFFT…! reaches almost as far back historically as some of the festival’s best-known guests. The project describes itself as an autonomous, constantly mutating body whose first actions date to 1984; its 2025 “Bunkerbeschallung” sits between industrial electronics, noise and what the project itself tags as “miner wave”.

Espectra Negra, the Berlin-based project of Mexican artist Verónica Mota, works with ritualistic noise, industrial experimentation and politically charged sound. Her album “Empire” appeared through HANDS and includes contributions from artists including N.U. Unruh.

The Polish contingent

The Polish side of XXV WIF is equally broad.

Opowieść construct performances around noise, mechanical sound, film projection and live visual actions. Their album “Podróż” develops a language strongly associated with movement and train-like mechanical rhythm, while their concerts have been described by the project itself as forms of musical ritual combined with visual performance.

Rites of Fall & Fugavit continue their joint audiovisual project. Rites of Fall, created by Bartek Kuszewski, grew from experiments placing religious and folk material into new contexts; with visual artist Fugavit, the collaborative performance has previously appeared under the title “Into the Well”.

Warsaw duo Mazut, Paweł Starzec and Michał Turowski, have spent roughly a decade moving between acid, industrial, noise and experimental dance music. Their 2025 “Dirt Collector” slowed the project down toward gritty post-industrial ambience, while the 2026 “Live Collector” documents performances from Wrocław and Kraków.

Finally, Gdańsk-based Dystopian Control brings the uncompromising end of the Polish noise underground. The project’s first full-length album, “Nothing Changes the Narrative”, arrived through Zoharum in May 2026, using harsh noise as a foundation while pushing beyond straightforward genre formalism.

After the concerts

The announced DJ programme is equally substantial: Ancient Methods, Philipp Strobel, Blackdeath 1334 / Francesca, Eric and Paradroid are all currently confirmed.

The official festival page has not yet published a complete day-by-day running order, so individual performance times should not be assumed at this stage.

Who plays when

Thursday, 5 November 2026 – Kino Nowe Horyzonty

• In The Nursery – live score for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc”
• Afterparty: DJ Eric

Friday, 6 November 2026 – Gothic Hall

• The Legendary Pink Dots
• Crash Course in Science
• Halo Manash
• Control
• Blood and Sun
• Robert Revell
• PFFFT…!
• Afterparty: Ancient Methods & Philipp Strobel

Saturday, 7 November 2026 – Gothic Hall

• SPKtR / SPK
• N.U. Unruh & Meta Meat
• Flint Glass & Ah Cama-Sotz
• Imminent
• Apoptose
• Empusae
• Espectra Negra
• Afterparty: DJ Blackdeath 1334

Sunday, 8 November 2026 – Sala Witrażowa

• Opowieść
• Rites of Fall & Fugavit
• Mazut
• Dystopian Control
• Afterparty: DJ Paradroid

Practical information

• XXV Wrocław Industrial Festival 5-8 November 2026
• Main venue: Sala Gotycka / Sala Witrażowa / Stary Klasztor ul. Purkyniego 1, Wrocław
• Cinema venue: Kino Nowe Horyzonty Kazimierza Wielkiego 19a/21, Wrocław

The official Polish ticket page currently marks the four-day pass allocation as sold out. Single-day tickets are available, with the current early-bird period running until 31 August: Thursday 85 PLN, Friday 250 PLN, Saturday 250 PLN and Sunday 85 PLN.

Twenty-five editions in, perhaps the most convincing thing about WIF is that its anniversary programme does not attempt to summarise industrial music into a fixed historical style. SPK and Crash Course in Science connect directly with its formative period; In The Nursery bring cinema into the equation; Unruh with Meta Meat and Flint Glass with Ah Cama-Sotz create performances whose history is only beginning; while projects such as Dystopian Control demonstrate that noise and industrial practice are still producing new languages locally.

For a festival born in a bunker in 2001, that seems a more appropriate way to mark twenty-five editions than simply looking backwards.

Zwickau’s Elektrisch Festival returns on 24 October 2026 with a line-up that makes a convincing argument for electronic music as a continuum rather than a museum of separate generations. At one end stands Portion Control, active since 1979 and fundamental to the development of British industrial electronics; around them are Hungarian EBM veterans Escalator, the much newer KRIEG-B, and the contemporary projects OSZYLAYTER and Cyborg Projekt X.

The 19th Elektrisch Festival takes place at Club Seilerstraße, Seilerstraße 1B, 08056 Zwickau. Doors open at 19:00, with the programme beginning at 20:00. The final line-up announced by organiser emmobiz Records is Portion Control, Escalator, OSZYLAYTER, Cyborg Projekt X and KRIEG-B.

A festival with a rather unusual history

Elektrisch is not a newly invented festival carrying an impressive number. Its history reaches back well before the current revival. Contemporary reports document the 11th edition in 2007, the 12th in 2008, the 13th in 2009, and two editions, numbers 14 and 15, in 2010, then held at Zwickau’s BPM Club. Artists appearing during that period included names such as Absolute Body Control, Birmingham 6, Tyske Ludder and The Klinik.

Then Elektrisch disappeared for fourteen years.

emmobiz Records revived it in 2024 with the 16th Elektrisch Festival, now at Club Seilerstraße. That return was already sold out months in advance and brought together Calva Y Nada, Cat Rapes Dog, Digital Factor and Accessory. The 17th edition followed in October 2025 with Test Dept, NZ, In Strict Confidence, Supreme Court and To Avoid. In February 2026, the 18th Elektrisch expanded across two evenings, separating a synthpop-oriented first night from a harder EBM/electro programme on the second.

That history makes the 2026 autumn line-up apt: Elektrisch has repeatedly connected artists from different phases of underground electronic music instead of reducing EBM to one historical period.

Portion Control

The obvious historical heavyweight is Portion Control. Formed in London in 1979, the group emerged from the early British industrial-electronic underground and became important for its use of synthesisers, drum machines and sampling long before those methods became standard practice. Their influence has subsequently been acknowledged in connection with artists including Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, Nine Inch Nails, Orbital and Nitzer Ebb; they also toured with Depeche Mode in 1984.

But calling Portion Control a heritage act would miss what remains interesting about them. They returned in the 2000s and have continued producing new work rather than maintaining the early catalogue. This August they released “1983-86 – Hit The Pulse to Purge…”, their first major Artoffact archival box, while their official site simultaneously continues to define the project rather succinctly as “uncompromising dark electronic audio.” Zwickau is currently one of only two forthcoming live appearances listed on their Bandcamp.

Escalator

Escalator brings another kind of history to the evening. The Hungarian project was founded in Budapest in 1988 by 2RT+TB and belongs to the late-’80s/early-’90s generation of European Electronic Body Music. Its musical roots lie in the harder intersection of EBM and industrial electronics, with early influences including Kraftwerk, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA and Front 242.

Escalator’s history has been anything but linear; long gaps between releases and activity have been part of the project, yet its work has remained closely associated with the physical, stripped-back mechanics of classic body music. Their presence next to Portion Control is more than an “old-school” pairing: the two acts come from different geographical and chronological points in the development of electronic body music.

OSZYLAYTER

The German OSZYLAYTER represents a much more recent strand of the line-up. Public biographical information on the project is relatively sparse, so it is better not to manufacture a grand history that isn’t there. What can be verified is a growing Bandcamp catalogue including “Hate This Day”, “Lover Boy”, “Free Girls” and “Dig It in the Dirt”, while current Elektrisch coverage places the project on the modern dark-electro/industrial side of the bill.

In the context of Elektrisch, that relative newness is actually useful. This isn’t five bands demonstrating variations of exactly the same established EBM formula; OSZYLAYTER helps shift the evening toward newer club electronics and shows where some of those older physical principles have travelled.

Cyborg Projekt X

Cyborg Projekt X is similarly one of the less extensively documented names on the programme. The confirmed festival announcement places the project alongside OSZYLAYTER as part of the contemporary dark-electro and industrial side of the line-up, with an emphasis on forceful, club-oriented electronics.

That makes Cyborg Projekt X something of the unknown variable of the evening, especially for listeners arriving primarily for the established EBM names. In a festival whose history has always mixed recognised acts with smaller projects, that is hardly out of character.

KRIEG-B

KRIEG-B is much newer as a project but comes with considerable history behind its members. The duo was formed in June 2023 by Dominique Lallement, known from Kriegbereit, Cobalt 60 and K-Bereit, and Benoît Buyse, associated with Dreadfool, Anamorphosis and Nihiliste. The project describes its music as a meeting point between industrial electronics, EBM and darkwave, drawing on several decades of electronic music rather than one specific period.

Their debut album “War Drums’ Resonance” arrived in November 2024, with tracks including “S.C.S.N”, “Parabellum”, “Artificial Minds”, “Truth Lies” and “King of Emptiness”. In a sense, KRIEG-B makes a neat closing piece to the Elektrisch concept: a young project constructed by musicians carrying several earlier generations of European industrial electronics with them.

More than the line-up

The revived Elektrisch has also developed a strong physical-release component. The 18th edition was accompanied by exclusive 10-inch festival vinyl releases, while emmobiz has already announced a V.A. “19. Elektrisch Festival” 10-inch connected to this year’s event.

The appeal of the 19th edition goes beyond Portion Control finally returning to Zwickau. The five acts represent very different positions within the same broad history: British industrial experimentation, Hungarian old-school EBM, contemporary German dark electronics, and a new Franco-Belgian project carrying the experience of earlier industrial formations into something current.

That is probably the strongest reason to pay attention to Elektrisch. After a fourteen-year absence, the festival did not return simply to recreate the period in which it originally existed. Its current identity depends on putting that history into the same room with what came after it.

19. Elektrisch Festival: date, venue and line-up

1. Elektrisch Festival 24 October 2026 Club Seilerstraße Seilerstraße 1B, 08056 Zwickau, Germany

Line-up: Portion Control Escalator OSZYLAYTER Cyborg Projekt X KRIEG-B

Doors: 19:00 Start: 20:00

Tickets are available through emmobiz Records.

Corlyx released “Your Heart In The Serpent’s Mouth” on August 20, 2026 through Out Of Line Music. The track runs 4:08 and slows the tempo of the guitar-led singles the band have issued through 2026, moving their gothic rock toward dream pop textures. It is the third single of the year, and the digital release bundles it with the two that came before it: “More Anarchy” and “Sweeter Than Blood”, three tracks across 10:47.

Caitlin Stokes wrote the lyrics and melody, and produced and arranged the track with Brandon Ashley, who wrote and performed the guitars. Davide Rocco played bass and Flow Toulman wrote and performed the drums. Ashley mixed and mastered the single at Dtuned Brighton Productions.

Stokes describes the single as part of a wider look at the era the band draw from rather than a change of direction. “We are exploring all the beautiful colours of this time period,” she stated. “Gothic Rock is at the core but so much was going around the subculture at this time, and currently there isn’t a lot of representation for rock genres in the scene – one of the many advantages of having a full band line up now is to explore these sounds.” She named a long-standing interest in Cocteau Twins as the reference point for the track, called it “quite experimental even for us”, and said the band hesitated over releasing a slower song as a single at all – “but really anything goes at this point and I love it so much.”

Ashley built the guitar sound to that brief. “Lets make the guitars super dreamy for this track, was a request by Caitlin and I obliged,” he stated. “I have my own unique tones that I spent a very long time creating, so we don’t necessarily sound like Cocteau Twins, but they were certainly an inspiration for this track.”

Stokes gives the lyric two readings. “Your heart in the serpents mouth, fragile and delicate, always in danger of being eaten alive, or worse,” she explained. “It’s a tale of trust and vulnerability, accepting the fates of love and the fears that come with this.”

The 2026 run began with “Sweeter Than Blood” on May 28, followed by “More Anarchy” on July 9, the more directly political of the three and the only one so far with an accompanying music video. Out Of Line has scheduled a Corlyx album for early 2027; no title or date has been announced. The single is on Bandcamp and the usual streaming services, and Out Of Line has published an official audio version on its own YouTube channel.

About Corlyx

Corlyx are the project of singer and songwriter Caitlin Stokes and guitarist and producer Brandon Ashley, originally from Los Angeles and now based in Brighton, with Out Of Line describing the group as living between the UK and Italy. The duo self-released the EP “One Of Us” on February 13, 2016, then the albums “Music 2 F 2” on February 3, 2018 and “In2 The Skin” on August 16, 2019. They joined the Negative Gain Productions roster in September 2020 with “Together Apart”.

The move to Out Of Line Music followed with the “Raindrops” EP on March 31, 2022, and Side-Line covered the video for the “Raindrops” single that March. The single “Never Love” arrived on October 5, 2022 and the album “Blood In The Disco” on November 25, 2022, trailed by the single and video for “Take Off Everything” the previous December. The double album “Purple Pain”, nineteen tracks, followed on February 14, 2025, after the band announced it alongside the single “Zombie Kid” in November 2024.

Collaboration has run through the catalogue. Stokes sang on ESA‘s “Eat Their Young” video and EP in 2020; Suzi Sabotage featured on the 2023 single “Kill Cave”; and the band appeared on Meersein‘s “Her Slave” the same year. On Out Of Line the band share a roster with Till Lindemann and Aesthetic Perfection. The addition of Rocco on bass and Toulman on drums has taken Corlyx from a studio-centred duo to a full band, which is the change Stokes points to when explaining where “Your Heart In The Serpent’s Mouth” came from.

The six tracks on “Decay” came out of the same sessions as “Purge” three years ago, and Justin Broadrick held them back while he looked for a label. He found one: the tenth Godflesh album arrives on 25 September 2026 through Relapse Records, the first the Birmingham industrial duo have issued outside Broadrick’s own Avalanche Recordings since their 2010 return. “Living/Ending” is the first single.

“Decay” is the penultimate Godflesh album, not the last one. Broadrick has said a further record is written and still to be recorded, and in March 2026 he announced the end of Godflesh live performances after abdominal surgery for a hernia.

Broadrick explained where the record came from and why it took three years to surface:

“Decay was born from the same sessions as Purge,” he stated. “It was one huge pool of songs. I picked what I felt was appropriate for what I wanted to achieve with Purge, with the intention of releasing the songs that didn’t fit as a new album within a year of Purge being released. Unfortunately, two years passed whilst considering external labels, so that I didn’t have to self-release GODFLESH anymore, but it took an awful lot of time to establish a comfortable home for me. The recordings were done, but as usual for me, I did change a lot of stuff once I came back to it.”

The band have done this before. “Decline & Fall”, issued on 2 June 2014, was built the same way, from tracks Broadrick cut from the sessions that produced “A World Lit Only By Fire” four months later.

He also addressed how the surgery intersected with the recording, since the hernia itself came from the way he sings:

“Fortunately, all of the recordings for Decay were completed long before the surgery, vocals included… although the back end of a couple of songs were recorded with the hernia itself, and that was a struggle. I was already aware that the GODFLESH shout, so to speak, was exacerbating the hernia greatly, as was every GODFLESH performance in the lead-up to the surgery once the hernia appeared, and the hernia was mostly caused by year upon year of shouting in GODFLESH. The album was mixed post-surgery, and while I was still in some pain and considerable discomfort, but fortunately GODFLESH is generally me expressing my pain, albeit [usually] mental, philosophical and existential, whereas this was physical pain.”

Broadrick points to the opening and closing tracks as the record’s core, and notes that the two of them together run half its length:

“The bookends of Decay are the most important pieces to me. They say it all, so to speak; the album could have been just those two songs alone – the duration of them is half of the total album!”

Godflesh ‘Decay’ tracklist and formats

The album runs six tracks:

1. “Master and Slave”
2. “Living/Ending”
3. “Feral Colony”
4. “Fear Of Man”
5. “Fodder”
6. “Consume Me”

Relapse Records offers “Decay” on 12-inch vinyl, CD and cassette, with a digital edition through Bandcamp. A deluxe 12-inch pressing in two limited colours, housed in a silver board laminated jacket with gloss UV and packaged with a slipmat, poster and sticker, has already sold out at the label store.

About Godflesh

Justin Broadrick and bassist G.C. Green formed Godflesh in Birmingham, England, in 1988. Broadrick had played guitar on side one of Napalm Death’s “Scum” the year before, and the pair built Godflesh around downtuned guitar, bass and a drum machine rather than a live drummer. The self-titled debut EP arrived in 1988, followed by the album “Streetcleaner” on Earache Records on 13 November 1989. “Pure” came in 1992.

The band ran until 2002, when Broadrick ended the project during a US tour; “Hymns”, from 2001, was the last album of that period. He spent the following years on Jesu and other projects before reactivating Godflesh in 2010 with Green.

The reunion output came out on Broadrick’s own Avalanche Recordings. The “Decline & Fall” EP appeared on 2 June 2014 and the seventh album, “A World Lit Only By Fire”, on 7 October 2014. “Post Self” followed in October 2017 on vinyl and CD. Six years later the duo returned with the ninth album “Purge” on 9 June 2023, previewed by “the ‘Nero’ single and a US tour announcement”. Away from Godflesh, Broadrick records as JK Flesh and has remixed and contributed to work by acts including Pitchshifter and Derision Cult, the latter alongside members of Ministry and The Cure.

“Decay” leaves one Godflesh album still to record. On what closing the project means, Broadrick stated: “It expresses my pain, and I’ve put my body and soul into this expression for the majority of my existence. I feel quite lucky, because Godflesh is now physically impossible for me, rendering it useless. I now wish to move out of its constraints, move on creatively with heavy/ugly music to new ground.”

Yazoo, the English synthpop duo of Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet, released their debut album “Upstairs at Eric’s” on 20 August 1982 through Mute Records. The album turns 44 this year. It reached number two on the UK Albums Chart and was later certified platinum by the British Phonographic Industry.

How Yazoo recorded ‘Upstairs at Eric’s’

The title points at Eric Radcliffe, who ran Blackwing Studios in London, where the sessions took place. Radcliffe produced the record with Yazoo and engineered it with John Fryer. Daniel Miller, the Mute founder who signed the duo, added production. Clarke wrote seven of the eleven tracks: “Don’t Go,” “Too Pieces,” “Bad Connection,” “I Before E Except After C,” “In My Room,” “Only You” and “Tuesday.” Moyet wrote the other four: “Midnight,” “Goodbye 70’s,” “Winter Kills” and “Bring Your Love Down (Didn’t I).” Two UK top-three singles, “Only You” and “Don’t Go,” had already charted before the album arrived.

Clarke had left Depeche Mode after that band’s 1981 debut “Speak & Spell,” and the pair came together through an advertisement Moyet placed in Melody Maker. Moyet has described what she was looking for at the time: “I put an ad in Melody Maker looking for a semi-professional band […] Not someone who’d just had a massive hit album.” The two had known each other since their school years in Basildon, Essex. Clarke recalled taking the duo’s first recording to Miller, and getting a reading he misjudged: “I took the demo to Daniel Miller at Mute, and I got the distinct impression he was not interested. ‘That’s that,’ I thought. ‘Get a proper job’.”

Clarke has described the sessions themselves as unplanned: “Nobody really knew what they were doing. We were open to trying anything – it was like being in a toy shop, finding out what would happen if you pressed different buttons.” In North America the album appeared under the name Yaz, on Sire Records. Mute issued a remastered edition in 2008, the version now on streaming services, alongside the “In Your Room” box set and the duo’s Reconnected tour.

About Yazoo

Yazoo formed in Basildon, Essex, in late 1981, with Clarke on keyboards and Moyet on vocals and piano. Mute released their first single, “Only You,” in May 1982; it reached number two on the UK Singles Chart. “Don’t Go” followed and entered the UK top five, and “Upstairs at Eric’s” arrived on 20 August 1982. The duo toured Britain that year as the Guided Tour, and in 1983 won the Brit Award for British Breakthrough Act alongside a nomination for British Group.

The partnership did not survive the second album. Clarke and Moyet split in May 1983, before “You and Me Both” reached shops. Moyet began a solo career with “Alf” in 1984; Clarke co-founded The Assembly, then formed Erasure with Andy Bell in 1985. A quarter of a century later the two reconciled, reissuing both studio albums with the “In Your Room” box set and touring the UK, Europe and North America in 2008 as Reconnected, documented on the 2010 live album “Reconnected Live.” They shared a stage again in May 2011, performing three Yazoo songs at a festival organised by Mute. Side-Line has since covered Clarke’s first solo album in Vince Clarke launches debut solo album ‘Songs of Silence’ – Out now, the archive footage in The last Depeche Mode show with Vince Clarke – Watch it now, and a recent reworking of the duo’s final single in Yazoo hit ‘Nobody’s Diary’ gets Sgt Slick rework – Out now. Forty-four years on, “Upstairs at Eric’s” remains the first of the two albums the duo completed together.

The Brussels project alarm!systemen released its self-titled debut album on the Belgian label Antibody on July 31, 2026. Jorne Leurs wrote, played and sang all ten tracks, which mix minimal synthpop lines with cold wave drum machines and Dutch and English lyrics. Yannick Franck mastered the record and Yesse Hoedemaekers supplied the artwork. It is out digitally on Bandcamp at 24-bit resolution; no physical edition has been pressed.

What alarm!systemen collected on the debut album

The album is an assembly rather than a studio session. Leurs describes it as material gathered over six years: “alarm!systemen is a project that was built over many years and originally meant as an audio diary, meant just to process certain events in my life through the lens of my favorite musical genres since childhood. From a very young age, I was inspired by the soundtrack of both the glitter and gloom of the 80s. My first self-titled release features tracks, cassette recordings, and improvisations made between 2019 and 2024.”

That span shows in the running order, which moves between short pop shapes and long-form pieces. The ten tracks are “Kapot” (4:48), “Answer Me” (6:04), “BURN” (4:00), “Comple X” (5:37), “Dance With Me” (3:56), “Eindeloos” (8:16), “Fade To Dust” (4:03), “Goes Again” (6:34), “Three” (5:15) and “Void” (7:14). Four of them pass the six-minute mark, and “Eindeloos” is the longest at over eight minutes.

Antibody describes the record as existential synthpop and cold wave. No official video has been released and the album is not on Spotify.

About Antibody and alarm!systemen

alarm!systemen has no earlier release history. This album is its first published work, and Leurs has not documented other projects. What is on record is the account he gives on the release page: the material began as private processing and was never conceived as an album.

Antibody operates out of Brussels and is run by Yannick Franck, who records as RAUM. Its first release, Damon Raum’s “Tantale”, appeared on December 4, 2020, and the catalogue has since grown to around fifty titles. The label describes itself as “a label specializing in de(con)structed forms of Techno, New Wave, EBM, Industrial, Dark Ambient, Sound Art, Metal and Noise”.

Franck is a Liège-born sound artist based in Brussels whose own work runs through the projects Y.E.R.M.O. with Xavier Dubois, Orphan Swords with Pierre de Mûelenaere, and Figure Section with Olivia Carrère. He also founded the Idiosyncratics label and scored the 2023 film “The Belgian Wave”.

Side-Line has followed Antibody since its early years, covering Hypnoskull launches all new single ‘TMKF’ on the Belgian Antibody label in May 2022, Lebanese electro project Maltash lands new EP on Antibody label in August 2022 and Brussels based label Antibody to release Jean Baudrillard inspired ‘Fatal Strategies’ compilation in March 2023. The alarm!systemen album sits at the synthpop end of that catalogue rather than the techno and noise end.

Veda Rays release the five-track EP “You Can Do Anything” on August 28, 2026 through Alleged Records, the band’s own imprint. The Philadelphia group mix post-punk guitar lines with dream pop and shoegaze textures, and have named “Capricious Fates” as the focus track. The EP collects two singles already issued this year alongside three tracks not previously released on their own, and is on Bandcamp as a name-your-price pre-order.

What is on the Veda Rays EP ‘You Can Do Anything’

The running order is “Rumination”, “True Agency”, “Hearts Behind Our Pace”, “Capricious Fates” and “You Can Do Anything”. “True Agency” went up on Bandcamp on May 29, 2026 and reached the streaming services as a single on June 18. “Hearts Behind Our Pace” followed on July 17, 2026 as a two-track release pairing it with “True Agency”.

“Capricious Fates” has not been released on its own. It carries no separate Bandcamp page, no streaming single and no video, so the EP is its first appearance. The band recorded, produced and mixed the singles themselves; no outside production or mastering credit has been published for the EP.

Alleged Records has carried every Veda Rays record since 2011 and is run by the band itself.

About Veda Rays

Veda Rays formed in Brooklyn in 2014 out of an earlier line-up that had been playing as The Veda Rays since around 2011, and now operate out of Philadelphia. The current pair are James Stark on vocals, guitar and production and Maria Joanna Bohemia on synthesisers and keyboards.

The first record under the earlier name, “Gamma Rays Galaxy Rays Veda Rays”, appeared on Alleged Records in 2011, followed by the remix EP “All Your Pretty Fates (Scott Hardkiss Remixes)” on God Within Recordings in 2012. The twenty-two-track retrospective compilation “Diamonds In Dust” went up as a Bandcamp exclusive on December 31, 2014.

Under the shortened name the band issued the “Shadow Side” EP on November 3, 2017 and the eleven-song album “For The Rest To Rest” on July 13, 2018. The singles “Rose Likes Leather” on March 19, 2021 and “Dissonance” on May 28, 2021 preceded the nine-track album “Crucial Fictions”, released on October 8, 2021, which Side-Line covered in Post-punk act Veda Rays readies new LP ‘Crucial Fictions’.

“You Can Do Anything” is the group’s first release since that album, and the first issued from Philadelphia rather than New York.

Los Angeles duo Zeistencroix self-released their album “Psychotronic” on August 14, 2026. The eight tracks run 29 minutes and 34 seconds and mix industrial rock guitars with electronic textures and alternative metal rhythms. Ulrich Wild, whose credits include Pantera, Deftones, Static-X, White Zombie and Powerman 5000, mixed and mastered seven of the songs and recorded the vocals at his own studio. The opener “Get It On” was mixed in Germany by Christoph Wieczorek of Annisokay, who has also worked with Eisbrecher.

The record was tracked across studios in Los Angeles and Miami, with “Get It On” recorded at Stygian Sound by Alex Crescioni. The running order is “Get It On”, “Subliminal Intentions”, “Blame The One Behind”, “Deceiving”, “Decadence”, “Animals In Denial”, “So Long” and “My Love”. The release is digital and streaming; no physical edition has been announced and the album is not on Bandcamp.

What Zeistencroix built ‘Psychotronic’ around

Vocalist and guitarist Orlando “OD” Draven places the record in the present rather than in science fiction. He stated: “This is not an album about a dystopian future, it is about the moments that precede one.” On the themes he added: “Its themes are rooted in the present, exploring the social, political, and psychological shifts that can become the early symptoms of authoritarianism. It examines how fear, crisis, and division can normalize the gradual expansion of control over speech, thought, and personal autonomy, often before society recognizes the consequences.”

Draven closes on the point the title carries: “Ultimately it’s a reminder that the future is not predetermined, and that recognizing the warning signs is the first step in preventing them from becoming permanent.”

Drummer Santi Rivillas described the material as a step on from the band’s previous work, saying the songs are “heavier in some ways and more atmospheric in others”.

About Zeistencroix

Zeistencroix are a Los Angeles duo built around Orlando “OD” Draven on vocals, guitars and songwriting and Santi Rivillas on drums. Draven was born in Caracas and Rivillas comes from Miami. The pair describe their sound as post-industrial rock, drawing on industrial rock, alternative metal, electronic music and noir imagery.

The project’s first release was the five-track EP “Gemini” on November 2, 2017, self-released and produced by Tim Palmer and Bill Metoyer, engineered by Alex Crescioni and mastered by Paul Abbott. The full-length “Gen Z” followed on October 1, 2019 through the Italian label Sliptrick Records, an eleven-song CD produced by Crescioni and Draven and preceded by the single “Sick” in July 2019.

A live album recorded at Radio Artifact, “Zeistencroix Live 2021 06 27”, appeared in January 2022, and the five-track EP “Cruxi-Fiction” arrived on August 26, 2022 through Pavement Entertainment, produced by Tim Palmer, Alex Crescioni and Draven. The band toured the US West Coast behind it and later played a run as direct support to Crazy Town, alongside Los Angeles club dates including the Whisky a Go Go.

“Psychotronic” is the first Zeistencroix record to carry no label at all, and the first to be built around outside mixers rather than a single in-house production team. It is also the project’s first appearance in Side-Line.

Celldweller released “Never a Thief” on August 19, 2026 through FiXT, the first track issued from the official soundtrack to “Thief: Pulse of Promise”, a licensed graphic novel from Bit Bot set in the Thief stealth game series. The electronic rock project of Klayton wrote and produced the track, with Brian Skeel mixing and mastering. It is out on digital platforms and Bandcamp, and a lyric video went up the same day.

Klayton describes the brief as an exercise in matching the source material without imitating it. He stated: “I was thrilled to get the opportunity to work in the world of Thief. It’s pretty much the quintessential stealth game franchise, and anyone who plays these kinds of games knows how important audio is to the experience. When you’re Garrett, hiding in the shadows, listening for footsteps and trying to avoid a patrol, sound and music are a huge part of what creates that tension. I had a lot of fun digging into the sonic DNA of the original games and figuring out how to pay tribute to what made them sound so unique, while bringing some of those ideas into 2026 with a modern Celldweller spin. The goal was to make something that felt like it belonged in the world of Thief, but still had my fingerprints all over it.”

The official lyric video runs 3:40 and carries cover art by Emanuele Ercolani, laid out by Cory Todd. The track is published by Eidos under exclusive licence to Bit Bot Media and distributed by FiXT.

What the ‘Thief: Pulse of Promise’ soundtrack covers

The full soundtrack is set to run to twelve or more original songs and will include new performances by Stephen Russell, who voiced the master thief Garrett across the original games. A limited vinyl and CD edition with Ercolani artwork forms part of the graphic novel’s BackerKit campaign, with the digital album to follow later.

The book itself is written by Joshua Viola and Sean Eads, with interior art by Ercolani and Gianluca Papi and lettering by Jeremiah Lambert. Its story sits between “Thief: The Dark Project”, released by Looking Glass Studios in December 1998, and “Thief II: The Metal Age” from March 2000, and brings back Artemus and Father Karras. Nightdive Studios, Eidos-Montréal and Atari announced “Thief: The Dark Project Remastered” on June 7, 2026 for a winter release on PC and consoles.

“Never a Thief” is the third Celldweller release of the last two months. “Respawn” arrived on July 29, 2026 as the second instalment of the ongoing “GOD MODE” single series, which began with “Fakebreaker” featuring Swarm and Reebz. FiXT has scheduled the complete “GOD MODE” album for 2027.

About Celldweller

Celldweller is the solo electronic rock project of Klayton, born Scott Albert, who took the name from a childhood nickname and turned the project into his main outlet in 1999 in New York City. His work before that ran through the industrial metal band Circle of Dust, formed in 1990 and signed to R.E.X. Records, the Buka collaboration Argyle Park, whose single album “Misguided” appeared in 1995, and Angeldust with illusionist Criss Angel, which produced “Musical Conjurings from the World of Illusion” in 1998.

The self-titled Celldweller debut came out on February 11, 2003 through Esion Media and Position Music. Klayton then founded FiXT in 2006 with James Rhodes and moved his catalogue onto it, releasing “Wish Upon a Blackstar” on June 11, 2012, “End of an Empire” on November 6, 2015, “Offworld” on July 28, 2017 and “Satellites” on October 14, 2022. He launched the synthwave project Scandroid in 2013 with producer Varien and the instrumental outlet FreqGen in 2017, and reclaimed the Circle of Dust rights in 2016 for the album “Machines of Our Disgrace”.

Placement work runs alongside the records. Celldweller music has appeared in Blade Runner 2049, Westworld, Deadpool 2, Call of Duty: Elite and Assassin’s Creed, among others. Klayton also scored “Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver – The Dead Shall Rise” for FiXT in 2026, issuing “Ozar Midrashim” on March 4 and “Elaleth” with Matthew Kiichi Heafy on March 18 before the game score arrived on April 1. Side-Line last covered the project when “Respawn” opened the second chapter of the “GOD MODE” run in July 2026; “Never a Thief” moves the work back into licensed game territory.