One of this withering orb’s most unceasingly brutal bands, Glasgow’s Black Sun have (in one form or another) been hurling around boot-to-skull riffs, imploding beats and sadistic noise for over a decade.
Russell McEwan, drummer, vocalist and solar core, knows his way around extremes of experience. He’s been at this game a while, as a former member of noise-rockers Macrocosmica and industrial experimentalists Test Dept, a sometime cohort of flesh-ripping body artist Ron Athey, and current pansexual high priest(ess) for conceptual noise duo Atomized.
While recording their sixth album, Twilight Of The …

Athens, GA sludge/noise rock trio Harvey Milk may have split up back in 1998 due to “indifference” and “boredom”, but since reforming in 2006 they have re-emerged as one of the most revered outfits in underground rock.
Now, with two records released in the space of just a few months – brand new studio album A Small Turn Of Human Kindness and the unearthed Bob Weston Sessions – they are enjoying the peak of their career, but drummer Kyle Spence doesn’t necessarily share the excitement: “We took eight years off, and …

There are at least twelve bands called Twilight around the world. Not to mention a certain teenage movie polluting the vampire myth to add further confusion. However, this particular Twilight rises above all that effortlessly.
Originally created in 2004 by a few US black metal luminaries, the project has recently awoken from the tomb where it had laid since 2005’s self-titled debut, with new blood coursing through its blackened veins – it’s a veritable Who’s Who of American extreme metal.
“It’s not a black metal record and I don’t want to call …

For a band that exists in a world all of its own – musically and quite possibly mentally – it comes as no surprise that Liars’ latest album deals with otherworldly matters.
Sisterworld, the latest quasi-concept album from the L.A. via Australia via Berlin trio sees them in decidedly bizarre and introspective mood, and that’s really saying something for a band that has brought us the impenetrable They Were Wrong, So We Drowned and Drum’s Not Dead, two albums of impossible-to-define music that have between them set the bar for modern, …

Weighty concepts, strange titles and mouthfuls are nothing new for post-rock supergroup Red Sparowes.
After all, this is a band whose previous albums included tracks like ‘And By Our Own Hand Did Every Last Bird Lie Silent In Their Puddles, The Air Barren Of Song As The Clouds Drifted Away. For Killing Their Greatest Enemy, The Locusts Noisily Thanked Us And Turned Their Jaws Toward Our Crops, Swallowing Our Greed Whole.’ What is different this time around, however, is that the band opted to present their ideas through more succinct song …

In the first of our Classic Albums series, Oxbow’s frontman Eugene Robinson remembers the making of the band’s debut, Fuckfest.
Released back in 1989 to “total radio silence” as Eugene recalls, the record remains one of the most unique first statements in modern avant-rock, reissued recently by the good folks at Hydra Head.
“I was losing the will to live, aided and abetted by my inability to make sense of life and love post-college. Well, that and huge amounts of LSD. But more importantly I started to really resent bad music” Eugene …

When every day we see and hear bands that have burnt out, on autopilot or in milking-the-cow mode, most of the bands that haven’t accomplished half of the artistic feats that these three unassuming musicians (and artists, let us not forget the Malleus collective of which they are all part) have, it’s an immense pleasure to witness how focused and how involved Ufomammut still are with what they do. Back this May with their most ambitious – and quite likely best – album to date, the Italian psych/doom trio have …

Pyramids aren’t really a regular band, as anyone who listened to their stratospheric self-titled debut has realized for quite some time. Their latest album comes in the shape of Pyramids With Nadja, a collaboration – as the title suggests – with the ubiquitous drone duo Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff, along with an assortment of guests that includes James Plotkin and Colin Marston – and all this via experi-metal überlabel Hydra Head. And it’s small wonder that the Texans attracted these names to their strange world – one listen to …

A lot of people talk about “living legends”, particularly with regard to musicians. What exactly makes you one is a fact hotly contested everywhere from the pages of magazines to coffee table pleasantries, but whatever it is, one would be hard-pressed to discount the legacy of Mike Watt.
Since Minutemen’s unexpected and tragic demise in 1985 due to the death of D. Boon, Watt has been on the road or in the studio almost perpetually, not least as bass-for-hire with Iggy and The Stooges. Ryan Drever caught up with the “man …

Last summer, when Thorr’s Hammer surprisingly reformed for an appearance at Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival, Greg Anderson got to talking with the bass player they brought along with them – Guy Pinhas – and lo and behold, another one of his old bands sprung back to life. Goatsnake, the cult doom/rock outfit he played guitar in up until the band called it quits in 2004, will break their half-decade hiatus at next year’s Roadburn festival in Holland.
“We’ve lost contact with [James Hale, the original Thorr’s Hammer bass player] over the years, …