Six kids from South London who met each other in sixth form, when a “career plan” meant which pub would let you play a set on a Tuesday, and now they knock the hell out of every room they walk into. They spent years earning their stripes in converted vicarages and sweaty pub backrooms, notching up over a hundred gigs before most of them could legally get properly drunk, and it shows. Cannonball, their debut for Fiction, does not sound like a first album. It sounds like a band that already owns the place.

Forty one minutes, and inside there is everything at once. A violin that screams like it has a personal grudge against you, courtesy of Clio Starwood, who is not decorating these songs so much as detonating them. Guitars from Billy Ward and Billy Doyle that go straight for the teeth, Pink Floyd haze one minute and full post punk assault the next. A piano, played by Emmie-Mae Avery, that for two bars makes you think you have wandered onto some Adele or Alicia Keys record, all warm and unguarded, before the rug gets pulled and you are dragged into a proper brawl. Behind the desk are Seth Evans, who cut his teeth with black midi, and Margo Broom, who has worked with Fat White Family and Big Joanie, and you can hear that double hand in the way the chaos never quite tips over into mess.

Only Girl kicks the door open with a chorus that sticks in your skull like gum under a school desk, all sugar and swagger. From there the record keeps swinging between tenderness and total wreckage without asking your permission. Goddamn, Lizard Man! is a monster, all crunching power chords and a vocal from Ward that channels Nick Cave at his most theatrically menacing, a modern cousin of Red Right Hand for people who grew up doomscrolling instead of reading tabloids. Nosedive is the one built for festival fields, ticking synths that owe a debt to LCD Soundsystem and the nerdy euphoria of Los Campesinos, the kind of song that turns a crowd of strangers into a single sweaty choir. Then Lighter lets you catch your breath, soft and lounge lit, almost a jazz club moment, before Snakebite and Still Angry grab you by the collar again.

You can hear the years of pub gigs and sticky floors in every corner of this thing, the sweat has not dried off it yet. Bassist Vera Leppänen and Avery trade lead vocals with Ward like three different narrators fighting over the same diary, while drummer Lola Cherry holds the whole contraption together even when it threatens to fly apart, particularly on Canyons, which opens like a ballad and ends up somewhere closer to old school dEUS, all nerves and noise. There is a real feeling running through the record, love, spite, heartbreak, the kind of stuff you actually live rather than just write songs about.

If there is a fault, it is that some tracks seem to run out of road just when they are getting somewhere, like someone pulled the plug early because the tea was getting cold. A couple of ideas on the second half feel like sketches rather than finished paintings, and there are moments where you catch the shadow of Black Country, New Road hanging over the arrangements a little too clearly. But maybe that is exactly the point. You get the sense these six have not decided yet who they want to be, and that is precisely why you cannot stop listening. This is not a flawless record. It is a live one, messy and a bit reckless, and there are not many of those left worth caring about.

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Five o'clock, and Brighton's cooking. Heat's wedged itself between the buildings like it's paying rent there. Tarmac gone soft and sticky, the whole place reeking of hot pavement, spilled lager and someone else's sun cream. Every street funnelling up towards Preston Park is rammed with people in black. Bad Seeds shirts that have survived divorces, house moves, breakdowns and, at least, one criminal haircut. Kids who weren't even a rumour when The Boatman's Call came out, walking next to blokes in their sixties who look like they never quite left 1989 and stopped bothering to try.

You don't need directions. Just follow the trains dumping bodies into the city, the buses stuffed to the doors, the pubs behaving like they'd had six months' notice that fifty thousand thirsty people were about to descend on them. People who know full well they're about to stand in a field for hours, deciding this is still the perfect moment for one more pint. Because obviously it is.

Brighton's turned the whole thing into a civic holiday, and fair enough. Cave isn't just passing through. Lived here the best part of twenty years, long enough that the city got welded into his private mythology, the place where certain songs took shape and never quite let go of him even after he did. This is Jubilee Street territory, The Death of Bunny Munro, 20,000 Days on Earth. Sea air, brutal winters, odd little backstreets, the years before everything changed how he saw the world.

But it's also a city that kept going without him. That's just what cities do. Shops opened, shops shut, ugly buildings went up, people fell in and out of love, got wrecked, moved away, came back, ran Pride, carried on telling stories about whoever used to live round here.

Funny thing is, he's already come home before the gig's even started. Resident Records had been mid-takeover since the 30th, and word had been going round for days that the band might show up on the roof. By quarter to eleven that morning the street outside was already heaving. At eleven, there they were: Train Long-Suffering to open, then a loose, piano-led run through T. Rex's Cosmic Dancer with Warren Ellis peeling off a violin solo, then Henry Lee with Janet Ramus stepping into PJ Harvey's old part, and an encore of Papa Won't Leave You, Henry to send everyone off buzzing. Susie and Earl watched from the edge of the balcony. "Fucking Brighton," Cave told the street below. "What a thing to be doing." Four songs, twenty-odd minutes, gone, and somehow it still made the Guardian by lunchtime.

A few hours later, same story, different scale entirely. A field. Fifty thousand people, give or take (reports land anywhere from forty-six to fifty). A stage the size of a building. And Nick Cave walking out around half seven, dressed in black, looking like a preacher who's wandered into the wrong gig and decided to run with it anyway.

Get Ready for Love kicks the night open and there's no easing in. Cave's straight off the stage and into the crowd, reaching for hands, hunting faces. By the time the song's over he's visibly choked up, tells the crowd, more or less, that being back here has completely wrecked him. Everyone believes it. You can see it doing the rounds through the front rows like a current.

The first thing that actually gets you isn't the size of the production. It's how much history he's dragged up there with him. From Her to Eternity lands early and it's like someone's kicked a door open onto another decade: the feral, near-animal Cave of the early years, the preacher, the bastard who looks like he crawled out of some Australian swamp specifically to tell the rest of us rock'n'roll can be a form of possession too. Next to him, Ellis does the Ellis thing, dragging a violin somewhere it's got no business being.

The great thing about the Bad Seeds is they don't sound like a band that's stuck together for forty years out of habit. They sound like a band that's spent forty years fighting, falling apart and rebuilding itself, over and over, which is a completely different animal. Train Long-Suffering comes round again and the day folds in on itself. Same song, roof of a record shop a few hours back, now tearing across a field of fifty thousand. 1985 and 2026 end up in the same room, even if that room's a park and the roof's the Brighton sky.

Wild God and O Children keep the engine running, less the songs you'll be talking about tomorrow than the ones doing the actual work: backing singers thickening everything up, the crowd finding its feet.

Then Tupelo lands and the whole temperature shifts. Larry Mullins and Jim Sclavunos throw up a wall of drums while Ellis drags his violin into the storm of it, and Cave tells the story of Elvis being born like something biblical's still got a shot at happening out there past the edge of the park. This is one of the things the Bad Seeds have always done better than nearly anyone: take a forty-year-old song and make it sound freshly assembled tonight, on the spot, out of spare parts and nerve.

Carnage drops the volume without dropping the band. Cave introduces it with a dig at himself, some line about him and Ellis once trying to be Simon and Garfunkel, him playing Garfunkel to Ellis's tunesmith. The crowd laughs, Ellis looks faintly embarrassed, and then it plays out as a held breath before Joy, and suddenly that title on its own feels almost cheeky. Joy. A word that, coming out of Nick Cave after everything, seems nearly too big to say without wincing. Happiness is a different animal altogether, easier, smaller. What he seems to be reaching for is the idea that joy can sit in the same room as grief without either one having to leave, that losing something doesn't mean you bolt every window shut for good.

Rings of Saturn comes next, delivered from the piano stool with George Vjestica on acoustic guitar, before Cave gets up and heads straight back to where he spends most of the night: right up against the crowd.

Then Cave stops dead and looks off to the side of the stage.

“Can we please welcome to the stage, Kylie Minogue!”

Nobody reacts for a second, fifty thousand brains all trying to confirm this is actually happening. Then there she is: white dress by Susie Cave, walking out like she's just stepped off a different decade entirely. It's the first time they've done Where the Wild Roses Grow with the Bad Seeds since 2018, and for anyone who grew up in the nineties, that's basically what it feels like: a decade climbing back out of the ground. "I am so happy to be here, always," she tells him, before something about undying love that gets the whole field making a noise like a kettle going off.

We all know the story: the video, the murder ballad, how it ends. But music's got this annoying habit of holding onto things better than we manage to ourselves. A song can sit quiet in a corner for thirty years asking nothing of you, then one summer night decide it's time to remind you exactly who you were the first time you heard it. Cave and Kylie sing at each other, then hold on tight. It isn't just nostalgia. It's stranger than that. Two people singing words written when they were both a lot younger, before every loss and every rewrite that quietly changed what those words actually meant. Kylie goes. The song ends. The past doesn't leave with her.

Back to work. The Mercy Seat is a full-on ambush. Papa Won't Leave You, Henry drags the old Cave back into the room, the one who can turn a song into a travelling house fire, and at some point in it he ends up hoisted onto the crowd's shoulders, riding the front rows like a man who's forgotten he's sixty-eight. Red Right Hand does what Red Right Hand always does: grabs you by the collar and hauls you into the dark.

Cave stays right on the edge of the stage through most of it. He's not singing to fifty thousand people, he's singing to fifty thousand people one at a time, chasing individual faces out of the mass. At one point he tells someone in the front row, "I'm a reflection of your beauty," a line that should get laughed straight off the stage and somehow, from him, just doesn't. That's the whole deal he's built with an audience over the decades, a straight trade. They give him their attention. For a couple of hours he hands back the feeling that they're actually part of the story.

The Weeping Song comes next, and Cave warns the crowd, half-joking, that this is the one where you cry, before promising they won't be at it too long. He claps out the rhythm himself and gets the whole field clapping along with him, the sound landing somewhere between percussion and rain.

Then Jubilee Street arrives, and something properly strange kicks in: Brighton stops being the backdrop and turns into the main character, the scruffier, more ordinary version Cave's spent decades turning into his own private mythology rather than the postcard one people come down for on a weekend. The streets and the pubs and the people wandering through them with no idea they've ended up inside somebody's song. The track builds slow, then speeds up, swells, catches fire properly. Ellis shoves it forward, the drums turn industrial, Cave keeps repeating the words till the crowd's throwing them straight back and you genuinely can't separate the voice on stage from the ones underneath it. Fifty thousand people, one voice.

This is what the Bad Seeds actually are, live: an organism, not a machine, one that knows exactly when precision needs binning. Tight and completely feral at once, controlled and out of control in the same breath, capable of swinging from the ugliest noise to the most fragile whisper without any of it looking out of place.

After Hollywood the band vanish and the stage suddenly looks massive and a bit stupid, all that gear, lights, cable, scaffolding, sitting there for one man. There's a proper break, then they're back for the encore: harmonica first, wailing straight into City of Refuge. Then Cave dedicates the next one to Susie, tells the crowd it's actually about Brighton and the beach, not the nudist end, he clarifies, while a photo of the old West Pier's blackened skeleton gets thrown up on the screen behind him for Wide Lovely Eyes. Then the band's thanked, and gone, and it's just Cave, alone, at the piano.

Into My Arms.

This is where the whole night finally clicks, not because it's the most famous song or the easy option for a closer, but because it's where every thread of the evening meets: faith and doubt, love and loss, the people still here and the ones who can't be. The crowd sings it. He leaves the space for them to. For a second Preston Park stops being a field with a gig stuck in it and turns into one of those impossible rooms that's had way too many people crammed inside, and somehow nobody's out of place.

And without meaning to, you start thinking about who's missing. The people who couldn't make it. The people who'd have wanted to be there. Old Bad Seeds, old mates, people Cave's lost along the way, earlier versions of him, and, inevitably, earlier versions of yourself. This is what music does when it's actually working: it makes the dead awkwardly, inconveniently present. Lets them sit next to the living for four minutes, and nobody's got the nerve to tell them to leave.

The song ends. Cave thanks Brighton, "God bless, good night," and he's gone.

Two and a quarter hours of music. Forty years of songs. A morning on a rooftop, Kylie Minogue, fifty thousand people, and a city that behaved for one day like Nick Cave never actually left it.

Outside the park the magic comes apart fast. Fifty thousand people go back to being fifty thousand separate people, couples hunting for each other, mates arguing over the best song, someone after a bus, a smoke, a phone, a toilet. Someone's lost a phone. Someone's found one. Someone's still crying. Someone else is laughing. Brighton takes the whole lot back, no questions asked.

Next morning, while they're taking the stage apart and the city gears up for Pride, Cave's down on the seafront promenade, knackered, barely slept, just out of a dawn swim in water that by his own account is properly cold. Around him Brighton's already resetting itself: parade floats lined up along the front, someone flogging novelty hats of dubious taste, a girl dressed as a slice of watermelon working on a placard about homophobia, a jogger with a huge white dog who clocks him, stops, and just hugs him. He'd been at the show the night before.

No stage anymore. No lights. No fifty thousand people. Just Brighton, the ordinary one, the one that gets up, walks the dog, buys a coffee, has an argument with someone, gets ready for Pride, looks out at the sea and carries on.

His manager rings that morning with the numbers: biggest ticketed show Brighton's ever hosted, by some distance. Cave, writing it up himself a few hours later, sounding as knackered as he clearly was, calls the whole thing "so completely and emotionally overwhelming," and says the whole point, in the end, was managing for one delirious stretch of time to build somewhere the absent and the present could actually dance together.

Coming home was never really about going back to the place you left. It's finding out the place had been quietly holding onto a piece of you the whole time, without ever once mentioning it.

Nick Cave came home to Brighton, and Brighton remembered him. Maybe it remembered something else too, who he used to be, before all of it. Because that’s the thing cities do with their ghosts. Let them go, sure. Never quite let them leave.

And that night, at Preston Park, the ghosts weren’t just watching.

They were dancing too.

Setlist

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Preston Park, Brighton, 31 July 2026

1. Get Ready for Love

2. From Her to Eternity

3. Train Long-Suffering

4. Wild God

5. O Children

6. Tupelo

7. Carnage

8. Joy

9. Rings of Saturn

10. Where the Wild Roses Grow (with Kylie Minogue)

11. The Mercy Seat

12. Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry

13. Red Right Hand

14. The Weeping Song

15. Jubilee Street

16. Hollywood

17. City of Refuge

18. Wide Lovely Eyes

19. Into My Arms

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Live Line-up

• Nick Cave: vocals, piano

• Warren Ellis: violin, guitars, keyboards, mandolin and other instruments

• Colin Greenwood: bass

• Jim Sclavunos: drums, percussion

• George Vjestica: guitar, backing vocals

• Larry Mullins: drums, percussion, backing vocals

• Carly Paradis: keyboards

• Janet Ramus: backing vocals

• T Jae Cole: backing vocals

• Mića Townsend: backing vocals

• Wendi Rose: backing vocals

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The Los Angeles–based Australians VOWWS have already earned a decent reputation, at least among the insiders. They describe themselves – or have been described – as death pop, though what that actually means remains anyone’s guess. There was even a compilation a few years back that tried to define the term, but the definition still feels like a fog with music inside it. In essence, we’re talking about a group of bands that move along a dark/goth aesthetic, updated with a full spectrum of ’90s sensibilities – crossover impulses, industrial grit, and electronic contamination.

On their third album, I’ll Fill Your House With An Army, VOWWS bring Billy Howerdel (A Perfect Circle) back behind the console, and once again the guest list doesn’t disappoint. Their debut The Great Sun featured Gary Numan and Thor Harris (then with Swans), while later Chino Moreno of Deftones appeared on a rework of their best-known track Structure Of Love. This time, Josh Freese (Foo Fighters, now back with Nine Inch Nails) opens the record with Blood’s On Fire: a slow-rising inferno that climbs from the sinister weight of Killing Joke to the angelic glare of Depeche Mode, all thunderous bass and hard-psych guitars that seem to breathe on their own.

Next comes Munky from Korn with Shudder, unsealing the Bauhaus tombs only to smear them with silicon nightmares and Nine Inch Nails-like tension. The track plays in contrasts – pressure and release, force and sensuality – with metalcore weight beneath its pulse. If this is death pop, it’s already many things at once, and none of them simple.

Between Pulls Me Apart and Hurt You, a more intimate, even melodic side surfaces: cinematic songwriting that heightens tension rather than resolving it. Silhouette channels the duo’s post-punk and synth-pop core – he (Matt) crooning in the spirit of Gary Numan, she (Arezo “Rizz” Khanjani) softening the edges with a voice that adds air and drama at once. Hurt You even carries faint surf-rock echoes, like sunlight flickering across a black puddle – fleeting, but irresistible.

VOWWS have been pushed hard so far, enough to stir a bit of skepticism about how much of the buzz they truly deserve. Their music has already seduced the fashion world – Comme des Garçons, Alyx, Givenchy, Byredo – and their opening slots for Deftones and Gojira have taken them around the globe. Yet mass recognition still feels just out of reach.

That I’ll Fill Your House With An Army is a solid album is beyond doubt: dark, carefully built, calibrated to the millimeter. Still, there’s a certain emotional distance – as if it had been assembled in a laboratory rather than grown in the night. It works beautifully on stage, where its weight and breath come alive, but at home it risks feeling like a polished object awaiting the spark of chaos. VOWWS keep dancing on the thin line between beauty and menace, though for now they stop just short of the abyss. And perhaps that’s exactly where they feel safest.

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A new kind of tension runs through From The Pyre, the second album by The Last Dinner Party. After the triumph of Prelude To Ecstasy, the five Londoners expand their baroque pop language into something richer and more ambitious. Less than two years after their debut, they choose evolution over rupture, building a record that folds in on itself. The final note of the closing track connects back to the opening bars of the first, creating a loop of dreams, love and apocalypse.

Produced by Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Florence + The Machine), the album comes close to being a concept work, where each song uses a different character to tell a personal story. It feels darker and grander, more confident in its contrasts and theatrical impulses. Echoes of Kate Bush appear in the visionary passages, Queen in the harmonies, Sparks in the wit, and Bowie in the more glamorous turns. On The Scythe and I Hold Your Anger, Abigail Morris sings with a kind of ceremonial gravity, somewhere between the visionary sensuality of Stevie Nicks and the quiet strength of Annie Lennox, while Emily Roberts shapes her guitar lines with melodic precision, a modern glam heroine in her own right.

The lyrics mix desire, irony and apocalyptic imagery. Catastrophe turns into longing, the end of the world becomes a form of release. The Scythe begins as a love song and grows into an elegy that binds grief and passion in one heartbeat. Agnus Dei, which opens the record, turns pain into personal myth, blending heavenly imagery with an earthy sarcasm. The writing is vivid and full of motion, amplified by arrangements that breathe freely and resist the short-form habits of modern pop. The balance between vitality and control is where the band finds its strength, turning passion into language and chaos into form. In Woman Is a Tree, the voices merge in a ritual chant that drifts between the sacred and the profane, perhaps the album’s most striking moment.

From The Pyre stands as a record of confidence and craft, more mature and more cohesive, aware of its own excesses yet proud of them. With this album, The Last Dinner Party prove they are here to stay. There is still ground left to claim, but they are moving in the right direction, and their theatricality now feels like a weapon, no longer the veil of Māyā that once softened their impact.

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Bar Italia arrive at their third album in two years and, more than ever, they mean business. Born within Dean Blunt’s World Music orbit but now far beyond that sphere, Sam Fenton, Nina Cristante and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi use Some Like It Hot to show a band that keeps expanding its palette of themes and moods, with greater personality and distance from their once-overbearing influences.

Marble Arch sets up a kind of lounge-jazz theatre, as Pete Doherty might within their already eclectic alt-rock perimeter; the waltz of bad reputation wanders through the same streets of a London lost in time, then turns to the open countryside, brushing against folk before snapping back to the city. When the scratch is fully urban, the Sonic Youth spirit rushes in (Cowbella), and when the guitars go into overdrive (I Make My Own Dust), shoegaze becomes another tool in the hands of a trio now more measured and road-hardened, shaped by touring miles and stage hours.

The influences remain, but now they collide fruitfully across decades: the Cure (specifically the Head on the Door era) surface right away in Fundraiser, meeting the sharp-edged guitars of Franz Ferdinand, The Hives and company; the ’80s and 2000s coexist freely, and Cowbella—listen closely—slides in a distinctly Dandy Warhols-style riff. The production is crisp, the arrangements tighter: these songs no longer hide behind a veil of mystery or settle for recycling noise and indie-rock tropes, Kim Gordon and Pavement echoes (Rooster), or the well-worn desert rock of King Hannah (The Lady Vanishes).

The interplay between voices remains their strongest card: Cristante provides emotional depth, while Fenton and Fehmi oscillate between detachment and confession, with more understatement and a Thurston-Moore-like coolness. The writing, both poetic and visual, balances observation, interiority and irony, turning the three into film characters—each with their own version of the story.

Beneath the recurring theme of relationships as performance or screenplay, the self splinters and reality fractures: “I let myself die / More than once / Borrow, stolen / Borrow, stolen from someone, anyone” (I Make My Own Dust). The lyrics evoke false intimacy, emotional distance, urban disorientation, warped spirituality, toxic love, emotional symbolism, stream-of-consciousness, disappearance and dissolution (“I’m quiet and I run to the end of the end,” from The Lady Vanishes).

Some Like It Hot is a mosaic that reveals a band now fully in command of its expressive language. Not a masterpiece, but certainly the moment when Bar Italia stop sounding like a promise and become a certainty.

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By their seventh album, Giöbia seem like a fixed constellation in the European heavy-psych sky. From Beyond the Stars to the acid voyages of Acid Disorder, the Milanese band – brothers Stefano “Bazu” and Paolo Basurto, Melissa Crema, and Pietro D’Ambrosio – have travelled through twenty years of fuzz and cosmic visions, arriving now at X-ÆON (Heavy Psych Sounds, 2025), which aims to be both a summation and a new beginning. The title evokes an eternal time, suspended between myth and technology, and the record truly tries to fling open the doors of perception.

Voodoo Experience raises the curtain with Sabbath-like energy and tribal groove, while Fractal Haze moves along kraut coordinates worthy of Amon Düül II and Neu!. The Death of the Crows — the album’s only sung track — brings an analog melancholy that recalls the Goblin of Suspiria more than straight psychedelic rock. Then comes 1976, a motorik sci-fi odyssey that merges Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream in a dense fog of delay.

At the heart of the album lies the prog suite La Mort de la Terre, twenty minutes divided into four movements: a monumental symphony where Giöbia become true architects of sound, though at the cost of losing a bit of soul. Where Acid Disorder was a carnal trip, X-ÆON is a cerebral experiment—lucid, perhaps too much so. A sumptuous and precise record, but one that risks becoming a prisoner of its own perfection.

There’s fascination, ambition, and meticulous craft here, yet also a subtle coldness born of total control that dulls emotional impulse. X-ÆON is a beautiful film, only intermittently moving: a cosmic ritual that hypnotizes more than it stirs.

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Upchuck’s Atlanta isn’t the glossy one you see in trap videos — it’s the city that smells of gasoline and fuzz, where music still feels like survival. I’m Nice Now, the third album from Kaila “KT” Thompson and her crew, produced by Ty Segall and mastered by Heba Kadry, hits like a punch to the face that wants to be a caress — or maybe just a cry of exhaustion that refuses to fall silent.

After two albums of compressed fury, Upchuck find a new kind of clarity here: the anger is still there, but it’s sharper, more focused. Tired opens the record like a political shout — “I’m tired of darker news” — while the guitars spit shards in pure Stooges fashion and the rhythm section pounds with near-military precision. Plastic gets murkier, with drummer Chris Salado joining KT on vocals in Spanish — a cultural reclamation, a crack of sunlight through American punk’s usual noise.

There’s a grunge soul pulsing through Kept Inside and Forgotten Token, where personal pain (KT’s loss of her sister) turns into collective language. New Case and Slow Down open the melodic window wider — hints of Pixies and Nirvana— but the band never stops snarling. Then Fried drags you back into the garage’s belly: distorted synths, collapsing drums, chaos as a form of healing.

Segall keeps everything raw and live-sounding, a mix that thrives on imperfection. At times it feels too restrained but it never loses its pulse. The KT/Salado vocal switch gives the album real character. If Homenaje and Un Momento speak from a Latin urgency, Lost One and Nowhere close things out like the end of a live set teetering on the edge of a blackout.

Upchuck are now a band aware of their power but still restless in their bones. I’m Nice Now doesn’t reinvent punk — it simply refuses to die quietly. A record that shouts without apology, and in its noise, finds its dignity.
It stumbles, it screams, it breathes — and that’s enough.

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They learned how to make noise long before they made a name for themselves. Little Pieces of Marmelade – Daniele “DD” Ciuffreda and Francesco “Frankie Wah” Antinori – exploded in 2020 through X Factor Italy, as part of Manuel Agnelli’s (Afterhours) team, where they took second place. From that experience a lasting collaboration was born: first their self-titled debut album, then Ologenesi in 2022, produced by Agnelli himself, which led them to play with him both live and in the studio. Back in their hideout in the Marche region (Italy), the two decided to wipe the slate clean and start again from noise, working in complete freedom.

From that isolation came Mexican Sugar Dance, a self-produced, feverish album built on contrasts. The garage ferocity of Family Therapy opens the curtain on a visceral, gritty sound, soon warped by the fuzzy lyricism of Fame and the funk-psychedelic soul of Love, swaying between ’70s warmth and punk instinct. The landscape grows darker with Doomy, slowing into Sabbathian sludge, while Q new and Path of Glory dive headfirst into grebo. At the album’s core, the dreamy keys of Sniffing Stars recall Supertramp before derailing into a psych vortex worthy of the early Flaming Lips, while the muddy melancholy of Sad Funk feels like an unintentional homage to Verdena. You can hear Brainiac, a glam-fuzz edge of Ty Segall, and the freedom of the best outsiders.

The result is raw, crooked, excessive – a controlled chaos, a psych-rock crossover that looks back to the ’90s dialogue between the US and UK, trying to recapture that freshness and jam-like spirit in a personal, visceral, and contemporary key, where every idea explodes before it settles. More laboratory than album, more instinct than form, but always driven by the hunger to reject formulas and clichés. Mexican Sugar Dance is a noisy construction site – a record that fails, dares, and, because of that, truly lives.

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In Passenger, Nightbus move through a disenchanted present, made of glass and rain-soaked concrete. The Manchester trio — Olive Rees, Jake Cottier, and Zac Melrose — debut with an album that is both an urban journey and a mirror of the psyche: between doom, uncertainty, and dependence, the listener drifts through liminal spaces where night bleeds into day and reality merges with dream.

The record weaves together electronic pulses and wave-rock guitars, nodding to New Order (Angels Mortz), broken-beat UK garage and fleeting rave echoes (Somewhere, Nowhere), occasionally sliding into acid tones (Ascension) or, more canonically, into a melodic catharsis à la The XX or Slowdive. Landslide rewinds the clock to a Joy Division-style dance floor, only to dissolve it into a dreamy haze; Host, instead, takes the Bristol route — febrile and narcotic.

Recorded at The Nave in Leeds with Alex Greaves, Passenger alternates reverb, compressed drums and obsessive melodies, evoking a constant tension that finds full expression in the group’s multimedia performances. The band’s personal “Gotham” stretches between Manchester and Stockport — city and suburb, urban energy and industrial decay — and you can feel it throughout the album, as both backdrop and frame for their stories.

The references are clear, and so is the generational urge not to rely on a single aesthetic. Yet Nightbus still lack that spark that could turn influence into identity — to make the music they love (and we love) into something truly their own, safely outside the comfort zone of a beautiful but never fully historicised imaginary.

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In Brighton, the air smells of salt and damp, and Talking Machine, the fifth album by The Wytches, seems to breathe it all in. Recorded live to analog tape, as in their debut Annabel Dream Reader (2014), the record sounds like a reunion with their own demons: no polish, no click tracks, just crackling amps and sizzling strings. It’s a return to a garage-bred psychedelia — heavy and damned, noir like the goth undertone that has always followed the band, now a quartet with the addition of drummer Bhavin “Bhav” Thaker.

If Annabel Dream Reader moved from surf punk to stoner under the cursed gaze of Edgar Allan Poe, and the three records that followed tried to recalibrate that formula — growing darker on All Your Happy Life or turning quieter and more reflective on Our Guest Can’t Be Named — Talking Machine marks a return to their roots with newfound awareness. The themes are contemporary — authenticity, artificial intelligence, the tension between human and mechanical — and the title, fittingly, recalls Thomas Edison’s nickname for his early gramophones.

The record swings between the hard-rock viscosity of the title track (somewhere between Ty Segall and Jack White) and the delicate piano-and-voice ballad Romance 2, moving through the abrasive psychedelia of Black Lips (Black Ice) and the twisted grunge undertones of Perform. The darker Factory and Is the World Too Old slow the pace, open up to melody, and even hint at unexpected Latin accents.

There’s a stronger sense of purpose here — in the lyrics, the references, the arrangements — and the authenticity the band proclaims finally finds tangible expression. The Wytches have never been the sharpest edge of their scene — not quite Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, Black Lips, or King Gizzard — but with Talking Machine they reaffirm both their solidity and their strange, smouldering inspiration.

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There’s a Jim Jarmusch film that opens on the rails of the West and closes like a fever dream — cracked, smoky, and beautiful. Dead Man (1995) is a movie you don’t simply watch; it’s a landscape you have to cross, step by step, through grit, gunfire, and hallucinations.

From a train carriage thick with smoke and silence begins the journey of William Blake — an unarmed, aimless accountant — who meets Nobody, a native without a tribe, his mirror and compass. Together they move toward the darkness, two shadows that no longer belong to the living.

Instead of solemn choirs and galloping strings, the soundtrack belongs to Neil Young and his battered Old Black guitar, crackling like a live wire. No themes tu hum, no comforting melodies — just electric improvisations, chords fading into the void, sounds leaking in from some other dimension.

The result is a film where sound and image don’t meet halfway — they melt together. Dead Man becomes a black ballad in which the music doesn’t accompany the characters; it stalks them, whispers to them, reminds them that their fate was written long before they set foot on screen.

A Broken Dream of the Frontier

Anyone expecting John Ford’s West — heroic silhouettes and horses vanishing into the sunset — will be disappointed. Jarmusch flips the genre inside out: no heroes, no glory, just a lost accountant swallowed by a hostile world.

Machine, the town of smoke and gears, is proof enough. It’s an industrial hell that reeks of coal and rust, more Charles Dickens than Sergio Leone. Robby Müller’s milky black-and-white turns the landscape into a living daguerreotype: prairies and forests that aren’t promises of freedom but warped, ghostly corridors. There’s no nostalgia here — only disorientation.

Machine isn’t just a factory town; it’s a Kafka trap, a senseless mechanism grinding down whoever walks in. Watching it, you think of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil — the same absurd machinery, the same corridors that lead nowhere. Blake isn’t doomed because he’s weak, but because the system itself is meaningless.

Dead Man belongs to that strange bloodline of the acid western — the bastard child of the spaghetti kind. It takes the wide plains and lonely journeys of the West, stirs in existential dread, surrealism, and black comedy, and ends up with something that looks like nothing else. A western that stares at itself after a sleepless night and laughs through its cracked teeth.

Here Jarmusch tears down the myth of Manifest Destiny. His West isn’t a dream being built — it’s already collapsing, eaten alive by greed and violence. Religion, far from redemption, is just another brand of rot: missionaries spreading disease, industrialists waving holy icons as excuses. Expansion is just another word for consumption.

The Gaze of the Dead Man

In casting Johnny Depp, Jarmusch didn’t want a gunslinger but a face too soft to survive the frontier. His William Blake moves like an outsider — dressed in black among men caked in dust, polite among killers, perpetually out of place.

Depp’s performance lives in silence: wide eyes, hesitant steps, gestures that never find their ground. He’s not a cowboy — he’s an intruder. And that’s why Neil Young’s music fits so perfectly. Those buzzing strings and hanging notes seem to breathe with Blake, translating the anxiety he can’t express.

The first truth comes from Thel, a paper-flower seller with a pistol under her pillow. “Why do you keep it?” Blake asks. “Because this is America,” she says — a line as sharp as a gunshot, summarizing the entire nightmare.

As the film goes on, Blake sheds his skin. The mild accountant turns, almost by accident, into an avenging angel, leaving behind bodies and blood. Yet he never stops looking surprised at his own violence. Depp holds the contradiction together — victim and executioner, absurd and tragic, an unwitting poet writing his work in blood.

And in Nobody — the outcast native, twice rejected, once by the whites and once by his own — he finds his mirror. Two nameless men who share one last direction: forward, into the dark.

The Guitar as Revelation

Jarmusch didn’t hand Neil Young a script or a score. He just said, Watch the film. Play what you feel.

What began as a chance meeting — a Crazy Horse concert near the shooting location — turned into an unrepeatable collaboration. Young briefly thought of bringing in Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl from Nirvana, but eventually decided to stay alone: This is one man’s journey. It needs one guitar.

So, in a San Francisco warehouse mic’d up like a cave, Young watched a rough cut of the film three times and played live. His Old Black spat jagged bursts, low drones, chords dying like embers. Sometimes percussive, sometimes mournful, always raw — raw as a skinned beaver left in the sun.

It’s less a soundtrack than a weather system — drifting in, crackling, eroding everything in its path. It’s something ancient and modern at once — the sound of the American machine colliding with the mysticism of Nobody. If Ennio Morricone filled the desert with brass, Neil Young tunnels into Blake’s skull: riffs looping and mutating, circling like vultures over a dying body.

The film’s main theme, curiously, never made it to the official soundtrack. The album itself is a ghostly artifact — seven improvisations stitched with dialogue, ambient hums, and Johnny Depp reading the real William Blake. Half record, half séance.

At its heart lies Guitar Solo No. 5 — fourteen minutes of wounded chords, feedback explosions, and sighs turning into landscape. It’s not accompaniment; it’s initiation. A guide leading the viewer into Blake’s own vision quest.

Young’s guitar doesn’t follow the images — it seeps through them like groundwater. Every string vibrates where the frame cracks; every silence leaves a wound. The score breathes with the film, sharing its pulse and its exhaustion. Like Blake himself, it walks toward the end — dying, note by note.

Bodies, Strings, and Dust

Where the old West galloped in rhythm and rhyme, Dead Man limps along on a wounded riff. Neil Young paints Blake’s fractured consciousness in sound — the whisper that there’s no way back.

Other filmmakers would later use sound as rupture: Jonny Greenwood in There Will Be Blood and The Master, his strings flaring like nerves; Mica Levi in Under the Skin, turning alien touch into magnetic distortion; Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in The Social Network, making electronic hum the heartbeat of self-consuming power. But none sound as primal, as alive, as haunted as Neil Young alone in that warehouse of amplifiers and ghosts.

And then there’s the chorus of outsiders. Just look at the faces drifting through Dead Man: Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop in a bonnet, Billy Bob Thornton, Jared Harris, Lance Henriksen, Robert Mitchum, John Hurt. A traveling freak show of lost souls, every one of them an apparition from some other world. It’s a frontier with no center — just a constellation of shadows.

Even the real William Blake entered the film by accident. Jarmusch, exhausted from research into Native traditions, picked up the poet’s work and found a perfect echo — the same visions, the same feverish mysticism. That coincidence turned an accountant into a metaphysical pilgrim, a name into a prophecy.

In the end, Dead Man lingers like a piece of skin left to dry under the desert sun — cracking, curling, eroding in a wind that never stops blowing. That’s its secret: a film you don’t just watch but wear, like a slow, merciless song that stays on your skin long after the screen fades to black.

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Born in Edinburgh in 1995, when British indie was caught between post-grunge and a dying britpop, Idlewild emerged with a raw urgency, closer to Fugazi than to Blur. Over time, they learned to temper that fury, opening up to melody and chasing their own emotional geography — the one that, in the early 2000s, led them to release 100 Broken Windows and The Remote Part.

Their tenth album after a long silence, Idlewild moves with the confidence of those who no longer need to prove anything. Stay Out of Place opens with controlled tension — dense guitars and a driving rhythm — while Roddy Woomble’s voice drifts between nostalgia and determination. Make It Happen brings back the grit of their early years; Writers of the Present Time feels like a letter to their twenty-year-old selves, full of gentle regrets and sudden sparks of pride. After thirty years, Idlewild have returned to tie together the threads of their own story.

And yet, behind the poise and fine sound, one can’t help but wonder if Idlewild have already said everything they had to say. The writing is solid, the references sharp, but the sense of risk that once made them essential is gone. Idlewild plays like the diary of a band that understands itself completely — perhaps too completely to still surprise. It’s an honest, well-made return — but not a necessary one. Sometimes maturity is just another way of saying you’ve stopped fighting.

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AFI have never been afraid to shed their skin. From their hardcore beginnings in Ukiah in the early ’90s, through the gothic-mainstream success of Sing The Sorrow and Decemberunderground, to the alt-rock detours of Burials and Bodies, Davey Havok’s band has always questioned its own identity. With their twelfth album, Silver Bleeds The Black Sun…, the metamorphosis becomes definitive: the immersion in ’80s-rooted goth is complete.

The opener The Bird Of Prey evokes Placebo gone western-noir, with dusty guitars, driving drums and Roger O’Donnell-like synths. From Behind The Clock to Holy Visions, all the way to Ash Speck In A Green Eye, the coordinates are unmistakable: in 2025 AFI sound like a cross between Bauhaus and Sisters Of Mercy. The album reaches for anthems without abandoning post-Joy Division danceability (Ash Speck In A Green Eye), even nods to Billy Idol(Marguerite), and finds in the production of Jade Puget and Tony Hoffer the perfect balance between spaciousness and control: wide reverbs but bass, drums, vocals and synths always clear and sharp.

The closing track Nooneunderground tries to rekindle their skate-punk past, but the connection to their new guise feels tenuous. The point is that AFI have now chosen the path of darkness: less pogo, more altars. Goth is no longer a disguise but a home, and the band steps into it without ever looking back.

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In the backstreets of Dublin – where the glow of pub lights mixes with the scuff of footsteps and indie postcards dissolve in the rain – you find the origins of Sprints. Formed in 2019, the Irish band broke through with Letter To Self in January 2024, a record produced by Daniel Fox (Gilla Band) that throbbed with anxiety and raw energy, yet still found space for moments of melodic clarity. It was a debut that made people stop and listen.

All That Is Over, released in September 2025 on City Slang / Sub Pop, is no simple echo of that debut. It’s a statement, an attempt to turn chaos into shape. It also arrives after a turning point: the departure of founding guitarist Colm O’Reilly in 2024, and the arrival of Zac Stephenson to fill that gap. That shift left its mark, tempering the new songs with both bruises and a new kind of confidence.

This second record is a collage of controlled rage and messy introspection. Tracks like Need and Pieces throw punches in the urgent post-punk register, while Descartes rattles with philosophical musings on vanity and art (“I speak, therefore I understand”) – Chubb in full intellectual snarl. Elsewhere, Better leans into shoegaze haze, opening up a space to breathe, and closer Desire takes us on a six-minute journey from desert-rock twang to total noise assault.

And yet, something of the wild spark from Letter To Self gets lost in translation. The “big” moments here sometimes feel too carefully sculpted. Songs like Need and Descartes sound more like blueprints than eruptions, as if the band are intent on proving their scale rather than letting the fire run loose. The ambition is admirable, but a little of the instinctive punch gets blunted.

That tension – between ferocity and form, between instinct and ambition – is the record’s defining trait. All That Is Over is a document of a band trying to grow without abandoning the flame that lit them in the first place.

The result is uneven but worthwhile: less about perfection, more about metamorphosis. And like any good diary of change, it leaves you curious to see where the next chapter goes.

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Getting Killed by Geese doesn’t really begin: you just find yourself inside it, like walking into a room where the conversation is already heated, voices overlapping, and nobody bothers to explain what you’ve missed. It’s an album that offers no introductions, leaving you with a choice: stand on the sidelines or dive headfirst into the fray.

Geese were born in Brooklyn as little more than teenagers, and like many New York kids they could have lived under the shadow of their influences. Projector (2021) showed them grappling with the post-punk playbook, somewhere between Television and Interpol; 3D Country (2023) hurled them into a brasher, dust-covered territory, like the Rolling Stones in the desert; while Cameron Winter’s solo debut, Heavy Metal (2024), revealed a more intimate side, halfway between Thom Yorke and a young Nick Cave. With Getting Killed, produced by Kenneth Blume (aka Kenny Beats), the band brings this trajectory to a close: no longer epigones, no longer students, but a group bold enough to write its own grammar.

The opening of Trinidad is a manifesto: funk grooves veering off course, sudden blasts of horns, voices shouted like sermons in an improvised church. The same controlled schizophrenia runs throughout the album. Cobra softens the mood with a soulful delicacy that recalls the Beach Boys filtered through the Velvet Underground; 100 Horses channels Captain Beefheart in its organized collapse, while Husbands and Bow Down echo the rhythmic obsessions of the Talking Heads, only sharper, less polished. The finale, Long Island City Here I Come, evokes the Rolling Stones of Sticky Fingers, stripped of any glamour: here it’s just the city, raw, leaving you short of breath.

Lyrically, Winter favors suggestion over storytelling. He repeats phrases like mantras, building images that oscillate between the absurd and the prophetic. In Taxes he spits out a blasphemous challenge — “If you want me to pay my taxes / You’d better come over with a crucifix” — sounding both furious and ironic. It’s his way of narrating the anxiety of living in a world overloaded with stimuli and contradictions, a bit like Radiohead on Kid A, but without the electronic filters to cushion the voice.

Kenny Beats’ production is central: he brings with him the logic of sampling and collage, borrowed from hip hop, and applies it to rock. The result is an album that breathes like a mixtape: fragments chasing each other, grooves repeating to the point of obsession, sudden ruptures that look like mistakes but reveal a precise guiding hand. It’s an approach that nods to the motorik drive of krautrock, fused with the theatricality of Roxy Music.

It’s not a flawless record. Some tracks feel like sketches left unfinished, others stretch out a little too loosely. But the strength of Geese lies in their willingness to take risks: to choose energy over calculation, vertigo over craft. In this sense, Getting Killed captures a moment of real maturity: Geese are no longer trying to prove they can play, but to show who they are.

Getting Killed isn’t their definitive masterpiece, but it stands as a sharp snapshot of a band in motion, restless and unafraid of contradiction, uneven in places, but charged with urgency and full of life.

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Some debuts sound like déjà vu: The Cords doesn’t feel like a 2025 record, but like a vinyl unearthed from a dusty box somewhere between Glasgow and Bristol, when indie thrived on a handful of chords and sheer urgency. Sisters Eva and Grace Tedeschi, from Greenock, have raced through the stages: a 7’’ that sold out in a flash, shows alongside The Vaselines, Camera Obscura, Belle and Sebastian and BMX Bandits, then the signing with Skep Wax and Slumberland. No calculation, just devotion.

The album lasts just over half an hour: 13 tracks, many under two minutes. The red thread ties the noisy wing of C86 (Shop Assistants) to the twee fringes of Sarah Records, passing through Talulah Gosh and The Pastels: melodies shot straight in your face, open and distorted chords, relentless tempos, amphetamines and punk. Fabulist sparks a jangle that hints at The Primitives; You, loud and melodic, looks across the ocean, combining Hüsker Dü, The Lemonheads and Juliana Hatfield with indolently pop verses. Weird Feeling is a pastoral pause before the sprint resumes (Done With You, with a Johnny Marr wink), while When You Said Goodbye closes with a young-adult ballad, natural and lightly inspired.

The Cords don’t aim for originality but for a TikTok-era speed applied to punk’s bluntness. This is young music, built to stay fresh, urgent and vital in a present that no longer fears the atomic bomb, but faces global threats just as — if not more — catastrophic.

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Wings of Desire is not a film that can be summed up in a few lines: it is a suspended parable, a poetic diary disguised as cinema. In 1987, Wim Wenders returned to his city, still divided by the Wall, and imagined two angels — Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) — walking invisibly among the people of Berlin. They listen to thoughts, collect confessions, witness lives broken by solitude and haunted by war. Only children can see them, because only children still have eyes pure enough to glimpse the invisible. But when Damiel meets Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a melancholy trapeze artist with stage wings costume and a wavering heart, he realizes that watching is no longer enough: he wants to touch, to love, to fall.

The film drifts in a milky black and white that, at times, opens into color — as if human experience itself were a sudden explosion inside a dream. It is made of inner monologues written by Peter Handke, of gazes resting on ruins and deserted squares, of music that swings between the celestial rarefaction of Jürgen Knieper and the earthy ferocity of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It is not merely a love story: it is a portrait of Berlin in its melancholy and resilience, a visual poem that in 1987 won Wenders the Best Director award at Cannes.

Berlin: a wound that breathes

When Wings of Desire was released, the Wall still stood — massive, stubborn, dividing the city like a scar that refused to heal. Returning after years abroad, Wenders found not just a wounded Berlin, but a city breathing his same solitude: squares emptied of traffic and trust, train stations reduced to shells, buildings in ruins standing as silent guardians of a faded glory. The sky was low, gray, and every corner sounded like a broken music box.

West Berlin was a peninsula suspended in time — physically isolated, yet strangely alive: neon lights flickering in the mud of the streets, clubs like Risiko and Dschungel where punks, new wavers, skinheads, artists and outsiders tried to build a community in the shadow of the Cold War. Photographers captured scribbled walls, rebellious faces, noisy ideas, while on the other side the GDR stared back with grim detachment.

With the eyes of an exile and a poet, Wenders saw that this cruelty of architecture, those abandoned spaces, those ruins were not only rubble but memory. They echoed the past of the Second World War, devastation and loss, but also the fragile hope of small artistic communities trying to reinvent the city. Out of that suspension came the idea of the angels: silent, invisible figures perched on statues like the Siegessäule, wandering through the shelves of the Staatsbibliothek, lingering in the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof. Not saints, but poetic projections — visions born from the verses of Rainer Maria Rilke, the canvases of Paul Klee, conversations with Peter Handke. Creatures condemned to observe without touching, who walk along the thresholds between light and shadow, past and present, in a city still living inside its open wound.

Angels and the music of silence

Through Henri Alekan’s lens, Berlin becomes a suspended, opaque black and white, where every ray of light seems to hold its breath before falling on the ruins. Streets and buildings turn into fragile silhouettes, as if the city itself were a dream balanced on the edge of collapse. Jürgen Knieper’s score sustains that suspension: harps like drops of water, synthetic choirs floating in the air, a cello crying with a human voice, embodying the melancholy of Damiel the angel.

The thoughts of Berliners — fragmented, contradictory, mundane — weave into this sonic fabric like invisible threads: whispered confessions between library shelves, solitude surfacing on trams, half-spoken desires in bars still empty at dawn. It was the music of a suspended, wounded world, struggling to breathe. And when the story bends toward flesh, toward the fall, Wenders summons the most earthly, nocturnal and lacerated voice Berlin could offer in those years: Nick Cave.

The fracture: Nick Cave and the city’s heart

Back in her trailer after the trapeze act, Marion lowers the needle onto a record. The suspension cracks. From the hiss of the grooves emerges The Carny, from the album Your Funeral… My Trial (1986). A crooked, macabre, magnetic waltz that tells of a vanished circus performer and leaves behind a trail of unease and mourning. Marion listens intently, sometimes humming along, as if seeking comfort in that dissonance: in its dark lament she recognizes her own solitude. And Damiel, invisible beside her, hears the call. For him — who until then could only observe and record — the music becomes the first door left ajar onto the mortal world, a sudden breach revealing the vertigo of feeling.

In that instant, an invisible triad forms: Marion is the body of the world, fragile and earthly; Damiel, watching without touching, is the soul of the world; and Nick Cave, voice crackling from a scratched record, becomes the intellect of the world, singing universal stories of abandonment and crumbling circuses. The Carny ceases to be just a song: it becomes both mirror of Marion’s condition and threshold that tempts Damiel toward the fall.

But it is in the red, smoky belly of a Berlin club that the fracture rips wide open. On stage, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds launch into From Her to Eternity, the title track of their 1984 debut. Cave’s voice writhes like a fever dream, telling of a man obsessed with the woman upstairs — desiring and fearing her, until love turns into threat. It is a song of desire as abyss, of closeness and distance devouring one another, of passion that offers no escape. Within the film, that performance is not a mere interlude: it becomes the very soundtrack of the fall. While Cave howls his torment before a spellbound crowd, Damiel chooses to renounce eternity and embrace the fire that music has shown him without mercy.

Nick Cave between heaven and earth

He was not just a musician in the background: in Wenders’ film, Nick Cave becomes a threshold. His songs are the fissure through which the world of senses, desire, chaos floods in. Alongside the vigilant silence of the angels, his voice embodies another form of secular sacredness: a nocturnal prophet singing obsession, loss, love turning to menace. Wenders himself admitted it: to make a film in Berlin without Nick Cave would have been a sin of omission.

The Carny, recorded in Berlin at the Hansa Studios that had welcomed David Bowie and U2, tells of a circus collapsing, horses abandoned, communities dissolving. It is not just the track Marion puts on the turntable: it is a self-portrait of the city itself, marginal and nomadic, in mourning and transformation. And then From Her to Eternity — a scream of carnal obsession that within the film becomes a narrative catalyst: it is while Cave bellows it on stage that Damiel chooses to fall, to become a man, to finally share the same plane of existence as Marion.

The fall and the inevitable encounter

It is the moment when everything changes — for the story and for the audience. The angel falls and becomes man: suddenly the world ignites in color, and every simple gesture — blood pulsing in his veins, the bitterness of coffee, the sting of a first cigarette — appears as a daily miracle. The camera lingers on them as if on revelations, fragments of a life that until a moment before had been denied.

Guiding him through this earthly baptism is not only Marion, but also an unexpected presence: Peter Falk (playing himself), whom the film reveals to be a former angel. With the disarming warmth of a smile, the actor audiences knew as Columbo becomes a terrestrial Virgil, teaching Damiel the joy of small things, the beauty of holding in one’s hands what can finally be touched. Marion — the trapeze artist who had sensed his presence without ever seeing him — now recognizes him in the stranger who approaches her at the bar. They embrace, while the roar of the Bad Seeds fades and a string quartet enfolds the scene. For a moment, the sky over Berlin bends low enough to brush the earth.

It is no wonder that, after this appearance, Cave began to modulate his writing differently, allowing tenderness and fragility to live beside fury and darkness. In that encounter, cinema and music do not merely cross paths: they fertilize one another, transforming into something that no longer belongs entirely to either.

In that red, smoky club, Nick Cave does not accompany the story: he makes it inevitable.

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Crippling Alcoholism, the Boston outfit formed in 2022 by vocalist Tony Castrati and drummer Danny Sher, have spent the past three years cultivating a reputation for turning ugliness into cult fascination. Their first two records — When the Drugs That Made You Sick Are the Drugs That Make You Better (2022) and With Love From a Padded Room (2024) — carved out a niche where synths, sludge, and grotesque narratives coexist uneasily, earning them a small but devoted following.

On Camgirl, their third album and debut for Portrayal of Guilt’s label, the band attempt their boldest step forward. At the center is a concept: the figure of a digital sex worker and the orbit of obsession, voyeurism, and power that surrounds her. It’s not quite a celebration, nor a condemnation, but a mosaic of voices on the margins, each reflecting the push-and-pull of desire and disgust. Musically, the template remains familiar — noise, synths, guttural growls, and occasional pop hooks — but the contrasts are heightened, sharper, and more deliberately seductive.

Camgirl often feels like a black-and-white film interrupted by flashes of pink neon. It invites you behind the curtain of a culture already unraveling: a woman becomes a character, seen, consumed, desired, and destroyed by her own masks. Inside these songs lies both disdain and twisted affection for American life in its current form — obsession with spectacle, commodified sexuality, despair, loneliness. It’s unsettling, and it lingers.

When the record leans into this tension between horror and pop, it works brilliantly. bedrot sticks in your head like a corrupted jingle; Pretty in Pink begins almost tenderly before collapsing into chaos; LADIES’ NIGHT sounds like The Cure reimagined by a Midwestern noise collective. In those moments, Crippling Alcoholism find a strange alchemy: grotesquerie rendered seductive, club-ready music that still reeks of the morning after.

But at fifteen tracks, Camgirl overstays its welcome. Some songs feel like filler, others retread old ground. The lyrics, too, veer between sharp vignettes and indulgent smut, at times more provocation than revelation. The band often seem torn between embracing their knack for grimy synth-pop hooks and clinging to their noise-rock roots.

Still, Camgirl is hard to dismiss. It’s a neon sign flickering in the night, daring you to step into a room you’d rather avoid. It isn’t a masterpiece — it stumbles, it sprawls — but it captures something raw and authentic about obsession and decay in contemporary culture.

Ambitious and intermittently compelling, Camgirl shows a band still in transition. If Crippling Alcoholism can trim the excess and more confidently balance their dual identity, they could yet become one of the most vital voices in the American underground.

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With Black Lips it’s always been about the “concept.” The country album (Sing in a World That’s Falling Apart), the kaleidoscopic and deranged one (Satan’s Graffiti or God’s Art?), the more polished but still crooked pop outing (Apocalypse Love). Each chapter arrived with its own frame, a stylistic detour, a new disguise. And now, with Season of the Peach, the band waves the flag of a return to their roots: analog, wild, dirty.

But listen closely to those roots. In the beginning, the Lips were bastard children of Butthole Surfers and the Cramps, radical garage-punk, filthy and unsettling. Outsider rock that smelled of basements and fake blood, music that snarled instead of winking. What we get here is something else entirely: a patchwork that plays like a remix of their last few records. Tippy Tongue toys with girl-group nostalgia filtered through glam; Kassandra dives into psych spirals with a Zappa aftertaste; Zulu Saints is yet another crooked honky tonk shuffle. More compendium than reboot.

The problem is that the old madness is gone. What remains is craft, craft, and more craft. The album sounds good, the songs hold up, but that dangerous spark never comes back. It’s as if the band have turned into their own cover act, repeating moves they know by heart.

Not a disaster, of course: Black Lips are still seductive in their imperfection. But if this was supposed to be the grand return to the dust and chaos of their beginnings, it feels more like a review session than a rebirth. The chaos here is catalogued, and the ferocity — the real one — remains a memory.

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With Altar, NewDad confirm they’ve found an identity that doesn’t deny its debts but reshapes them into their own language: of course, the temptation to play “spot the influence” is strong, and from The Cure / New Order (Pretty, Heavyweight) to Garbage, via Pixies (Roobosh) and Wolf Alice (Misery), the catalogue of references is all there, ready to resurface. And yet, the way Julie Dawson sings gives meaning to it all. She may not summon the late Dolores O’Riordan or Rachel Goswell, but her voice - fragile and relentless at the same time - slots in like velvet between sharp basslines and guitar riffs. It’s in this contrast between release and turbo-charged ennui that the album finds its strength.

There are tracks that hit the mark—Roobosh as a furious outburst, Pretty as a suspended caress, the metallic Misery as a statement of intent—and others that fall short, unable to manage the tension (Sinking Kind Of Feeling) or fading into the background (Puzzle). Compared to Madra, there’s clear growth and a sharper pop edge; what’s still missing, perhaps, are those truly memorable singles that can stick in the mind long after the atmosphere has faded.

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