ROCK-A-RAMA

ROCK-A-RAMA

Rebel y’all: a bunch of records that argue that punk, hardcore, and metal are actually the friends we made along the way

Zachary Lipez

Fred Pessaro

BILLY IDOL

Dream Into It Dark Horse/BMG

Seeing one of the great innovators in the field of mall punk (complimentary) making an album that’s half not bad but also halfrote, third-wave pop punk (derogatory) breaks my heart. Like, I’m genuinely sad that there’s no one in Billy Idol’s circle to tell him, “Your voice is still there, your lyrics are still fun, your cheekbones are still fab. You 100 percent can make an album of '80s new wave plastic punk and it will be the greatest thing ever. No, no, Billy, don’t worry about Machine Gun Kelly or the English Machine Gun Kelly, or even the drummer of Blink-182. All those people would not exist if it weren’t for you, but they are not your peers or competition. You are 69 years old. C’mon, babe. If you absolutely must rock, let’s do an album that sounds like Sonic Temple and be legends."

But, nope. Billy Idol has a producer who, when Idol says shit like, “Let’s get a guy from Foo Fighters!” doesn’t immediately slap Idol across the face and say, “I told you, Billy, NO hacks. We’re pairing you with this gaggle of synth-goths that Artoffact Records found passed out under a table in Toronto.” Rather than a bold truth-teller, Idol is cursed with a guy who says shit like “All these players...come in and contribute on the highest level of rock musicianship.” THE HIGHEST LEVEL OF ROCK MUSICIANSHIP. Jesus Christ. Our Bill never stood a chance.

All that said, the album is not a complete wash. The first track samples Suicide and is solid. “Too Much Fun" is slight but likable, and most endearingly contains the line “Did GHB with GBH” (we reached out to GBH to ask about the accuracy of these lyrics. Representatives of GBH declined to reply on the record). The duet with the lady from the Kills doesn’t reach the delirious, age-gap-tastic heights of Iggy Pop’s duet with Kate Pierson, but very little in this life does. Finally, the album ends with “Still Dancing,” which is a hard n’ heavy AOR rewrite of “White Wedding,” and it’s more fun than anything any of the fools involved have touched in decades. If Idol ever gives us a full album of “Still Dancing”-quality songs, it’ll be the most hot-shit awesome day in America since they faked the moon landing. -ZACHARY LIPEZ

TURNSTILE

Never Enough Roadrunner

On Never Enough, when Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates sings that “time is happening,” he’s not just stating a true thing (Yates’ lyrical minimalism doesn’t leave a lot of room for argument), he’s also picking at what used to be a core Turnstile concern: that things and people change. Even more than the moshing and streetwear, a fixation on the passage of time has signified the Baltimore five-piece as “of hardcore,” even as the songs have grown poppier, the accolades got Grammy-er, and the band has discovered that the little plastic circles on the side of their shirts can be inserted in the slightly smaller fabric holes across from them, with dynamite results. Now, maybe because his band is actually aging (in promo shots, a couple of them look almost 26!), Brendan Yates has narrowed his koan-like focus even more. He feels loved or he doesn’t, and then he finds a sunbeam to stretch out in. It’s possible that Brendan Yates is literally a cat.

In fairness, lyrical specificity has never been what Turnstile are about. Like the jazz singer Betty Carter is with scatting, Brendan Yates is with universally relatable feelings. Anyway, maybe Turnstile’s singer is a cat, or maybe dude has seen enough frontmen disappear up their own diaristic or ideological asses that he prefers to emulate the impressionism of Claude Monet, but with the lyrics of “Sailin’ On” as his muse rather than all those haystacks. Or maybe drummer Daniel Fang having Lee Fang as a brother has given them all enough discourse for a lifetime.

Or maybe it’s just that, in Turnstile’s devotion to building their community—making venues into safe and third spaces, with the veneer of violence (i.e., stage diving, the pit, etc.) applied tastefully as tradition or as an opportunity for Instagrammable bits of ritualized derring-do—Turnstile disdain anything that might diffuse the message of freeing the ass. In the belief that the rest will follow suit.

As to whether a hardcore band existing on a higher plain of spiritual not-surrendering is beautiful or naive...well, we’re still crunching those numbers. Ask us again in 2028.

Either way, a Turnstile that believes in the transformative power of a hardcore discotheque would go a long way to explaining how the band consistently manages to pull off the impossible task of integrating various youth subculture sounds— from hyperpop to B’more club to the Cumbia revival—into heavier guitar rock, without sounding like complete cornballs. Never Enough is audacious enough to even throw new age ambient and chillwave into the mix, and it does so seamlessly, as if the boringness inherent to either genre was always part of the plan; a multi-decade fake-out of chorus-less soma waves, made by an international coterie of gentrifying geniuses, all shat out with the long-game intention of eventually being used as sick buildup on a Turnstile song. Readers who might reasonably fear that the interspacials could get in the way of their God-given right to windmill will be relieved to hear that, when the band gets to the meat of each song, Turnstile still believe that the only thing better than a verse is a chorus, so why not just make ’em all choruses? —z.L.

MELVINS 1983 Thunderball ipecac

The 2006 documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man tells the story of the artist’s journey from teenybopper poster boy, to baroque chanteur, to avant-garde weirdo. It’s a decent flick, but the filmmakers clearly think that Walker didn’t really start cooking, in the artistic-genius sense, till he started hitting slabs of meat with a stick. With Marc Almond as the sole talking head to buck the thesis—the Soft Cell singer basically saying, “I liked it when he wrote songs”—the documentary is so impressed with the whole meat-punching thing that it kind of obscures that Marc Almond was actually wrong. Refreshing, but wrong. Because the industrial accoutrements, embraced nearly a decade after Einstürzende Neubauten had popularized (relatively speaking) aural cow-tipping, were always the least of Walker’s art. Not bad, but barely relevant to Walker’s essential freaky-deakiness and his way around a song, which he never lost.

I bring this up because Thunderball is the second Melvins album in as many years where I’m supposed to give a shit about some concept that, in practice, hardly matters. On last year’s Tarantula Heart, the conceit was that King Buzzo Frankensteined the album from extended jams. As a collection of Melvins songs, Tarantula Heart was nice! As some sort of avant-studio-magic exquisite corpse, it didn’t even approach Eliminator levels of tomfoolery. Now we get the third album by Melvins 1983. No, the conceit is not Buzz Osborne playing with Mike Dillard, the band’s very first drummer. That’s just a cool thing for friends to do together, and Dillard does the job with enough appropriately glacial gusto that the album doesn’t feel like workfare. Nah, the point of complaint is the additional additional musicians. Besides undercutting the album’s very premise—I think it’s unlikely that either Void Manes (“NOISE, CREEPY MACHINE VOCALS”) or Ni Maîtres (“NOISE, UPRIGHT BASS, HAND GESTURES”) were doing much proto-grunge/Sabbath-related activity in 1983—the addition of two noiseniks does very little. The fact that they don’t detract is, in fact, part of the problem. What’s the point of noise if it doesn’t ruin the good time? Instead, outside of occasionally making me think that my Bluetooth earphones were dying, the various bleeps and bloops and drones serve much the same purpose as flair on a TGIF waitress uniform; cute, but I’m here to get wasted in Times Square exclusively. —Z.L.

SCOWL

Are We All Angels

Dead Oceans

The Santa Cruz alternative rock band Scowl came up in the hardcore scene, where they played hardcore music. Now they are an upper-mid-tier popular band that no longer plays hardcore music. If the previous two sentences make you feel any emotion whatsoever, let me be the first to congratulate you on your leisure time. In fact, let’s all take a moment to revel in gratitude for agriculture and the discovery of fire, the two greatest contributing factors for our species no longer having to center our lives on not getting eaten by bears, and therefore having the time to get worked up about Scowl’s hardcore credentials.

While I’m genetically predisposed to being sympathetic to any community that sees itself as a modern-day Warsaw ghetto, with the resultant need to winnow out and purge the traitors, I'll admit that I have a hard time seeing the stakes involved in a band like Scowl using the pre-chorus guitar screech from Radiohead’s “Creep" (and/or that one Everclear song) to get a slightly bigger festival lineup font size. I mean, the riffs still work like crazy, and it’s not like Radiohead or Everclear (or Weezer or Nirvana or or or...) are doing anything with them. And frankly, if sounding like a band that’d be on Revelation Records in 1995 means you’re no longer hardcore, the entire bootleg T-shirt industry is going to take a hit that I’m not sure the naysayers over at r/Hardcore are financially ready for. —Z.L.

THE MARS VOLTA

Lucro Sucio; Los Ojos Del Vacio

Clouds Hill

Like if Phil Collins was in Genesis. Like if Rob Thomas sang for Santana. 10 out of 10.

According to my editors, “Nobody is going to get that,” and even if they did, it’s “not that funny.” So, fine, the new Mars Volta is not just AM radio pop sensibilities + loping Latin prog. It’s also like if any of the ’70s sensualists of your choosing (Labi Siffre, Jimmie Spheeris, Vampirella, etc.) put out a soundtrack on Fania.

Also: A couple years back, Volta drummer Linda-Philomène Tsoungui got some shit online for not listening to Rush. So if there’s a spontaneous human combustion epidemic amongst the male-traction-alopecia YouTube commenter set, Lucro Sucio; Los Ojos Del Vacio is why. —Z.L.

VIAGRA BOYS

Viagr Aboys

Shrimptech Enterprises

Viagra Boys formed in 2015, when a bunch of tracksuited Swedes (with names so Swedish one assumes their parents were At the Gates fans) logged onto whatever the Temu was in 2015 and had a sentient Mike Ness sex pillow delivered to their doorstep. The Swedes named said sex pillow “Murphy,” taught him rudimentary English (using only a Bill Hicks joke book and the 14th studio album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), and that was that. The rest was easy.

Or at least the Viagra Boys make it look easy. Exactly how this rinky-dink, plinkety-plonk gang of Quincy Punx manages to Velcro their own sneakers, let alone make one album after another of near perfect bubblegum post-punk (with 2022’s Caue World having a song, “Troglodyte,” so near perfect that Father John Misty used it as a template for writing his first good song), is a mystery. I’d say they do it with mirrors, but I’m pretty sure frontman Murphy is the only member of the band to have ever owned a mirror. And he doesn’t seem like a sharer. Whatever the secret, Viagr Aboys continues the hot streak. Eleven tracks of disco-fied scuzz rock and pub goth anthemics, with a batting average for shameless hooks not seen since the first few Kaiser Chiefs albums, and the whole sordid mess carried into beauty by the incongruously resonant voice and sub-Bukowski provocations of Sebastian Murphy, who, failing to be “haha” funny even once, settles for poignancy. —Z.L

USE KNIFE

Etat Coupable

VIERNULVIER

The press for the album includes the line “And although ‘État Coupable’ doesn’t pretend to offer a solution, there’s a hopeful philosophy at its core,” which is more than fair but also teases a possibility where a band with geopolitical focus says, “Good news! We figured it out!” and then on, like, track 3, world peace and the liberation of all oppressed and marginalized people are achieved. That doesn’t happen here (maybe on a B-side...), but what is here is pretty good too. In fact, what this Belgian-Iraqi trio manage—a Wax Trax!’s greatest-hits package, all throbbing bangers and pulsating atmospherics, minus the orientalism that edgy industrial rockers indulged in during the ’80s/’90s—is downright astounding. Maybe a distant second to world peace, but on par with, like, Nitzer Ebb at their best, and way better than most of the world’s junk. —Z.L.

SACRED PAWS

Jump Into Life

Merge

Drawing most from highlife, post-punk and folk—three genres where shredding is either redundant or frowned upon—Ray Aggs is an atypical guitar hero. It’s unlikely that the guitarist would even approve of such hierarchical thinking. Yet, as the reverse-Clapton in the bands Shopping, Trash Kit, and Sacred Paws, Aggs—with their unerring sense of melody coupled with quicksilver playing—has indeed risen up as one of their generation’s most consistently awe-inspiring axe-persons. As their awesomeness is not operating on any shred-based metric, Aggs fits in snug as a bug with fellow Glaswegian, drummer, and singer Eilidh Rodgers on their also extremely awesome Sacred Paws project. Without sublimating either of the artists’ charms, Sacred Paws play up the strength of the melodies and the chiming heart behind even the duo’s more melancholy impulses. For point of comparison, one could do worse than Fun Boy Three, in that golden age of the band when Jane Wiedlin would drop by and keep the demons at bay. Of course, half the songs on Jump Into Life appear to be about some Jane Wiedlin or another walking out the door. So, fingers crossed on Sacred Paws’ behalf. —Z.L.

INFINITY KNIVES & BRIAN ENNALS

A City Drowned in God’s Black

Tears

Phantom Limb

The song “Baggy” opens with “Kobe Bryant was a rapist and he paid for that/Alcoholic househusband, I was made more for that/ Sniffing new blow off of old magazines,” then the hook: “From the river to the sea/ From the baggy to the key/Shit don’t stop till all my free.” If any of that bums you out, I’m sorry about your being a spiritual (non-gendered) pussy. Thoughts and prayers to you. Still, I feel like I should at least try to save your deficient soul by pointing out the fact that this Baltimore duo’s bracing/inspiring worldview is generally couched in what the downtown set calls “New Music” (think opera that Brooklynites with hairdos like), old-timey music (think the medieval black metal band Obsequiae but more black and less metal, or Charlie Looker’s Extra Life, or just doing lines at the Renaissance fair), electro/freestyle roller funk (“Bobby Brown is my North Star/And rehab is my New Edition”), the decades of rap where—if there needed to be singing—you either sampled a Middle Easterner or called up Jody Watley, and the eras of hiphop when the listener didn’t need the equivalent of a “Who’s Who in the Marvel Universe” to have heard of who the rapper wanted to die of hurt feelings. If none of that moves the needle, I suppose I’m at a loss for how to help you. I mean, not that you need help. Seeing as how Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals do not make music for people who are doing great, I assume you have 20/20 vision, are addicted to nothing stronger than Western Civilization/hentai, and probably own the building where I’m typing this. So, actually, can I borrow $10,000? —Z.L.

ASHLEIGH FLYNN & THE RIVETERS

Good Morning Sunshine

Blackbird

As Apple TV tends to treat its TV shows like redheaded stepchildren, I have no idea how many people saw the show Bad Monkey, and how well this framing device is going to fly, but let’s roll them dice. Bad Monkey is an excellent show, based on the Miami noir novels of Carl Hiaasen. The show is bright and jaunty, sardonic without being cynical, features a lovely performance by Vince Vaughn, and is only marred by one novelty, which diabolically was the only aspect of the show that Apple TV put any effort into promoting. That novelty was that the soundtrack of Bad Monkey is almost entirely Tom Petty covers. And those covers are uniformly mediocre, like what you’d get if you gave a thousand monkeys a thousand years to try to improve upon “Free Failin’,” and all the monkeys were fucking hacks.

What they should have done is just given the assignment to Ashleigh Flynn & The Riveters, the rollicking twang-Americana band that makes a no-frills hoot/holler (but with frills attached) and who’d have played the shit out of “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” This is bar rock, sure, but it’s out of a bar in Portland, so the hair is especially wild and the politics are impeccable (without being egregiously so...they’re clearly drinkers). Better yet, the show should have just hired the Riveters to do their originals.

Don’t even get me started on how some of the urbane ruralism spat out by these blues-getting cowgirls would have maybe saved that goddamn Justified spin-off... —Z.L.

MEKONS

Horror

Fire

The so-called “curse” of the Mekons is a big tent. As the greatest punk band that most punks have never heard more than one song from, and as the most sonically diverse post-punk band ever to be pigeonholed as merely the first alt-country band, the greatest indignity the Mekons will ever suffer is the inalterability of their designation as a “critic’s band.” Even in 2025, when nary a critic under the age of 45 gives a shit about the Chicago/Leeds/international institution, a critic’s band the Mekons remain. And here’s why: After a month of wading through endless ’90s revivalism, '70s pastiche, relentless cynicism, slack-jawed naivete, willfully oblique prog rock, countless ninth-rate pro-gear indie acts, and one million emails essentially framing an onset fascist regime as a big win for the arts, I’m currently sitting at my computer, almost sobbing with joy while listening to this decades-old punk band who are still crafting accessible rock/pop songs and sloshing over with idiosyncratic ideas, who are still breathing under the boot of history and empire, and who are still sweating out hope like they’re still drunk from the night/century before. Who still sound only like themselves. I’m not trying to hyperbolate. Maybe the Mekons are singular because they are just bad at approximating the bands they’re trying to rip off and nobody sounds like the Mekons because nobody wants to. Either/or, the outcome is the same. These 12 songs about English imperialism, on the album appropriately named Horror, are gorgeous and strange, with the band checking off the few subculture boxes (Flying Nun jangle, anthemic peace punk) they hadn’t, over the course of 30-something LPs, gotten around to. Best Mekons album since 2019’s Deserted. Or 2011’s Ancient and Modern. Or 1993’s I Heart Mekons. Or...well, let’s not let sentiment blind us; it’s not better than anything prior to 1993. Still, it’s fantastic. Mekons are a critic’s band because non-critics had their chance and they fucking blew it. So now they can go get their own Mekons and good luck to them. This Mekons is ours. —Z.L.

BROWN ACID

The Twentieth Trip

RidingEasy

Ten years on, predicated on the entirely correct belief that the record industry gatekeepers have never had a clue what they were doing, hard rock label RidingEasy’s mathless answer to the Messthetics compilations is going strong as strychnine on its 20th edition. When it doesn’t work, like when the sub-Lucifer’s Friend riffs are swell but the tape hiss is literally painful, it’s very annoying. But that’s two songs tops, and I’ve been running in indie circles long enough to know how much people love music that “authentically” sounds like shit. More important, when the comp works, it works like it’s someone with a job. Both the Banana Bros, and the Jordan Brothers (no relation) illustrate the caveman range of the music within, with the former grandly funking and the latter’s “Thank You for the Ride” somehow managing to top the absurdity of the song title, the song’s gang vocal chorus, and its police-whistled coda, by—despite sounding like the theme song of a particularly problematic grindhouse biker band— having been released initially in 1980.

Basically, as part of this very magazine’s existence is predicated on an appreciation for the Yardbirds’ blues rock being misrendered via the fevered idiot minds of Count Five, it would be disgraceful of us to not dig a song like Hot Candy’s “Darkened Passage,” where, in less than four minutes, the entire Black Sabbath discography is run through the wood chipper and reassembled by a bunch of thumbless tree-people. And dig it we do. SO MUCH. Not only is it a real time-saver, the song’s proto-proto-proto-no-wave guitar solo will give you enough insight into atonality that you’ll never have to listen to Sonic Youth again. (I know the solo is not literally atonal, just real screw-loosey. Please don’t write in.) —Z.L.

LO-PAN

Get Well Soon

Magnetic Eye

I’ve never been in a stoner metal band. But I was, for almost a decade, in a band with an amazing drummer (s/o Jimmy Paradise!) who’d been in a fairly popular one. Through that connection, I spent a fair amount of the aughts playing with bands with names like “Jimbo’s Sunglass Hut” or “Torque Slut.” The continental United States used to be littered with such

bands: half-sketchy, half-professorial duders with landing-strip chin hair and baseball caps that looked like they’d been to hell and back, playing tuned-down riffs that ranged from Cavity to Torche. So getting an album from Lo-Pan—a Columbus, Ohio, band whose fidelity to the genre is strong enough to have a jokey pidgin Chinese band name and album mixing done by Andrew Schneider (of PIGS...s/o Jimmy Paradise!)— triggers a bit of low-grade PTSD. Or it would, if I didn’t happen to enjoy the works of Sleep, Unsane, Torche, et al. If critical darlings can make a living just by hiccuping some Mark E. Smith laundry list, I’m not going to judge those who choose different strains of traditionalism. So, yes, Get Well Soon is in the wheelhouse. But Lo-Pan get credit for rocking a lane that is not 1/100th as crowded as it used to be, and their version of the wheel is excellent. The chrome shines and the wheel surely does roll.

Extra credit for the raucous guitar freak-out on “Rogue Wave” and for Jeff Martin’s singing, which is quite distinct (especially on “God’s Favorite Victim”) and nicely elides the bluster and pastiche usually associated with stoner-stock. He sounds invested more than cool (and he sounds pretty cool). —Z.L.

L. A. WITCH

DOGGOD

Suicide Squeeze

Sade Sanchez, L.A. Witch’s vocalist/guitarist, has an affinity for motorcycles that extends beyond the usual garage rocker romanticism for leather and chrome. It’s self-evident on L.A. Witch’s previous two albums (and multiple singles), where the trio present biker aesthetic repeatedly but nonchalantly, with enough Ghost Rider brio that, when I say they make me think of Love and Rockets, the reader can imagine I’m talking about either the U.K. band or the American comic book and be right.

If one doesn’t mind a little critical reaching, Sanchez’s ability to disassemble a Harley shines through on DOGGOD, a collection of stripped-down purrers where the only parts used are the ones that make a song go. With loping basslines and sunset-fried vocals—and a hi-hat, snare, and fuzz minimalism that makes their ancestors (JAMC, Dum Dum Girls, etc.) seem positively baroque in comparison—the trio’s laser focus on moody cruising largely works. It also might be a bit dry for some. Probably depends on how one feels about driving through the desert.

Speaking of areas where mileage may vary, as the use of palindromes in album titles usually implies, on paper some of the lyrical themes of DOGGOD are...well, let’s just say they’re no more or less woo-woo than anything by the Cult. And since Sanchez sings out those themes with a perfectly winning cough-cool resignation, we can follow the band’s lead and keep it moving. Anyway, if the album title’s analogy—something about women being subservient as dogs and therefore divine—feels a bit inexact, that doesn’t mean the songs aren’t bitchin’. —Z.L.

IRON LUNG

Adapting // Crawling

iron Lung

Iron Lung are a Nor’western powerviolence duo made up of Jensen Ward (drums/ vocals) and Jon Kortland (guitar/vocals), with Ward being the power and Kortland wearing the violence pants in the relationship. I'm kidding, of course. The two men’s roles in Iron Lung can’t be so neatly defined because “powerviolence” is one word. And, like “powerviolence,” “badass,” “DIY,” or “godhead,” Iron Lung is, in a word, a miracle of compression and combustion. (Powerviolence doesn’t do math. That’s a different genre.)

What is powerviolence, you might ask? Glad you asked. Powerviolence is hardcore but with shorter songs, just like hardcore! Powerviolence is metalcore minus 90 percent of the guitar parts and 100 percent of the guys in a metalcore band who make metalcore suck as bad as it does. Powerviolence is grindcore, but instead of being performed by men in shorts who have to wear ankle bracelets, it’s performed by men in camo shorts who’d be criminals only if skateboarding were a crime (which it isn’t!!!). Powerviolence is the first five seconds of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla,” stuck on lock groove, but still expressing deep ambivalence regarding humanity’s relationship with nature. Powerviolence is the Minutemen if the Minutemen were from Boston. Still confused? Don’t worry about it. While you were reading this, all 18 songs on Adapting // Crawling have finished.

All you need to know is that Iron Lung are the best powerviolence band on Earth. Mainly because there are few bands, of any genre, as singularly focused on grievance and dignity as Iron Lung are (with those twin obsessions being the fuel for every 60-second blast, against the forces of lassitude, on here), and only slightly because Iron Lung are the last powerviolence band on Earth. That fact only proves how good Iron Lung are, since—much like how hardcore is the point of hardcore—not dying is the point of powerviolence. Birds are the last dinosaurs, but only a moron would use that as faint praise. —Z.L.

KINSELLA & PULSE, LLC

Open ing Night

Kill Rock Stars

I was heavily predisposed to hate this. Being one of those ancient clichés who believes “emo” went wrong when emotional hardcore singers stopped screaming off-key, I’m not a big fan of the bands that made Tim Kinsella a hero to those who find my adolescent gate keeping idiotic. Fair point to them, but I can’t tell the difference between the Promise Ring and Goo Goo Dolls, and I don’t seem to be outgrowing that anytime soon. Plus, on the Kinsella & Pulse, LLC (the Cap’n Jazz dude and his wife, Jenny Pulse) website there’s a “Life/Style” section where the duo sell Portlandia vibes by the yard. (Meaning they sell things that I enjoy/appreciate, but, because I don’t know them personally and there are no visible NYHC signifiers, I have some weird fucking problem with it.) Finally, the band’s bio compares the album to the KLF, which is the kind of hubris that leads to floods, wifey pillars of salt, and various towers throughout history getting smote.

Well, it looks like my prejudice of small differences has made me an idiot again, what with Open ing Night being an album of small differences, to its own great success. Strange, Steady Diet of Nothing-esque off-riffing subverts the songs’ pop melodies (but not too much), while the understated loveliness of Pulse’s voice gives reason to whatever drifting codas might otherwise feel tacked on. The ostentatiously rudimentary beats conjure up the DIY keyboard experimentations of the '80s and '90s, but those time stamps are offset by either elaborate art guitar, space-age folk melodicism, or just the entire unselfconscious lyrical concerns of the two singers. A reasonably gorgeous tidal feel prevails, with every push and pull sounding as intentional as whatever grand design the moon gets up to at night. Maybe the only way Open ing Night resembles the work of the KLF is in how putting out such an oddball record is the equivalent of Kill Rock Stars setting $1,000,000 on fire, so there’s a Sisyphean integrity to this art too. —Z.L.

PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS

Death Hilarious

Missing Piece

Full disclosure: Despite having always enjoyed their brand of doomy, Iron Clawstropheliac rock ’n’ roll, I have previously declined to write about Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs because the name has too many “Pigs” in it. And I don’t want to use the “Pigs 7x” shorthand favored by my peers who are always looking for a shortcut to the truth. I feel strongly that our industry can’t argue for our not being replaced by AI if, once we commit to coverage of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, we’re not even willing to type out the word “pigs” seven times. Having held firm to this principled stand for the past eight years, I agreed to write this review because Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs’ publicist got my wife and I tickets to see Tindersticks, an English rockabilly act that my wife enjoys. Don’t think of it as payola, think of it as how the sausage sausage sausage sausage sausage sausage sausage gets made. Or consider that Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs are a band that is as inventively classicist in its approach to denim demonology as Tindersticks are about their noir/velour crooning. The only difference (besides the two bands not sounding alike) is how the Newcastle-upon-Tyne quintet mix things up by clearly loving Unsane as much as they do the Pink Fairies, and having El-P feature on a track, while Tindersticks keep things interesting by cheating on their girlfriends. Otherwise, it’s all black velvet. Point is: Seeing as current events have led to “money” no longer existing in any traditional sense, if you also happen to rep a hella solid stoner/noise metal band with an unwieldy name, my wife also enjoys Rod Stewart and Kraftwerk, both of whom are touring this year. —Z.L.

SPELLLING

Portrait of My Heart

Sacred Bones

How one will feel about Portrait of My Heart, this Oakland avant-pop auteur’s fifth album, is theoretically dependent on how one feels about Chuck Eddy, in his 1992 book Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, listing Teena Marie’s Emerald City as the ninth-greatest heavy metal album (in the universe). I say “theoretically” because the existence of any overlap between Teena Marie fans, Chuck Eddy’s readership, and regular consumers of the Sacred Bones catalog is...theoretical. Bearing that in mind, let’s say that how one feels about Portrait of My Heart depends on whether one considers Joi’s famously rejected 1997 collaboration with Fishbone, Amoeba Cleansing System, to be solely of historical interest or a lost masterpiece of '90s R&B/hard rock fusion. No? Still nothing? So, okay, maybe it would be better to say that how one feels about Portrait of My Heart depends on how one feels about Nona Hendryx. No? Really? What the heck are they teaching in schools these days? Alright, look, Portrait of My Heart is a roller-coaster-esque pop album, with Chrystia Cabral’s typically inventive arrangements and soaring vocals occasionally alley-ooping to some fairly typical guitar chuggery provided by the dudes from Turnstile and Zulu. When it works, it’s perfectly thrilling. When it doesn’t, it’s still a solidly inventive pop metal album. Maybe not the ninth-best heavy metal album in the universe (the universe has expanded considerably since 1992), but in the top couple hundred for sure. —Z.L.

ANIKA

Abyss

Sacred Bones

First LP was Nico using sub-bass and compressed drums to drive dub reggae beats and I loved it. Exploded View was Nico over Can or Amon Düül with super haunting production. And guess what, I loved it. Now Abyss is Nico over tensionfilled post-punk like Joy Division and the Fall. I love it. Now if I can only get her to respond to my calls, texts, emails, telegrams, or faxes. -FRED PESSARO