Bartosz Dziadosz - Peace (2023)

Bartosz Dziadosz is better known as pleq, but this time he released his new album under his birth name. And the results are particularly interesting both thanks to the form of the music and the atmosphere that Peace is filled with.

Perhaps the artist chose to use his own name to underline the theme of the album which is the tragic war that Russia started in Ukraine and the longing for the title's peace. Interestingly enough, the album was released by the formerly Russian label DRONARIVM, making it clear that at least some of this country's citizen feel the same about the war. The music here is an extremely ethereal take on meditative and moody ambient-like neoclassical soundscapes. It's also fairly diverse genre-wise, but the overall results are clearly mesmerizing in the beauty of the neoclassic elements and experimentally interesting.

Peace costs 5 EUR.

Check: GABI

Country: Poland

Genre: experimental dreamscape

Label: DRONARIVM

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Loather - Eis (2023)

While I first posted about the Austrian band of Loather back in 2018, this year's Eis is their first LP ever. And it was quite worth waiting for since the album is a great example of rough and heavy music that is also particularly mesmerizing.

The band's road to the debut release has been rough with pandemics problems and line-up changes along the way. Luckily they made it. And Eis is filled with captivating music. From the very first notes, it attacks the audience with rough guitar sounds and heavy and dark atmosphere. The lo-fi vibes add to the sincerity of the album, making it even more striking I feel. On Eis, the band dances between black metal and shoegaze quite regularly and with fantastic grace too. Some parts are clearly (post-) black metal with angry screams and fittingly aggressive guitars, but some other are smoothed down by attractive, almost dreamy vocals. Still. very, very loud. And really, really good.

Eis costs 7 EUR.

Check: Mortuary

Country: Austria

Genre: post-black metal

Label: Vendetta Records

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Magic Wands - Switch (2023)

It's time for already the sixth album in the California-based band's discography and I have to say, Magic Wands are one of the lesser known dreamy artists whom I find the most consistently good with what they do. As it is the case with this year's Switch.

Their dream pop feels like hot chocolate: it's beautiful but not high-paced, it's atmospheric but melodic, it's dark. I can feel notes of wave and post-punk here (especially thanks to the clear bass line backgrounds), but the whole thing is more dreamy and hazy than cold and minimalist. It's great pop music with this gloomier hint and ethereal mood all over it. The balance between all the ingredients is pretty good here and it's one of the reasons I find the band so good since 2018's Abrakadabra (and I need to check out the previous albums as well). For hardcore fans, the Bandcamp version of the album includes remixes that make the release virtually twice as long. 

Switch costs 10.99 USD.

Magic Wands - Illuminate (2020)

Magic Wands - Abrakadabra (2018)

Check: Switch

Country: California, US

Genre: wave-esque dream pop

Label: Metropolis Records

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Battlestations - Memoirs of Once (2023)

As you can already tell, I'm a big fan of this mysterious project from Brussels. Their music can be called many things but orchestral ambient is probably the most interesting one of them. Their new take on the curious music is called Memoir of Once.

The Belgian artist(s) combine various genres into one coherent soundscape. There are long fragments of ambient beauty that slowly but surely becomes louder and louder until it reaches the level of almost-post-rock music. But there are also bits and pieces of dark ambient and sacral ambient (so great in The Disappeared) as well as full-blown electronica and neoclassicism. The whole thing is like a mystery for the audience to uncover bit by bit, note by note. This music has a lot of focus-inducing and self-reflective abilities, but it definitely can be actively enjoyed as well.

Memoirs of Once costs 7 EUR.

Battlestations - Inform (2020)

Battlestations - Vixit (2017)

Check: The Ghost of Lady Farewell

Country: Belgium

Genre: sacral ambient

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Psychic Scream - Psychic Scream (2023)

The "melt your face noise punk from the depths of hell", the depths of hell meaning North Carolina, band called Psychic Scream is a new thing that follows the trail of great American bands that combine nugaze with very aggressively heavy and noisy music. Connor Regan, who is responsible for this commotion, showed it on his self-titled debut EP.

I love how uncontrollably noisy the music is. While the melodies are very catchy, the vocals appropriately dreamy, the music beneath them (and above and around really) is a chaotic storm of noise: the guitars wreck your nerves, the audio effects make your brain scream and the drums march in extremely fast, mesmerizing pace. Regan didn't do the whole thing by himself, but I admire his music taste with the psychedelia and doom showing their influences everywhere on the album. The pure chaos of noise rock, however, is what I hear the most here and I love how overwhelming it gets and how well it works with psychedelic/nugaze vocals. Great debut.

Psychic Scream costs 4.20 USD.

Check: Fairweather Friends

Country: North Carolina, US

Genre: noise-gaze

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Soulless - The Supreme Resurgence (2023)

I've been experiencing a lot of great quality blackgaze music recently. And this week is no different thanks to the Indonesian project Soulless. This year the artist released their fifth album (after 2020's cooperation with Sadness among others) and called it The Supreme Resurgence.

I'm extremely keen on this music genre, especially recently. The shoegaze's flow and blissful atmosphere meeting the pure noise of black metal fits perfectly into my moods. And Soulless definitely nails the genre's requirements with their fast and atmospheric loud music. The artist reaches the very pinnacles of airiness in the synth-heavy compositions like the very fittingly titled Let There Be Dreams. I love how slowly some of the tracks develop from the airy ambients into the massive, monumental passages of loudness and ethereality. One of the best albums within the genre this year, no doubts about it (although it was recorded three years ago).

The Supreme Resurgence costs 7 USD.

Check: Let There Be Dreams

Country: Indonesia

Genre: blackgaze

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TAKH - TAKH (2023)

While TAKH is technically the debut album from the band, the artists behind it are known from the The Black Heart Rebellion and here are joined by Annelies Van Dinter. Together they have recently released their self-titled debut album and promoted it during this year's Dunk!Festival.

The band's music is this kind of prog rock, psychedelia, folkish post-rock music that I automatically associate with Crippled Black Phoenix. The music layer is made of heavy and crunchy guitars and well-audible drum pulse, but, while noisy, it's far from the metal-like wall of noise. This is combined with clear, rock-like mixed (or choral) vocals and results in heavy but also very much melodic compositions. It feels like heavier, darker folk rock and I appreciate this approach very much (especially in Azure Blue!). This makes it sound primal, very natural but also unnervingly gloomy with the potential for the songs to be big hits at the same time.

TAKH costs 10 EUR.

Check: Azure Blue

Country: Belgium

Genre: psychedelic post-prog-rock

Label: Consouling Sounds

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Emphasis - Lazaret (2023)

This is the fourth album in the band's history, but I have to say that I'd never heard of the Croatian Emphasis. Meanwhile, the outfit is really fluent at combining post-rock music with heavier, post-metal elements and they prove it on their new album called Lazaret.

The experienced outfit (they've been around at least since 2007) creates guitar-oriented instrumental soundscapes that strike with dense, moody atmosphere and puts angry, shouting post-metal vocals on top of them. These metal vibes can also be heard in the guitars as well, in some places, like in The Gray Man, the clearly post-rock compositions suddenly get stormier and heavier only to get back to the moody instrumental music again. The post-rock nature is only underlined by the inclusion of voice samples that add to the story-telling side of the music. But the strength of this music lies in the perfect balance between the overwhelming post-metal and moody post-rock and this balance is best audible in Flood the Earth where the extremely heavy music gradually takes over the spot lights and offers a fantastic performance.

Lazaret costs 7 EUR.

Check: Flood the Earth

Country: Croatia

Genre: blackened post-rock

Label: Geenger Records

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Perfumed Saturnine Angels - Saccharine Curses Exhaled in the Wind (2023)

I know Garry Brents as Gonemage, the music project that combines black metal with chiptune and it's as crazy as it sounds. The project conceived as a duo, now, after Brandon Nurick's passing, continues as Brents solo project with the debut album called Saccharine Curses Exhaled in the Wind as a homage to Nurick's name.

While this time Brents doesn't use the electronica samples and, overall, sounds more "serious" for the metal music fans, his work still surprised me a lot. There is something in the quality of the sound (and particularly his vocals) that makes me feel like I've got hit in the head with the audio wave. It's loud and it's overwhelming in the best possible way. But the compositions are far from being homogeneous walls of noise: they are experimentally diverse with mathrock-like pace changes going from slow guitar-only passages to fast and angry, energy-fueled madness as rapidly as you can imagine. 

And I have to mention that: the cover art is at the god-tier level.

Saccharine Curses Exhaled in the Wind costs whatever you want to pay.

Gonemage - Handheld Demise (2022)

Gonemage - Mystical Extraction (2021)

Check: Trash Judgement

Country: Texas, US

Genre: math black metal

Label: Zegema Beach Records

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