The Sword have announced their first European tour dates since 2015, with the recently reunited band slating a trio of intimate club performances alongside festival appearances, including Copenhell, Freak Valley, and Tons of Rock.
The Sword European Tour:
June 19 Copenhagen, DK Copenhell Festival
June 21 Netphen, DE Freak Valley Festival
June 22 Nijmegen, NL Doornroosje
June 25 Gothenburg, SE Monument
June 26 Stockholm, SE Slaktyrkan
June 28 Oslo, NO Tons of Rock Festival
Tickets for the three exclusive club dates are on-sale now, with ticket links available via TheSwordOfficial.com.
The legendary Austin-based band announced their reunion earlier this year, bringing their signature blend of crushing heaviness and cosmic groove back to audiences who have long awaited their comeback. JD Cronise, in conversation with Revolver, discussed The Sword’s Levitation Festival performance as a turning point for the foursome, describing the experience as “like putting on a comfortable pair of sneakers.” Kyle Shutt added: “I can’t tell you what it means to see everyone’s positive reception. It feels so good to see people out there almost more enthusiastic about the band than ever – it’s something we’ll never take for granted.”
Psychedelic-laced indie rockers MESSINESSpresent the single ‘Previous Life’ – an upbeat sonic reflection on alienation, sensory excess, and the paradox of nostalgia. At its heart, the song articulates an existential crisis in which the self seeks refuge in an imagined past that is not so much remembered as it is constructed. The band’s debut album will be released later this year via Tarla Records and StoneFree Records. ‘Previous Life’ imbues psychedelic 60s-flavoured indie rock with a raw, rebellious exploration of life.
Based in the gritty underbelly of Italy’s fashion capital, Milan, Messiness revolves around Sicilian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist MAX RAFFA. Messiness is the welcome result of his remarkable journey, carved through Europe’s cultural landscapes, from sun-bleached Balearic shores to British harbor towns, as Raffa performed in various rock ’n’ roll bands while conducting the ethnographic research that ultimately shaped his musical vision.
Raffa has assembled a proper motley crew: Rosario Lo Monaco wielding guitars, Filippo La Marca manning the keys, Giovanni Calella thumping the bass, and Luca Anello keeping the beat.
“This “Previous Life” is not a site of historical retrieval but a metaphysical counterpoint to the suffocating present—a liminal space where agency dissolves, aspirations are rendered obsolete, and structure itself is negated. The song thus stages a dialectic between presence and absence, reality and myth, in which the very act of longing for another life exposes the impossibility of its attainment,” explains Max Raffa.
“‘Previous Life’ is not merely a reflection on nostalgia; it is an interrogation of nostalgia’s internal contradictions. The song exposes the futility of retreating into an imagined past, revealing that such a past is, by definition, uninhabitable. The impulse to escape is simultaneously an acknowledgment of entrapment—the longing for a life beyond structure, obligation, and meaning ultimately leads not to liberation but to negation.”
Messiness creates accessible, vibrant feel-good indie rock with Britpop leanings. Incorporating elements of art pop, psychedelic and space rock elements, their harmonic styles bring Canterbury scene experimentation together with Southern European flavours, drawing from both traditional and urban soundscapes.
In ‘Previous Life’, the repetition of “I’m making plans for my previous life” serves as both a mantra and a lament. The author clings to the idea of a different, freer existence, but the sheer act of making plans—a forward-looking action—ironically contradicts the notion of a previous life. Raffanotes, “This contradiction reinforces the song’s central theme: the longing for a life beyond structure, obligation, and meaning ultimately leads not to liberation but to negation; the search for meaning often leads to its undoing, and the past we construct as a refuge is, in the end, an illusion.”
Night Beats announces a new 7″single, “Behind The Green Door,” out April 11 on Suicide Squeeze. The video features the directorial debut by Danny Lee Blackwell,which was heavily inspired by Giallo films.
On side A, we’re treated to a down-tempo, minor key track drenched in the haze of vice, as if some aspiring Motor City outfit had traveled down to Austin and snuck into the studio to cut a song while The 13th Floor Elevators were on a smoke break. Or perhaps it’s more akin to a meeting between Ray Charles, Skip Pence, and Link Wray. Or maybe it’s Joe Tex grappling with Gram Parsons. Or Duane Eddy pairing up with Cedric Bixler-Zavala. Or maybe it’s just years of Blackwell distilling and translating the sounds around him into his own concoction.
Danny Lee Blackwell explains the story behind “Behind The Green Door”:
“This song started as a lone star instrumental, something I pieced together in my studio in 2024. I imagined dusty roads and dimly lit dance halls. I wanted the guitars to shimmer like heat waves on an open road. The rhythm to pull like footsteps across a wooden floor, soaked in smoke and neon. The lyrics followed, drawn from past and present—unwavering love, transcendence. The ‘green door’ is that threshold between devotion and disillusionment. The story lives not just in the words, but in the tones and textures, if uncovered.”
Under the moniker of Night Beats, Texas native Danny Lee Blackwell has spent the last fifteen years exploring a nexus of vintage rhythm & blues, after-midnight soul, and sun-scorched psychedelia. On Night Beats’ latest offering, Blackwell presents two markedly different renditions of his song “Behind the Green Door.” On side A, “Behind The Green Door” is an invitation to enter the kingdom and dwell in the garden while the shadow of doubt looms nearby, a subconscious journey into the delights and pitfalls of unknown territories made manifest in the music of Night Beats.
Side B features the Rah John version of “Behind The Green Door.” According to the Night Beats camp, Rah John was discovered by Blackwell on his recent expedition to the island Koh Khram Yai, located off the coast of Pattaya in the Gulf of Thailand. Not much is known about the young artist besides his love for 70’s Thai disco and dancehall tapes received from local sailors. Hearing a streak of revelry buried in the Night Beats tune, Rah John summoned a sunnier, breezier, and more exotic side to the Rhythm and Blues sway of the original.
Suicide Squeeze is proud to offer up Night Beats “Behind The Green Door” b/w “Behind The Green Door (Rah John Version)” out April 11 on seven-inch transparent violet vinyl, limited to 500 copies.
Ty Segall rides back in with his 16th album, Possession, to be released May 30th via Drag City, and with today’s announcement, releases the lead single, “Fantastic Tomb.” Following 2024’s Three Bells, Possession sees Ty on the hunt for new horizons, hitting the trail beneath the big skies of our frontier empire to take us on a high-octane narrative journey. A literary set of lyrics co-written by his longtime collaborator, filmmaker Matt Yoka, paint an abiding view of quintessentially American stories. All the while, there are invigorated new sounds around every bend – glittering rhythm arrangements feature more of Ty’s own piano woodshedding than ever, joined in battle by sweeping movements of strings and horns. Rife with singing guitar leads and banks of Ty’s vocal harmonies, Possession features some of Ty’s most inspired songs to date.
Tapping Yoka to write with him was one of the keys to this new music. As a non-musician, Yoka’s language sense is different from the one Ty’s amassed as a player of music. With the trust they’ve developed over the years — brainstorming the visual worlds of Goodbye Bread, Manipulator, Emotional Mugger, and music of Yoka’s Whirlybird documentary — they throw the conceptual ball back and forth to translate a general feeling or a vibe into wicked lyric imagery, each acting as writer and editor in the process. Be it de Toqueville, duBois, George H. Nash, Howard Zinn, Bob Dylan or Smile-era Beach Boys, Ty’s sharpened narrative approach and storytelling takes a page from everyone’s history.
Today’s single, “Fantastic Tomb,” is an epic story-song. Desperate for something he can hold onto, our hero takes a job hitting the house of “a man worth more than a country could make,” only to find the treasure hunt to be just another ride to nowhere. The song is a modern American noir-cum-classic rock hoedown, scored with Ty’s burnt-filament lead guitar and ingeniously sealed with Mikal Cronin’s saxophone section.
Possession is Ty Segall’s own bizarre traversing of the American landscape, taking back alleys through complicated cityscapes and singing about the end of the rope while resisting defeat — suggesting an ecstatic new empire to build as he cruises the countryside. Ty is currently on a solo acoustic tour throughout North America, with a full band fall tour commencing in October. Tickets are on sale now.
Recorded in an abandoned warehouse on a banana farm, and named after a towable tractor plough made by the Bunyip company (“…a revolutionary ripper of great strength.”), Babe Rainbow‘s new album, slipper imp and shakaerator, is a trippy affair that blends psych-rock with surf vibes.
The album starts with a question: “What is ashwagandha?” Elliot O’Reilly‘s bass groove hooks you right away as you “swim around like yin and yang” and “plunge into oblivion” with them. “Long Live the Wilderness” encourages us (with great yacht rock guitar riffs from Jack Crowther) to take it easy and get outside now and then. Or maybe it’s “Now and Zen,” as the next track adds in some vocal echoes and warps the instruments to produce a neat effect.
“Sunday” dips into astrological themes and spacey, jangly guitar chords backed by Miles Myjavec‘s zero gravity-drifting drums. The instrumental “Apollonia” is a lovely transition to “Like Cleopatra” – a fun love song about taking your girl to outer space and treating her like a queen.
“When the milk flows” (featuring King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard‘s Stu Mackenzie – who mixed the album) is a bouncy track designed to get you to shake off your troubles. Mackenzie returns on “Mt dub” – which seems to be a song about surfing in Australia (which Babe Rainbow do often, as well as in other parts of the world) and learning that “You’re more loved than you know.”
“Aquarium cowgirl” has a fun beat and sounds ready for radio play as the band sings about how amazing it is to be alive, despite what many others would tell you. It’s interesting that there’s no apostrophe in the title of “Rainbows end.” It’s a sentence, and song (featuring Camille Jansen on guest spoken word vocals), about impermanence with dreamy synths to help you relax with the idea that all things pass. The album ends with “re-ju-ven-ate,” in which Angus Dowling asks the bold question, “What are you paying for?…Abundance, abundance for everyone.”
This is a fun record, possibly the most fun one I’ve heard so far in 2025. Have a good time with it.
Black Moth Super Rainbow – now two decades into their candied up career – emerges from the technicolor pollen puckered Pennsylvania landscape with a new and reformulated fructose-blasted seventh album. Soft New Magic Dream is announced today for a June 6th release via Rad Cult, and it comes that familiar rush of flavors that pump directly from the BMSR soda fountain; that signature blend of strange neon nostalgia, sweetly melancholic synth pop wizardry, hip hop head bobbing, and citric acid tinged freak out flourish.
Today they share the new single “Open the Fucking Fantasy,”alongside an announcement of a North American tour in summer 2025. Check out the new searing new single via YouTube(as well as the video for the previously released “All 2 of Us”), and see below for the full list of tour dates. Pre-order the album here.
It’s been seven years since the more sinister Panic Blooms, and in that time plenty has happened in the house of Rad Cult, but with Soft New Magic Dream, we are invited to bask in the analog sweet and sour embrace of that classic and here notably chilled out and snoozled up BMSR sensibility.
Soft New Magic Dream has a nuanced flavor profile; these are freaky love songs, they funk up crunchy and rattle the speakers here and there, they melt down gelatinous at the right temperatures, and even go full ballad in a few extra-soft spots. The album balances sugar kinked romance with their distinctive and here notably downtempo funky production. Never fully eschewing BMSR’s signature strange liquid centers, these songs still flirt with the uncanny while honing in on the deeply melodic and approachably groovy tendencies they’ve have been exploring in their twenty years of lid flipping. Soaring synth leads ribbon through taffy colored chord changes and highly tactile and fractured drum programming and breaks.
Tobacco’s classic vocoder vocals, puckish as ever, burble fawning tenderness and body horror quasi erotic double dares in the fizzy saturated mist. These gummy serenades will leave you blissed out with a cavity-crumbled ear to ear grin.
As the BMSR project has evolved, from the scuzzier and folk-tinged backwoods leaf worship of the first albums into the more anthemic roller disco fog machine scenes of their mid-career, and then darker turns in the last few recent albums, Soft New Magic Dream feels like another subtle and surprisingly tender twist on that now-classic sound you’ve come to expect from BMSR. A turn towards something more serene, more direct, playfully wooing us without totally ditching that enigmatic crooked smile.
Lose your toothbrush in the clouds and get ready to guzzle down this potent marshmallow cloudscape concoction optimized for falling into face first.
Black Moth Super Rainbow
Upcoming Tour Dates
8.7.25 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Spirit Hall
8.8.25 – Cleveland, OH @ Mahall’s
8.9.25 – Chicago, IL @ Metro
9.11.25 – New York, NY @ Le Poisson Rouge
9.12.25 – Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts
9.13.25 – Cambridge, MA @ The Sinclair
10.9.25 – Nashville, TN @ Main Stage at Eastside Bowl
10.10.25 – Asheville, NC @ The Grey Eagle Tavern & Music Hall
10.11.25 – Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade – Purgatory
Keep your mind open.
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Blackwater Holylight crafts music that offsets airiness and immediacy. Today [February 26, 2025], the Los Angeles, CA band announces their new EP, If You Only Knew, out April 18, 2025 via Suicide Squeeze Records. Though it clocks in at just four tracks, the EP traverses countless cosmic peaks and sludgy valleys. The band has also shared the single “Wandering Lost,” premiering on FLOOD Magazine, which gradually evolves from atmosphere to heaviness. Over the course of almost seven minutes, metal, shoegaze, and psychedelia coalesce. The song was slowly conceptualized while Blackwater Holylight was working with acclaimed producer Sonni DiPerri (Animal Collective, DIIV, Suzanne Ciani) in Los Angeles, and mimics the mysterious, sometimes painful chapters of life by shifting between multiple movements. Like all of Blackwater Holylight’s material, there is an ample dose of beauty to be found beneath “Wandering Lost”‘s snarling exterior.
On “Wandering Lost,” singer, guitarist, and bassist Sunny Faris shares:“‘Wandering Lost’ came to us in pieces throughout a handful of weeks in Los Angeles. The four of us intentionally wanted this song to have multiple parts to tell a story that takes you on a journey throughout. This song is very special to us because it represents us as musicians individually and is a perfect reflection of what we’ve created as a group. It’s a song about wandering through the chapters of life, curiosity, and the connection we all have to each other through the unknown of how it will all unfold.”
Levitation France has announced its full (?) lineup for 2025, and they’ve packed a lot of good bands into just two nights.
Vendredi (Friday) brings in Italy’s New Candys (whose new album, so far, sounds pretty cool), UK’s Ditz (a sharp new post-punk band), Spain’s Hinds (also promoting a new album), Danish metal giants Kadavar, and the U.S.’ own Blonde Redhead.
Samedi (Saturday) has Angers post-punkers Rest Up, UK’s mysterious HONESTY, goth-queen Heartworms, experimental psych-rockers Bryan’s Magic Tears, and psych-proggers bdrmm, plus the U.S.’ synthwave duo Boy Harsher, and finally French psych heavyweights The Limiñanas.
It’s a good lineup with some serious rock in it this year, and it’s in a new location – a pyramid on a lakefront, no less. Don’t miss it.
First, I need to give The Death Wheelers a thumbs-up for the Ennio Morricone joke with titling their new album The Ecstasy of Möld. The Death Wheelers are big fans of cult films and cinema in general, and the riff on Morricone’s classic “The Ecstasy of Gold” from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is brilliant.
As is the album. Opening with the short but heavy “Loud Pipes Take Lives,” and a man declaring he’ll purify the world with blood, the album lets you know right away that this is going to be a wild ride. Need further evidence? Well, the thrash metal banger “Homicycle Maniac” (which my computer’s autocorrect wants to write as “Hemicycle Maniac,” which works just as well) will convince you. “Hella Hammered” continues the thrash metal shredding, proclaiming that the motorcycle gang of the band’s moniker are a “bunch of real psychopaths.”
“Un Pneu Dans La Tombe — Aide Musicale À Mourir” dips a bit into psychedelia before it turns into a riff-raging rocker. The title track claims “There is only one ecstasy…Death!” and then launches into pounding punk rock. “Blood, Bikes and Barbiturates” has more heavy cymbal crashes than I could count.
“Bleu Nuit (Les Plaisirs De La Chair)” is one of the trippiest tracks on the record as the band goes looking for pleasures “more primitive” than what you’d find in a strip club. The groove on it is top-notch. The distortion and reverb are cranked on “Way of the Road” for you and your neighbor’s enjoyment (and don’t miss the salute to Led Zeppelin in it).
“The Heretic Rites of Count Choppula,” apart from having a great title, adds touches of horror-surf rock to the album that show another side of The Death Wheelers you didn’t expect at first, but think, “Oh yeah, that tracks.” when you hear it. Finally, “Get Laid…to Rest” ends the album on a Pink Floyd-like mind trip to give your brain a chance to reset after all the chaos you just heard.
It’s another fine instrumental rocket blast from The Death Wheelers. Get in on this roadtrip or get the hell out of the way.
Keep your mind open.
[I might reach ecstasy if you finally subscribe today.]
I discovered Vuelveteloca at the 2017 Levitation Music Festival where they played a great show at the now long-gone Barracuda club. I hadn’t heard them before then, but their Chilean version of metal, psych, krautrock, and stoner metal was something to behold. I snagged their Sonora album from their merch table…and it got lost in a stack of CDs in my office for years. It’s a shame I’m finally getting around to reviewing it eight years later, because it’s a slick record.
First, you should know that the band’s name translates as “Go crazy.” in English. That lets you know what you’re in for with this record. It’s a fitting name.
The album’s title translates as “Sonorous” – which implies something deep and powerful. Opening track, “La Niebla” (“The Fog”), stomps the gas pedal to the floor and charges through the titular weather with reckless abandon. The brief moment of coasting (around the 3:30 mark) lets you feel the wind on your face for a bit before the guitars from Marcos De Iruarrizaga and Tomás Olivos come back to melt it.
“Alta Montaña” (“High Mountain”) displays their love of stoner metal and cosmic rock, as Juan Gili hammers out mantra-like beats to induce rhythmic head-nodding. “Ataque Masivo” isn’t necessarily a tribute to the band “Massive Attack,” but I wouldn’t be surprised if Massive Attack were an influence on them. The track has krautrock leanings, but also synth touches that lean it a bit in Massive Attack’s direction.
The fuzz returns in full force on “Carnaval,” sending us on a trippy journey down streets full of masked people who might have dark intentions. “L.A.” slows things down into 1960s psych-rock. It’s a neat change in tone from the heavy stuff that’s come before it as the song builds in power and volume. “El Lado Frio” (“The Cold Side”) takes that power and volume and uses it to cause your brain to swirl in your skull.
“Tormento” (“Torment”) is a song you’ll want to blast while competing in a demolition derby. “Chepical” dives back into krautrock, but adds soaring cosmic rock guitars to the mix. Ending with the interestingly titled “Cientologia & Altiplano” (“Scientology & Plateau”), the album uses Jose Navarrete‘s bass grooves to maximum effect and creates a great jam track with limited vocals and maximum head-trip riffs.
It’s a wild record, and one I slept on for too long. Don’t do the same.
