Dion Lunadon has a habit of dropping crazy, wild records on a consistent basis and now he’s about to release Rare Gems Volume One.
The album is comprised of ten rare and unreleased studio tracks recorded between 2016 and 2026 and also features fan favorites, 1976 and When Will I Hold You Again.
The first single is the unreleased track, Dead Or Alive, which is already out for your listening pleasure.
Rare Gems Volume One is now available for pre-order. It will be available on 12” black vinyl and a very limited edition run of 2-tone liquid smoke vinyl, CD and digital download.
These bundle options are available through Dion’s Bandcamp page:
Austin, Texas’ American Sharks have returned after a five-year hiatus with a new rocker of an album titled Not Dead Yet for all of you out there figuring they were finished.
The opening title track takes off like someone stomping the gas pedal of a muscle car outfitted with flame throwers and machine guns. “Flowers for the Dead” (featuring a guitar solo by David Sullivan of Red Fang) has the flame throwers on that car burning down everything along a funeral procession while a dog growls and barks as they pass and toss an empty beer can at it. “Goodbye, my love, goodbye,” Roky Moon sings, preferring to send his dearly departed out on a high note.
“I saw a demon on my left. I saw a lizard on my right,” Moon says in the beginning of the absolutely slamming “Going Insane,” letting us know about weird visions he’s having both in and out of sleep while Aaron Echegaray goes bonkers on lead guitar. “Fuzz War” is suitably fuzzy for its title. “I need blood, I need something real,” Moon sings on “Give Me Blood.” His vocals become echoed and distorted as he tries to find anything concrete in the illusions in which he’s living.
“Bang Yer Head” (with solo Mike Derks of GWAR) is a fun classic metal track that you can imagine was a blast for them to record. Nick Cornetti goes wild with his snare hits, sounding like he went through several of them while playing it. Zach Blair of Rise Against stops in for his own guitar solo duty on “The Machine,” which almost reaches hair metal territory, and The Sword‘s “Kyle Schutt” unleashes a solo of his own on “Sunny Sunday,” an upbeat track with sad lyrics (“It ain’t been the same since you were last around…I’ll be sittin’ here waiting for you.”).
The album ends with “They Want Peace” featuring Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol‘s Leo Lydon not only contributing another guest guitar solo but also backing vocals. “Hey, man. I need water. Could you spare a little please?”, Lydon asks. They’re looking for compassion in a world that’s lacking it. It can also be allusion to the Southwest’s growing and dire water shortage issue.
The world’s not dead yet, and American Sharks are trying to tell us that we can do something about it. We don’t need to just roll over and die. We can keep banging our heads and rocking out and watching out for each other. Someone you know needs a boost. Crank this and wake them up.
The Darts’ frontwoman / keyboardist Nicole Laurenne noted back in 2024 that there weren’t a lot of good, modern Halloween-themed songs, let alone albums. You get “Monster Mash” and a handful of others that get dragged out of their tombs every year, but nothing new has come along in decades. So, she and her bandmates (Rebecca Davidson – guitar, Lindsay Scarey – bass, Rikki Styxx – drums) set out to fill that void and created Halloween Love Songs.
The first side of the album consists of tracks that Laurenne describes as “full of colorful, early-evening energy, the kind of songs you could blast while the neighborhood lights are flicking on.” “Midnight Creep” simultaneously is a fun rock tune, a new dance craze, and a spooky stomper with sizzling keyboard work from Laurenne and a fun solo by Davidson. “Zombies on the Metro” is about both the living dead consuming flesh and the living consumed by the daily grind (“The nine-to-five will steal your soul.”).
Styxx’s beats on “Blood Runs Cold” move from psychobilly to punk to almost jazz at one point. “Vampires in Love” is another fun one destined for your goth romance playlists. Scarey’s bass is a sinister snarl on “Dream Ghost.” “Every Night Is Halloween” is a fun way to end Side A with its promise of the holiday lasting as long as you want.
Side B (“…the soundtrack for after dark, when the bonfire is raging.”) starts with the appropriately fiery “Apocalypse” – a song inspired by the Apocalypse Tapestry in Angers, France. “The Devil Made Me Do It” might be your new favorite makeout / rock out song. “Darkness” gets a bit heaver, and “Up in My Soul” gets way funkier, bringing in surf elements and some of Styxx’s wickedest beats on the record.
“Haunt Me” is the song you’ll want to play after everyone but your lover has left the party and the candles are still lit (in a magic circle or pentacle being optional). “Shadow” has great vocals throughout it, not only from Laurenne but also the rest of the band singing with her. The closer, “Late Drive,” sends us out with a cruise across the desert and all the weird things one sees and imagines on such a trip.
It’s a cool record and The Darts not only understood the mission (“Let’s make a cool new Halloween record.”), they nailed it.
What’s the point of the howl of string to speaker, the hammering of stick-on skin? Is it transcendence, elevating the human spirit by catharsis in sound? Or is it summoning chaos, a purgatory in which to bask in all that’s unclean, the better to feel alive?
Why not both? Because that’s what’s on offer on Diet Of Worms, the second Rocket release by The Shits, Leeds via Newcastle’s titans of disgust and deliverance. This is a feast for the senses in the worst way possible – primal rock boiled down to its essence and flung full in your face. Using repetition, tortured vocal invective and heads-down intensity as blunt instruments, these eight tracks are an unprecedented torrent of acidic salvation. Whilst lurking somewhere on the decadence-destruction axis between the nihilism of prime Stooges and the bloody blackout of Brainbombs, Diet Of Worms is possessed of a legitimately uncompromising hostility that both elevates and debases it to co-ordinates unknown. Discussing today’s drop of the new single, ‘Thank You For Being A Friend‘, the vocalist of The Shits, Callum Howe notices: “The Shits are driving down the sleazy streets of West Yorkshire. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. You can’t stop us, we do this cos we love it.”
There are revelations here in the riffage and the rancour, even if they are the kind that occur in the bleary miasma of the lock-in, or witnessing the streetlight blur of the subsequent stagger home. Even more single-minded and remorseless than the band’s Rocket debut ‘You’re A Mess’, this is a record that demands full immersion. Whether it’s ‘Then You’re Dead’ hammering on a pulverizing garage-stinking riff until it begs for mercy, or ‘Change My Ways’, whose Creedence-In-Hell swagger and lurch is that of abjection transmuted into joy, this is psychedelia forcibly removed from its comfort zone of pastiche, and thrust into a bad-trip realm of the vivid and nightmarish.
But rarely has the process of making beauty and horror indivisible seemed like so much fun. If Werner Herzog was right, and the only harmony in the universe is that of overwhelming and collective murder, then The Shits are the true music of the spheres.
Pre-order Diet of Worms coming out April 3: Digital via Bandcamp here. And LP directly from Rocket Recordings here.
Austin trio American Sharks drop a new single today, the title track to their first new album in 6 years, Not Dead Yet. The song, “Not Dead Yet” is available to hear and share on all DSPs HERE.
The band returns to the stage this week with two special performances at SXSW in Austin. First, Hotel Vegas’ 15th Anniversary Party on March 12th, and at Sagebrush for Duel Step with Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol on Friday the 13th. American Sharks will be main support on the upcoming full U.S. tour dates with Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol beginning in April. Please see all dates below. Tickets for all shows are available HERE.
American Sharks is a three-piece band hailing from Austin, TX. Their punk-metal hybrid sound blends pop hooks with blasting-yer-face riffs resulting in something akin to if Weezer went Stoner Rock. Coupled with hook-laden singalong lyrics, American Sharks’ forthcoming 2026 album Not Dead Yet is, well, a breathtaking return.
The band is joined on the album by special guest guitar soloists: Mike Derks (GWAR), Zach Blair (Rise Against), Kyle Shutt (The Sword), David Sullivan (Red Fang), and Leo Lydon (Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol).
Since the release of their 2013 self-titled debut album, American Sharks has toured extensively supporting the likes of GWAR, Clutch, The Sword, Red Fang, Big Business, Corrosion of Conformity and many others. After touring to support their debut album on The End Records, American Sharks took time off to write and record their self-produced follow up album, 11:11 on BMG. After a 5 year break, American Sharks are back (centered around founders, vocalist/bassist Roky Moon and drummer Nick Cornetti) with 9 fast-paced, pummeling tracks.
Not Dead Yet will be available on LP, CD and download on April 17th, 2026 via Permanent Teeth.
The cover of VIAL‘s new, raw, angry, fierce album Hellhound features an image that could be three different snarling, savage dogs ready to tear out your throats…or it could be an image of Cerberus – the three-headed dog who guards the underworld. Both are accurate reflections of the power trio, three beings who can each rip you to shreds and a three-in-one force that can stomp you into oblivion.
“Infected,” the album’s opener, even mentions dogs biting and tearing into you. “Scorpio Moon” buzzes more than rare Fuzzbox tracks and kicks trolls squarely in the teeth (“You just talk to hear yourself speak.”). “Creep Smoothie” mixes punk rage vocals with 1990s grunge-metal riffs while eviscerating dickweed dudes. “Idle Hands” is a cry for acceptance (“Why won’t you take me as I am? How can I make you understand?”) amid L7-like chugging bass.
“Sob” has the ladies of VIAL turning the “Fuck your feelings” table on their detractors (“Two thousand dollars for you if you can quit your whining…Send me your tears in a bottle. It’s really not that awful to see you cry for once. I think I’ll drink them with my lunch.”) who are now feeling the effects of stuff they voted for a couple years ago or experiencing sadness over being kicked to the curb. “Never Been Better” reminds me of some of Lunachicks‘ more radio friendly tracks. It’s a solid rock tune that seems primed for college rock radio shows this spring. The title track is under a minute, but it packs in enough power for a song three times as long.
The Be Your Own Pet-like “Undermine Me” is about discovering a relationship has gone south and it’s time to cut it loose. “Blah” has VIAL making fun of boys trying to become big things in the music scene mainly to impress girls and not to do anything meaningful. “Puke” has, oddly enough, a good groove to it. You’d think, with that title, that it would be another punk rager, but it’s more of a snarling groover that’s close to Queens of the Stone Age-like desert rock.
“Don’t watch the TV, and I don’t watch the news,” they sing on “Talktalktalk” – a song about information overload, endless opinions, and people who are “all bark, no bite” with their convictions (“You talk, talk, talk with nothing to say.”). “Boredom / Combustion” has the band tearing down Philadelphia and the entire state of Pennsylvania and comparing it to hell (“Death by boredom or combustion, I’m not sure which is worse.”).
Wrapping up with “Blood Red,” the band leave us exhausted and partially deaf, but ready to take on the world. You’re ready to go after your detractors like a three-headed beast after hearing an album like this. It’s the kind of album we need right now when friends, family, and neighbors are feeling targeted and vulnerable. We need compassionate ferocity, and VIAL inspires it.
Seattle’s The Darts return with “Apocalypse,” the second advance single from their upcoming LP Halloween Love Songs, arriving March 3. Where “Midnight Creep” danced in B-movie shadows, “Apocalypse” blows the door off the darker half of the album, leaning into caveman rhythms, volcanic fuzz, and the kind of apocalyptic joy that makes destruction sound like deliverance. It marks the moment the record shifts from spooky fun into full-throttle, after-midnight fire.
The song was born in Angers, France, when singer/organ conjurer Nicole Laurenne wandered through the massive medieval Apocalypse Tapestry, a wall of woven chaos, angels, beasts, storms, the whole cosmic meltdown. “The lightning bolt struck me,” she says. “The song practically wrote itself in the van as we left the castle.” Instead of doom, Nicole leaned into the strange liberation of burning it all down: freedom from suffering, freedom from crowns, freedom from being told what comes next. She wrote the line “no future, no kings” as a mantra of release — and a year later, as if the song had cracked something open, “No Kings” erupted as a protest chant across the U.S. All while the track existed only as a demo on her laptop.
Musically, “Apocalypse” hits like a ritual. A pounding, Neanderthal beat through the verses, wide-open chant on the chorus, and those snaking organ lines that nod straight to The Seeds, The Standells, and other 60s greats who knew how to make the end of the world sound like a block-party with broken amps. Rebecca Davidson’s guitar tone drags the song into modern grit with thick, grimy Mudhoney fuzz, a little L7 bite, and flashes of Bikini Kill’s unbottled anger. It’s garage rock with a cracked halo, stomped through the dirt and set on fire.
Long before the album was finished, the band slipped “Apocalypse” into their live sets, and the audience reaction was immediate. People were yelling for it after shows, asking where they could buy it, treating it like a lost classic. When the studio version was finally tracked, Gretsch Guitars tapped the instrumental for a major ad, with Lindsay Scarey and Rebecca featured front and center. A quiet demo had somehow become one of the band’s most in-demand songs before it ever saw daylight.
Recorded at Station House Studio in Los Angeles with Grammy-winning producer Mark Rains, “Apocalypse” is the bridge into Halloween Love Songs’ after-midnight terrain: heavier, darker, louder, and built to shake rooms. It’s the sound of a band deep into its evolution with Nicole, Becca, Lindsay, and returning drummer Rikki Watson, pushing garage rock to its breaking point and finding something feral and euphoric on the other side. No future, no kings — just volume.
I described Gran Moreno’s new album, El Sol, to a nephew as “Latino garage-psych.” That’s about the closest I can get to how they sound. Mix their hometown Austin, Texas love of heavy psych grooves with some blues influences, border rock, and metal riffs, then bake it in the desert sun, and you get the idea.
“Las Montañas” starts off the “sun” (“El Sol”) side of the album with enough heavy riffs to start a landslide or give you the power to scale literal and figurative mountains. The last minute of this song is like a match thrown on a trail of gasoline. It doesn’t so much flow into “Aztlan” as it roars into it like a flash flood through a desert wash.
“Huracán” is almost an arena-rock track with big, Brian May-like guitar riffs mixed with soulful, mellow chords. It’s another song of many on the album that reflect the elements: “Las Montañas” (“The Mountains”) are earth, “Huracán” (“Hurricane”) could be air and / or water. After it comes “Temple of Fire” with its marching beats and tales of a long road ahead to something grand on the horizon.
“La Mentira” (“The Lie”) brings in more heavy, fuzzy, bluesy swagger and grows into a scorcher by the end. “Oaxaca / Please Don’t Cry” has a great inclusion of saxophone and trumpet on it to elevate the song, somehow, even higher. The album (and the “La Luna” side) ends with “Hikuri” — a track that blends catchy guitar riffs with hammering power chords and drums that catch you off-guard every time.
It’s a strong record, and one I’d love to hear live. It must flatten you.
I picked this up at a record store in Paris because, frankly, the cover looked nuts and the number of great psychobilly, garage, and trash-rock bands on it is stunning.
Starting with The Trashmen‘s classic “Surfin’ Bird,” you know the rest of the album is going to be bonkers. The Sonics‘ “Psycho” lands somewhere between swing-rock and psychedelic fuzz. Up next, The Novas pay tribute to one of their favorite pro-wrestlers on “The Crusher” (“Do the eye gouge, you turkey necks!”). The song is downright weird, and almost drops into monster-rock territory.
“Scream!” by Ralph Neilsen & The Chancellors is a wild one, as guitars run around the room, apparently chasing hysterical women who spend the next few minutes screaming until they’re hoarse. Speaking of people losing their voice, I don’t know how Legendary Stardust Cowboy (who, according to the liner notes, used to perform standing on peoples’ cars at drive-ins during intermission) doesn’t do it during “Paralyzed.” Following him with the legendary Hasil Adkins‘ “She Said” is appropriate. They would’ve made a great double-bill.
Would it be a “garage disease” compilation without Link Wray or The Meteors? Wray’s cover of Willie Dixon‘s “Hidden Charms” is a forgotten classic by him and will, as usual with his material, make you wonder why people don’t speak of him in the same way they speak of Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton. When The Meteors proclaim “My Daddy Is a Vampire” (a live version, no less), you believe them.
You get to hear one of The Cramps‘ earliest recordings when they’re the backing band for Jimmy Dickinson on “Red Headed Woman.” Link Wray returns, sort of, when The Milkshakes perform a cover of his “Run Chicken Run.” The Meteors then come back into orbit for “Radioactive Kid.”
The live cut of Tav Falco & Panther Burns‘ “Dateless Night” is a super-rare cut and worth the purchase price of the whole disc if you’re a rockabilly collector. The Gun Club‘s “Jack on Fire” is almost post-punk, but they never loose their rockabilly swagger. There’s plenty more of that swagger on The Geezers‘ cover of Johnny Cash‘s “Folsom Prison Blues.” The Sting-Rays‘ “Cat Man” is dangerous and gritty, and the closer, “Just Love Me” by The Guana Batz, wraps this up with wild abandon that will have you wanting to loop the album all over again.
I saw over 50 bands last year, so these five had to bring it to make the top of the list.
#5: Osees – Old National Center – October 22, 2025 – Indianapolis, IN
I’m not sure it would be proper for me to not see Osees at least once a year by this point (or The Black Angels, for that matter). This show was in a small ballroom in the basement of the Old National Center that didn’t have much airflow but did have rock-sold pillars at the four corners of the dance floor / mosh pit. It was a sweaty, loud affair, which is just what you want for an Osees show. They hadn’t played in Indianapolis in a few years, so the crowd was eager to see them — and many hadn’t seen them until that night. They were either shocked or delighted by the end.
#4: King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra – August 09, 2025 – Ravinia – Highland Park, IL
I almost didn’t include this show by King Gizzard (another band I seem to catch every year) because our seats were too far back to see the actual stage. However, this show teaming KGATLW up with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was too neat of a show to pass up and, what put it into the top five, they sounded great. No joke, this is probably the best sound engineering I’ve experienced at a KGATLW show, and I’ve seen many (and all of them are recorded and released by their highly skilled sound crew). I’d never heard them so clear in a live setting.
#3: TV on the Radio – September 27, 2025 – Levitation Austin – Austin, TX
I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to see TVOTR live, so I was bouncing when my suspicions were confirmed and they were booked for Levitation Austin. The show was everything I’d hoped for — high energy, great sound, and powerful messages. It felt like a blessing to see them after so many years without a tour.
#2: Nine Inch Nails – August 20, 2025 – United Center – Chicago, IL
Here’s a show I almost didn’t attend because the first night at Chicago’s United Center sold out so fast that I couldn’t get tickets. Luckily, Trent Reznor and his pals decided to book another show the following night and I scored tickets for that. The set included three different stages, great new versions of classic tracks, new tunes, and NIN looking and sounding like they’d never taken a break to make Oscar-winning film music.
#1: Underworld – May 17, 2025 – Radius – Chicago, IL
Here’s the other band I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to see live. They don’t make many trips to the U.S., and the closest they’d come in recent years was Detroit (four hours from where I live). Seeing them in a relatively small venue half the distance away was an immediate priority, and then I learned they were playing two sets with no opening act. It was a stunning performance that had everyone jumping for hours with only a short intermission and left everyone floating by the end.
Who do you want to see this year? I’m already looking forward to catching The Hives, Dry Cleaning, LCD Soundsystem, Gary Numan, Failure, Shame, Alison Krauss, and (of course) Osees, not to mention a return to Levitation Austin. Levitation France is taking a hiatus this year, so perhaps Austin Psych Fest will take its place?
