Australian band Pleasure Symbols enter a new phase in 2019, physically and stylistically with the forthcoming release of their first full length record Closer And Closer Apart. Three years have passed since the release of their debut, self-titled EP through Avant!. The time away being a necessary moment of reflection and regeneration for singer, songwriter and bassist Jasmine Dunn. Joined by fellow musician Steven Schnorrer, the duo began the push towards a more 80’s inspired post-punk sound with a ‘pop noir’ twist.
Deciding to record and produce the album themselves, gave the freedom to take time to grow and explore their new direction as a song writing duo. Despite current trends in popular music, Pleasure Symbols continues to focus on a more guitar based post punk, dream-pop sound, while slowly diverging from a previous minimal wave, synth based musical output. With themes of desire for desires sake and self confrontation, the new musical direction may seem initially harrowing, but look closer and you will see vulnerability and tenderness triumph over the struggle of the human experience.
LP / Digital Album
Exactly two years after their latest Front Teeth LP, the Zürich-based duo VEIL OF LIGHT is back with a new album called Inflict which will be out May 10 on Avant! Records.
This is their fourth full-length and their industrial-tinged synth-based post-punk keeps on getting better, making Inflict their strongest release to date. In these eight new cuts you’ll hear how their sound has gotten heavier, bulkier, even more beat-driven. Tracks like So Hard and Holy Wars display drums pounding like noises from a rusty machinery, synths on You Done Me Wrong and Fact2019 they’re so sharp they can slice through your skin, Europe and Animal Instinct feature melodies from the abandoned industrial district of your ghost town.
We could go on but you are probably aware of what these two Swiss are all about, and if you are not you’ll know the Veil Of Light when you face it.
LP / Digital Album
Profit Prison is the solo work of Seattle-based Parker Lautenschlager, previously in the hardcore band Marrow, power electronics act Anteinferno, and black metal cult Bhereg.
Conceived in 2016, Profit Prison explores lyrical themes of isolation, estrangement, deprivation and paranoia against an aural backdrop of synthpop, post-punk and abstract industrial music.
Inspired by Franz Kafka as much as Kraftwerk, Profit Prison achieves a cold minimalism that speaks to the nightmarish dystopia in which it was created.
EP / Digital Album
By now you must be already familiar with Qual being the solo project of William Maybelline, one half of the Lebanon Hanover duo. When William first stepped into the scene as an individual artist back in 2014, he declared the intention to explore the very grimmest areas in synth-based music.
While Sable debut LP was unapologetically gothic in subject matter and sound, Qual’s most recent and uncompromising outputs of Cupio Dissolvi EP and last year’s album The Ultimate Climax merge the despairingly freezing properties of 90s EBM with the more aggressive sensibilities of industrial techno without ever diluting the intensity of either. Brand new 4-track EP Cyber Care is the perfect synthesis of both these aspects. On A side the slither of the title-track and the mechanical assault of Inject Your Mind will make you feel the hardest, most vicious side of Maybelline’s creation. B side’s I Have To Return Some Video Tapes and Motherblood will toss you into a ice-cold galaxy of paranoia and disorientation.
This is not an appealing world, as Qual is impossible to listen to half-heartedly – it will drag you by the jaw and butcher you in a dirty alleyway.
EP / Digital Album
A mere 18 months after the release of 2017′s Chroma, Buzz Kull (real name Marc Dwyer), has returned with his sophomore album. Traversing EBM, darkwave and goth sounds with ease, New Kind Of Cross traverses much darker waters than Dwyer’s last effort.
New Kind Of Cross speaks to the rapid change and tension at play in Dwyer’s own life. Marc spends a good portion of each year in a new city every night – and when settled in Sydney, is constantly between jobs. It makes perfect sense that New Kind Of Cross deals explicitly with themes of isolation, introversion and sometimes anger. The music on this record is heavy and unforgiving.
Throughout the past, Dwyer has refined his sound to a knife’s edge, proving his capabilities within the realm of darker music time and time again. His pursuits are relentless; the last year has seen him tour extensively in Europe, with another run throughout the continent starting in mid-November to coincide with the release of New Kind Of Cross.
LP / Digital Album
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