Winter Severity Index is a New Wave project from Rome, Italy, by Simona Ferrucci, singer, guitarist, composer and songwriter. It was born in 2009 as a traditional band, formed by four young women. During 2010 the band published a self-released EP, “Winter Severity Index”, distributed by AF Music, now sold-out. In the same year and in 2011 the band received lots of good reviews all over Europe and performed gigs in Italy, in Berlin and in Lisbon, at the Graveyard Fest. In January 2012 the project took the form of a duo, after the decision of two members to leave the band. Simona continued collaborating with Valentina Fanigliulo (a.k.a. Mushy) .
Simona and Valentina recorded the new EP “Survival Rate”, released on May 2013 by Blood Rock Records. The EP, now sold out, has been widely distributed all over the world and collected many of good reviews from music magazines and web-zines. Now Simona is collaborating with Alessandra Romeo ( ex Cat Fud and Bohemien).
They recorded the first LP of the project, “Slanting Ray”, released on April 2014 by Manic Depression and Blood Rock Records, now sold out. The album was presented in several venues and festivals all over Europe and it was mentioned as one of the best New Wave album of the year by many magazines, both in Italy and abroad.
Their second LP Human Taxonomy, released by Manic Depression Records in may 2016, was presented in first preview at the Wave Gothic Treffen in Leipzig, receiving a warm welcoming by the audience.
Listen here and order here.
What more can you say about a band called DEAD that hasn’t already been made abundantly clear at first glance? The fact that these French mercenaries of noise can conjure up such a powerfully dark aesthetic before even hitting a note is impressive, but when they finally do, they unleash a far more potent beast entirely. If DEAD aren’t already mapping out the future destruction of the planet, they’ve sure as hell written the soundtrack.
Bleak, confrontational, but with a firm command of rhythm and deep grooves, this might be the dancefloor antidote we’ve been waiting for.
Digipak and vinyl edition.
Since the group’s founding in 2010, Brooklyn-based Bootblacks’ sound has been described as a balance of contradictions: both pensive and buoyant, referential and modern. Fitting, as the Bootblacks name is derived from novelist William Burroughs’ description of the dark underbelly of glitzy New York City.
Vocalist and frontman Panther MacDonald lists an eclectic set of influences: Depeche Mode, New Order, Simple Minds, Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, early U2, as well as the Beatles and David Bowie for lyrical inspiration.
Bootblacks released their first EP, Narrowed, in the fall of 2012, recorded with Brian Scott Herman, after previously collaborating with Jim Sclavunos (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds). Songwriters MacDonald and Gorman describe the collaboration with Sclavunos as a “life-changing” one that informs Bootblacks’ music to this day.
Panther describes Veins, the newly-completed Bootblacks album, as the most recent step in the band’s evolution from punk to post-punk. Fans can expect a more textured, atmospheric and “bigger-sounding” Bootblacks than before.
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The Spoiled is an Italian solo project founded in late 2015 by main producer, singer, songwriter and instrumentalist Giovanni Santolla. Its musical framework is a mosaic of darkwave, noise rock, dark ambient and industrial combined with a deep love for surrealist and horror movies and Decadent literature.
Glacial drum machines, tribal percussions, chorused basses, distorted synths and ethereal vocals portray a claustrophobic yet melancholic journey through the deepest and darkest feelings of human being.
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Ascetic is the post-punk project of Saxon Jörgensen, August Skipper and Andrew Jigalin from Melbourne, Australia, now located in Berlin, Germany.
Second album ‘EVERYTHING IS BECOMING’ is the distillation of a slowly evolved sound stemming from the long writing collaboration between Jörgensen and Skipper, a carefully collated sonic vocabulary that along with the main instrumentation of guitar, bass, voice and electronic drums, includes found sounds, voice memos, field recordings, sampled synths and resampled guitars woven into the texture of the record, lyrics that embody a poetic restraint in exploring what it is to be human in a moment in history through both darkness and redemption.
Listen and order here.
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