Unusually, Acróbata. were also our only proper post-hardcore feature this time, so the screamo community may be getting a little nervous.

We also had the sad news of Jonny Bones’ death, while Ересь brought us into a Warsaw band split between Ukrainian and Russian backgrounds, with war, displacement and the very practical risks around citizenship sitting right inside their story.

🔥 Hardcore / Crossover / Melodic Hardcore

Frayed Ends BC (Belfast, Northern Ireland. hardcore / beatdown) - The band spent Wednesday rehearsals pulling WhatsApp demos apart for three or four hours at a time before taking debut album “Nothing At All” into Black Mountain Studio for four days. The songs bring 1990s NYHC and Belfast punk into stories about neurodivergence, housing, Gaza and far-right violence, with guest voices from Bayway, Knuckledust, Lost To Life and Jenova.

Deceased (Singapore. crossover hardcore / thrash) - Six years after “The Void of No Return”, enough new songs had piled up from the live set for Deceased to realise they had an album. “Last Stand” also took us through disappearing Singapore venues, six labels in six different markets and a rehearsal routine where they prepare for a 45-minute show by playing the whole set three times.

Barriers (Brighton, UK. hardcore / melodic hardcore) - We premiered the full video for “Final Fight”, closing track from their five-song EP “Time Crisis”. Every song had already been tested live before recording, and the title came from both the old arcade game and four people trying to keep a band moving around work, families and getting older.

💔 Post-Hardcore

Acróbata. (Puebla, Mexico. post-hardcore) - Their 12-song debut “tèlesma” was written in Puebla and entirely in Spanish, with the band giving us a useful look at what DIY shows there actually cost. Zach once spent around 6,000 pesos putting one on, charged 50 pesos at the door and broke even; the album also carries an old Violeta Parra interview and two songs he wrote while dealing with his father’s death.

⚡ Punk Rock / Garage / Folk Punk

Ересь (Yeres) (Warsaw, Poland / Ukraine / Russia. punk rock / garage rock) - Ересь are two Ukrainians from Kharkiv and a Russian drummer from St Petersburg now playing together in Warsaw. We talked about war, displacement and writing in Russian around debut “Загон для скота” and the slower 90 BPM “По следам”; the drummer asked to remain anonymous because he still holds Russian citizenship and fears political repercussions.

Generacion Suicida (Los Angeles, USA. punk rock / post-punk / rock en español) - “Hombre Nuevo” brings ten new songs out of the South Central LA backyard punk band, with Spanish lyrics and guitars carrying a clear post-punk pull. Alex Estrada tracked it at Pale Moon Ranch and Jack Shirley mixed and mastered the record for its release through Vitriol Records.

The Monsters (Bern, Switzerland. punk rock / garage punk / rockabilly / trash rock) - Five US shows are costing The Monsters around $6,000 in visas alone, roughly 60% of the entire tour budget, after a process that took a year and required support letters from Keith Morris and Queens of the Stone Age engineer Hutch. We also got into October album “Off The Road We Go”, recorded for a month in their rehearsal room before Jim Diamond was handed roughly a thousand tracks per song to sort through.

Jonny Bones / The Still Spirits (Vancouver, Canada. punk rock / folk punk / Celtic punk / folk rock) - Jon Aaron, better known as Jonny Bones of The Still Spirits and Bone Daddies, died on August 21 after living with late stage 4 cancer. He had lost his voice during treatment, got it back, finished “Small Time Crime” and played its February release show, so we returned to our March conversation and the line he left us with: “a little kindness in the world can go a long way.”

🌀 Post-Rock / Post-Metal

Russian Circles (USA. post-rock / post-metal / instrumental) - “Nine” was written across Los Angeles, Chicago and Vashon Island through shared Logic sessions, then tracked at Electrical Audio with finishing work at Kurt Ballou’s GodCity.

Brian Cook talked about returning there after Steve Albini’s death, the Kola Superdeep Borehole that gave “Borehole” its name, and “Five Points of Light”, the four-minute song they once thought could cross over before leaving it off “Gnosis” because one member simply did not enjoy playing it.

All latest articles:

Projects like this would not be possible without your support.

IDIOTEQ is all about supporting under the radar artists, in-depth features with unique perspectives from artists from all around the globe, is ad-free, and runs on one person’s time. Every bit of support directly helps keep it independent and going.

You can now ☕ buy me a coffee here, 💸 drop a tip via PayPal, or become a patron here.

BROWSE ALL HERE

~ Thanks! Karol

🔥 Hardcore / Metallic Hardcore / Punk

Defy You (New Jersey, USA, hardcore / hardcore punk) - “Happy HellFest” connects three points in the band’s life: a Guns Up! cover, a new version of demo track “P.O.D.” and “Fragile Mask”. That last song grew partly from a conversation after a show with someone afraid that talking about their mental health would make them look weak in hardcore.

Pleb (Leeds, UK, sludgecore / metallic hardcore / sludge) - The title of debut EP “Grease Trap” came from an actual box full of foul water that Steve once had to empty. From there we got into Leeds DIY, political exhaustion, anxiety and why Pleb wanted to keep the whole release under their own control.

Inkwell (Atlanta, USA, hardcore / post-hardcore / screamo) - Inkwell existed for barely two years, with their strongest run packed into roughly spring 1995 to spring 1996. Thirty years later, “Remembrance” finally collects that short Atlanta hardcore history, including stuff guitarist Joe Myers kept looking after long after their packed final basement show.

React (Batangas, Philippines, hardcore / hardcore punk) - “True Grit” arrived after nine years of playing together rather than because React thought a full-length was overdue. Paul also traced “Navigator” back to reading “Invictus” in grade school, with friendship, loss and conviction running through the wider conversation.

Shirime (Rome, Italy, hardcore punk / melodic hardcore) - Their self-titled debut is three songs about class, work, fascism, inequality and people losing empathy. Even the name feeds that idea: Shirime is a Japanese spirit with an eye where its anus should be, which Luca saw as a pretty good metaphor for refusing to look properly at the world.

Supportive Parents (Minneapolis, USA, hardcore punk / melodic hardcore / punk rock) - “Party Bus From Hell” is a seven-minute concept EP based on the night the band gave a driver the name of a bar, reached the wrong one during a blizzard and spent six hours trying to finish the trip. Matt originally tried to fit the story into one song before accepting that it needed three.

Trouble Bound (Hudson Valley, USA, street punk / melodic hardcore / Oi! / hardcore) - Johnny woke up with the title riff for “Step To The Line” the morning after Trouble Bound’s 25th anniversary show, with Mike Ness’ cancer diagnosis still on his mind. The album keeps its working-class anger close, while the title track even drops into a ska section that Johnny traces back to Operation Ivy.

Amnezia (Russia, hardcore punk / punk rock) - Protest music made through anonymous accounts and a VPN, with AI-generated instrumentation used because recording openly is no longer considered safe. “The Sellout Rebel” turns some of that anger towards musicians Amnezia believes have accommodated the Russian state.

💔 Post-Hardcore / Emo / Indie Rock

Scrambled Heads (Curitiba, Brazil, emo punk / post-hardcore / alternative rock) - “Inward, Then Apart” grew from Buga learning that he missed his wife, dog, home studio and even his own bathroom more than he missed constant touring. The former Abraskadabra songwriter and André Pamplona built the EP around a slower life without completely losing the punk movement underneath it.

Break To Broken (Australia / USA, post-hardcore / post-punk) - The three members have still never all been in the same room, but “The Hope Experiment” now stretches their file-sharing setup across 12 songs, three home studios and four independent labels. Their system remains remarkably ordinary: group chat, exchanged files and enough trust to let somebody else rewrite the thing you started.

Time Spent Driving (Santa Cruz, USA, emo / indie rock / post-hardcore) - We premiered the whole of “Lost Leaves”, the fourth proper Time Spent Driving full-length. Jon’s home studio made the writing faster and more collaborative, while songs dating back to around 2002 and 2008 were rebuilt alongside guest appearances from old friends scattered through the band’s history.

🎛️ Post-Punk / Noise Rock / Industrial / Synthwave

French Inhaler (Chicago, USA, synthwave / new wave / post-punk) - “Practiced Lines” has no guitars, but it does have an old Magnavox radio Adam became attached to after bringing it home before the recording session. He eventually spun its dial by hand in the studio, finding static and fragments of conversation that became part of “White Noise”.

Lung (Wellington, New Zealand, noise rock / no wave / art punk / industrial / post-punk) - Lung recorded the 12 songs on “Fog” across two days, keeping wrong notes, timing slips and James laughing at the end of a one-take song. Their new “Isolated Gun” video followed the same logic: six complete takes in Dave’s hallway, eighteen minutes of filming in total, finished before 9 a.m.

🌀 Post-Rock / Ambient / Experimental

Sleepthink (Perth, Australia, ambient / instrumental / post-rock) - Eight-piece album “joy” pulls from philosophy, modular synths, acoustic instruments and field recordings while Ethan keeps asking whether happiness can ever be a permanent state. One recurring sound began with a branch from a neighbour’s lemon tree scraping against its own trunk outside his studio.

Raging River/Furnace Sky (UK, experimental / post-rock / alternative rock) - Michael and his nine-year-old son Sami have seven home recordings built from cheap pedals, a Zoom recorder, keyboards and whatever catches their attention. “Dream Sequence” includes Sami hitting the body of a guitar, birds he wanted to record outside and Michael’s late father’s old Spanish guitar, still playable on only three surviving strings.

Projects like this would not be possible without your support.

IDIOTEQ is all about supporting under the radar artists, in-depth features with unique perspectives from artists from all around the globe, is ad-free, and runs on one person’s time. Every bit of support directly helps keep it independent and going.

You can now ☕ buy me a coffee here, 💸 drop a tip via PayPal, or become a patron here.

BROWSE ALL HERE

~ Thanks! Karol

If IDIOTEQ were about travel and nature, Yellowstone, the Tetons, South Dakota, Utah and the rest of that route would probably get a separate post.

People were ridiculously kind, the parks were hard to take in even when you were standing inside them, and I came home with a head full of it. I would only ask America for two small upgrades next time: better coffee and a little more healthy food on the road, haha.

Anyway, music.

The break did its job while I was away, so this is very much not a normal one-week newsletter. From July 6 through August 9 we published 48 pieces, moving from straight edge hardcore and industrial punk to sludge, screamo, post-rock, power pop, progressive metal, deathcore and plenty of stuff that does not sit comfortably in one box. I checked the full latest archive again to make sure the July 6 starting point was covered.

One thing I am especially happy about is how much space we gave to the multi-interview format. We went deep with CNHC Fest in China, The End of Impact in Italy and a 15-band conversation around New Friends Fest in Toronto. These take a stupid amount of coordination, but getting different bands to describe the same scene from different corners is worth it. More are coming.

We also had longer conversations with Dead Tired and Protest the Hero, alongside old punk lifers looking back over decades and bands barely out of their first demos. So, yeah, there is a lot below. This is everything we ran since the last newsletter.

🔥 Hardcore / Metallic Hardcore / Metalcore

Toxic Youth (Italy, hardcore punk / crossover) - “Join Da Resistance” and a band history reaching back to 1990.

Converge (USA, metallic hardcore / metalcore) - November Europe run, “It Used to Matter” video and two 2026 albums.

By Any Means (USA, hardcore / metallic hardcore) - Baton Rouge debut with Boosie Badazz and Gridiron’s Matt Karl.

Brach (Germany, melodic hardcore / post-hardcore) - Four-song “Plastic Lights” tape and a more reflective turn.

Dimming (NYC, metallic hardcore / doom / death metal) - Five DIY tracks dragging hardcore into slower, heavier territory.

Dead Tired (Canada, hardcore / post-hardcore) - George Pettit on friendship, small rooms and fourth album “Hornets of Fall”.

Bad to Worse (USA, hardcore punk / melodic hardcore) - “These Are Our Streets” plus their hardcore take on Green Day’s “Jaded”.

Following Seas (USA, melodic hardcore) - Friends reconnect after twenty years and write between Alabama and Texas.

TrashxStrike (Philadelphia, straight edge hardcore) - DIY “Core Values” and straight edge without judging anyone.

Expellow (Switzerland, metalcore) - “Ten Of Swords” video in the band’s twentieth year.

Kārtël (NYC, hardcore punk) - Immigrant hardcore and “Ningún Ser Humano Es Ilegal” heading to vinyl.

If I Die Today (Italy, metalcore / post-hardcore) - “I Felt Nothing” turns grief outward into politics, guilt and responsibility.

Willing Hands (USA, metalcore / chaotic hardcore) - “The Anatomy of an Atomic Heart”, written around survival and recovery.

Brec Destroyer (Austria / Croatia, deathcore) - “Griefeater”, made remotely with Void.404 and written from grief’s point of view.

Protest the Hero (Canada, progressive metal / metalcore) - “Within”, ageing, ownership, money and keeping the band alive.

⚡ Punk Rock / Melodic Punk / Pop Punk / Emo Punk / Indie

Bum Ticker (USA, hardcore punk / punk rock) - Four-song debut from a small Forked River DIY pocket.

3 Dollars (USA, emo punk / pop punk) - “Nauseous” ahead of debut EP “Plus Tax”.

Concrete Youth (Indonesia, melodic hardcore / pop punk) - Jakarta hardcore players trading technical riffs for hooks.

Overton (USA, melodic punk / punk rock) - Political fatigue and internet rot turned into singalong punk.

Antillectual (Netherlands, melodic punk / punk rock) - Twenty-five years of touring, politics and DIY work.

Radio Weekend (Seattle, melodic punk / power pop) - Nostalgia and anxiety packed into six tight songs on “Circles”.

Velour On Tap (Canada, indie rock / alternative rock) - Four-song “Cruel Harbour”, Atlantic Canada and old memories.

💔 Post-Hardcore / Screamo / Emoviolence

Miss your call (Russia, emo / screamo) - Debut “I Won’t Say Goodbye”, tracked in ten hours.

Antioch Arrow (USA, screamo / post-hardcore) - Numero collect 23 Gravity-era tracks, outtakes and live recordings.

Car Underwater (USA, emo / post-hardcore) - “Heaven In Hindsight” and their first European run.

Tano! (Catalonia, post-hardcore / math punk / screamo) - They secretly made “Danses a la Discòrdia” and had J. Robbins mix it.

Wrong Man (Belgium, post-hardcore / noise rock) - Deathwish debut “Here’s That Feeling”, mixed by Kurt Ballou.

Dreamwell (USA, screamo / post-hardcore) - Track-by-track through “Hymns For The Denial Of God”.

New Forms (USA, emoviolence / screamo) - Five songs in under seven minutes, largely tracked live at Godcity.

Teeth Kids (Chicago, post-hardcore / noise rock) - “Fake Hell”, Chicago and their final record made with Simon Small.

Iron Linings (USA, post-hardcore / noise rock) - “Urban Abyss”, from personal failure to conspiracies and deep space.

🔊 Sludge / Noise Rock / Doom / Industrial

Hiss (USA, sludge / noise rock) - Portland trio go lower and heavier on “A Cheapened Crown”.

Bongrot (USA, sludge / grindcore) - One-man Appalachia sludge about addiction, church trauma and isolation.

Dumb Waiter (USA, experimental rock / noise rock) - Richmond quartet take sixth album “Change” apart track by track.

Wealthy Women (USA, sludge / noise rock) - “Children” deals with masculinity, immigration and war.

Machinekit (USA, industrial punk) - Five short songs about labour, burnout and losing your own time.

Sliimo (USA, space-sludge / experimental rock) - New 10-inch expands their Kyper story and includes a song for Mike’s late wife.

🌀 Post-Rock / Post-Metal / Experimental

Ničiteľ (Slovakia, post-metal / sludge / crust) - Nine colour-titled songs plus nine paintings by new vocalist Tamara.

Astoria (Norway, post-rock / ambient / shoegaze) - “Fragment” previews “Colder Than Before”.

The Mantra Discord (USA, post-rock / instrumental) - Their second LP was delayed almost a year after Russ lost his mother.

Viscera/// (Italy, post-metal / psychedelic metal) - First full-length in nine years, looking at cults, dogmatism and collapse.

🎪 Festivals / Scene / Archives

New Friends Fest 2026 (screamo / emoviolence) - 36 bands, four reunions and 15 bands reporting on their own scenes.

The End of Impact Fest 2026 (screamo / hardcore) - Six bands plus Warm Room Collective on DIY spaces and safer shows.

Ferret Music (USA, hardcore / metalcore) - Carl Severson relaunches Ferret with new signings and catalogue reissues.

Jennifer Finch / L7 (USA, punk rock / grunge) - Chantal Roeske’s personal remembrance of Jennifer Finch.

Release Athens (Greece, punk / post-punk) - High Vis, Bad Religion and The Offspring through Anastasia Zisopoulou’s lens.

CNHC Fest 2026 (China, hardcore) - Leo and ten bands give us a city-by-city report on Chinese hardcore.

Italian Party 2026 (Italy, emo / screamo / math emo) - Gabriele Gargiuolo reports from inside Italy’s young emo scene.

Projects like this would not be possible without your support.

IDIOTEQ is all about supporting under the radar artists, in-depth features with unique perspectives from artists from all around the globe, is ad-free, and runs on one person’s time. Every bit of support directly helps keep it independent and going.

You can now ☕ buy me a coffee here, 💸 drop a tip via PayPal, or become a patron here.

BROWSE ALL HERE

~ Thanks! Karol

Before I hand things over to the scheduler (there will be new posts coming up throughout July while I’ll be away), here’s the rundown from the last week.

We had a genuinely wild spread: Ecuadorian hardcore confronting school suicide, Jack Grisham (T.S.O.L.) writing a record 6,000 miles from his collaborator over Zoom, more screamo (as usual), more quality noise rock, Boston queercore, US hardcore band reporting from European roads, and a lot more. Also two pieces that generated more reader mail than anything else we’ve run this year, and we had zero fun dealing with it. More on those at the end.

For the record: the scheduler is loaded. Plenty of good stuff going out while I’m away. Keep checking idioteq.com/latest.

🔥 Hardcore / Punk

RISK IT! (Dresden, Germany — hardcore punk) - “Mercy For None” via WAR Records, out July 3. Five years between albums, Nick Jett of Terror producing, track-by-track from guitarist Thomas.

HUMAN ISSUE (Southern California, USA — hardcore) - “In Flesh” via Smartpunk Records. Dual vocals between Hunter and Matthew, most takes first or second. Songs about sobriety, cycles of self-destruction, and knowing where you’ve been.

WAKE OF HUMANITY (USA — metallic hardcore) - European Distress Tour diary, phase one.

PUKARANA (Durán, Ecuador — hardcore punk) - 23 years in, Elizabeth and Catalina Coronel still the core. New single “Suicidio Escolar” tackles school bullying and institutional silence around teen suicide, backed by a public discussion at a Guayaquil cultural centre with a mental health organisation. A piece about one of Latin America’s most consistent DIY hardcore bands and a scene that’s held together with no infrastructure.

KING SANS (Chicago, USA — noise punk) - Debut LP “Sell the Cow” out August 21 via Dipterid Records. Two-piece, built around anti-capitalism and the pressure to sell out just to exist. Named after the moment Jack sells the family cow in the beanstalk story: sacrificing something meaningful because you feel you have no choice.

FUET! (Madrid, Spain — melodic hardcore / punk rock) - New single “Roll With It” while the second album brews for 2027. The band that went from 8 Spotify monthly listeners to a sold-out tent at Mad Cool (while clashing with Avril Lavigne) and back to a standalone single. This goes as the most melodic side of punk rock and hardcore this week.

CITY SPEAK (Mainz/Wiesbaden, Germany — punk rock) - Video premiere for “Every Day Is A Good Day For A Pizza Bon Jovi” and European summer tour dates. The trio’s second run, first since 2022, starting July 11 with a SAWA Fest date in Croatia they’ve been looking forward to for years.

RAINCHECK! (Lyon, France — punk rock / melodic hardcore) - New video “We Ain’t Gonna Take It” using public-domain vintage footage from the Prelinger Archives, first track from their second LP. Ten years as a band, first US date (Dingbatz, NJ) plus a Green Day tribute comp landing July 24.

BRATLASH (Boston, USA — queercore / punk rock) - Debut EP walkthrough from Jett Hexx. All-femme production chain (Nadia Lee engineering, Natalie Bibby mastering, Sarah Tudzin producing the upcoming “Yr Lies”). Not on Spotify, by choice, and they explain exactly why. Songs about power, institutional religion, and what it costs to exist queer in Texas during the Bush years, then America now.

DEAD TIRED feat. GEORGE PETTIT / ANDREW NEUFELD (Canada — post-hardcore / heavy rock) - Hard to label it between hardcore, rock and post hardcore. Anyways, new single “Dust Storm” with George Pettit of Alexisonfire and Andrew Neufeld of Comeback Kid is up. No further explanation needed if you know either band.

GLASSMOUTH (Singapore — mathcore / chaotic hardcore) - Debut LP “Monolith” via Glass Records, out July 3. Concept album about a crashed spaceship that started as Kubrick and turned into a Michael Swanwick short story about grief on Io. Dillinger Escape Plan energy, personal losses, industrialized chaotic blend of metal and hardcore.

💔 Post-Hardcore & Screamo

ангст. / L’IDYLLE / MISERICORDE (St. Petersburg, Russia / Rouen, France — screamo) - Split “мизерикорд // отрава” via dead dogs barking. Started as Dmitry from ангст. messaging L’Idylle on Instagram because he liked their music. One song in two languages, French and Russian, same track, different alphabets. “Bare emotions need no visa.”

RIJEKA (Toulon, France — screamo / post-hardcore) - First new song in two years, recorded in one afternoon during a rehearsal. The band has two full unreleased records on a hard drive. Nicolas sent us the song with: “We are still alive, we’ve released a short song between our boring jobs and our lovely children, we have no plan to tour or play live again.” Share it if you think it deserves.

TETSUO (Athens, Greece — chaotic hardcore / post-hardcore / screamo) - "critters" EP, self-released. Alice is a trans woman who built the room because the Athens scene never made space for her. Songs range from chaotic hardcore to lo-fi bedroom to post-hardcore, with the fourth track taking a full hip-hop detour after she accidentally baked a sample into the vocal chain and liked what happened. One of the more honest conversations we've had about what it means to produce everything yourself, keep full control, and still make something that doesn't sound like a closed room. Also, one of the most striking and harsh records last week.

🔊 Noise Rock / Post-Punk / Post-Hardcore

MR. PHYLZZZ (Chicago, USA — noise rock) - New single “Over and Over Again” ahead of “Fear the Lord” on Amphetamine Reptile Records. July tour with two Melvins support dates, then Empty Bottle on July 20 where they’re recording a live album for the band’s 10th anniversary.

RITUAL ERROR (London, UK — noise rock / post-hardcore) - “Terminal with Benefits” via Totality, out September 25. Recorded at Bear Bites Horse with Wayne Adams. Written in a windowless practice room, the last five songs written a month before recording because they needed five more. First single “New Slime” out now.

NARROW ARM (Providence, USA — post-punk / post-rock) - Debut single "Ticking Clock" ahead of an EP out October 2. Three people who switched instruments from their main bands, recorded live in a Rhode Island barn. Post-rock with more physical drive than the genre usually allows.

🎸 Indie, Alt & Emo

GYOZA (Barcelona, Spain — alternative rock / indie) - Double EP “Beber y soltar” as A/B vinyl with “Beber y doler”. Ten years together, a concept built on grief that doesn’t go away. One of the most thoughtful pieces we’ve run.

SOMETHING SNEAKY (Boston, USA — indie rock) - “Old Notes” on Swimwear Recordings, eight years in the making. Four people who grew up together on the South Shore, still rehearsing in the same basement. Ian MacKaye and Pinback both get cited as influences on how Jett thinks about lyrics.

BODEGA DOG (Hudson Valley, USA — indie / emo / acoustic) - New single “Gone, Gone” — solo project from Nico Caro, everything self-recorded. Third single, this one about the point after loss where you stop looking for closure.

QUIET AS A MOUSE (Brisbane, Australia — indie rock) - “Nostalgia is fine…but…” on Over The Hedge, London-born, Edinburgh-raised, Brisbane-based Alex Moran walking through the studio history of his project from Marcus Mackay to Liam Watson to a barn in Rhode Island.

JACK GRISHAM AND THE LIFE UNDONE (USA/Germany — punk rock / guitar pop) - Self-titled album July 10 via Lost in Berlin Records. Ex-T.S.O.L. frontman writing over Zoom with Berlin-based Lars Triesch. Songs about sobriety, isolation, his first wife’s overdose. A record between friends.

🎻 Americana & Folk

THE HUNTRESS AND HOLDER OF HANDS (Providence, USA — folk / americana / sludge-adjacent)
“Babylon” — MorganEve Swain’s second album, built ten years after her husband Dave Lamb of Brown Bird died. Cello, bowed string bass, fiddle, and a bottom end that’s heavier than the debut. Songs about power, corruption, survival. “Doctrine” was written in 2017 and she’s been hoping it would become obsolete.

🌀 Post-Rock & Avant

FOR WHAT YOU BURN (Germany — post-rock / instrumental) - “Rewind and Repeat” EP out July 24, first band record in five years, back to three-piece. Post-rock with a punk-leaning rhythm section.

FUGU (Vienna / Vermont — avant-pop / experimental) - “Last Note” on Rock Is Hell Records, their second full-length, 22 years after a handwritten note in a dining room started the whole thing. Heimo Wallner in Vermont, Fredl in Vienna, writing across the Atlantic.

🎪 Festival & Scene

2000TREES (UK — festival editorial) - Guest piece by Coolea on why UK festival lineups keep recycling the same bands, and why 2000trees still feels like it knows what it’s doing. Glassjaw, Sunny Day Real Estate, Scowl, Alkaline Trio. Worth the read before the gates open.

🗺️ IDIOTEQ Explore is live

While we were putting all of this out, we also launched explore.idioteq.com — a searchable, mappable archive of IDIOTEQ’s coverage going back to 2006.

At launch: 5,079 articles, 4,647 artists, 213 styles, 75 countries. Four views: Catalog (filter by country, city, year, genre, label), World Map (clustered by city, Chicago leads at 101 stories), Styles graph (213 genres connected by how often they appear together), and Stats (label treemap with Zegema Beach at 90 articles).

New articles sync twice daily. It’s a beta. If something’s wrong, tell me.

A note

Two pieces this week generated more reader mail than anything else we’ve published recently, coming from opposite directions. The Baratro follow-up, where Luca Antonozzi lays out his position on Zionism and the Gaza Skate Team, drew criticism for the sharpness and political content of his wording. The Eternal Struggle piece, where a Tel Aviv band speaks about what the past two years have been like for them, drew criticism for not naming what’s happening in Gaza. Both pieces have editor’s notes on site.

For 20 years IDIOTEQ has kept a clear line. We don't platform politicians. We don't run people who preach hatred against anyone. We don't do neutrality theatre either. What we care about is honesty, human dignity, and DIY values that hold up when a topic gets loud, not just when it's easy. We hate extremism, on every side of every argument, and we're not going to pretend that a musician's words stop hurting people when those words happen to fit the shape of the loudest slogan. Where a band's account of their own life is uncomfortable to sit with, we'd rather publish it and let readers see it clearly than smooth it into something more palatable.

All latest features:

~ Stay tuned. Karol

Projects like this would not be possible without your support.

IDIOTEQ is all about supporting under the radar artists, in-depth features with unique perspectives from artists from all around the globe, is ad-free, and runs on one person’s time. Every bit of support directly helps keep it independent and going.

You can now ☕ buy me a coffee here, 💸 drop a tip via PayPal, or become a patron here.

BROWSE ALL HERE

~ Thanks! Karol

explore.idioteq.com went live on July 1.

It’s an interactive archive of 20+ years of IDIOTEQ coverage: hardcore, punk, post-hardcore, screamo, metal, post-rock, noise, and everything adjacent.

In this beta version, we have lancuhed four public views: Catalog, Map, Genres, Stats. All open.

INTRO

There's also a small intro flow we put together for fun.

First-time visitors get a two-tab pop-up. One tab is a quick onboarding by country: pick United States, Germany, Italy, Sweden, whoever's on your radar, and you land on a page with how many artists and articles we've covered from that scene, the top styles, and recent coverage to jump into.

The other tab is a five-round quiz that asks you to guess which country has more independent artists on IDIOTEQ. Italy or Canada. Sweden or France.

Skip it if you want to browse everything straight away. But if you're curious how your local scene stacks up against ours, that's the fastest way in.

CATALOGUE

Catalog is a searchable, filterable feed of every article we’ve written. Filter by country, city, year, feature type (premiere, interview, track by track, tour diary), genre, label, and sort by newest or oldest. Want every metalcore piece from Germany in 2024? That’s now a two-click query.

WORLD MAP

Map is the one we’re most excited about. Every article got a location. Cluster the map and you get article counts by city: Berlin has 78, Paris has 15, Chicago has 8, and so on down the tail. Click a cluster and you get the full list of stories, with thumbnails, release dates, tags, and links back to the original piece. Location coverage was heavily cleaned before launch. As of the July 2 audit, all 5,077 visible articles had city data. If you find one that doesn’t, tell us.

GENRES / STYLES

Genres is where we’ve spent the most time, and it’s still moving. It’s an interactive graph of 213 styles connected by how they show up together in the archive.

Screamo sits next to post-hardcore. Blackgaze bridges black metal and shoegaze. Emoviolence hangs off screamo and powerviolence.

You can search, zoom, click, and follow the connections. Some edges are still being tuned. If you see a mislabel or an obviously missing connection, please email us. That view exists because of scene feedback, and it will keep changing because of it.

STATS

Stats surfaces the data in ways we couldn’t before.

The independent labels treemap is a good one: Zegema Beach Records at 90 articles, Dingleberry at 81, Shove at 39, Through Love at 37, Refuse at 32, then a long tail of tape labels, micro-presses, and regional collectives that put out one record we covered and never came up again.

A fun set of numbers that will certainly grow and morph into new versions sometime soon.

Under the hood

New IDIOTEQ articles sync into Explore automatically, twice a day. New coverage shows up within hours instead of the next morning.

Your turn!

Poke around. Find a band you forgot about. Find a label you never noticed. Find your city. If something looks wrong (wrong location, wrong genre, missing article, weird edge in the genre graph), tell me.

The archive is a conversation, not a leaderboard.

More coming up soon!

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~ Karol

🔥 Hardcore, D-beat & Grindcore

SAMADHI (Lubbock, USA — D-beat / hardcore punk) - “Ego Prison” via Blurry Vision Records — six tracks, 16 minutes, no clean parts anywhere. Two years of beatings and mental torment to finish it. Songs about billionaires, children being shot at schools, media disease, and getting out of your own head. The title track: “you lock yourself inside this cell / you are the prison.”

KICKED IN THE HEAD BY A HORSE / UNDERNEATH (Pittsburgh, USA — screamo / grindcore / mathcore) - Split “The Great Yinzer Trendkill” via Crestfallen Records — the opener is about a nuke going off in Pittsburgh and accepting your fate with your partner. KITHBAH go screamo-tinted grind, Underneath work the Pig Destroyer / Discordance Axis lane. A two-hatchback, Waffle House every morning tour follows.

💔 Screamo & Post-Hardcore

KID, FERAL (Skövde, Sweden — screamo / post-hardcore)- “2019” via Backpack Records — drums tracked in October 2019, the rest finished almost seven years later after a nerve injury ran at 9/10 pain around the clock and nearly ended everything. The vocalist had to learn to play guitar again after surgery. Named for the year it was supposed to come out.

junejunejuly (Herford, Germany — emo / screamo / pop-punk adjacent)
Debut EP “a false warmth” out simultaneously on five DIY labels across four continents — four people who met at a self-governed DIY social centre that’s been relocated eleven times since the ‘70s. Songs mostly without a chorus, about toxic relationships, transience, and being let down. The cover art is a frog stuffed with flowers. Very emo, very correct.

THERE WERE WIRES (Massachusetts, USA — sludge / post-hardcore) - “Vessel” via Iodine Recordings — first album in over twenty years, tracked across twenty months at home with no deadlines. Vocals recorded screaming into a winter storm through glass doors on Cape Cod. Songs about aging parents, dementia, loss, and what gets left behind. One track features the bassist’s twin daughters on the chorus. A Boston band that came back heavier and more open.

🎸 Emo, Indie & Folk

MOCK BISHOP (Kentucky/Tennessee, USA — midwest emo) - Self-titled debut EP — six songs about drift, addiction, identity, and the apartments you can’t hold onto, written by four people across two states and three cities. Group vocals show up exactly when the lyrics get heaviest. One song’s second verse was written nine years ago, sitting home alone and hoping things would change. They did, eventually.

proun (Austin, USA — emo / indie / folk) - “Maybe Luck” via Good English Records — debut LP written partly on a nylon-string guitar the vocalist went halves on with her parents at age eleven, and finished inside a church and daycare that doubles as a practice space. A transition record made from a “mostly positive place” for the first time. The cover photo is a Thailand lookout that hung in her late grandfather’s backhouse for decades.

RACOONHEAD (Melbourne, Australia — emo-punk / pop punk) - “Long Live Our Apartment Complex” out July 1 — lead single “Same Old Haunts” written after a panic attack on an overnight flight, watching stars from a red-eye budget plane. A love letter and a complaint addressed to the same addiction. The closing song on an album about moving somewhere beautiful and slowly getting used to it.

🌊 Post-Rock & Instrumental

HUBRIS. (Switzerland — post-rock / instrumental) - New single “Death” ahead of album “White Shores” out September 10 — the song that started everything, written on a $150 amp after the composer’s grandfather died. The album maps five stages of grief onto five Tolkien words: Death. Is. Just. Another. Path. European tour from late September.

🔊 Noise, Post-Punk

UNLETTERED (Southwest Florida, USA — post-punk / noise rock) - “Devil’s Bowl” out today — eleven tracks written inside a geographic bowl where weather and pressure accumulate without release. A civic grief record about the US right now, framed as a documentary, not a protest. The cover is an abstracted hurricane. Guitars that grind low and patient, bass that settles like a hum after the amp goes off.

HONDUH DAZE (Tulsa, USA — noise punk / post-punk) - New single “Data Plan” — Oklahoma duo turning internet-age frustration into something loud and methodical, industrial hip-hop drums under a wall of guitar. A manifesto with a beat.

🎮 Synth, Chiptune & Avant-Garde

GOM JABBAR (Italy — chiptune punk / synth punk) - Self-titled debut via Subsound Records — the Game Boy on stage is an actual 1989 unit plugged directly into the mixer, not a sample, not an emulator. The duo of Stormo’s Federico Trimeri and Kenobit refuses Instagram and Spotify on principle and operates from the Fediverse. The constraint of four monophonic channels is the political position. “We don’t want followers, we want accomplices.”

DEAFKIDS (Brazil — experimental punk / Afro-Brazilian / avant-garde)
“Cicatrizes Do Futuro” via Neurot Recordings — the opener runs a Moroccan Gnawa trance-inspired guitar riff over the rhythm of Bumba-meu-boi. Another track is built on a 5/4 Mozambique groove with tabla and a Tito Puente-style timbales solo. The drummer wrote an essay about the difference between borrowing those rhythms and actually living inside them.

🎻 Americana & Folk

THE HUNTRESS AND HOLDER OF HANDS (Providence, USA — folk / americana / sludge adjacent) - “Babylon” — the second album from MorganEve Swain’s project, built a decade after her husband and musical partner Dave Lamb of Brown Bird died. Cello, bowed string bass, fiddle, and a bottom end that’s read more doom records than the debut ever did. Songs about corruption, violence, and whether humanity can still learn. The protest song “Doctrine” was written in 2017 and she’s been hoping it would become obsolete. It hasn’t.

🎶 Punk & Oi!

TORO BRAVO / SOCPRO (Lithuania — oi! punk) - “Mūsų Balsai” (”Our Voices”) via Pasidaryk Pats records — two bands who’ve known each other for thirty years, five rehearsals, straight to tape. An oi! punk song about what survives a generation, with the line “In the 2000s punk rock saved us” sitting at its centre. “A lot of people around me chose paths that led to prison or the grave. Punk rock gave me an alternative.”

All latest features:

~ Stay tuned. Karol

Projects like this would not be possible without your support.

IDIOTEQ is all about supporting under the radar artists, in-depth features with unique perspectives from artists from all around the globe, is ad-free, and runs on one person’s time. Every bit of support directly helps keep it independent and going.

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Came back to a good batch that landed last week, but is still worth a deep dive: French screamo getting more politically direct after eight years of silence, a Spanish post-metal record 14 labels decided was worth co-releasing, teenagers from Richmond signing to a label via emails sent from school, and Gord Taylor making an electric solo record in Athens to prove bagpipes don't need a kilt attached.

Also, just look at the visual work independent labels are putting into these releases. Artwork, layout, packaging, the whole thing. It gives these records real character and reminds you that underground music isn’t being kept alive by algorithms. Much respect to all DIY labels mentioned in the following pieces.

🔥 Hardcore

STABBER (Oslo, Norway — hardcore punk) - “EP II” via Kick Rock / STAB! Records — four tracks, six minutes, no detours. New drummer learned the songs just weeks before recording because the room they’d been using was about to close down. They wanted the new start documented before anything else.

OMOIYARI (UK — metalcore / emocore / post-hardcore) - Debut album “The View From Halfway Down” via A Cozy Death — two years in a bedroom, an audio interface rescued from a skip, a DAW corruption that wiped a chunk of the work, and a tracklist that moved around forty times. Pressed on PlayStation 2 disc. The design was built by staring at a Marc Ecko book for hours. Songs about grief, psychosis stigma, imposter syndrome, and falling to feel human again.

💔 Post-Hardcore & Screamo

SOLITONE (Bordeaux, France — screamo / post-hardcore) - New EP “Le champ des possibles” out June 19 via Voice Of The Unheard — back after eight years, with a lineup that lost a member over political differences and a vocalist who spent five years in Paris reading about feminism, racism, and systemic domination. The record is more direct than anything they’ve done and they’re honest about why staying evasive keeps the status quo intact.

OR DOES IT EXPLODE (Madison, USA — post-hardcore / emo) - New album “Realities Disguised as Symbols” via Middle-Man Records, tracked at Electrical Audio — the heavier companion to last year’s “Tales to Needed Outcomes,” recorded in the same room as Neurosis and Sunn O))). Songs about American authoritarianism, wars, and finding shelter. One vocalist spent time in Ukraine and Russia and still has friends there.

ERETIA (Cantabria, Spain — post-metal / post-hardcore / screamo) - “The Autumn of Civilization” co-released across 14 labels — four untitled songs, 21 minutes, one continuous lyric broken into four pieces, built around Mario Benedetti’s poem “Autumn.” Climate collapse, supply chains, the exhaustion of a planet treated as infinite. Tracked in a house being renovated, mixed by Scott Evans, mastered by Matthew Barnhart (Neurosis, Kowloon Walled City, Sumac).

GAFFER (Richmond, USA — emo / post-hardcore) - New single “Money” via Ephyra — four teenagers, the oldest is 16, booking their own shows from school Gmail. Their third show drew a hundred kids who already knew the words. The first show that felt real was a demo release at Greenfield Rec Center with two other high school bands. Slint, Title Fight, and a Richmond band called Tarantula on the record shelf.

🎸 Alternative, Shoegaze & Post-Grunge

TRAINFANTOME (Brittany, France — shoegaze / post-grunge / alternative) - New album “Constant Farewells” via Howlin Banana — if their last record was Nevermind, this one is In Utero. Olivier started the band in 2017 after a stint as Harm Done’s roadie, during which his entire bag of clothes disappeared in Bologna and he responded to a bail-out offer with “Isn’t this supposed to be a Punk tour?” Kellii Scott from Failure plays drums on one track.

LOVERSTEETH (Hamilton / Montreal, Canada — post-hardcore / alternative metal)
New single “Closer to the Sun” ahead of EP “Floral Violence” - first song the four of them wrote together, music and lyrics and melodies, after the guitarist had been pushing to take on more vocal parts. About religious hypocrisy and the harm done by institutions preaching love while enforcing exclusion. Real worms in real mouths in the video. Shot DIY in their jam space.

🪗 Folk Punk & Oddities

GORD TAYLOR (Winnipeg / Athens — folk punk / celtic punk / bagpipes) - New electric album “Made in Hell” — ex-Real McKenzies piper making solo records in Athens to prove bagpipes work without a kilt attached. Covers Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” because he genuinely loves it, uses a distortion and wah pedal on a bagpipe solo (claims it’s a first), and spent years as a long-haul trucker before all of this. Long conversation, worth the read.

🛻 Guest Post

WTF IS UP KELOWNA? (Kelowna, Canada — DIY punk / community) - Guest post by Laura Lee Schultz (Down The Lees / Off White House Records) — three bands played out of the back of a U-Haul in a parking lot surrounded by unfinished condos, because the venues keep closing. People came from Penticton, Vernon, and Calgary. One of the better pieces we’ve run on what DIY actually looks like when there’s no infrastructure left to rely on.

All latest features:

~ Stay tuned. Karol

Projects like this would not be possible without your support.

IDIOTEQ is all about supporting under the radar artists, in-depth features with unique perspectives from artists from all around the globe, is ad-free, and runs on one person’s time. Every bit of support directly helps keep it independent and going.

You can now ☕ buy me a coffee here, 💸 drop a tip via PayPal, or become a patron here.

BROWSE ALL HERE

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🔥 Hardcore & Metalcore

HOLD ME TIGHT (Sardinia, Italy — hardcore / metalcore) - New single “Silence Before Rebirth” feat. Tony from Desolated — Fran wrote the lyrics in a hospital bed thinking about years of accepted harm and the way she’d been speaking to herself. The song started as “last song” in the band files. Desolated appear at the heaviest point; Fran’s tied to them from years of reconnecting with herself in London hardcore rooms. Dark, abrasive, and more emotionally direct than anything they’ve done before.

MELTING (Melbourne, Australia — metalcore / death metal adjacent) - Second EP “A Pathetic Excuse For A Life” via Greyscale Records — Melbourne band pushing against the polished production trend in heavy music, keeping guitars and vocals DIY while the drums hit massive. “The Sword” runs 1:01 and spends none of it warming up. Music you want to mosh to in tiny sweaty venues, made for exactly that.

💔 Post-Hardcore & Screamo

MAN LOOKING MAN (Berlin, Germany/Italy — post-metal / screamo / sludge) - Self-titled debut via Argonauta/Octopus Rising - six songs in six languages, recorded on a rooftop in West Berlin, pulling from Converge and Orchid on one side and Mussorgsky on the other. Five years in the making, nearly scrapped twice. Songs about alienation, capitalism, and trying to stay human in a deranged system.

SIDE OVER (Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, USA — melodic hardcore / post-hardcore) - Debut album “Loves You” premiere - formed in 1989, nearly released a debut in 1993, then three bandmates passed in the years since. A memorial benefit show in 2025 brought the survivors back. One song was built from incomplete riffs the guitarist found on a cassette recording he’d made with the late drummer Brian Craig. “It was like reuniting with his dormant spirit.”

ENDLESS FEST 2026 (Brooklyn, USA — screamo / hardcore / noise rock / festival) - Three-night benefit at TV Eye for ABC No Rio - 26 bands, free entry, proceeds going directly to the PA and AV system at the new 156 Rivington space opening this autumn. The State Secedes play their first show since 1997. Saetia, Lord Snow, Hundreds of AU, Uniform, Nø Man, Sunrot, The Saddest Landscape. Full multi-band interview across every headliner and all four labels tabling.

BOI TOI (UK — experimental post-hardcore / funk hardcore) - New EP “That’s Boss” out July 10 — grunge through psychedelic panic, Primus-level bodily discomfort, Tool-adjacent tension, and jokes about fascism that stop being funny halfway through. Comes in a cassette sealed inside a replica food can. Five tracks about work stress, macho fantasy, and internet paranoia, built through live shows rather than studio polish.

🎸 Punk Rock

ALL COASTED (Vicenza, Italy — pop punk / skate punk) - Fifth album “Time For Disruption” — the venue where they started playing at 13 just got demolished for a high-speed rail project, which pretty much sums up the mood of the record. A decade-long NOFX chase that’s arrived at something darker and more honest, written by adults with actual things to be angry about.

MERMAID ISLAND (Los Angeles, USA — punk rock / folk punk) - Self-titled debut via Anxious and Angry / No Dad Records — started by a Cape Breton songwriter who stayed in LA through the pandemic alone when everyone went home, busking roots showing through every distorted chord. Feminist, funny, direct. Tracked live off the floor in two days.

PAOLO PALMACCI / NO CAPITULATION (Italy — experimental punk / situationist satire) - Vinyl compilation of seven imaginary bands fronted by 1980s Italian punk contributors — includes fake adverts for products that don’t exist, a Ranxerox cover drawn by Tanino Liberatore, a satirical dictionary, and an NFC tag inside a purple three-inch vinyl. A conceptual argument against AI and passive consumption, using the tools of the Italian fanzine scene to build it. Ends with a planned ritual destruction of unsold copies.

🌊 Post-Rock

LOST IN KYIV (France — post-rock / post-metal / electronic) - Fifth album “We’re All Going To Be Fine” out June 19 via Pelagic Records — renamed from Lost In Kiev after the invasion, the first album with new drummer Jérémie Legrand, and the heaviest they’ve ever sounded. Jung provides the closing voice sample. A female vocalist appears for the first time on the most atmospheric track. The title is either reassurance or denial; the band leaves it open.

MILLION MOONS (London, UK — post-rock / instrumental / progressive) - New album “You Be Good, I Love You” out June 26 — named after the last words a famous research parrot ever said. A concept record about consciousness in other species, covering colossal squid, the 52-hertz whale, immortal jellyfish, and a Labrador rescued from a front porch chain. Saxophone and church organ appear for the first time. Main stage festival debut in China happened between records.

FOREIGN FILM (Sacramento, USA — post-rock / space rock / cinematic)- Debut LP “A Love Letter” — Will Haven guitarist Jeff Irwin building the project he couldn’t fit inside his main band: Pink Floyd, Hum, The Cure, Depeche Mode. One song had been sitting in a demos folder for twelve years before Foreign Film gave it a home.

🎸 Alt Rock, Psych, Indie

MELTT (Vancouver, Canada — psych-pop / indie rock / dream pop)
Third album “Pathways” out today via Nettwerk — warm, slow-burning psych-pop that sits closer to Beach House drifting into War On Drugs territory, self-produced for the first time, mixed by Chris Coady remotely from Burbank. A Manchester crowd sang the synth line from “Up All Night” back at them on their first EU/UK tour and it felt like, in their words, “a tiny taste of the War On Drugs at Glastonbury.” 34-date North American tour from August.

HAIRPIN (Dorset, UK — emo / grunge / power pop / post-hardcore) - New single “Framing” — Angel Du$t-style pop hooks with actual hardcore behind them, about the futility of arguing with someone who’s already decided they’ve won. The studio, the artwork, and the booking all belong to the band. Support for Glitterer coming up.

VOLYNKA (Athens, Greece — noise ‘n’ roll / post-punk / grunge) - Second album “Staycation” — the band spent lockdown rehearsing and emerged angrier, tighter, and more politically direct. A satirical dictionary definition opens the Bandcamp page. Four people in their late thirties writing about feeling trapped in Athens as it gets more expensive and more touristed, about love handled badly, and about the contagion of daily life in a city that’s become someone else’s aesthetic backdrop.

GEN AND THE DEGENERATES (UK — art-punk / dance-punk / indie) - Essay and new single “Favourite Jumper” — non-binary vocalist Genevieve Glynn-Reeves wrote about bisexuality, the heteronormative cha cha slide, and what it means to be queer when the culture keeps expecting you to take one step to the right. The song slaps. Talking Heads and LCD Soundsystem in the DNA.

🔩 Metal

AGARWAEN (Finland — extreme metal / theatrical / Asylum Metal) - New album “The Murder Trend” out July 3 — concept album following a boy broken by systemic cruelty into ritualized murder and cult indoctrination, performed live with actors, costume changes, blood bags, and fifteen clowns storming the crowd at the January show. The drummer holds a master’s in non-verbal theater. Their guitarist has ten years of musicals behind him. They call it Asylum Metal.

All latest features:

~ Stay tuned. Karol

Projects like this would not be possible without your support.

IDIOTEQ is all about supporting under the radar artists, in-depth features with unique perspectives from artists from all around the globe, is ad-free, and runs on one person’s time. Every bit of support directly helps keep it independent and going.

You can now ☕ buy me a coffee here, 💸 drop a tip via PayPal, or become a patron here.

BROWSE ALL HERE

~ Thanks! Karol

Saints of Lorain's debut album is built around a friend who overdosed alone in a Wendy's bathroom. A Milwaukee noise rock trio wrote a song from a fire escape the night they watched someone get shot in the parking lot below. A Manila straight edge band put Have Heart's Pat Flynn on a track about learning history or repeating it. The Real McKenzies made their first record since Paul got sober, after roughly fifty years of hard drinking. If These Trees Could Talk added vocals to an album for the first time in two decades — the voices belong to the drummer's kids. The Dharma Chain moved from Byron Bay to Berlin, lost half the lineup to breakups and visa problems, and came back as a four-piece with something tighter and stranger. And a lot lot more. Quite a week.

🔥 Hardcore & Punk

SAINTS OF LORAIN (Cleveland, USA — street punk / garage punk / rock ‘n’ roll) Debut album “Those Dark Roads” premiere — a firefighter turned novelist working through a friend’s overdose death, 25 years of Cleveland underground history, and the guilt that doesn’t dissolve. The record stays in the breakdown; the redemption hasn’t arrived yet and the band isn’t pretending otherwise.

RISK IT! (Dresden, Germany — hardcore punk) First single “The Bottom Line” from upcoming LP “Mercy For None” on WAR Records — five years between records, a producer change that finally broke the logjam, and a song about standing up for the things that matter in a dog-eat-dog world. No sugarcoating.

FIGURE OUT (Manila, Philippines — straight edge hardcore) New EP “Through The Tides” via Still Ill Records — straight edge political hardcore about the Philippine legal system failing a mistreated security guard, Marcos-era revisionism, and class war as daily texture. Pat Flynn of Have Heart and Fiddlehead appears on a track about learning history or repeating it, relevant given his day job as a history professor.

OMIT ALL (Philadelphia, USA — metallic hardcore / industrial) New EP “Lights Up on The End Stage” — three songs about AI outsourcing your own mind, parasocial dependencies replacing actual relationships, and endless wars being passed down through generations. Philly four-piece with twenty years of combined scene history, running somewhere between Powerman 5000 swing and Harms Way weight.

MERVILLE (Nantes, France — melodic hardcore / post-hardcore) Demo “Side Lines” — ex-Direwolves and Harm Done members who kept bumping into each other until one of them finally said yes. The drummer runs a bar and bakery, which is how they got a drummer who also keeps them in pastries. Drug Church, Touché Amoré and Title Fight in the room.

💔 Screamo & Post-Hardcore

MISERE (Ludwigsburg, Germany — screamo / post-hardcore) Debut single “Lichtschacht” — first music from a German-language five-piece sharing members with Cages, writing about finding a sliver of light when the walls are still closing in. More direct than Cages, same emotional territory, mother tongue making the exposure sharper. For fans of The Saddest Landscape and early Caravels.

DEARHEART (Seattle, USA — post-hardcore / emo / rock) Second album “Until All the Light in Us Is Given Up” — the follow-up to their debut moves through the later stages of grief, the part where you finally accept the love isn’t coming back. Structurally restless, built on hope turning into anxiety and the dangerous habit of keeping it alive past its usefulness.

HAD SANDY (Brighton, UK — emo / post-hardcore) New single “t’other side” — Brighton band with a song that “just punches you in the face,” chasing early Trophy Eyes energy and Citizen’s unsettling chord progressions at the same time. A B-side exists only on cassette, sold at the release show, because “everything is intangible these days.”

🔊 Noise Rock, Psych, Post-Punk

PRIMITIVE BROADCAST SERVICE (Milwaukee, USA — noise rock / angular post-punk) Third album “Monsters” via Learning Curve Records — every song comes from the urban environment around them, including a track written from a fire escape the night the parking lot below became a crime scene. One song was finished before ICE killed two people in the Twin Cities; proceeds go to mutual aid funds in Minneapolis and Milwaukee. Shellac and Unwound are the chassis.

SINECURES (Newcastle, UK — post-hardcore / math rock / post-rock) Debut album “Brace” — three people, two bottles of premium tequila, one local venue, zero outside money. A guitarist-professor who researches big tech infrastructure bleeding his day job into lyrics that have become more direct because “overly cryptic lines feel disingenuous right now.” For fans of Unwound, Slint, Fugazi, Shellac.

SCREENSAVER (Melbourne, Australia — synth post-punk / new wave) Mid-tour dispatch from ten days into a European run — five-piece Australian synth post-punks cataloguing bad rentals, a toilet with no flush button, strawberry vitamins on the M74, and why creative expression still matters when technology and greed keep threatening to replace what makes us human. Henry Rollins plays them on KCRW.

VELVET MIST (Belgium — darkwave / post-punk / goth) EP “The Shape of Losing Light” — five-track concept record that requires the listener to physically flip the vinyl halfway through, with the gesture serving as the narrative pivot. Side A is the descent; Side B doesn’t resolve anything. Sisters of Mercy, Lebanon Hanover, Twin Tribes.

THE DHARMA CHAIN (Melbourne / Berlin — psych rock / neo-psychedelia / trip-hop-adjacent) Second album “Some Kind of Pure State” premiere — an Australian five-piece that moved to Berlin and lost two members to breakups and visa nightmares, rebuilt as a four-piece, and came back with something more focused. Hauled amps across Berlin on the U-Bahn to play shows while the lineup kept falling apart. Desertfest, Brighton Psych Fest, and Manchester Psych Fest ahead.

THE VENUS CHILDREN (Leeds, UK — psych rock / garage rock) New single “Amygdala” — Leeds band turning fear and emotional collapse into something grotesque and oddly euphoric, described by the bassist as “conducting a summoning of the brain.” Video shot in a windowless room in Leeds with daft outfits and a Chicken of Chance.

🌊 Post-Rock

OH HIROSHIMA (Örebro, Sweden — post-rock / progressive rock) New album “And the Dead Tree Gives No Shelter” via Pelagic Records — eight tracks pulling from a decade of archived riffs, a song written for a different band ten years ago, and one closer with a church organ and the first saxophone on an Oh Hiroshima record. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in the title; Mogwai and Alcest in the DNA.

IF THESE TREES COULD TALK (Ohio, USA — post-rock / instrumental) First album in a decade, “The Hidden Hand” via Metal Blade — a band that has always refused vocalists added a chant to the opener for the first time; the voices are the drummer’s kids, recorded because he couldn’t stop hearing a guitar line in his head. Playing Bigfoot country Ohio gave them the central metaphor: rarely seen, always blurry.

🎸 Emo, Punk Rock

RACOONHEAD (Melbourne, Australia — emo-punk / indie rock) New single “Same Old Haunts” shot on a Melbourne Airport runway — Singaporean transplant Adam Boo Rad Lee came away with an asthma attack from the runway dust. Song about the tension between restlessness and staying still, settling for the love that’s right in front of you. Third album due July 1.

THE REAL McKENZIES (Vancouver, Canada — celtic punk / folk punk) Thirteenth album “On Yer Bike” via Stomp Records — Paul McKenzie’s first record since getting sober after approximately fifty years of hard drinking. He calls it the best thing they’ve ever done. The Sawney Bean trilogy covers a 16th-century cannibalistic Scottish clan; “I Wanna Eat Sardines (With Yer Mother)” is also on there.

All latest features:

~ That’s a wrap! More coming up this week! Stay tuned. Karol

Projects like this would not be possible without your support.

IDIOTEQ is all about supporting under the radar artists, in-depth features with unique perspectives from artists from all around the globe, is ad-free, and runs on one person’s time. Every bit of support directly helps keep it independent and going.

You can now ☕ buy me a coffee here, 💸 drop a tip via PayPal, or become a patron here.

BROWSE ALL HERE

~ Thanks! Karol

21 under the radar artists. The Week in Underground

Another prolific week ends with a great set of new discoveries and cool new features, also including some bigger names.

Our longtime emo post hardcore heroes A Static Lullaby bought their own masters back just to do a live re-record of their 2003 debut - 23 years later, Joe Brown finally has the vocal performance he never got the first time around. Back to the future, literally.

There’s a lot of hardcore this week, and it comes from very different places. Promise from Padova with one of the most honest post-hardcore records I’ve heard in a while — five songs written from inside a real crash, no posturing. Body Eviction from Worcester with a record that feels like reading the news too much and finally snapping: ICE raids, Epstein files, morning dog walks past a MAGA-wrapped truck. On Borrowed Time from Dorset with a debut full of melodic hardcore that earns its weight. Kids of Rage with 16 years of Barcelona scene history packed into an EP and an interview that reads like a small sociology paper on DIY culture. Beyond the Styx with their heaviest French hardcore yet. And Omoiyari - bedroom-built metallic emo about cleft surgeries, burnout, Icarus myths, and a debut album pressed on a PlayStation 2 disc. Plus Thrownness from Lisbon, one of those post-metal/sludge records that pulls from Neurosis and Dylan Thomas at the same time — our kind of thing.

Outside the heavy stuff: Scared Little Toaster recording inside a metal container where the two players couldn’t see each other, wracaj bo ciemno and milion lat przestępnych with a split sealed by 17 shared shows and friendship bracelets, A Static Lullaby deep-dive, metalcore beast Cober Mouth going from school posters to a 15k arena in Leipzig, and more pop punk, emo, post-hardcore, and noise rock below.

🔥 Hardcore

OUT OF LINE (Central California, USA — hardcore punk) New album “Rec Center” via Find A Way Records — blue-collar hardcore about 4am alarm clocks, fake sympathy, bad parents, and recovery. One song is about finding someone in a vacant tower trying to stay warm, being turned back out into the storm. The title track is about running, drinking, getting picked up by police, and receiving 48 hours of medical wristband instead of actual help. “It isn’t help, they just prolonged the end.”

ON BORROWED TIME (Dorset, UK — melodic hardcore / punk) Debut LP “In The Dark Before The Dawn” via Omen Records — ten tracks built around darkness, resentment, distance and slow return, referencing Have Heart, Defeater and Bane. The closing track features guest vocals from Mark Betteridge, who went to the studio and nailed his section in one session. “It was emotional to be honest as it felt like the final piece of the puzzle.”

PROMISE (Padova, Italy — post-hardcore / melodic hardcore) Debut EP “Chlorine” full premiere — five songs written from inside a period when sleep, relationships, and the basic sense of steering your own life all stopped working. The Padova/Venice hardcore scene has grown from 20-person rooms in 2012 to Arkangel and Crush Your Soul to packed halls. “A lot of these songs read as trapped on the page and feel like movement in the body.”

BODY EVICTION (Worcester, USA — post-hardcore / melodic hardcore) New EP “Dead Civilians” — six tracks reacting to ICE raids in Massachusetts, the erosion of abortion rights, and the Christofascist turn in American politics. One song is literally named after the number of times Trump appeared in the Epstein files. Built as blunt, mid-tempo post-hardcore with nowhere polite to go. The most political record in their catalogue, written by someone who walks past a MAGA-wrapped truck every morning on his dog walk.

HEALING WOUND (UK — metallic hardcore / screamo / sludge) Debut album “Bodies of Heavenly Violence” full premiere ahead of release — eight songs about depression, dissociation, and the slow process of forgiving yourself, written mostly on bass before drums were added. Most tracks circle one person’s life falling apart and being rebuilt from scratch. Going straight into a US/Europe/UK tour with Agriculture.

BEYOND THE STYX (Tours, France — metallic hardcore / thrash / death metal) Fourth LP “DIVID” — ten tracks about inherited hatred, war, environmental collapse, and systemic indifference. Their vocalist says the record came from “a world where everyone seems to hold their own truth. But our only truth is suffering.” Guest vocals from Sisterhood Issues on “Flowerviolence.” Over 300 shows with Sepultura, Terror, and Walls of Jericho in the background.

KIDS OF RAGE (Barcelona, Spain — hardcore punk / 2000s metalcore) New EP “Rearranged” via Useless Pride Records — six tracks, band still going after 16 years and five bass players. The full interview is a scene history of Barcelona hardcore from squats and youth centers through Razzmatazz and the financial district swallowing the Marina area. “Un desalojo, otra okupación.” They miss cheap tickets and bands bringing other bands’ records to their merch table.

TRUEANDTRUE (Oslo, Norway — industrial hardcore / post-hardcore) Debut album “NOSEDIVE” via New Bloom Records — the song they wrote first became the template for everything else, and it felt “like it was constantly on its way to falling apart.” Songs move through self-worth, belonging, grief, and religion crumbling under pressure, with humor threading through that never quite makes it to the surface. Prior EPs covered by Stereogum and Metal OBS.

💔 Screamo & Post-Hardcore

AWAYWITHROSES (Edmonton, Canada — screamo / emoviolence / metalcore) Debut EP “My Involvement With Witchcraft” — vocalist Colten wrote about their cleft lip and palate surgeries for the first time. Multiple operations as a kid, doctors repeatedly saying the next one would be the last. One song recorded in front of a computer desk instead of the closet vocal booth because the take was too cathartic to re-cut. “It came out so naturally and cathartically that it didn’t feel right to record it again.”

A STATIC LULLABY (California, USA — post-hardcore / screamo / early 2000s melodic hardcore) Full in-depth interview on the live re-recording of their 2003 debut — the original rights ended up at a major label, so the band bought them back from a third party at a discount. Joe Brown was ill during the original sessions; the live re-record gives him his own vocal performance 23 years later. Dan Arnold on writing the record in 2002: “Right place, right time, right idea. We didn’t know the same thing was happening everywhere else at once.”

OMOIYARI (UK — metallic hardcore / post-hardcore) New single “Poisoned Seas” ahead of debut album “The View From Halfway Down” June 19 — built over two years in a bedroom on an audio interface pulled from a skip. The album is being pressed on PlayStation 2 disc. The Icarus myth runs through everything: burning out, the fall, the sea clearing. “I found a place and a way in which peace, serenity, and explosive catharsis could co-exist.”

DEMERSAL (Copenhagen / Odense, Denmark — post-hardcore / screamo / post-rock) New single “Som Sendt Fra Himlen” — the Icarus myth told in second person, about a child who grows too big and burns. The cello on the track was recorded inside an old round church on the Danish island of Bornholm. The upcoming album explores conservative masculinity, loneliness, and how powerlessness becomes hatred. Playing Roskilde Festival this summer with a string and brass section onstage.

SO-CRATES (Surrey/Hampshire, UK — post-hardcore / post-punk / math rock) New EP “V2,” first music in a decade — some songs were written the day after their 2016 debut, finally finished now. One track came together after watching people make their earthquake experience about themselves on social media. The band spans England and Portugal, and the gap between sessions was used to sharpen parts rather than lose them.

WRACAJ BO CIEMNO / MILION LAT PRZESTĘPNYCH (Warsaw, Poland — dreamo / emo / post-hardcore) Split EP “wszystko robimy razem” via Close Call Records — two Warsaw bands who’ve played 17 shows together turning that into a release. One WBC song is about a room flooded with ladybugs that keep coming back however many times you throw them out. The cover letters came from a birthday gift; at a show in Poznań the two bands made friendship bracelets with each other’s names, but only two got finished.

🔊 Rock, Noise & Experimental

SCARED LITTLE TOASTER (London, UK — noise rock / experimental / jazz-influenced) Live session premiere from a converted metal container at General Waste Studio — bass-and-drums duo, no space to turn around, Hugh couldn’t see the drummer the whole time. No click, just feel. The closer bass and mic proximity gave the recording an intensity they couldn’t manufacture in a normal room. “It was cramped yet spacious, loud, and slightly surreal, which suited us perfectly.”

🤘 Metal, Metalcore, Post Metal

COBER MOUTH (Bristol, UK — nu-metalcore / deathcore) New single “CESSPIT” and interview — Bristol trio going from secondary school music department posters to opening a 15,000-cap arena at Till Fest in Leipzig this summer, their first show outside the UK. Two people who’ve been making music together since school, still going. “It still feels hard to believe our music resonates with people to quite that extent.”

THROWNNESS (Lisbon, Portugal — post-metal / sludge / atmospheric hardcore) EP “Marrow Part II: A Fire Through The Ether” via Raging Planet — three songs finishing a split project started years ago, reshaped when a new lineup extracted “a rage, vision and strength I didn’t know those songs could have.” Neurosis and Cult of Luna are the school he went to. Songs written from inside grief and mourning, with Dylan Thomas quoted in a track title. One riff was written on the spot in the room, spontaneously, and it stayed.

🎸 Punk Rock, Emo, Indie & Pop Punk

RITUAL BRONZE (Cleveland, USA — post-hardcore / emo) Debut single “Tortured Artist” ahead of June 12 full-length via Steadfast Records — the last song written for the album, built from 12 drum videos the drummer sent to the guitarist. About a life spent in DIY bands. “I’ve been playing in bands now longer than I haven’t.” Casket Lottery, On the Might of Princes, and Appleseed Cast in the room.

THE THIRSTY GIANTS (Mankato / Minneapolis / Duluth, USA — punk rock / hardcore punk) Debut LP "Escape the Junkyard" via Round Bale Recordings — a father and son who started the band in lockdown basement sessions, now spread across three cities, with a bassist the drummer openly admits is "far more musically gifted than either of us."

AYODYLAN (South Florida, USA — pop punk) New EP “Knuckle Head” — the only book he’s ever finished is a Kurt Cobain biography. Wrote the lead single the morning he read about Cobain living under a bridge. Over a million streams on his 2025 debut. Fast, hook-driven pop punk built for morning commutes.

HOAXXERS (Austin, USA — pop punk) New EP “Hard Luck” via Mom’s Basement Records — the original lineup of defunct Southeast Texas band Joe Jitsu back together for the second time since 2023. Their pop punk is built on Dan Vapid and Josh Caterer, and the first political song one of them has ever written is about 2016. “I used to be hopeful and care free, until I got knocked out in ‘16.”

~ That’s all, but today is Monday, so be sure to check out our new features, too! Catch you on the flip side! Stay tuned. Karol

Projects like this would not be possible without your support.

IDIOTEQ is all about supporting under the radar artists, in-depth features with unique perspectives from artists from all around the globe, is ad-free, and runs on one person’s time. Every bit of support directly helps keep it independent and going.

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~ Thanks! Karol

🌊 Ambient, Post-Rock & Shoegaze

HAMMOCK (Nashville, USA — ambient / post-rock / shoegaze) Long Q&A with Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson on “The Second Coming Was a Moonrise,” out May 22 - their fourteenth album, shaped by fundamentalist upbringings, a misread moonrise on acid, and three losses inside two weeks including a tornado through Thompson’s home. Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd appear on “Chemicals Make You Small,” which may be the last thing the two work on together.

SADFACE (Silesia, Poland — dark ambient / film score) EP "Unsolved: KD-1" — cinematic score for a Polish true crime documentary about a 1999 cold case murder at a coal mine signal box in Czerwionka-Leszczyny, never solved. The song titles use German, which Gregorczyk hears as fitting for the subject given Silesia's mixed Polish-Czech-German heritage; the trumpet on the closing track comes from the regional tradition of playing it at miners' funerals.

ATOMIK CLOCKS (USA — experimental / avant-garde) Split bass, drums, sax, and synth into two distinct live machines — two configurations, same band, different instrumental combinations depending on the show.

VELCRO DOG (Trondheim, Norway — fjord noir / folk rock) New single “The Gonzo Futurist Manifesto” from second album “Fjord Noir,” out September 18 — Tony Gonzalez of Barren Womb forced himself to write a major-key chorus, then weighted it down with doomy lyrics about depression and missing out. “Every time I sit down to write I resemble a blind person at an orgy: I have to feel my way around for a bit.”

🎸 Rock, Alt & Indie

MR. CHARISMA (Houston, USA — acoustic / dark folk / outlaw country) Debut EP "Evil in This World" out May 19 — Daniel Austin (Die Young) and his collaborator Chris (Will To Live), fifteen years of hardcore between them, sitting down with acoustic guitars and four songs in minor and Dorian scales about philosophical pessimism, Rust Cohle, and the Gulf Coast. The Bandcamp bio reads "sad music for assholes," which Austin says is true.

THE MAGIC CITY (Boston, USA — indie rock / glam / post-punk) Self-titled debut out May 22 — a Boston band whose name maps an imagined city where Boston and London overlap, with reference points running from Pixies and Bowie to Suede and Kate Bush. Four players, self-produced, release party tonight at The Burren in Somerville.

SAM VANE (Michigan, USA — grunge-shoegaze) New single “islander” - Vane keeps the vocal on top of the haze rather than letting it disappear into it, which he traces to singing louder over Julie and Glare records than the actual vocals on those records. “If I’m pushing my voice that hard, I want people to feel what I’m saying, not just hear it buried somewhere in the background.”

OBJECT FICTION (Austin, USA — heavy shoegaze / alt rock) Three singles out across spring 2026 — drummer and vocalist Emily Day joined on the condition she’d play both roles simultaneously, and their take on Austin’s venue situation is blunt: a new city “street impact fee” makes opening independent venues inside city limits effectively impossible, so the action has moved to smoke shops, art galleries, and spaces under bridges.

JAGUERO (Vicenza, Italy — emo / grunge / punk rock) Debut full-length “Make Me Feel Alive Again” out April 10 via Anchors Aweigh Records — ten tracks circling displacement, burnout, and the defiance of choosing a life other people read as a waste of time.

WINDED (Miami, USA — indie rock / shoegaze) "Double Memoir" music video shot solo during a Miami lunar eclipse — Thrin Vianale took a corner of a mushroom chocolate, went outside with a phone at 11pm, and filmed their own shadow around a construction site while avoiding a security guard's golf cart. The song is about finding chosen family when your biological one rejects you, the first time they've addressed the subject through music.

OCHRE (Glasgow, UK — post-hardcore / post-punk) New single “Trouble In The Eye Of The Beholder.” from upcoming EP “PEN.” — written in roughly an hour, built around one bent guitar note repeated out of time, with lyrics about looking straight at your own flaws and accepting that change starts there. Shot the video at a small brutalist building hidden in the trees behind Queen Margaret Union.

CHRIS BROACH (USA — post-hardcore / emo) Two-song solo EP “Reality Sufferer” — Braid’s Chris Broach alone in his home studio writing about algorithms, propaganda, and left-side performative outrage. Kevin Frank (Gauge, Haymarket Riot) on bass; UK dates supporting Hey Mercedes and with Braid in July.

HONEY VHS (Brooklyn, USA — folk rock / indie*) Debut EP “With Pulp” — Cameron Roberts and Luca Schliemann recorded most of it at Lucas Saur’s studio, but “November” kept failing until they took it back to the apartment floor where they wrote it. The next batch of songs is going to tape in Luca’s home studio, leaning more Blaze Foley.

ELEPHANT JAKE (Philadelphia, USA — emo / indie pop punk) New single “’98” — written on a 1982 Casiotone 101 after both of Sal Fratto’s grandfathers died within three weeks of each other in 2024. The closing lines borrowed from City Pop and Masayoshi Takanaka; the chorus title is his birth year.

TANGLED IN WIRES (Sydney, Australia — nu-metal / grunge / shoegaze / post-hardcore) Debut EP “All That’s Left” — four songs built as a single arc: self-blame, apology, acceptance, and the wound that stays. They’ve described themselves as “Deftones from Temu,” which is close enough to fair.

SEEK VALIDATION LOOP (Italy — darkwave / new wave / post-punk) Debut single “Dead Letter” — Paola Torrisi and Alessandro Palazzo built it around a drum machine, distorted bass, and the specific phenomenon of a relationship that ends without a scene: chats that just stop mid-sentence. Shot the video in Alessandro’s kitchen with a black backdrop and two hard blocks of red and blue light.

🔥 Hardcore / Punk / Metal

CATERWAUL 2026 (Minneapolis, USA — festival / noise rock / hardcore) Multi-band interview and full feature on the fifth edition of the Minneapolis underground rock festival, June 5–7 — Rye Coalition’s first show since 2011 closes the weekend, co-founder Rainer Fronz is on the transplant list at Status 1 waiting for a new heart and answering questions from a hospital room. Bands from six cities on what the scene looks like in 2026.

BLACK MANTRA (Bressuire, France — hardcore punk / reggae punk) New EP “Slow Motion Apocalypse” out May 22 — seven tracks including a Misfits cover pushed toward ‘90s melodic hardcore and a Beastie Boys’ “Gratitude” fully rebuilt as reggae/dub, with backing vocals from The Wheel-Hers. Bad Brains is their compass, Shelter and Burning Heads the scenery.

MANGUALDE (Porto, Portugal — blackened crust / screamo / grindcore) Debut album “A Festa” out April 17 — eleven tracks written through a year of stacked defeats, dismissal from the local Porto art scene, and three-song grindcore stretches tracked in single takes with no gaps between songs. One riff traces back to the J-rock song that made guitarist Jorge start playing guitar in the first place, from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

UNDERGUST (São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil — crust / grindcore) New album “Collapsing In Silence” incoming — eight-year gap since “Chaos Farm,” caused by the pandemic, lineup dispersal, and the vocalist’s father dying from COVID. Now back with a harder crust/grind shift and guests from Rot and Vazio.

BOTTOM FEEDER (Calgary, Canada — metalcore) Debut EP “I” — named after a line yelled at a television during a soccer loss, this is ETID/Converge-lineage metalcore from four people in their late 30s playing the music they wore out as teenagers, recorded in a t-shirt store. Guitarist Matt Lannon on why Calgary lost its scene: “It does not matter where in the world you are. When that happens, the scene dies.”

SINNER SELF (Slovakia — deathcore / metalcore) New single “Malignant” — and an unusually direct conversation about being ghosted by music press, the pressure of constant promotion crowding out actual writing time, and how the promotional cycle can eat a band alive before a follow-up gets made.

HYPER MINDS (East Los Angeles, USA — garage punk / hardcore) New single “Sink or Swim” — three-minute rush about kitchen pressure and being thrown into situations before you’re ready. Tight four-piece, no corners cut.’

TRIP VILLAIN (Brooklyn, USA — industrial nu-metal / dance / techno) Second LP “Dose” out May 8 on Seeing Red Records — Josh Musto’s thesis is that the pressure before a Pantera riff and the drop in a Boys Noize set are the same physical command. “This is not a 50/50 dance/metal album — it’s 100% of both sonic palettes blasting at every moment.”

~ A lot more coming up this week! Stay tuned! Karol

Projects like this would not be possible without your support.

IDIOTEQ is all about supporting under the radar artists, in-depth features with unique perspectives from artists from all around the globe, is ad-free, and runs on one person’s time. Every bit of support directly helps keep it independent and going.

You can now ☕ buy me a coffee here, 💸 drop a tip via PayPal, or become a patron here.

All latest features:

BROWSE ALL HERE

~ Thanks! Karol

🔥 Hardcore

END OF THE LINE (San Diego, USA — early 90s hardcore) Interview with Matt Anderson and Cory Linstrum ahead of June reunion shows with Downcast at Che Café and The Smell. The band started in 1991 as a one-off farewell show for a vocalist who was quitting hardcore - everyone else kept going for eight months, sparked a label bidding war between Vermiform and Ebullition, and recorded a debut album they knew wouldn’t outlast the band. The reunion is the first time the two bands have shared a stage since 1992.

ALARM! (Stockholm, Sweden — hardcore punk) Second LP “Failure By Design” out May 8 on De:Nihil Records - the title came from a Noam Chomsky-referenced book arguing that financial crashes aren’t accidents, they’re policy choices. Vocalist Gareth grew up in Corby, a steel town his family worked in until the Tories shut it down in the early 80s. Former members of Victims and Outlast reconnecting 25 years later, with new vocalist Henrik Lindqvist back after not releasing music since 2009.

BLUNT FORCE (Philadelphia, USA — metallic hardcore / powerviolence) Debut demo out on Manic Mantra — formed when a guitarist spotted the vocalist’s No Time shirt at a Spectral Voice show and the two stayed talking through the whole gig. Five members from Denver, Pittsburgh, and Philly projects spanning ages 26 to 36. Vocalist Cole, who previously screamed for Raw Breed and Candy Apple, on apolitical hardcore: “Everything is political, to be apolitical is fencewalking bullshit.”

DEAD TO FALL (Detroit, USA — metalcore) Their 2001 demo gets its first-ever vinyl pressing via Tarnished Records — 300 copies, four variants, remixed and mastered by Dereck Blackburn. The original was cut in 24 hours in a warehouse at Cloud City Studios with Mike Hasty, the band sleeping on the floor between sessions. They were still hammering Victory Records’ door before the session existed; they drove overnight from a Georgia show and slept in the van in the Victory parking lot so they’d be there at opening. The unaligned vocal doubles in Blackburn’s remix are deliberate: “If everything lands perfectly, you lose some of the danger.”

DISPOSAL (Barcelona, Spain — death metal / beatdown hardcore) Debut demo “In Reverence to Nothing” — HM-2 buzzsaw tones and 90s NYDM crush in a city where the government keeps shutting down underground venues. The cover art depicts an execution where every figure looks identical to the others: “It’s about executing the worst parts of yourself.”

WRVNG (Belgium — metallic hardcore) Debut EP “Slow Motion Ruins” arriving via Pasidaryk Pats, Vina Records, and Hecatombe Records — four veterans of Belgian punk and hardcore who had the same amount of anger sitting in everyone and decided 2026 called for it. They had the name Wrang until a Dutch black metal band turned up with it on Spotify; they kept the letters, added a V where the A was, and describe the result as “still WRANG, but a little more chaotic.”

TÆEL (Oslo, Norway — powerviolence / no guitar) Self-titled second album out May 1 across seven international labels — fifteen tracks, eleven under a minute, with one bass doing the work of both guitar and bass. Drummer Magnus had “basically never played a blast beat” before joining the band, which Antonio describes as a blessing in disguise: he adds hardcore punk feel to the fills instead of the standard powerviolence approach. The band donates a portion of earnings from every run of shows.

👩‍🎤 Punk Rock

THE CRIMSON GHOST (Bergamo, Italy — horror punk) Third and final EP “Witchcraft” closes a trilogy: lycanthropy, vampirism, witchcraft, each delivered in three-song installments to honor the 70s concept-album tradition without asking anyone to sit through 45 minutes in one go. Their main musical reference for the trilogy is Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours.” They’ve left a prize at the merch booth for anyone who can name every cult horror film referenced across the nine tracks.

BRAT FARRAR (Melbourne, Australia — garage punk / new wave) Sixth full-length “Group” — first record made as an actual band rather than a solo bedroom project, tracked almost entirely live in a single day at Soundpark. The demo drums, demo guitars, and demo vocals kept getting rejected in favour of the originals because the proper re-recorded takes were too clean. Out on Beast Records (France), Ghost Highway (Spain), and Take The City (Spain), with the Australian side handled in-house.

SMALLWAYS. (Sydney, Australia — punk rock / alt*) Second single “WHAT I’M DOIN’” from debut album BROKE BRAIN Part 2 — their heaviest track yet, no chorus by design, the shape of the song refusing to land. The cover art, hand-drawn by Dirk Kruithof, pairs a priest with a scientist, a king with a soldier, a peasant with a homeless person: same roles across centuries, different uniforms.

🎸 Rock, Alt, Shoegaze, Noise Rock

SPARTA (El Paso, USA — post-hardcore / alt rock) Full sit-down interview with Jim Ward on “Cut A Silhouette,” out May 29 on Equal Vision / Dine Alone. Produced by J. Robbins in seven days at Magpie Cage, with Frank Iero co-writing two tracks, Kemble Walters (Chevelle) on another, and Carlos Arévalo from Chicano Batman on “Midnights.” Ward’s records that left a silhouette on him recently: IDLES, Turnstile, Hayley Williams. On where Sparta is now: “This feels like we’re a fucking band again.”

honeybee (Cleveland, USA — shoegaze / post-grunge) Debut LP “Only Dark Shit” out May 15 on Candlepin, Flesh and Bone, and Pleasure Tapes — the title made YouTube demonetize every clip and ad platforms flag every post. They kept it anyway. Their self-described philosophy “slowpunk”: being punk after you get a mortgage, corporate job, and fewer shows. “Hate is easy. Support your friends.”

TOJO YAMAMOTO (USA — psych noise / noise rock) New 7″ featuring a cover of R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon” tracked by a guitarist who doesn’t actually like R.E.M., using bass pickups pointed at a kick drum to add a weird texture to the drum sound. The whole band is part of an ongoing cover series tying Memphis wrestling history to noise rock. Guitarist Elwood, currently touring with ZZ Top Wednesday through Sunday, runs the sessions from a tour bus by text.

MARCH DOVE (Warsaw, Poland — grungegaze / shoegaze) New single "Jubilation" from upcoming debut LP "I want to live" — married couple Helena and Mateusz building an album concept around Jungian shadow work, from confronting the worst parts of yourself through to cautious joy at the road behind. Every released song so far points back to the album title without naming it. The band has had four songs out and the album still isn't ready; their youngest daughter arrived and the timeline moved.

GAB DE LA VEGA (Brescia, Italy — acoustic punk rock) 26-date Canadian tour underway — Pouzza Fest in Montreal through Medicine Hat, Alberta, entirely self-booked as always. Songs written in Brescia playing rooms in small Ontario towns most international tours skip, for people he’s never met, in places he’s never been. “It still feels surreal that songs written in Brescia can travel this far and take on a life of their own.”

🖤 Emo, Post Hardcore, Indie, Pop Punk

CAR VS. DRIVER (Atlanta, USA — post-hardcore / emo) “Deja Grateful,” their 1993 debut, back in print for the first time in 30 years via Stickfigure and Lunchbox Records, with Carl Saff on the remaster. The band made record covers out of manila envelopes, slept on top of their van, and played basements and living rooms alongside Current, Policy of 3, Braid, Cap’n Jazz, and Hoover. Drummer James Joyce was 17 when the band started and 19 when they played their last show.

GOL OLÍMPICO (Monterrey / North Carolina / BC — emo / shoegaze) New single “respirar en cuadro” - a six-minute fuzz-and-reverb panic attack song whose title refers to box breathing, the calming technique Andrés Pérez learned from his therapist. Co-produced by Kar of Accidents, who showed Pérez at age 16 that emo could be done in Spanish; Pérez hadn’t written a song in English since. They met in person for the first time at a Tijuana show last October, swapped band t-shirts like footballers at full time, and the collaboration grew from there.

COMPREHENDING / FOR EXAMPLE JOHN (Uppsala, Sweden / Warsaw, Poland — math rock / post-rock) Tour diary and backstory on Comprehending’s first shows outside Sweden - May dates in Poland, June in Sweden. The whole thing almost fell apart when a Stockholm venue cancelled with no notice, leaving For Example John holding hotels and travel plans for a city that dropped off the map. A month of asking around produced a replacement in Örebro one month before the date.

LOU LOU LOUIE! (Nebraska, USA — emo) Debut LP “Social Smoking” — the title comes from a Dragon Ball technique that boosts your power by burning life energy, which the band saw as the perfect analogy for the social smoker. Two-hour drives to shows in either direction, no money for housing so always driving back home after, lost jobs and relationships to the time commitment. They play with each other because there’s basically nobody else in the local scene to play with.

ROBO PUMPKIN (Boston, USA — indie emo) Debut LP “The Autumn Here” — a concept record about two people watching their friends leave Boston one by one while staying in their shared house as the seasons cycle. No guitar on the record, every melody played on bass by Max Adams, for whom “writing with the bass guitar has become second nature” after four albums and ten years of doing exactly this.

EVERETT TEA (Camas, Washington, USA — emo / pop punk) New single “long-tailed cat” ahead of second LP “smoke signals” out July 10 — the lead single was chosen because it shows both extremes of where the record ends up. Debut was written alone in a college dorm; this one had multiple co-writers, a new drummer, and a producer who also played glockenspiel and trumpet. The annual backyard show they run in Camas exists because growing up there, the two founding members mostly just played with each other.

🌊 Post-Rock

MONO (Tokyo, Japan — post-rock / orchestral) Long Q&A with Taka about “Snowdrop,” out June 12 via Temporary Residence Ltd. and New Noise — their first album recorded without Steve Albini in 27 years, tracked at Electrical Audio with Brad Wood. The record was shaped by three losses in four years: Taka’s father, Steve Albini, and his father-in-law, who died on January 1, 2025. At the funeral on January 11, he played a song he’d written for his wife and recorded with Albini in Chicago, still unreleased. The next day, he sat down with everything he’d been writing for years and the album came together at once.

🔩 Metal, Progressive

MANEATING ORCHID (Bengaluru, India — mathcore / death metal) Video premiere for “Cosmic Shroud” from upcoming LP “Cold Logic” — six minutes with not a single bar in 4/4, but written so you can still headbang throughout. The main riff came from spread-triad exercises the guitarist was running; the late-song detour into what they call “jazz metal” pulls from a John Zorn influence. They describe the track as “probably the closest thing we have to a radio single, but just about cacophonous enough to avoid the airwaves.”

THE CHRONICLES OF MANIMAL AND SAMARA (London, UK — progressive rock / post-metal) Fourth album “Misantropi” out June 12 on 12″ vinyl — built as a direct argument against AI music: real instruments, real bodies, no generative tools anywhere on the record including the music video. Vocalist Daphne Ang and guitarist Andrea Papi describe the last few years as having “challenged our ability to see a positive future,” and the record follows accordingly. The music video uses only 20th-century public domain film footage to avoid any AI-generated images.

~ That’s all. I’ll be back, very soon! Karol

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IDIOTEQ supports under the radar artists, produces in-depth features with unique perspectives from artists from all around the globe, is ad-free, and runs on one person’s time. Every bit of support directly helps keep it independent and going.

You can now ☕ buy me a coffee here, 💸 drop a tip via PayPal, or become a patron here.

All latest features:

~ Thanks! Karol

Wait, what?

Yup, here’s another curated IDIOTEQ batch of artists worth a check!

🔥 Hardcore & Punk Rock

KALI MASI (Chicago, USA — emo / punk rock) First new song in five years — “Searching For A Sunbeam” produced by Joe Reinhart, video pulled from last fall’s European tour alongside Joyce Manor, Hot Water Music, and Tigers Jaw. Singer Sam Porter is honest about the gap: lineup rebuilds, van breakdowns, cancelled tours, fundamental disagreements. Coast-to-coast US run now underway.

INCENDIARY DEVICE (New York, USA — NYHC / hardcore) Second LP “New York City” out May 1 — eight tracks with Bobby Hambel (Biohazard) on a guitar solo and Eugene Hutz (Gogol Bordello) on vocals. The title track came from post-pandemic New York and the band living in its shadows rather than photographing its skyline. Includes a rework of a Drew Stone song originally written in the early ‘80s with The High & The Mighty.

GET THE NET (Metuchen, NJ, USA — pop-punk) Debut LP “Til House Lights” out June 26 on Bright & Barrow Records — lead single “Tijuana” is essentially two minutes of the same chorus, designed to be screamed back from the floor. The whole band formed because someone booked them a show before they were actually a band. Shot the video at their practice space at 10pm on a Thursday in iMovie. Three suburban dads, their words.

POISE (Spokane / Portland, USA — d-beat hardcore punk) New 7″ “Iron Foot” out May 22 via Discos Enfermos and Human Future — title pulled from an Emma Goldman essay about the US planting its iron foot on the necks of other nations. “Ill Anguish,” premiering this week, is about trying to get ahead financially in a system built to keep you down. First record written with all five members in a room together.

FEEL FREE (Orange County, USA — metallic hardcore) Debut demo from two ex-bandmates who locked themselves in a practice space one October night and left with all the songs. Recorded in a bedroom, drums at Forever Ending Recordings. Built on Earth Crisis riffs, Sanction chaos, and the central line: “No machine can play god.” Positioning themselves to bridge the OC and San Diego scenes.

ANCST / MÄRNØ (Germany / Czech Republic — blackened metalcore / neocrust) Double tour diary from April’s seven-city run across five countries — two bands, two vans, two different headspaces keeping parallel journals. The Märnø backing track player died mid-set on day two. A drunk woman kept interrupting Tom from Ancst’s set in Bratislava until he lost the thread entirely. SO36 in Berlin had the wrong time on the flyer; they started to 40 people, finished to nearly 200.

💔 Screamo & Post-Hardcore

NICOTA (Prague, Czech Republic — screamo / post-hardcore) “Kapitola IV” EP — five songs, four years in the making, now featuring a Polish vocalist (Adam Adamiuk) singing mostly in English, with one Polish song written while living abroad. New drummer pushed the writing into darker post-metal territory. The Pol-Czech underground connection runs through shared shows, splits, and vocalists crossing borders to join other bands.

LETTERBOMBS / ÅTERSTOD (Finland / Sweden — screamo) New split tape on No Funeral Records — Letterbombs contribute their longest song to date, a single track taking up the whole side, while återstod’s four pieces on the other side run a day-cycle arc from “dawn” to “dusk.” Letterbombs, originally formed with no intention of playing live, have now toured Germany and Poland.

MUROSUONO (Rome, Italy — post-hardcore / math rock / screamo) Second LP “Chimera” out May 1 via five labels — five Roman musicians from psych rock, math emo, shoegaze, and post-punk backgrounds who built the record around a “no FOMO” approach after their rushed debut. Sung entirely in Italian, with seven tracks about dreams becoming nightmares. “How do you stop other people’s dreams from becoming your nightmares?” is the question the title track keeps circling.

JUNA (San Gabriel Valley, USA — screamo / post-hardcore) Second EP “Last Nerve” — the only song “I Am Deadly” has a lyric about the Grim Reaper as a member of the working class: “He has been doing the same job longer than anyone. He’s just doing the same job till the end of time. That fucking sucks.”

RITES OF SPRING FEST (Munich, Germany — festival / screamo) Year two of CoreChaos’s Munich festival, built as a half-joke about the “real emo” copypasta. Two days at Kafe Kult — Raein and Weatherday as headliners, Stormo closing Saturday, with Pg.99, Blind Girls, Øjne, soastasphrenas, Leda, Hummm, Moral Bombing, Older Friends, Pennwood Rd., and I practice saying sorry all weighing in on what “real emo” still means to them. Full multi-band Q&A published this week.

🔊 Noise Rock, Industrial & Alt Rock

THE FAMILY MEN (Gothenburg, Sweden — industrial punk / noise rock) Second LP “Co/de/termination” on Welfare Sounds — moved from 8-track tape to computer this time around, which opened things up sonically. Lyrics fed by CCRU texts, Kim Zetter’s Stuxnet book, and the sentence “Nothing human makes it out of the future” from a Terminator line the vocalist had to trim by one word to make fit. DVD players, they’ve learned the hard way, skip at frequencies below 60hz.

BARATRO (Milan, Italy — noise rock / sludge / post-hardcore) “No Comply” out May 8 on Supernatural Cat — born in the orbit of squat Cox18, now a quartet since cellist Matteo Bennici joined as a full member. The album cover is a photo of Rajab Al Reefi from the Gaza Skate Team performing a trick across rubble; the band reached out, got permission, and dedicated the record to the team. Guests include Dave Curran (ex-Unsane) on bass and Eugene S. Robinson (Buñuel/Oxbow) on vocals.

JACKSON FIG (Charlotte, USA — alt rock / shoegaze) “No One Knows the Bottom” out June 5 on Catholic Morphine Records — a year of patient writing in a storage unit, no paid studio time, drums and guitars tracked free at a converted garage. The lead guitarist came from a metal background and ended up playing exactly what the record needed; not a single demo take was cut. Title from Wall Street jargon about a market in freefall: “Here-in lies the cause / Same shit, different job.”

SUPERCORE (Buenos Aires, Argentina — industrial rock / post-punk) Debut EP “Erased” — written solo by Fran Beceiro in his home studio, starting with drum patterns before anything else. Vinyl pressed in the US via Sonic Rising Records. Live, the songs get heavier and more aggressive than the recordings. “I’m not sitting in the studio thinking about how the hell we’re going to play this live six months from now.”

🌊 Shoegaze & Dream Pop

SILK (Belfast, UK — shoegaze) Debut mini-album “Auralux” via Blowtorch / Shoredive Records — the drums on four of six tracks are the original demos because the properly re-recorded versions were “emotionally dead.” Solo project by Michael Smyth (ex-Virgins), guided partly by a Bill Murray sticker on his laptop. The record runs a chronology: a terrible event in “Auralux,” grief and memory in “Clementine,” resolution in “Pleasures.”

NO PINE MALL (Milan area, Italy — shoegaze / post-rock) New single “Impostor Syndrome” from November 2025 album “Adrift” — the band built the feeling of self-doubt into the song’s structure itself: the tension, the repetition, the way sound piles up or dissolves. Live, the closing section gets stretched until the tension breaks the room. They use it to end sets.

🎸 Emo & Indie

HOMEGROUND (Nevers, France — punk / indie rock) “Splendid” out May 8 on KROD Records — the title track is named after a Beatles cassette played on a Walkman in a father’s car. “That Track” is dedicated to that father, who passed away around the time the band formed and passed on his love of music. The song about small-town gossip “Everyone Knows” is affectionate and a little tired at the same time.

JARDIN ANIMAL (Managua, Nicaragua — Midwest emo / indie) Debut LP “Pudo Ser Peor” — the title means “it could have been worse,” and it isn’t ironic. The band sold 80 shirts to pay for the mix. There are roughly four rehearsal rooms in the entire country. Their breakthrough came when they played Furia Fest in Costa Rica and people sang along to songs they didn’t expect anyone outside Nicaragua to know. Guests from Spain, Mexico, and Costa Rica across the tracklist.

POWER BURKAS (Vic, Spain — power pop / emo) Fourth album “Amb la fi al davant” out May 29 on BCore Disc — written in Catalan, the only language three of four members speak in daily life. One track is about the demolition of the Municipal Market of Vic, which the band watched with “macabre fascination.” Another, “Crossfit Taradell,” is exactly what it sounds like. The album title comes from a line about being “a bunch of cross-eyed folks facing the end.”

MILK ST. (Bangor, Maine, USA — slacker indie / emo) New single “Just So” — the chorus is “Why are you so sad all the time,” written to mock the vocalist’s own inability to express anything except “I feel sad” during a period when his siblings were separated from his father and he was the one holding everyone together. Recorded in 2024, just now surfacing.

🌀 Experimental & Other

CZARNY LAS (Warsaw / Łódź, Poland — spoken word / bleak rap / downtempo) Debut album “Jak się masz?” — eight tracks from two people who used to organize hardcore/punk shows together a decade ago. One track is built around the voice of a child narrating a night raid on their family. Another reconstructs memories of a father who was never actually there. “Nie zapomniałem, tato, o tym, że byłeś, mimo że nigdy ciebie nie było.”

CAVEIRAS (Italy — baile punk / post-punk / dub) “Guerra Total Na Boca Do Lixo” on UR Suoni — an Italian trio feeding Brazilian street-party music through European post-punk. The cover art is a photo of someone skating across rubble. Dedicated to Mark Stewart of The Pop Group, a personal friend of the band who died in 2023. Roots run from Cinema Marginal to Quimbanda to Run DMC.

VERADAS (Portland, USA — psych rock / grunge-gaze) Debut single “Hud Money” on Dipterid Records — the title is a thinly-veiled Mudhoney nod. Shoegaze, jazz, funk, krautrock, grunge, and the Everly Brothers described as equal parts of an upcoming full-length. Lyrics written from the perspective of someone being slowly digested by their phone.

BY MILLION WIRES (Tarnów, Poland — post-rock / alt rock) EP “Not Over” — songs written around eight years ago, recorded partly that long ago, finally out. The guitarist tracked atmospheric parts at home in what he considered demos; they ended up being the final takes because everything properly re-recorded sounded too clean. The local rock scene in southern Poland has, in his words, practically ceased to exist since their 2012 debut.

~ That’s all folks! Heading to the mountains till Wednesday - next drops land Wednesday evening CET, see you then! Move your ass, go to a show! Or… 🏔️

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☕ Back it monthly on Patreon — for the price of a coffee, you’re part of what makes this possible No middlemen. No bullshit. Just music worth your time.

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But first, let me know:

FOR EXAMPLE JOHN (Łódź, emo / math rock) Full album stream for “failed as a friend” ahead of its May 8 release — thirteen tracks where a year of listening to more emo than math rock quietly rewired the band’s whole approach.

URZAH (Bristol, UK, progressive post metal ) Second LP “A Tranquil Void” out June 5 on APF Records — a diptych to 2024’s “The Scorching Gaze,” opening on the same note the previous record fades out on.

HOUSE OF THE BLOOD CHOIR (Osaka, Japan, screamo) Debut LP “Mom’s Anxiety” out June 30 on Gerpfast Records, 100 cassettes — 13 songs that cross grunge, post-hardcore, and full-speed skramz without ever deciding which one to commit to.

SSAANN (Milwaukee, USA, shoegaze dream pop) Debut LP “Higher” on Broken Palace Records — songs built from JunoDS88 loops Melissa Simes started recording in 2018, finally finished six years later after a Korg Prologue borrowed for a different band convinced her what the record wanted to sound like.

L’IDYLLE (Rouen, France, screamo) New EP “Pardon pour mon absence, je suis allé mourir à l’abri des regards” on No Funeral Records — cover art designed by the band over several weeks, with a naked figure from Cabanel’s “Birth of Venus” placed in a snowy forest, protected by trees, a daemon perched on her chest.

LE MUR (Murcia, Spain, indie rock / punk) Deep dive into the making of “Bruto” — vocalist Elsa Yepes describes playing “Porno” live as a moment her brain literally cuts out, blanking the recording as protection against the fear.

CAPE CRUSH (Salem, Massachusetts, USA, power pop / emo / pop punk) Track-by-track for debut LP “Place Memory” out May 1 — title track built around a 2011 Dear Sugar advice column and Tomas Transtromer’s “The Blue House,” with over 300 voices recorded live at Salem’s Bit Bar for the outro.

TONGUECUTTER (Muskegon, Michigan, USA, noise rock) Guest essay from frontwoman Chantal Roeske on micro-touring in your forties — three middle-aged parents running weekend warrior runs out of a converted church apartment in Palmyra, Wisconsin.

COOLEA (UK, rock/metal) Guest piece on methodology — 180,000 subscribers built on a system where the content starts as a joke or a meme, then gets researched until it’s actually defensible.

BARRACUDA DISCO (Nashville, USA, garage rock / punk) Debut EP from a two-piece who describe themselves as The White Stripes with breakdowns, The Sonics with a Metalzone, The Beach Boys but evil.

МИР (Hamburg, Germany, blackened screamo) Debut LP “molidae.” out April 29 on Ten Plagues Tapes (US, 10 hand-numbered copies) — mostly about Philipp’s grandmother, born in East Berlin in 1943, who fled an abusive first husband with two kids and raised them alone on a woman’s income in the 70s after a court “divorced guilty” and left her nothing.

MONK (Southern California, USA, hardcore / post hardcore) New single “No Gods” via Dine Alone Records featuring George Pettit of Alexisonfire — a full-circle moment for Frank Bach, who first worked with Pettit on his previous band’s LP in 2008.

‘92 (Lancaster/Long Beach, California, USA, hardcore / hip hop / funk) New single “’92 Till Infinity” — a tribute to their friend Brillo, who grew up with the band, helped pick out vocalist Jabril Ward’s first car, and was a fixture at shows even when he didn’t know the lyrics.

TRASH N’ PRIVILEGE (Fresno, California, USA, punk rock) Premiere of “Best That You’re Dead” — written from the perspective of the person doing the cutting off, about rejecting a friend over politics or religion. Vocalist Steve Shepard finds that instinct “completely antithetical to politics and religion.”

MEDUSSA (Spain, progressive post metal) Fifth LP “Mueran las Ideas” — the original bassist returned six months before recording and had seven bass parts to write from scratch in songs he hadn’t been part of building.

SYDNEY (Canada, post hardcore / emo) New single “Things Could Be Better” featuring Keith Buckley — bassist Anto reached out cold, figuring the worst he could say was no.

THE NUCLEAR NUNS (Athens, Greece, space hardcore punk) Debut LP “R.O.A.C.H.” — self-pressed, paid out of pocket, free to stream. Three metalheads playing hardcore, with Fallout game lore mixed into a post-apocalyptic concept about survival in Athens. Mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege.

PORTLAND IS THE NEW PORTLAND short film, a 17-minute film starring Creed Bratton (The Office), about a 31-year-old in Portland, New York who runs an underground label with 17 bands on the roster — none of which exist. He records all of them himself.

SPARTA (El Paso, USA, rock, alt post hardcore) New single “Everything You Say” from sixth album “Cut A Silhouette” out May 29 on Equal Vision / Dine Alone — produced by J. Robbins at Magpie Cage in seven days.

CUT SHORT (Liverpool, UK,0 mellow post hardcore rock) New single “Unrequited” filmed in the Liverpool room where the Titanic was sold — a deliberate choice tying the end of a relationship to the city’s long decline from industrial titan to a place with buildings that are, as the band puts it, “deceased monuments to a loss of an optimistic time of excess.”

MIDSCALE (Paris, France, shoegaze) New EP “Dread, This Could Save You” on Phonomagic Records — a record about fear as protective instinct, accidentally split into two halves by how it was written.

MT. FOREVER (Richmond, USA, doom / stoner) Debut LP “Welcome to Mt. Forever” out May 1 — vocalist Jonathan returned to recording for the first time since 2004, describes his first rehearsal with the band as “nothing less than embarrassing” and kept getting invited back.

JUNON (Lille, France, post metal) Behind-the-scenes on the “The Chaser” video — four days in northern France, no AI, no permissions, no electricity in the cornfield, a driver without a licence behind the wheel of the American Ford van. The blood is SFX. The killer was cast for his “cold, mechanical presence.”

MUSIC IS THE ENEMY (Albuquerque, USA, chaotic hardcore) First release in eight years — “Sansational” out May 1, and a band that has faked its own breakup multiple times. Their theory on musicians: “A musician is truly one of the most useless outcomes a life can take.”

TOWNHOUSE (Adelaide, Australia, indie alt rock) Video premiere for “Avenger Level Threat” — one performer in the foreground at full intensity, a sitcom collapsing in the background, neither side acknowledging the other.

BROWSE ALL LATEST FEATURES

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💸 Drop a one-time tip via PayPal — every dollar goes straight into keeping this running

☕ Back it monthly on Patreon — for the price of a coffee, you’re part of what makes this possible No middlemen. No bullshit. Just music worth your time.

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A court declared her “guilty” in divorce proceedings, leaving her without financial support. She raised her children alone on a woman’s income in the 1970s. That history sits inside “Spirits (Vnschvld)” and “Ghosts (Honte),” where private memory collides with violence enforced by law, family, and society.

“Words don’t matter anymore, but the process of grieving, being close to one another, is so much more meaningful and incredibly precious,” Philipp says when speaking about “Obituaries,” the first song that confronted his grandmother’s death directly.

The title “molidae.” carries its own strange path. Sunfish were among his grandmother’s favourite animals. While writing and recording the album, the band came across a story about a stranded sunfish on a California shore. The conversation drifted back to her. Another layer followed: “mola” comes from the Latin word for millstone, and Philipp’s grandfather — his grandmother’s third husband, with whom she spent nearly thirty years — volunteered at a defunct mill. He passed away in 2017.

мир move between short, urgent screamo tracks and longer guitar-led pieces that open into choirs and spoken word. The lineup features Laura and Lukas on drums, Tobi on bass and vocals, and Philipp on guitar and vocals. The album was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Fabian Schulz at Sunsetter Recording.

The full piece on IDIOTEQ goes deeper into the history behind “molidae.”: Philipp’s grandmother, the band’s antifascist foundations, writing about helplessness without turning it into performance, and a record that treats grief as something collective rather than a private burden carried in silence.

“molidae.” arrives April 29 digitally and on cassette — self-released in Europe and issued in the US through Ten Plagues Tapes. The album will not appear on Spotify.

FULL FEATURE HERE

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We have no ads, no banners, no algorithm - just independent DIY coverage of under the radar artists worth attention. IDIOTEQ exists and stays free because some readers choose to support it directly. If you’re one of those people:

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☕ Back it monthly on Patreon — for the price of a coffee, you’re part of what makes this possible No middlemen. No bullshit. Just music worth your time.

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PAMIĘĆ (Warsaw) — Post-jazz duo. Release “Ireneo Funes, Clementine and Prospero” with a detailed map of literary and cultural references behind each track.

TRANSMISSION ZERO (Cracow) — Post-rock. New track “Yes And I Would Do It Again” written after a breakup, rougher approach to post-rock structures.

BADTERMS (Boston) — Rock’n’roll skinheads. “Nest of Vipers” premiere ahead of upcoming European tour dates.

OXIDE (Oakland) — Heavy instrumentalists. “Is It Dead…Or Dormant” featuring Thoabath, concept inspired by band discussions about parasitic fungi.

ADIÓS CABALLOS (Spain) — Post hardcore. New EP “Edificios Abandonados” incorporates themes from Neuromancer, 1984, and Fight Club.

CORPORATE JOB (Spain) — Hardcore punks. Band name comes from the corporate jobs members worked and disliked before forming the group.

ONESIE — Indie/emo. “Twilight Years” written following the death of vocalist’s father.

ROPE (Italy) — Post-hardcore. New LP focuses on moving beyond their hardcore origins while processing personal grief.

THE POST SEASONS — Rockers. Debut album “Songs For The Sound Guy” with “Rat Race” video premiere.

FALL OF MESSIAH — Post rock screamo hybrid. “Green Lands” completes their second trilogy of releases, full album stream available.

MENDERBUG — Post rockish indie duo. Planning three EP releases, current single “Falling Voices” now available.

THE VENUS CHILDREN — Psych-rockers. Debut single “Rollercoaster” story traces back to a petrol station encounter and something called the Chicken of Chance.

SEUM — Bass-only sludge trio. “Parking Life” recorded entirely without guitars, three bass players handling all parts.

SHOWER BEERS (NYC) — Pop-punk. “The Final Album, Vol. 1” released after four years of regular NYC venue shows.

SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY + Chop7x — Matchcore / Grindcore / experimental. Originally planned pro wrestling concept record, shifted to Magic: The Gathering adaptation for track “Brothers.”

MODERN GUILT — PMA hardcore. Curated playlist of positive mental attitude hardcore tracks.

QUICKSAND (NYC) — Post-hardcore legends. “Bring On The Psychics” marks first album in five years, includes new tracks “Get To It” and “Regenerate.”

TERROR — Hardcore veterans. Scott Vogel’s band releases tenth album “Still Suffer” alongside new documentary.

CITY OF THE SUN — Fusionists. Music video shot in Panamanian jungle led to sold-out shows in Athens.

SAGOR SOM LEDER MOT SLUTET (Sweden) — Post-metal. Fourth album “IV” explores what band describes as “magmatic core” themes.

HOWELLS — Halo-COre Rockers. “Overflow” video collaboration with Astrology Girl, song written in single three-hour session.

DIAMOND WEAPON (Toronto, Canada) — Emo post hardcore. “Letters from the Flood” EP written during year marked by multiple funerals.

HOLD ME TIGHT (Sardinia, Italy) — Hardcore. New single “No Turning Back” from Sardinian hardcore scene.

OSHIRA (Mexico City, Mexico) — Dark screamo duo. “Vorágine” debut addresses themes of timing, belonging, and disappearing.

PETRICHOR (DC) — Teen band. “Richest Witches of the West” tackles wealth extraction and ICE enforcement policies.

BEDTIMEMAGIC (Boston) — Duo. “Lie Down With Dogs” and “Aroused” video premiere, Boston harsh minimalism.

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💸 Drop a one-time tip via PayPal — every dollar goes straight into keeping this running

☕ Back it monthly on Patreon — for the price of a coffee, you’re part of what makes this possible No middlemen. No bullshit. Just music worth your time.

— Karol

Fall Of Messiah - “Green Lands”

If you like your screamo with actual post-rock space in it — Envy, Caspian, Pianos Become The Teeth, State Faults territory — “Green Lands” is gonna sit right with you.

Ten tracks, the big parts go properly big and the chaotic parts bite. Chalk Hands guest on “Tour de force,” there’s a trumpet in there too, and the whole thing breathes the way records like this are supposed to.

Super organic, reflective, and truly adventurous.

Best part is what it’s actually about. Pierre the drummer moved into a wood farmhouse a couple years ago with a forest basically at his back door, stopped being stressed all the time, started hiking, and wrote a record about it. It closes the trilogy that started with “Empty Colors” — and in his words: “Empty Colors was quite dark, Senicarne felt deeply melancholic, and even if Green Lands still carries some of that weight, it also feels lighter — maybe more peaceful, or even slightly hopeful.”

Three creative DIY labels

Out April 24th on three amazing labels: Voice Of The Unheard (FR), Dog Knights (UK), Persistent Vision (US).

Full album premiere plus the long story behind the six-year gap is up on IDIOTEQ now.

FULL FEATURE HERE

Support IDIOTEQ

We have no ads, no banners, no algorithm to chase - just independent DIY coverage of artists most outlets ignore. It stays free because some readers choose to support it directly. If you’re one of those people:

💸 Drop a one-time tip via PayPal — every dollar goes straight into keeping this running

☕ Back it monthly on Patreon — for the price of a coffee, you’re part of what makes this possible No middlemen. No bullshit. Just music worth your time.

— Karol

CLUE (Pemalang, Indonesia) — Youth crew / hardcore. Debut demo born from a coffee shop conversation — vocalist Ibung had been around hardcore for years but never actually played in a band until this.

INVISIBLE WOUNDS (Sweden) — Post-punk / hardcore. Debut EP “Dark Visions” carries the weight of friends lost to suicide and overdose, addiction, a brain tumor, and recovery that didn’t come clean.

NADSAT (Italy) — Noise rock / sludge. Second single “A Nice Relaxing Bath” from upcoming “Out For Blood” features Eugene Robinson of Buñuel and Oxbow, who says of the track: “this song was never anybody else’s but mine.”

OWL BE DAMNED (San Diego) — Hard rock / noise rock. New video for a track about a guy named Doug who wakes up in the wrong room and can’t get home — filmed at half speed then snapped back, so Doug drags through life while the rest of the world flies past him.

SHOOTING DAGGERS (London) — Earworm melodic hardcore / queercore. Mini-album “The Real Life Thing” arrives June 5 via New Heavy Sounds — seven tracks pushing against the flattening effect of screen life, written through constant proximity and weekly rehearsals. Lead single “Glow” features Dennis Lyxzén of Refused on dual vocals.

SPRING HOUSE (Detroit) — Post-hardcore. Self-titled debut from members of Blue Skies Burning, Coalition, First Comes Second, and Thera — eight tracks recorded at I/O Detroit with Patrick Sheufelt, mastered by Jason Livermore at the Blasting Room. Drummer Joshua Beausoleil’s first show ever was the Descendents 30 years ago; mastering with Livermore felt like full circle.

CATHEDRAL BELLS — Dream pop / slowcore. “Parallel Dreams” out April 10 via Artoffact Records took nearly two years — songs left half-formed for months at a time, layers stripped when overbuilt, tempo shifts of just a few BPM changing how whole sections felt.

ZENI GEVA & STEVE ALBINI / IF IT KILLS YOU — Two Albini-connected features landed on the same day. The Zeni Geva “Superunit: Maximum Implosion” double LP collects the full 1992 Japan collaboration — three Tokyo and Osaka shows, studio sessions in borrowed spaces, and the moment Albini crouched under the console and disabled the dbx noise reduction system because he hated what it did to the dynamic range. Out April 18 via Skin Graft Records for Record Store Day.

Meanwhile, Bakersfield’s If It Kills You finally unveiled “Arrow Eye” — their record tracked with Albini at Electrical Audio in early 2024, held back after his passing, then finished after a lineup change.

THE FOUR FLAGS (Chicago / Richmond / Baltimore) — Post-hardcore / noise rock / post-rock. Four-song EP from Funeral Recordings featuring With Patience, Orlock, IUIO, and SoundTracks — all connected through drummer and studio owner Lee Diamond, whose Evanston basement hosted J. Robbins flying in from Baltimore for the sessions. A thread that traces back to Albini himself walking a young Diamond through acoustic treatment in a bungalow called Shabby Road. Out April 17.

THE ARRIVALS (Chicago) — Punk rock. First album in over 15 years — “Payload” tackles colonization, environmental collapse, nationalism, and class power written from street level rather than abstraction. Vocalist Shi ran for Congress as a leftist before returning to the band; bassist Jack lost both his parents in the years between records. Out April 17 via Recess Records.

APE UNIT (Cuneo, Italy) — Grindcore / powerviolence. New EP “Sticks” — ten songs in just over ten minutes, with cover art built from 3D-printed AI models the band painted and assembled into a handmade diorama by hand.

BASAL GANGLIA (Heraklion, Crete) — Solo debut label EP “Celestial Warfare” — a 20-minute, four-part sci-fi concept piece recorded and mixed by one person who had never played bass or touched a guitar pedal when he started.

CLOSEDOWN (Cleveland) — Post-punk / post-hardcore. New EP “The Doldrum Sound” from a band whose vocalist runs an intervention program for men who have caused harm to their partners by day.

BIRTH (DEFECTS) (Baltimore) — Noise rock. Final release “Fictional Days” premiering “Deceiver” — covers of Sonic Youth, Nirvana, SSD alongside unreleased originals, recorded by J. Robbins and mixed by Barrett Jones. Vocalist Rob Savillo banned all stage banter and replaced it with harsh noise interludes because he didn’t want to give the audience a break.

DISCORDIA / DISCORDIA / HOLOCAUSTS — Contributor Craig “Gregorio” Lewis filed three pieces this week from Mexico: a tribute to Tijuana crust legends Discordia, with whom he’s maintained contact for 30 years and whose drummer Manuel he still talks to today; a remembrance of Quebec City’s Discordia and Caillou, with whom he appeared in an unreleased documentary before filmmaker Edmé Etienne died; and a piece on Israeli anti-Zionist crust punk band Holocausts, who play clandestine protest concerts in front of IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv.

THE APE (Norway) — Melodic hardcore / punk. Second single “Anticrats” ahead of debut album on Loyal Blood Records — fast, hard, blunt, aimed at a specific list of targets the band doesn’t bother dancing around. Guest vocals from Oda Førde Branaas of Utflod; the band describes it as “a heartfelt salutation to every loud and sane person out there.” FFO IDLES, The Armed, Mspaint, Show Me The Body.

.GIF FROM GOD (Richmond, Virginia) — Screamo / metallic hardcore. Third full-length “Dissimulation” via Prosthetic Records — 15 tracks, two vocalists, three guitarists.

HEAVE BLOOD & DIE (Tromsø, Norway) — Post-punk / stoner. “Burnout Codes” reissued on Arduous Records — a new imprint started by manager Blaze James specifically because no existing label would sign the band after he discovered them at Bukta Festival in Arctic daylight. He describes the moment as one of maybe five in a long career managing At The Drive-In and Murder City Devils that made him laugh out loud with excitement. European tour in May includes Warsaw on May 20.

WATERDEER (London) — Slowcore / dream pop. Debut double A-side “Goddamn//Cassandra” from a six-piece pulling from the early Too Pure roster — Mazzy Star, Movietone, The For Carnation. Both songs built around Greek myths.

MAN BAND (Margate, UK) — Heavy music. Debut “Strong Man” out April 17 on Faith Healer Records — ex-OHHMS members who didn’t want to replicate doom and didn’t want to go back to hardcore either. The title track started when vocalist Chainy Rabbit got mugged for £50, took up kickboxing, and became, as guitarist Daniel Sargent puts it, “super strong and muscle-covered.” A record about masculinity examined from every angle, not just one.

MERWULF (Portland) — Indie rock. Lead single “The Mountain Lion” from upcoming “In the Golden Age” on Moodkiller Records — shot on the Oregon coast during king tides, sitting with grief and what the band calls “the pull of disappearance.” The album title is a direct sarcastic reaction to the current US political climate; half the songs were inspired by inside jokes.

PRAY FOR DECADENCE (Athens, Greece) — Post-screamo / noise rock. Debut EP “Sleeping in the Deep” from a band that built Athens’ screamo scene largely by themselves. “Little Zodiac Boy” is dedicated to Aylan Kurdi, tracking the impossible logic of a child told to float who was never given what makes floating possible.

BRIGHTR (Newport, Wales) — Acoustic emo. Double A-side “Pob Lwc” (Welsh for good luck) — Laurie Cottingham came close to stopping music entirely last autumn, then pulled back after crying in traffic to Julien Baker’s “Appointments” during a night shift drive home.

SCARBORO (New York) — Melodic hardcore / punk rock. Second album “Hate Season” on Sell The Heart Records — 13 tracks covering a Congressional campaign, valium addiction from a bad psychiatrist, nearly 20 years of marriage, and Jack losing both his parents. Shi’s verdict on the closing love song to punk: “this thing we do, as much as it’s going the way of the buffalo, is hardwired into my DNA.”

STATE POWER (Utrecht, Netherlands) — Melodic hardcore. Debut single “Schizoscene” from upcoming LP “Hyperstition” on their own Parasocial Records — fast, thrash-edged, with a breakdown built for the pit. The album title borrows Nick Land’s concept of ideas that become self-fulfilling through their own existence; vocalist Stefan is clear that Land “went crazy from smoking too much meth” but thinks the diagnosis might have been partially right. Out August 28.

TINDER YOUTH (Italy) — Dark wave / electronic. Solo debut single “Let’s Not Keep In Touch” from Gianmaria of Carnero — more electronic than his previous work, rooted in 80s new wave. He played back the first demo in his studio and teared up. A fractured rib and a long breakup confined him to his apartment long enough to finish what he’d been sitting on since 2018.

PILORI (Rouen, France) — Blackened metal hardcore. Third LP “Sans Adieu” on Frozen Records — 10 years to the month after their first show, 150+ gigs across 20 countries, never hired a booker, PR agent, or manager. The title means “without farewell” — death as absence, not ending. First cover the band has ever recorded: a 1982 Alain Bashung / Serge Gainsbourg song, with cello appearing on a Pilori record for the first time. Booked for Motocultor 2026 alongside Emperor, Alcest, Amenra, Judas Priest.

ALIVE INSIDE (Vienna, Austria) — Hardcore / youth crew. New 7″ “The Only Way Out” and the launch release for their own Vienna Crew Records imprint. Eight labels across Europe and Asia split the pressing, each with a different cover color; the only hole in the map is a US partner. FFO Floorpunch, Mindset, Sportswear.

CIRCLES (Nantes, France) — Melodic hardcore. EP “In Defense of Lost Causes” on Shield Recording — the B-side of the vinyl is engraved with a Karl Marx quote about capital as vampire. Six tracks written and recorded in a single weekend each, back to basics after an LP session the band felt they saw “too big.” Includes an SSD cover “Glue” as a vinyl exclusive, recorded the week Al Barile passed.

UNDERGROUND PALACE (Mexico City, Mexico) — Post-punk / dream pop. New single “Lo Que Prometiste” marks the band’s return after four months as a duo while guitarist Diego Mora was in recovery from addiction. Recorded during power outages with neighbors banging on the wall. EP “pneuma” coming before end of year.

QUIET FEAR (East LA) — Screamo / hardcore. New album “La Tierra Arriba/El Abismo Abajo” coming June 19 on Iodine Recordings — Chicanx band rooted in East LA backyard shows and house party circuits that predate the city’s established venues. Lead single “Retén” already landed in Revolver’s Songs of the Week. Language in their songs switches between Spanish and English the way it does in actual conversation, not as a statement but as an invitation.

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We have no ads, no banners, no algorithm to chase - just independent DIY coverage of artists most outlets ignore. It stays free because some readers choose to support it directly. If you're one of those people:

💸 Drop a one-time tip via PayPal — every dollar goes straight into keeping this running

☕ Back it monthly on Patreon — for the price of a coffee, you're part of what makes this possible No middlemen. No bullshit. Just music worth your time.

— Karol

MOTHER GIRAFFE (Sicily) — Crank wave. Sicilian quartet mapping late-capitalist anxiety through relentless repetition on “Food Is a Necessity.” They describe their sound as “a kind of psychedelic loop where meaning starts to dissolve” — perfect for when everything feels ridiculous and abstract. Out via Solium Records with handmade cassettes.

ORGAN (Italy) — Instrumental post-metal doom. Belluno crew pushing into colder, more desolate territory on “Immobilism.” Five suites built like enclosed spaces, each tightening around a single idea until it feels physical. The band calls it “a soundtrack to self-induced sleep paralysis.”

THE DOWNSTROKES (Maryland) — Garage punk rock’n’roll. Turning small-town parades and insomnia into “The Furious Hours,” recorded in a basement studio a mile from the songwriter’s house, extra vocals tracked on whims, arguments over mixes nobody timed. Democracy in action.

TIM KASHER (Nebraska) — Indie rock. Compressing a year of writing into four days on “Sponges of Experience” — day three nearly shut it down from exhaustion, day four snapped back. Won’t be on streaming, just for the people already paying attention.

FINAL GASP (Massachusetts) — Crossover deathrock thrash. Documenting 26 days of tour life behind “New Day Symptoms” in our very special tour diary — ghost towns, bad gigs, and all. From hometown Cambridge to Joshua Tree desert shows, mapped day by day without trying to make it prettier than it was.

FAINTING DREAMS (Denver) — Screamo / blackgaze / post-metal. A record split into three movements that doesn’t drift — it locks in, circles, and refuses to break. “The Silence of Birds That Rarely Sing” moves from MS diagnosis and medical indifference through collective responsibility to climate collapse, pulling from Niemöller’s “First They Came” and getting heavier at every turn. Out via Softseed Records.

GUILLOTINE (UK) — Alt rock. Stepping out with “Haunted” after six years quiet, armed with a new lineup and a July record. They spent weekends in a Hereford barn until they found the version of themselves that had been sitting unfinished for years.

elbowsway (Uzbekistan) — Shoegaze. Stretching across burnout and Lynchian dread on debut EP “common sense.” Started when the frontman fractured his elbow in a mosh pit, pivoted from extreme metal, and built a network through TikTok clips that now spans continents.

CASH BRIBE (NYC) — Hardcore punk. Turning a wedding joke into a blown-out live document on “White Wedding.” They butchered Billy Idol for friends’ nuptials in Bushwick, kept it in their set, then captured it at Cart Music while everything still had momentum.

CRAPGUM (Bangkok) — Grindcore / powerviolence. A cheap PC, electronic drums, and a guitar through an octave pedal — that’s the whole setup. 11 tracks, barely 15 minutes, “Terrible Culture Normalizing” covers domestic violence, war, exploitation dressed as religion, and patriarchal structures without looking away. Both members play and shout simultaneously just to keep it together. Out via District Six Records and Smoothie Records.

(16) (California) — Sludge. Tracing their DNA back to Black Flag on “Beat My Head Against the Wall” from covers LP “Forgeries Vol. 1.” After 34 years of influence, they finally surrendered and just covered the song that started it all.

BÆNCH (Norway) — Post-punk. Stretching into synths and drum machines on “Watch You Go” ahead of spring tour. They chopped up a repetitive track and added layers until it became something about the stubbornness and love in relationship conflicts that never actually end.

BUMMER CAMP (Queens) — Shoegaze / grunge. Pushing honesty to its breaking point on “Too Far.” Started as pandemic loop-station therapy, evolved into full-band exploration of how speaking your truth often comes back to hurt you.

NORTHEAST REGIONAL (Richmond/DC) — Post-rock / emo. Stretching time, doubt, and distance across “In The Desert.” Built in pieces around families and jobs by a band split between cities, with one member briefly relocating to Oman before regional conflict forced a return.

TIME SPENT DRIVING (California) — Emo / indie rock. Restoring and rethinking “Just Enough Bright” with J. Robbins and a decades-late addition. Producer found the original 2” tapes from 2001 sessions, remixed the whole album, then added a song written during the original era but never recorded.

BRIGHTSHADE (Bristol) — Nu-metal / modern post hardcore. Blurring drive and cinematic tension on debut “Lost and Haunted.” They call themselves a “new save file” — a response to perfection fatigue where heavy music started feeling sterile and needed some human mistakes back.

THE FINCH CYCLE x CHAMPION MOTORIST (Australia) — Post-rock. Collaboration on “We Must Be Cautious,” recorded in three days at a rehearsal space with no demos. Three people, carpeted room, other bands practicing nearby — they turned everything up and documented the moment.

TOKYO ROSE (New Jersey) — Emo. Pulling mid-00s emo into 2026 with “Ugly Comes Out” after 19 years away. They remember the scene with rose-tinted glasses — basement shows, VFW halls, kids passing burned CDs — but now work across cities via laptop studios.

ADORN (Dallas) — Melodic post-hardcore. Leaning into tension between division and trust on debut LP “Let Love Remain.” Started as metalcore demos, pivoted when the singer auditioned over softer material, built everything collectively via Discord sessions.

CARROSER (Antwerp) — Post-hardcore. Four Royal Conservatoire graduates who always had fire burning inside them. Classical guitar training channeled into something with a lot more rage than centuries-old repertoire allowed.

SMALL TALK (San Diego) — Emo. Turning loss, lineup changes, and time into something that lingers on “what’s gone never left.” Debut LP ten years in the making, where past members remain embedded in songs and nothing was re-recorded to tidy up the timeline.

THE ENDORPHINS (Boston) — Grunge. Returning with “Mirage,” a heavy, dreamlike lead-in to September’s “Echoes in the Decaying Dream.” Written while losing control and regaining it repeatedly — loss, friendship endings, band member departures — then channeled into something about embracing life’s unpredictability.

SIGNAL BLEACH (Los Angeles) — Industrial. Pushing raw noise and decay through “Rats Eating Rats” video. Glitchy, abrasive, hypnotic — old TVs, lo-fi camerawork, TouchDesigner creating cyber-realistic details with 90s hip-hop style closeups and anti-authoritarian anthems.

ELLEN AND THE BOYZ (France) — Indie post-punk. Confronting the body and its damage on debut EP “SEXY BUT SAD.” Seven tracks moving between tight structures and loose shifts, built for collective catharsis, dealing with violence, love, and eating disorders without cleaning anything up.

GNAW (Singapore) — Shoegaze. Bending alt-rock instinct through digital distortion on “Inside a Machine That’s Glistening.” Built around a drum mistake — one clipped MIDI beat that became their internal logic — then expanded into something about pursuing stardom to the point of madness.

MAXIMUM FORCE (Cobourg) — Hardcore. Late-80s blueprint locked in tight on the “Physical Therapy Records” demo. Most of them have been playing together 15-20 years across different projects before this clicked, chasing that old Normandy Studio feel but louder, heavier, sharper.

PODŁOGA (Kraków) — Ambient post-rock. Turning everyday life into slow-moving instrumentals on a new five-track release. Two people recording separately at home, passing fragments back and forth, building something around bike rides and John Frusciante influence without ever rehearsing in the same room.

BROWSE ALL LATEST HERE

Support IDIOTEQ

We have no ads, no banners, no algorithm to chase - just independent DIY coverage of artists most outlets ignore. It stays free because some readers choose to support it directly. If you're one of those people:

💸 Drop a one-time tip via PayPal — every dollar goes straight into keeping this running

☕ Back it monthly on Patreon — for the price of a coffee, you're part of what makes this possible No middlemen. No bullshit. Just music worth your time.

— Karol

103 features in March. 20+ countries. 30+ styles.

We caught up with a bunch of super creative, all-over-the-place artists last month. Each one had some pretty wild stories to throw on the table.

What caught our attention

There’s SOASTASPHRENAS from Berlin doing emoviolence stuff and getting 150 people to read the same poem into one recording — pretty wild community project right there. Meanwhile GOOD RIDDANCE dropped their 10th album and it’s possibly their most conscious work yet, which says something about veteran bands still having things to figure out. SWEAT from LA got Jack Shirley to produce their new thing, recorded it live-to-tape with no headphones, no click, no cowards — you can hear the difference.

PAINIST had maybe the most bonkers approach though — ditched guitars entirely, ran a cheap piano through HM-2 pedals, and called it crust punk. Genre boundaries? What genre boundaries. Over in Greece, FALOODA were making weird noise rock in an Athens rehearsal building that got sold out from under them to make room for tourists, which pretty much sums up gentrification everywhere.

EIGHT came back from Finland with screamo that includes a full VR experience, because apparently technology and intensity can actually work together. dagerman. from Italy walked us through their second album about the politics of being indifferent to everything, which hits different when you’re drowning in information. H.ISS in Brazil kept pushing their dark screamo further into collapse territory — sometimes the breakdown is the point.

CARRION SPRING returned with 43 minutes shaped by grief, illness, and finding a way back from all that. VOLTA spent eight years away and came back with Italian stories about screens, grief, and boredom that somehow don’t feel boring at all. GIANTE turned depression into eight tracks of raw Basque post-hardcore, because sometimes personal struggle makes the best art.

THE SHITS let us in on their “Diet Of Worms” sessions where Callum Howe writes lyrics either hungover or drunk — apparently the distinction matters for the final result. STUNT DRUMMER broke down nine songs that came from mistakes, cheap drinks, and conversations with a pear farmer named Paul. DAMOKLES spent thirteen tracks chronicling a fictional serial killer, which is either very committed storytelling or something to worry about.

Some artists brought geography into it. GENTILESKY premiered the first song Yaprak Kırdök has written in Turkish in twenty years — language and identity stuff that actually matters. TAROUG turned family memory and southern Tunisian landscapes into something beautiful. COMIC SANS channeled heartbreak into “Todas las cosas que nos salió mal” while dealing with lineup chaos. EMERGENCY BROADCAST carried Istanbul’s hardcore weight all the way to London.

EBDROMEER introduced us to Kazakhstan’s blackgaze scene, which we didn’t even know was a thing but makes total sense now. CONCEALER pushed past metalcore conventions with their debut, DEEP SKY OBJECTS from Brooklyn talked about making big sound with three people, and OHIO MARK unpacked how breakup, coincidence, and getting things slightly wrong can actually work in your favor.

Then there were the veterans and anniversaries. FOOTBALL, ETC. looked back on “The Draft” 15 years later, PIEBALD reissued old stuff while working on new stuff, and Noc Walpurgii hit 30 years and came back to Warsaw to celebrate. Time keeps moving but some things stick around for good reasons.

Here are additional paragraphs for the newsletter’s “What caught our attention” section:

ESCALATE from Hungary came through with their most direct approach yet — vegan straight edge hardcore that sounds like accumulated anger from over a decade of watching people know exactly what they’re doing and not giving a fuck anyway. Sometimes the breakdown is the political point.

RULE OF TWO took REFUSED’s “New Noise” and ran it through darkwave-industrial treatment. For a song that’s been stuck in punk walls since 1998, hearing it reimagined with analog synths and Nine Inch Nails textures was genuinely jarring in the best way. The original’s backbone is still there.

DAGGERS from Belgium brought their dirtiest hardcore yet with “El Mundo Kaput,” recorded live with no clean-up, no fixing, just instinct. Oil pastels and photocopier artwork to match.

Meanwhile WAKE OF HUMANITY from Tacoma turned that specific 4am paralysis of doom-scrolling protest livestreams during 2020 into “Mastering the Fine Art of Self Annihilation” — sometimes the best songs come from the worst nights.

GUN GHAOL pulled off something nobody else was even attempting — Scottish Gaelic metalcore that takes ancient psalm singing and buries it under downtuned breakdowns.

Plus Mr. Banana from Prague’s 007 Club compiled the definitive list of non-Japanese bands who actually nailed Burning Spirit hardcore, complete with stories about coal-throwing riots and forgotten t-shirts.

And YOUTH NOVELS turned a quiet trip to Japanese temples into “Kamakura,” an entire album that sounds like whispered conversations with string quartets.

Here’s everything we covered in our exclusive features in March:

Check out our Full March Archive and tons of new April features: idioteq.com/latest

Support

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— Karol