Next month, Throbbing Gristle will release their long-awaited Desertshore album, Trent Reznor’s new band How to Destroy Angels will issue a new EP (and full-length in 2013), and NON, aka industrial-noise pioneer Boyd Rice, will issue a brand new album as well. We hear the message loud and ...

Tune into radio late at night, and you’ll encounter a world that tends not to make itself audible much during daylight hours. There’s the expected cast of characters, like the deep-throated slow jams DJ, or along the same lines, Loveline. In some remote corners, listeners may be haunted by the ...

Last week marked 20 years since the release of Alice In Chains’ Dirt, an album that not only brilliantly fused heavy metal with alternative rock (“grunge,” if you prefer), but sold 4 million copies! And later this year, Soundgarden is releasing their first album in 16 years. Jury’s out on ...

Chan Marshall isn’t a blues singer, but everything she does has an element of the blues to it. Chan Marshall isn’t a folk singer, but the American folk tradition plays a huge part of who she is as a songwriter. And Chan Marshall may not be a rock star, but when she wants to, she can rock as hard ...

When asked which musical instrument least belongs in a punk song, a lot of options come to mind. Accordion? Yeah, probably. Ukulele? Absolutely — keep it at least 500 feet from punk rock at all times. Saxophone? Now, let’s not go crazy. Sure, saxophone is emblematic of the excess of the ‘80s, with ...

Summer ended over the weekend, which is a drag only in an abstract sense. It certainly still feels like summer outside, and the compilation of unstoppable jams we’ve been putting together over the past year only keeps on stacking up. Our fall edition of the Endless Playlist is 24 tracks deep, and ...

"History's Greatest Monsters" is a regular evaluation of albums deemed some of the worst in history. We do this not for the sake of schadenfreude, but to try to understand how these reputations were earned. Certainly, there are bound to be pleasant surprises. And certainly, there will be some ...

Fans of innovative, groundbreaking heavy music got some truly sad news last week: Hydra Head records is closing up shop. In a way, it’s kind of amazing the Los Angeles-based metal label was able to ...

Blindfolded, they are led out of the back of the white, nondescript van by a roving band of harpies thirsty for vengeance. It is like a "Hostel"-meets-"Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" fever dream: a wallpapered crate of a room lined with instruments for entertainment and for torture. Dragged ...

The greatest lesson that indie rock ever taught us was that a record didn’t have to sound like it cost $1 million to be good. In fact, it didn’t even have to sound like $100. Some of the best albums in our collections were made on shoestring budgets in living rooms, with four-tracks or tape ...