With the end of March and the clocks going forward, we inch into April, hopefully some better weather, and the onset of Spring.

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It’s also been really busy here, as we’ve broadly finished the work we needed to do on the new house, so with a bit of luck posts might (might!) be a little more regular again.

Anyway, here’s this month’s best tracks. As usual a mix of styles, sounds and artists, and it includes the 6,000th entry in the series, 551 posts in – which happens to be Einstürzende Neubauten.

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Track of the Month

/earthtone9
/Oceanic Drift
/In Resonance Nexus

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The Nottingham alt-metal veterans earthtone9 unexpectedly announced a new album a few weeks ago, their first new album since IV in 2013. They noted in the announcement that it was something of a return to their earlier sound, and the relentless momentum of first single Oceanic Drift confirms this. There is a sense of enormous power in the sound, as well as their trademark dips into melodic passages that suit Karl Middleton’s vocal delivery well. A fantastic return from a perennially underappreciated band.

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/ULTRA SUNN
/Broken Monsters
/US

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The chaos of the last few months means that I’ve got a bit of catching up to do on some newer artists/releases, and here’s one of them: Belgian duo ULTRA SUNN. The promo picture is all a bit General Zod meets “we saw you from across the bar” vibes, but musically they are actually quite great.

The opening track to their imminent new album is a big, dramatic track: which brings to mind modern EBM meets classic, leather-bound Depeche Mode, and that’s no bad thing. Everything about this promises much for the album.

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/Cell Zero
/Something Wrong

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I know practically nothing about this new(ish) artist, but I do know that I like this track a lot. An artist that is very much familiar with classic industrial-rock/coldwave sounds, with processed guitars providing a steely edge to an industrial stomp; not to mention a huge, anthemic chorus that might bring one certain artist to mind. Anyway, this is absolutely marvellous, and the mooted album that this is the precusor to cannot come soon enough.

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/Einstürzende Neubauten
/Ist Ist
/Rampen – apm: alien pop music

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The excellent Alles In Allem felt like a mostly wistful look back down memory lane, as they examined their history and ties to their home city of Berlin – and how much has changed in the city over the four decades since they formed – and it was for the most part the most mellow album they’ve ever released.

But amid those mellow atmospheres, there was still the metallic and rhythmic chaos of Einstürzende Neubauten fighting through at points (most notably on the glorious Ten Grand Goldie), and Ist Ist – from the new, double-album coming on Friday – has a slightly wilder feel bubbling away. A whole host of percussion crashes around Alexander Hacke’s steady bassline, and Blixa Bargeld’s voice at points gets buried in the maelstrom.

Word is that the album is at least partly deeply experimental, and I’m fascinated to see what it’s really like.

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/Delilah Bon
/Maverick

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The fierce, genre-skipping Delilah Bon (who may be familiar to some thanks to her previous time in Hands off Gretel) has a new album coming, and the scorching Maverick was released on International Women’s Day as a celebration of women and herself. It’s some pep talk, too, as Bon’s powerful vocals are backed by a metal-edged hip-hop rhythm that pulls no punches whatsoever.

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/Edgecase Development Corporation
/Euphrosyne
/ECEP II: Belt Objects

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Eric Oehler moves away for a second time from his work in Null Device and KLACK – the latter also releasing new music this coming week, with the Modern Production EP coming on Bandcamp on Friday – for a new EDC EP. All four tracks are named for asteroids whose names are Greek or Roman goddesses too, as far as I can tell, and the pick of the tracks is the thundering Euphrosyne, whose quasi-tribal stomp is accompanied by wailing vocal samples and distinctly middle-eastern musical instrumentation. Not exactly a new idea – the likes of Transglobal Underground have been doing this for decades – but it’s very nicely done here.

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/Frank Turner
/Letters
/Undefeated

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My love of Frank Turner’s folk-edged punk rock remains undimmed after god-knows how many releases and live shows, and the upcoming album Undefeated seems to be continuing his nudging back toward more punky sounds. The best of the new songs so far is the wistful nostalgia of Letters, where he reminisces about exchanging letters with a pen-pal in his youth, and marvels at how much he shared with this person. I had an Italian pen-pal for a while, and I never really got into it – and certainly didn’t share a great deal!

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/Buffalo Tom
/New Girl Singing
/Jump Rope

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A band that have, remarkably, been mostly active since the late 1980s, this Boston-based trio have long specialised in melodic alternative rock, owing something to classic Americana and folksy music alongside their more gritty moments – and I’ve loved their music since I first heard the album Let Me Come Over back in 1992 (!). Happily, their new album Jump Rope sees them keeping to the sound that they’ve long made their own, and New Girl Singing is a celebration of female power and advancement, while musically it has lovely, Byrdsian harmonies at the heart.

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/[:SITD:]
/Brieselang

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Now down to a duo – founding member Tom left last year for “personal reasons” – SITD mark their twenty-fifth year as a active band with their first new material since Stunde X in 2019. The new song – that apparently is about the Brieselanger Licht, a light phenomena in a Brandenburg forest – continues the band’s longstanding ability to write mid-paced electro-industrial anthems. Everything I’ve loved about this band since their first album is still present and correct: heavy, bone-shaking beats, those melodic synth hooks, and songs that stick with you long after you first hear them. It’s good to have them back.

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/Laibach
/The Great Seal
/Opus Dei (Remastered)

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The Slovene Industrial band Laibach – much like their peers Neubauten – have now been an active band for four decades, and similarly to Neubauten, the world and environment that they originally formed in and to kick against, has irrevocably changed. So looking at pre-1990 material by Laibach in particular has to be seen through a specific lens, as they fought for their voice to be heard in post-Tito Yugoslavia (and commented on the complex history between the Slovenes and Germany and the previous Habsbury Monarchy).

Opus Dei, though, remains probably their greatest album pre-millenium, as they began their examination of Western pop music, bringing out the barely disguised totalitarian influences in some of the music (their spectacular, military rally take on One Vision as Geburt einer Nation, for a start), but also expanding their sound to a much grander scale generally.

Apparently this – long hoped-for! – reissue has seen the band re-record parts to improve the sound, and certainly The Great Seal sounds amazing. This song, of course, is another Laibach milestone, as it is the anthem of the NSK state (the same “state in time” whose “passports” reputedly later saved the lives of a number of people escaping the wars in the former Yugoslavia), and whose lyrics are part of Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech.