As is traditional, January felt like it took all year, February felt like a couple of days.

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We’re now well into the swing of 2025, and the new releases have been coming thick and fast (indeed a handful this month have already been held over for next month due to a lack of time, or because covering them next week will be closer to the release date).

Anyway, here’s the /Tracks of the Month for February.

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

/Factory Floor
/Between You
/Between You 12″

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It is, amazingly, twelve years since the exceptional Factory Floor debut – and only – album, and Gabe Gurnsey and Nik Colk Void have busied themselves with other projects in the years since: and to be honest, I wasn’t really expecting to hear new FF material again. But, after a tentative resurrection last year with a live show or two, a new single dropped out of nowhere in February. Between You comes in a four-minute mix and an extended six-minute mix, and you know what? This could continue for twice that length and I’d not get tired of it. The hypnotic synths, dronelike vocals and thumping rhythmic punch of the sound that made their music so recognisable years ago is present and correct, and as the track builds, there is a minor sense of euphoria that builds and builds. Then again, that latter feeling might be all of the listeners celebrating their return. I certainly am.

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/Brutalist Architecture In The Sun
/Everything Must Die
/Desolation Street

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Interestingly, Medway-based duo Brutalist Architecture In The Sun have pivoted their synthpop sound a bit, judging on the precursor single to their upcoming album. There is a darker, harder edge on show, and those acid-flecked synths owe something to Factory Floor and their ilk, that’s for sure. It’s a song that also puts the vocals into the background a bit – past releases have seen them high up in the mix – and while it suits this song, I’ll be interested to see if this approach persists. Either way, this is an impressive return for the duo and they deserve a wider audience. The video – with lone people in crowds in towering, brutalist environments – is well worth seeing, too.

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/V▲LH▲LL
/Calling For Storms
/Skymningsdjur

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They aren’t the forbidding, anonymous artist that they first appeared as, but there is still something deeply unsettling about the Witch House sounds V▲LH▲LL continue to create. Calling For Storms is the first single from their upcoming album, and ups the tempo a bit from their usual slower pace, with the synths firing a chaotic salvo around Mary S. Sax’s sweet but oh-so-threatening vocals. There is a looming warning from her vocals, it seems, as if they are hunting down a quarry, and if they are, the victim doesn’t stand a chance. One of the few early Witch House artists still going, they continue to fascinate and evolve, as if there is a deep well of ideas that are still not exhausted.

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/The Birthday Massacre
/Sleep Tonight
/Pathways

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The new Birthday Massacre single is here, and it is introduced by a mighty, meaty riff that you might hear from an industrial metal band, less a goth-pop band from Canada. That riff features heavily through the song, adding to the heft of the rhythm, that’s for sure, but it’s not there all the time, and Chibi has lots of airtime as she soars through a song that deals with our own demons, fighting against the negative thoughts and regrets that drag us down. The Birthday Massacre have long been experts in balancing between the light and the dark, the heavy and the softer moments, and this is to these ears their best single in a long time. New album Pathways follows in May.

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/This Morn’ Omina
/Samadhi_Q
/Omm of Life

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Four years since the last album, Mika Goedrijk’s tribal-industrial titans returned last week with an unexpected and previously unannounced new EP, released the day after Goedrijk’s fiftieth birthday. Inspired this time, apparently, by saccadic movement and meditation, there is a more mellow feel to this release, even in the polyrhythmic, uptempo sections. There aren’t the fiery, climactic sections that make TMO live gigs so thrilling, for the most part, but maybe on record we don’t necessarily need them – and by TMO standards, this is a near-pop length release – only one of the tracks here tops six minutes, and that track Veridian has the (ccf) marker that usually means a (much) longer version will likely follow. The track that comes closest is opener Samadhi_Q, which rises out of a squall of discordant sounds to unleash a trance-like rhythmic powerhouse. It’s great to have TMO back.

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/Heartworms
/Extraordinary Wings
/Glutton For Punishment

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Not gonna lie – I knew absolutely nothing about this artist until various friends started raving about her music (and I hear her live shows recently were quite something). Anyway: Josephine Orme is Heartworms, and rather than being yet another darkwave/goth artist, appears to have a far wider range of influences to her sound, which makes the recently released album Glutton for Punishment absolutely fascinating. Sure: there are moments of straight-up goth, but it’s where Orme moves away from that to explore other ideas that things get really interesting. Recent single Extraordinary Wings is a case in point. Here, the tempo gets slowed down, to a moody, widescreen take that nods to after-dark trip-hop and artists like Nadine Shah alike, as she tangles in the lyrics with a predatory partner whom she apparently wishes revenge and fate upon.

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/BIG|BRAVE
/innominate Nº ii
/OST

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After – by their standards – dropping the volume and maximalism somewhat on their last album A Chaos of Flowers, if not the intensity, BIG|BRAVE return with another album barely a year since then. And this one feels radically different. They went into the studio with no pre-written music, just a few concepts around the idea of creating music for a film that hadn’t yet been made or conceived, and using some instruments that they created themselves. The key part of the latter is “The Instrument”, made using piano strings, and its dramatic, stark tones prove to be the centrepiece of innominate Nº ii. There are the echoes of post-war contemporary classical music here, in that the instruments leave cavernous spaces around them to reverberate through, and fuzzy feedback blurs the edges on occasions. It perhaps loses some of the identity of the band without Robin Wattie’s vocal violence, but this is a clear move to spaces new.

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/Warfield
/All The Fun (Kiss, Kiss, Kiss)

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An unexpected new single recently was a first solo single for Justin Warfield in many, many years. Over the past couple of decades he’s mostly been known as frontperson of darkwave/goth band She Wants Revenge, but prior to that came to prominence as an alt-hip-hop MC, fronting One Inch Punch, releasing solo albums and memorably fronting the Burroughs-inspired, Bomb the Bass single Bug Powder Dust in 1994.

This new project – under his own name, notably – is a hyperactive, goth-pop-darkwave track that is all haunted synths, dirty basslines and a punchy drum machine, and very much a step away from She Wants Revenge. This is darkwave decadence, less interested in the darker underbelly, instead deciding it’s time to throw a dark party with a tune to match.

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/Model/Actriz
/Cinderella
/Pirouette

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Apparently inspired by vocalist Cole Haden’s unrealised dream of having a Cinderella birthday party when they were five, the band have gone all-in on a crazy, fever dream video of a modern retelling of the tale in NYC to accompany their outstanding new single. Cinderella the song is taut, like a coiled spring: pulsing bass and a driving rhythm contain the threat of all-out release that never quite comes, with minimalist guitar licks hiccupping away in the mix. But really, this is Haden’s show, and their fragile vocals are weighted down with the relief of telling a story that has clearly been eating away at them for some time.

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/Swans
/I Am A Tower
/Birthing

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Admittedly, we’ve been here before, but the press release that announced new album Birthing and the first track/single, the nineteen minutes of I Am A Tower, appears pretty unequivocal in that this will be the last large-scale Swans album and tour cycle. Michael Gira is now 71, of course, and Swans have been active for nearly forty-five years, on-and-off, and the sheer intensity of the music isn’t sustainable forever.

At points, though, Swans albums recently have become endurance tests for even the most ardent fans. Across the six albums released since the reactivation in 2010, five have been double albums, four of them two-hours long at least, and the longform tracks on most of them seem designed to test the listener beyond their limits. It’s unclear yet what Birthing will bring, but I Am A Tower gives hints at perhaps more light and shade. Gentle voices are replaced by Gira’s bellow, drones and picked guitars wash like waves, and small choirs of voices make lovely sounds…before being swept away by storms of riffs, percussion and noise.

It’s Swans. There’s a lot going on, there’s no chance of compromise. Business as usual to the end, then?