2026 is an important year for me: it marks thirty years since I began writing about music (the actual anniversary comes at the end of September). But it is also going to be the year where I start to wind down my writing, and this website.

This will be the last full year of activity on /amodelofcontrol.com.

I’ve been considering this for a while: as it becomes more and more expensive to run a website, and more difficult to get “content” out there, and, frankly, I’m finding it more and more taxing to make the time to write (it takes a lot of work). But also, there are other, younger folk now writing or broadcasting about the music we love, and I don’t want to be that older writer (I turn fifty in a couple of years) grumbling about music not meant for him or that he doesn’t understand.

So: in 2026, I’ll be continuing the /Tuesday Ten series, the events listing, occasional livestreams and interviews, festival reviews and one more /Countdown, wrapping up the best music of 2026. The /Tuesday Ten series will then continue until the end of March 2027, to make it to twenty years of that series (and if all goes to plan, /Tuesday Ten /675 will be the last one).

It’s not quite yet, then, but the end of /amodelofcontrol.com is coming.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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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).

In the meantime, here’s the first /Tuesday Ten of 2026, looking at the best tracks of the past month or so.

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/Track of the Month

/Foetus
/Succulence
/Halt

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JG Thirlwell has, perhaps, long been an underappreciated artist in the development of industrial music, despite recording and releasing under the Foetus (and countless variations thereof) name since 1981 – not to mention collaborating with a host of artists as well – and maybe this final album (and the first since Soak in 2013) will, at last, make some reconsider just how important his work has been.

In a week that has seen the US illegally invade Venezuela and despose their President – and then apparently announce they are running the country in the meantime – the martial, war satire of Succulence seems uncomfortably appropriate, and it sounds enormous. Full of John Barry horns, army-marching rhythms, an intro that seems to echo the Tom Waits Iraq War-era piece Hell Broke Luce and JG Thirlwell’s snarling, biting lyrics. It’s a shame Foetus is ending, but fuck me, what a way to go.

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/Mandy, Indiana
/Magazine
/URGH

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Not gonna lie, the intense, noise-industrial-experimentation of Mandy, Indiana was not a sound that I was expecting to break through over the past couple of years, and indeed for their second full-length album, they’ve been signed to Sacred Bones. Going on Magazine, the first track released in advance of release next month, they have not compromised one bit. The track is like a panic attack in the heart of a noisy, strobe-lit club, as it flits between steady beats and vicious, screamingly chaotic musical breakdowns, and Valentine Caulfield’s vocals similarly split between a seductive purr and a raging roar. An album of this is going to be a hell of a thing.

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/This is Radio Silence
/Deadlines

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London(ish) band This Is Radio Silence have hardly been inactive in recent years – a succession of EPs, a handful of live shows – but this new single Deadlines feels like a bit of a reset. A slower, more contemplative song that some others in recent years by the band, it also leans heavily into their lesser-explored shoegaze influences – the song is dominated by sheets of guitars that drop through the mix like a waterfall as the snow melts. What is interesting is that the song ends very abruptly – is this intended as part of a larger work, I wonder?

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/The Berzerker
/Shut The Fuck Up

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I first heard Forever over twenty-five years ago, and to this day there are few metal bands who’ve gone as extreme and as full-on as The Berzerker did from the start. The tag founder member Luke Kenny apparently prefers – Industrial Death Metal – barely scratches the surface of their extremity, as they use insanely fast gabba-style drum patterns and song lengths better suited to grindcore (for the most part). Years after they originally broke up, this new song dropped out of nowhere on Christmas Day, their first new song since 2009 (if you ignore the wild cover of All the Things She Said that’s been kicking around in the meantime, and was “properly” released in 2020).

But what of Shut The Fuck Up? Well, as the video comprising footage from their first live show in 2000 suggests, this is a return to their roots. Furious, gabba-level beats underpin filthy riffs and vocals from hell, and the samples are back too. No-one ever sounded like The Berzerker, and going on this, they still don’t. It’s fucking great to have them back.

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/Where We Sleep
/Headlong

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One of a number of tracks released right at the end of November that didn’t make it into consideration for /Countdown /2025 (simply as I was buried in work and writing!) was this new track from Beth Rettig’s latest project, and I understand is the forerunner for an upcoming album at some point in the first months of 2026. An unusually high-tempo track for Rettig, this charges forward powered by drum machines and fuzzy guitars, and seething vocals full of anger and accusations, as if she really needed to get this one off her chest.

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/Skindred
/You Got This
/You Got This

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It’s genuinely amazing to think that Benji Webbe has been part of the metal landscape for over thirty years now, first with Dub War, and since they split as the frontman of Skindred. Twenty-five and change years on, Skindred still rock bells: both as a phenomenal, feel-good live band but also on record. Latest single You Got This, the title track from their upcoming ninth album, is a great case in point: big, irresistible hooks and slick metal that is both heavy and endlessly listenable, not to mention, as the video proves, remaining a band that look to be having the time of their lives.

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/Poppy
/Bruised Sky
/Empty Hands

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The last Poppy album, Negative Spaces, was an exceptional Nu-Metal album, for the most part, and it appears that the follow-up is heading down a similar route. Bruised Sky has downtuned bass and guitars and a thundering rhythm that gives the song a mighty heft, while the big, soaring chorus reminds just how good a voice Poppy has. I inadvertently predicted the Nu-Metal revival over a decade ago (on /Tuesday Ten /223, fact fans), and I don’t think I could ever have imagined some of the new material in this revival could be so good.

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/Portion Control
/Possessed
/SEED EP3.1

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The latest British industrial legends to sign to Artoffact (after Test Dept. earlier in the autumn), and to mark that Portion Control have released an expanded and remastered version of their SEED release, with a bunch of shorter, experimental pieces and four full-length songs. One of the new songs added to this latest release is the pulverising Possessed, built around a trademark, mid-paced rhythm that glowers and threatens as much as Dean Paviani’s voice. Formed in 1979, it’s long felt that these industrial and sampling pioneers never quite got the respect they should have had. Maybe in 2026, they might do at last.

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/Ruby vs The Shadow Majlis
/The Age of Stupid

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A rather unexpected collaboration – Lesley Rankine (Ruby, Silverfish, Pigface), with Toronto artist Ali Jafri, whose music takes in different cultures and sounds with almost wild abandon. This song reflects the cross-cultural mash-up, a glitchy, trip-hoppy sound with processed vocals that reflect on all that humans have achieved, only for it to be torn down by a bunch of fucking idiots in the present day. An intriguing track, and hopefully bodes well for more new Ruby material at last in 2026.

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/ULVER
/Weeping Stone
/Neverland

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Is there any band that have so comprehensively left their origins behind – and evolved so much – as ULVER? The Norwegian group started out as part of the Norwegian Black Metal scene (although even then stood out from their peers) and have since taken in classical, avant-garde, electronic and progressive sounds while never seemingly willing to stand still. The last few albums – particularly The Assassination of Julius Caesar and Flowers of Evil – took them into lush synthpop territory with astonishing songs and it seems that as we reach 2026, we are entering another new era for the band.

Neverland is for the most part, vocal-free, instead an exploration of electronic sounds and textures (with what sounds like treated samples and field recordings as part of the collage that results) that are not allowed to drift into trite, coffee-table ambience. Instead a tight leash seems to result in relatively short, tightly organised pieces that all sound beautiful, but with an ugliness beneath that tries to fight to the surface. Weeping Stone is a perfect case in point, with anguished vocals supplied by Sara Khorami (apparently recorded in the early hours of the morning) and ominous synths that break the surface of the calm electronics which otherwise make up the song.