Finally, the eternal month of January is over, and now we’re into February, it’s time for the best tracks of the first month of the year.
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/Subject /Tracks of the Month
/Playlists 
/Spotify / 
/YouTube
/Related /616/Tracks/Dec-25 /Tuesday Ten/Index
/Details /Tracks this week/14 /Tracks on Spotify Playlist/13 /Duration/60:00
As is often the way, the new release announcements have been coming thick and fast, and so this month features fourteen tracks as I attempt to keep up.
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).
/Track of the Month
/Mesh
/Exile
/The Truth Doesn’t Matter
Gosh, has it really been ten years since the last new Mesh album? Obviously they’ve hardly been idle since – I’ve seen them live four times since – but it’s great to hear new material at last. Especially since the striking first single sounds like a rejuvenated group, with echoes of hits of their past, not least thanks to that mighty, skyscraping chorus that I can already hear the devoted fans at their gigs singing back to them down the front.
Oh yes, what is probably the UK’s greatest, and perhaps most underappreciated, synthpop band of recent times are back and on fighting form, not least with a theme to the album that will feel familiar this week, in these dystopian times.
/The Empty Page
/Death On Our Side
I’ve been featuring this Manchester group for a while now, and their latest single is another that fits the current, prevailing mood. A gloomy, mid-paced rock track whose dark tone matches with the lyrics, that bemoan a total lack of faith in the future as our world is burned down by the rich looking after themselves. If you’re not angry yet, you better start being so. It’s a great song, mind.
/Bonnie “Prince” Billy
/They Keep Trying To Find You
/We Are Together Again
Will Oldham’s work has always had a fragile beauty, teetering on the edge of collapse but with a reassurance that in his words and delivery that he’s always got your back. This gorgeous song, from his upcoming new album, feels like a return thematically to his stone-cold classic I See A Darkness, an examination of mental health and the terrible toll that it can take on you at the lowest points. There is no judgement, just an acceptance that it can happen, and that at that point there feels like no escape.
/Courtney Barnett
/Site Unseen (feat. Waxahatchee)
/Creature of Habit
In something of a change to much of the music featured this week, Courtney Barnett’s latest single is a sunny, somewhat carefree song, untroubled by the world outside their own bubble. Rather than panicking about the future, or what they’ve not done until now, Barnett is instead putting off those worries for another day, instead choosing to enjoy what is in front of her right now instead. The song itself has a breezy, country twang, and with Waxahatchee along for the ride, it’s a quite lovely three minutes.
/Clubdrugs
/Heart 2 Break
/lovesick
I’ve heard a fair bit of buzz about this Chicago duo of late, and thankfully, they aren’t just another boring, identikit darkwave duo. Instead, there’s more than a little of Ladytron and School of Seven Bells to this track, which flits between stark electronics and noisy shoegaze and a distinct sense that they are deliberately holding something back. Colour me intrigued for the upcoming debut album.
/ADULT.
/No One Is Coming
/Kissing Luck Goodbye
Detroit electronic/industrial/electroclash veterans ADULT. are seething with rage at what their country has become, and it seeps from every pore of No One Is Coming. A song that sounds off-kilter – at least in part because the rhythm they created for it was sampled from a skipping record, apparently – and underpinned by a fuzzy, dirty bassline and searing vocals that implore listeners to stand up and take ownership of their fight, as no-one is fucking coming to your rescue.
ADULT. albums are always worth looking out for, and we’re in for a bracing listen if this is any indication of what’s to come.
/Damage Control with Leæther Strip
/Rage
/Oblivion Grid
An intriguing new release comes from Damage Control, an English-Australian-German industrial group who put out a record nearly a decade ago. This second album has been coming for a long time, then, and the choice of producers (Chris Peterson and Greg Reely) becomes obvious as you play the track. This harks back to the classic electro-industrial sound, and particularly that out of Vancouver, with an intricate, detailed production that fizzes with life: particularly with the distinctive vocals of Claus Larsen on it.
/This Morn’ Omina
/7Skehem
/INSHA
The tribal powerhouse that is This Morn’ Omina returns with their first new full-length album in five years, and there is definitely a sense of change (not for the first time). For a start, this album is a single disc, and just fifty minutes or so long – so not the sprawling, double-length releases we’re used to (it’s been years since a TMO album was a single disc!). But also, 7Skehem feels like it is dialling back the overtly tribal rhythms of before, with this sounding more industrial and perhaps more mechanical than organic – and also somewhat muzzled, as if the track could really soar but never really does. The new album might take some getting used to.
/DÄLEK
/Better Than
/Brilliance of a Falling Moon
Will Brooks doesn’t mess about – just weeks after the release of the excellent collaboration HAYWARDxDÄLEK, we get news of the next DÄLEK album proper. The album’s unusual title comes from the excellent Erik Larson book In The Garden of Beasts: Love and terror in Hitler’s Berlin, which is about the first US Ambassador to Hitler’s Germany, and his experiences as Hitler consolidates power.
Better Than is a dense, heavy track – in the classic DÄLEK style. The beats feel like they contain lead weights as they hit, and the production is dense and overwhelming, and Brooks is furious. Furious at the fascist takeover of his country, furious at those unwilling to take a stand and help to force change for the better. This is not unusual territory for his songs, mind: political anger and activism have long featured in his lyrics, but this is unusually overt and helps remind of the urgency right now.
/Sunn O)))
/Glory Black
/Sunn O)))
The metallic drone lords Sunn O))) are back, newly signed to Sub Pop, and for their first album proper in over six years, they have returned to just the duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, with no guests providing assistance – instead they did it themselves.
The first track from it, Glory Black, is at first listen in the classic Sunn O))) mould, as slow riff after slow riff washes over you like waves of sound, and even played very loud is, to these ears, oddly soothing and warm. But for a moment or so in the middle of the track, the riffs fade away for an unexpected, unnerving piano interlude, before the waves of sound crash back in again.
Even after all this time, mind, Sunn O))) are a group that you either love, or you don’t. It remains the case that my wife and I are very much on opposite sides of the fence…
/Hellripper
/Hunderprest
/Coronach
There’s nothing subtle, particularly, about James McBain’s speed/thrash/death metal project Hellripper. But why should it be? Tapping into decades of the genres, he nailed the sound a few albums back and is now exploring ways to keep things interesting, and on the upcoming album the songs are all based on Scottish myths and legends. The rampaging first single, Hunderprest, is apparently about the vampire of Melrose Abbey, a sinning chaplain who was said to have stalked the town after death in search of blood.
Such a bloodthirsty tale is ripe for Hellripper to turn into a fantastic new single, that’s for sure, and comes with a video filmed at Damnation Festival last November.
/Lamb of God
/Into Oblivion
/Into Oblivion
Lamb of God have long been standard bearers for ferocious, mainstream metal over the past quarter-century and more, and like a number of other bands, the horrors of the current political situation in the US in particular appears to have inspired them to greater heights. The title track of the album is the first single, and is a monstrous, riff-heavy beast that takes absolutely no prisoners in its dissection of the world we are seeing – or more to the point being told to see.
Well worth reading, too, is Randy’s Blythe’s lengthy Substack post this week about the world he sees, and why he won’t stay quiet in the face of adversity. One choice quote: “For thirty goddamned years I have been screaming a warning— because it is the right thing to do, because I give a fuck, because I HAVE A VOICE.”
/Party Cannon
/Improper Use of a Speculum
/Subjected to a Partying
The much-loved Scottish slam/death metal loons are back, and still as lowbrow as ever. But would we want them any other way? There is perhaps a bit of a change: lead single Improper Use of a Speculum at least starts out slower than lightspeed, as it chugs into life, but it appears that was only a short breather to allow them to get the inflatables ready to chuck into the crowd and let all hell break loose. Again.
They remain one of the most fun extreme metal bands live, the more amazing bit is that they continue to be great on record too.
/Eximperitus
/Golden Chains for the Construction of Individual Greatness
/Meritoriousness of Equanimity
Eximperitus, or Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum, if you want their full, 51-character name (needless to say, they were used long ago in Unreadable Band Logo of the Week on MetalSucks) are a Belarussian death metal band that I probably would never have heard of were it not for the attention-grabbing name. Indeed they generally appear to have an issue with brevity – just take a look at the track names on the new album…
But the good thing? Their nasty, dry death metal is actually great. There’s not too much ground-breaking here, but why should it be? Death metal is not meant to be reinventing the wheel, it’s good, heavy stuff to headbang to. And this does the job nicely. But interestingly, when you look at the lyrics, this appears to be a thinly veiled jab at authoritarianism, which is doubly interesting when you consider where they are from…