The end is now looming ever closer, and this is the last /Tracks of the Month of 2026 – and there are just three more of them after this in 2027 before things here close for good. It’s been a long month, and I’ve put my body through a lot during it: my first tattoo on my forearm, followed by minor(ish) surgery to remove a lipoma from my back.
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/Subject /Tracks of the Month
/Playlists 
/Deezer / 
/YouTube
/Related /654/Tracks/Sep-26 /Tuesday Ten/Index
/Details /Tracks this week/13 /Tracks on Deezer Playlist/10 /Duration/36:00
With this being the last tracks wrap up for a couple of months – from early December, for one last time, it’ll be /Countdown /2026 – I’m covering as many tracks as I can.
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 above).
/Track of the Month
/In Strict Confidence
/Fever
/The Final Kiss
The grandiose, skyscraping darkwave of ISC is back at last, and this is their best song in aeons. Their first truly new material in some time – their last album, the decidedly patchy Hate2Love, was a decade ago – but their extensive work in recent years of reinterpreting some of their classic songs has perhaps given them new impetus. Fever is a big, brash song that rolls and stomps away before exploding into a spectacular, irresistible chorus. Back, perhaps, to show some of the younger pretenders how this darkwave business is really done…
/SCALER
/Spiral
/Reflex
No matter how hard I tried (and I had another go with the recent reissue), I just couldn’t get on with SCALER’s second album at all: it felt like it was missing all the bite and interesting stuff of their early singles, as if AI had reinterpreted it and only got the sound. The announcement of a new EP that takes them back to their earlier, improvisational work perhaps suggests that the band themselves realised, too, that they needed to reset (even if they may not admit it publicly). Lead single Spiral suggests this was the right call: the track has the urgency and power that caught my attention in the first place, with an intriguing industrial-rock-meets-cyberpunk-electronics sound that feels very much of the now.
/Normal Bias
/Soft Power
/Ways of Keeping Clean
Kingdom Come was an outstanding debut from the duo that make up Normal Bias, and what has felt like a lengthy silence since was finally broken in the past month by the first single from their upcoming second album (which is due in the spring). Their sound hasn’t particularly changed: this is still sleek, eighties-leaning synth-funk that also cherry picks elements of classic EBM and more modern minimal wave, and perhaps the biggest change to these ears is that Matt Weiner’s rich vocals aren’t quite as Dave Gahan-aping as they were before. The surreal, strange video – a nod to a variety of classic eighties bizarro-MTV hits – is well worth your time, too, as it isn’t often you see such impressive videos from smaller artists anymore.
/kidneythieves
/Winners
It’s been a long fucking time since we last heard new music from KT: last album The Mend came out in 2016 – indeed, our one regret from our honeymoon at the end of 2016 was not making last minute changes to our plans, to stay in LA for one more night to see them live, as we ended up missing that gig by 24 hours…
But after a long, long build-up – this song seems to have been promised for a year at least – Winners is finally here. And you know what? It’s the groovy, melodic industrial-tinged rock that we know and love. Sure, the harder, tighter edge of their early days is long gone, but that’s no surprise, and frankly, this is more than good enough (especially when that chorus kicks in).
/Burner
/Sunrise, Parabellum
/No One Is Coming To Save Us
One I heard about thanks to a friend with ears to the ground in the metal scene, this London band dropped an excellent album a month or so back, and it is well worth mentioning here. Burner are a band that take in hardcore, deathcore and death metal into one unholy, furious hybrid, and this album absolutely destroys from start to finish. This track was an immediate highlight, a three-minute rampage that is an unleashing of utter rage at what their – and our – world has become. The fascists are burning the fucking place down, and Burner refuse to have any part in it, instead wanting to be part of that reckoning that appears now to be coming.
/Odonis Odonis
/No One Is Coming To Save You
While this Canadian band have moved between a number of styles over their career, the last, self-titled album, felt something of a misstep. A move toward a darkwave sound felt like swimming with the tide rather than against it as they have so successfully done, it wasn’t an interesting release and I’ve not listened to it again since. Odonis Odonis have already moved on, it turns out, with a seventh album coming in the new year, and the first taste of it is what they call their most club-oriented track yet.
They aren’t wrong: this 150 second slams from the off, a bouncing industrial-dance monster that sounds remarkably upbeat for a track that appears to be standing their ground against someone who has wronged one too many times, and are beyond salvation.
/bloody knives
/kill me again
Many shoegaze-influenced bands of more recent times are, to put it mildly, often a little polite with their sound, apparently uninterested with the sonic force and volume of their forebears – instead content to use the textures instead. Preston Maddox and his band bloody knives have no such qualms. Having seen them twice live in Chicago over the past decade, I can fully attest to their extreme use of volume, and their industrial-tinged electronics only provide a heavier bottom edge to what is otherwise a fully shoegaze sound. The first of a couple of recent singles (presumably a new album is coming in due course), kill me again has propulsive drums that are periodically smothered in an avalanche of treated guitars, with Maddox’s vocals reverbed and looped amid the sonic carnage.
/Heartworms
/Guess I’m Stuck In The Dark
The exceptional Glutton For Punishment – one of the best albums of 2025 – seemed to come out of nowhere, a young new artist doing what they wanted to do, and resulting in an album that had feet in a number of camps (it sure as hell wasn’t just a Goth album – even if there were a lot of gothic moments within). Going on the interview with Jojo Orme on NME.com this week, it may be wise not to try and second-guess what’s coming on the next album.
But then, Guess I’m Stuck In The Dark is already taking us in a new direction. Peppered with a capella spoken word sections – the song was apparently inspired by a powercut and a fear of the dark – the track otherwise has the feel of mash-up of Talking Heads and the xx, a modern take on the weirder, more experimental reaches of post-punk and a continuation of the feeling that Jojo Orme is thinking very differently indeed to their peers.
/Mesh
/Fallen Angel
/Fallen Angel EP
Such are the riches from Mesh recently – the outstanding The Truth Doesn’t Matter earlier this year had sixteen songs and some excellent B-sides – that a follow-up EP provides five more new songs, and going on the title track, these are not discarded songs. Fallen Angel is another dancefloor-bound track, a big, brash synthpop track with the usual hooks and lush sound, and true to form, it’s another takedown of a duplicitous, callous lover. Sure, Mesh have rarely changed their subject matter, but after thirty years, they have no business still sounding this good.
/Marika Hackman
/33
/False Dogs
Like her last album, Marika Hackman begins the False Dogs era in reflective fashion. Gone is the savage oversharing of earlier songs that made for fabulous entertainment (and some even better songs), maybe it is a symptom of Hackman getting older and tempering her approach. 33 is a song about getting old(er), facing up to your past and the present, assessing what was good and what was bad, but also realising that it’s not healthy to be doing things just because you should. The song itself begins to swell like a gathering storm, a sparse piano-led song that builds in urgency and volume, Hackman’s vocal getting more and more strained…before it just stops, as if the plug was pulled.
/dEUS
/Keptman
Happily, it doesn’t appear that we’re going to have to wait another decade for a new dEUS album, as keptman dropped out of nowhere this month, heralding a new phase for a band who’ve never stood still, even if for the past year or so they’ve been marking three decades or so since their much-loved first two albums (and the show in London on that tour in the Spring was an absolute joy).
Maybe, just maybe, that trip into the past has informed this song. This is a song that seems – meaning is often a slippery, deceptive thing when it comes to Tom Barman’s words – to be talking about a human weakness for the new and shiny, for the things we cannot or shouldn’t have, and there is a dense, powerful force to this song that sees dEUS return to old sounds again (there’s no escaping the fact that this song builds – and stops dead – in a similar fashion to longtime fan-favourite Roses) in a way they’ve genuinely tried to avoid in the past. There’s a comfort in this: they still have it, I still love this band.
/UCNX
/Humanity Is Bleeding (feat. Alyson Rodriguez Orenstein)
/World Memory Erased
East Coast industrialists UCNX have been around a long time now, although as with many longer-lived, independent industrial projects, progress and releases have often been sporadic at best. After a second covers album last year – that covered both Front 242 and Billy Joel, among others – they are finally preparing to release their first album of new material in nearly ten years. The first single from that album was, it has been revealed, co-written with Ian Ross (Flesh Field), and that influence quickly becomes clear, not least in the guitar samples that pepper the mix, orchestral-esque synths, and the use of a female vocalist (in this case Alyson Rodriguez Orenstein), that doesn’t half leave an echo of Flesh Field’s classic album Strain. But there’s enough of the DNA of UCNX in here too – glitchy, dense programming and a clear cyberpunk leaning – to leave me excited for the album World Memory Erased, due next year.
/808 DOT POP
/neofuturism (guillemins)
/Maximalism
Passenger S (Metroland) has been relentless in his own release schedule in recent years as Metroland has slowed down. This autumn, there are two albums coming, one called Maximalism, the other Minimalism, both inspired by modern architecture and design (a common theme in both Metroland and 808 DOT POP has been that of 20th Century advances in design, technology and art, and how they inform modern life).
One of the singles from Maximalism is the lovely neofuturism (guillemins), a song as sleek as the station that inspired it. Gare de Liège-Guillemins, in Liège, Belgium, was designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, never one to shirk a striking design or an enormous budget (this station rebuild cost €312 million), and is a sweeping, sinuous thing as the roof of white steel and glass arches and swoops over the platforms, and looks very pretty indeed. Having waited to change trains there on a cold December night, though, it did seem that it was rather windswept and cold, very much a case of form over function!