GLU, the genre-blending solo project of Michael Shuman(Queens of the Stone Age, Mini Mansions), delivers a brand new summer anthem-in-waiting with new single “LA.” The superb release will be part of GLU’s brand new EP ‘PONY BOY‘ – out August 14th on FLG.
Capturing the spirit of an LA summer, “LA” is a nostalgic tribute to home at its core. It’s personal, effortlessly uplifting, and features a standout vocal contribution from lifelong friend Lily James.
“Being an LA native, I have a lot of pride for this city,”Shuman explains. “I’ve been on the road most of my life, but I’m always drawn back home to LA. Long term, it’s hard to imagine anywhere else I’d rather live. This song represents that nostalgic feeling of endless summer, and was written and recorded 4 years ago, but I thought now was the right time for it to be released. It’s very special to have Lily on this track, and I’m glad that we can still continue to support each other creatively in all of our endeavours. She is a lifelong friend, and I think her voice has never sounded better.”
The EP has already delivered two thrilling offerings in the striking, reimagined cover of Jennifer Paige’s ’90s pop classic “CRUSH,” as well as the infectious title track “PONY BOY.” Today, “LA” ups the ante and shows yet another dimension to the GLU project.
GLU first emerged in early 2023 with debut EP ‘MY DEMONS,’ a raw and revealing release exploring struggle, loss, addiction, and childhood trauma. In 2025, GLU hit a new high point with the single “BOOGIE MAN,” an infectious, dance-forward track about losing yourself in the moment and letting go of self-consciousness. Drawing comparisons to Jamiroquai, Gorillaz, and Mac Miller, the song secured a major sync placement in MLB The Show ‘25 alongside Kendrick Lamar & De La Soul. The track pushed GLU past 3 million global streams.
That momentum has also translated directly to the stage, with tours and headline dates across the UK, Europe, and the US. GLU has toured with The Kills, Blood Red Shoes, Miles Kane & more, alongside UK headline shows of its own. Earlier this year saw GLU support The Blue Stones across three big UK shows, including the O2 Forum Kentish Town.
Radio support from BBC Radio 1 and 6 Music, as well as glowing press from the likes of the NME, Rolling Stone & more, has further established GLU as a project operating well beyond “side project” territory.
With its fearless approach to reinvention and emotional honesty, GLU continues a year of exciting activity, whilst blurring genres, stripping away pretence, and creating music that feels both personal and relatable.
IMPURE WILHELMINA are sharing “Train mort” as the third advance single from their forthcoming album Le sanglot. Where the two previous singles highlighted the album’s melodic and atmospheric range, this song stands as its most confrontational moment.
“Train mort” opens on an oppressive, industrially-tinged guitar riff that builds slowly before giving way to a moment of desperate stillness, only for the weight to return, head-on, in the final passage. The lyrics are carried by Michael Schindl’s alternating screamed and whispered vocals, describing a man pushed past the point of return, and observe with cold precision the violence that festers at the far end of endurance.
“Train mort” features French artist Mütterlein (Marion Leclercq), whose howls of despair are woven throughout the song. The collaboration, the first in Impure Wilhelmina’s history, arose from a natural affinity between Mütterlein’s tormented artistic universe and the atmosphere of the song. She co-wrote the track and, in the band’s own framing, darkened the darkness further.
Born from Geneva, Switzerland’s thriving alternative music scene, IMPURE WILHELMINA has been developing a truly unique blend of sound over the years, somewhere in between metal and progressive-tinged dark rock. The band’s distinctive style is dense, melodic and deeply melancholic, brought to life by introspective lyrics both profoundly humane and chilling, infused with raw emotion.
Impure Wilhelmina was founded in 1996 and made a name for itself in the early 2000s, with a series of iconic albums – I Can’t Believe I was Born in July (2003) and L’amour, la mort, l’enfance perdue (2005) along with several European tours. Little by little, the quartet led by guitarist and vocalist Michael Schindl won over the hearts of a now loyal fan base, who appreciate how the band turns dark themes into a universe of healing sound.
Impure Wilhelmina’s story is also one of perpetual renewal. The band’s sound has evolved from its gritty beginnings to more mature, melodic productions driven by clear magnetic vocals. Black Honey (2014), Radiation (2017) and Antidote (2021), widely appraised by critics, pushed horizons further yet for the band, signed to the label Season of Mist since 2015.
Throughout the years, Impure Wilhelmina has played hundreds of shows across Europe, performing at underground venues and large festivals alike, including opening for icons such as Gojira, Baroness, Amenra, Sólstafir and Crippled Black Phoenix.
Since 2023, the band has been working on its next album to follow Antidote. The process is enriched by the arrival of new guitarist Edouard Nicod, joining Sébastien Dutruel (bass), Mario Togni (drums) and Michael Schindl (guitar and vocals). Their new album entitled Le sanglot, set to be released by Season of Mist in 2026, will showcase the band’s next radical yet organically logical transformation: lyrics entirely in French, unleashing dimensions of sound you wouldn’t expect, with renewed creative energy.
« Rescapé de l’ancien monde, touché par la grâce »
Line-up: Michael Schindl — Vocals, Guitar Mario Togni — Drums Sébastien Dutruel — Bass Edouard Nicod — Guitar
Production Credits: Recorded at Kitchen Studio, Geneva, Switzerland. Produced, engineered & mixed by Yvan Bing at Kitchen Studio, except for track 9, recorded by Serge Morattel at Rec Studio. Mastered by Magnus Lindberg at Redmount Studio, Stockholm, Sweden.
Recording Line-up: Michael Schindl Mario Togni Sébastien Dutruel Edouard Nicod
Guest Musician: Marion Leclercq (Mütterlein) on the track 6, ‘Train Mort’.
Black/death experimental band Emptiness are sharing “The Clash of Forces” as the lead single from their forthcoming seventh full-length album Nowhere Speaks. While the album describes a world beyond human reach, “The Clash of Forces” is not about observing that world from a safe distance. The song is evidence of intrusion, another layer pressing through into the visible. No distance between sound and source.
“The Clash of Forces” is also the first glimpse of what the recording process actually meant for Nowhere Speaks. The whole album, save for vocals, keyboards and additional effects, was played live in the studio, after four years of preparation, rehearsals and tests to ensure the music could be performed with the right weight and intention. This is not a production detail so much as a commitment to a specific kind of tension, the kind that does not survive being assembled in pieces. Emptiness’ previous album, Vide (2021), had no distortion, was sung entirely in French, and existed at the edge of silence; Nowhere Speaks moves in the opposite direction, and does so deliberately, opening exactly where Nothing But The Whole (2014) cut off mid-riff and closing by looping back to that album’s opening riff.
Tracklist: 1. Nothing but the Whole (Part 2) (01:19) 2. The Threat (04:07) 3. Nowhere Speaks (05:37) 4. Darkness Commands (01:02) 5. Words to Wind (08:24) 6. One Must See All (01:29) 7. When the Whole Arrives (05:43) 8. The Clash of Forces (03:08) 9. Next in Line (04:15) 10. All for Nothing (06:37) Full runtime: 41:44
With Nowhere Speaks, EMPTINESS descends into a dimension stripped of all human trace, a place governed by its own silent logic, where unfamiliar forces and energies move with intent that has nothing to do with the listener. The album does not narrate; it confronts. Its opening track, “Nothing But The Whole (Part 2)”, begins mid-riff, picking up exactly where Nothing But The Whole (2014) cut off, the abrupt ending that baffled fans for years and became one of the more discussed gestures in underground metal. The closing track of Nowhere Speaks then returns to the opening riff of that same 2014 record, completing a deliberate loop between the two albums, beginning and ending inside each other. It is the band’s central idea made structural: nothing and everything at the same time, a cycle with no fixed point. After the stark withdrawal of Vide (2021), distortion-free and sung in French, this is a return to density, weight and immersive intensity, recorded live in the studio after four years of preparation, and entirely unconcerned with making its listener comfortable.
Founded in Brussels, Belgium in 1998, EMPTINESS set out with a clear and uncompromising intention: to explore darkness not as aesthetic but as territory. Drawing from black and death metal as departure points rather than destinations, the band approached extreme music with an experimental orientation from the start, shaping a sound that resisted easy classification. Early demos established a presence in the underground, their reception confirming that something distinct was forming in the Belgian capital.
The debut full-length Guilty to Exist(2004) laid the foundation, establishing the band’s identity without yet fully realizing its potential. Oblivion(2007) was where that potential first arrived completely: a record of exceptional production depth, commanding guitar work and a heaviness of atmosphere that made it, in retrospect, one of the defining metal releases of that year.
Error (2012), released through Dark Descent Records, pushed further into dissolution and atmosphere, sacrificing structural clarity in favour of immersion. Menacing, dissonant and unrelenting, it cleared space for what came next.
Nothing But The Whole (2014) was the album that opened EMPTINESS to a broader critical audience and remains their most discussed and celebrated statement from that first phase. Strange, hypnotic and formally resistant to genre convention, it held the raw force of extreme metal while stripping back its mechanics, allowing texture, dread and silence to carry weight where blast beats and tremolo picking had previously stood. Its closing moment, a riff severed mid-phrase as though the record had simply ceased to exist, drew years of speculation from listeners. It was not an error. It was a promise deferred.
Not For Music(2017), the band’s first release through Season of Mist, represented a categorical departure. Moving away from extreme metal frameworks entirely, the album drew on goth rock, coldwave, industrial and post-punk, pursuing a palette of dark music that felt fully inhabited rather than borrowed. Recorded at the band’s own Blackout Studio in Brussels, its final form was shaped with the involvement of Jeordie White (MARILYN MANSON, A PERFECT CIRCLE, NINE INCH NAILS), with mixing and mastering by Sean Beavan (GUNS N’ ROSES, NIN, SLAYER). The resulting record reached audiences well beyond the metal world, confirming EMPTINESS as a serious proposition across multiple scenes.
Vide (2021) took the band’s trajectory to its most formally radical point. Recorded in isolation, across apartments, a cabin in the woods and a Brussels rooftop, sung entirely in French and stripped of all distortion, it was a claustrophobic document of confinement and perceptual dislocation. The surrounding global context only reinforced the collapse between the inner world being constructed and the one outside. EMPTINESS performed the album in its entirety at Roadburn Redux 2021, a pairing that confirmed their standing within the avant-garde and experimental underground as precisely as any review could.
From early in their career, EMPTINESS has worked this way: Jérémie Bézier handling production across all its dimensions, Olivier J.L.W. directing the visual work in its entirety. Sound and image conceived, shaped and finalized from within. Nowhere Speaks continues that closed circuit, as it always has been.
Nowhere Speaks is not a return. After the most introverted and isolated record of their career, the band opens outward into density and live intensity. The album, developed over an extended period of time, was composed by Jérémie Bézier and Olivier J.L.W., who oversee its production across both sonic and visual dimensions, bringing the work to completion as a unified whole, committed to tape live in the studio. The structural conceit of opening mid-riff from where Nothing But The Whole ended, and closing with that album’s opening riff, is not nostalgia. It is the same logic that has always governed EMPTINESS: the cycle without a fixed point, beginning and ending inside each other, nothing and everything at the same time. The band has spent years demonstrating that they do not move in straight lines. Nowhere Speaks is a continuation from a point the listener was not meant to forget.
Line-up: Jérémie Bezier — Vocals, Bass Olivier J.L.W. — Guitars Simon L. — Guitars Dea Hydra — Synths Laye Louhenapessy — Drums
Swedish hard-rock risers Velveteen Queen return with their most ambitious statement yet, their sophomore album, The Greater Good, set for release on September 18th via Silver Lining Music. Pre-orders available now at this location.
Velveteen Queen are rapidly emerging as one of the most electrifying young acts in the modern rock scene, channeling the grit, swagger, and anthemic power of classic ’80s influences into a bold and contemporary sound. Having shared stages with Alice Cooper and Judas Priest, the five-piece have already built a reputation for their explosive live performances, undeniable stage presence and anthemic rock songs with instantly memorable hooks.
From the very first teasing riff and maraca-shake of ‘Too Far Gone’, the opening track of the album, the Swedish rockers make it clear your hips had better be ready to swing and your rockin’ boots ready to roll. Produced by renowned producer Sören Andersen, this is a record which brings the strut of the Sunset Strip’s glory days via Sweden, with a healthy dash of old-school Guns N’ Roses, alongside spiritual ties to Aerosmith, Velvet Revolver and Hanoi Rocks.
The new single and title track, ‘The Greater Good’, is out now. The song featured Peter Keys (Lynyrd Skynyrd) on piano and is accompanied by a larger-than-life video directed by esteemed filmmaker Patric Ullaeus.
“In ‘The Greater Good’, we confront the lies that run deep in our city, challenging apathy while calling for action amid chaos. When the fight for truth fades, where does the ‘greater good’ truly lie?” – Velveteen Queen
There’s a snap and vigour in Velveteen Queen that is instantly exciting to the ears. Take the bounce and groove of the glam-punk ‘Talk or Walk’, which boasts a huge choral hook and a snarling top lip of attitude. Meanwhile, ‘Adrenaline’ is built around a razor-sharp, singalong chorus, with riffs swinging low and hard. Yet there’s also full ballad artistry on display with the soulful ‘Chains’, showing that Velveteen Queen can bring it down to strands of raw emotion.
Make no mistake, while the influences on Velveteen Queen are clear, the approach, songwriting, and delivery is utterly fresh, packed with undeniable positive energy and rebel attitude. There’s a new generation of young glam/trash rockers craving The Greater Good, and Velveteen Queen confidently and successfully deliver exactly what they are looking for.
And that same high-voltage energy captured on the record will soon be unleashed on stage, with Velveteen Queen poised to turn every show into a full-throttle rock ’n’ roll event. Their next live chapter continues in truly grand fashion, joining forces with rock legends Alice Cooper and Danko Jones at Rättvik on June 27th.
The Greater Good track listing:
1. Too Far Gone 2. The Greater Good 3. Talk or Walk 4. Adrenaline 5. Can’t Go Back in Time 6. Chains 7. It Ain’t Over 8. Liar 9. Best of the Best 10. Sorry 11. Try (Try to Believe Me)
The Greater Good will be available on vinyl, CD, digital formats and D2C bundles. Pre-orders can be placed here
Upcoming shows: 27 June – Dalhalla, Rättvik (SE) 18Sept – Debaser Nova, Stockholm (SE) 19 Sept – Valand, Gothenburg (SE)
With their new album It Takes The Village arriving May 8th, New Jersey heavy metal powerhouse WHO ON EARTH continue the momentum with the release of their latest single and video, “Shadows”—a towering anthem packed with galloping riffs, soaring harmonies, and the band’s signature no-frills approach to modern heavy metal.
The third single from the forthcoming album, “Shadows” channels the spirit of classic metal while reinforcing the band’s sharp lyrical perspective. Built on thunderous grooves, dual guitar harmonies, and an arena-ready chorus, the track delivers both nostalgia and urgency in equal measure.
Bassist Pete Rizzi comments:
“‘Shadows’ is our third single from It Takes The Village, and it truly epitomizes what we are all about. It’s got that old school metal vibe with a catchy chorus, guitar harmonies reminiscent of old Maiden & Priest, and a locked-in rhythm section. The lyrics also speak to a concept we touch on quite often: deception and the need to be vigilant about what you see, hear, read, eat, watch, etc., because there are a lot of bad actors trying to profit from us through manipulation, deceit, and outright lies. We don’t write love songs. Ha!”
“Shadows” follows the previously released singles “Vigilance” and “Any Other Way,” both of which offered fans an early glimpse into the sonic force of It Takes The Village—WHO ON EARTH’s most dynamic and fully realized record to date.
1. Vigilance 2. Any Other Way 3. Shadows 4. Good Man Down 5. Closer 6. Too Close 7. Double or Nothing 8. Monster! 9. Oh, Set Me Free 10. We Don’t Belong Here 11. Ascension 12. The Unbeaten
WHO ON EARTH Tour Dates w/FOZZY:
May 8 – Charlotte, NC – Amos’ Southend May 9 – Waynesboro, VA – The Foundry May 12 – Philadelphia, PA – Underground Arts May 13 – Harrisburg, PA – Capitall City Music Hall May 15 – St. Charles, IL – Arcada Theatre May 16 – Flint, MI – The Machine Shop
About WHO ON EARTH:
Who On Earth cut its teeth through relentless gigging across the New York tri-state area, with founding members Coosh and Pete previously tearing up stages as MadHaus. During 2020, the longtime collaborators shifted focus from covers to original material, quickly writing ten songs and entering Sonic Stomp Studio with producer Mike Orlando (Category 7, Adrenaline Mob). Joined by drummer Joe D’Aqui, the group crafted a heavy, story-driven sound rooted in influences like Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Alice in Chains, and Tool. Despite pandemic delays, the sessions yielded their debut full-length album Blame’, released in October 2022.
Following the addition of guitarists Bruce Gatewood and Johnny James Barone, the band gained traction with a heavier reimagining of Toto’s “Hold the Line,” now their most-streamed track. Lineup changes continued with drummer Howie Fallon joining in 2024, bringing renewed chemistry and power, though tragedy struck later that year with the passing of Gatewood. In late 2024, Jimmy Kocha joined, filling the role of co-lead guitarist, solidifying the lineup that is currently in full force today. Honoring his legacy, the band pushed forward, releasing the Smoke & Mirrors EP in March 2025—a sharp, socially reflective six-song release.
2026 marks Who On Earth’s return with their brand new album, It Takes The Village; a 12 track record of pure and relentless rock and metal that reignites the spirit of heavy music.
Lineup: Coosh – Vocals Pete Rizzi – Bass Johnny James Barone – Guitar Jimmy Kocha – Guitar Howie Fallon – Drums
Abandoned Ocean is a new project that introduces the English written material by Finnish post metal / doom metal artist Harri Kauppinen. Now released debut release Inner Dusk -EP could be described as post-metal. Kauppinen once again combines elements of lo-fi and doom into his intimate singer-songwriter style.
“The last time my music was released was in 2016. After a long break, it’s great to see that I still get excited when a whole (and damn dark) song is built out of total emptiness. It’s one of the greatest experiences music offers me.” -Harri Kauppinen
Check the lyric video of the track “Unpleasant Light”:
Escaping from It All – music & lyrics : Harri Kauppinen – ISRC : FIH3X2600001
Unpleasant Light – music & lyrics : Harri Kauppinen – ISRC : FIH3X2600002
I Am the Darkness – music & lyrics : Harri Kauppinen – ISRC : FIH3X2600003
Record label: Self released
Although the EP’s music was written by Harri Kauppinen, there’s also other players involved: Teemu Liekkala (Rioghan, Red Eleven), Otto Närhi (Psychework, Nestruction) and producer Hiili Hiilesmaa (Kypck, Swallow the Sun, HIM).
These four gentlemen last came together on a unifying theme in 2016, when Kauppinen’s debut solo album, Helvetin laulut, was released. Not forgetting the fact that Kauppinen, Liekkala and Närhi share a common history from 2005-2014, when they were part of the dark metal band Beyond The Dream.
Inner Dusk is a narrow passageway into a gloomy world, but one where there is hope for a way out. Step inside. You can come back if you want, but before you do ; close your eyes and immerse yourself in the inner dusk.
Kimmo Kuusniemi’s ASA unveil the long-overdue release of "Collective Failure" + first music video for title-track! Check it out and stay tuned for more news! Click image to watch the video
Kimmo Kuusniemi’s SARCOFAGUS return with a Historic 2010 Concert Video Premiere on YouTube! Click image to watch the video
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Visionary artist KIMMO KUUSNIEMI's ANCIENT STREAMING ASSEMBLY (ASA) have released “Aurora Nuclearis”, a powerful 12-minute audiovisual experience, dedicated to the Late Keyboardist Esa Kotilainen. - Click image to watch the video
Click image to watch the video
Metal Shock Finland (World Assault )