With major international tours and chart placements around the world, after more than 30 years, Borknagar remain a consistently evolving force. Starting with their self-titled beginnings, the band quickly pushed past the boundaries set by traditional black metal by encompassing prog, neofolk and hard rock. Their tenth album remains a true force of nature.
Today, Season of Mist is proud to announce a reissue of Borknagar’s tenth full-length album Winter Thrice. With blinding blast beats, melodies as crisp as the first frost and Garm of Ulver joining forces with their seasoned vocal trifecta, the band summoned a perfect storm of blackened progressive metal.
Swiss rockers King Zebra share their new single, “Heart Without A Home”, along with an official lyric video, out now via Frontiers Music Srl.
The band commented: “Heart Without A Home” is the first ever King Zebra ballad. Acoustic guitar leading the approach is another first for the band. In the spirit of 80’s power rock, the arrangement and lyrics are a tribute to the human desire to be at peace & belong. It paints a sonic picture of the struggle between loneliness and coexistence, and the price paid for both.”
Hailing from the picturesque city of Zurich, Switzerland, King Zebra is a melodic hard rock powerhouse that has been making waves in the international rock scene since their inception in 2017.
Led by the charismatic frontman Eric St. Michaels, a seasoned veteran in the world of rock ‘n’ roll, the band has been on a relentless journey to redefine the genre with their electrifying sound.
Eric St. Michaels, originally from the vibrant rock scene of New Jersey, found a new home in Switzerland over two decades ago. His powerful and soulful vocals are best known from his time as the former lead singer of the renowned band China. With King Zebra, Eric has embarked on a new musical odyssey, taking his rich experience and passion for rock to new heights.
In 2019, the band gained international attention with the release of an EP. Since then, King Zebra has performed at festivals such as Rock the Ring alongside legends like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Uriah Heep, and Rose Tattoo, and opened stadium shows for Alice Cooper.
In 2020, they released the album “Survivors”, produced by Oscar Nilsson (Crashdiet, The Halo Effect, Hank van Hell), which led to successful European tours and sold-out shows both abroad and in their home country.
In 2023, King Zebra signed a record deal with Frontiers Records. The following year saw the release of “Between The Shadows”, accompanied by a European tour with The Gems and a subsequent club tour in Switzerland.
In 2025, the band performed at renowned festivals such as the Riverside Festival, shared the stage with Hammerfall and Kissin’ Dynamite, and joined Shakra as Special Guest for their 30th anniversary show at the legendary Z7 in Pratteln. Later that year, King Zebra returned to Bohus Studio in Gothenburg to work on new material.
As King Zebra continues to conquer stages and hearts around the globe, their mission remains clear: to keep the flame of Melodic Hard Rock burning brightly and to carry on the legacy of Rock ‘n’ Roll through their electrifying music and unforgettable live shows.
Line Up: Eric St. Michaels Roman Lauer Jerry Napitupulu Benjamin Grimm
Italian desert cult rock psychonauts BANTORIAK return to unveil their long-awaited new album “Vol. II”, set for release on June 19th, 2026 via CD, colored vinyl and digital formats on Argonauta Records. Seven years after their acclaimed debut Weedooism, the band opens a new sonic chapter, expanding their vision into a deeper and more immersive psychedelic experience.
Conceived as the solo vision of Izio Orsini (Rancho Bizzarro), BANTORIAK evolves on this new chapter into a collective ritual, bringing together longtime collaborators and fresh contributors. The result is a hypnotic blend of psychedelic doom, drenched in a warm, vintage 70s-inspired sound, where desert winds meet humid, mystic atmospheres and hard blues inflections.
To mark the announcement, the band unveils the first single “Blu Bus”, featuring the legendary Sergio Ch. of Los Natas and Soldati on lead guitar. The track stands as a manifesto of the album’s spirit: expansive, gritty and deeply evocative, channeling the raw essence of desert rock through swirling jams and magnetic grooves, LISTEN HERE https://tidal.com/track/517988755/u
“Vol. II” is a shared experience shaped by a remarkable cast of musicians, including: Dome La Muerte, Sergio Ch. (Los Natas), Marco Gambicorti (Rancho Bizzarro), Toto Barbato (The Cage, Snaporaz), Omar Tognotti, Giacomo Cerri (Vesta), Rosy Ninivaggi (Profanal), Valentina Erre, Jacopo Pannokkia, Filippo Del Bimbo (Supernaughty), Andrea Appino (Zen Circus), Mattia Cominotto (Green Fog Studio), Giacomo Vaccai.
From the scorching deserts of California to the dense, humid echoes of India, “Vol. II” unfolds through hypnotic jams, heavy riffs and a timeless psychedelic aura, confirming BANTORIAK as a unique voice within the European underground.
Tracklist Vol II Blu Bus Ritualism Liquid Brain Kairot La Muerte Amanita Karpura
Stay tuned for more music, pre-orders and upcoming announcements.
The Helsinki-based oi! punk band The Bulldozer unleash a fierce, old-school punk outburst with their new single “Kicking Grannies.” The track stomps firmly in the boots of bands like Cockney Rejects and Anti-Nowhere League.
Despite its title, the band is not actually kicking grannies.
“I’m not the one kicking grannies with my boots. Did you know most dangerous men wear suits,” goes one key line in the song.
Kicking Grannies tells the story of older women who still have plenty of fight left in them. The narrative features a rough-looking crowd escorting them to the pub for a game of bingo. At the same time, the track continues a familiar theme for the band: the real threat doesn’t always look like one, it often hides behind neatly dressed figures in positions of power.
Formed in 2023, The Bulldozer represent the SHARP movement (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) and combine oi! with traditional punk, spiced up with touches of ska and reggae.
The band’s previous release, Battle Scars EP, explored similar themes, tackling working-class frustration and social inequality. In particular, the track “Breathtakingly Ordinary Man” took aim at “men in suits” disconnected from the realities of everyday people.
The Bulldozer’s debut release was the Shit Drops Keep Fallin’ On My Head EP, released in 2024.
Kicking Grannies won’t be the band’s only release this spring. A four-track EP is set to follow at the end of May.
TERAMAZE unveil “Enemy In The Garden,” the latest single from their upcoming album The Silent Architect.
Built around the timeless narrative of Adam and Eve, the track explores temptation and consequence through a modern progressive lens—balancing restraint with intensity.
Featuring keyboardist Matt Guillory (James LaBrie), the song expands the band’s sonic depth while maintaining its core power.
Video directed by Wayne Joyner (Sevendust, Dream Theater, Alter Bridge).
This is TERAMAZE at their most focused, cinematic, and deliberate.
“The Silent Architect wouldn’t be lyrically and thematically complete without ‘Enemy in the Garden’. It drives the core themes in the album in the most potent way possible, reflecting our short comings back at us.” N Peachey | Vocalist
For fans of: Dream Theater, Tesseract, Devin Townsend
Some albums are planned. Some are demanded — by grief, by love, by the kind of loss that leaves a silence so wide you have no choice but to fill it with the only thing you know.
“For The Hawk” is the new release from Citovitz and The Fireflies of February — the recording project of Polish-born guitarist, composer, and songwriter Andrzej Citowicz, based in Cairo, Egypt. It is available now on all major streaming platforms worldwide. And it arrives on a date that was never truly a coincidence. The official lyric video for ‘I Don’t Have To Hide’ — released also today with the album premiere, May 4th — is available now on YouTube:
May 4th. Star Wars Day. The day the world celebrates the Light Side of the Force.
He was always Light Side. Not once. Not ever, did he choose anything else.
THE HAWK His name is not printed here. Those who knew him need no introduction. Those who didn’t will understand everything they need to know from the music itself.
He was a friend. A mentor. A father figure to both Andrzej and his wife Shereen Shoukry Citowicz. He stood quietly in the background for years — never asking for recognition, never needing applause — and made everything around him better simply by being present. He was the kind of person who would die for the people he loved without hesitation, and never once mention it afterward. The kind of person the world produces rarely and loses too soon.
He was also a devoted Star Wars fan. A Light Side soul in every sense of that phrase — not as metaphor, but as lived practice. He chose good not because it was easy or rewarded or noticed, but because that was simply who he was.
“He stood in the background so we could stand at all. He never asked for anything. He gave everything. Love was not something he spoke about — it was something he did. Every single day.” — Andrzej Citowicz
When he was gone, Andrzej and Shereen faced what so many have faced before them — the impossible task of responding to an absence that language cannot adequately address. They did what they have always done. They turned to music.
A BLESSING, A CURSE, AND THE WEIGHT OF FRIENDSHIP For The Hawk did not begin as an album. It began as a song — Love Is All We Need — written in the spirit of Bon Jovi, warm and wide open and completely unapologetic in its belief that love is the hardest, strongest, most load-bearing thing a human being can carry. Shereen wrote the lyrics as a tribute. As his message, returned to the world in the only form she and Andrzej knew how to give it.
Then the grief kept arriving. And the songs kept coming with it.
This Is One’s For the Hawk. We Are The Good Guys. I Don’t Have To Hide. Love Is All We Need. Each track arrived from the same source — the specific, irreplaceable ache of losing someone who shaped you. Someone whose guidance you did not fully appreciate until the guidance was no longer there. Someone whose friendship was so present, so reliable, so quietly foundational, that you only began to understand its full weight when it was no longer something you could reach for.
“Music is all I can give back. If there is any paying back for his love, his friendship, his heart held out for both of us — for me and for Shereen — then this is it. Every note. Every lyric. Every song on this record.” — Andrzej Citowicz
“For The Hawk” is not a grief project. It is a friendship project. It is a record about the people who stand in the background and hold everything together — unseen, unrewarded, irreplaceable. About the loyalty that does not announce itself. About the loss that does not diminish but deepens everything it touches.
Andrzej and Shereen have faced much in recent years. Loss upon loss. The kind of accumulation that would silence many artists. Instead, it has done the opposite — driving both of them deeper into the work, further into the honesty that has always defined Citovitz and The Fireflies of February at their best.
MAY THE 4TH BE WITH HIM The choice of May 4th as the release date arrived with the particular logic of things that feel inevitable in retrospect. Star Wars Day. The day the galaxy celebrates the Light Side. The Jedi. The ones who chose good because it was right, not because it was easy — who stood in the fire and did not become it.
He was exactly that.
“I told myself it was coincidence. I know now that it was not. He was always Light Side. This was always his day.” — Andrzej Citowicz
On the day of the album’s premiere, a special official lyrics video was released for I Don’t Have To Hide — one of the most intimate tracks on the record. A song about the freedom that comes from being fully known and fully accepted by another person. The kind of freedom H gave to everyone around him, simply by being who he was.
THE MUSIC: CITOWICZ WITH GUITAR IN HAND Musically, For The Hawk is unmistakably Andrzej Citowicz. The guitar is first. It is always first. Modern technology surrounds it — the home studio in Cairo, the production, the arrangements — but the heart of every track beats with the same pulse it always has: a guitarist who grew up in Wałbrzych, Poland, absorbing Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Desmond Child, and the great power ballad tradition of the late 1980s and early 1990s as if his life depended on it.
Because in some ways, it did.
That DNA runs through every track on this album — the melodic hooks, the emotional guitar work, the cinematic arrangements that make vulnerability feel enormous rather than small. Phil Collen’s harmonized leads. The Bon Jovi warmth that turns a love song into a declaration. The Def Leppard wall of sound that makes a chorus feel like the world opening up.
But For The Hawk is not nostalgia. It is a man with a guitar and fifty years of scars, writing songs for someone who mattered, in the only musical language that has ever felt completely honest to him.
“The guitar is always first. Modern technology helps me build what I hear. But what I hear — I have been hearing since the early 90s. That has never changed. And with this album, more than any before it, I did not want it to change.” — Andrzej Citowicz
SHEREEN: THE LYRICAL SOUL Shereen Shoukry Citowicz is not a supporting presence on this record. She is one of its two central voices. Her lyrics — on Love Is All We Need and throughout the album’s emotional architecture — carry the particular honesty of someone who has processed grief not as a subject but as a lived experience, and found a way to transform it into something that reaches far beyond the personal.
After nearly 18 years of marriage, Andrzej and Shereen have built a creative partnership that continues to deepen and surprise. She gives him words he could not find alone. He gives her music that carries those words further than either of them could go separately. For The Hawk is their most unified and most personal collaboration to date.
“Without her — there would be nothing. Not the music. Not the courage to finish it. Not the reason to begin again every time the silence got too heavy. She is not just the person I come home to. She is the reason the guitar sounds the way it does.” — Andrzej Citowicz
AVAILABLE NOW For The Hawk is available now on all major streaming platforms worldwide. The official lyric video for ‘I Don’t Have To Hide’ — released on the day of the album premiere, May 4th, 2026 — is available now on YouTube. Youtube link: https://youtu.be/id41xCN6u8Y?si=KxZJTsx1GD8yoU6l
This is independent music in the truest sense. No label. No industry machine. Just a home studio in Cairo, a guitar, a marriage built partly on music, and the memory of a man who deserved to be honoured in the only way Andrzej and Shereen know how.
“May the Force be with him. It always was. Light Side. Forever.” — Andrzej Citowicz
TRACK CREDITS Music & Guitars: Andrzej Citowicz Lyrics: Andrzej Citowicz / Shereen Shoukry Citowicz Recorded & Arranged: 2026 Premiere Lyrics Video: I Don’t Have To Hide — May 4th, 2026 Artist: Citovitz and The Fireflies of February Dedicated to: H — Light Side. Forever. 🦅
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
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