Back in stock: Industrial/Noise

Review: Swedish EBM icon Celldod returns to Electronic Emergencies with a new album pressed on striking transparent magenta vinyl. Pa Liv Och Dod is a superbly emotionally charged release that channels the raw energy of D.A.F. and Front 242 while blending dark electronic beats with intense lyrical themes. It has collaborations with Leroy Se Meurt and Michael Zodorozny, plus Anders Karlsson's haunting Swedish vocals exploring death and life's meaning also appear across tunes that are both urgent and dance floor directed. Pa Liv Och Dod will force you to confront fear and chaos head-on while offering a soundtrack that offers some catharsis from it all.

Review: As we hapless reviewers make our way through these five new experimental LPs by Current 93, we cannot help but feel increasing torment and terror at the figures portrayed on the front covers of each record: hand-painted by David Tibet himself (the artist has increasingly indulged such formal solo trend-buckings through his own Cashen's Gap imprint in recent years) they appear like sleep paralytic demons or the ghosts of cancelled English folk yore. All the records are apparently ritually connected to a recent string of live appearances between London and Hastings, and Tibet's penchant for demonologic peerage titles such as GreenSleeve Drakon and Gnostic Sketch - blurring a sense of self-referentiality and occult otherworldliness - leave us bewildered and slack-jawed.

Review: Moony Tunes is one of five new 12" LPs recently unveiled by David Tibet aka. Current 93, mad witch doctor of the post-80s industrial continuum. An ever-morphing project, Current 93 always implies motifs of apocalyptic folk, dream logic, and esoteric revelations, and this volume, subtitled Preparing To Sleep In Menstrual Night, feels like a whispered dispatch from the edge of sleep and symbol. True to C93's nature, it resists easy description, lullabying eerily through hoveringly attentive drones and spellcasting vocals. Each pressing includes a riso print of Tibet's painting Moony Toons, hand-signed in pencil, thus hand-stamping an album best received as a kind of ritual, and shaped by the occult aurae of Tibet's performances in London and Hastings earlier this year.

Review: Industrial legends Front Line Assembly return with bold reimagining of their sound on new release Mechviruses. It features ten tracks that remix, rework and reinvent with new instrumentation and vocals merged with the band's signature dark electronic edge. Traversing genres from darkwave to metal-industrial to synthpop, this one pulses with complex textures and relentless beats and has fine contributions from Artoffact labelmates ULTRA SUNN, Ayria, Bootblacks and others, plus collaborators like MVTANT and s:cage. It's a work that bridges past and future and is more than just a remix record, but instead serves as a reinvention, proving Front Line Assembly's relentless drive to push industrial music into new dimensions.

Review: Rhode Island post-metal avant-garde duo The Body have made a name for themselves due to their caustic maelstrom of harsh, brutalist experimentalism as well as their prolific output and collaborative nature, releasing collab albums with the likes of Full Of Hell, Thou, Uniform, and most recently, Dis Fig. Their latest endeavour sees the pair link up with another duo of musical extremity, Toronto, Canada's recently reformed industrial two-piece Intensive Care. Was I Good Enough? has been on the cards since the artists first began making plans as far back as 2018, trading, warping and ruining mutual sessions with layers of loops, distortion, samples and even dubs, constantly striving to find the ideal haunting balance between both of their sonically hideous, oppressive worlds. For all of our ears' sakes, they just might have succeeded.