Category: Special Features

Recommendations, reviews, interviews and more

What the Flesh Remembers: The Hands of Orlac (1924)

The body can be taken. By war, by surgery, by the state. What remains is not automatically the self that was there before. Identity, it turns out, is not housed in the flesh. It has to be chosen, each time, from whatever is left. In Robert Wiene’s Orlacs Hände, shot in Vienna in 1924, a concert pianist receives a murderer’s hands and discovers he no longer knows whose body he is living in.

The Yorkshire Gothic: Paradise Lost’s Gothic at Thirty-Five

Paradise Lost’s Gothic turned thirty-five in March 2026. The album dragged the English Gothic literary tradition, two centuries of ruined houses and English moors running from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764 to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in 1847, into 1991 death metal. Five Halifax kids recorded it fifteen miles from where Brontë walked, building through accident the vocabulary that symphonic gothic metal would later exhaust through repetition. The new Peaceville reissue is the occasion to hear Gothic for what it always was: an English literary tradition arriving in 1991 by way of a Halifax death metal band who had the Brontës in their water and Milton in their name.

Reaching Into the Void: An Interview with Requiem in White

Requiem in White named themselves after the Catholic Mass for the Dead, played the New York underground in a former Episcopal church on 20th Street, and circulated their recordings on cassette without ever explaining a single one of them. The Boston gothic rock band dissolved in 1994. Thirty-two years later, Doc Hammer and Lisa Stockton-Wilson have returned with The Visible Heaven, released through The Circle Music on May 21, 2026. The silence had a theory behind it, and the gap it left had a price.

Ambiences of Imprisonment: An Interview with The Ruins of Beverast

The Ruins of Beverast is Alexander von Meilenwald’s solo project, formed in Aachen, Germany in 2003. Seven full-lengths in, he named the latest after enkoimesis, the ancient Greek practice of sleeping inside a temple to receive oracular dreams that a priest then had to translate. The parallel is the key to everything his music does. Von Meilenwald answered our questions about the record, the ritual, and twenty-three years of making music that answers only to itself.

Review: Litúrgia – I

Litúrgia’s debut album, I, delivers six tracks of Catalan epic doom from Barcelona, sung entirely in their native tongue and rooted in the mythology and landscape of Catalonia. The band perform in hooded pilgrim robes and call themselves the Pilgrim Order of Holy Fear. The model for what they are doing is older than doom metal: Romanesque art, made to teach legends and scripture to a congregation that could not read.

The Oldest Trick: The Exorcist (1973)

William Friedkin’s 1973 film, adapted from William Peter Blatty’s novel, takes that logic and dismantles it. The Exorcist is a film about a demon who operates through misdirection, feeding medicine, psychiatry, linguistics, and the Church just enough to keep each one looking the wrong way, while saving his most devastating instrument for the one man in the room who is already halfway destroyed.

(((SIGNALS))) Kalmo – Feeding the Worms

Kalmo means cadaver in Finnish. The three-piece, Mika on vocals, Pekka on guitar, and Anu on bass, grew from what was originally Mika’s solo project, the expanded lineup appearing for the first time on the 2025 single Thy Chosen One. “Feeding the Worms” is the third in a running series of singles, following Thy Chosen One and Thy Saviour, Thy Master, both from 2025. Mika answered our questions.

No Owner: Interview with Xavier Godart, Birtawil

Bir Tawil is a strip of desert on the Egypt-Sudan border that neither country claims. In 2013, a musician from Bordeaux, Xavier Godart, named his solo project after it. The logic turned out to run deeper than the name. Dua Min, Birtawil’s 2026 album, is a record about what happens when unclaimed territory finally gets a structure imposed on it: drum machines, live performance, industrial coldness, and six tracks in Esperanto that move from feeling to death. Godart on autonomy, solitude, and the cost of friction.

(((SIGNALS))) Void Sinker – “Hanged”

A signal comes before the full transmission. (((SIGNALS))) is Doomnation Radio’s space for bands to tell us about their new single and what it points toward: why this song came first, where it lives on the album, and what world it carries inside it. Three questions only, the rest is up to them.