Category: Special Features
Recommendations, reviews, interviews and more
Christopher Thomas Elliott records Buzzard by himself in Massachusetts, running banjo and lap steel through fuzz and dropped-tuning riffs. The new single pairs Hillbilly Fuckery, built from an International WTF Tabernacle Choir of more than fifty voices sending in recordings of themselves, with Appalachian Blood Bourbon, a tale of backwoods vampires who climb from the hollers into billionaire bunkers. He answered our three questions from inside the world he calls Buzzard.
Within two years of each other, two Japanese films put a mask over a face the war had burned. Kaneto Shindō pulled a Noh demon over a widow in Onibaba, and Hiroshi Teshigahara fitted a flawless synthetic face onto a scarred engineer in The Face of Another. One mask is the oldest thing in the country’s theatre and the other is built in a laboratory, and both cover the same wound, the newest in its history. Each film asks whether the face underneath is a monster, a stranger, or the only truth a person has left.
Doom is the music of the self alone in the dark. It sits with grief and holds it, slow and low. Twice before, a recorded voice entered one of their songs, a man who looked at his own death and called it a plain ending. Circadian Promise brings in a different voice, one that says the self is part of everything around it, that what you fear losing dissolves back into the whole it came from. A new singer arrives to carry it, and the band that kept to the ground begins to rise.
The third album from the Halifax doom band closes a trilogy built on the language of light, and hands its songs from one singer to the next. Strong, heavy and varied, with a handful of moments that lift above the rest.
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.
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.
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.
Meret was founded in Heinola in 2025. Its core is Mikko Kolari, Hanging Garden’s longest-serving guitarist, and Janne Jukarainen, who drummed on that band’s earliest records. Toni Hinkkala writes the songs and sings them. Pasi Löfgren plays bass. Meret answered our questions.
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.
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.
