Superfuzz

Cancer House's The Moth arrives barely lit, a slowcore hush. It has that Bark Psychosis afterimage, that early Low devotional freeze, but scraped down to couch-spring shimmer and dusk-window amp hum, guitars crawling as if afraid to wake the floorboards. The whole thing feels born from the kind of afternoon where nobody remembers to press record - domestic séance latency, moth-wing circuitry, a little chapel of blown speaker dust. Melodies do not announce themselves so much as condense on the walls, sweet and grey and almost gone. Beautifully understated, quietly wrecked, the sort of record that makes volume feel vulgar.

Australia's Love Chants return with Shadow Season, their first vinyl since 2013, and it moves like a little boat that knows the moon personally. The band keep the thing wonderfully unstraightened: primitive pop guitar drift, breathed vocals, drums wandering off and somehow bringing flowers back, a hand-stamped domestic tide-clock of DIY pop gentleness, charming as a cracked window left open all night.

Ratvader's Kite, from Gothenburg composer Oscar Sidoff Rydelius, drifts out of the forest on Frihetens Förlag sounding like a tiny court orchestra trying to score the end of electricity. Fourteen soundtrack miniatures of medieval-ish lift, toy-box ache and wolf-hour glow, where Penguin Café prettiness gets dragged through Ferraro's cracked domestic pageantry. Pure chapel-kite circuitry, stupidly moving and POSITIVE, no pomp hangover.

Sword II's Electric Hour comes howling out of a flooded Atlanta basement with mildew in its eyes and hooks stuck all over its hide. You can hear the house fighting them: damp drywall voltage, eviction-notice glamour, a whole rotten domestic grid made to spit chorus after chorus. It has that scary early-band lift, the sense of Pixies learning in real time how to make sweetness bruise and guitars lurch like bad weather with a pulse. The psych smear and pop powear are there, but the win is how direct it feels without ever getting polite. Crazy addictive, weirdly theatrical, raw as a cable bite. Major record, no caveats.

Kjostad & Magnetic Coroner's Sanctuary Against Shadow is first-contact basement ritual, three tracks of environmental grit and tape-handling nerve. Kjostad feeds in the outside world - rough air, half-known sources, weathered object-memory - while Magnetic Coroner runs it through machines until the referent peels off like dead skin. The result is devotional tape weather inside a wooden lung, calm spaces suddenly flexing into hard, metallic pressure and then vanishing back into hush. Lasse Marhaug's mastering keeps the dread huge but breathable, no mudbath cop-out.

Rifle comes out of Camden swinging: hardcore at the root, but with Oi knuckles and anarcho nerves firing all through it. You can hear the 1970s UK punk bite and 1980s US hardcore velocity colliding in a squat-room pressure rash - melodic only in the sense that a chant becomes a weapon when enough bodies believe it. Raw, direct, no varnish, no apology.

Thee Headcoatees return with Man-Trap, and the joke is that it sounds less like a comeback than a door being kicked open by people who never accepted the lock. Recorded in early 2025 with Billy Childish producing (duh), it has Thee Headcoats back in rhythm-section duty while Ludella Black, Kyra LaRubia, Bongo Debbie and Holly Golightly spit, chant and grin through 14 cuts of garage-pop bad manners. The whole thing has a gin-sticky tambourine séance feel, cheap lipstick on the microphone grille, basement wiring throwing sparks under the choir robes. Covers ("The KKK Took My Baby Away"!!!) and new songs get the same treatment: clipped, bratty, unvarnished, alive. Twenty-six years off? Sounds more like they were waiting outside with the engine running.

A Country Western's Four-Team Dream Machine is three minutes of scrappy, grinning, basement-court guitar pop that lands like some lost early-90s 7" pulled from a milk crate still warm with somebody else's bad decisions. All hook, wobble and cheap-amp confetti, a tiny dumb-brilliant blast of locker-room jangle fever. Where's the album, then? Feed us.

Brånd's Tåg & Nåcht comes out of Linz swinging a soot-black lantern, post-punk with the punk left in and the black metal not scrubbed off for guests. Built up from decade-spanning 4-track demos into a first full-length, it still has that basement oath feeling - drumbeat as bootprint, guitar as rusted rail, voice pitched somewhere between pagan heckle and factory curse. Think Horrid Red's wrong-blood romance catching early DIJ in a stairwell, then shoved through Upper Austrian weather. The warmth is the trick: crunchy, almost bodily, with a trumpet cutting in like it caught a cemetery infection. Refreshingly grim, refreshingly direct, and gone before the poseurs can find the light switch.

Genital Shame's "I Want to Die Before You", the first cut from Wellness Plan, takes technical metal out of the gym and into the kitchen at 3am, where the main riff shivers on acoustic like tendon-lace carpentry under black light. Erin Dawson lets emo/screamo blood-want lyrics scrape against precision sickness, and the result feels weirdly merciful: survival music with its wrists showing.

Petrozavodsk's Forest Fire has three tracks and behaves like three different machines left running in the same burning warehouse. Porto and Barcelona-based "heavy drone trio" refuses the usual album-shape civility and somehow gets more exciting because of it. "Forest I" throws Container, aka Ren Schofield, into the amp-room and lets him boil the guitars down into rave-sludge locomotion, hot and rubbery and grossly alive, like a basement PA developing amphibian lungs. Then "Forest II" changes the weather completely: blackened guitar hanging there like damp iron, low thrusts repeating until the room starts to list, a snare apparently being hit from the far side of a valley or the bottom of a municipal well. "Fire" is the long drone collapse that feels architectural. Three approaches, one blaze.

Unity's "3 Weeks" is Oakland DIY heart-force cut into hooky, anthemic 90s indie rock, Jeff Cheung's skate-crew cartoon tenderness suddenly standing at the mic with everybody yelling back. First taste from the group's second album for Smoking Room, it hits like curb-scuffed community electricity: bright guitars, gang vocals, feelings big enough to make the halfpipe look like a church basement.

Death Kneel's Remembering Well has Max Klebanoff (who's also the drummer in Tomb Mold), dragging his solo practice into a huge, hyper-detailed stereo chamber where the smallest scrape feels like it has been granted architectural permission to bleed. Built from impromptu recordings, handheld devices seemingly either carried in the change pockets or thrown through empty parking lots, and binaural microphones catching the rooms breathing back, this is high-definition damage music: not lo-fi confession but spatial autopsy, every crack and shift pinned in place like evidence. The wide stereo field is the killer here, a head-worn panic theatre where near-contact rustle, electrical bruise and distant concrete weather keep swapping scale until the whole thing starts to feel like surveillance footage developing a nervous system. There is a sick tenderness inside it too, the kind that makes the violence feel less performed than discovered, as if Klebanoff has found some private corridor between body-noise collapse and after-hours urban dread and decided to leave the door open. Remembering Well is intimate in the worst/best way, a record that gets close enough to fog the glass, then reveals the glass was inside your skull all along.

Regina Collage's Horizont is bedroom pop from Bristol by way of Kharkiv, Ukraine, an underground signal pulled through borrowed studios, bass wire, guitar scraps and an exposed voice that refuses the soft-focus exit. The standout is "Vpiznavaty", where the thing gets brutally plain: post-punk bass walking in the dark, voice close enough to fog the glass, carrying that same severe spell as Carla Dal Forno's "I'm Going Out" - minimal, unshowy, completely possessed. Elsewhere the songs sag into cloudy dissonance and tender shame, like a bedsit radio developing border-static homesickness. The title's horizon sits there as a cruel line, never arriving, sky and earth withholding contact. Horizont hurts because it stays open.

The Chutes' self-titled debut catches Kenneth Turner of San Francisco punk legends Fentanyl and his wife Erika flipping the hardcore basement inside out into seven cuts of bright, bruised jangle-pop. All C86 nerve, Sarah Records ache and Slumberland fizz, it treats romance, nostalgia and dismay like a sugar bowl full of broken glass - twee as matrimonial emergency lighting, glowing sweetly while the walls fail.

god of war is Douglas Dulgarian of They Are Gutting A Body of Water and members of Hooky sliding out of the blown shoegaze wreckage and into something softer, lazier, weirder, still wired to the same pleasure-centre prank. Pop songs and melancholy instrumentals are turned into glitchy mid-2000s bedroom drift, all MTV afterglow and console-menu heartache. It has that odd catchy TAGABOW thing, but with the drop-tuned concrete and Slint worship removed, leaving pure Y2K carpet-fuzz euphoria. Little melodies loiter like they forgot why they came in. A sweet, busted, electronic slacker-pop side, grinning through the loading screen.