Sextile's "Push" and "Yes, Please" & US Tour: Sept 11 - Oct 11

Returning after an extensive tour earlier this year, in which they opened for Sacred Bones labelmates Molchat Doma, Los Angeles duo Sextile are back on tour to headline a bill at Seattle's The Crocodile. Like much of this current electro and wave-inspired scene, theirs is a style looking back to a bandwidth of music within the goth, synthwave, electro-industrial and early EBM sounds of the 1980s and 1990s. Where Sextile distinguish themselves is in their bridge both the original electro-industrial and EBM sound of that era, along with that of modern raved-up breakcore and jungle rhythms, and the new synth and darkwave revivals that are occurring concurrently. On the two recent albums "Push", and this year's "Yes, Please", their specific amalgamation of these genres is then held together with the adhesive qualities of punk attitude, and matched with an anthemic, lyrical defiance. Yet there is a shared affinity with this new set of darkwave acts which most clearly define their genre and cultural alignment. Inspired by the original wave and post-punk bands of the 1980s, and the balancing act of their particular brand of starkly minimal, angular, existential electronic dance pop of alienation and heartbreak, a new generation of producers have come to the fore. These have been presented in an ideal introduction by The Guardian in their, “‘The Body was the Drums, the Brain was the Synthesiser’: Darkwave, the Gothic Genre Lighting up Pop”. A cross-section of artists within this subgenre, Molchat Doma, The KVB, Xeno & Oaklander, Twin Tribes, She Past Away, Lebanon Hanover, and Boy Harsher, express a spectrum of variations on an aesthetic of darkly romantic, sexually fetishistic, and imperially fatalistic thematic concerns. In describing Boy Harsher's sound as a "moving choker-collar muscle-mash" which "contains a dark power, an atavistic pull", the music press has rightly depicted the central components from which the variables pivot and deviate around. Sextile move closely within these same affinities, with variables of their own, sharing an additional razor-sharp electronic and rhythmic edge with such acts as Machine Girl, Pixel Grip, and the defiant electro-industrial noise pop of fellow Los Angeles duo, Youth Code.

Wardruna's "Birna" & North American Tour with Chelsea Wolfe: Sept 4 - 28 | "'The Drum Needed a Blood Sacrifice': The Rise of Dark Nordic Folk" | The Guardian

In "An In-Depth Interview with Wardruna on their Brilliant Norwegian Roots Music" with Louder Than War, Gaal and Einar Selvik characterize their performances as acting as a musical ritual in which they conjure the primal wilderness of the Nordic Bronze Age. Blending the theatrics of elk skin-drums, choral chanting, instruments made of animal bones, Rune stones and amulets, and the resulting conjuring of the past through music is chronicled by The Guardian in their, "'The Drum Needed a Blood Sacrifice': The Rise of Dark Nordic Folk". Sharing a kinship with other pagan ritualistic music of central and northern Europe, like that of Heilung and Danheim, the music of Wardruna belongs to a new strain of dark folk music that draws from traditions in the Bronze, and Norse Age, which the New York Times portrays as, "The Sound of the Vikings, With a Heavy Metal Twist", as it moves to hybridize these traditions into a 21st century neo-gothic sound. The process of approaching the past was described to Revolver Magazine by Christopher Juul of Heilung, "Denmark's Heilung are Creating 'Amplified History' With Human Bones". "In order to connect to what was before," says Juul, "you have to disconnect from what is now.". Speaking with NME, Wardruna's co-founder, Einar Selvik maps their own musical traversing of past and present, "Wardruna Call on ‘the Wisdom of the Past’ to Soundtrack Hit TV show ‘Vikings’". At the time of the interview, having completed an album cycle over the course of seven years with, "Runaljod: Gap Var Ginnunga", "Runaljod: Yggdrasil", and 2016's "Runaljod: Ragnarok", "Norse Code: Wardruna's Runic Trilogy Transformed Norway's Musical Landscape", they remain steadfast in continuing their evolving hybridization of the sounds of an ancient Nordic past, and a new modern music of their own design.

These themes are touched on by The Quietus in their, "The Terror of Stagnation: Gaahl of Wardruna", and "Ragnarok & Roll: Einar Selvik of Wardruna Interviewed", and manifest in the following set of works in 2018's "Skald", and "Kvitravn" of 2021. The two albums resulted in the first major tours of the United States, which took them to Seattle's National Nordic Museum, The Neptune Theatre, and a rescheduled performance at The Moore in late 2021 after the delays of the coronavirus pandemic. This year, Wardruna bring their sonic rituals to Montana's Fire in the Mountains festival and domestic stages across North America with west coast dates in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. Their most recent album offers an expansion of the sound heard on "Kvitravn" and the Runaljod trilogy before it, "Birna" bridges their interpretation of Nordic traditional music and a sound not dissimilar to the notable 1980s gothic-inflected orchestral world music of Dead Can Dance. All of the above might lead listeners to perceive Wardruna as purveyors of old ways, from a distant past and culture, yet as plumbed "A Kind Of Magic: Wardruna Teach Us Ourselves Again" their music aspires to help us understand ourselves in the modern world today. Opening for them on this tour will be another modern voice of folk and blues traditions, made hybrid and contemporary in her neo-gothic explorations of the yearning soul, existentialist thought, and a ritualistic kinship with Wardruna's speaking with the natural world. The music of Chelsea Wolfe has acted as a hybridization of gothic rock, blues, folk, doom metal and even recently, electronic subgenres. In recent years the songwriter has "Embracing Her Inner Wisdom" and moved beyond alcohol addiction, discovered new passions, and in her taking of a singular pathless path to her "Gothic Heart", forged a musical amalgamation of all of these forms.

Blood Incantation's "Timewave Zero" & North American Tour: Jul 12 - Aug 7

In just the last two years, the varying threads heard in the sound of Blood Incantation came to be fully realized in a synergy of their affinity for synthesizer and kosmische sounds alongside the death metal and technical proficiency of their earlier work. Producing in the album "Absolute Elsewhere", a maximal music and culmination of all of their broadly heterogeneous styles and forms. This masterful feat of genre fusion found great praise in the pages of The Quietus, and in a rare moment of unrestrained ebullience, The Wire proclaimed; "It belongs on the shelf alongside Pestilence’s "Testimony of The Ancients and Spheres", The Orb’s "UFOrb", and Pink Floyd’s "Wish You Were Here". It’s a goddamn masterpiece". For many, the first awareness of Blood Incantation came with their 2019 Albums of the Year charting, "Hidden History Of The Human Race". This assembly of tracks took their sound into truly progressive, inventive death metal with intermittent passages of song structures and a haunting intergalactic bent to the lyrical themes. Technical and occasionally delirious in its precision, the performances are precise without being flashy, and occasionally ornate in their psychedelia without the encumbrances of gaudiness. Tangents are taken into doom and meditative synth workouts, which then return to death metal riffs and unexpected structural shifts, all executed with assurance. All of the above are considered in their exploration of influences and newly formed manifestations of form by The Quietus, in their "Expanding the Circle: Blood Incantation Interviewed". In recent years with the advent of their "Timewave Zero", the band have leaned harder into the realms of progressive rock and German kosmische which they had previously only hinted at, delivering a work of unadulterated cosmic synthesizer workouts with 2023's, "Luminescent Bridge". Speaking with The Guardian, they map the trajectory which brought them to this far fringe of the metal world, "‘Subtlety is the Hardest Part’: Blood Incantation Trade Extremes for Ambience". Returning on tour again, after a stopover at Montana's Fire in the Mountains, Blood Incantation arrive with a succession of nights at Tacoma's Temple Threatre. The second of the two will be a return to last year's excellent "Absolute Elsewhere", while the first is explicitly a showcase for their cosmic side, promising an ambient opening set by Krallice, and a full night of cosmic journeying to distant and desolate stars, billed simply as "Timewave Zero".