Hear the entirety of a dusted-off Pygmy Lush album the band hadn’t previously released, read about their theories on the JFK assassination, and learn why every “UFO sighting” isn’t to be believed in my FLOOD interview with the recently reunited experimental hardcore punk posse.
“This myth of the ‘suffering artists,’ the myth of Van Gogh and ideas like this—perpetuated by Hollywood—have become abstracted. It guilt-trips us all into thinking that if our art is our job, it lacks purity, and purity is the highest art form. But really, all we’re doing is trying to manifest joy, or insight, or translate the human experience.” Read more of my interview with Mark Mallman on New Noise.
The nine tracks featured on The Live Quest provides arbiters who dare distinguish “good metal” from “bad metal” with an ample amount of evidence that Crystal Viper firmly belong in the former bracket. Read my New Noise interview with the band’s leader.
Jesika von Rabbit recently reached out to New Noise say she enjoys our Pet Sounds series and wanted to pay homage to her recently deceased pet, Buzz (who, for the record, was a cat and not a rabbit).
It could be argued—hell, let’s have it out right now; why wait for a rainy day?—that there’s actually no better time for a musician to launch a side venture when their primary project is experiencing peak success. Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme pulled it off with Them Crooked Vultures and Eagles of Death Metal. Jack White kept his seat with the White Stripes warm while engaging in extracurricular activities with the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather. And Chino Moreno put them all to shame by dividing his time between Deftones, Team Sleep, Crosses, Palm s and Saudade. And you have the nerve to call yourself busy?
The latest band to experience the music equivalent of polyamory is Sheer Mag. The Philadelphia punk-rock posse quickly started gaining traction less than a year after congealing in a dilapidated house in which they creatively made room for a studio too. Slipknot started out in a similarly shared dwelling, and it took them about four years of surviving their hellhole before terrestrial radio came a knockin’. Sheer Mag managed to do it in less than half that time, finding themselves transported to Coachella and a late-night TV talk show only two years after they set sail with their band.
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The two principal members of Shearling, a new band formed after the demise of Sprain, recently shed a lot of light on their ambitious, hour-long, single-track debut album, Motherfucker, I am Both: “Amen” and “Hallelujah”… Read my recent FLOOD interview, the first one the band gave in support of their debut album, for more.
There’s a default word that society uses when it deems someone to be neither pretty nor rude: mediocre. Unlike the gnarly way that the badass villains in Fury Road employ the term as a cutting insult, in real life, the term is—in the common parlance of our times boring. So, while the guys in the band at issue in this feature story might not exactly make hearts go a-twitter when they saunter down sidewalks or even grace stages at music venues, they seemed far more polite than rude when The Bad Penny caught up with them a month ago. “Mediocre” was the one of the last words we’d reach for to describe them.
A far better descriptor for Pretty Rude would be “ballsy.” Brooklynites James Palko and Matt Cook connected less than a year ago to form Pretty Rude, signed with revered, 30-year-old punk label SideOneDummy Records in February. Just a few days later, they introduced themselves and showed their sweet side by presenting their first release—a self-titled EP—on Valentine’s Day. A pretty rude gesture that most certainly was not.
Continue readingBecause Transcending Obscurity founder Kunal Choksi’s moral values include humility along with nurturing strays back to health, few are aware of his superhuman efforts helping animals concurrent with running his Mumbai-based record label. Read my profile on one of the most standup dudes in underground music via New Noise.
New York bedroom pop trio Triathalon spent two years writing, demoing, recording and mixing the record in bedrooms, studios and houses, as if they were on a scavenger’s hunt. Read my New Noise profile on the band.
“I wrestle with some things that have got worse in my life, or deeper (into my psyche,) and I wanted to get into the weeds of those ideas and express them.” Get deep with English hard rock squadron Wytch Hazel in my profile on the band for New Noise.
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