Vibrant SLC newcomer Leetham wants to be taken seriously – but only by people who also know how to throw down on the dance floor. Raised in a Mormon household and now embraced by the queer community with which he proudly associates himself, he’s furious that intolerance is driving trans kids to suicide. He’s also mystified as to why young MAGA don’t seem to grok that the Dark Side were the villains in Star Wars. Yeah, folks, it’s worse than we thought out there.
Catch Leetham in concert soon when he opens for another ascendant pop newbie, Zee Machine – and in the meantime, savor his recently released, four-track, must-get EP, KINK, for all its worth.
Before Russia unleashed its shocking, abhorrent, genocidal and unlawful invasion into Ukraine in February 2022, Bernard Van Isacker – Chief Editor of Side-Line – didn’t have designs on focusing his music publication on current affairs and events per se. “But it did happen,” Isacker, a Belgian citizen, confided in a candid interview with The Bad Penny on Friday, July 17. “I had witnessed something I never imagined … [would be] possible in a democratic country. Tyranny can hit quite close sometimes. You’d never imagine this would be possible in a democratic country, but it happens,” Isacker continued. “And it happened to me. [Not to mention] a lot of crap being published online about myself.”
In response, Isacker spearheaded an initiative to help the people of Ukraine. Specifically, a pay-what-you-want-compilation called United 1 – The Freya Files, a various-artists dark-wave compendium issued by Side-Line. The collection just came out today.The track list is below:
The Bad Penny revels in one of our favorite interviews to date: An all-encompassing conversation with Marios Iliopoulos, who founded Greek melodic death metal squad Nightrage in 2000 and has held the throne ever since. The reigning king leaves no stone unturned in providing the ultimate historical account of how heavy metal sowed its roots in Greece and developed there in the decades since.
From revealing previously unshared stories about the growth of extreme heavy metal in Greece to reflecting on past troubles and tribulations that he later vanquished to his staggering prolific output in Nightrage and beyond, Iliopoulos delivers what perhaps could be the greatest interview of his lifetime.
Enjoy The Bad Penny‘s latest roundup of the best music videos that caught our eye over the course of this month. They feature costumed people walking in the city, people tossing back shots in a vintage saloon, Walter Goggins, interstellar space scenes, a harpist – and Joe Pera!
Imagine your dream is to be a rock star – an aspiration that’s probably occurred to many readers of this website. Now imagine that you work as hard as you possibly can, exhausting all your drive and motivation, squeezing every drop of your creativity and spending every moment at your disposal to make your dream come true.
And it does, because there is still some justice in this world, and because perseverance and the human spirit can lead to extraordinary outcomes. You’ve established your heavy-psych/garage-rock band in your homeland of Venezuela, you’re continuing to put in the hard work, you’re gaining traction, you’re building a fanbase. And then – without any time to prepare or redraw the plan for your future that you’ve had all along – you’re upended by external factors that are totally out of your control, and threaten your life, the lives of those you love, and your lifelong ambitions. Rampant violence and thugs with no regard for human life are willing, ready and able to extinguish yours without a second thought and the simple pull of a trigger or slice of a blade.
As we trudge through an cultural era of moribundity that will hopefully reach a conclusion some day, we rely more heavily on those of us who, while aware of the enshitification of the world, refuse to let it pop their bubble. One of the essential artists who lives his life in this regard is Darren Smallman, who goes by the name Dez Dare when performing his heartwarmingly zany, zest-for-life music with the reckless abandon of someone who refuses to let reality get him down.
Beginning in March, Dez started slipping out one song a month digitally, with the compiled result called These Days Are Wild & Blind and available now on Bandcamp.
Because we’ve interviewed Dez multiple times before about his music, we decided to rope him into our Favorite Films series this time around. Still, we’d be doing both him and you a disservice if we didn’t precede Dez’s film picks with this video for his new song “You Woke Up on My Side of Time.” (Pro tip: Never say no to puppets.)
Earlier this month, The Bad Penny caught up with Toadies bassist Doni Blair (who is a very cool dude, wouldn’t ya know) while the band was on tour with fellow ’90s-era alternative rock bands Local H and Sparta. The consummately down-to-earth bassist regaled us with a story about Steve Albini, who engineered the most recent Toadies record (The Charmer) – and that was just one of many jaw-dropping war stories he told in our freewheeling conversation.
The greatest embarrassment a music journalist can experience isn’t accidentally misquoting what an artist said in an interview. It’s not asking a thoroughly banal question during an interview and not realizing how dumb it was until after the conversation concluded. It isn’t even rocking out at a concert, hard, for everyone to see, because the line between critic and fan can be so paper thin.
No, the real, deep-seated — even primal — despondency that courses through a music journalist’s body, shakes them to the core and compels them to reevaluate whether their opinion actually has any value whatsoever comes when the purportedly professional scribe “discovers” an exceptional musical talent, only to realize that thousands, or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people caught onto the musician or band long before the supposedly intrepid journalist stumbled across them.
No one seemed to notice, but yours truly felt utterly ashamed in December after stumbling across blackgaze phenom Sadness and thinking the artist’s career was nascent. Turns out Damián Antón Ojeda (a.k.a. Elisa) launched the one-person project all the way back in 2013 and has released piles upon piles of records between then and now. Sadness also has a rabid fanbase, as evidenced by the 3,400 people who viewed our conversation on YouTube.
After sulking in self-pity for a spell, a new way of coping with the Sadness oversight arose. As Ojeda/Elisa frequently collaborates with other musicians who must be talented in their own right if Sadness chose to join forces with them, it made sense to start exploring some of those comrades. The experiment proved to be a success right away; after spinning a split EP called Dusk Garden that came out in October, we became introduced to the other participant, a musician from the Scottish Borders, south of Edinburgh, who goes by the name Lux and, like Sadness, has an affinity for post-black metal.
Any fan of indie pop worth their salt is familiar with Low, the legendary band that almost single-handedly created the indie subgenre known as “slowcore.” And any music lover who is familiar with Low, which reached its conclusion in 2022 after the heart-wrenching death of co-founder Mimi Parker, knows that her widower husband, Alan Sparhawk, launched the singular project together in 1993.
More than three decades later, Americans are stuck with Donald Trump ambivalently tanking the United States in every conceivable way, as ambivalently as he did with the litany of business ventures he bankrupted and otherwise destroyed over the course of decades. As a result, the (admittedly justified) shouting and anger dominating the public discourse is increasing in volume exponentially.
So what better time to check in with the soft-spoken Sparhawk, arguably one of the greatest musicians of our time who knows the value of, and is an expert in, taking a calm and measured approach to his art and his life. Don’t confuse his demeanor with being content about the state of the country, which is declining so rapidly that comparisons to the fall of the Roman Empire must be taken seriously. In fact, Sparhawk – aswe learned when we interviewed him this very morning – is as heartbroken, disappointed and shocked as the vast majority of Americans.
The track record of musicians suing the record labels that employed them is pretty dismal. The reason is obvious: Artists generally aren’t very wealthy. Meanwhile, the companies that hire creators for their services – and not uncommonly have a sick fetish for screwing them over when the relationship sours – have more money than they know what to do with.
That’s why it’s such a cause for celebration when artists defeat their employers, which are typically corporate controlled, in David-beats-Goliath fashion. One of the most heartwarming examples of an underdog band scoring a major court victory over their former label recently transpired when pioneering stoner-rock squad Fireball Ministry won back the rights to what is largely considered their best record, 2003’s The Second Great Awakening.
