Fresh off playing a co-headlining set in Tokyo with another legendary idiosyncratic group, Sparks, Cornelius (real name Keigo Oyamada) is finally turning his sights again to his illustrious music career even though he’s engaged in loads of admirable endeavors over the years. Cornelius’ new album – which marks his eighth studio effort – is called Refractions, a title that appears curious at face value but speaks to the changing sounds that permeate the album.
Continue reading
After documenting his recovery from cancer on 2024’s Dulling the Horns, Wild Pink’s John Ross returns with an album that reassures us that healing is always within our grasp.
Continue reading
Whatever hang-up Hulder homes in on throughout Verbolgen, her response is an unwavering middle finger throughout seven of the record’s songs (the other two are instrumentals). “I stand unbowed” is her refrain over the course of “In Blood and in Earth,” which explicitly lays out two options in the face of adversity: “fall upon your knees” or “face the dawn as it glows.” Similar sentiments are located in the last album track with vocals, “View from Nemeton,” in which the Belgian-born artist evokes Prometheus Bound—knowingly or not—when she screams: “The eagle’s beak has ripped my corpse/ Here I shall remain.”
Continue readingIs it August already? Wait … it’s almost September, you say? Someone’s been sleeping under a rock – and I’ve got moss growing on me to prove it:
Anyway, I’m not gonna make you good people suffer the consequences of my hibernation and misdeeds. Will leave that type of sick, immortal behavior to Trump.
With that said, here are the best videos that came out last month:
1. Cor de Lux’s “The Deli”
2. Insomnium – “Gleam in the Black”
It’s not a negative that Brutal Occupation is another Alienator EP with four strong songs. It’s actually the highest compliment that can be paid to a band that has been unwaveringly devoted to hardcore since day one — and, for our money, will probably adhere to that philosophy until their final day as a band. The word “authenticity” gets bandied about way too often these days, because it’s misused nine times out of ten. Alienator’s Brutal Occupation is what authenticity really sounds like. Read my full review on Post-Trash.
What dd Mötorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister say the night that Republican candidate John McCain lost in the 2008 U.S. presidential election?
Continue reading
Thank you to the devoted readers of this unconventional, iconoclastic and oftentimes just plain nutty music website – and also to those who just happened to stumble across it – for making Aug. 18, 2026, the most highly traffic day since The Bad Penny launched November 25, 2009. Traffic is not the be-all, end-all of this website, but it’s also worth noting that we surpassed our total numbers for the entire year of 2025 early last month.
Every single prop (that’s what the cool kids say nowadays instead of “all the props,” so get onboard, yo) goes to the readers who have consumed (we prefer “ingested”) one or more of our tens of thousands of posts, whether they be the multitudinous stories on The Jesus Lizard – who we are proud to say is the most popular band on The Bad Penny – to our invaluable (which is to say, value-less) post on the Best Albums of 1909.
Every day till all this goes away, we’ll continue to try to both educate and entertain you, turn Bad Penny readers on to good music, steer them away from crapola, buck trends, go against the grain, reject social media (except YouTube, which is our guilty-pleasure equivalent of Obama sneaking out for a cig), protecting all of us in this space from AI infiltration and, most importantly, adhere to what we consider to be our values as best we can.
If you ever have any valuable feedback, ideas worth sharing, rad bands you’d like to see get more coverage and that are a good fit for this website, don’t not never hesitate to contact me directly at korzeck at gee male dot calm. (Apologies for the tortured language; such are the rules on the battlefield in the war against the bots.)
Long live great music, great people with great character (we gotta get around to working on that someday) and great animals. And, lest it need be said, down with tyranny.
Thanks to readers of The Bad Penny, our new series in which we ask bands from non-U.S. countries to list the best heavy bands from their homeland is really taking off. (Look below for all the editions we’ve run thus far). Today we have the distinct pleasure of presenting you with picks from Italy’s Orbita. Even to their Italian brethren, the post-metal/doom quartet from Bologna are fresh faces, having only released a demo up to this point. That’s about to change, though, when the band busts out their much-awaited debut LP, Farewell to All We’ve Lost, on October 9 via Aural Music.
Give one of Orbita’s early tracks, “This Flesh,” a spin below, and then get blown away by the young team’s impressive knowledge of their country’s best heavy bands after that.
• One of the best bands in Italy, Hate & Merda stands as a unique force in the noise/sludge/drone scene. This extremely powerful duo is capable of delivering the heaviest and most desperate music, while also comforting the listener with nihilistic lyrics, making us feel less lonely in this crazy-spinning world. The Italian language is not a limit at all, as we are all able to understand the feeling and the astonishing force in their music. A truly underground gem for everyone who still believes in DIY.
Despite a scattered presence in Europe, even those intimately familiar with the violent genre would be hard-pressed to name a deathcore band from Austria. Well, here’s one for ya: Castiel, who hails from Klagenfurt and started gnashing their teeth and every other part of their bodies since 2014. Dudes have flown under the radar since then, not even getting an entry on heavy metal’s Wikipedia equivalent, Encyclopaedia Metallum.
Read my full review on AllMusic.
Some 15 years after ganging up in their home city of Beringen in Belgium (population approximately 45,000 residents), 30,000 Monkies continue to claim the throne as the country’s most enduring we’re-kidding-but-not-really-kidding, noisy, sludgy, experimental doom metal band. Or so we presume; try as we may to acquaint ourselves with every arty, far-out band in every nation on the planet, The Bad Penny still has plenty of work to achieve that mission.
We were fortunate enough, however, to recently land upon Belgian rabble-rousers 30,000 Monkies. Not only did we find the spelling of their moniker worth a chuckle, we also came across a written plea to fans that appears on the quartet’s illustrious website:
Driving the point home, here’s a truly outlandish video that the band – who would fit comfortably on a tour with Mclusky, Ken MODE and/or Melvins – released six years ago:
Wacky personas and band presentation aside, 30,000 Monkies will once again prove their mettle – and heavy, fuzzy forays into their self-constructed fun house – with the September 12 release of Super Rebound (Champagne Metal) on September 18 via FVN KULT REKORDS. That said, when the band accepted our proposal to collaborate editorially in an idiosyncratic manner – rather than toss conventional queries about their upcoming record – we thought 30,000 Monkies would be fitting ambassadors to name the best heavy bands from their home country of Belgium. They obliged, and here’s the list they compiled exclusively for The Bad Penny.
Continue reading
