Dozens of new songs, if not more, are hurled into the void of the internet every day, never to be seen or heard from again. Seemingly with good reason. Why listen to new music when your favorite band released your favorite album fifteen years ago? Listen, we don’t want to seem like alarmists, but every time you don’t listen to a new song, climate change gets closer to the point of no return. Fixing the planet is your responsibility and your responsibility alone. Before you get overwhelmed, we’ve listed some of the best new songs and summer classics we’ve been spinning to avoid all of the wildfire smoke that is mostly your fault. Feel free to thank us when we can all go outside again.
Ghost “We Don’t Need Another Hero”
We aren’t too cool to admit we like a little bit of Ghost over here, and you shouldn’t be either. If you’re unfamiliar and looking for a good entryway, you might as well start with the confoundingly goofy covers EP they released a couple of weeks back called, ‘Phantomime.’ In addition to tackling classic tracks from Television, Genesis, and Iron Maiden, the band also gifted us this amazingly fun rendition of the late Tina Turner’s ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero.’ You definitely don’t want to miss this one. You’re allowed to smile every once in a while.
Queens of the Stone Age “Carnavoyeur”
Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘Carnavoyeur’ as ‘a person who enjoys watching people eat meat’ or, ‘someone who secretly observes carnivals, perhaps from a hill overlooking the grounds.’ Just kidding. ‘Carnavoyeur’ isn’t a real word, a good pun, or a respectable song title. What it is, however, is an excellent new single from Queens of the Stone Age’s forthcoming album, ‘In Times New Roman…’ (also not their best title). Questionable monikers aside, this single rips, and it coincides with the band’s recent North American tour announcement. Since your town is being intentionally skipped again, you’ll have to make do with imagining how great this one probably sounds live.
Royal Blood “Mountains At Midnight”
West Sussex’s Royal Blood is back after discovering more riffs to throw in our faces. You may have missed this new release considering the recent blowback from their notably polite breakdown at Radio 1’s Big Weekend a few weeks ago. ICYMI, bassist Mike Kerr asked the unenthused festival crowd if they knew what ‘rock and roll’ was with the energy of your ninth-grade English teacher. He proceeded to gingerly set his bass down and brandish two middle fingers at the audience. They likely would have been pissed had they been paying attention. Once you lift your jaw off the floor after reading that shocking account of a mortifying event, give their new single ‘Mountains At Midnight’ a try.
PUP “How To Live With Yourself”/“Smoke Screen”
Coming down from the high of last year’s incredible album, ‘The Unraveling,’ Toronto’s emo-punk heroes, PUP, have surprise-released two brand new B-Sides from the record. ‘How To Live With Yourself’ and ‘Smoke Screen.’ Backed with fuzz guitars and careful arrangements that would make ‘Pinkerton’ shit itself, these songs manage to dig deeper into emotional depths than even the band’s 2022 record could go. Perhaps these tracks were deemed too heady for the aforementioned album, or maybe the band thought it better for you to have something to do this summer.
FIDLAR “West Coast”
FIDLAR is currently dangling the hope of a new full-length in front of our drooling faces. Their newest EP, ‘Don’t Fuck With… Vol 2’ is such a return to form that we won’t be satisfied until we get at least eighteen more songs in the same vein. Until then, we’ll have to settle for their older material. Since the air is attempting to kill us right now in several parts of the country, we’ve been playing a lot of THPS to kill time. Every single time this song comes on we get so excited that we almost break our controllers and ruin the sick manual combo we had going. When it’s safe to drive with the windows down again, we know the first song we’ll be blasting.
feeble little horse “Freak”
When we last wrote about Pittsburgh’s feeble little horse, we predicted their sophomore record ‘Girl With Fish’ would be stellar. While we are often wrong about these sorts of things, we hit the nail on the fucking head here. If Sebahdo had been abducted by aliens in 1994 and dropped back down to Earth directly into a recording studio with all their newfound extra-terrestrial knowledge, they likely wouldn’t even come close to the massive sounds feeble little horse are producing today. Give the first ten seconds of the opening track ‘Freak’ a chance and we guarantee the next thirty minutes of your life will be more eventful than the preceding five years.
We promised you some summer classics, and we sure as shit aren’t gonna have you walking around town calling us fucking liars. We asked our staff to list their favorite jams to celebrate the approaching season in which we all become sweaty and gross while desperately trying to look like we’re having fun. Here are a few to throw on your next beach playlist. Just make sure you play them super loud so the people around you can have a bad time too.
Jonathan Richman “That Summer Feeling”
This one might feel a little on the nose, but there’s no better way to celebrate warmer, longer, and sunnier days than thinking about how you may have squandered your entire fucking life. Nostalgia is said to be hip, so why not go whole hog and think about your middle school crush and how you fucking blew it. A trend that proved to continue through the present day. It doesn’t all have to be doom and gloom, though. There’s a faster Modern Lovers version that will make you just as sad, but with a killer backbeat that might just make you dance or maybe just sway a little bit.
TWRP “Under The Sun”
We’re pretty sure AI is going to take over the world soon, but instead of being scared little Chicken Little shits, we figure we may as well start learning to cater to our new robot overlords. This song has a fuckton of talkbox, so we’re pretty sure we have a leg up when the shit really goes down. While we can’t be sure what the lyrics are, chances are the final form of ChatGPT will. With any luck, the monstrosity of our own hubris will hear the futuristic sounds and spare us. Also, it sounds pretty summery too, if robots like the beach.
Cerebral Ballzy “On The Run”
This song was featured as a needle drop in the latest Spider-Man movie, which reminded one of our writers that Cerebral Ballzy existed. They haven’t shut up about them since, regaling us with stories of blasting their record on serene summer drives. We can’t blame them. The album that features this track came out in 2013, a full three years before everything started going to shit. Or at least before we noticed everything was going to shit. Anyway, be sure to spin this one if you want to be whisked away to simpler times for approximately two minutes.
Thursday “Standing On The Edge of Summer”
As temperatures climb and your seasonal affective disorder slowly dissipates, it’s important not to shock your system with overtly sunny music right out the gate. You don’t want to go too happy too quickly unless you’re trying to pull something. This track by Thursday can help bridge the gap with its combination of explosive drums, danceable guitars, and depressing as fuck lyrics. One of our editors called this one his ‘essential summer jam’ and we really hope he’s okay.
Neckbeard-y hot take incoming: This is the least Cave In sounding Cave In album. How many times have you seen this story? Band known for a certain sound gets signed to major label, releases a too-polished, overly-produced album that does not appeal to wider middle America audience while simultaneously alienating their core fans. “But… but… isn’t this their most popular album?” Yes, and “The Phantom Menace” was the highest-grossing movie of all time until “Avatar” came out and those are both terrible.
This is a mixed bag of unfinished demos that possibly never got to be refined due to the sudden death of bassist Caleb Scofield. There are still great moments here though, some with an understandably somber tone. On “Shake My Blood” the band’s love of Failure is put on full display. Given time this could’ve been one of their best releases.
Ok, let’s start with the good news. Cave In are still active and put out an album in 2022, Nate Newton from Converge, Jesuit, and Doomriders amongst others is now playing bass and doing the screaming vocals, the first two songs are absolute ragers. Things start to get a little hit-or-miss afterward though. It’s tough to put on our finger on it but something just feels off in some of these songs. You know like when the cast of an old TV show does some hamfisted reunion and you can just tell everyone is just tired and maybe a little strung out? It’s kinda like that.
After their brief stint on major label RCA, Cave In spent a year or so licking their wounds from the experience and returned to their home on Hydra Head and to a sound closer to what many fans remembered. They rediscovered the heavier metalcore sound mixed with the spacey operatic elements while dialing up the experimental weirdness a bit. Most bands after their big-time record deal falls apart typically break off to do self-indulgent solo projects or even worse, form a “supergroup.” Luckily they were able to course-correct here though and avoid the cringey burnout phase.
Not included in the ranking since it isn’t a studio album but a collection of their first hardcore-era 7”s and various songs from compilations with a revolving door of vocalists. Most of these songs were written while the band was still in high school which is astonishing when you think about how most high school bands sound like the inside of a Guitar Center on some kind of “play all of our instruments at once” day.
For many die-hard followers of Cave In, this was their least favorite release on first listen. But just like how George Costanza was able to get a woman to be interested in him by repeatedly dropping a little earworm “Cuh-STAN-za,” this started to grow on people also. (Seinfeld references are still relevant, right?) They went to a weirdo realm on this but kept that shit heavy. Stephen Brodsky takes a bit of a backseat on vocals here and lets Scofield’s screams do the heavy (pun intended) lifting.
A year prior to “Jupiter” Cave In released the “Creative Eclipses” EP which teased out a new direction the band was heading in musically. “Jupiter” picks up right where “Eclipses” left off and yes, the mosh parts and the screaming were gone but what was left was something entirely new. And much like its namesake Jupiter, the album feels like a massive presence with weight that draws you into its orbit of celestial violence and beauty. (Dear reader, please submit the last line of this blurb to the fine folks who hand out the Pulitzer Prize, they are going to shit themselves.)
We’re ending this ranking with their first album which probably seems like we’re just being lazy in our writing but (need joke here). After burning through a few frontmen, the group became a four-piece and Brodsky took over vocal duties on both singing and screaming for the first and only time. Not many in the mathy metalcore genre of the time could’ve pulled off an ambitious 8-minute epic space odyssey like “The End of Our Rope is a Noose” without it being a catastro-fucking-phe but Cave In sure did it.
Dokken “Breaking the Chains”
Slayer “Show No Mercy”
Metallica “Kill Em’ All”
Saxon “Power and the Glory”
Dio “Holy Diver”
Accept “Balls to the Wall”
Raven “All for One”
Battleaxe “Burn This Town”
Mercyful Fate “Melissa”
Motörhead “Another Perfect Day”
Iron Maiden “Piece of Mind”
Torch “S/T”
Trance “Power Infusion”
Exciter “Heavy Metal Maniac”
Thin Lizzy “Thunder and Lightning”
Savatage “Sirens”
Satan “Court in the Act”
Grim Reaper “See You in Hell”
Tank “This Means War”
Ashbury “Endless Skies”
Warlord “Deliver Us” EP
