No Knock No Doorbell

Well, friends, it's time for a satan classic: a new album rollout.

This time's a little different though, as the album is having a longer rollout than usual - thought it about time these things had a little chance to breathe and have a moment in the sun rather than just plonking it on the digital table and being like 'here you go - have at it'.

So, with that in mind, here's the album... it's up for pre-order now: 

 

It's available on CD and cassette this time too, and if you hit that pre-order button now, you get lead track A Looming Spectre immediately. That one sounds like this, if you're curious:

Musically, the album is a little different to the last few. It's a bit more taut, a bit more reigned in, a little less 'free' but still has that dark, brooding sound. There aren't many long ones on it basically, it's cut up into these concentrated little chunks of electronica. A lot of stuff on there too: mad jazz drum math rock, some spacey trip hop, gnarled, frazzled drone, little guitar based skits, the lot. 

Hope you all enjoy it anyway, and I'll be back next month with another track off it :)

Live!

Got some gigs coming up, which will delight the small percentage of satan fans that live within the boundries of West Yorkshire. 

 First one up is this one, at Shipley Triangle on February 6th:

It's with our good friends Hexama, and will be a blast. 

Tickets here! 

Doors at 7, Hexama at 8, us at 9, everything wrapped up and done by 10 at the absolute latest, so you can all go home and get some kip. If you're new to the area, or you're traveling, the Triangle is here on maps. It's on a main road, next to a car park, and on various bus routes too. The train station for Shipley is about a 15 minute walk, and the one for Saltaire is about the same just in the opposite direction.

The Triangle is a bottle shop, and fully stocked with pretty much anything you could want: beers, pop, wine, coffee, 0%-ers, lethal whiskies, you name it. If you're after food though, there are plenty of options - 2 Italians, a chinese and an Indian are just over the road, and if you want something even quicker, there's a big Asda literally round the back of the venue, so you can stock up on sarnies and crisps. Failing that, Saltaire itself has plenty of options and is about 15 mins away walking. Plus it's dead nice, so come early and have a look around? 

Music wise, it'll be a totally brand new set, all semi-improvised, so it's not something we've released before or anything like that. Here are a few shots of us practicing over the weekend:

 Details on the second show we've got lined up coming soon..!

 

Favourite albums of 2025

here we go then, time for another roundup! fuck spotify wrapped, here's some stuff I really really liked this year:

Cheekface - Middle Spoon (fun indie pop)

Kinski - Stumbledown Terrace (krauty noise rock)

Clipping - Dead Channel Sky (glitchy noise-rap)

Pan American & Michael Grigoni - New World, Lonely Ride (beautiful pastoral acoustic instrumentals)

Pink Floyd - Live At Pompeii (2025 Mix) (legendary live prog)

Surgeon - Shell-Wave (relentless stripped back techno)

Yoo Doo Right with Population II and Nolan Potter - Yoo II (perhaps my favourite album this year, just relentless Neu! style rippers)

Deradoorian - Ready for Heaven (sort of post-punky/ indie stuff)

billy woods - Golliwog  (the most intense, brutal rap album of the year)

IE - Reverse Earth (spacey/ dreamy kosmische stuff, really pretty)

Stephen Vitiello with Brendan Canty and Hahn Rowe - Second (jazzy/ kosmische-y instrumentals)

Holden & Zimpel - The Universe Will Take Care of You (improv synth stuff)

Nenjah Nycist x Trust One - I Hope These Gems Stay with You (awesome old skool rap)

The Armed - The Future is Here and Everything Needs to be Destroyed (pure brutality)

Deftones - Private Music (yes lads! big metal, huge riffs)

Valentina Magaletti/ YPY - Kansai Bruises (skittery, jazzy electronic)

Oren Ambarchi - Ghosted III (jazzy/ kosmische-y instrumentals. 'barchi-core)

Neko Case - Neon Grey Midnight Green (intense folksy singer/ songwriter stuff. legendary)

Soulwax - All Systems Are Lying (big electronic prog/ dance)

Steve Hauschildt - Aeropsia (Tangerine Dreamy electronic floatiness)

Verity Den - wet glass (amazing lo-fi indie rock, sort of like Sonic Youth in bits) 

Lucrecia Dalt - A Danger to Ourselves (South American singer/ songwriter fare)

Carrier - Rhythm Immortal (underwater, slow motion techno)

Clark - Steep Stims (typical Clark [in a good way])

SDEM - At Quadrant Park (Autechre-adjacent electronic business)

Slow Crush - Thirst (loud, heavy shoegaze)

Slime City - National Record of Achievement (nerdy, fun rock a-la Devo, etc)

The Bug vs Ghost Dubs - Implosion  (sludgey sub-shredders)

HEALTH - Conflict DLC  (bonkers dystopian indsustrial slammers)

 

Other stuff I liked from this year:

The summer being nice and hot, and not a washout like the last 2

Seeing Autechre twice

Raising over £1k for Cancer Research off sales of Subtle Manoeuvers

Bradford City of Culture stuff

Finally seeing Deftones again, after the last time (2008?) was marred with shite sound

Seeing Sophie smash a headline set with my guys Maybeshewill, after my car broke down on the way to Arctangent (took all day to get there on the train instead)

Finally getting some decent promo pictures done, courtesy of my old mate Jez Sheard

Seeing Villa go from 'oh shit, we're in deep doo-doo here' to 'oh shit, we're actually quite good?'

Reading The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre (seriously, what a book) 

Liz Pelly's book Mood Machine

This Drew Gooden video 

Showing off

I was talking to Siavash Amini and Brandon Invergo the other day over on Bluesky, and the topic was 'what do you do to keep people interested in an album that's come out but not that old just yet?' - that inverse sweet spot where the album is, say 3 months old, so it's not new but it's not quite archive territory just yet. How do you keep people interested, how do you keep them invested in this work that may have taken you years, but is all over in the blink of an eye after it's put out into the world?

One thought I had is basically just showing off.

I'm not one to go around tooting my own horn much, and I'm pretty sure both Brandon and Siavash are like me in that regard, but I'm thinking more and more like we need to break out of that more insular, reserved sort of headspace and show off once in a while.

Like, obviously not be an egotistical dick about these things - there's a balance you have to strike, like a lot in life I suppose, but there should be a way of basically saying 'HEY, I'M PRETTY GOOD Y'KNOW!' without coming across like a complete knobhead.

I started a thread on Bluesky recently, just showcasing some of the stuff I've done over the past 19 years - the Adam Curtis stuff, the gigs, festivals, etc. that I've been involved in. Y'know, the cool shit - the really fun stuff. Because if I don't do this sort of thing, literally no-one else will, so the next time someone offers me a gig for no money, or never responds to my emails, etc. I can look at this thread and think 'yeah fuck that, I'm worth something!' instead of drying up into a ball of self doubt and anxiety.

Because sadly, all this stuff I put in that thread means absolute zero when you're talking to people in 'the biz' - the agents, the labels, the press, etc. it's all 'how many streams do you have on spotify?' (sigh) or 'how big is this person this week?' and without big PR, or a label push, it's unlikely you'll tick all their boxes. And even if you do have those things, it's still fucking hard. So you'll rush to release something else, just to get that sweet hit of something so people can talk about you. 

So yeah, go on, even if it's just for yourself, just fucking show off once in a while, it's a nice reminder if nothing else, of all the stuff you've actually accomplished over the years. And trust me, even plucking one note or standing on one stage is waaaaaay more than most people do in life, so you've done more than most already. Just shout about it more! 

All The Way...

New single out today!

It's one of those 360 degree handbrake turns that I love to throw in there every now and then. Gone are the beautiful textured ambient atmospheres and dub techno soundscapes, and in come some absolutely unhinged, feral electro-disco stompers.

I actually did these at the start of the year, but other things sort of got in the way, so couldn't just put them out then and there, which was the original idea.

They came out of me listening to a lot of that early Factory Floor stuff and wondering why the hell no-one does this anymore. Surely it's just really visceral and fun - we should all be doing this?! So anyway, I set everything up and just let rip. 

When recording, due to the way my very old setup works, I basically had to just record the synth in one go and hope I'd get it right with transitions and crescendos, etc. without hearing the beat, bassline, or anything else. It was quite fun working like that, in a weird way. I built the rest of the track around these one take wonders, and so even though it sounds very loose and jammy, it's been pieced together with painstaking detail!

Anyway, enough yakkin', here it is:

 

Won't someone please think of the exposure!

Hahahahahaha, I mean fucking hell:

 

 

Pulling the old 'do it for the exposure' thing, but pulling it on Taylor Swift is a beutiful encapsulation of the music biz, really. You couldn't ask for a better headline than that. I mean, fuck me - she earns *billions*, never needs to play a festival ever again because each one of her shows is basically a festival anyway. It's insane, the GDP of countries go up when she rolls into town, and the fucking Superbowl thought 'nah we're not paying for that, if you're lucky you can pay us' hahaha. Incredible.

 

Got me thinking about exposure though, mainly in the ways I've personally been royally fucked over by it over the years.

 

I suppose, this being an 'industry' and a 'business', you will eventually have to dance with the devil at one point (or several to be honest), but part of doing this, of making music, is finding that line between 'this might benefit me' and 'this is a joke, fuck off'. It's all part of growing up, I guess. When you're young, you're bulletproof - you can do whatever, whenever, and it just doesn't matter. Yeah, play that gig for free, do that remix, get your name out there, sure why not eh?

 

But as you get older, as you wise up, you get experience. People always make fun of me because I have a 'grudge list', which is essentially a big list of things I'm never doing again, and a list of people or entities whom it's not worth my time to entertain anymore. I don't look at it as a grudge list though, I look at it as my protection - a way of shielding myself from another shitty experience. You'll, in time, come up with one whether explicitly or not, trust me.

 

But we all have to play a game we don't want to sometimes. I once did a remix, and against my better judgement, said yes to a band I didn't really know. I asked about budget and they just came up with some stuff about not having a budget, having to pay loads of other people, etc. Now I don't mind doing freebies for mates - I do them all the time tbh, but if I don't know you just yet, it's different. So having the rug pulled like this, I did whatever I could to at least have some control over it. So I loaded in their remix stems, put reverb up to 100% on all of them and called it a day. Took 30 minutes, but I figured they were getting what they paid for, ie. absolutely nothing. They loved it anyway, haha.

 

So anyway, my advice is to hone that instinct - know what you're worth, and don't accept anything less. It takes time, and you'll have to eat the occasionaly shit sandwich, but we all do. Just don't eat too many. 

New live set

With 2025 heading towards the exit door, me and Sophie thought it'd be a great idea to work on a brand new live set for the new year, where we're hoping to get back out on the road again. 

It's sounding amazing so far, a lot darker than the one we've been playing for the past year, but really cool. We've upgraded a lot of the gear, and elevated Sophie's violin into the set, so she's not just playing a lot of atmospheres and loops now. 

Here are a few snaps from the practice sessions we've had so far: