The Satanic Band Nobody Was Supposed to Recognize

In 1988, a low-budget Canadian horror film called Black Roses went straight to VHS without so much as a theatrical run. The premise: a demonic heavy metal band arrives in a small town, corrupts the youth, and generally causes satanic mayhem. The satanic band in question was called Black Roses. The lead singer was named Damien. A character in the credits was listed simply as “Flunky.”

It is, by any measure, a terrible movie. One of the fathers gets pulled into a wall-mounted speaker by a giant rubber bug creature. The teacher hero kills a monster with a tennis racket. Vincent Pastore, best known as Big Pussy from The Sopranos, plays one of the concerned dads. There is fake blood so bright red it looks like latex paint. The film ends with a news broadcast announcing Black Roses is about to open a three-night stand at Madison Square Garden, implying the demonic conquest continues, presumably into Europe.

None of this is relevant to why you should care about the soundtrack.

The soundtrack is worth caring about for a completely different reason: the fictional band Black Roses was played by members of the real band King Kobra, specifically the lineup featuring Marcie Free on vocals, Mick Sweda on guitar, Carmine Appice on drums, and Chuck Wright on bass. King Kobra was being dropped by their label at the time. A friend of Carmine’s had a connection to the film production company. And so, by the kind of casual chain of favors that defined the late-80s LA music scene, one of the better-assembled melodic rock lineups of the decade ended up recording songs for a straight-to-VHS horror movie about devil worship.

Metal Blade Records bought full-page ads. The album cover is legitimately striking. A lot of people remember seeing it in Hit Parader and Circus. Almost nobody bought the record.

The King Kobra Reunion Nobody Announced

To understand what makes this soundtrack more than a curiosity, you need to understand the lineup politics embedded in the tracklist.

The four songs credited to Black Roses: “Dance on Fire,” “Soldiers of the Night,” “Rock Invasion,” and “Paradise (We’re On Our Way)” are essentially an unreleased King Kobra record. This is the Marcie Free/Mick Sweda/Carmine Appice/Chuck Wright version of the band, recording under a pseudonym for a horror movie while their label situation dissolved around them. The performances are not B-movie filler.

Marcie Free (who recorded these tracks in 1987 under the name Mark Free, before her transition in 1993; she passed away in 2025) delivers some of her finest 1980s vocal work here, particularly on “Soldiers of the Night,” where her range draws comparisons to Kevin DuBrow and Blackie Lawless in the same breath. Mick Sweda’s guitar work is more expansive than his later Bulletboys material. Carmine Appice, whose drumming can sometimes blend into the era’s generic hard rock sound on standard King Kobra recordings, is distinctly audible throughout.

“Rock Invasion” is the track that most clearly demonstrates what this lineup was capable of. It opens as a conventional anthemic hard rock number, the kind of song that could have appeared on any respectable 1988 metal record. Then the middle section arrives: a minor-key breakdown with trippy guitar effects that genuinely does not belong in the same song, in the best possible way. It is the most musically unexpected moment on the record, and it arrives buried in track four of a straight-to-VHS movie soundtrack.

“Dance on Fire” has the cadence and construction of a legitimate Headbangers Ball single. The chorus shares DNA with Bon Jovi’s “In and Out of Love,” and in any other context, on any other release, it could have been exactly that.

There is also a second version of King Kobra on this record. “Take It Off,” credited to King Kobra (with the later, different spelling signaling the lineup change), features Johnny Edwards on vocals, the singer who replaced Marcie Free after the label dropped the original lineup. Edwards later became the lead singer of Foreigner. “Take It Off” is a slicker, more polished track, closer in spirit to a Gene Simmons-era Kiss song than the Black Roses material. It is fine. It is not the same band, and the contrast is audible.

Bang Tango’s Secret First Recording

One of the more surprising footnotes on this record sits at track three: “I’m No Stranger” by Bang Tango.

Bang Tango became a name in 1989 when Psycho Cafe arrived and introduced the world to their sleazy funk-metal hybrid. But “I’m No Stranger” predates that debut by a year. This is their first commercial recording, released before a single album, before most people had heard their name. It appears on a straight-to-VHS horror movie soundtrack because Metal Blade Records was using the project as a partial showcase for emerging LA bands alongside the fictional band from the film.

Even the liner notes give away the newness: Joe Leste’s name is spelled differently in the credits, a small error that signals Bang Tango had not yet solidified their own identity in print, let alone in the marketplace.

“I’m No Stranger” holds up. It is recognizably the same band that would make Psycho Cafe, with the same street-level energy and Joe Leste’s distinctive delivery. As a time capsule of what Bang Tango sounded like before they had a record deal, it is genuinely interesting. As a commercial release, it had zero impact. The movie was on Tubi before Tubi was a concept.

The Lizzy Borden Standout and the Soundtrack’s Identity Problem

“Me Against the World” by Lizzy Borden is the best song on this record. It is not particularly close.

The track is more stripped-back than the band’s usual theatrical material, closer in spirit to an AC/DC-amped chorus than the elaborate compositions that define their studio albums. It is also the song used twice in the film: once during the opening sequence, when rubber-masked ghouls stomp around a club stage, and again when Vincent Pastore’s character listens to an album that spawns the creature that kills him. “Me Against the World” had already been a single with a video before the movie existed. Its presence here is almost incidental to its actual quality.

But the fact that it is so clearly the best track on the record also illuminates the soundtrack’s central structural problem. The Black Roses album exists in an uncomfortable middle space between two things a soundtrack can be. On one end: a cohesive artist record, where every track serves the same creative vision (the Fastway/Trick or Treat model, where the soundtrack is effectively a Fastway album that happens to have a film attached). On the other end: a showcase compilation, where a range of bands get positioned against each other in a way that works as a listening experience even without the film (the Bill and Ted approach, with Extreme, Tora Tora, Winger, Shark Island, Kiss, Slaughter, Steve Vai, and Richie Kotzen creating a coherent document of the era).

Black Roses is neither. It has four songs from the fictional movie band, a structural choice that commits to the artist-record model, but then pivots to showcase mode with Bang Tango, Tempest, Hallow’s Eve, and the two King Kobra/David Michael Phillips tracks. The result is a record that is more cohesive than it has any right to be across the middle eight songs, then derails with “Paradise (We’re On Our Way),” a power ballad that sounds like Winger writing a song for a Transformers soundtrack, and “D.I.E.” by Hallow’s Eve, which is sludgy and thrashy and sounds like it came from a completely different decade.

Tempest’s “Streetlife Warrior” is a minor footnote: a band that released exactly one self-distributed cassette EP before disappearing entirely, landing one song on this soundtrack as what appears to have been their only commercial release.

The Pink Floyd Footnote

Carmine Appice is the only member of the King Kobra lineup who actually appears in the film. While the movie was shooting in Canada, he visited a local record store because an album he had played on was just being released: A Momentary Lapse of Reasonby Pink Floyd. Nick Mason had a hand injury; Pink Floyd called Carmine to play on “Dogs of War.” Standing in a Canadian record store while playing the demonic drummer in a zero-budget horror film, Carmine Appice heard himself on a Pink Floyd album for the first time.

This is, in miniature, the story the whole record tells: legitimate talent operating in contexts that had nothing to do with the mainstream industry, doing work that would not be properly contextualized for decades.

The Scarcity Paradox

The Black Roses soundtrack is not available on any streaming platform. There is no authorized digital release. Finding it on YouTube means finding a bootleg upload. The CD on Discogs ranges from $50 to over $300. Patron Keith Miller paid $100 for his copy.

The movie, by contrast, is free on Tubi with no account required, and also available on Shudder, Peacock, and AMC+.

This inversion is close to perfect. The thing of no cultural value is freely available everywhere. The thing of genuine musical interest requires either a significant cash outlay or a bootleg upload. It is a precise diagram of how the late-80s music industry treated its second-tier roster: promoted the packaging, abandoned the content, and let the actual recordings vanish.

The album cover, that striking image that appeared in full-page ads across every metal magazine in 1988, still exists everywhere you look. The music it was selling is effectively inaccessible unless you know exactly where to look.

What Did the Hosts Make of It?

The Black Roses soundtrack rewards the kind of listener who finds the archaeology more interesting than the hit. There is no hit here. There was never going to be a hit here, because there was no infrastructure to make one happen. What there is instead: a document of Marcie Free at or near her vocal peak, Mick Sweda doing his most interesting work, Carmine Appice playing with genuine commitment, Bang Tango before they were Bang Tango, and Lizzy Borden delivering one of their finest individual performances.

Does that add up to an album? Does it earn a full listen, or is it more honestly an EP’s worth of material spread across ten tracks? Does the identity crisis at the heart of the tracklist (part fictional-band concept record, part B-movie showcase, part late-label-deal salvage operation) actually diminish what the strongest songs accomplish?

The three hosts landed on the same verdict. Whether you agree or disagree says something about how you weigh the good against the awkward, and whether a record needs to know what it is to be worth your time. The full conversation, and the final call, is in the episode. Drop your own verdict in the comments below.

Episode Highlights

• Intro (0:00): Poll reveal. Black Roses wins a four-way race at 30.4%, beating Venom, Death Angel, and Marry My Hope. Patron Keith Miller spent $100 on the CD to make this happen.

• 6:23: The movie. Jay watched it on Tubi: satanic band, small-town teacher, monster from a speaker, tennis racket murder, Vincent Pastore, an open ending where Black Roses heads to Madison Square Garden.

• 14:07: Is it fun-bad or just bad? Jay: “Worst movie I’ve ever seen.” Taken completely seriously, no camp wink at the camera, zero budget.

• 17:45: The Keith Miller subplot. An actor named Keith Miller appears in the film’s credits. Running gag: he is possessed, much older than we realize, a satanic demon.

• 20:07: Rock Invasion. Carmine Appice’s drumming is most audible here; a conventional anthemic verse gives way to a minor-key trippy middle section nobody expected.

• 22:27: Two versions of King Kobra on one record. The Black Roses band is the Marcie Free/Mick Sweda/Carmine Appice lineup; “Take It Off” is King Kobra with Johnny Edwards, who later sang for Foreigner.

• 26:34: Paradise (We’re On Our Way). Power ballad that divides the hosts: sounds like Winger or Stan Bush’s “The Touch,” overly positive, no edge.

• 30:10: Bang Tango’s first commercial recording. “I’m No Stranger” predates Psycho Cafe by a year. Joe Leste’s name is spelled differently in the liner notes.

• 32:13: Me Against the World. The best song on the record by a clear margin. Used twice in the film. Already had a video before the movie existed.

• 36:03: Take It Off (King Kobra). Johnny Edwards, later of Foreigner. Jay: “Could have been a Gene Simmons song.”

• 41:40: Trick or Treat comparison. The 1986 Fastway soundtrack as a contrast: bigger budget, theatrical release, now retroactively a Fastway album. Future episode pairing suggested.

• 44:38: Carmine and Pink Floyd. While filming in Canada, Carmine walked into a record store and heard himself on A Momentary Lapse of Reason for the first time. Nick Mason had a hand injury; Floyd called Carmine for “Dogs of War.”

• 47:07: Bill and Ted comparison. Black Roses falls between a cohesive all-artist album and a showcase compilation, satisfying neither. Hosts rattle off both Bill and Ted soundtracks from memory.

• 53:20: Dance on Fire. Chip: “I kept singing Bon Jovi’s ‘In and Out of Love’: same cadence.” Could have had a Headbangers Ball video.

• Outro: Verdicts delivered. Keith Miller shoutout.

Space, Spiders, and the Glorious Problem of a Band Too Weird for Britpop

J Dziak and Tim Minneci, June 9, 2026

What happens when a Liverpool band dodges the Oasis/Blur template with a collage of lounge, trip-hop, and off-kilter pop? They get one huge single (”Female of the Species”), one cult-classic album, and a place in the “what if” file forever. This week we dig into the moment Britpop almost made room for the weird kids.

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Gang of Four’s Entertainment!: Punk, Funk, and the Politics of Rhythm

J Dziak, Chip Midnight, and Tim Minneci, June 2, 2026

From Thatcher-era anxiety to 2000s indie dancefloors, Entertainment! is the record that taught two generations of guitarists they could play funk if they did it angry enough. The poll winner gets the deep dive.

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Kashmir’s No Balance Palace: The Forgotten Album with Bowie and Lou Reed

J Dziak and Tim Minneci, May 26, 2026

A Danish art-rock record that went to number one in its home country, featured David Bowie and Lou Reed as guests, and somehow never escaped Europe. Patron Jason Pan picked it for exactly that reason.

Listen to the episode

👋 Know a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it for a future episode.

Coming Up Next

Black Roses (Various Artists) Soundtrack

The 1988 cult horror film about a glam-metal band that turns out to be literal demons. Soundtrack contributors include King Kobra (whose Ready to Strike just hit the Hopper, picked by jdziak), Lizzy Borden, and Bang Tango. 80s metal at its peak commercial absurdity, before grunge sent everyone running.

Give it a spin before Tuesday and come ready with what works and what doesn’t.

Want to hand-pick an album for a future episode and join us on the show to dig into it? Join the Board of Directors at dmounion.com.

New Releases

Modest Mouse – An Eraser and a Maze

Close your eyes and you’re back in 2004, summer somewhere, “Float On” coming out of every passing car. Modest Mouse were the band who broke through after a decade of grinding through indie obscurity, and Isaac Brock’s voice became the texture of the mid-2000s. An Eraser and a Maze is their eighth studio album, out June 5 on Brock’s own Glacial Pace, their first independent release in 30 years and first record since drummer Jeremiah Green’s passing in 2022.

What works: The Au Review gave it four out of five and called it “a meandering self-reflective tribute to life.” RANGE goes further: “the band’s strongest in years, eclipsing both The Golden Casketand the often-overlooked Strangers to Ourselves.”

What doesn’t: Fiona Shepherd at The List (per the Wikipedia summary) scored it 3 out of 5 and called it a record that “captures the eclecticism of their career in under 50 minutes,” which doubles as praise and as a warning: 15 tracks across that many moods can feel like a tour rather than a destination.

Death Cab for Cutie – I Built You a Tower

You remember “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” at every wedding, every breakup mixtape, every late-2000s indie playlist that lived in someone’s iPod. Ben Gibbard spent the 2000s articulating sadness for an entire generation, and Death Cab quietly became one of the most reliably good American bands of the last 25 years. I Built You a Tower is their 11th album, out June 5 on Anti-, their first independent release in 20 years after two decades on Atlantic, produced by John Congleton in three weeks and written through the dissolution of Gibbard’s second marriage.

What works: The Fire Note lands on the leanness: “Some of Ben Gibbard’s sharpest writing in years arrives on a record that feels lean, focused, and emotionally exposed.” The speed of the sessions shows up in the spark.

What doesn’t: Kerrang scored it 3/5 and gave the contradiction at the heart of the record: “It’s Death Cab at their brooding, beautiful best. While not every track hits that hard, this is still a worthy addition to the band’s catalogue of poignant, sorrowful songs.” Translation: if you wanted the Gibbard who wrote “The Sound of Settling,” you’ll find pieces of him. If you wanted a whole new band, that isn’t the record.

Of Montreal – aethermead

Picture Kevin Barnes at the Hissing Fauna peak in 2007, the freakiest art-pop band on the Elephant 6 roster, building entire records out of dance beats, glam-rock theatrics, and Barnes’ chronic emotional oversharing. aethermead is the 20th of Montreal album, out June 5 on Polyvinyl, written after Barnes’ breakup and move to Brooklyn, where he walks his dog every morning through the Nethermead meadow in Prospect Park. The title comes from that walk.

What works: Beats Per Minute gave it 76% and frames it as “a sort of a musical recap of what he has done in the 30 years,” with Barnes “picking and choosing musical elements with such an ease that often escapes other artists.”

What doesn’t: Psychedelic Scene Magazine names the cost of admission: the record “seems to reflect a lost relationship in an unhealthy way and focuses on the negative qualities Barnes showed to his lover while blaming her for leaving.” Barnes has always written from the wound. If that’s a feature for you, this is more of it. If it’s a bug, it’s a big bug.

👋 If you want to hand-pick an album for a future episode and join us on the podcast to dig into it, that’s exactly what the Board of Directors is for. Join at dmounion.com.

Converge – Hum of Hurt

Remember the first time you heard Jane Doe in 2001 and realized hardcore could be that emotional and that punishing at the same time. Converge spent 30 years being the band that other hardcore bands measured themselves against. Hum of Hurt is their 11th album (or 12th if you count the Chelsea Wolfe collaboration), out June 5 on Deathwish/Epitaph, and remarkably, their SECOND album of 2026 after February’s Love Is Not Enough. The sessions split into two records: one leaning metal, one leaning emotional hardcore. This is the second one.

What works: Wonderbox Metal calls it “essential listening” and lands on this: “Well, if it’s not enough for Converge to release one great album in a year, they’ve now gone and released another that’s arguably even better.” New Noise Magazine adds that it’s “one of the band’s most emotionally exposed records.”

What doesn’t: The reviewer at YouTube/A Reaction calls it “the blander of the two records the band has just released” and notes that while it’s still solid Converge, it doesn’t carry the same nuance as Love Is Not Enough. Two records in four months is a lot to absorb. If you’ve only got room for one, the consensus is Love Is Not Enough.

Yes – Aurora

If you have a parent or older sibling who ever sat you down and made you listen to Close to the Edge in 1972, you know exactly what Yes are. Steve Howe’s guitar lattice, Jon Anderson’s choir-boy register, Rick Wakeman’s cape-wearing keyboard wizardry, and the most ambitious prog band ever to fit a 20-minute song onto one side of vinyl. Aurora is their 24th studio album, out June 12 on InsideOut/Sony, produced by Steve Howe, with the current lineup of Howe, Geoff Downes, Jon Davison, Billy Sherwood, and Jay Schellen.

What works: The Prog Report calls it “the strongest album of the Jon Davison era so far,” with “a rhythm section that feels genuinely locked in, Geoff Downes’ keyboards pushed much further forward in the mix, and the increasingly rich vocal blend developing between Jon Davison, Steve Howe, and Billy Sherwood.”

What doesn’t: Something Else! is positive overall but warns that Aurora is “leaner in concept” rather than reaching for the sprawling mysticism of the 1970s catalog. If you came for Close to the Edge Part 2, this is not that record. Both reviewers agree: judge it on its own terms or skip it.

Piebald – Tales for the Rages

If you were on a Vagrant Records tour bus in 2002 or wore out your We Are the Only Friends We Have CD in college, you remember Piebald. The Andover, Massachusetts emo/indie band who specialized in anthemic sing-alongs with an offbeat sense of humor, then went quiet after 2007. Tales for the Rages is their first new album in 19 years, out June 12 on Iodine Recordings, written and recorded between 2019 and 2025 after their 2016 reunion, produced in part by Jay Maas (Title Fight, Citizen) and mastered by Jack Shirley (Joyce Manor).

What works: The Concert Chronicles frames the comeback as “a continuation rather than a throwback. The same voice, just with more time behind it. It sounds like a band that understands exactly what made them work, without feeling the need to prove it again.”

What doesn’t: The Concert Chronicles acknowledges the risk plainly: “No reset. No reinvention. Just a band picking back up where they left off.” If you wanted Piebald to evolve into something they’ve never been before, they didn’t. If you wanted 13 more tracks that sound like Piebald, they delivered.

Also Out This Week

Rachel Bolan – Gargoyle of the Garden State: The Skid Row bassist’s punk-rock solo debut on earMusic, produced by Nick Raskulinecz with guest spots from Corey Taylor, Danko Jones, and Nuno Bettencourt. Chaoszine called it “one of the most personal works of Bolan’s career.”

The Dwarves – Jenkem: 17th album from the Chicago-via-SF punk provocateurs, 13 short violent bursts that The Concert Chroniclessays “strips things back to speed and impact, short songs, aggressive pacing, and no real interest in overcomplicating anything.”

Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs – Mission of Mercy: Tom Petty’s longtime guitarist’s fourth Dirty Knobs album, classic Heartbreakers-adjacent rock that fans of his guitar tone have been chasing ever since Petty’s death in 2017.

Thomas Bangalter – Mirage: Ballet For 16 Dancers: The Daft Punk co-founder’s second post-helmet contemporary classical work, scored for a Stéphanie Aubin choreography after 2023’s Mythologies. Confirms his “I’m a French composer now” pivot is permanent.

Jon Spencer – Songs of Personal Loss and Protest: First Jon Spencer record under his own name in a decade. Title tells you exactly what you’re getting.

Fresh in the Hopper

The queue has been busy. Here are the picks worth bookmarking.

Tsar, Tsar (2000), submitted by whitsbrain. He calls it “an all but forgotten work of guitar pop mastery,” ranking it near the top of the power pop genre. His pitch: “Why did it take me this long to give it the recognition it deserves? Quite possibly one of my largest musical oversights.”

Queens of the Stone Age, Rated R (2000), submitted by Jake Miller. The pitch is the perfect Dig Me Out frame: “For meatheads like me who only discovered QOTSA on Songs for the Deaf, Rated Ris the one where they really made the leap.” The record where the band became a band, not a Josh Homme post-Kyuss project.

Fields of the Nephilim, Dawnrazor (1987), submitted by Chip. He bought the cassette at 16 in a Florida record store after spotting them as a Black Sabbath tour opener. The spaghetti-western instrumental opener scared him. Carl McCoy on the cover, no face visible except the yellow eyes.

Got a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Drop it in the Hopper.

Suggest an Album

There are albums that fit neatly into their era, and then there are albums that seem to have shown up wearing the decade’s clothes while quietly plotting against the dress code. Spiders, the 1996 debut from Liverpool band Space, belongs to the second category. It arrived during Britpop’s peak commercial years, when the market was flooded with bands trying to bottle some combination of Beatles shimmer, Kinks wit, Oasis swagger, and Blur cleverness. Space looked at that lane, shrugged, and swerved into something stranger.

That strangeness is the whole story.

If the only thing most listeners remember is “Female of the Species,” that’s understandable. It’s the kind of single that burns so brightly it can distort the memory of everything around it. Sultry, theatrical, vaguely sinister, and just knowing enough to be funny without collapsing into novelty, it remains one of the great oddball hits of the era. It sounds like a lost lounge-pop theme from an imaginary 1960s spy flick that somehow escaped into the alt-rock ecosystem of the mid-90s and started making itself comfortable in movies, TV, and anybody’s brain who heard it after midnight.

But Spiders is not merely the album that contains “Female of the Species.” It is a much messier proposition than that: a record full of half-brilliant pivots, theatrical overreach, eerie atmosphere, great singles, questionable sequencing, and enough personality to stay interesting long after its flaws have made themselves obvious.

Britpop by way of the haunted funhouse

What makes Spiders compelling is that it refuses to settle down long enough to become generic. Where so many bands of the period were polishing their influences into something market-ready, Space assembled a collage. You can hear late-60s mod, pulpy lounge-pop, Madchester looseness, trip-hop mood, cheap sci-fi soundtrack kitsch, and a little bit of classic-rock drama all rubbing against one another. It feels less like an album with a single sonic thesis than like flipping channels at 1 a.m. and landing on a string of reruns: spy shows, horror flicks, off-brand variety specials, some weird imported crime drama with bad dubbing, then a music video that looks like it cost £17 and somehow still nailed the vibe.

That atmosphere is the record’s best trick. Organs wheeze and shimmer. Synths creep in from the corners. Xylophone and mallet percussion pop up where normal bands would settle for tambourine. Strings show up not to elevate the songs into grandeur, but to give them a sly, cinematic wink. Even the guitars often feel less like the center of the band than one more prop in the production design.

It gives the album a mood few of its peers could touch. Space were not trying to beat Oasis at being Oasis. They were building a world instead.

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One undeniable hit

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that “Female of the Species” towers over the rest of Spiders.

That isn’t because the other songs are bad. It’s because that track is one of those rare moments when concept, songwriting, arrangement, and performance all click at once. The groove is sly. The hook is immediate. The orchestration is playful without being cluttered. The vocal is theatrical, but disciplined. Most importantly, it feels complete. Not dressed up. Not overcompensating. Complete.

That’s what separates it from a lot of what surrounds it. On the album’s best songs, the production deepens the material. On its weaker songs, the production sometimes feels like it’s trying to distract from songs that are merely decent. “Female of the Species” never has that problem. Its lounge-pop strut, sinister charm, and perfectly calibrated weirdness are the song. Strip the arrangement away and you lose the whole point.

That’s also why it outlived the band’s broader reputation, especially outside the UK. It didn’t need context. It didn’t need scene literacy. It didn’t need a listener to buy into all of Space’s eccentricities. It was just instantly, unmistakably itself.

And that kind of single can be a curse. Once a band lands a song that specific, every other track risks sounding like either a failed attempt to repeat the trick or proof that the trick can’t be repeated.

The case for Spiders

The strongest argument in favor of Spiders is that when it hits, it’s a lot of fun. Not polished fun. Not prestige fun. Real fun. The kind that comes from a band willing to try a weird instrumental choice, a left-turn arrangement, a vocal flourish that shouldn’t work but maybe does.

“Neighbourhood” has the crackle of a strong opener and quickly establishes that Space are more interested in mood and movement than guitar-band orthodoxy. “Money” leans into a sleazy, cinematic cool that suits the band’s instinct for stylized storytelling. “Me and You vs. the World” carries a 60s-pop glow that suggests Space could have made a cleaner, more focused retro-pop record if they’d wanted to. “Dark Clouds” and a few others flash the band’s knack for texture—how to make a song feel like a set piece even when the tune underneath it is only partway there.

And that’s really the charm of the whole enterprise: you can hear the curiosity. The album doesn’t sound like a band trapped by a formula. It sounds like a band chasing whatever detail or influence excited them in the moment, whether that meant baggy grooves, keyboard color, spaghetti-western twang, pulpy narrative lyrics, or dancefloor percussion. In a decade full of alt-rock records that flattened personality into market-tested sameness, that counts for a lot.

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The case against it

But there’s another side to all that freedom.

For all its invention, Spiders can also feel like an album that mistakes motion for momentum. It jumps styles, moods, and vocal approaches so often that the experience starts to blur. What feels playful in the first half can feel scattered in the second. A record this committed to collage needs either knockout songs or ruthless pacing to hold everything together. Spiders has flashes of the first and not enough of the second.

The back half is where the strain starts to show. Some tracks begin to sound less like bold acts of reinvention and more like affectionate but lesser versions of other bands’ ideas—second-tier baggy grooves, second-tier dance-rock, second-tier Britpop songwriting hidden under layers of character and production. The more the album sprawls, the more it exposes how much of its identity depends on atmosphere doing the heavy lifting.

The vocals don’t always help. Space love character, but character is a dangerous drug. Sometimes the exaggerated accents, theatrical cadences, and shape-shifting deliveries make the songs feel cinematic. Other times they make them feel muggy and overacted, like the musical equivalent of a supporting character in a Guy Ritchie knockoff trying way too hard to steal the scene.

Then there’s the rhythm section problem. Some of the drum programming and loop-based choices lock the album so firmly into mid-90s production habits that the songs flatten out instead of erupting. You keep waiting for a few of these tracks to hit harder, swing more, or open up dynamically, and too often they just hover in place. The result is an album that can feel long not simply because of its runtime, but because so many songs occupy the same murky middle distance.

This is where Spiders becomes such a great record to argue about.

Because the honest answer might be that it is not a great album so much as a very good five- or six-song EP trapped inside a full-length running on nerve, style, and a willingness to risk embarrassment. Trim the fat, sharpen the sequencing, keep the strongest singles and the most vivid deep cuts, and you’ve got something closer to a cult classic than a curio.

That isn’t a backhanded compliment. Plenty of bands never make one great single. Plenty of bands never build a world vivid enough that listeners still want to rummage around in it decades later. Space did both. They just may not have had the songwriting consistency or editorial restraint to stretch that world across more than 50 minutes.

And yet even that excess is part of the appeal. Spiders is not the sound of a band playing it safe. It’s the sound of a band trying too much, pushing too far, trusting their oddest instincts, and occasionally tripping over their own ambition. There’s something admirable in that, especially now, when so much music arrives pre-smoothed and algorithmically legible.

The one-song trap

A lot of albums in the 90s fell victim to the one-song trap: one brilliant single, one unforgettable video, one radio moment, and then a full-length that couldn’t possibly live up to the expectation created by that hit. Spiders belongs in that lineage, but with an important twist. Most of those records are remembered only for the disparity. Here, the gap between the hit and the rest of the album is real, but so is the atmosphere, the ambition, and the strange little collection of pleasures sitting around it.

That makes Spiders more than a footnote. It’s a reminder that some records matter not because they’re airtight, but because they’re gloriously unstable. Because they capture a band in the act of trying to invent a language of their own, even if they only speak it fluently a few times.

“Female of the Species” may be the song that gets Space into the room. Spiders is what keeps them there just long enough to make the conversation worth having.

Episode Highlights

00:00 – Patron setup and intro – How a long-time Union member brought Spiders into the rotation and why it stood out in a sea of 90s Britpop and alt‑rock

05:10 – Band history – The early days of Space, lineup changes, and how a supposedly Britpop band ended up chasing film, trip‑hop, and lounge instead of Beatles worship

09:00 – Singles and UK vs. US reception – The strange rollout of five singles, why “Female of the Species” broke through, and how the rest of Spiders stayed a cult item outside the UK

13:30 – Building the “spy‑fi lounge” sound – Organs, synths, xylophone, strings, and how the band leaned into retro TV, B‑movies, and cocktail‑lounge vibes instead of standard guitar rock

18:45 – Cinematic songwriting and dark humor – How Tommy Scott writes like he’s scoring imaginary films, the Tarantino influence, and the tension between playful arrangements and morbid lyrics

24:20 – When the collage works (and when it doesn’t) – The highs of the album’s atmosphere versus the moments where stock drum loops, overcooked vocals, and weaker songwriting start to drag

31:10 – The back-half problem and 90s production – Why the second side feels more like genre cosplay, how dated beats flatten dynamics, and what a tighter runtime might have fixed

36:40 – One killer single vs. whole-album verdict – The “worthy album / better EP / decent single” debate and why most roads lead back to a leaner version of Spiders

41:30 – Community verdict and where Space fits now – Patreon poll results, listener comments, and how Spiders sits today as an eccentric 90s time capsule rather than a lost classic

And the reason we’re talking about it now isn’t because some label cooked up a deluxe box set. It’s because a bunch of listeners threw it into a cage match. In one corner: The Damned’s Machine Gun Etiquette. In another: Lone Star’s Firing on All Six. Over there: Throbbing Gristle’s D.O.A.. And then, quietly sharpening its knives in the back, Gang of Four’s Entertainment!—a 1979 outlier that ended up squeaking past The Damned in a runoff vote that felt more like 51–49 than a decisive knockout.

If you’ve got a 70s, 80s, 90s, or 2000s rock record you’d throw into that kind of knife‑fight—a weird outlier, a buried classic, the one you’re mad nobody talks about—submit it for a future poll and see if your pick survives the gauntlet.

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The sound of the floor dropping out

Drop the needle on Entertainment! and the first thing that hits you isn’t melody, it’s geometry. The guitars don’t strum; they jab. They show up in short, percussive bursts, like somebody turned the rhythm guitar slot into a blunt instrument. You’re waiting for big chords to ring out and instead you get these knife‑edge shapes that hang in mid‑air and never resolve the way a classic rock brain expects.

So what keeps it from collapsing into pure noise? The bass. The bass is the secret hero here. It doesn’t just thud along on root notes—it moves. There’s funk in there, and R&B, and a bit of dub lurch, like someone sped up a James Brown or Parliament groove and stripped away the gloss. If you soloed some of these lines, you could probably drop them into a dance or soul track and nobody would flinch.

The drums glue it all together with this weird human‑machine feel. Remember, this is 1979—drum machines are starting to sneak into pop, sequencers are creeping in—but Gang of Four get to that stilted, almost robotic grid using nothing but people in a room. It feels mechanical and slightly cold, but you can still hear the sticks, the air, the tiny imperfections. The future they’re pointing at is automated, but the hands playing it aren’t there yet, which gives the whole record this uncanny, in‑between vibe.

Rhythm as manifesto

Most rock bands treat rhythm like plumbing: you need it, but you don’t talk about it. Here, rhythm is the whole architecture. Guitars, bass, vocals—almost everything behaves like percussion. The riffs are clipped, the phrases are short, and even when the band locks into a groove, it feels like they’re testing how tightly they can coil it before it snaps.

That leads to one of the coolest (and most disorienting) tricks on Entertainment!: the subtractive chorus. We’re wired to expect the chorus to be the moment where everything explodes—more guitars, more backing vocals, more everything. Gang of Four often do the opposite. “Damaged Goods” spends the verses building this twitchy, nervous energy, and when the chorus finally arrives, the arrangement drops down to basically drums and voice. It’s like the floor disappears right when you expect fireworks.

Why does that matter? Because in a scene where “punk” was already getting standardized—faster, louder, snottier—they’re quietly saying, “We’re not playing that game.” Punk doesn’t have to mean turning the volume knob further right than the band next to you. It can mean ripping up the invisible rules about how songs are supposed to work in the first place.

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Theory in the pit: lyrics and delivery

If the music is all sharp angles and rhythmic traps, the lyrics are the essay written in the margins. This is late‑70s Britain; unemployment is up, Thatcherism is looming, and everyone’s being sold a story about modern life getting better and better. Gang of Four’s answer is basically: “Better for whom?”

Take “Natural’s Not In.” On the surface, it’s a jagged little tune with that same stripped‑down aesthetic. Underneath, it’s a takedown of how “advancement” can hollow out the actual experience of being alive. The key line—“this heaven gives me migraine”—lands like the punchline to a very bleak joke: you’ve been promised paradise, but it just makes your head hurt. You can hear the frustration of living in an allegedly golden age that still feels gray and constricting.

The band keeps circling back to the body as a site of business. There’s a line that essentially casts the body as “good business,” which is a brutal way of saying we carve ourselves up, day after day, and hand those hours to capitalism. Eight hours at work, every day, traded to the machine so we can afford to keep existing. It’s not subtle, but honestly, it’s not trying to be.

What really sets the lyrics apart, though, is how they’re delivered. A lot of these songs use two vocal lines at once: one speaking, one singing. On “Anthrax,” you get this almost spoken‑word rant running alongside a more traditional vocal, and every so often they sync up on a phrase like “Love will get you like anthrax,” and it hits twice as hard. It feels like you’re hearing someone’s inner monologue and their public voice collide in real time.

And then there are the little nerdy Easter eggs: references to Lot’s wife, Great Expectations, and more obscure ideological threads tucked into the verses. It’s the same trick Manic Street Preachers would pull years later—writing songs that double as reading lists if you’re the kind of listener who pauses to Google a line. If you like disappearing down rabbit holes, this record absolutely enables that behavior.

Totally 1979, somehow not stuck there

Here’s the weird thing: Entertainment! is obviously a product of its time, but it doesn’t feel trapped in 1979. You can hear the era in the ingredients—punk’s urgency, disco’s groove, reggae and dub’s sense of space, funk’s bass language—but the band never settles into any of those as a comfy lane.

Contrast it with what rock radio was doing. While Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles were rolling out big, plush, FM‑ready productions with layers of overdubs and studio shine, Gang of Four basically sound like they plugged in, checked levels, and hit record. The guitars are dry and almost confrontationally unadorned—no lush reverb caves, not a lot of pedalboard ornamentation. You can practically see the cables on the floor.

The funk and R&B influence isn’t “here’s our funk song” obvious either. It’s more like the record is wearing those styles under its clothes. Those basslines and rhythmic shapes keep things moving and give you something to latch onto, even when the guitars and vocals are trying their hardest to knock you off balance.

That’s part of why so many people discover Entertainment! backwards. They hear the 2000s bands first—the dance‑punk wave, the angular‑guitar indie stuff—and then stumble across Gang of Four and realize, “Oh, this is the blueprint.”

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The template everyone else stole from

If you want to understand how ahead of the curve Entertainment! was, you don’t even have to stay in the 70s. Skip forward a couple of decades to when The Rapture, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand and company were getting tagged with “dance‑punk” or “post‑punk revival,” and you can basically draw a straight line back to this album.

That whole recipe—tight, syncopated drums; basslines doing as much heavy lifting as the vocals; guitars that slash on the off‑beat instead of ringing out heroically—lives here in rougher, more abrasive form. Those later bands had the luxury of sanding down the edges, adding bigger choruses, and slotting themselves into festivals and TV dramas. Gang of Four were busy, you know, inventing the thing.

The influence radiates beyond the obvious too. You can hear flashes of this approach in the way Local H’s “Bound for the Floor” handles its verses—those simple, stabbing guitar figures that feel more Gang of Four than grunge, even if the song doesn’t sound like a tribute. Parts of The Cult’s more taut, post‑punk‑leaning moments seem to drink from the same well, especially in how they build verse tension before letting the chorus go widescreen.

Individual players took notes as well. Flea has talked about how this band rewired the way he thought about bass, and it’s no coincidence that Andy Gill ended up producing the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ debut, dragging some of that jagged, skeletal funk into their orbit. Dave Allen’s later band Low Pop Suicide and the long list of musicians who rotated through Gang of Four over the years—people tied to Belly, L7, Slint and more—helped spread that influence across alternative rock, post‑hardcore, and beyond.

Even hip‑hop got in on it. “Ether” gets sampled by Run the Jewels decades later, proof that those rigid yet funky grooves still hit hard enough to anchor a modern beat. “Damaged Goods,” meanwhile, has become the closest thing the band has to a standard—covered, referenced, and even nearly turned into an album title by bigger acts.

When innovation wears you out

Here’s the honest part: as much as Entertainment! is a landmark, it’s not exactly an easy Sunday‑morning listen. Several spins in, one thing that keeps coming up is how long 40 minutes can feel when every song is challenging you on multiple fronts.

Because the record leans so hard on tension—rhythmic, harmonic, structural—it doesn’t give your ears a lot of release valves. There aren’t many big, sing‑along choruses to coast on, no lush ballads where everything softens and breathes. For some listeners, that’s thrilling; for others, it can start to feel like homework by the back third of the album.

It’s easy to imagine a slightly tighter version that trims a track or two and keeps the focus on the absolute killers: “Ether,” “Not Great Men,” “Damaged Goods,” “At Home He’s a Tourist,” “5.45,” maybe “Glass” depending on your tolerance for the more abrasive end of their palette. The flip side is that these “less essential” tracks also show you the limits of the band at this stage—they’re not great at slow, moody pieces yet, and when they stray too far from their rhythmic sweet spot, you start thinking more about what they can’t do than what they can.

But that’s kind of the nature of a record like this. It’s not designed as a greatest‑hits package; it’s a document of a band figuring out how far they can push rock’s skeleton before it breaks. Sometimes that means a few experiments land awkwardly. It also means the highs feel genuinely new, not just very good versions of something you’ve already heard a hundred times.

After the blast radius

If Entertainment! hooks you, there’s a whole rest of the story waiting: albums like Solid Gold and Songs of the Free, where the band leans harder into funk and more polished production, pulling in things like backing vocalists and slicker arrangements without totally losing the bite. The lineup shifts, people cycle in and out, and Andy Gill slowly morphs from just “the guitarist in Gang of Four” into a kind of patron saint of jagged, groove‑driven rock production.

For some listeners, the best single starting point is a well‑chosen compilation that pulls key tracks from Entertainment! and the more accessible later records, showing how the band moved from skeletal agit‑funk to something closer to alt‑rock with teeth. For others, it’s all about absorbing the debut whole at least once—letting the full 40 minutes wash over you so you can feel where so many later bands quietly stole their ideas.

Either way, Entertainment! is one of those albums that changes how you hear other records. Once you’ve spent time with it, you start spotting its fingerprints everywhere: in a riff here, a bassline there, a weirdly empty chorus that suddenly makes more sense.

So if you’ve got a record you think plays a similar role—rewrites the rules instead of just following them—send it in. Maybe it’s a too‑heavy 90s album that scared radio programmers, or a 2000s rock disc that got lost in the blog deluge, or another punk/post‑punk mutant like Entertainment! that never quite fit anywhere. Throw it into the next poll and see if you can force everybody else to sit with “your” difficult, brilliant 40 minutes and ask, “How were we not talking about this already?”

What kind of album are you personally itching to nominate next: a jagged art‑punk curveball, or a melodic, hooky record that still got criminally overlooked?

Episode Highlights

0:00 – Intro – How a community poll pitted Gang of Four against The Damned, Lone Star, and Throbbing Gristle, and why Entertainment! edged out the win

5:12 – Setting the stage – Late‑70s Leeds, art school punks, and how Gang of Four stitched punk, funk, reggae, and dub into something new

13:30 – “Ether” – Opening track breakdown: rhythmic knife‑edge guitars, politicized lyrics, and the groove that anchors the chaos

20:45 – Rhythm as revolution – Why the band treats guitars and vocals like percussion, and how their subtractive choruses flip rock song structure on its head

27:10 – “Natural’s Not In” & “Not Great Men” – Capitalism, bodies as “good business,” biblical and literary references, and the link to Manic Street Preachers‑style lyric nerdery

34:30 – “Damaged Goods” – The band’s de facto anthem: from angular verses to that stripped‑back chorus, and how it became a template for generations of bands

42:05 – “At Home He’s a Tourist” & “5.45” – Melodica lines, TV‑age dread, and the way the record feels both 1979 and weirdly timeless

50:20 – “Anthrax” – Dual vocals, anti‑love‑song energy, and how the band turns noise, rant, and groove into something iconic

58:40 – Influence and aftershocks – From Flea and Red Hot Chili Peppers to The Rapture, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, Local H, and Run the Jewels sampling “Ether”

1:06:15 – Does it still work front to back? – The guys debate the 40‑minute runtime, favorite cuts, what they’d trim, and whether Entertainment! is best as full album or curated gateway

1:13:50 – Final verdicts – Where Entertainment! lands in the Gang of Four catalog, why it’s still required listening, and who this record is really for

Want to pick an album and hear us cover it on the show? Join the Dig Me Out Union. Paid members vote on which albums we review each month, and the winners become full episodes with community ratings, Discord discussion, and your comments read on air. Your vote doesn’t just influence the show—it decides what gets made. Join the Union at digmeoutpodcast.com

Kashmir’s No Balance Palace topped the charts in Denmark in 2005. It featured David Bowie singing a verse and Lou Reed delivering spoken-word noir. Tony Visconti produced it. And unless you were living in Benelux, you probably never heard a single note.

This week on Dig Me Out, J and Tim return to Kashmir—11 years after covering their 1994 debut Travelogue—to find a band that barely resembles itself. The transformation is stunning, strange, and a reminder that some records only get made when the right people walk through the studio door at the right time.

The 11-Year Gap

Kashmir formed in Denmark in 1991. Their debut was workmanlike, searching for identity. By 2005, they’d evolved into something darker and more atmospheric—melodic without being hooky, propulsive without being showy. No Balance Palace is their fifth album, and it sounds like a band that finally knows who it is.

The contrast is jarring. Travelog felt like a band still figuring out their sound. This record—anchored by clean, delayed guitars, driving bass, and breathy vocals—lands somewhere between The Cult’s melodic edge, Failure’s spacey heaviness, and the melancholy undertow of Swedish bands like Kent.

It’s not pop. But in Denmark, it went to number one.

Tony Visconti, David Bowie, and Lou Reed Walk Into a Studio

No Balance Palace was recorded at Sun Studios in Copenhagen and Looking Glass Studios in New York. The producer was Tony Visconti—the man behind T. Rex, Thin Lizzy, and a mountain of David Bowie records.

Which might explain how Bowie ended up singing the second verse of “The Cynic.”

His voice is subtle, blending into the song’s eerie, proggy atmosphere. It’s not a spotlight moment—it’s a texture. And that’s the thing about this record: it doesn’t showboat. Even with Bowie on it.

Then there’s Lou Reed, who shows up on track 10 with a two-minute spoken-word piece about passing a mysterious black building and wondering if the devil lives there. It’s evocative, strange, and—if we’re being honest—skippable on repeat listens. Cool story for the band. Less essential for the listener 20 years later.

A Tale of Two Halves

The first six tracks on No Balance Palace work. They build tension, atmosphere, and momentum. Songs like “California,” “Jewel Drop,” and “The Cynic” use clean guitar tones, delay, and heavy bass to create a driving, nocturnal sound. The vocal is breathy, sometimes bordering on Thom Yorke territory, but it fits the mood.

By track seven, things start to drift.

The second half of the record feels looser, more experimental, less focused. Songs like “She’s Made of Chalk” lean too hard into Kid A-era Radiohead without the payoff. The melodies thin out. The vibe turns from propulsive to meandering. It’s the sound of a band trying things out in the studio—interesting, but not as compelling.

Take the first six songs, maybe add “Snowman,” and you’ve got a tight, intriguing record. The rest feels like an experiment that didn’t quite land.

Why This Record Never Crossed the Atlantic

No Balance Palace was released in Europe, Japan, Russia, Argentina, Australia, and the mysterious region known as Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg—not a spy novel country, despite how it sounds). It was not released in the United States.

In 2005, American rock radio was leaning into Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, and Block Party—high-energy, angular stuff. Death Cab for Cutie was having a moment with Plans, but even that was more melodic and accessible than Kashmir’s moody, atmospheric approach.

This record is darker, slower, less immediate. It’s the kind of album that rewards patience—and in 2005, U.S. audiences weren’t being asked to be patient with Danish rock bands.

What It Sounds Like Now

No Balance Palace holds up best when you meet it on its own terms. It’s not a record for every mood. But if you want something melancholic, propulsive, and cinematic—something that feels like driving through open space at night—the first half delivers.

It’s also a fascinating case study in evolution. Kashmir went from a decent-single debut to chart-topping records in their home country. They refined their sound, brought in a legendary producer, and got two icons to guest on the album. And then they just… kept going. They released three more albums after this, went on hiatus in 2017, got back together, planned a tour, and then COVID hit.

They’re still out there. And their entire catalog is now streaming.

Kashmir’s No Balance Palace didn’t make it to the States, but it made it to number one in Denmark. And for one fleeting moment in 2005, David Bowie walked into a studio and sang a verse on a Danish rock record that most of the world never heard.

That alone makes it worth digging out.

Episode highlights

[00:01:26] Jason Pan’s Pick History: Patron Jason Pan’s selection history since 2018—mostly Australian picks including Mansun, Pollyanna, and Soulwax.

[00:02:17] Kashmir Returns After 11 Years: Second time covering Kashmir—last reviewed their 1994 debut Travelog back in 2016.

[00:05:33] Tony Visconti Produces: Legendary producer (Bowie, T. Rex, Thin Lizzy) at the helm.

[00:06:35] Bowie and Lou Reed Guest: David Bowie sings on “The Cynic,” Lou Reed does spoken word on track 10.

[00:07:16] No Poll This Week: Tim forgot to post preview before vacation—no comments or poll results.

[00:08:39] What Works: Melancholic Atmosphere: Jay highlights clean guitars, driving bass, breathy vocals. Comparisons to The Cult, Failure, Kent.

[00:13:52] What Works: Sonic Diversity: Tim praises shoegaze elements, minimal soundscapes, post-Radiohead influence.

[00:17:37] Dramatic Sonic Transformation: Hosts shocked by how different this sounds from the 1994 debut.

[00:19:51] #1 in Denmark: Mainstream pop success in their home country—three consecutive #1 albums.

[00:23:03] What Doesn’t Work: Second Half Falls Apart: Jay says it gets too loose, experimental, derivative—like a failed attempt at Kid A.

[00:25:51] The Lou Reed Problem: Both hosts question the two-minute spoken-word piece. Cool story, instant skip.

[00:32:57] Never Released in the U.S.: Album came out in Europe, Japan, Australia, but not America.

[00:34:12] Wrong Time for U.S. Market: Too melancholic for 2005—Death Cab, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys dominated.

[00:36:47] Final Ratings: Better EP: Both hosts say first six tracks (Jay) or seven including “Snowman” (Tim) make a strong EP.

[00:40:50] Thanks to Jason Pan: Rare opportunity to cover same band with 11-year gap between albums.

This episode happened because a Union member picked it. Patron Jason Pan chose No Balance Palace from a ballot of forgotten 2000s rock albums, members voted, and this became the episode. That’s how the show works now—your participation shapes what gets covered.

Join the Dig Me Out Union to vote on albums, influence the show, get your comments read on air, and access bonus episodes and our private Discord.

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The Hummingbirds Gave the Lemonheads Their Biggest Hit

J Dziak, Tim Minneci, and Chip Midnight,

loveBUZZ (1989) is geo-locked to Australia, produced by Mitch Easter, and responsible for one of the most surprising songwriter credits in 90s alt-rock. The Hummingbirds were the Sydney jangle-pop band who never quite made it out of the Southern Hemisphere, but their song “Into Your Arms” became Evan Dando’s biggest single. This week we dig into the album you can’t stream and the story you’ve never heard.

Listen to the Episode

🤔 Know a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it for a future episode.

Coming Up Next

Kashmir – No Balance Palace (Tuesday, May 26)

Danish art-rock from a band that briefly had Tony Visconti’s full attention. No Balance Palace (2005) was Kashmir’s fifth album, the one that won the Danish IFPI Awards’ Best Album of the Year and got David Bowie himself to guest on the track “The Cynic.” Picked by Jason Pan from the Board of Directors as a follow-up to the band’s Travelogue episode.

Give it a spin before Tuesday and come ready with what works and what doesn’t.

Want to hand-pick an album for a future episode and join us on the show to dig into it? Join the Board of Directors at dmounion.com.

New Releases

Ed O’Brien – Blue Morpho

Close your eyes and you can hear it: the gliding, chiming guitar lattice on “Karma Police,” the warmth Ed O’Brien quietly poured into every Radiohead record for three decades, never the loudest player on stage but the one who kept the room from collapsing. Blue Morpho is his first album under his own name, out May 22 on Transgressive after his 2020 EOB debut Earth. O’Brien made it with producer Paul Epworth and Dave Okumu’s 7 Generations players in what he describes as a healing period centered on nature, birdsong, and reclaiming his sense of self.

What works: Chris DeVille at Stereogum frames the recording as “three what I consider sort of utopian days,” with collaborators including Dave Okumu, Dan See, and a guest spot from Radiohead drummer Philip Selway on two tracks.

What doesn’t: Fans on the r/radiohead discussion thread are split, with some calling it “splendid” and “exceptional,” while others note O’Brien’s vocals sit so far back in the mix you find yourself straining to hear the words. A choice, but one that won’t land for everyone.

Nashville Pussy – 10 Inches of Pussy Season 1

You remember the first time you heard “Go Motherfucker Go” and realized somebody had taken AC/DC, Motorhead, and the entire Stooges catalog, run it through a Confederate-flag-on-the-wall dive bar, and pressed go. Blaine Cartwright and Ruyter Suys made an entire career out of supercharged sleaze-rock that Lemmy himself called “America’s last great rock ‘n’ roll band.” This 4-song EP is their first new music in 8 years since 2018’s Pleased To Eat You, recorded fully analog at Wire To Wire in Lexington with new drummer Dusty Watson (The Sonics, Agent Orange) and longtime bassist Bonnie Buitrago.

What works: Metal Mantra names the tradeoff for what it is: “Nashville Pussy are coming back with a short vinyl EP that sounds like it was made to be played loud and sold at a merch table.” Track titles include “King Shit Of Fuck Mountain” and “Hard Road,” which tells you exactly what lane they’re driving.

What doesn’t: Four tracks under 20 minutes after an 8-year wait is more of a tease than a comeback. Metal Mantra calls it a “Season 1” concept, which leaves the door open for more, but the first installment is short on substance for anyone who wanted a full record.

Armored Saint – Emotion Factory Reset

Anyone who came of age in the 80s metal scene knows John Bush’s voice, that grown-ass man growl that made Armored Saint the band metal nerds kept defending while everybody else moved on to grunge. Joey Vera kept the band intact through every label collapse, every Bush detour into Anthrax, and every shift in what people thought metal was supposed to sound like. Emotion Factory Reset is their ninth studio album, out May 22 on Metal Blade, with the same core lineup that’s been together since 1989.

What works: Dom Lawson at Blabbermouth calls it “a glowing example of what happens when a band of brothers block out the rest of the world to plough their own musical furrow,” and lands on the word “triumph.”

What doesn’t: Rich Oliver at The Razor’s Edge calls it “another great album chock full of hard rocking metal anthems,” which is exactly the appeal and exactly the limit. If you came in cold, Armored Saint will sound like what they’ve always sounded like: 80s metal that never bent for any era. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends entirely on your relationship with John Bush’s voice.

⛏️ If you want to hand-pick an album for a future episode and join us on the podcast to dig into it, that’s exactly what the Board of Directors is for. Join at dmounion.com.

The Sheila Divine – The Middle Ages

If you spent any time in Boston alt-rock circles in the late 90s, you remember the Sheila Divine: Aaron Perrino’s wrestling voice, those guitars that sounded like they were always one degree from breaking, and a band that lived in the second tier just under Buffalo Tom and the Neighborhoods. The Middle Ages is their sixth album, out May 22 on Trash Casual, recorded by David Minehan (The Neighborhoods, Buffalo Tom) and Steven Lord, with mixing by Wally Gagel (Sebadoh, Folk Implosion) and Paul Kolderie (Hole, Radiohead).

What works: Alt Recess frames the lead single this way: “Perrino still has that voice, the kind that doesn’t just sing over guitars but wrestles with them,” and calls the album “not a reunion lap, a statement.” The themes are middle age, fatherhood, fractured relationships, and rage at what the country has become.

What doesn’t: Alt Recess also notes the band is “owning their age instead of fighting it,” which is the right move for the people who remember them and a harder sell for anyone discovering them now. The Sheila Divine were always a band you had to find. The Middle Ages is still that band.

Also Out This Week

Criteria – SEIZE!: Stephen Pedersen of Cursive returns with his post-emo project’s follow-up to 2020’s Years, recorded in Omaha at ARC Studios with producer Matt Bayles. Punk Rock Theory quotes Pedersen calling the songs “alchemy under pressure, love as the undertow, empathy as survival.”

Pig – Hurt People Hurt: Raymond Watts’ long-running industrial rock project returns on Metropolis Records, co-written with Jim Davies (The Prodigy, Pitchshifter). Side-Line Magazine quotes Watts describing it as “the shepherd to pain, shoehorned between the masochist and the drama queen within.”

Fresh in the Hopper

The queue keeps stacking. Here are the picks worth bookmarking.

Fields of the Nephilim, Dawnrazor (1987), submitted by Chip. He bought the cassette at 16 in a Florida record store after spotting them as a Black Sabbath tour opener in a UK metal magazine. The spaghetti-western instrumental that opens the record scared him. Carl McCoy on the cover, no face visible except the yellow eyes. Chip says you can hear exactly why Sabbath tapped them.

Bison of Disorder, (the green drip record) (1996), submitted by Keith Tasker as the third of his four-album hardcore drop. Long Island metalcore before metalcore existed, with the earliest examples of the harsh-and-clean vocal split that defined the 2000s. Keith calls “Suffer” the standout, a Gen-X reckoning delivered like a 20-round Tyson fight.

Bob City, Bob City (2000), submitted by Tim M. Columbus punk/metal/hard rock band makes a Southern boogie-rock inspired album. Tim is digging deep into a regional scene the rest of the country never noticed.

Alta May, Dark Days (2003), also from Tim M. Obscure stoner/grunge band, second album, Tim’s personal favorite. Not on streaming. The kind of suggestion that’s exactly what the Hopper is for.

Got a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Drop it in the Hopper.

Join the Board of Directors at dmounion.com for polls, picks, and deeper dives.

The album that went Gold in Australia and vanished from the rest of the world.

This is not the usual obscurity story. The Hummingbirds did not fail. They did not get bad reviews. They did not play to empty rooms. Their 1989 debut loveBUZZ hit ARIA #31, their single “Blush” cracked the top 20, they sold more than 40,000 copies in Australia, and they toured alongside The Ramones, Dinosaur Jr., and The Cure. The reason most people outside Australia have never heard of them is simpler and stranger than any tale of artistic failure: the album is geo-locked. It is not available on streaming services outside Australia. There is no official digital release for the rest of the world. There is a fan-uploaded YouTube video. That is your option. Thirty-five years of licensing dysfunction have done more damage to this record than any critic ever could.

Rolling Stone Australia ranked loveBUZZ #154 on their 200 Greatest Australian Albums list in 2021. It appeared in the book The 100 Best Australian Albums. The band that made it played the right venues, ran with the right crowd, and recorded with a producer who had already defined the sound of one of America’s greatest rock bands. Then the file got stuck. The world moved on. The album stayed in Australia.

The Producer Who Should Have Made This Famous

Mitch Easter is not an obscure name if you know your early R.E.M. He produced Murmur(1983) and Reckoning (1984), the records that established R.E.M. as the defining sound of American college rock, and he was the founder and frontman of Let’s Active. He is not someone labels hired when they were being careless. He is someone they hired when they believed in a band.

In 1989, rooArt Records, a Sydney label founded by Chris Murphy, the manager of INXS, brought Easter to Australia to record loveBUZZ. The result sounds exactly like what it is: a jangle pop record made by people who understood both the melodic architecture of early R.E.M. and the rhythm-forward aggression of the best power pop of the era. Rickenbacker-bright guitars ring clean on the surface while chuggy downstroke rhythms push hard underneath. The drums, courtesy of Mark Temple, hit with a snare punch that is genuinely rare for the genre. This is jangle pop that has a backbone.

The Hummingbirds formed in Sydney in 1986, rising from the ashes of a band called Bug Eyed Monsters. By the time they recorded loveBUZZ, the lineup was Simon Holmes on vocals and guitar, Alannah Russack on guitar, Robin St. Clair on bass and vocals, and Temple on drums. Their rooArt deal was the kind of moment Australian indie bands dreamed about: a label with resources, an American producer with credentials, and enough advance money to make something real.

The Harmonies Are the Point

Put on headphones. Seriously. loveBUZZ is built around an interlocking vocal architecture that does something most bands in 1989 were not attempting. Simon Holmes anchors the center. Russack and St. Clair weave around him on either side, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes running counter-melodies that cut against the main line rather than reinforcing it. Women singing low while men sing high. Multiple cadences layered over each other in the same bar. The effect on “Alimony” and “Blush” is closer to the Mamas and the Papas than to anything happening in the Sydney indie scene at the time.

This is the album’s most durable strength, and also what holds it together across its more uneven moments. The songwriting ranges from the bright pop precision of “Blush,” which reads like a college radio single that should have happened, to the six-minute shoegaze dirge “House Taken Over,” which sounds fully formed and genuinely interesting but probably belongs on a different release at half its current length. “Word Gets Around” is practically a Buddy Holly song; “If You Leave” closes with a deep, moody female vocal that draws comparisons to Stevie Nicks at her most atmospheric. At fourteen tracks, the album tests its own cohesion. The back half loses steam. There are songs that feel like they arrived at the session from a different band’s rehearsal.

None of that changes what the first eight tracks can do on a good speaker system with the volume up.

The Lemonheads Connection Nobody Talks About

During the recording era, Nic Dalton filled in on bass when Robin St. Clair fell ill. Dalton was Australian, connected to the Sydney scene, and would later become a full member of The Lemonheads. While he was filling in, he and St. Clair were together. They wrote a song during that time, a song called “Into Your Arms.”

Evan Dando heard it. The Lemonheads recorded it. It became their biggest single.

The Hummingbirds gave the Lemonheads their signature song. Most people who know every word of “Into Your Arms” have never heard of the band that wrote it. This is a Natalie Imbruglia situation on a smaller scale, in reverse, with a geo-lock on the original.

Evan Dando’s affection for Australian music ran deep. He covered songs by multiple Australian bands during this period. The cross-pollination between Sydney’s inner-city scene and American college rock is a thread that keeps surfacing when you look at what was actually happening in the late 1980s, and The Hummingbirds sit right at the center of it.

The Label Story

rooArt was not a scrappy indie operation. It was founded by the manager of the biggest Australian rock band in the world at the time, sold to BMG Australia for five million dollars not long after loveBUZZ came out, and eventually had a genuine commercial breakthrough with Ratcat, who went to number one. The Hummingbirds were the label’s second signing. They were the proof of concept.

What the label gave them: a serious budget, Mitch Easter, and a chance at the American market via a Polygram US licensing deal. What the label also gave them, apparently without telling anyone: an unauthorized house remix of “House Taken Over” that a rooArt executive commissioned for the UK market. Electronic drums, a dance beat, the band learning about it after the fact. The Hummingbirds broke up in 1993, leaving behind loveBUZZ, a follow-up record called Va Va Voom (1991), and a catalog that has been stuck behind a geographic firewall ever since.

Simon Holmes died in July 2017, at fifty-four. The band released a compilation of early EPs that year as a tribute. There has been no official remaster of loveBUZZ. The YouTube upload remains.

The Verdict Nobody Agreed On

When Dig Me Out covered loveBUZZ, the hosts split: two voted Worthy Album, one voted Better EP. The community poll came back 80% Better EP. The minority host opinion won the popular vote.

Which is right? The Worthy Album argument: even with its weaker tracks, loveBUZZ contains enough genuinely great material that trimming it to ten songs produces a near-perfect record, and there is no reason to penalize an album for what could be edited out. The Better EP argument: a fourteen-track album that loses altitude in the back half is not a great album, it is a great EP that kept recording. Both positions are defensible. Neither is obviously wrong.

What the split actually reveals is something honest about how the record is constructed. The first eight tracks are locked in: momentum, vocal interplay, guitar architecture that holds under examination. The back six are more variable, occasionally adventurous, frequently unfocused. The closer, “Miles to Go,” builds to a cinematic crescendo and then just stops. “If You Leave,” which precedes it, would have been a far stronger ending.

Is the geo-lock protecting a forgotten masterpiece, or is it making an uneven debut album easier to mythologize than it deserves? Does 80% of the community know something two of the hosts don’t? And what does it mean that a band that opened for The Cure and Dinosaur Jr. is still only accessible to people with an Australian IP address?

Go listen. Then come tell us what you hear.

loveBUZZ is available on streaming within Australia. Outside Australia, the full album is on YouTube. Listen to the full episode and share your verdict in the comments.

Episode Highlights

Intro: Blush: loveBUZZ opens the episode exactly how it should, no preamble, just the single.

1:11: Josh Page returns from Australia: back with his second patron pick, and this one isn’t on US Apple Music.

2:37: The album title before Nirvana: loveBUZZ got its name before Nirvana broke, then the Australian industry came knocking for “the next Nirvana.”

5:05: Band history: from Bug-Eyed Monsters to a Gold record: started in 1986, signed to rooArt (INXS manager’s label), Mitch Easter producing, “Blush” hit ARIA #19, 40,000+ copies sold.

6:09: The Lemonheads connection: Robin St. Clair and Nic Dalton co-wrote “Into Your Arms” while he was filling in for her; the Lemonheads turned it into their biggest hit.

9:03: Into Your Arms (The Lemonheads): clip played to illustrate the co-writing story; this is a Lemonheads track, not a Hummingbirds song, written by St. Clair and Dalton.

13:08: What works: the harmonies: three to four interlocking voices, women singing low, men singing high, more complex than The Bangles and closer to the Mamas and the Papas.

14:19: Alimony: originally an EP single smuggled onto the full album; Chip and Jason both flag it as a standout.

19:17: Get on Down: aggressive rhythm and hooky drum fills give this jangle pop record some actual weight underneath.

22:52: Hollow Inside: multiple hosts call it a keeper; plays during the open what-works discussion.

28:51: House Taken Over: called a “shoegazy dirge” by Jason; Josh reveals a rooArt executive secretly remixed it as a house track for the UK market without telling the band.

33:27: Miles to Go: Chip calls it “half a song”; it builds to a cinematic crescendo and just stops; all four agree it is the wrong album closer.

38:48: If You Leave: deep, moody female vocal with a Stevie Nicks vibe; Josh and Tim agree this should have closed the album instead.

42:08: Verdicts: the hosts split 2-1; the community voted 80% Better EP; the minority position won the popular vote by a wide margin.

Outro: Blush: loveBUZZ opens the episode, and it closes it the same way.

🧠 Have a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it here.

If this hit for you, try these next

• Lemonheads: History of the Band: How Evan Dando built one of the most beloved alt-rock catalogs of the 90s, from hardcore roots to melodic breakthroughs.

• The Lemonheads: It’s a Shame About Ray: The 1992 album that featured “Into Your Arms,” written by the very people in today’s episode.

• Dinosaur Jr. in the 80s: Roundtable: The Hummingbirds toured with Dinosaur Jr.; here’s the full DMO breakdown of what that era sounded like.

Somewhere in a crate, on a server with 156 monthly listeners, this record has been waiting.

Purusam were a straight-edge hardcore band from Skellefteå, Sweden, later based in Umeå. In 1997, they recorded their second full-length album, Daybreak Chronicles, on Desperate Fight Records, a label co-owned by Dennis Lyxzén of Refused. Then they broke up. Then nothing. The album never came out in the United States. It never toured here. It died quietly in Sweden and Spain, the only two territories where copies ever existed.

In 2022, a Swedish label called Svensk Hardcore Kultur pressed 501 numbered vinyl copies to keep it from disappearing entirely. That is where most people are finding it now, twenty-five years later. The remaster brought the guitars back to life. The songs were already there.

The Buried Blueprint

Here is the part that makes this album genuinely strange to sit with. The guitarist on Daybreak Chronicles, Jon Brännström, left Purusam and joined Refused. One year after this record was released, he co-wrote The Shape of Punk to Come, now considered one of the most important hardcore albums ever made. You can hear the connection clearly: the way the burst sections land, the rhythm of the vocal against the guitars, the instinct to build something architecturally complex out of raw hardcore energy. The DNA is shared. The credit is not.

The Shape of Punk to Come died on release too, for the record. It was not until a music supervisor placed “New Noise” in Friday Night Lights years later that the world caught up. Refused got a second life. Purusam got 501 vinyl copies and a Spotify page with monthly listeners you could count on two hands.

The drummer on Daybreak Chronicles, Fredrik Holmstedt, later recorded Veni Vidi Viciouswith The Hives, one of the most beloved garage rock albums of the early 2000s. Two completely unrelated genre histories, separated by geography and style and a decade of distance, run through the same obscure 1997 Swedish hardcore record. Most people have never heard of Purusam. Almost everyone has heard of what came next for the people who made it.

What Actually Happens When You Listen

The production is dry and hot in a way that will either grab you immediately or send you looking for a volume knob. The mix clips audibly on the opening double kick. The first thirty seconds feel like your head is pressed against a cranked Marshall amp, which is almost certainly the point. Once you adjust, the record rewards the patience.

The guitars are the thing. Two of them, constantly trading roles: one carrying a galloping Iron Maiden-style riff while the other runs something technical and offset, then switching on a dime to a desyncopated 90s feel you weren’t expecting. Sweep runs and pinched harmonics and harmonized solos appear not as showboating but as sudden energy events, like pressure releasing. It sounds like a group of teenagers playing at the absolute edge of what they can do, and doing it in a room together, not pieced together in a studio. That immediacy is the point. It is not glossy. It is real.

Three tracks feature violin and cello. The instrumental interludes between the heavy sections lean toward what a later generation would call post-rock, or what one listener compared favorably to Failure. The album’s lyrics reference Final Fantasy and Mana, two JRPG franchises, inside a straight-edge hardcore concept record about light and darkness and the passage of time. That combination should not work. It does.

The tracklist divides into three sections: “The Way of the Hero,” “The Great Conqueror,” and “The Final Fantasy.” It is a concept album in the most earnest sense, not a marketing gesture. The screamed male vocal is an acquired taste, which the band name (from the Sanskrit “purusha,” meaning universal spirit) probably did not help, given how easily it got lumped into the Krishnacore subgenre they had nothing to do with.

The Female Vocal, and Why It Mattered

Anna-Lena Svanborg sang clean on this record. In 1997 hardcore, that was nearly unheard of. Not operatic, not soaring: her presence is ethereal and restrained, a counterweight to the screaming male vocal rather than a competition with it. The contrast creates something more interesting than either element alone. She is in a different headspace. That is what makes it work.

This approach, the juxtaposition of harsh and clean vocals, particularly male screaming against female singing, has become standard practice in the metal adjacent genres of the last fifteen years. In 1997, this record was doing it in a self-produced straight-edge hardcore album by teenagers in Sweden. The genre called it “fantasy hardcore” at the time, which sounds like an insult but is actually a fairly accurate description of what they were building.

Have a listen to “Atma,” the seventh track. It opens with the feeling of a Bruce Dickinson Valkyrie charge, drops to a halftime verse, and features a cannon sound effect at the forty-one second mark that is used exactly once and never again. The band plays that card and folds it. That restraint, that instinct to introduce something wild and then let it go rather than repeat it into the ground, is what separates a genuinely interesting record from a genre exercise.

Why It Disappeared

The reasons are almost too obvious once you line them up. The band name read as Krishnacore in a scene that was not Krishnacore. The album art was poor on the original and worse on the Victory Records version. Desperate Fight Records, Dennis Lyxzén’s label, had essentially no distribution outside Scandinavia. Victory eventually put out a Desperate Fight bundle of reissues and sent them to radio stations in five-pack boxes with no promo, no chart pushes, nothing. Keith Tasker, who was a radio DJ hosting a metal show at the time, remembers getting the box and not knowing what to do with it. That was the entire US promotional campaign for this record.

The album never came to the States. It probably played Germany, Sweden, Switzerland. It may not have made it to England. According to Discogs, Sweden and Spain are the only countries where physical copies were officially released. Converge was doing comparable technical hardcore-metal fusion in the US and building a reputation. Purusam was doing it in Umeå and building nothing outside the scene.

Refused had a similar problem. The Shape of Punk to Come also died on release. They broke up on tour, playing house shows. It took a TV music supervisor and a sports drama to resurrect them years later. Purusam had no such catalyst. Nobody picked up “The Way of the Hero” for a film. Nobody sync-licensed “Starlit.” The record just waited.

The Verdict, and What You Should Do

This is proto-metalcore before the genre existed. It is one year before the record that supposedly invented the template, made by people who were living inside the same creative moment, on the same label, in the same city. Jay, who came in knowing nothing about Purusam and without any particular affection for hardcore as a genre, walked out calling it “The Shape of Metal to Come.” Tim, also hearing it blind, found himself returning to the two-guitar passages with headphones on, floored by the interplay.

The community vote when this episode split three ways: exactly one-third each for Worthy Album, Better EP, and Decent Single. That split is honest. The screamed vocal is not for everyone. The production is raw even by the standards of the era. The concept album structure does not always cohere across all twelve tracks. These are real limitations.

And yet: is this a better record than its complete historical invisibility suggests? Does the Brännström connection reframe what happened in 1998 in ways the genre histories have never acknowledged? What would you call a record that sounds like the future but arrived with no mailing address? And how many other albums like this are still out there, waiting for someone to bring them to a podcast?

Listen to the episode. Then tell us what you think.

Episode Highlights

Intro: Opening Theme / The Way of the Hero: Jay and Tim welcome first-time patron guest Keith Tasker, joining from the Great Lakes region.

1:07: Introducing Purusam: Keith lays out the case for a proto-metalcore concept album from Umeå, Sweden, released in 1997 on Dennis Lyxzén’s Desperate Fight Records.

4:02: Fantasy Hardcore: What Makes This Record Different: Harsh and clean vocals, female clean vocals in hardcore (rare in 1997), Iron Maiden gallop rhythms, pipe organ, strings, flutes, and dueling guitar solos in a self-produced straight-edge record by teenagers.

6:07: The Refused Connection: Former Purusam guitarist Jon Brännström later joined Refused and co-wrote material on The Shape of Punk to Come, making Daybreak Chroniclesa sonic blueprint for the blueprint.

9:27: Band Lineup: Drummer Fredrik Holmstedt would later record Veni Vidi Vicious with The Hives, the only member to surface elsewhere in music history.

12:32: The 90s Hardcore Lineage: Keith traces straight-edge hardcore’s family tree and explains why Purusam’s Iron Maiden-rooted approach was shocking in that context.

15:47: Leave and Forget: Track 2 played as entry into the full album discussion.

22:38: Atma: Track 7 opens like a Bruce Dickinson Valkyrie charge, drops to halftime, and features a cannon sound effect at 41 seconds used exactly once, never repeated.

33:27: Drumming Spotlight: Fredrik Holmstedt’s double kick never numbs because bass and rhythm guitar accent those moments as events, not wallpaper.

35:23: Starlit: Track 10 played as transition into the critiques section.

38:04: What Doesn’t Work: The hot-amp mix clips audibly on the opening double kick; the screaming vocal has no traditional melodic movement, which Tim compares to following a native Italian speaker on Duolingo.

50:41: Why Didn’t It Make It: The name, the art, the tiny label, no US distribution, no US touring. Contrasted with Refused, whose Shape of Punk to Come also died on release until a TV sync revived it years later.

Outro: Hourglass: Track 12 closes the episode. Keith teases his next patron pick, a 1990 England-only release from a band that still headlines UK festivals but is unknown in the States.

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If this hit for you, try these next

• The Shape of Punk to Come by Refused: The album Purusam’s guitarist helped build one year after Daybreak Chronicles -- the definitive DMO episode on the record that changed hardcore.

• Converge: History of the Band: The US counterpart to what Purusam was doing in Sweden -- technical, heavy, and built on the same hardcore-metal fusion that nobody else was attempting in the mid-90s.

Stevie Wright’s Hard Road Is the AC/DC Prequel Nobody Told You About

J Dziak, Chip Midnight, Tim Minneci, and Gavin Reid · May 5, 2026

Malcolm Young played on it. Vanda and Young produced it. Stevie Wright turned down the singer job for AC/DC. The blueprint for what would become the biggest rock band on the planet was sitting right there in 1974, on a solo album by the original Easybeats vocalist that almost nobody outside Australia heard. We tell that story this week.

Listen to the episode

Gang of Four Won the 70s Vote

This one started as a four-way late-70s split between punk, post-punk, hard rock, and industrial in the original poll. Then “Entertainment!” and The Damned’s “Machine Gun Etiquette” finished locked at 7 votes each, which sent the whole thing into sudden death.

And the post-punk revolution won.

That means “Entertainment!” now gets the full Dig Me Out treatment: band history, and album deep dive.

See the result

🚨 Know a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it for a future episode.

Coming Soon…

Purusam – Daybreak Chronicles (Tuesday, May 12)

If you missed Purusam the first time around, this is a good place to start. Swedish hardcore-metal that splits the difference between melodic and crushing. Daybreak Chronicles (2024) is their newest, picked by Keith Tasker from the Board of Directors as one of his 2026 album picks.

Give it a spin before Tuesday and come ready with what works and what doesn’t.

Want to hand-pick an album for a future episode and join us on the show to dig into it? Join the Board of Directors at dmounion.com.

New Releases

Social Distortion – Born to Kill

Remember when “Ball and Chain” came on the radio and you couldn’t quite tell if it was country, punk, or rockabilly, and decided you didn’t care? Mike Ness has been writing variations on that song for almost 40 years, and a lot of us grew up with his voice in the background of every road trip, every garage, every late-night cassette deck. Born to Kill is Social Distortion’s eighth studio album, out May 8 on Epitaph, and it’s their first new music in 15 years, the longest gap of their career. The middle of the recording was interrupted by Mike Ness’s Stage 1 tonsil cancer diagnosis. He finished the record after treatment.

What works: Danielle Chelosky at Stereogum frames the title track as the sound of a band that’s earned the right to come back swinging, “the band’s first album since leader Mike Ness beat tonsil cancer.” The 11 tracks were narrowed down from roughly 40, with guest appearances from Benmont Tench and Lucinda Williams and a Chris Isaak cover of “Wicked Game.”

What doesn’t: Reactions on r/punk are mixed-positive rather than ecstatic. The most common note from longtime fans: it’s solid Social D, but if you wanted reinvention rather than a comfortable return to form, this isn’t that record.

Broken Social Scene – Remember the Humans

Think back to the first time you heard “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” and realized indie rock could feel like a fifteen-person choir on the brink of falling apart. That was 2002. You Forgot It in People was the record that made you keep an entire Canadian indie scene on your radar for the next decade. Broken Social Scene are back with their first album in nearly a decade, the first since Hug of Thunder (2017). The hook for longtime fans: producer David Newfeld is back too. He hadn’t worked with the band since 2005’s self-titled. Newfeld is the architect of the You Forgot It in People sound, and getting him back is the closest thing to a homecoming this band can stage.

What works: Charles Spearin told Stereogum “There’s a different kind of honesty in this record.” Hannah Georgas, Lisa Lobsinger, and Feist are all back as collaborators, and the lead single “Not Around Anymore” is squarely in the chaotic, wide-screen mode that made fans fall for the band in the first place.

What doesn’t: Reunions with original producers can feel either revelatory or backward-looking, and the r/indieheads discussion lands somewhere between. If you’ve been waiting for Broken Social Scene to evolve past the You Forgot It in People template, this leans into the template rather than away from it.

Midge Ure – A Man of Two Worlds

Picture the music video for “Vienna” in 1981: Midge Ure in a long coat, the synth pads rolling like fog, that voice climbing into a chorus that helped define what a synth-pop ballad could be. He fronted Ultravox, co-wrote “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” with Bob Geldof in a single afternoon, and has spent four decades quietly making one of the more interesting solo catalogs in synth-pop’s afterlife. A Man of Two Worlds is his first new music in 12 years, and it’s a double album: eight instrumentals on disc one, eight songs on disc two. The concept came out of pandemic listening habits and his stretch hosting The Space on Scala Radio.

What works: Andy Sweeney at At The Barrier calls the songs side “trademark ethereal harmonies, electronic distortions, guitar slides and soaring synths,” with the second disc dealing in “the frailty of the human condition” through tracks like “The Man Who Stole Your Soul” and “Shouting at the Moon.”

What doesn’t: The double-album structure is a commitment. As Sweeney’s review acknowledges, the instrumental disc demands you sit with it, and Ure himself has said writing instrumentals that hold up “without the help of lyrics or the build to a chorus” is harder than it looks. If you came for the songs, you might find yourself skipping straight to disc two.

👑 If you want to hand-pick an album for a future episode and join us on the podcast to discuss it, that’s exactly what the Board of Directors is for. Join at dmounion.com.

Linda Perry – Let It Die Here

“What’s Up?” comes on at a basement party, and within three seconds every single person in the room is screaming the chorus back at the ceiling. 4 Non Blondes were a one-album band for a reason, but that one album was inescapable, and Linda Perry’s voice has lived rent-free in your head ever since. Then she vanished from the front of the stage and started writing “Beautiful” for Christina Aguilera and shaping records for Pink, Gwen Stefani, and Dolly Parton. Let It Die Here is out May 8 on her new label 670 through Kill Rock Stars, her first solo album in 27 years, and the album emerged out of an unplanned documentary by Don Hardy that captured Perry through her mother’s death and her own breast cancer diagnosis.

What works: Audra Heinrichs at Paste calls it “an unflinching glimpse at a prolific artist, a self-professed workaholic and, ultimately, a person on the precipice of an existential breakthrough.” For anyone who only knew Perry from the “What’s Up?” decade, the record is a recalibration of who she’s been all along.

What doesn’t: The album’s emotional weight is the point, but it’s also the cost of admission. As Heinrichs’s Paste piece details, the record is more existential breakthrough than greatest-hits package. If you wanted the anthemic punch of 4 Non Blondes, this is a different record.

Fresh in the Hopper

The queue blew up this week. Here are the suggestions catching attention.

Hatebreed, Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire (1997), submitted by Keith Tasker as the first of a four-album hardcore deep dive. Keith calls it Jamie Jasta “at his most raw,” before Hatebreed became “the face of heavy music for a generation.” Fourteen songs, twenty-eight minutes, all killer no filler. If you’ve ever circle-pitted, this is foundational.

Snapcase, Progression Through Unlearning (1997), also from Keith. He frames it as the post that came before post-hardcore: “NY hardcore with zero frills. Drop the pretentiousness of Helmet and just drive the nail through.” If you’ve ever wondered what the early-2000s Victory Records explosion was built on, Keith says the answer is here.

Cherry Blossom Clinic, The Great Poptastic Splendorbomb (2002), submitted by whitsbrain. Power pop with crunchy guitars, comparable to Redd Kross or the Blue and Maladroit stages of Weezer. Thirty minutes total, so the commitment is small. whitsbrain says if you’re fond of harder-edged power pop, this should land.

Springbok Nude Girls, Surpass the Powers (1999), submitted by Gary Kalmek. Despite the name, SNG were the biggest rock act in South Africa in the late 90s, a non-ska punk band with a trumpet player who actually contributes to the songwriting. Recorded by Kevin Shirley. Gary’s pitch: it’s the most radio-friendly entry point into a catalog that deserves a much bigger international audience than it ever got.

🚨 Got a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Drop it in the Hopper.

Before Highway to Hell, There Was Hard Road

Picture the scene: a Sydney studio, 1974. Harry Vanda and George Young are behind the board. Malcolm Young is on guitar, not the famous one yet, not the rhythm engine of the biggest hard rock band on earth, just a kid in his early twenties doing session work for his brother’s production partner. And out front, a raspy, road-worn voice named Stevie Wright is recording what will become the second-highest-charting album in Australia that year.

Nobody outside Australia has ever heard of it.

Hard Road was Wright’s debut solo album, released in April 1974 on Albert Productions, and it peaked at #2 on the Australian charts. It received international distribution on ATCO in the United States and Polydor in the UK. Rod Stewart covered the title track on his 1974 album Smiler. None of it was enough to make the rest of the world pay attention.

What the rest of the world missed was the founding document of Australian hard rock. Vanda and Young were not merely producers here: they were architects assembling a sonic vocabulary that would, within a year, define one of the most successful rock bands in history. The grinding, piano-driven stomp of “Hard Road,” that title track with its no-nonsense riff and roll-your-sleeves-up energy, is, as one listener put it bluntly, “Highway to Hell is a slower version of Hard Road.” The DNA is not metaphorical. It is audible. The same guitar tone, the same rolling rhythm-section physics, the same sense that the song is about to knock a door off its hinges. AC/DC did not invent that sound. They inherited it.

The Man Standing at the Center

To understand Hard Road, you have to understand Stevie Wright and the wreckage he emerged from.

Wright had been the lead singer of The Easybeats, Australia’s first genuine international rock act. Their 1965 song “Friday on My Mind” became one of the most covered songs in Australian rock history, eventually reaching #6 in the UK and denting the US charts. The Easybeats were, in their moment, the Southern Hemisphere’s answer to the British Invasion. Then heroin arrived. Specifically, Stevie’s heroin. The band collapsed on its return from England in 1969.

Vanda and Young brought him back. They signed him to Albert Productions in late 1973, sat down, and wrote him a showcase. Not just a record, but a deliberate demonstration of every version of Stevie Wright they believed audiences might buy: the swagger of a hard rock frontman, the groove of a soul singer, the tenderness of a singer-songwriter, the ambition of a theatrical rock voice. The resulting album is loose and warm and uncommonly alive-sounding, like a live set miraculously preserved in amber rather than overproduced into compliance.

The voice is the thing. Heard today against contemporaries like Dirty Honey or Rival Sons, Wright’s delivery carries that same full-throated, unself-conscious rock-singer authority. There is rasp without gimmick, power without effort, soul without sentimentality. On “Life Gets Better,” the groove sits somewhere in the Marvin Gaye territory, warm and hip-rolling. On “Didn’t I Take You Higher,” the rhythm builds with an almost Funkadelic stomp. On the title track and on “Dancing in the Limelight,” the attack is pure hard rock without the Hollywood sheen. This is a performer at the top of his form with nowhere to go because geography swallowed him whole.

The Rock Opera Nobody Outside Australia Has Heard

Then there is “Evie.”

Side B of Hard Road opens with a 10-plus-minute three-part rock opera called “Evie (Parts 1, 2 & 3).” Part 1, “Let Your Hair Hang Down,” is a hard-rock bulldozer with a bass groove that sounds like it could shake a stadium loose from its foundations. Part 2, “Evie,” drops to a tender piano ballad with Wright’s voice at its most exposed. Part 3, “I’m Losing You,” builds back to a guitar-driven climax that closes the suite like a door being slammed on something you loved.

The single reached #1 in Australia for six weeks. It was the first 11-minute song to chart at number one anywhere in the world. Twenty thousand people tried to see the live performance at the Sydney Opera House in June 1974; only 2,500 got in. Every Australian who was alive and listening during those years knows this song word for word. Young Australians who have never bought a vinyl record were caught singing along to it in an office recently, not knowing why they knew it.

Now for the argument that will make you either nod slowly or roll your eyes. “Evie” was released in 1974. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was released in 1975. Both are multi-part suites with a massive structural contrast between a hard rock section and a cold piano section. Both open with a melodic hook, drop into ballad territory, and build to a guitar-driven finale. The structural parallel is close enough to be interesting and distant enough to be unprovable. What is not unprovable is the timing: the Australian invention came first. Whether Freddie Mercury heard “Evie” or whether the same spirit of 1974 ambition independently produced two rock operas twelve months apart is a genuinely open question. But it is a very interesting one.

The What-If

There is a detail that puts the whole story in a different frame.

When AC/DC were forming in 1973 and 1974, they needed a lead vocalist. Stevie Wright was offered the job. He turned it down because the key was too high for his voice.

Read that again. The man who sang “Evie,” that ten-minute rock opera that hit #1, passed on AC/DC because the songs sat outside his comfortable range. Bon Scott got the call instead. Hard Road became the road not taken twice over: first when the album failed to break internationally, and then when Wright stepped aside from the gig that would have made him the voice of the biggest hard rock band on earth.

Meanwhile, AC/DC, including the teenage Angus Young on guitar, were literally Stevie Wright’s live backing band on the Hard Road tour. The blueprint was not just sonic. The entire operation was a training ground.

One honest flaw. It would be dishonest to pretend Hard Road is a perfect album. Its weaknesses illuminate exactly what makes its strengths so striking.

The midsection stumbles. “Movin’ On Up” and “Commando Line” represent Vanda and Young’s attempt to market the Cat Stevens side of Stevie Wright: the heady, folk-inflected, acoustic-strumming version of the man. This detour is not unlistenable. But it sits at odds with everything around it. Placed between the grooves of tracks 1 through 7 and the ambition of “Evie,” these two tracks feel like a change of clothes between fights. The transition is jarring in the way that all showcase albums are jarring when they showcase one thing too many. Even “Evie” Part 2, the ballad at the center of the suite, is the weakest of the three movements; the hinge that needs the flanking bookends to earn its place.

The album cover made things worse. Three different regional versions of the artwork exist: the Australian, the American, and the UK edition. All of them look like a singer-songwriter folk record, not a hard rock document. In a pre-internet era when you picked up an album based on the sleeve, Hard Road announced itself as something softer and more pastoral than it actually was. That marketing failure was not minor. It was one more door that closed on a record that deserved a wider room.

Always in the Shadow

Stevie Wright died on December 27, 2015. He was 68 years old. David Bowie died on January 10, 2016. Wright’s death, his passing from a world he had shaped in ways only Australians fully know, was almost entirely swallowed by the noise that followed Bowie. Almost no international outlet covered it. The man who had been Australia’s first international pop star, who had fronted The Easybeats, who had recorded the record that set up everything Vanda and Young would build next, died in near-silence outside his home country.

The Wrights , a supergroup assembled from members of Jet, The Living End, You Am I, Spiderbait, and Powderfinger, had already recorded “Evie” for Wright’s Australian Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. That gesture, that collection of Australian rock’s best generation paying tribute to the man who started the chain, is the monument he deserved. It just happened quietly, in a country where these things are understood without needing to be explained to anyone else.

The story of Hard Road is the story of an album that was always brilliant, always overshadowed, and never quite given its moment. Malcolm Young played on it. The men who built AC/DC produced it. The most ambitious rock single of 1974 anchors it. And almost nobody outside Australia has ever pressed play.

The Verdict

Here is what the Dig Me Out community brought home after spending an episode with this record: a unanimous four-way judgment, backed by 75% of the patron poll. The exact word will be on the episode. What we can say is that at least one listener was already searching for a cheap Discogs copy before the conversation was over, and another was ready to add four tracks to a permanent playlist on the spot.

“If I bought this record brand new from a brand new band, I would love this band. I would travel to go see them.” (Chip Midnight)

Does Hard Road deserve to sit alongside the albums in AC/DC’s catalog as a document of equal historical importance? If you had given Stevie Wright a different answer at the right moment in 1974, would the classic rock canon look substantially different today? And given that “Evie” was an 11-minute #1 hit the year before the most famous 6-minute #1 in rock history, should the Australian invention have a place in the conversation about where the rock opera came from?

Listen to the episode. Then come back here and tell us where you land.

Episode Highlights

• Intro: Didn’t I Take You Higher, the album’s Funkadelic-flavored groove sets the tone

• 2:19: Friday on My Mind (The Easybeats), Stevie Wright’s origin story and where the story starts

• 17:40: Hard Road, the title track and the riff that sounds like Highway to Hell’s blueprint

• 21:44: Evie (Let Your Hair Hang Down), ten-minute rock opera, #1 in Australia, predates Bohemian Rhapsody by a year

• 26:00: Dancing in the Limelight, early AC/DC energy; Chip’s standout non-Evie pick

• 27:11: Life Gets Better, the soul-influenced side of Stevie Wright with a Marvin Gaye warmth

• 28:59: Didn’t I Take You Higher, Funkadelic stomp with a White Lines-style groove

• 32:29: The Other Side, 50s rock feel, the album’s most surprising left turn

• 40:21: Evie (I’m Losing You), the suite’s emotional closer and the moment the whole record earns its ambition

• Outro: Hard Road, the verdict lands and the blueprint is confirmed

Join the Board of Directors at dmounion.com to pick and album and join us on the podcast.

Have a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it here.

If this hit for you, try these next

• The Living End: The Living End: Australian punk-rockabilly at its sharpest, from one of the bands that covered Evie for Wright’s hall of fame induction.

• You Am I: Hi Fi Way: The 1995 Australian rock album that proved the country’s hard-rock lineage never stopped producing the goods.

We’ve got a problem.

The 70s poll closed with The Damned’s Machine Gun Etiquette* and Gang of Four’s Entertainment!* locked at 7 votes each . Both from 1979. Both undeniable. Both sitting there, waiting for one of you to break the tie.

So here’s what happens next: runoff poll, paid members only, winner gets the full Dig Me Out treatment.

What’s at stake

One of these albums becomes the next episode. The other one goes back on the shelf—maybe forever, maybe until someone nominates it again in a future round. This is the vote that decides which record gets:

• Full band history and album context

• Track-by-track breakdown

• Host ratings and hot takes

• Community ratings read on air

• A permanent spot in the Dig Me Out catalog

The Damned gave us the first UK punk single, the first UK punk album, then broke up, reformed, and delivered Machine Gun Etiquette—their third record and the one that proved they could evolve without losing the plot. “Love Song” became a crossover hit, but the whole album moves between gothic atmosphere and buzzsaw punk without flinching.

Gang of Four arrived with Entertainment! as a debut that didn’t sound like anything else in 1979. Funk bass lines, wire-tight guitar, lyrics that dissected capitalism and consumer culture like a political science seminar set to a disco beat gone wrong. Rolling Stone ranked it #273 on their 500 greatest albums list; musicians have been stealing from it ever since.

This is two versions of what happened when the first wave of punk burned out and the next wave figured out what to do with the ashes.

Drop a comment and tell us why your pick deserves the win. Best arguments get read on the episode.

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Pretty Girls Make Graves’ Good Health: The 27-Minute Album That Had Everything

Remember when you couldn’t take a CD out of your car player? Not because the stereo was broken, but because the album inside was too perfect to remove? That’s what Good Health was for a certain kind of listener in 2002. This week on Dig Me Out, we revisited the Seattle post-hardcore band that existed for just six years (2001–2007), made three albums, and left a mark that still hasn’t faded. Producer Phil Ek (Built to Spill, Modest Mouse) captured something raw but never under-produced, and Stereogum wasn’t wrong when they called it “28 delirious minutes that are enough to leave you breathless and stirred.” If you haven’t heard it since college, you owe it to yourself.

Listen to the episode

80s Metal Poll: Demons, Thrash, & Black Crowes Connections

80s horror soundtracks, thrash experiments, and genre-defining chaos. Each one’s got a story worth telling. The question is: which one do you want to hear us tear into first?

Vote Now

Know a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight?

Suggest it for a future episode.

Coming Up Next

Stevie Wright – Hard Road (Tuesday, May 5)

If the name Stevie Wright doesn’t ring a bell, here’s the entry point: he was the original lead singer of The Easybeats, the Australian band that gave the world “Friday on My Mind” in 1965. Hard Road was Wright’s 1974 solo debut, and it was produced by Harry Vanda and George Young, the songwriting duo who would go on to produce AC/DC’s early records. That pedigree alone should make your ears perk up.

This one was picked by Gavin Reid, a member of the Board of Directors. Give it a spin before Tuesday and come ready with your take.

Want to hand-pick an album and join us on the podcast to discuss it? Join the Board of Directors at dmounion.com.

New Releases

Foo Fighters – Your Favorite Toy

You know Foo Fighters. Your Favorite Toy is their 12th album, out April 24, and at 36 minutes it’s the shortest thing they’ve put out. The bigger story is the drum stool: this is the first Foos record with Ilan Rubin behind the kit, following Taylor Hawkins’ death in 2022.

What works: Eli Enis at Kerrang! calls it “back to brilliant basics as Foo Fighters strip back and crank the volume on killer 12th album.”

What doesn’t: Drew Litowitz at The A.V. Club calls it “a retread of well-worn ideas advertised as a ‘return to form.’” If you wanted Foo Fighters to evolve rather than consolidate, this won’t change that.

The Toadies – The Charmer

Fort Worth’s finest, authors of “Possum Kingdom,” are back with their eighth studio album, their first in nine years. The detail that makes it worth your attention regardless of where you land on the band: The Charmer was tracked all-analog with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio, one of the final projects he completed before his death in 2024.

What works: Jeremy Lukens at Glide Magazine writes that the record “stays true to the raw, aggressive roots of their early work.” The Albini influence is audible in the best way: nothing is smoothed over.

What doesn’t: Nine years is a long time, and David M. Rangel at The Indy Review frames it as “a no-frills record, devoid of studio trickery.” That stripped-down approach rewards familiarity with the band’s earlier work; coming in cold, the appeal is less immediate.

At The Gates – The Ghost of a Future Dead

The Swedish band that wrote the rulebook for melodic death metal with Slaughter of the Soul in 1995 returns with their eighth album. Vocalist Tomas Lindberg recorded his parts the day before surgery for the cancer that took his life in September 2025. This album is his last. It debuted at number one on the Swedish albums chart.

What works: Nick Ruskell at Kerrang! gave it five out of five: “Out of context, it stands tall among their best records.” Fans on r/melodicdeathmetal have treated it as a landmark moment.

What doesn’t: This is unrepentant melodic death metal: tremolo riffs, blast beats, Lindberg’s signature bark. Even sympathetic listeners can find it heavy lifting. As Andrew Rothmund at Teeth of the Divine put it, “the songs vary fairly widely in style; thus, depending on what you actually want from At The Gates, you might be put off by various sections of this album.” If the genre has never been your entry point into extreme music, the emotional story will likely land harder than the songs themselves.

If you want to hand-pick an album for a future episode and join us on the podcast to dig into it, that’s exactly what the Board of Directors is for. Join at dmounion.com.

American Football – LP4

If you know American Football, you know “Never Meant” and that 1999 self-titled debut. LP4 is their first album in nearly seven years, and Mike Kinsella has written a record about middle age, divorce, addiction, shame, suicide, and rebirth across 10 tracks and nearly 50 minutes.

What works: Sam Law at Kerrang! calls it “a huge, exploratory, horrifyingly candid” record that “may just be their best.”

What doesn’t: American Football have always asked for patience, with songs that build slowly over seven or eight minutes. As Boolin Tunes’ 9/10 review notes, the band turns “disparate personal tragedies into a collective opus that is disarming and often breathtaking,” but only if you commit. Background-listen this one and you’ll miss everything that makes it work.

Failure – Location Lost

Failure are one of those bands the people who know them feel personally responsible for. Location Lost is the LA trio’s seventh album, written by Ken Andrews while recovering from back surgery and intentionally turning off what he called his “editorial brain.” Hayley Williams of Paramore guests on “The Rising Skyline.”

What works: PsychicChris at Sputnikmusic gave it 4.5 out of 5 and called it “an especially impressive offering that may be their best since Fantastic Planet.” That’s a serious benchmark for this fanbase.

What doesn’t: Failure’s appeal is cumulative. The discussion thread at r/failure shows the split: longtime fans love it, but newer listeners often note they can’t fully connect without working back through the catalog. If Fantastic Planet isn’t already in your rotation, the “best since” framing won’t carry the same weight.

The Claypool Lennon Delirium – The Great Parrot-Ox and The Golden Egg of Empathy

Les Claypool and Sean Ono Lennon’s third record together is out May 1, seven years after South of Reality. It’s a 14-track concept album about the Paperclip Maximizer, an AI ethics thought experiment about a superintelligence that optimizes for a single goal until it consumes everything. There’s a 24-page comic book included. Claypool says it’s the most labor-intensive project of his career.

What works: Eric Harabadian at Music Connection gave it an 8 out of 10 and called it “their best yet.”

What doesn’t: The concept demands buy-in and the runtime demands patience. If Primus or Sean Lennon’s solo work has ever struck you as trying too hard, Tim Jackson at Far Out gets at the line you’ll have to cross: he calls it “a fantastical attack on AI that leans on the right side of psychedelic charm.” Whether you agree with the “right side” depends on your tolerance for the Delirium universe.

Also Out This Week

Sepultura – The Cloud of Unknowing (EP): Four songs recorded spontaneously in Miami, the final studio work from a band wrapping up a 40-year career on their “Celebrating Life Through Death” farewell tour. SonicAbuse called it a “mini-masterpiece and a very special farewell” (10/10).

Tori Amos – In Times of Dragons: Her 18th album, a 17-track concept record about escaping a sadistic billionaire Lizard Demon husband, out May 1. Spill Magazine called it outright “a masterpiece.”

Metric – Romanticize the Dive: Their 10th album, recorded at Electric Lady Studios and designed as a conscious return to the band’s early essence. AllMusic said it’s “yet another great Metric album” and a showcase for Emily Haines’ vocals after 25 years together.

The Black Keys – Peaches!: A covers album of blues tracks, recorded live with minimal overdubs in Nashville, the first they’ve self-mixed since 2006. Louder Sound heard something revitalized and unrefined; the A.V. Club was less convinced.

The Boo Radleys – In Spite of Everything: Their ninth album, out May 1, written in the shadow of real loss (the death of bassist Tim Brown’s son) and produced by Brown himself, without Martin Carr. Hotpress called it an impressive return from Britpop maestros, full of catchy hooks and gorgeous harmonies.

Seefeel – Sol.Hz: The pioneering duo’s first full-length in 15 years on Warp Records, described as their “dub album,” built on cavernous bass, processed effects, and hazy shoegaze-electronic textures. Igloo Magazine called it “ambient-adjacent music with a pulse, dub-inflected electronic music with a human touch.”

John Corabi – New Day: The ex-Motley Crue vocalist’s first full-length of original material, produced by Marti Frederiksen (Aerosmith, Ozzy) with Richard Fortus of Guns N’ Roses on guitar. Maximum Volume Music (8/10) wrote: “What you are really hearing is a songwriter with genuine mastery of the craft.”

Glen Hansard – Don’t Settle Vol. 1: Transmissions East: Recorded live over two days at Berlin’s Funkhaus studio in April 2025 on Hansard’s 55th birthday, this career retrospective draws from his work with The Frames, The Swell Season, and his solo records. Hotpress called it a “powerful and spellbinding listen” (8/10).

Doug Gillard – Parallel Stride: The Guided By Voices and Nada Surf guitarist’s fourth solo album, his first in 12 years, 11 tracks co-produced with Tom Beaujour. Louder Than War called it “a fabulously catchy new album of simpatico songs.”

Fresh in the Hopper

These are recent listener suggestions sitting in the queue, waiting for their moment.

Cherry Blossom Clinic, The Great Poptastic Splendorbomb (2002), submitted by whitsbrain. Described as “very catchy, hook-filled songs with loud guitars that just crunch and grind,” with comparisons to Redd Kross and the Blue or Maladroit stages of Weezer. The whole thing runs 30 minutes and whitsbrain says if you’re fond of harder-edged power pop, “you should certainly enjoy this.” That’s a persuasive pitch.

HSAS, Through the Fire (1984), submitted by Chip. A supergroup of Sammy Hagar, Neal Schon, Kenny Aaronson, and Michael Shrieve that, by Chip’s reasoning, should have been a much bigger deal: Hagar’s solo run was in full swing, Schon had Journey behind him. Then Hagar joined Van Halen in ‘85 and Schon went back to Journey, and the whole thing became a compelling one-and-done footnote. The counterfactual is genuinely interesting.

CIV, Thirteen Day Getaway (1998), submitted by Gavin Reid. CIV started in the hardcore scene, moved into SoCal punk, then surprised everyone on their third album by pivoting toward a 70s British rock sound: think the Faces, but with 90s loudness. According to Gavin, the pivot was met “with predictable bemusement by the public,” the album sank the band’s momentum, and they faded away so completely that they only recently showed up on streaming. That’s a classic Hopper story.

Springbok Nude Girls, Surpass the Powers (1999), submitted by Gary Kalmek. Despite what Gary admits is a terrible name, SNG became the biggest rock act in South Africa in the late 90s. Their thing: a non-ska punk band with a trumpet player who contributes meaningfully to the songwriting, each track blending different styles of rock into something cohesive. Recorded by Kevin Shirley. Gary’s description alone earns it a spot on the list.

Got a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Drop it in the Hopper.

That’s exactly what we’ve got cooking in this month’s poll—four wildly different slices of 80s rock and metal goodness that range from demonic movie soundtracks to Bay Area thrash experiments. Each one’s got a story worth telling. The question is: which one do you want to hear us tear into first?

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Black Roses (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Various Artists

Black Roses is a movie about a band of demons who come to a town to drag everyone to hell. The band is played by King Kobra, who contribute tracks like “Take It Off” to the soundtrack. But they’re joined by Lizzy Borden, Tempest, and Hallow’s Eve in what becomes a compilation of pure cheesy 80s metal goodness. This 1988 soundtrack isn’t high art—it’s the kind of gloriously ridiculous album that lives in the “so bad it’s perfect” zone. Think leather, hairspray, and supernatural mayhem condensed into one glorious slab of vinyl.

Nominated by: Keith P Miller

Museum - Mary My Hope

A weird anomaly of an alt-rock, goth rock, hard rock album. This Atlanta outfit was formed in 1987 by Clinton Steele and Sven Pipien (both formerly of The Children), along with Kentucky transplants Steve Gorman and James Vincent Hall. Drummer Steve Gorman was an early member who left to join Mr. Crowe’s Garden—which would become The Black Crowes—and bassist Sven Pipien ended up in The Black Crowes too. Their 1989 album Museum is what happens when goth rock, hard rock, and alt-rock get tossed in a blender by a band that couldn’t decide what they wanted to be. Critics called it “flawed and unfocused,” comparing it to everyone from Bauhaus to the Beatles to Pink Floyd. But tracks like “Suicide King” and “Communion” suggest there’s something genuinely compelling buried in the chaos. An anomaly? Absolutely. Nominated by: Marmaduke

Frolic Through the Park - Death Angel

A young Bay Area thrash band made up of Filipino teenagers, Death Angel’s 1988 sophomore release saw the band branching out a little bit, incorporating some punk, funk, and hard rock into their speed metal sound. They had a small bit of success with the single “Bored,” which got some airplay on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball in October 1988 and was even used in the 1990 film Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. While the album got good reviews, it’s not the favorite of the band, which is still around today. They’ve been quoted as calling this the “bastard” of their catalog, and they’ve criticized the production which was done by Davy Vain of the band Vain. Sometimes the albums artists distance themselves from are the most fascinating to dissect.

Nominated by: Chip Midnight

Welcome to Hell - Venom

From the UK but mostly eschewing the NWOBHM sounds of their youthful compatriots Iron Maiden and Saxon, Venom were immediately on their way to creating the new black metal genre on their debut release in December 1981. Since it didn’t exist yet, this was what black metal actually was before the genre became more well-defined. For that matter, death metal didn’t exist either, so their Black Sabbath-inspired demonic lyrics and their Motörhead-level breakneck speed are now revered as the impetus of several extreme metal subgenres. Critics hated them, possibly because they were not good at playing their instruments and the production is so lo-fi that the drummer sounds like he is in a closet (or a casket, if you will). However, the real reason critics struggled was because they couldn’t easily define the band—and they didn’t have the bloody guts to. This raw, unpolished slab of fury became the blueprint for extreme metal.

Nominated by: Patrick Testa

Cast Your Vote

So what’ll it be? The tongue-in-cheek horror soundtrack? The genre-confused Atlanta oddity with Black Crowes connections? The thrash experiment the band disowned? Or the primitive extreme metal blueprint that changed everything?

Drop your vote and tell us why. Which one of these deserves the full Dig Me Out treatment?

Got a Hidden Gem?

Think we missed an album that deserves this kind of treatment? Drop your nomination in the hopper and why it’s criminally overlooked. We’re always hunting for the next poll’s contenders, and the best finds come straight from you.

Suggest an Album

I had a six-disc CD changer in my car in 2002. You remember those, right? This album got stuck in there for months. Not because the changer was broken—because I couldn’t bring myself to take it out.

Good Health by Pretty Girls Make Graves was that record. Twenty-seven minutes that felt like they contained everything I’d ever loved about rock music, compressed into nine tracks that refused to waste a single second.

You probably forgot this band existed. Most people did. But man, they shouldn’t have.

“Speakers Push the Air” and the Power of the Physical

The album opens with one of the best first tracks of the entire decade. Bold statement? Maybe. But “Speakers Push the Air” does something most opening tracks don’t—it tells you exactly what’s about to happen while it’s happening.

Andrea Zollo sings about life’s complications disappearing when the music starts playing. About finding a record that opens your eyes. And while she’s delivering that message, Jay Clark’s guitar is literally doing it—these siren-like runs up the fretboard that feel less like technical exercises and more like pure excitement made audible.

But here’s the line that gets me every time: “I couldn’t put it away.”

Not “I couldn’t stop streaming it.” Put it away. That’s the CD era talking. The physical relationship with music. When you loved an album so much that even the act of ejecting it from your player felt wrong. When the only reason you’d finally swap it out was because your hand was tired from handling the case.

That guitar tone? Like controlled chaos—angular and melodic at the same time, which shouldn’t work but absolutely does.

Here’s something wild: bassist Derek Fudesco co-founded the Murder City Devils. Yeah, that Murder City Devils. He and Andrea Zollo had been playing together in bands with names like The Hookers, The Death Wish Kids, and Area 51 before landing on Pretty Girls Make Graves. The name itself comes from a Smiths song, which came from a Jack Kerouac book.

So why doesn’t this sound like Murder City Devils? Because they added Andrea’s commanding vocals, Clark’s intricate guitar work that bounces between post-punk angularity and straight-up hooks, and Nick DeWitt on drums doing things that made you remember why you fell in love with rock drumming in the first place.

This was post-At The Drive-In era rock when everything felt possible again. You know that feeling? When a genre cracks wide open and suddenly bands are grabbing every tool in the toolbox? That’s this.

When Did Drummers Get This Good?

Something happened in the early 2000s with drummers. Suddenly you’d go see a band at a small venue and the drummer would be doing things that in the 80s or 90s you’d only hear from prog bands or arena acts. Technical ability, yes—but also feel.

Nick DeWitt is the perfect example. Listen to “If You Hate Your Friends, You’re Not Alone”—he’s shifting from angular complexity to straightforward momentum, sometimes in the same measure, and it never feels like showing off. He knows exactly when to hit simple quarter notes to emphasize a groove, when to drop into halftime for drama, when to unleash a fill that makes you go “wait, what?”

The whole band does this, actually. Alternating between complexity and simplicity so your brain can process what’s happening while your body just responds to the energy. Guitar part gets wild? Rhythm section keeps it simple. Vocals get conversational? Guitars go nuts. It’s like they understood that maximalism doesn’t mean “everything all the time”—it means knowing when to deploy what.

Producer Phil Ek—who’d go on to work with Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes—captured something crucial here. This sounds raw but not under-produced. Roomy but not distant. You can crank it in your car and it sounds massive, but it never feels polished to death.

That matters because Pretty Girls Make Graves’ later albums got slicker. Not bad, just different. Good Health sounds like a band that might physically combust at any second. Like they recorded it live and then said “yeah, that’ll do.” Whether they actually did that or meticulously multitracked everything, I have no idea—but it feels like a performance.

Everything in 27 Minutes

You want 80s arena rock energy? “Speakers Push the Air” delivers. Post-punk experimentation? Check “Bring It On Golden Pond.” Gang of Four-style rhythm playing? It’s in there. Fugazi-like dueling guitars? Absolutely. At the Drive-In angularity? Of course. But also pop hooks you can actually sing.

Nine tracks. Twenty-seven minutes. No filler.

Brooklyn Vegan ranked it among 2002’s best emo and post-hardcore albums. Stereogum’s 20th anniversary piece called it “28 delirious minutes that are enough to leave you breathless and stirred.” Our community gave it 83% “the album” rating.

The Six-Year Wonder

Pretty Girls Make Graves existed from 2001 to 2007. That’s it. Six years, three albums, some seven-inch splits, done.

Nick DeWitt left in January 2007 and the band called it. Jay Clark went on to form Jaguar Love with a member of the Blood Brothers, then got replaced by a drum machine, which is honestly hilarious. Andrea Zollo played in a couple more bands, then left music entirely to become a hairstylist. She’s on Facebook being gracious to fans who still remember.

They’ve done reunion shows—When We Were Young Festival, Bumbershoot, Best Friends Forever Fest. Weekend in Vegas, play the old songs, remind people what 2002 felt like. But no new music is coming.

I know what you’re thinking: “This is just nostalgia talking.”

Maybe. But I went back and listened to Good Health for the first time in probably fifteen years, and you know what? It still rips. The technical stuff still impresses. The hooks still land. The energy still feels urgent.

This is a band that loved everything about rock music—the anthems, the noise, the precision, the chaos—and refused to pick one. For 27 minutes, they had it all. They alternated between complexity and simplicity so seamlessly that you could process the technical stuff while your body just moved.

That’s rare. That’s special. That’s worth remembering.

So here’s your homework: Go listen to “Speakers Push the Air.” Then tell me why this band wasn’t massive. Because I still don’t understand it.

Highlights

0:00 - Intro - Ghost In The Radio
0:42 - Album Introduction
2:22 - Band History & Formation
4:58 - What Works: The Maximalist Approach
12:05 - Musical Analysis: Guitar Work & Vocals
13:05 - Speakers Push the Air
18:34 - Production & Sound
24:28 - What Doesn't Work (Spoiler: Not Much)
25:08 - The Get Away
31:12 - If You Hate Your Friends, You're Not Alone
33:35 - Overall Rating & Community Response
40:02 - Outro - More Sweet Soul

If you loved this, check out these related episodes:

In On The Kill Taker by Fugazi

The post-hardcore blueprint that made bands like this possible

In/Casino/Out by At The Drive-In

The angular explosion that defined the era

The late 70s had like four different timelines running at once—punk burning down the house, art kids rebuilding it, hard rock trying to go bigger, and weirdos quietly inventing industrial in the corner.

Machine Gun Etiquette is punk evolving in real time: safety pins still in, but now there’s 60s psychedelia, horror‑movie energy, and big hooks pushing beyond the three‑chord sprint. Entertainment! is a few blocks over—art‑school punk where the cover looks like a warning label and the rhythm section yanks you around while the lyrics side‑eye capitalism.

Firing on All Six lives on the hard‑rock side street: denim, dual guitars, soaring vocals, and that hazy space between classic rock radio and the metal that’s about to crash in. And D.o.A is the shadowy lab, where Throbbing Gristle are tearing rock apart with tape machines and electronics, accidentally sketching out the blueprint for industrial and noise.

So which late‑70s timeline do we step into together—the sweaty punk club, the art‑school dancefloor, the overlooked hard‑rock back road, or the experimental bunker? Your vote decides which of these worlds we blow up into a full episode.

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The Damned – Machine Gun Etiquette (1979)

Suggested by Eric Peterson

“Everybody knows London is calling and never mind the bollocks. Here’s the Sex Pistols right behind those records is machine gun etiquette by the Damned as one of the great 70s UK punk albums

Edging away from the full throttle garage punk of Damned Damned Damned … 1979 machine gun etiquette finds the first UK punk band release a single on the first UK punk band to release an album having broken up reformed and kicking off a new moment of evolution for their sound. This was around the time that Lemmy was in the band and it’s a record and not to be missed.”

Gang of Four – Entertainment! (1979)

Suggested by Darren Leach
If Machine Gun Etiquette is punk mutating in real time, Entertainment! is punk learning to dance while reading Marx. Released in 1979, Gang of Four’s debut is a seminal post‑punk album that chops up punk, funk, reggae, and dub, then welds it into something angular, danceable, and confrontational.
Lyrically, it’s all about capitalism, war, and alienation, but it never feels like homework—more like having your worldview reprogrammed over a jagged rhythm section and scraped-raw guitar lines. If you’ve ever thought, “How did we get from The Clash to Fugazi, Rage, and beyond?” this is one of the missing links.

Lone Star – Firing on All Six (1977)

Suggested by Richard Waterman
Time for the “wait, how have I never heard this?” pick. Firing on All Six is the second album from Welsh hard rock band Lone Star, released in 1977, and it leans into a heavier, more progressive-leaning sound than their debut. With new vocalist John Sloman in place, the record pushes dual guitars to the front—big riffs, dramatic turns, and that late‑70s “is this classic rock, proto‑metal, or early prog?” blur that so many bands never quite nailed.
It charted modestly in the UK but never fully crossed generations, making it a perfect candidate for a “how did this not become a staple?” deep dive. If you love the intersection of early Queen, Thin Lizzy, and UFO, this could scratch a very specific itch.

Throbbing Gristle – D.O.A.: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle (1978)

Suggested by Ian McIvor
And then there’s the curveball. D.O.A. isn’t rock in the traditional sense so much as the sound of rock’s corpse being rearranged in a basement lab. Released in 1978, this Throbbing Gristle album is a foundational industrial record: abrasive electronics, tape experiments, unsettling atmospheres, and an almost total rejection of conventional song structure.
It’s the kind of album that makes later industrial, noise, and experimental bands possible, even if most people never actually hear it—more cited than spun, more felt in influence than remembered in tracklists. If you want an episode that leans into “what even is music anymore?” territory, this is the chaos button.

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How the Poll Works

• Pick one album from the four above.

• Drop a comment:

  • What’s your history with the record?

  • First-time listen or long-time favorite?

  • Why does it deserve a podcast episode?

We’ll tally the votes, declare a winner, and then go full deep-dive on the top pick in an upcoming episode—history, context, sonics, and why it still matters (or doesn’t) today.

And if your personal 70s hill to die on isn’t on this list? Tell us that too. Drop your dream pick for a future poll in the hopper.

Suggest an Album

You toured with Metallica. You got MTV airplay. You peaked at #92.

So how does an album just disappear for nearly 40 years?

Metal Church released The Dark in October 1986, opened for Metallica, landed a video in heavy rotation, and spent 23 weeks on the Billboard 200. By any reasonable measure, they should have been a household name. They weren’t. They still aren’t. And figuring out why is exactly the kind of question this podcast exists to answer.

Origin Story

Kurt Vanderhoof formed Metal Church in San Francisco in 1980. The band relocated to Aberdeen, Washington the following year, making them an early fixture in the Pacific Northwest heavy metal scene before anyone outside the region was paying attention. Vanderhoof has been the sole constant in the band across every lineup change, every hiatus, every comeback.

By the time vocalist David Wayne joined and completed the classic lineup, something unusual was happening: this band from the Pacific Northwest was running in the same circles as the Bay Area thrash elite. They sold 70,000 copies of their 1984 self-titled debut independently before Elektra Records came calling. Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield reportedly urged Elektra to sign them before another label could. That is the level of peer respect Metal Church commanded in 1985.

The Dark followed in 1986, recorded with engineer Terry Date at the beginning of what would become one of the most consequential production careers in heavy music. It was released the same year as Master of Puppets. That timing is a large part of the story, as is Vanderhoof stepping back from live performance entirely after the album’s release, destabilizing the band at exactly the moment they needed to build on their momentum.

The Sound

What makes The Dark worth your time in 2025 is a combination no other band was quite pulling off in 1986: the aggression of thrash, the melodic instinct of NWOBHM, and the ambition of power metal, all occupying the same record without any of them canceling the others out.

The guitar work is the album’s backbone. Vanderhoof’s riffs carry a precision that owes something to early Metallica but a melodic sensibility closer to traditional British metal. The hooks feel structural, not grafted on.

Then there’s David Wayne. His range on The Dark is a genuinely underrated performance in 80s metal. He drops into guttural lows on “Ton of Bricks” and pivots to near-Bruce Dickinson territory without showing off. The voice carries information about the song’s emotional state. That’s rarer than it sounds.

The production is Terry Date’s earliest major work, and you can hear both its strengths and its limitations. There’s a Celtic Frost-ish doom atmosphere threading through several tracks, particularly the second side, that gives the album texture beyond pure thrash velocity. The drums, though, are coated in the period-typical reverb that dates the record more than anything else. The band themselves have since described it as “woefully over-produced,” and there’s something to that: the arrangements are sophisticated, but the sonics feel like they’re fighting the music.

The Songs

Side one is almost perfect. “Ton of Bricks” opens the record at a sprint and doesn’t waste a second of its 2:55. It’s the most unambiguous Metal Church statement on the album: direct, fast, no introduction needed.

“Start the Fire” is the track that shows off the band’s range most efficiently. The guitar hook in the chorus is the kind of thing you find yourself humming two days later without knowing why. “Method to Your Madness” stretches the arrangement further, pushing past four minutes with a tempo shift and a quiet section that proves these weren’t just speed merchants.

“Watch the Children Pray” is the outlier. It’s a genuine ballad, or as close to one as 1986 thrash metal was going to produce, with a half-tempo arrangement and a melodic shading that brings Queensrÿche to mind. That’s not a complaint. It’s the moment on the record that most clearly argues Metal Church were thinking beyond the genre’s conventions.

“Burial at Sea” closes the original side one with a driving momentum that’s hypnotic. There’s a cadence in the main riff that echoes Testament, a churning quality that keeps pressing forward even when the tempo shifts.

The second side is where the album loses some of its grip. “Psycho” is the track the band themselves point to as their most definitive statement, and it has its moments, but alongside “Western Alliance” it constitutes a stretch of the album that feels more generic than anything on side one. The hooks aren’t as sharp. The urgency softens. The title track itself is genuinely haunting, a slow-building, unsettling piece that justifies its placement as the album’s centerpiece, but “Psycho” and “Western Alliance” on either side of it don’t help it land with the weight it deserves.

The Context: 1986 and Why It Got Buried

Master of Puppets came out in March 1986. The Dark came out in October 1986. There is no version of that calendar year where The Dark doesn’t get swallowed by its shadow. Metallica were ascending toward cultural dominance. Every other band in the genre was operating under the same gravitational pull.

But Master of Puppets isn’t the only explanation. There was an image problem. AllMusic reviewer Eduardo Rivadavia described Metal Church in terms that were not kind to their visual presentation, and the band’s lack of a distinctive look in an MTV era was a real liability. They looked like five people who played in a metal band. That wasn’t enough in 1986.

The Metallica connection is real and documented, though not in the way the internet has claimed. There is a persistent rumor that Lars Ulrich tried out for Vanderhoof’s predecessor band Shrapnel before forming Metallica. Vanderhoof publicly debunked that story in 2016. The actual connection is better anyway: guitarist John Marshall, who became a member of Metal Church, filled in for James Hetfield on two separate occasions when James burned himself with stage pyrotechnics. That’s a footnote that runs through both bands’ histories like a quiet thread.

The Seattle Chapter Nobody Talks About

The story of Seattle in the 1980s is almost always told as a grunge origin story. What gets compressed into a footnote is the Pacific Northwest heavy metal scene that preceded Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden by nearly a decade.

Metal Church were part of that scene alongside Queensrÿche and Sanctuary. Three very different bands, same regional ecosystem. Queensrÿche were pushing toward progressive rock territory. Sanctuary, produced by Dave Mustaine, were the most overtly aggressive. Metal Church occupied the middle ground, combining thrash velocity with the melodic instincts that would later define power metal.

Terry Date, who engineered The Dark, also engineered Sanctuary’s Refuge Denied (1988). The fact that he went on to define the sonic character of grunge-adjacent metal with Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love and Badmotorfinger, then produce Pantera’s Cowboys from Hell, is not coincidental. He learned his craft in this ecosystem.

David Wayne died on May 10, 2005, from complications following a car accident. He was 47 years old. His death forecloses any reunion that might have brought renewed attention to the classic-lineup albums. Revisiting The Dark now carries that weight: this is the best work of a vocalist who is gone, on an album that never got the audience it was reaching for.

Verdict: Listen and Decide

The Dark holds a #389 ranking in Rock Hard magazine’s 500 Greatest Rock and Metal Albums of All Time. Encyclopaedia Metallum reviewers consistently treat it as a classic of the genre. Stone Sour covered the title track, which is how a generation of listeners first heard the song. The 30th anniversary threads on Reddit still turn up new fans who are stunned they went years without encountering this record.

So here’s what the episode asks: is the second half of The Dark a forgivable flaw in an otherwise essential album, or does it undermine the whole thing? Is David Wayne’s vocal performance here the equal of anything Bruce Dickinson was doing at the same moment? And what does it tell you about how musical canons form that this band, touring with Metallica, charting on the Billboard 200, landing videos on MTV, ended up as a deep cut?

Episode Highlights

• Intro: Scene-setting and poll results context, how The Dark beat Fastway, early Pantera, and Metallica for the community vote

• 0:47: Poll Results: The Dark Wins at 47%: breakdown of the combined Patreon and Substack vote and why the margin surprised the hosts

• 6:08: Band Background: Metal Church origins in San Francisco, relocation to Aberdeen Washington, Vanderhoof as the constant creative force, the Elektra Records signing story

• 12:23: What Works: The Thrash-Meets-NWOBHM Sweet Spot: Jason’s overview of the album’s tonal range and why the combination of aggression and melody holds up

• ~13:30: Method to Your Madness: the tempo shift, the quiet section, and why this track shows the band’s range beyond pure speed

• ~15:00: Start the Fire: the chorus guitar hook and how it holds up as a melodic anchor on the record’s strongest side

• ~19:44: Watch the Children Pray: the genuine ballad argument, the half-tempo arrangement, and the Queensrÿche-adjacent shading that makes it an outlier

• ~22:00: Burial at Sea: the driving cadence, the Testament comparison, and why this track closes side one with such momentum

• ~22:30: The Dark: the title track’s haunting atmosphere and the creepy quality that justifies the album name

• ~23:00: Ton of Bricks: the case for this two-minute-fifty-five-second opener as the most efficient Metal Church statement on the record

• 29:09: Terry Date Connection: how the engineer of this record went on to shape the sound of Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love, Badmotorfinger, and Pantera’s Cowboys from Hell

• 33:14: The Lars Ulrich Rumor: Vanderhoof’s 2016 debunking of the Shrapnel audition story and the real documented Metal Church/Metallica connection through John Marshall

• 35:16: What Doesn’t Work: The Second Half Sag: Psycho, Western Alliance, the reverb-heavy drum sound, and the honest case that the album runs out of ideas before it runs out of songs

• 43:38: The Verdict: where all three hosts land on The Dark after working through every track and its context

• 49:08: Outro: Jay’s Operation Rock and Roll 1991 cassette sidebar (Metal Church, Alice in Chains, Judas Priest, Motorhead, Fishbone)

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Join the Board of Directors at dmounion.com for to pick your album and join us on the podcast.

Have a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it here.

You remember how weird the 90s actually were, right?

Like, the decade didn’t just flip a switch from hair metal to grunge and call it done. There were bands doing completely different things at the same time. Power pop kids. Speed metal diehards. Melodic punk bands quietly writing arena-sized hooks in clubs that held 200 people. Alt-rock weirdos making covers records that had no business being as good as they were.

Most of them didn’t get the moment they deserved. But they got the music right. And that’s exactly what this poll is about.

Every few weeks, we open the floor to you. Four albums nominated by Dig Me Out subscribers, four very different 90s stories, and your vote decides which one we dig into on the show. No algorithm picking the winner. No editorial agenda. Just the community steering the ship, the way it’s always worked around here.

This month? We’re going deep into four records that each tell a different version of what the 90s could have been.

The Nominees

🎸 Goo Goo Dolls — Hold Me Up (1990)

Nominated by Keith P. Miller

Before “Iris” was on every movie trailer, before “Name” was soundtracking someone’s slow dance at prom, the Goo Goo Dolls were a loud, scrappy band from Buffalo that almost nobody outside of their scene had heard of.

Hold Me Up is that record. The hooks are already there. “Two Days in February” closes the album like a band leaving a breadcrumb trail to the sound they’ll perfect five years later. “A Million Miles Away” should have had a video. Should have had real label push behind it. Metal Blade just didn’t have the infrastructure that Warner Brothers would later bring to A Boy Named Goo.

The talent was always there. The machinery just hadn’t caught up yet. You know? We actually covered this one back in Episode 276 if you want a taste of what a deep dive sounds like.

🎵 Listen on YouTube

⚡ Battalion — Excessive Force (1991)

Nominated by Chuck Marshall

Picture a Michigan speed metal band that did everything right. They played tight. They played fast. They had the chops and the riffs and the attitude. The only problem? They showed up right as the industry decided speed metal wasn’t the party anymore.

Excessive Force is the sound of a band that would have been huge in 1987 dropping their best record in 1991. Grunge was moving in. Nu-metal was already being plotted in some A&R office somewhere. And Battalion was left standing at the door.

It’s a genuinely great metal record that got caught in the worst possible window. And that’s a story worth telling.

🎵 Listen on Bandcamp

🍁 The Killjoys — Starry (1994)

Nominated by Kyle Bittner

Here is a question: how does a Canadian power pop record this warm and this melodic and this immediately lovable not find a bigger audience?

Starry sounds like the kind of album that Teenage Fanclub fans would have passed around on dubbed cassettes if they had known it existed. Jangly guitars, big choruses, no pretense, total conviction. It spent decades as a CD and cassette-only release before finally getting a proper vinyl pressing. The kind of thing that survives purely on word of mouth from people who stumbled onto it and had to tell someone.

If you don’t know it, this vote might be the one that changes that.

🎵 Listen on YouTube

🔧 The Replicants — The Replicants (1995)

Nominated by Vadim Taver

Members of Failure, Tool, and a few others sat down and made an album of covers. That sentence probably sounds like a curiosity. It isn’t.

The Replicants is one of the quietly brilliant things to come out of the mid-90s alt-rock underground. These are musicians with real taste and real chops using other people’s songs to say something genuinely interesting. The originals don’t disappear. They just get refracted through a very specific lens, and what comes out the other side is something you didn’t expect. We actually spotlighted it in our One and Done episode years back, and it’s been in the conversation ever since.

Almost nobody talks about this record. That feels like a problem worth solving.

🎵 Listen on YouTube

🗳️ Cast Your Vote

🎤 Submit Your Own Nomination

We pull from listener suggestions every single round. If you’ve been sitting on an overlooked 90s rock album that deserves more than it ever got, drop it in the comments.

Tell us the album, the artist, and make the case for it in a sentence or two. What’s the 90s story it tells? Why does it belong in the conversation?

This show has always been listener-driven. 900 episodes in, and that hasn’t changed. Let’s hear what you’ve got. 🤘

Suggest an Album

If you’re a Nine Inch Nails fan, you know Trent Reznor doesn’t do anything halfway. So when Boys Noize — Berlin-based DJ and producer Alex Ridha, the guy behind remixes for Daft Punk and Depeche Mode, co-writing Lady Gaga’s Grammy-winning “Rain on Me,” and forming the duo Dog Blood with Skrillex — started opening for NIN on the 2025/26 Peel It Back Tour, it wasn’t just a typical support slot. Every night, Ridha joined Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on a B-stage for a four-song electronic detour deep into NIN’s catalog. It was unexpected, a little unhinged, and fans absolutely lost it.

That rapport didn’t come out of nowhere. Ridha had already been in Reznor and Ross’s orbit — contributing to Challengers, a full-length continuous dance remix of their Challengers film score, and lending production to the Tron: Ares OST and its companion remix record, Tron Ares: Divergence. By the time those B-stage sets became the highlight of the tour, the writing was on the wall. Nine Inch Noize — the collaborative project name hiding in plain sight — showed up on the Coachella 2026 lineup poster before anyone knew quite what it was. Now we have the album, released April 17, 2026, on Null Corporation/Interscope. And yes, Reznor’s wife and How to Destroy Angels vocalist Mariqueen Maandig adds talents to the project as well.

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A 1996 active rock radio hit with zero Spotify listeners thirty years later. Reacharound were British expats working Silverlake rehearsal spaces and playing shows with the Sex Pistols reunion, Cheap Trick, and Reverend Horton Heat, all on the strength of one single. “Big Chair” was the most-added track on modern rock radio for one week in August 1996. Then the band dissolved, the album vanished, and the story ended before most people knew it began.

Patron Darren Leeman brings this one to the table: a record he remembered only by a melody stuck in his head, which sent him on an eight-month search before he found the CD online. The result is a 43-minute genre sprint through British punk, rockabilly, power pop, and 60s mod, the kind of album that sounds like The Living End meets The Kinks with a Reverend Horton Heat detour midway through. If you respond to Super Drag or The Who at full volume, this record has something for you.

The album is not on streaming. You will need to find the CD. The discussion of why it vanished, what the album title means (it involves a British comedian who died on live television in 1984), and whether the back half holds up to the front half is all in the episode.

The Joke Americans Never Got

Here is one of the great “only-makes-sense-if-you’re-British” inside jokes ever pressed onto a major label record. Tommy Cooper was a six-foot-four Welsh prop comedian and magician who wore a red fez, performed tricks that appeared to fail (the failure was the joke), and died of a heart attack live on national television in 1984 at the age of 63. The studio audience at Her Majesty’s Theatre kept laughing as he slumped to the stage, because they assumed the collapse was part of his act. He was beloved across Britain. He was unknown in America.

When the members of Reacharound arrived in Los Angeles from the UK in the early 1990s and mentioned Tommy Cooper to Americans, they got the same blank stare every time. “Who’s Tommy Cooper?” That question, repeated back to them at enough bars and rehearsal spaces in Silverlake, became the title of their only album. The inside art of the CD depicts a stage with a curtain and a pair of shoes poking out below it, a visual eulogy that only sharpens the joke. In the pre-internet era of 1996, this title was a total void to American listeners. Walk into a record store, see a CD called Who’s Tommy Cooper, and you had nothing to go on. In the streaming era, you could Google it in five seconds and land on something genuinely poignant. The band picked the wrong decade for the bit.

The album name was the second-least commercially savvy decision they made. The first was the band name itself: a studio joke made during a rehearsal session that the drummer shouted at a Warner executive during a showcase. The rep loved it. It stuck. Frontman Matt Caisley later went on record saying he genuinely regretted it, noting that the name made the band hard to find. Their previous names, Medicine Show and The Great Unwashed, suggest a band with a cheerful gift for sabotaging their own marketability.

The Song That Should Have Launched a Career

The origin of “Big Chair” is almost too perfect. Around 1994, the band was on the verge of splitting as Medicine Show, rehearsing in a Silverlake space they could barely afford. Dusty Wakeman, best known at the time as Dwight Yoakam‘s producer, heard them through a wall. He told them not to break up. He offered to record five songs for free. The first song they tracked was a three-chord argument Caisley had written about a fight with his girlfriend. It was called “Big Chair.”

The song found its way onto college radio and then into rock programmers’ hands. In August 1996, it peaked at #22 on the Radio & Records Active Rock chart. For one week, it was the most-added track on modern rock radio, with pickups at WXRK New York, WBCN Boston, and Q101 Chicago. Cash Boxcalled the album “a stunning, fierce mix of nasty, instantly memorable rock and roll that goes from metal to rockabilly to Sex Pistols-y old time punk in one graceful, effortless swoop.”

That is a real critical response, from a real trade publication, about a record that currently has zero monthly Spotify listeners.

What makes “Big Chair” hold up is that it sounds nothing like a record that would have zero Spotify listeners. It opens with Caisley’s harmonica cutting through the mix like a switchblade, drops into a locked guitar-and-bass groove that would make The Living End jealous, and lands on a chorus so blunt and memorable that listeners were still humming it eight months after they had last heard it. That is not a hypothetical: one fan tracked down the CD online three decades later specifically because the chorus surfaced unbidden in his memory, with no band name attached. He had to work backward from a YouTube search for “Big Chair song” to find out who wrote it.

What the Record Actually Sounds Like

Who’s Tommy Cooper opens with “Big & Mean,” a bouncy, swaggering track that immediately establishes the band’s thesis: British punk energy filtered through rockabilly precision and power pop songwriting, delivered with more authority than anyone at a Trauma Records showcase in 1996 had any right to expect. The Kinks are audible. The Who are audible. The Clash surface on the harder edges. The drums, played by Adam Maples, who had previously worked with Legal Weapon and the Sea Hags before landing in Reacharound, swing exactly when the song needs swinging and lock down exactly when it needs locking.

The A-side is nearly flawless by any power-pop metric. “Big Chair” is the hit. “Nearest Bridge” turns surprisingly dark subject matter into something almost sunny, a tonal trick that should not work but does. “Hole in My Soul” is a punk freight train with the harmonica riding on top. “Then You Go” pulls the tempo down to a slow delta blues burn without losing any of the grit. “Seen It Before” is where the record tips its hand about what year it was actually built for.

“Seen It Before” is a 60s-soaked power-pop track with a Who-like stomp and an Elvis Costello melodic sensibility: the kind of song that sounds like it wandered in from 2001 by mistake. When the garage rock resurgence arrived and made Jet famous, Reacharound had already recorded the template. They were Jet before Jet. The Mooney Suzuki, who made that same 60s throwback energy fashionable in the early 2000s, essentially picked up where “Seen It Before” left off, five years after Reacharound had already put it down.

“Gene Autry,” a short whistling-driven psychobilly detour that sounds exactly like Reverend Horton Heat on a ranch, works as a midpoint palate cleanser. The back half drifts toward Southern rock on “Fools & Horses” (Black Crowes riffs planted firmly in a 1975 British hard rock context) and atmospheric delta blues on the overlong “Hand in My Pocket,” which would benefit from being half as long. Production consistency also starts to slip: “Shaking Like a Leaf” sounds live-ish, “Caught Up With Myself” sounds stripped down, and the overall sonics shift in ways that dilute the tight identity the first seven tracks built so convincingly. The B-side energy drop is real, even if the individual songs are not without merit.

What holds the whole record together despite the back-half wobble is Caisley’s voice: a rasp with just enough pitch control to land a hook, rhythmically precise in a way that ties the vocal identity across every genre pivot. The band sounds like the same band on every track, whether they are doing punk, rockabilly, or slow blues. That is harder to achieve than it sounds.

The Guitarist Who Went Somewhere Else

The most legible trace Reacharound left on music history runs through their guitarist, Ted Hutt. After the band dissolved, Hutt eventually found his way into Flogging Molly as a player, then pivoted to production, where he became one of the more respected rock producers of the 2000s and 2010s: Flogging Molly’s Drunken Lullabies, Dropkick Murphys‘ Going Out In Style, The Gaslight Anthem‘s The ‘59 Sound, multiple records by Old Crow Medicine Show. His production discography contains a Grammy winner and several Billboard top-10 debuts. His band has zero Wikipedia page and zero Spotify listeners.

The band’s collapse has a clean narrative: Interscope pushed them toward a Radiohead or U2 sound for a second album. They wrote 30 songs in a rehearsal room, seven days a week. Hutt fell in love with The Verve and tried to pull the band toward the Britpop orchestral direction. Caisley, who had built the band on “punky British invasion type of songs,” found himself recording material that, as he later said, “wasn’t me.” The label told him he didn’t mean it. He agreed. He quit the band.

No manager, no second single, label manipulation on tour expenses, a creative split at the exact wrong moment. The band lasted two years. The 30 unreleased songs have never surfaced.

Why It Vanished (And Why It Matters That You Find It)

The touring history of this band is, in retrospect, hilarious given their subsequent obscurity. They opened for the Sex Pistols reunion at Red Rocks. They went on the road with Cheap Trick. They toured with Reverend Horton Heat, who were good to them, though the Reverend’s crowd found Reacharound too poppy for their taste. They played with Korn, Fun Loving Criminals, Luscious Jackson, and the Butthole Surfers. They were everywhere in 1996, and then they were nowhere.

The album cover did not help. The font choices and color palette read as ska, not punk rockabilly, and in 1996 those were two very different market positions. There was no manager to point out that the album name was a British inside joke, the band name would create search problems before search engines existed, and the artwork looked like it came with a two-step and a horn section.

Caisley, after the band ended, worked at a restaurant for a time and felt embarrassed when patrons recognized him. He had, by his own account, felt like a failure. The music does not support that self-assessment.

The question Who’s Tommy Cooper? turns out to have a longer answer than the band intended: a British comedian who died on live television, yes, but also a record that reached #1 most-added on active rock radio and then disappeared so completely that its most comprehensive recent coverage is a podcast episode from 2026. The irony is not lost on anyone paying attention.

You can find Who’s Tommy Cooper on Discogs for a few dollars. You can stream the full album on YouTube. Whether the hosts and fans who revisited it agree it holds up as a Worthy Album, a Better EP, or something else. What do you think: is this a lost classic, a promising near-miss, or exactly the kind of album that should have broken through in 2001 instead of 1996? Leave a comment. Find the CD. And look up Tommy Cooper while you’re at it.

Episode Highlights

• Intro: Album overview and Darren Leeman’s patron pick: a record he ordered online after the chorus of ‘Big Chair’ popped into his head eight months earlier

• 1:53: Who was Tommy Cooper?: the life of British prop comedian Tommy Cooper, who died of a heart attack live on television in 1984 while the audience laughed thinking it was part of his act

• 8:32: Band history: Reacharound’s origin story: notes from a 2016 Hustle podcast interview with frontman Matt Kaisley, from near-breakup to college radio hit, the band name joke that stuck, and producer Dusty Wakeman recording their first songs for free

• 10:58: Touring, label troubles, and breakup: Reacharound toured with Sex Pistols, Cheap Trick, and Reverend Horton Heat but had no manager, only one single, and were pushed by Interscope toward a Radiohead sound that fractured the band

• 18:29: Patron comments: community members praise the album, compare it to Reverend Horton Heat and the Fireballs, and note the ska-looking album cover is misleading

• 20:16: Album overview: what works: Hosts describe the album’s core sound of English punk meets rockabilly with power pop songwriting, compared it to The Living End, The Kinks, The Who, and The Clash

• 22:22: Big Chair: The band’s college radio hit plays, a three-chord song Matt Kaisley wrote about an argument with his girlfriend

• 26:37: Seen It Before: Track 6 plays and the hosts immediately call out its 60s Who/Kinks energy and note it sounds like something the Mooney Suzuki would release five years later

• 31:14: Darren’s track-by-track breakdown: walk through all 12 tracks with notes: genre tags, influences spotted, and highlights like Imperial’s Elvis Costello vibe and Hand in My Pocket’s atmospheric slow burn

• 33:36: Gene Autry: A brief rockabilly/psychobilly track with whistling plays; Darren immediately calls out Reverend Horton Heat, and the hosts love it as a fun mid-album detour

• 35:02: B-side deep cuts: Fools & Horses and Hand in My Pocket: Discussion of the album’s Southern rock outlier Fools & Horses (Black Crowes comparisons) and the hypnotic, atmospheric Hand in My Pocket, plus debate over whether the back half loses momentum

• 40:03: What doesn’t work: the production inconsistency and energy drop on the B-side; Hand in My Pocket is too long

• 44:40: Drummer Adam Maples’ wild discography: the drummer previously played with Legal Weapon and the Sea Hags in the 80s and later recorded with Mark Lanegan, making for unexpected connections to heavier rock history

• 46:24: The verdict: All three hosts rate it Worthy Album; 75% of the Patreon community agrees, a rare unanimous verdict for an album so obscure it barely surfaces in search results

• 53:51: What if and what happened next: the album was ahead of its time and might have broken through in 2001’s garage rock moment; discussion of Matt Kaisley’s post-band life and a tangent about a completely different Milwaukee band called The Reacharounds

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Join the Board of Directors at dmounion.com to pick your favorite lost album and join us on the podcast.

Have a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it here.

If this hit for you, try these next

The Living End by The Living End (1998): The most direct sonic comparison the hosts make in this episode. Australian three-piece doing the same British punk-meets-rockabilly blueprint, with the same locked walking bass lines and tight two-minute-punch energy. If the A-side of Who’s Tommy Cooper landed for you, this record is the logical next listen.

The Wildhearts: P.H.U.Q. (1995): UK hard rock that pulls from the same metal, power pop, and punk intersection as Reacharound, with big sugary hooks over heavy riffs. The Wildhearts get a mention in the community comments for this episode, and the connection holds up across both records.

Superdrag: Head Trip in Every Key (1998): The retro-60s power pop angle that surfaces on “Seen It Before” and “Imperial” finds its closest equivalent in Superdrag’s approach: Kinks and Who filtered through 90s American college radio with just enough grit to keep it honest.

Patrick Testa threw The Dark into the ring, and the community backed it. So that’s our next deep dive podcast.

Maybe you wore out a dubbed Metal Church cassette in a rusted‑out Camaro. Maybe you’ve only seen the logo on old denim jackets. Maybe you clicked the name in the poll thinking, “I’ve heard of them, but never actually listened.”

Your homework

Between now and release day, treat The Dark like a little listening assignment.

• First spin: just vibe.
  Put it on front to back, no skipping, no shuffle. Let 1986 wash over you.

• Second spin: listen with a critical ear. As you listen, here are a few prompts we’ll be bringing into the episode:

  • Is The Dark a buried classic, or a fascinating almost‑there?

  • Does the cleaner major‑label sound help the songs, or sand off too much grit?

  • If you were DJ’ing an 80s metal night, which track is absolutely non‑negotiable?

  • And big picture: with songs this strong, why didn’t Metal Church break on the level of some of their peers?

You don’t have to agree with where we land. In fact, it’s more fun if you don’t.

Suggest an Album

Got a record you’re dying for us to put under the microscope?

Hit the form, make your case, and your pick might be the next one the whole community has to do homework on.

Suggest an Album