Industrial/Noise charts

Review: Margaret Chardiet's semi-regular album outings as Pharmakon are always worth a listen, if only to recoil at the intensity of her unsettling blends of buzzing industrial noise, paranoid vocal screams, throbbing aural textures, forthright mangled guitar riffs and rusty, razor-sharp power electronics. "Devour" is the artist's fourth album for Sacred Bones and her first new set for two years. It explores similar sonic territory to its predecessors, offering claustrophobic, mind-mangling soundscapes that are creepy, disturbed, awe-inspiring and sonically challenging in equal measures. In some ways, calling out individual tracks as highlights seems pointless: this is a singular, ever-changing work that sees Chardiet escort us on a nightmarish journey through experimental extremes.

Review: Luis Vasquez is the artist behind The Soft Moon and on his latest album we find him in his most confessional and self-reflective mood to date. An array of his inner most feelings are laid bare here for all to wallow in on this cathartic and soothing fifth full-length album. It brings all new emotion to post-punk industrial with two standout collaborations with fish narc and Alli Logout of Special Interest adding further greatness to this instant classic. It is now 12 years since Luis debuted his first album, but this might be his best work yet.

Review: Originally conceived in 2019 during a tour with industrial hardcore purveyors Uniform, Japanese psychedelic noise-rock juggernauts Boris would invite their co-conspirators on stage to reimagine the trio's classic "Akuma no Uta" as part of their encore, with the resulting chemistry inspiring both acts to begin crafting a fully collaborative album. Many years of exchanging ideas from one home studio base to another has finally bore fruit in the form of the hideous yet glorious Bright New Disease. Combining almost every nuance of each group's genre-less machinations, the project swells and extends in every sonic direction from harsh walls of screeching noise to retrofitted Japanese D-beat hardcore, with time in between for aquatic, shoegazing serenity and mechanized industrial venom.