The Sanctuary Gazette

Zeu, alias of Matthew Zedolik from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, is releasing two singles, “Blind Among the Rust” and “Beyond Life and Death”, on Everything Evaporated. They follow the album “Existor”, released in July. Zedolik writes, plays, records and produces everything himself.

He places his approach somewhere between 1980s Springsteen, Billy Idol, Depeche Mode and Sisters of Mercy. Post-Punk.com's review instead hears a cross between Tom Waits and The Gun Club, with skeletal guitar in the manner of Rowland S. Howard and a theatrical sense close to Foetus. The echoing guitars evoke desert roads, the synths add an industrial chill, and the raspy vocals rest on a garage rock foundation.

His background explains the mix: teenage metal bands, The Ordinals on bass, American Buffalo Ghost on guitar, then recording studies in New York.

The darkwave and ethereal goth duo The Machine in the Garden, made up of Roger Fracé and Summer Bowman, released the single “The Beginning of All Things” on October 9. It follows “Space-Time”, released in May, the band's first new track in six years.

The lyrics, which include “We're on our path to nowhere” and “Blindly we fly / Blindly we fail”, deal with humanity's loneliness in the universe as it damages its own planet while searching for answers in space. The cover art extends that theme: it uses “A Sliver of Earth”, the sunlit horizon of the Earth in the darkness of space, photographed by the Artemis II mission in April.

The single, in its “single edit” version, is available on Bandcamp at a pay-what-you-want price. These two tracks are the band's first new music since the album Places in Between, released in 2020.

Poems For Dead People and Intertitle have joined forces on “There Are Spiders In My Dreams”, a track that blends post-punk, darkwave and experimental electronics. Writer and singer Ryan Kent lays a dark spoken word performance over Intertitle's electronic structures.

The song opens with a spacious synthesizer wash and a spoken voice, before a nervous guitar and a driving drum part come in. The rhythm keeps a post-punk regularity from start to finish, while the guitars move between surges in intensity, notably around the second minute, and more restrained passages.

The synthesizers build a dreamlike atmosphere in tune with the text, which deals with dreams, memory and unease. The voice keeps describing its visions right into the final fade-out, where the vintage-sounding keyboards and the rhythm section gradually disappear.

Baltimore electro-industrial duo Pygmy Children released “Malignant: Redux” on October 2 via Re:Mission Entertainment. The record revisits their debut album “Malignant” (1994) and the EP “Facedown” (1993). The recordings, made at Hit and Run Studios in Rockville (Maryland) with engineer Steve Carr, receive their first official remastering, by Jeff Mortimer of JM Mastering. Brian Roper did the cover art.

Brothers Pete and Brian Roper speak frankly of a raw sound, of novices who wanted something multilayered and frenzied, with synths pushed until the voices gave out and several drum tracks playing at once.

The digital edition gathers both releases in sixteen tracks. The digipak CD, limited to 100 copies, contains “Malignant” plus “Fear”, the B-side of “Facedown”. A box set of three signed CDs, limited to 25 copies and reserved for shipments within the United States, also exists.

For Wes Turner, the label's founder, the band shaped his taste for dark electronic music in the 1990s. The duo returned in 2025 with “Coincidental Strategies” and is preparing a fifth album, “Into The Silence”, led by the single “Proof in Lies”.

The Belgian electro project CauseNation, founded in 2015 by Ivan Heyligen (aka Vain Sacrosanct), is releasing its new album “World In Decay - The Final Chapter”. After a first EP in 2018 and a debut album in 2021 on Wool-E Discs, a label that no longer exists, the band has found a home at DressCode Black, the Antwerp label of Frederik Strobbe, known for his project Darkvolt. For now, the record is only available digitally.

The reviewer hears raw, dark and cold electro that sometimes makes room for a more melodic futurepop approach, as on “Not Alone” or the rousing chorus of “Saviour”. “Nowhere To Hide”, with an echo of Klinik, and “Messiah” are harder and aimed at dark electro fans.

“Obscene” belongs to endzeit electro, the title track plunges into a horror atmosphere over a modern EBM beat, “Overload Obsession” combines the Canadian and Belgian schools, and “So Complete” recalls Dance Or Die. “Far Away” closes the album with a nod to crossover electro. This diversity makes the record more accessible without scattering it. It can be streamed on Bandcamp.

The Californian trio HEALTH, straddling industrial and shoegaze, has once again collaborated with composer Tyler Bates. The result is called “Outer Dark” and can be listened to online.

The two parties had already worked together, with Chino Moreno, on Anti-Life in 2021. HEALTH thus continues its series of collaborations, in a universe that is both depressive and playful, fed by geek references.