Pleasure, shame, and survival often arrive tangled together, indistinguishable in the moment. 'Camgirl', from Crippling Alcoholism, takes that entanglement as its starting point. Rather than separating desire from damage, the record allows them to coexist, tracing a path through obsession, performance, and persistence without offering clean resolution.

'Camgirl' is the 2025 breakthrough album from Boston’s Crippling Alcoholism, a record that frames pop immediacy against obsession, endurance, and collapse. Built from ear-wormy hooks and abrasive noise rock textures, the album smuggles grotesque and confrontational subject matter into songs that remain deliberately melodic. Pleasure and revulsion blend throughout, with choruses that linger even as the lyrics refuse comfort.

Released on September 12, 2025, 'Camgirl' follows a loose narrative centered on a sex worker moving through cycles of exploitation and survival, treating intimacy as spectacle and visibility as threat. Songs flicker between desire and despair, confession and performance, flooded with artificial light. Despite its subject matter, the record resists nihilism. Its closing moments arrive quietly triumphant, not through escape or redemption, but through persistence itself.

Originally released on vinyl by Portrayal of Guilt Records, the first pressing of 'Camgirl' sold out quickly. The Flenser reissue makes the album widely available for the first time, reaffirming it as a defining statement from a band operating at the intersection of pop form, noise, and lived experience.

TRACK LISTING

1. Mr. Sentimental
2. Saran Wrapped Cash
3.LADIES' NIGHT (feat. Luxury Skin)
4. Pay Pigs
5. Bedrot
6. MONET
7. Pretty In Pink (feat. Luxury Skin)
8. Pliers (feat. Luxury Skin)
9. Screentime
10. I Have A Key To Your House
11. CAMGIRL
12. Sweet Talk (feat. Ameokama)
13. TARAVISTA (feat. Luxury Skin)
14. Mary Kate & Ashley
15. Despair (feat. Latter)

There's a tendency in metal to mistake aggression for honesty, volume for depth. To confuse the performance of darkness with its actual weight. 'Hidden Fires Burn Hottest', the new album from San Francisco-based post-black metal band Bosse-de-Nage, sidesteps this entirely. It’s the group’s most fully realized work yet, precisely because it refuses to be pinned down.

Bosse-de-Nage have been working with The Flenser for over fifteen years. They were one of the first bands the label ever partnered with and have the longest active relationship in the label's history. But unlike most bands who build momentum through constant touring and visibility, Bosse-de-Nage has largely existed apart from the music world's usual machinery. They've evolved on their own terms, in relative isolation, allowing the work to develop without outside pressure or influence. What began rooted in black metal anonymity has mutated into something that actively defies categorization. The aggression is still there, but it's no longer the point.

'Hidden Fires Burn Hottest' finds the band treating emotions like physical objects, feelings with spatial properties. 'No Such Place' describes a space that can't exist but does anyway, somewhere between thought and location. 'Immortality Project' examines infinite possibility not as promise but as problem, endless options collapsing under their own weight. These songs don't use metaphor to describe emotion. They make emotion into something you could theoretically touch.

Tracked by Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Oathbreaker) at Atomic Garden East and mixed and mastered by Richard Chowenhill of Agriculture, 'Hidden Fires Burn Hottest' was years in development, with some tracks beginning in 2018. The long writing process offered time that most records don't get. Time to live with ideas, revise endlessly, to let structures settle. For the first time, lyricist Bryan Manning wrote everything in advance, creating a surplus to pull from rather than working under deadline pressure. The difference shows.

Coming off 'Further Still', an album built on constraint and economy, Bosse-de-Nage sought the opposite: sprawl, strangeness, fewer rules. Space for ideas to develop without rushing them. Dynamics that move through quiet as much as noise. Presence earned through atmosphere instead of volume. The record even includes 'Mementos', which might be considered the first love song the band has ever written.

Nothing here coheres into a theme. These are pieces pulled from low moments and private feelings made public through sound. The band has never been interested in positivity, in music that resolves cleanly or offers comfort. But bleakness doesn't mean humorlessness. There's something darkly funny running through much of it, even when it shouldn't be.

'Hidden Fires Burn Hottest' doesn't explain itself. It just insists: what you feel is as real as what you can see.

TRACK LISTING

1.Where To Now?
2. Mementos
3. In The Name Of The Moth
4. With A Shrug
5. No Such Place
6. Triangular Dream
7. Underwater
8. Frenzy
9. Immortality Project
10. Leviathan

Before Chat Pile took on sold out tours and widespread critical acclaim, they played Roadburn 2023, their biggest show to date, in front of a packed room of 3,000 on the festival's main stage. Fresh off the release of God’s Country, the Oklahoma quartet brought their suffocating, sludgy noise rock to Tilburg for their first ever European performance, delivering a set that felt like a milestone. The bleakness, the anguish, the raw absurdity—it all scaled up effortlessly, proving that Chat Pile’s chaos could consume any audience, no matter the size.

The set was recorded and later remixed by the band’s longtime engineer Jared Stimpfl, capturing the full weight of the performance. The result is something both massive and unrelenting, a document of Chat Pile at a pivotal moment, pushing their sound to its heaviest and most visceral extremes.

"A gut-churning amalgam of molten guitars, pile-driving drums, and agonized howls, Chat Pile’s sound is as ugly as their inspiration." Pitchfork

"The bleakness, the anguish, the raw absurdity — it all scaled up effortlessly, proving that Chat Pile’s chaos could consume any audience, no matter the size." Bandcamp"

TRACK LISTING

1. “Hello, Hello, Hello” 00:44
2. Why - Live At Roadburn, 2023 03:11
3. “Thoughts On The ‘Dam” 00:36
4. Tropical Beaches, Inc. - Live At Roadburn, 2023 03:39
5. “What A Guy” 00:53
6. Pamela - Live At Roadburn, 2023 04:25
7. “Beloved By Toni Morrison, Check It Out” 00:45
8. Cut - Live At Roadburn, 2023 04:14
9. “Do Y’all Got Arby’s Here?” 00:35
10. Rainbow Meat - Live At Roadburn, 2023 02:17
11. “Setlists Are For Cowards” 00:48
12. Anywhere - Live At Roadburn, 2023 05:55
13. “Talked About Robocop Already” 01:01
14. Crawlspace - Live At Roadburn, 2023 04:35
15. “Two More Songs” 00:43
16. Dallas Beltway - Live At Roadburn, 2023 04:17
17. “My Mom Would Never Forgive Me” 00:57
18. Garbage Man - Live At Roadburn, 2023 04:07

There’s a kind of quiet violence in how music is consumed today—flattened into background noise, sonic perfume fed into algorithms, sold as lifestyle. It’s entertainment as anesthesia. Sound without the weight. The Spiritual Sound, the new full-length from Los Angeles–based band Agriculture, stands as a pointed refusal of this condition. This is not a playlist. This is not a vibe. It is a demand.

Across its runtime, The Spiritual Sound traces a narrative arc through extremes: searing, sky-cracking catharsis on side A; a slow-burning, devotional undercurrent on side B. The album is largely a fusing of the visions of its two principal songwriters, Dan Meyer and Leah Levinson: distinct voices, deeply complementary.

Meyer writes like someone clawing toward the divine through noise, channeling Zen Buddhism, historical collapse, ecstatic grief. Levinson’s songs move differently: grounded in queer history and AIDS-era literature, amid the suffocating fog of the present, they carry the weight of survival as daily ritual. Her writing asks how to honor queer community and collective struggle without turning it into identity branding or personal mythmaking: how to stay honest, how to stay present. Though distinct, their voices converge in a singular spiritual grammar—one that defines the totality of The Spiritual Sound, not as separate parts, but as one unified expression.

Agriculture’s formation mirrors this duality. What began as a loose collaboration between Kern Haug and Dan Meyer in the Los Angeles noise scene evolved into a shared pursuit of the sublime through heavy music. With the additions of Richard Chowenhill and Leah Levinson, the project solidified into the band’s current form. The ecstatic black metal foundation was laid on 2022’s The Circle Chant, expanded into something more precise and far-reaching on their 2023 self-titled full-length, and deepened further with 2024’s Living Is Easy: a record that embraced devotional intensity and radiant heaviness in equal measure.

Agriculture doesn’t offer salvation. The Spiritual Sound isn’t a map out of the fire. What it offers instead is presence: a confrontation with the moment, however unbearable, however divine. It insists that meaning is still possible, even in a world hell-bent on reducing everything to content, and where suffering itself can be conducive to recovery. As the Buddhist saying goes “the only way out is in.”

TRACK LISTING

1 My Garden
2 Flea
3 Micah (5:15am)
4 The Weight
5 Serenity
6 The Spiritual Sound
7 Dan's Love Song
8 Bodhidharma
9 Hallelujah
10 The Reply

In the spring of 2019, a new rock band consisting of four otherwise ordinary Okies would arise out of seemingly nowhere, swiftly turning heads with a grotesque new take on noise rock fuelled by the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. Taking its name from the towering mounds of toxic waste that stand as monuments to capitalism’s cruel hubris across its home state, Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile made an immediate impression, soon culminating in the release of its landmark 2022 debut album, 'God’s Country' and 2024’s expansive follow up 'Cool World'.

While the massive success of 'God’s Country' would propel the quartet from the status of underground favorites to an international sensation, Chat Pile’s mission to take rock music to new zeniths of intensity was part of the plan from the very start. In fact, during its first handful of months as an active project, Chat Pile began writing and recording some of the heaviest, hellish, and harrowing music of its entire catalogue, laying the foundation of the themes and traits that would eventually manifest in the band’s debut LP. The result of these sessions would be a pair of EPs, 'This Dungeon Earth' and 'Remove Your Skin Please', released in the summer and winter of 2019, respectively.

Initially put out by Reptilian Records in 2020, The Flenser is proud to present a special reissue of Chat Pile’s pivotal first two EPs, each compiled onto a single disc. This dual EP compilation chronicles the earliest moments of the Oklahoma City quartet’s discography, a snapshot of the band’s pre-Flenser days and of the eight tracks of noxious, nihilistic noise rock that would propel the Midwest band to a globe-spanning, underground heavyweights.

TRACK LISTING

1. Face
2. Rainbow Meat
3. Rat Boy
4. Crawlspace
5. Dallas Beltway
6. Mask
7. Davis
8. Garbage Man

Planning For Burial is the solo project of Thom Wasluck, emerging from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It’s Closeness, It’s Easy is the long-awaited follow-up to 2017’s Below The House. If Below The House was about returning home, following in the footsteps of one’s father and joining a union, and leaving behind youth’s wild days, It’s Closeness, It’s Easy embraces what comes next—the weight of all years, the quiet shifts, the reckoning with what remains. This record is many things. It captures the slow drift of time, the unnoticed shifts in a loved one—the creeping changes in mental health, the quiet pull of addiction, the kind of grief that settles in the bones rather than announces itself.

At its core, It’s Closeness, It’s Easy is about stepping into middle age and taking stock. It confronts the reality of living with the hand that’s been dealt and searching for meaning in what remains. It speaks to loss—the crushing weight of saying goodbye to a beloved 17-year old cat, the slow-motion grief of watching friends self-destruct, the inescapable passage of time as it bears down on aging parents and the self. But it also reflects the warmth of reconnection, the kind of love that never burns out but instead deepens. The feeling of picking up where things left off, untouched by the years in between.

While written over the course of two years, the recording process reflects a sense of immediacy. Rather than assembling songs piece by piece over time, the album took shape in singular, immersive sessions—less an act of construction, more an unveiling of something already waiting to take shape.

Rooted in a staunch DIY ethos, Wasluck handles every aspect of Planning For Burial project himself—recording the music, designing the artwork, and performing live as a one-man band. He books his own tours, ever and independent creative. This hands-on approach has led Planning For Burial to play hundreds of shows solidifying his place in the underground music scene. A defining moment came in 2018 when he performed at the Meltdown Festival in London, curated by Robert Smith of The Cure.

TRACK LISTING

1. You Think
2. Movement Two
3. (blueberry Pop)
4. A Flowing Field Of Green
5. With Your Sunglasses On Like A Ghoul
6. Grivo
7. Twenty-Seventh Of February
8. Fresh Flowers For All Time
9. Farm Cat, Watching

Received an 8.4 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork.

Low-fi slowcore and ambient from the San Francisco Bay Area. For fans of Grouper, Midwife, The Flenser. The music of San Jose-based artist Kathryn Mohr exists in a liminal space of auditory dissociation. Drawing inspiration from lost items washing up on the shore of the San Francisco Bay, Mohr’s art chases the ephemeral nature of humanity, the warping of memory, and how trauma changes one’s experience of this world. Her new album Waiting Room out on The Flenser was written and self-recorded over the course of a month in eastern Iceland, within the walls of a disused fish factory surrounded by remote nature. Mohr spent hours immersed in the writing and recording of this album in a windowless concrete room lit with a string of multi-coloured light bulbs (which made their way into the album art), taking breaks to wander the factory or disappear up the shoreline—field recorder in hand. What came out of those recording hours are songs inspired by horror as extravagant as limb amputation by a faulty elevator and lyrics as maze-like and misguided as the torturous love and fears they depict. During this period of isolation in the tiny fishing village of Stöðvarfjörður, Mohr was all too aware of a feeling of waiting, attuned to all the worm-like emotions and memories that crawl out of the ground when there is nothing and no one to distract. She spent most time in the factory, which had sat derelict for a decade, and was in the process of being repurposed into a space for artists, with many parts left untouched since the last days of fish production and other rooms made new with heat and light. This state of incompleteness, of loss of meaning, and repurposing became a mirror of her inner world, her abandoned ideas of home, love, affection, and meaning dissolved by traumatic memories of violence. Waiting Room is a processing of nearly untouchable emotions of rebuilding the foundation for which elusive words like affection, passion and home can have a meaning weatherproof to and detangled from the direct, physical and emotional violence that permeates our experiences on earth.

TRACK LISTING

1 Diver
2 Rated
3 Driven
4 Petrified
5 Take It
6 Elevator
7 Prove It
8 Horizonless
9 Cornered
10 Wheel
11 Waiting Room

Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift—a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.

Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks.

Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.

While Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”, what the band depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Uncompromising blasts of guitar, paddling kick drum and hardcore bursts, reminiscent of Jane Doe era Converge or Crowpath's Red On Chrome. Impeccable, scathing hardcore.

TRACK LISTING

I Am Dog Now
Shame
Frownland
Funny Man
Camcorder
Tape
The New World
Masc
Milk Of Human Kindness
No Way Out

Oklahoma’s Chat Pile have had an exciting 2022; they released their album God’s Country, toured the midwest and east coast in support of the album, announced their appearance at Roadburn Festival 2023, and while the band is working on LP2, they’re revealing details for their score for the indie film Tenkiller.

While not a proper full-length album, the Tenkiller score was written and recorded in the winter of 2020, and it waxes and wanes from the signature Chat Pile sound but also ventures into new ones including arena country music.

The band comments, “The music we made for Tenkiller is quite a bit different than what you may come to expect from us. We were given the freedom to really experiment and explore territories that we’ve never done before.” They continue, “It’s not going to be for everyone, but we hope some of you connect with what we set out to do.”

TRACK LISTING

1. TAH
2. Badman
3. Dad’s Drunk
4. The Fabulous Shitheads
5. LE
6. The Return Of Badman
7. Lake Time (Mr. Rodan)
8. Kids
9. QUAH
10. Badman 3: Die Badman Die
11. B4dm4n
12. Punishment Box
13. Beck’s Theme
14. OK
15. Badman V: A New Beginning
16. Bleeding Out
17. Tenkiller