Weekly Recap (April 22nd-28th, 2024)

Discover Weekly

- izzy reign - Broken by Design

- Left Spine Down - Last Daze (Funland Mix) by The Birthday Massacre

- Celldweller - Into the Void - Single Edit

- Reliqa - The Ritualist (The rapping came outta nowhere! Omg! They dropped / are dropping a new album this year, I gotta check that out...)

- Employed To Serve x Alien Weaponry - Sun Up To Sun Down - Remix

- Enter Shikari x WARGASM (UK) - The Void Stares Back (A pretty wild ride! Going so fast across the genres I'm sure I missed some ;) )

- Dope ft. Drama Club - Lovesong (Wow. An unexpected cover. In many different ways. First of all, The Cure and Dope. 2nd of all, the electronic industrial rock... Pretty cool!)

- Ice Nine Kills - Assault & Batteries (I've never heard Ice Nine Kills before, and this is not how I imagined them sounding! This is so weird! And fun!)

- Zero 9:36 - Stuck In My Ways

- Jinjer - Teacher, Teacher! (Never heard this song, I've heard the title, tho, when Pisces was a hit. She's such a dope vocalist.)

Knox Hill, Cliff Beats, Anthony Ray, ThatSingerReactions and Black Pegasus started a podcast called What's The Word! I liked it, very educational hearing professionals discuss hiphop together.

On Wednesday morning, heard Azahriah's four moods for the first time. Very nice! Very talented. Have to check out how much music he's got and do a Deep Dive. Right off the bat, after hearing the first song, I know the rest of it's probably gonna be dope as well. I'd say his music is alternative pop, with elements from hiphop and folk. But like, what even is genre anymore? :D Especially artists this young - Azahriah is only 22. He's a decade younger than me.

Gen Z is so cool. They don't care about labels or boxes, including music genres. They grew up with smartphones, listening to all of the music genres. Unlike my generation, who typically grew up listening the music that other people chose for them - what was on the radio, the record store, the library. When I got into metal at 11 years old, the internet was still a dial up. My parents allowed me to use to it an hour a day. I got into metal because there was this tv channel that would show music videos a couple of hours in the afternoon and they showed Nightwish's Nemo and that was the first time I heard metal with clean vocals. Finland is a big metal country, the biggest metal bands are up there, charting with the pop, rock and hiphop.

So, there was that channel, and a couple of music related tv shows I watched, and the radio. When I was 15, Radio Rock was founded and it changed my life. I would listen to it 24/7 when I was home. Wake up earlier on Saturday and Sunday so I could hear Klaus Flaming talk about music. He's a rock journalist, has been for decades, and his show back in the day consisted of a theme, and then he'd play songs relating to that theme or each other, and explain the history and correlations and everything. People I know IRL are often impressed how much I know about music. Maybe half the stuff I know, I learned from listening to Klaus for hours on end every weekend.

Other than tv and radio, my main source of finding new music was the library. I loaned all the books they had on the history of metal music, read through them all and made notes of the bands and albums. I listened to all the metal albums I wrote about that they had, and then all the rest they had. Then all the rock and punk albums. I listened to one album each morning before going to school and going through all the records took me about a year or two. It was quite a small library. When I ran out of those, I listened through all the other artists of other genres that I had at least heard of. Heard some classics of blues, hiphop and electronic music that way. I continued to listen all the new CDs they got until I moved out of town at 19. When I got my first laptop and mp3, I'd copy all the songs I liked onto my computer and then pick and choose a mix that'd fit my mp3. (That's legal here, to make a few copies of a music file for personal use.) Later I'd download songs from YouTube (using outside programs, this is not legal). I still have that mp3, I have one Weekly Recap where I listened to the music on there.

I'd write down any new albums that dropped that I knew I wanted to get, and then maybe once every 1-3 months I'd travel on train to the nearest city on a Saturday, and go shopping for music, clothes and other stuff. I'd go on the morning train, go to Anttila (a department store chain) to get new records and items, sometimes clothes. Then I'd go to Levykauppa Äx (a record store chain) and buy 3 older CDs (they had this ongoing sale thing where 3 CDs bought together was cheaper than buying 3 of them individually). Then eat lunch somewhere. And then go to my favorite second hand store to get clothes. And then come back on the afternoon train. I would save up my allowances to use on these shopping trips.

Release Radar

- Knox Hill ft. Josh Schulze - Best of Myself (Like I wrote in my Initial Thoughts post, this song got to me like no other song has in months. He's told about the cancer scare him and his wife went through and of course I've felt bad for them. Sympathetic for what they went through. But this song made me live through that with Knox. This song is an amazing piece of art. 10/10.)

- Twenty One Pilots - Backslide (Cool. I like the verses especially. Probably an unpopular opinion, but I don't care for this hook...)

- Knocked Loose ft. Poppy - Suffocate (His vocals aren't for me. But it's so cool Poppy can match that, that this is still going to the Metal playlist. This is probably the hardest I've ever heard her go! She can match his energy, 💯!)

- Savage Ga$p x Ugovhb - pretty girls haunt me (The vocals in the beginning sounded like a burp 😂 Otherwise the song's ok.)

- YNG Martyr x Token - Melancholy Dreams (This is kind of a bop!)

- Unlike Pluto - Lost Inside (A bit more... rock? Than the songs I've heard from him in the past. But that's alright. He still got the same voice and production style that I love.)

- Nik Nocturnal ft. Lindsay Schoolcraft - Never Again (Let Me Sleep) (Pretty good. Her voice is like a mixture of Amy Lee and Anette Olson - airy like Amy's, but more pop-style, like Anette's.)

- Anthony Ray - Training Day (N0ice.)

- Nathan James x Arankai - Paranormal (Nice screams, a pretty good song.)

- Mike's Dead - Bestrafe Mich (Punish Me) (It's a bit campy, but if you know my music taste at all, you know I like campy humor. This song's fun!)

- RAEGAN - FUCK RAEGAN (I LOOOOOVE her song STALKER and subscribed on Spotify to hear a few songs more and make up my mind if I like her overall, or just the one song. I do like this. Not as much as STALKER, but this is a bop, and it's The Vibe... What more could I ask for?)

- Wheel - Disciple (They have an album coming soon. I'm still not sure if I love this of it's just ok...)

- Hanging Garden - The Garden - Live Remake (OMG this is 🔥! The second song I hear from this EP - I'm gonna go and like the rest of the songs on the EP as well, I bet they're just as dope!)

- Dawn of Ashes - The Hollowing (Quite alt,but definitely in the good way.)

- Knives At Sea x Easy Mccoy x Jade Josephine - Drip (What in the banger?!!)

- Dust in Mind - Speak For The Voiceless - Instrumental Version

- Don Johnson Big Band feat. Emma Salokoski - Unbroken (I do prefer the old music, but this is still great. Quite alt, but they've always been quite alt. Kinda comes with it to not keep doing the same music decade after decade.)

Also Void Chapter and The Vision Bleak had new music, pretty dope.