Music

Hailing from Santa Cruz, CA, hardcore band Scowl has burst onto the scene as one of the most authentic young voices in the genre, influenced by everything from '80s hardcore, punk, and oi, to modern, alternative pop. The band has made a name for themselves with songs that are as reflective and dark as they are fun. A new addition to the Flatspot Records family, the label presents their new album "How Flowers Grow." Vinyl version includes digital download.

Track Listing:

1. Bloodhound
2. Dead To Me
3. Pay Privilege Due
4. Trophy Hunter
5. Seeds To Sow
6. Idle Roaring Room
7. Fuck Around
8. Roots
9. Four Walls
10. How Flowers Grow

Planning for Burial is the solo project of Thom Wasluck, emerging from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It’s Closeness, It’s Easy, his fourth album, arrives on May 30th via The Flenser.

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 your 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 the 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 an 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.

As of 2025 Planning For Burial has existed for 20 years. Wasluck’s debut full-length, Leaving (2009), was released on Enemies List Home Recordings, the in-house label of Have a Nice Life. In 2014, he joined The Flenser with Desideratum, becoming a cornerstone for the label’s connection to community and ethos. The follow-up, Below the House (2017), was met with widespread acclaim, further establishing Planning for Burial as a voice that's singular and unique.

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

Melbourne, Australia based five piece AWOL are creating hardcore for hardcore’s sake - staking their claim in the genre with their debut album Tear ‘Em To Bits, due out April 26th on Last Ride Records and Flatspot Records. Following 2021’s AWOL EP, the nine songs on Tear ‘Em To Bits build on the band’s monstrous sound, filled with gruff vocals, groove-driven riffs, and meaty breakdowns.

AWOL hit the recording studio in Melbourne over the course of 2023, where the band captured their love of classic hardcore in its purest form on the upcoming Tear ‘Em To Bits. Drawing from bands like Madball and Biohazard, AWOL pack an intense aggression across the record. The lyrics are punishing, covering everything from deception and failed relationships to addressing drug addiction and police brutality.

With Tear ‘Em To Bits, proves that AWOL has earned a seat at the table as one of the most compelling new bands in the genre they love. As the band simply states: “The only goal was to make a good hardcore record that we were proud of and that our friends could get behind.”

Track listing:

1. Lejos De Dios
2. AWOL
3. Who You Were
4. Oblivion
5. Tear 'Em To Bits
6. Kingdom
7. Fall From Grace
8. So Many Nights
9. Lost Again

Drawing from the bands 21 years’ experience, this album is set to solidify Darkest Hour’s legacy as a metal power house. Raw as all hell, musically complex, melodic, yet cutting with razor blade precision, Darkest Hour’s 9th full length record, Godless Prophets and the Migrant Flora is fierce and hungry for blood.

Track listing:

1. Knife in the Safe Room
2. This is the Truth
3. Timeless Numbers
4. None of this is the Truth
5. The Flesh & The Flowers of Death
6. Those Who Survived
7. Another Headless Ruler of the Used
8. Widowed
9. Enter Oblivion
10. The Last of the Monuments
11. In the Name of Us All
12. Beneath It Sleeps

There’s no other band like Angel Du$t. In fact, the singular group is almost defined by how far they stand apart from the pack. So if saying Angel Du$t aren’t like anyone else is a no-brainer, then what are they like? Are they cutting edge genre-destroyers or one of the last authentic guitar bands standing? Are they blunt force aggression incarnate or earnest experimentalists? Are they the hardcore version of an indie band or is it the other way around? You might ask yourself these kinds of questions while taking in the totality of Angel Dust’s decade-plus journey–but the band’s new album, COLD 2 THE TOUCH, suggests that maybe it’s not so complicated after all. Or as vocalist/mastermind Justice Tripp puts it: ”Angel Du$t is rock & roll.”

COLD 2 THE TOUCH captures this simple fact better than ever before. The 26-minute blast of eclectic and hardhitting music makes it clear that Angel Du$t can’t be contained within the confines of narrow subgenres, and that a term as elemental as rock & roll might actually fit like a glove. This is the band’s most overtly ferocious album in some time–a blender of hard riffs and big hooks that are matched by Tripp’s open-hearted existentialism.

A constellation of collaborators makes COLD 2 THE TOUCH a captivating listen that’s constantly surprising the listener: guitarist Jim Caroll makes his presence especially felt on “Zero,” a veritable Angel Du$t epic that clocks in at over three minutes of spiraling riffs and features vocals from Wes Eisold of American Nightmare and Cold Cave; “Downfall” has the growl of Restraining Order’s Patrick Cozens; “Man On Fire” taps UK punk legend Frank Carter; and “The Beat” includes guttural guest vitriol from Taylor Young of Twitching Tongues, Deadbody, and more.

The album’s final one-two punch of “The Knife” and “The Beat” sum up exactly what makes Angel Du$t such a special band. This is a creative endeavor where heart-on-sleeve musings about the finite nature of life can coexist with the unbridled thrill of violence-enducing riffs, where real humanity can flourish and being true to yourself and your own spectrum of thoughts, interests, and feelings takes primacy above all else. “This is who I am,” says Tripp. “and I speak for the band too: these are people who are always going to be playing aggressive rock & roll. It’s happening whether you like it or not. I’m me, and if you get in my way I’m gonna crush you.”

Track Listing:

1. Pain Is A Must
2. Cold 2 The Touch
3. I'm The Outside
4. Jesus Head
5. Zero
6. Downfall
7. DU$T
8. Nothing I Can't Kill
9. Man On Fire
10. The Knife
11. The Beat

Tour Exclusive limited to 500 units 

Track Listing:

A		ほどけていく x 振りきれた風景 Loose X Red	21:34
B		めまいの椅子 x ふりおろす Giddiness Throne X Evil Wave Form	20:23
C		干渉 x 泣きたがるスピード Interference Demon X The Evilone Which Sobs	21:44
D		アバオアク A Bao A Qu -Dronevil Mix-	17:38

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.

Nestled away in the UKs quiet, picturesque east coast town of Ipswich, the lads in Basement are conflicted between the comfort of the beautiful familiar and the allure of escape. This duality pervades the band's existence. As frontman Andrew Fisher's gravelly yowl skips and stretches over driving rhythms and poignant guitar melodies, its clear Basement expertly walk the line between the contrasts of heartrending pop and gruff post-hardcore. When working through a slow-burning mid-tempo or pounding out driving punk, Basement has a quiet layer of jagged desperation weaving songs together under the smooth melodic surface. Much like a coming of age, the songs are toiling, torn and bursting at the seams.

Tracklist:
1. Fading
2. Plan To Be Surprised
3. Canada Square
4. Crickets Throw Their Voice
5. Earl Grey
6. Ellipses
7. Every Single Word
8. Yoke
9. Grayscale
10. March

Pressing Information:
First Press:
25 Black (Record Release Cover)
80 Black (UK Tour Cover)
200 Grey
300 Green
500 Black

Second Press:
200 Pink
300 Cream
500 Black

Third Press:
500 Red
500 Coke Bottle Green

Fourth Press:
2000 Blue w/ White Starburst

Fifth Press:
2100 Translucent Gold
900 Red/White/Blue Starburst (Hot Topic Exclusive)

Sixth Press:
500 Blue/White/Green Starburst
3000 Red/White Marble

Seventh Press:
500 Silver / Clear Pinwheel (Newbury Comics Exclusive)
1000 Silver & Clear Galaxy Swirl

Eighth Press:
300 Coke Bottle Green & Yellow Butterfly with White Splatter (Newbury Comics Exclusive)
2000 Red with Bone & Purple Splatter

Ninth Press
2000 Cloudy Maroon

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 List:

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)

Hands Like Houses release their first album with their new front man Josh Raven, formerly of The Faim. Marking the beginning of a new era the band explore the layers of the atmosphere in an epic four EP series coming together to finally form ATMOSPHERICS. 

Putting their best foot forward, the record features collaborations with heavyweights from Underoath, Redhook, Normandie, Sleeping With Sirens and SAFIA.

The classic emo/indie-rock album from Florida's Further Seems Forever is back in print for the first time in 20 years. Featuring the late Jon Bunch (Sense Field) on vocals, the 20th Anniversary Edition was repackaged and remastered with a deluxe gatefold jacket and a retrospective essay about the making of the album. Also includes three bonus acoustic tracks recorded in 2004. Available on vinyl from Iodine Recordings and select indie retailers.

Track Listing:
01. Light Up Ahead
02. Hide Nothing
03. Already Gone
04. Someone You Know
05. Make It A Part
06. All Rise
07. Call On My Life
08. Lead The Way
09. Bleed
10. For All We Know
11. Bleed [Acoustic]
12. Light Up Ahead [Acoustic]
13. Make It A Part / All Rise [Acoustic]

Pressing Info:

First Press:
100 x Half Yellow / Half Burgundy
100 x Yellow Marble (Smark Punk Exclusive)
100 x Red Clouds (Bridge Nine Exclusive)
100 x Burgundy Marble (Thirty Something Exclusive)
200 x Gold/Blood Twist (EU/UK Exclusive)
200 x Noise Cult Infinite Splatter
200 x Golden Sky (FSF Exclusive)
300 x Dusk Moon Phase (Tooth and Nail Exclusive)
300 x Light and Blood Smash

Second Press:
200 x Gold Nugget
800 x Gold and Crimson Swirl