Some weeks my Spotify Release Radar is brilliant. Other weeks it appears to have decided what I really need is seventeen acoustic versions, six remixes I didn’t ask for and a demo of something I didn’t especially like the finished version of.
This week was actually pretty bloody good.
I’m not going through absolutely everything that appeared in it. These are just the September 2026 alternative music releases that made me stop, replay something, or at least have enough of an opinion to start shouting at my phone about it.
And there are some properly interesting ones in here, so I thought I’d do a quick review of some.
I’ve been on a bit of a new-music rabbit hole lately anyway — most recently resulting in me asking “What the FUCK was that?!” in my review of Avenged Sevenfold’s “STATICA” — so apparently this is where my brain lives now.
SKYND – Johnny Kitagawa
Right. First of all: I fucking love this.
SKYND are already extremely good at making horrible subject matter sound unreasonably catchy, but “Johnny Kitagawa” feels slightly more immediately accessible than some of their material.
There’s something in it that feels almost WARGASM or The Prodigy-adjacent to me — that collision of metal, electronics and clubby aggression — and I bloody love the shamisen riff that keeps running through it. It shouldn’t necessarily fit. It absolutely does.
The subject is Johnny Kitagawa, the enormously powerful Japanese talent mogul whose agency ultimately acknowledged that he had sexually abused aspiring young stars after years of allegations and an independent investigation.
Which means that, following SKYND’s Jimmy Savile track, they appear to be taking a brief holiday from their usual murderers and serial killers and branching out into prolific sexual abusers.
Diversification.
Musically, though, this is easily one of the things from this week that grabbed me hardest. It sounds like SKYND, but there’s an immediacy to it that makes me think it could reach people slightly outside their existing audience too.
Fear Factory – Roboticist
Fear Factory have one of those sounds where you can hear about three seconds of a song and go, “Yep. Fear Factory.”
“Roboticist” is very much one of those.
This is the first studio recording I’ve heard with Milo Silvestro on vocals. He’s been fronting the band live since 2023, but “Roboticist” marks the recording debut of the current line-up.
And he fits.
He sounds sufficiently like former vocalist Burton C. Bell that nothing about this suddenly feels like somebody has transplanted an entirely different band into Fear Factory.
My only reservation is his clean voice.
It’s fine. It works. But particularly when he starts layering those harmonised clean backing vocals, there’s just something missing for me. Bell’s cleans had a strange character to them that made those melodic sections interesting.. Silvestro’s don’t quite grab me in the same way.
But that’s hardly a damning verdict.
This is a serviceable Fear Factory record. It sounds exactly like the machinery is still functioning as intended.
Professor Elemental & Tom ESC – Wonderground
I’ve been a fan of Professor Elemental for years, and somewhere along the way I’ve actually ended up becoming friends with him. “Wonderground” also brings in Tom ESC — Tom Hyland, another friend of mine and one of the driving forces behind The Electric Swing Circus. Tom is a founding member, guitarist and manager of the band, as well as the man who set up Swingamajig Festival — a much-missed favourite of mine and responsible for some bloody good times over the years.
So there’s something rather lovely about hearing the two of them together on “Wonderground”. It’s a big slice of electro-swing wonderfulness, but big is probably the operative word: it has a fuller, more expansive sound than I instinctively associate with a lot of Professor Elemental’s material. There’s the electro-swing backbone, but I can hear little flashes of reggae and drum & bass in there too, and the whole thing is really quite danceable. I like it a lot.
PRESIDENT – Sleepwalker
There’s something slightly unusual about PRESIDENT’s “Sleepwalker”.
It’s… happy?
Well, perhaps not happy. This is still PRESIDENT.
But it feels more major-key, uplifting and open than I usually expect from them. It isn’t some dramatic reinvention of what they’re doing — it’s still recognisably more of the same — but there’s a bit more light getting in.
And I like it.
“Sleepwalker” appears on their debut album Blood Of Your Empire, released today, 4 September 2026.
Which leaves the other question.
Do we all still think it’s Charlie Simpson?
Officially, PRESIDENT remain anonymous. Unofficially, plenty of people have reached exactly the same conclusion, largely because the vocalist sounds suspiciously like . Official Charts explicitly notes the theory while also making clear that the identities remain unconfirmed.
So I’m not saying it is Charlie Simpson.
I’m just saying…
Come on.
Polaris – Without You
Polaris – Without You
I already knew “Without You” was going to carry some weight before I heard it.
It’s Polaris’s first new music in three years, and their first new song since the death of guitarist Ryan Siew in 2023. The band have been very open about the fact that the song grew directly out of that loss — describing it as an attempt to process the shock, grief and heartache of losing their bandmate and friend.
With that context, it’s difficult to hear it as just another Polaris single.
Musically, though, my reaction was a little more restrained. It’s nicely punchy, very recognisably Polaris, and has a properly hefty breakdown at the end, but it doesn’t strike me as one of their more remarkable songs. It does what Polaris do very well rather than revealing a dramatically new side of them.
That sounds harsher than I mean it to.
Given what the song is actually about, there’s something almost fitting about it sounding so unmistakably like Polaris. It isn’t trying to make some grand stylistic statement; it feels more like the band processing something devastating through the musical language they already share.
And that gives it an emotional weight that goes well beyond whether or not I think it’s one of their best tracks.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Hyperballad (Live at the Royal Albert Hall)
This one was always going to get my attention.
Björk is one of my all-time favourite artists, and “Hyperballad” is one of my favourite Björk songs.
I find the original dreamy, strange and thoughtful in that way Björk is particularly good at — simultaneously intimate and otherworldly.
So when cover it, I don’t particularly want them to sound like Björk.
And thankfully, they don’t.
I find slavishly faithful cover versions a little frustrating. If you’re going to spend the time recording somebody else’s song only to reproduce what already exists as closely as possible, there’s a part of me that inevitably wonders:
Why bother?
Yeah Yeah Yeahs have very definitely bothered.
Their live Royal Albert Hall version is lighter, simpler and melancholic in a completely different way. The original seems to float around inside its own little world; this feels more exposed.
That is exactly what I want a cover to do: not replace the original, but find another emotional route into the same song.
Do I prefer it to Björk’s?
Absolutely not.
Not remotely.
But I like it a lot.
And the fact I can love the original as much as I do while still getting something different from this is precisely why the cover works.
The recording is part of the forthcoming Hidden in Pieces: Live at the Royal Albert Hall release.
Our Last Night – All The Things She Said
Talking of covers…
Our Last Night have taken “All The Things She Said” and done what Our Last Night generally do to songs.
They’ve metalled it up.
Usually I bloody love their covers.
This one?
It’s okay.
That’s really my entire review.
I like it. I don’t dislike anything it’s doing. They’ve definitely changed the style rather than simply recreating the original, which earns points from me after everything I’ve just said about “Hyperballad”.
But for some reason it falls a little flat for me.
Which is interesting because “All The Things She Said” is one of those songs that, for me, appears to be almost cover-proof. I’ve heard loads of versions of it and I don’t think I’ve ever heard one I’ve actively disliked. The versions by Harrison and Poppy immediately spring to mind.
There are a handful of songs like that.
Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” is another. I genuinely struggle to think of a cover of that song I’ve hated. My favourite is probably Ki:Theory’s version although I also really like Mike Shinoda’s remix.
Then there’s Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”. Again: apparently indestructible.
HIM did a great version. Tenacious D did a great version. You can drag that song through remarkably different genres and somehow the bones of it survive.
Maybe that’s the real sign of an exceptional song.
Anyway.
Our Last Night’s “All The Things She Said”?
It’s okay.
Polyphia – POWER IN THE BLOOD
Always nice to get some new Polyphia.
“POWER IN THE BLOOD” does exactly the sort of thing I go to Polyphia for: loads of brain-tickling proggery, little technical details bouncing around everywhere, and that sense that my ears are having to work slightly harder than usual to keep up with what everybody’s fingers are doing.
But there’s something surprisingly uplifting about this one too.
Parts of it become almost euphoric.
It’s intricate without just feeling like an exercise in showing off how intricately everybody can play, and I found myself enjoying the contrast between all that technical movement and the big, open, triumphant moments.
It’s taken from their forthcoming album BE NOT AFRAID, which is due in October. Interestingly, Tim Henson has described that album as deliberately moving between two extremes — one uplifting and triumphant, the other frightening and dark — so apparently the euphoria I’m hearing isn’t entirely accidental.
I like this a lot.
Zeal & Ardor – Intermezzo II – 2026 Master
have a slightly weird personal significance for me.
Devil Is Fine was the album that got me into them, and I discovered it at almost exactly the same time I started working on my graphic novel about Robert Smalls.
Then I realised that the man staring back at me from the cover of Devil Is Fine was…
Robert Smalls.
That was quite a moment.
I ended up disappearing down that particular rabbit hole and writing a whole piece over on Unsung Superheroes about . The project’s collision of black metal with African-American spiritual and work-song traditions made the coincidence even more interesting to me.
Now we have Devil Is Fine X.
The X is the ten: this is the tenth-anniversary edition of the album, newly mastered and expanded from the original nine tracks to fourteen with five bonus tracks. “Intermezzo II – 2026 Master” is one of those additions.
And it isn’t particularly metal.
It’s intense and very electronic — much more electronic than what I instinctively think of when somebody says Zeal & Ardor — but that side of the project isn’t actually new.
In fact, the thing that originally made me investigate Devil Is Fine was one of its weird little interludes, “Sacrilegium II”, this plinky-plonky music-box piece that put me in mind of Yann Tiersen.
Then I went looking for more and discovered:
Oh.
Apparently this is a metal band.
“Intermezzo II” taps into that other, stranger side of Zeal & Ardor. It’s electronic, forceful and quite intense. It isn’t one of my favourite things Manuel Gagneux has ever done. But I like the fact it doesn’t sound like the thing I expected him to do. Difference is interesting.
In This Moment – Shame
Finally, In This Moment’s “Shame” has once again confirmed something I’ve believed for a while:
Somebody needs to put Maria Brink in a studio with Lady Gaga.
I’m not saying “Shame” sounds like a Gaga song.
It doesn’t.
It’s more that there are moments where I hear that theatricality and ferocity in Brink’s delivery and think about how well it could work against the same thing Gaga is capable of doing when she decides to really let rip vocally.
Both can do dramatic.
Both can do huge.
Both can sound genuinely vicious when required.
There is surely a gloriously ridiculous industrial-metal-pop monster waiting to happen there.
Please.
Someone arrange this.
“Shame” opens In This Moment’s new album Witch, released at the end of August.
That’s What Caught My Ear
So that’s the stuff that survived my Release Radar filtering this time.
There’s a decent spread in there too: SKYND throwing a shamisen into industrial true-crime filth, Professor Elemental going unexpectedly big and danceable, Polyphia making my brain itch pleasantly, Fear Factory reassuringly sounding like Fear Factory, and two very different examples of what can happen when somebody takes another artist’s song apart and rebuilds it.
Which is probably what I enjoy most about new music generally.
I don’t need every release to reinvent the people making it. Sometimes I just want a good version of what a band already does.
But I do like being surprised.
And whether it’s Yeah Yeah Yeahs stripping Björk down, Zeal & Ardor veering into electronics or PRESIDENT unexpectedly letting a little sunlight through the curtains, there was enough of that this week to keep me interested.
That probably explains why I enjoy DJing alternative weddings as much as I do. The interesting bit isn’t just knowing the obvious rock and metal crowd-pleasers; it’s understanding the little branches between genres, the covers, the electronic oddities, the heavier stuff and the songs that sit somewhere in between — then working out which of them actually belong in a room full of people. That’s pretty much what I mean when I talk about being an alternative wedding DJ