A new band for 2025, Austin’s Cheap Fix deliver two slabs of raw garage punk on their debut 7”. Whilst neither track attempts to break any new ground, genre wise, it’s actually clear within seconds of hitting the play button that these Texan lads mean business, and this first taste of their hard and fast sound suggests they are capable of going head to head with some of the scene’s best noise makers.
Author Archives: Real Gone
amilost – Chapter A Heartbreak EP
With members hailing from Norway and Scotland, amilost are a duo with a truly international flavour. Vocalist Sigrid Zeiner’s vocal style taps into a very melodic vein of Scandinavian singer songwriter fare, somewhere on the fringes of adult pop – something which dominated their breakthrough single ‘Pillowside’ in 2022. Multi instrumentalist Ross Craib isn’t shy of allowing his geographical roots to show, sometimes strongly, adding a traditional folk/Celtic melody to a sound that’s been dubbed having a “sense of cinematic grandeur”. On amilost’s ‘Good Morning’ single from 2023, Sigrid’s strong vocal was augmented by a choir of smooth voices that offered more than a strong callback to classic Clannad. This gave amilost a very easy vibe, but this certainly helped to bring out the very best in their very adult oriented sound.
DRONI EYE OMI – Liminal Mass
When a band opens their album with a track that clocks in at nearly half an hour, you know they aren’t messing around. When it happens to be the first release by an unfamiliar name, you have to wonder if the musicians involved aren’t contemplating career suicide. That said, ‘Chromosphere’ – the huge sound collage that opens the debut album from sonic experimentalists Droni Eye Omi – is absolutely superb.
Watch: Silver Dollar Room share new video for ‘Monsters’
Barely six weeks after the release of ‘Come Morning’, Scotland’s Silver Dollar Room have returned with the immensely powerful ‘Monsters’, a riff heavy number that really shows off their alt-rock sound in the most direct way possible.
The track’s opening rhythm guitar salvo calls back to 90s emo with strong echoes of Shift within the tone. This catches the ear with immediate effect, suggesting that this could be one of the band’s biggest sounding tunes to date. From there, though, ‘Monsters’ grows into something huge; a tune that moves between a few very distinctly different musical passages, eventually peaking with an epic instrumental break, showcasing the band’s heaviest sounds to date.
PERPETUAL PARADOX – Deathwish
Born during the “lockdown era”, London’s Perpetual Paradox are a band who instinctively know their way around a heavy riff. Blending metalcore, prog metal, groove metal and thrash, their core sound lurches between different styles of extreme heaviness – often within the same song – but as demonstrated throughout ‘Deathwish’, the first Perpetual Paradox full length, following a couple of EP releases, their complex sound really works for them. The musicians are insanely tight players; so tight that it doesn’t really matter that there are points where the listener might find themselves playing “spot the influence”. The end results are rarely less than stunning.