Afternoon Astronauts is a relatively new name for 2025, but ahead of the release of their debut album, their single ‘Times Like These’ suggests that the band are about to click with an audience of melodic, heavy riff lovers in a rather big way.
DUCK & COVER – No Hounds In The Cluster
Between 2020 and 2025, Boston band Duck & Cover released a succession of digital singles and EPs that showcased their sometimes ragged, sometimes retro, often enjoyable rock sounds very effectively. The material didn’t necessarily reach beyond a cult audience, but the band’s various college rock and noisy power pop influences often struck a chord with those who stumbled across the band’s work.
2025’s semi-punky ‘Bored of The City’ was actually one of Duck & Cover’s finest numbers to date, and this didn’t escape the notice of Rum Bar Records. Taking the digital wares from that six year stretch and adding a previously unreleased nugget, they gave the material its first physical send off at the end of that year with the fourteen track ‘No Hounds In The Cluster’ – a collection that plays brilliantly as an album in its own right.
STRAENGE – Filthy Microbes
In the middle of the first pandemic lockdown of 2020, Japanese thrashers Straenge released their second demo, the ‘Thrash Medicine’ EP. Its five tracks demonstrated a brilliant, very technical approach to heaviness, often combining the speed of ‘Seasons In The Abyss’ era Slayer with the anger of early Kreator. On a musical level, the band sounded great. Vocally, things were a different matter: the material featured an ugly growl that fused the guttural edge of death metal with the power of hardcore, which, coupled with an obvious Japanese accent, made all of the lyrics inaudible. Assuming you could approach the material purely on its instrumentalists’ merits, of course, this underground band often sounded very cool.
Watch: Gustaffson invites fans to ‘Dance To The Algorithm’
In October 2024, Gustaffson released ‘On Broadway’, a brilliantly theatrical single that fused muted guitar parts with a waltzing time signature and a crooned vocal to create something that brought a fantastic twist to the world of adult pop. More than style over substance, the single also ultilised a huge yet simple hook to make the track even more memorable.
Watch: Check out ‘A Stone’s Throw’, the new video from Soho Dukes (featuring Spike Gray)
At the beginning of October 2025, Soho Dukes released ‘Sunday Magazines’, an unashamedly British sounding single that celebrated the past with a namecheck for Whispering Bob Harris and a rollocking arrangement that borrowed liberally from Mott The Hoople and early Quireboys. With a vocal hook on loan from Cockney Rebel, it was anything but subtle, but in terms of pushing those “feel good” buttons, the Dukes served up a winner.