Take us to nirvana, Celestial cosmonaut
Teach us Galactic truth 

Looking into a night sky, it is easy to see how the stars became a place to put our questions. We draw figures between distant points of light, imagine gods moving among them, and wonder whether someone out there might know more about our lives than we do. The celestial visitors of alien mythology inherit that mixture of curiosity and longing: they may bring knowledge, promise deliverance, or announce that our time has run out. Much depends on which message we are willing to believe.

That primeval appetite for revelation runs through They Are Here, the new single from Rose Haze, the project of Los Angeles songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Kate Ramsey. Accompanied by an animated video from Japhy Riddle, the song sends ethereal goth, shoegaze, and psychedelia into a sky crowded with competing promises of salvation.

A rushing surge gives way to a deep post-punk bassline and drums that shudder with slow tension. Heavy guitar presses into the spaces around them, while a buzzing synth melody appears and recedes like small lights crossing the dark. Ramsey’s cool, airborne vocals suggest The Shroud and the more spectral reaches of the Projekt Records catalogue, carrying a melody whose beauty makes the unfolding catastrophe all the more unsettling.

As the arrangement expands, the guitars approach the luxuriant heights of Cocteau Twins and the gothic grandeur of Faith and the Muse. They shiver and crash, at moments acquiring the reedy, massed cry of bagpipes. The bass keeps a firm foothold beneath all that upward movement, giving the song a physical weight equal to its celestial ambitions.

Ramsey’s lyrics gather burning forests, the falling Wormwood star, a drying Euphrates, and creatures assembled from horses, locusts, and scorpions. Biblical catastrophe becomes entangled with bodily possession and appeals to a “Celestial cosmonaut.” The mingling of divine visitation and alien arrival evokes the ancient-astronaut speculation of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, with sacred imagery reconsidered as possible extraterrestrial contact. Yet the early warning, “False prophets seduce the weak,” hangs over every promised revelation. Each return of “Do you believe?” tests the distance between wanting an answer and trusting whoever offers one.

Riddle gives this uncertainty a wonderfully strange visual form. Pale, chalk-like contours turn bodies, beasts, spacecraft, and machinery into moving constellations. A hooded preacher addresses a congregation of sheep; screens repeat his image, and disembodied lips multiply across the darkness. Horsemen rise through a violet sky while forests burn below. The imagery suggests a universe in which belief travels through broadcasts, symbols, and spectacles, with every apparent revelation raising another question about who controls the picture.

Those expressive outlines recall Emily Hubley’s animation for The Origin of Love in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, where drawn figures give an ancient myth about human longing an immediate emotional life. Riddle’s figures likewise seem to belong to a story being written across the heavens. Their spare forms make the immense scale approachable, allowing the viewer to follow a gesture or a face through the surrounding cosmic machinery.

Eventually, the darkness opens onto a pastel heaven of clouds, floating crystals, and sheep. Its sweetness proves unstable: the scene resolves into a wireframe image on an old computer monitor, which goes blank. “The simulation has come to an end,” Ramsey sings. After all those appeals to higher powers, the film leaves us looking at the apparatus that contained their universe.

The closing dedication brings the film back to a deeply personal loss. They Are Here features the late guitarist Ruben Gonzales, Ramsey’s close collaborator, who died in 2024. His guitar parts date to the earliest sessions for the forthcoming album, which Ramsey finished alone after his death. The force of his playing gives this vast journey an intimate center: within its visions of endings and escape, the recording preserves the work they began together.

Watch the video for They Are Here below:

They Are Here is the lead single from Rose Haze’s forthcoming album, A Whole Lot of Nothing for No One, out January 31, 2027. Her first full-length album in five years is available to pre-order here. In the meantime, listen to They Are Here below:

A Whole Lot of Nothing for No One by Rose Haze

Born in Ohio, Ramsey plays piano, synth, guitar, harp, bass, and flute. She recorded and performed her first two albums with Lisa Bella Donna, later traveling through Europe and Kaua’i before moving to California in 2019, where she met Gonzales. Her live performances make room for improvisation and changing instrumental combinations, allowing the songs to shift shape from one set to the next.

Riddle is an animator and musician whose interests in science, mathematics, and computer engineering inform his visual work.

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The post “Do You Believe?” — Los Angeles Ethereal Goth Artist Rose Haze Summons Celestial Visitors in Video for “They Are Here” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Source: Post-Punk.com

Take my hand

Angels and demons have tried

We create our own design

The Devil has always been an enthusiastic gambler, particularly when the stakes involve somebody else’s eternal future. Across centuries of folklore, he has appeared at crossroads, in taverns, and beside the beds of ambitious men, offering arrangements whose disadvantages become apparent around the time the contract comes due. Chess, with its elaborate rules and opportunities for deception, seems particularly suited to his temperament. Every sacrifice has a purpose, every advance invites retaliation, and the unfortunate soul across the board must calculate how much of himself he can afford to lose.

In Angels + Demons (Arcana Remix), Galicia-based American darkwave artist C Z A R I N A revisits the work of American cinematic electropop duo Majestic Phoenix, contributing her own vocals, lyrics, and instrumentation to a composition concerned with fate, spiritual transformation, and the difficult business of deciding who gets to govern one’s existence.

C Z A R I N A’s interpretation supplies the confrontation with an appropriately extravagant musical vocabulary. Her commanding voice rises through theatrical electronic arrangements, drawing upon the dramatic sensibilities of Kate Bush, the ethereal grandeur of Lisa Gerrard, and the widescreen emotional sweep of Florence + The Machine. The music suggests an occult fairy tale unfolding at the edge of the known world, where every melodic ascent carries the possibility of revelation.

Produced and directed by The Kitsunés, the accompanying video pays homage to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), while drawing inspiration from Friedrich Moritz August Retzsch’s 1831 painting The Devil’s Checkmate, originally titled Die Schachspieler. Retzsch’s painting depicts a young man facing Satan across a chessboard, his immortal soul hanging in the balance as his adversary surveys the pieces with the confidence of someone who already knows the outcome. Bergman would later explore a similar predicament through a medieval knight who challenges Death to a game of chess, hoping to bargain for a little more time. Both works contemplate the uneasy relationship between free will and fate, raising a question that has troubled theologians, philosophers, and gamblers for centuries: how much freedom does a person possess when the rules have been established by somebody else?

The filmmakers transport this confrontation to Malpica de Bergantiños, along Galicia’s formidable Costa da Morte, where the Atlantic crashes against ancient coastal formations. A pilgrim travelling the Camino de Santiago encounters the Devil, and his spiritual expedition takes an unexpected detour into supernatural competition. Against the vastness of the coastline, their chessboard becomes a miniature arena for mankind’s oldest anxieties about temptation, judgment, and the possibility of redemption.

The video’s central wager also illuminates the remix’s larger preoccupation with inherited beliefs. To abandon an old conviction can resemble a small death; to replace it requires imagination, courage, and occasionally a willingness to disappoint the authorities, earthly or otherwise, who benefited from one’s obedience. At the Devil’s chessboard, destiny appears to have been calculated in advance. C Z A R I N A leaves us contemplating the delicious possibility that the pilgrim might yet overturn the board.

Watch the video for “Angels + Demons (Arcana Remix)” below:

Listen to Angels + Demons (Arcana Remix) below and order it here.

Angels + Demons (Arcana Remix) by Majestic Phoenix, C Z A R I N A

C Z A R I N A is the musical project of Vero Faye Kitsuné, a Philippine-born, New York-raised American singer, producer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and filmmaker now based on Galicia’s Costa da Morte. Her background spans music, visual art, and a career as a fashion designer and creative director. Since her recording debut in 2018, she has developed an elaborate musical language encompassing gothic post-metal, orchestral darkwave, and ethereal dark synthpop, combining the weight of metal with orchestral arrangements and dark electronic textures. Mysticism, mythology, and alchemy inform her recordings and films, while cosmic and celestial imagery accompanies her explorations of destruction, transformation, rebirth, and transcendence. Albums including Arcana (2022) and Empire explore these interests on an increasingly ambitious scale. Alongside her husband, artist Carlos Kitsuné, also known as DeadlyKawaii, she co-runs The Kitsunés, the creative partnership behind her visual work.

Czarina
Majestic Phoenix brings together composer and multi-instrumentalist Aaron McLean and producer and audio engineer Kent “Von” Hertzog, whose friendship and creative partnership began at the Art Institute of Philadelphia in 1999. Reuniting decades later, the American cinematic electropop duo returned to musical ideas left unfinished during their college years. Those recovered recordings, alongside new material, became their debut EP, Manifest, released in October 2025. McLean writes, performs, and produces the music, while Hertzog contributes co-production, mixing, and mastering at The Social Club, drawing on his background in audio engineering and hip-hop production. Their music combines electronic textures from earlier eras with contemporary arrangements, balancing melodic detail with atmosphere and emotional expression. Friendship, fate, and creative renewal inform the project, with subsequent releases inviting vocal collaborators into the partnership. Their association with The Kitsunés also extends to the duo’s artwork and visual identity.

Majestic Phoenix
Follow C Z A R I N A:

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The post The Devil’s Checkmate — Majestic Phoenix and CZARINA Play an Infernal Game in Video for “Angels + Demons (Arcana Remix)” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Source: Post-Punk.com

Live Music Hall, Cologne, Germany 7th November 2026President - “Blood of Your Empire” Tour 2026 - Special Guests: Dreamwake, VianovaPRESIDENT is a band that, from the very beginning, has relied on mystery, sheer force, and total sensory overload. With no recognizable faces and no music releases, they suddenly appeared on the Download Festival line-up - instantly causing a stir. Their dark visuals, apocalyptic language, and cinematic, metallic soundscape hit a nerve: powerful, mysterious, and highly dramatic. Turns out that this was exactly the secret sauce which propelled the band to stardom, and drew scores of people to sell out the venues for the tour promoting their first album ‘Blood of Your Empire’ in no time.

Source: Reflections of Darkness

Neun Stücke, 71 Minuten, zwei prominente Gäste: Mein erster Händedruck mit ‘Cult Of Luna’ fällt ausdauernd aus und endet in einer ziemlich festen Umarmung.

Source: MedienKonverter

Peer Lebrecht of Golden Apes talks to Side-Line about light, darkness and physical imagery on "The Sun Came Up Tremendously," out via Icy Cold Records.

Source: Side Line