cult of youth began as a bedroom project in 2006 when founder sean ragon took a broken acoustic guitar, a $20 mackie mixer, and a roland rack synth and tried to recreate the atmosphere of the post-industrial and neo folk records he had been obsessed with since childhood. the project eventually evolved into a fully fledged band and for the better part of a decade released a string of genre-bending albums that made perfect sense to some people and absolutely no sense to others.

Varg Vikernes is once again wasting no time getting new music out into the world as Umskiptar is now the third album since his release from prison in 2009. While both Belus and Fallen were powerful examples of atmospheric black metal that harkened back to the early Burzum material, Umskiptar finds Vikernes moving away from that sound and diving into avant garde and Bathory styled viking metal.
That's not to say that there aren't some similarities here to the previous two releases. Varg likes to stretch out the atmospheric passages, sometimes for a tad too long, and the plodding tempos here on a few tracks, especially on "Alfadanz" sound a bit familiar…

Varg Vikernes made his name as one of the Norwegian black metal scene's more notorious figures early on, involved not just with the extreme music of Mayhem and other black metal groundbreakers, but also with church burnings, murder, and time spent in prison for his crimes. This is all old news to anyone familiar with Vikernes and his one-man project Burzum, a musical entity that shifted from early black metal darkness into progressively more and more ambient territory. With 11th album The Ways of Yore, Vikernes continues the foray into European medieval music that he began with 2013's Sôl Austan, Mâní Vestan. The album's inherent gloom comes not from the burning hatred and isolation that fueled earlier Burzum albums, but conveys the same intensity through its use of chant and traditional instruments of early Norwegian folk music…

Annabel Mehran's black-and-white cover photo for Steve Gunn's The Unseen Inbetween is a portrait of the guitarist and songwriter seemingly on the move. It evokes those found on early- to mid-'60s recordings by Bob Dylan, Koerner, Ray & Glover, Jackson C. Frank, Bert Jansch, and others. Gunn has shifted his focus considerably. Rather than simply showcase his dazzling guitar playing, he delivers carefully crafted, uncharacteristically tight and well-written songs with guitars, keyboards, strings, reeds – and percussion – translating them without artifice or instrumental disguise. Gunn's also a more confident, capable singer than he was on 2016's Eyes on the Lines and it shows.

Three years in its creation, birthing and borning, it follows on from 2018’s million-selling classic, The Light Is Leaving Us All. We are OverMoon to announce the following release information pertaining to the brand new full-length album by David Tibet’s Hallucinatory ChartToppers CURRENT 93, entitled If A City Is Set Upon A Hill.