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| Photo - Liz Bretz |
Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Maria Taylor released, Story’s End on Friday, her first full length album release in 7 years out now on Conor Oberst’s Million Stars Records. The 10-song collection unfolds like a hazy, cinematic narrative—songs acting as chapters that trace love, loss, fracture, and the quiet search for solace in the aftermath of personal upheaval.
“These songs have a personal, yet universal, narrative of loss, surrender, transformation, and growth,” Taylor explains. This record is about a divorce; it’s about losing a friend I thought I would have forever; it’s about my love for this life; it’s about my love for my kids; it’s about mistakes and desire, about growing older and stronger; it’s about acceptance. It took me five years to complete Story’s End – the longest I’ve ever spent on a single album. The story was still unfolding.”
Last month, Taylor released “Sorry I Was Yours” featuring Conor Oberst that was praised by The New York Times, who called it “a bittersweet reminiscence about a long-ago romance, recalling both thrills and heartache and ending in apologies.”
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"Monsters” showcases Faith’s bold vocals and sharp songwriting, blending emotional storytelling with a vibrant, modern sound. The track is built for both radio and streaming playlists, connecting with fans who love anthemic, authentic rock music.
"Monsters dives into the fear-based patterns we develop to protect ourselves, and the moment we stop letting them run the show. The bridge brings a punch of defiance, calling those thoughts out and kicking them to the curb with 'I'm done being haunted' and 'I'm taking the trash out.'" ~ Faith Eliza
Monsters was recorded at Off the Row Studio and produced by PT Houston and showcases Faith Eliza’s introspective songwriting and emotional depth. Written entirely by Faith, the track blends her alt-rock edge with her signature storyteller soul — a haunting, honest look into the shadows we face and the strength we claim.
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| Photo - Patricio Lizama |
Rare and Deadly cracks open a decade-long vault of raw nerve and sonic chaos from A Place To Bury Strangers. Spanning 2015–2025, this collection of demos, B-sides, abandoned experiments, and forgotten fragments reveals the band at their most unfiltered—caught between breakthrough ideas and beautiful mistakes. Pulled from Ackermann’s personal archive of late-night recordings, blown-out tapes, and half-finished sessions, here the interference is closer, the electricity more dangerous, the edges left jagged on purpose.
What makes Rare and Deadly truly unprecedented is that every format tells a different story. The CD, cassette, vinyl, and digital editions each feature their own unique tracklisting, a fractured release strategy that is almost unheard of. No single version contains the “complete” album. Instead, each format becomes its own window into the archive, revealing alternate paths, missing links, and parallel versions of the band’s inner life. It’s a deliberately unstable document: the album shifts depending on how you choose to hear it, mirroring the chaos of its creation.
Across these recordings, you can hear the evolution of Ackermann’s restless mind. Some pieces feel like prototypes for future chaos, seeds that later bloomed on studio albums. Others are dead ends—ideas too volatile, too strange, or too personal to ever fit the frame of a proper release. But together they form a secret history of the band, a parallel world of possibilities that existed just outside the spotlight. The tracks contain riffs mutated by malfunctioning pedals, songs born from gear pushed past its limits, or delicate melodies overwhelmed by walls of feedback until only their ghosts remain.
Rare and Deadly is less a compilation and more a documentary—an aural snapshot of how sound takes shape before it hardens into something finished. You hear the room, the accidents, the restless experimentation, the immediacy of a moment being captured before it disappears. It’s a reminder that A Place To Bury Strangers has always thrived in this in-between space: the tension between control and collapse, melody and noise, beauty and distortion.
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‘Desolate Moments’ is the new video-single from Italian darkwave / post-punk quartet, Christine Plays Viola: a fragile, moody, processional ballad exploring the loss of self and dissolution of identity, for fans of Faith or Disintegration-era Cure, and Closer-era Joy Division. The song is the third video-single from the band’s latest album, F.I.V.E. – Fear Increases Violent Emotions (Cleopatra Records, January 2026).
Guitarist, songwriter and bandleader, Fabrizio Giampietro, says of ‘Desolate Moments’: “Desolate Moments is about that fragile space where you realize you’ve lost yourself, but you’re still conscious enough to feel it. I was thinking about the idea of emotional disappearance — not in a physical sense, but in a psychological one. That moment when you look back at your life, at promises you made, at people you loved, and you understand that somewhere along the way… something broke. There’s a strong sense of guilt in the song, but also inevitability. Like being trapped inside your own mistakes, watching your world slowly collapse while you’re unable to stop it. The line ‘you exist nowhere’ really sums it up for me — it’s about losing your place in reality, becoming a shadow of yourself.”
Discussing the video, Fabrizio adds: “Musically and visually, we wanted to reflect that dissolution of identity. That’s why in the video we chose silhouettes instead of faces — no clear identity, just fading presences merging with memories, like fragments of something that once was. It’s probably one of the most introspective and emotionally exposed tracks we’ve ever written.”
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