Inbox overflowing with messages from every band and label you’ve ever heard of (and tons you don’t even remember subscribing to)? Must be Bandcamp Friday!
If you need help wading through the oceans of stuff being marketed at you all day, I’m here to help with a few selections to highlight.
First: our good friends over at Philip K. Discs have dropped some sweet exclusive merch today.
- They’ve got super-limited mystery bundles, packed in custom-designed cereal boxes and filled with tons of label-related goodness, but there are only TWO sets available!
- “This Vending Machine is a Compilation” full-color poster-sized prints as companion pieces to last year’s compilation of the same name.
- From Chaos to Ambiguity: A Theology of Noise Rock – the guidebook to noise rock written by the label’s owner (spoiler alert: not Philip), now available signed by the author.
- And there’s lots more where these came from, from printed ‘zines to sculpted mini-figurines to hot sauce bottles to a special edition Touching Grass CD bundled with an actual packet of grass seed — check it all out right here!
Next, get yourself ready for winter weather with a brand new pair of socks! But not just any socks, these ones come emblazoned with the logo of Italian dark-occult/doomsters Messa. Wear them in good health!
And finally…
Cathedral – Society’s Pact With Satan (Rise Above Records, 03 October 2025)
When English doom icons Cathedral announced they were calling it quits after two dozen amazing years, with the release of their opus extremus The Last Spire over a decade ago, it truly was the end of an era.
Well, to everyone’s surprise, today Rise Above — the label run by vocalist Lee Dorrian who formed Cathedral in the late 80s after exiting from Napalm Death — have revealed a never-before-heard recording, which was rediscovered and resurrected from the sessions for that final album, dusted off and mixed, and now ready to greet your ears which likely never expected to hear new material from this band again!
Consisting of one single track, but clocking in at a whopping thirty minutes, Society’s Pact with Satan features all the hallmarks one would expect: creeping riffs featuring the crunchiest bass tone you could ask for, church-organ sounds reverberating as much as the band’s namesake dictates they should, vocals that impart utter existential dread, all blended together with just the appropriate amount of progressive experimentation and weirdness, and then stretched over a duration that’s right in that bizarro limbo between EP and LP. For lifelong fans of Cathedral or for the doom-curious out there who may have missed out on the band’s original run, either way this newly-released classic composition is well worth checking out!
Society’s Pact with Satan can be found as a digital download through Bandcamp (see the video/audio player embedded below), or physical formats are also available here.
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Valley of Steel 