On "Pseudologia Fantastica" Christine Tobin Confronts a World of Disinformation

Irish vocalist, composer and songwriter Christine Tobin is taking on one of the defining anxieties of modern life with Pseudologia Fantastica, a striking, genre-defyingwork that explores disinformation, political extremism and the increasingly blurred boundary between truth and fiction. Released on 2 October 2026,the project finds an acclaimed artist using music, spoken word and experimental sound to examine a world struggling to agree on what is real.

Rather than sticking to the familiar conventions of a jazz album, Tobin has created something considerably more ambitious: a multimedia musical journey that combines her distinctive vocal approach with electronic textures, instrumental improvisation and pointed social commentary. The result is a project that aims not merely to entertain, but to make listeners stop, think and perhaps question the noise surrounding them.

When the truth becomes part of the performance

The title Pseudologia Fantastica refers to pathological or compulsive lying, an idea that provides the conceptual foundation for Tobin's examination of contemporary information culture. Her concern is with more than individual dishonesty: the work considers what happens when misinformation becomes commonplace, language loses its reliability and technology can be used to manipulate public perception.

The project originated through the Improvised Music Company's BAN BAM commission and development award, and premiered at Dublin's The Complex on 3 April 2025 as part of the New Music Dublin festival. Its subsequent development into a released album brings that experimental performance into a form that listeners can revisit and explore at their own pace.

Tobin's approach is particularly compelling because she does not treat the subject as a conventional political lecture set to music. Instead, the different artistic elements become part of the argument itself: spoken passages, shifting soundscapes and contrasting musical moods reflect a culture in which competing voices continually battle for attention.

A sound that reuses to sit still

The album's musical palette is as varied as its subject matter. Tobin brings together jazz, spoken-word performance, layered vocals, electronics, hand percussion and improvised passages, with cellist Kate Shortt and guitarist Phil Robson providing important instrumental counterpoints. Robson also produced the recording.

One of the album's most intriguing features is its four-part structure, which gives the work a dramatic arc rather than the feel of a conventional collection of unrelated songs. The opening section moves through uneasy, searching material before reaching the more hymn-like Grace. The title track then arrives with a markedly different energy, using voice and cello in a theatrical, almost circus-like parody of the grandstanding liar.

From there, the music turns increasingly rhythmic, disruptive and satirical. Tracks including Astroturfing, The Noise and March address the mechanics of contemporary propaganda and the atmosphere of perpetual confrontation, while Patriarchy and Women turn attention towards women's rights and the structures of power. The closing pieces, Resistance and Healing Water, offer a more hopeful conclusion, placing solidarity, compassion and collective action at the heart of the record's message.

It is a bold progression, moving from confusion and disorientation towards the possibility of renewal. Crucially, Tobin's use of different musical forms makes that journey feel expressive rather than simply explanatory.

An arTist with a distinctive musical history

For listeners familiar with Tobin's earlier work, this new direction builds on a career defined by an adventurous relationship with jazz and literature. Born and raised in Dublin, she studied at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London before becoming a prominent figure in the London and New York creative music scenes. She returned to Ireland in 2020.

Her previous projects have explored poetry and song in equally individual ways. Sailing to Byzantium, her settings of W. B. Yeats poems, won a British Composer Award in 2012, while her interpretations of Leonard Cohen's songs earned her a Herald Angel Award in 2013. She was named Jazz Vocalist of the Year at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards in 2014, following a BBC Jazz Award for Best Vocalist in 2008.

That background helps explain why Pseudologia Fantastica feels like an evolution rather than a sudden departure. Tobin has long been interested in the relationship between words, music and emotional meaning. Here, she applies that curiosity to a particularly urgent contemporary subject.

Frm disinformation to resistance

What makes Pseudologia Fantastica stand out is its refusal to leave the listener in a state of despair. Although its themes include deception, misogyny, far-right ideologies and the misuse of technology, its final movement points towards resistance and the possibility of a more humane society.

That sense of purpose is central to Tobin's own description of the project. She has framed the work as a response to the forces dividing communities, while acknowledging the people challenging inequality and campaigning for social justice.

Ultimately, Pseudologia Fantastica asks a difficult question: when the world is saturated with competing narratives, how do we recover a shared sense of truth? Christine Tobin's answer is not a simple solution, but a challenging, richly textured work that makes room for doubt, dissent and, finally, hope.

On "The Legend of the Six Kings" Frozen Crown Unleash a Full-Speed Fantasy Assault

There are bands who ease you into an album. Then there is Frozen Crown.

The Milan, Italy-based power-metal outfit have built their reputation on speed, melody and an almost gleefully relentless guitar attack, and The Legend of the Six Kings looks set to continue that tradition while giving the band's fantasy storytelling a darker, moredramatic edge. The sixth Frozen Crown studio album is due 2 October 2026 through Napalm Records, making it the band's second release for the label following 2024's War Hearts.

And, yes, the numbers line up rather neatly: this is Frozen Crown's sixth album, performed by a six-piece, with "six" right there in the title. But the real story is what the band does with all that momentum once the music starts.

Six Kings, ten songs, zero hanging around

Frozen Crown performing at Milady Metalfest, 2025. Photo credit: Dario De Marco, Frozen Crown (1) (54310650398), via Wikimedia Commons.

The album contains ten tracks, opening with "Lightning in the Sky" and moving through"Who Wants to Burn in Heaven", "Reborn", "The One", "Iris", "Winter Hearts", "River of Time", "Through the Fire", "To the Stars" and the closing title track. The sequence is confirmed by Frozen Crown's own Bandcamp listing and Napalm Records' album information.

The first impression is exactly what fans of the band might expect: guitars pushed to thefront, rapid-fire drumming, big melodic hooks and choruses seemingly engineered for a festival crowd with one collective set of raised horns.

But The Legend of the Six Kings isn't simply War Hearts with another coat of armour. Napalm describes the new record as taking a more narrative approach, with a somewhat darker atmosphere, while the band themselves have framed the album as another attempt to distil their trademark sound into concise, direct songs.

That emphasis on concision is significant. Frozen Crown have never sounded particularly interested in wasting time, and the new material appears to embrace thatinstinct rather than fighting it.

Jade takes the crown

At the centre of the attack is vocalist Giada "Jade" Etro, whose role becomesparticularly interesting on this record. According to Napalm's album description, Etrotakes a more sinister vocal approach than on some of the band's earlier material, matching the darker world established by the album's fantasy narrative.

She is joined by founding guitarist and vocalist Federico Mondelli, whose growled andclean vocals provide another layer to the band's sound. The current six-piece also features Niso Tomasini on drums, Francesco Zof on bass, and guitarists Alessia Lanzone and Aleksandra Stamenkovic.

That twin-guitar presence is hardly incidental. Frozen Crown's identity has long revolved around the collision of melodic European power metal with old-school heavy-metalriffing and speed-metal urgency. Their 2024 album War Hearts was explicitly presentedby Napalm as the band's first record as a six-piece, with Lanzone's arrival adding another dimension to the guitar arrangements.

Frozen Crown at the Parma Tattoo Nerd Fest, 2023. Photo credit: Dario De Marco, Frozen Crown @ Parma Tattoo Nerd Fest – Area Fieristica di Parma (PR) 10-06-2023 (12) (52980752416), via Wikimedia Commons.

From War Hearts to a darker kingdom

The road to The Legend of the Six Kings has been relatively rapid. Frozen Crown formed in Milan in 2017, released their debut The Fallen King in 2018, followed it with Crowned in Frost in 2019, Winterbane in 2021 and Call of the North in 2023. War Hearts arrived in October 2024 as their Napalm Records debut.

That history matters because Frozen Crown's development has been less about abandoning their core sound than tightening the machinery around it. The new album'smaterial reportedly leans into fantasy and Tolkien-inspired storytelling while retaining the band's emphasis on energetic melodies and immediately memorable choruses.

The already released material gives a taste of that approach. "Who Wants to Burn inHeaven" brings choir-backed grandeur and a groove-heavy chorus, while "Reborn" is framed as an anthem about perseverance and collective strength. "The One", meanwhile, continues the album's fantasy-driven narrative.

Then there is the title track itself, which pushes further into the band's dramatic side. Napalm describes it as featuring Etro alongside Mondelli's growled and clean vocals, with the arrangement moving toward melodic-death-metal territory during its heavierpassages.

Full throttle, but with a little more shadow

What makes The Legend of the Six Kings intriguing is that Frozen Crown don't appear to be trying to reinvent power metal. Instead, they're doubling down on the things that have defined them from the start: speed, dual-guitar melody, soaring vocals, fantasy imagery and songs built to hit quickly.

The difference is in the atmosphere.

Where earlier Frozen Crown records could lean heavily into youthful exuberance and high-speed attack, the new album's concept gives those familiar ingredients a darker backdrop. The result is a record that looks designed to function both as a fast-moving power-metal listen and as a larger fantasy narrative.

With release day arriving on 2 October 2026, The Legend of the Six Kings is about to leave the kingdom of advance singles and promotional copy and enter the real test: the speakers, the headphones, the car stereo and, eventually, the festival stage.

If the album's stated mission is to strip away unnecessary frills and concentrate the essence of Frozen Crown into sharper, more direct songs, the six-piece have certainly chosen an appropriately uncompromising title.

The crown is ready. Now comes the charge.

Mattia Zanlorenzi’s Wanderlust: A Jazz Journey Through Space, Silence and Paul Motian

There is a particular kind of freedom that only appears when the music stops telling you exactly where it is going. A rhythm flickers at the edge of the room, a guitar note hangs in the air a little longer than expected, and suddenly the destination matters less than the journey. That sense of open-ended discovery runs through Wanderlust, the striking debut from Turin-based drummer and composer Mattia Zanlorenzi.

Released by Dodicilune in March 2026, the album feels like a musical map drawn while travelling — its routes constantly shifting between Zanlorenzi’s own compositions and the work of Paul Motian, whose restless, beautifully unconventional approach to rhythm casts a long shadow across the project. With guitarist Claudio Lodati and bassist Danilo Gallo alongside him, Zanlorenzi turns that influence into something exploratory and distinctly his own.

Across nine tracks, Wanderlust slips between intricate composition, spacious improvisation and bursts of restless energy. It is music with a strong sense of place but no fixed destination, inviting the listener to follow its detours and see where the trio lands next.

A journey inspired by Paul Motian

Zanlorenzi, born in 1994, came to the drums at 12 before moving from an early interest in pop and rock towards jazz. He studied at the Conservatorio “G. Verdi” in Turin and the Conservatorio “A. Vivaldi” in Alessandria, where he graduated with honours in jazz drums and percussion. His academic work also led him deeply into the music of PaulMotian.

That connection is central to Wanderlust. Four of the album’s nine pieces are Motian compositions: “Sod House”, “Psalm”, “In the Year of the Dragon” and “India”. The other five — “Enigma”, “Corsa”, “Beyond Time”, “Assenza” and “Altrove” — are Zanlorenzi originals.

The result isn't presented as a straight tribute album. Recent reviews have insteadhighlighted the way Zanlorenzi uses Motian as a starting point for his own exploration, with the trio treating the compositions as spaces for interaction rather than museumpieces.

That distinction matters. Motian's career — from his celebrated work with the Bill Evans Trio and Keith Jarrett to his later groups with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano — was characterised by a highly individual approach to rhythm and ensemble interaction. Zanlorenzi's project engages with that legacy while surrounding it with his own compositions.

Credit: Marco Tambara, “Frisell lovano motian by MT.jpg”, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-SA 3.0). No changes made.

Three musicians, plenty of room to breathe

The instrumentation tells much of the story. Zanlorenzi handles drums and percussion, while Lodati contributes guitar, live electronics and Korg Monotron synthesizer. Gallo expands the low-end palette beyond conventional bass, also playing bass balalaika, Farfisa and noise box.

That unusual combination gives Wanderlust plenty of sonic territory to explore.

Recent coverage has pointed to Lodati's guitar as a major source of atmosphere, while Gallo's additional instruments help push the trio away from a standard jazzconfiguration. Zanlorenzi, meanwhile, often plays with restraint, allowing silence, texture and the interaction between the three musicians to become part of the rhythm.

The album was recorded on 28–29 June 2025 at Crossroad Recording Studio in Cologno Monzese, near Milan, with Vincenzo De Leo handling engineering, mixing and mastering.

And the recording's architecture is deliberately balanced: Motian's compositions are interwoven with Zanlorenzi's, making the connection between influence and individuality impossible to miss.

Wanderlust is about movement without a map

The album's title is an especially neat fit. Rather than suggesting a literal travelogue, themusic feels concerned with movement between musical states — composed and improvised, dense and sparse, rhythmic and atmospheric.

“Enigma” opens the record, followed by Motian's “Sod House”, before Zanlorenzi's “Corsa” and Motian's “Psalm” continue the alternating pattern. Later, “Beyond Time”, “Assenza” and “Altrove” push further into Zanlorenzi's own vocabulary, while “In the Year of the Dragon” and “India” return to Motian.

Independent reviews have similarly focused on the album's spaciousness and its refusalto settle into obvious genre formulas. One recent assessment describes Zanlorenzi's playing as capable of moving from near-whispered passages to occasional eruptions, while another hears the record as a meeting point between written material and open improvisation.

That makes Wanderlust an intriguing debut: the record is rooted in serious study, but itsambition isn't simply to demonstrate what Zanlorenzi has learned. Instead, the trio uses that knowledge to investigate what might happen when the familiar structures are loosened.

For listeners drawn to adventurous contemporary jazz, it is an album built around curiosity — and, appropriately enough, the willingness to keep wandering.

Aria Opens a New Chapter with Rectify at Soho Album Launch

For an artist who has spent the past few years finding her voice between soul, jazz and contemporary R&B, Aria’s debut album Rectify arrived with the feeling of a milestone — and its London launch was appropriately personal.

On 21 September 2026, the London-based singer-songwriter returned to PizzaExpress Live Soho, the very venue where she first performed live in London three years earlier.This time, however, she was there to introduce a full album of her own.

That sense of coming full circle was impossible to miss.

Released through Sarah Gillespie’s Pastiche Records, Rectify brings together nine tracks shaped by relationships, desire, vulnerability, anger and self-discovery. The record sits comfortably in the space between neo-soul and jazz, while leaving plenty of room for contemporary R&B influences and Aria’s instinct for storytelling.

And this is very much a collaborative record. Chris Montague features prominently on guitar, while the album’s wider musical cast includes keyboard players William Hobson, Ross Stanley and James Pearson, bassist Harry Gould, drummer Daniel Hester, trumpeter Poppy Daniels and saxophonist Trish Clowes. Backing vocalists Elisha Zion, Siobhan Prince and Lauren Fretwell also play an important role in the album’s rich vocal sound.

Chris Montague performing with Artikal Sound System at Wonder Bar, Asbury Park, 11 October 2024. Photograph by Constantino14, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

A live sound with plenty of soul

The Soho launch demonstrated why the album’s live dimension matters.

Opening with “Resentment”, Aria moved through original material including “Angel”, “Kiss Me”, “Only Time I Get”, “Belong” and the album’s title track. “Rectify” itself arrived in the second set as a slow-burning, funky number, with flute and trumpet adding extra colour to the groove.

The performance also made room for songs that have influenced Aria, including Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill and Jill Scott, alongside Bonnie Raitt’s “Something To Talk About” andEdith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose”. Rather than feeling like distractions from the album, thecovers helped underline the musical territory Aria is drawing from.

From Rectify Your Soul to Rectify

The album represents a substantial step forward from Aria’s earlier releases. Her debut single, “Rectify Your Soul”, arrived in August 2024, followed by “Lover Mine” and, in 2025, “It’s All Your Fault”. The latter was subsequently named Jazz FM’s Track of the Week and received BBC Radio 2 support.

“Rectify Your Soul” also established the collaborative approach that runs through the wider album. Recorded at Eastcote Studios with live musicians playing together, theproject was produced with Sarah Gillespie and Polly Gibbons, with Grammy-winningengineers George Murphy and Andrew Tulloch involved in the recording and masteringprocess.

That live-in-the-room philosophy seems particularly important to understanding Rectify. This isn't a project built around stripping everything back to a solitary vocal and studio polish. The arrangements leave space for musicians to interact, while Aria remains at the centre.

The next stop: London Jazz Festival

The Soho launch is only the beginning of the album's live story.

Aria is scheduled to bring Rectify to the 2026 EFG London Jazz Festival on 17 November at Crazy Coqs – Live At Zédel. The festival describes the performance as a celebration of the debut album, with Aria fronting her band for an evening combining neo-soul, jazz and contemporary songwriting.

After three years of developing her sound, Rectify gives Aria a proper introduction: soulful without being confined to soul, jazz-aware without becoming a conventional jazzrecord, and built around songs that are clearly personal to their writer and performer.

The Soho launch may have marked the album's arrival, but Rectify feels more like the opening chapter of something considerably bigger.

Kai Hansen Unleashes Born With A Hammer: A Wild, Genre-Hopping Metal Workout

Kai Hansen has spent four decades helping define European power metal. On his new solo album, he sounds less interested in preserving that legacy than smashing it open and seeing what happens.

There are musicians who carefully tend their legacy, and then there is Kai Hansen. Afterhelping establish Helloween and later building Gamma Ray into one of Germany's defining metal acts, Hansen could be forgiven for sticking to the formula that made his name.

Instead, Born With A Hammer goes wandering.

Released on 18 September 2026 through earMUSIC, the ten-track album is Hansen'sfirst solo studio album since XXX – Three Decades in Metal, released in 2016 under the Hansen & Friends banner. The official announcement describes the new record as drawing together heavy metal, punk attitude, hard rock, melodic hooks and guitar-driven energy — and that description turns out to be remarkably accurate.

The Hansen DNA is still all over it

The opening track, “Feeding The Beast,” initially takes a surprisingly restrained route before the guitars kick the door in. It is a useful introduction to the album because Hansen's familiar melodic instincts are still there, but the arrangements aren't simply trying to recreate classic Helloween or Gamma Ray.

That distinction matters.

Hansen co-founded Helloween in the 1980s and left the band in 1989, subsequently forming Gamma Ray. Gamma Ray's own history confirms that Heading for Tomorrowarrived in January 1990 and established the band's melodic, bombastic power-metal approach.

More than three decades later, Born With A Hammer feels like Hansen giving himself permission to step sideways.

“Welcome To Life” brings a punkier attitude and even an unexpected reggae/ska-flavoured passage, while “Don't Care” leans into a playful, rebellious energy. “Wait And See” heads somewhere darker, with a heavier, more mechanical feel. Those stylistic shifts are also reflected across contemporary reviews, which variously identify punk, hard rock, industrial textures, pop elements and traditional metal in the album's musical palette.

And then there is the title track.

Helloween-Kai Hansen by vSpectrum.jpg, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Eight minutes of glorious excess

At more than eight minutes, “Born With A Hammer” is the album's great sprawling centrepiece. It begins comparatively gently, develops through several contrasting passages and eventually embraces a distinctly theatrical scale, with multiple reviewers noting the influence of Queen.

It is precisely the sort of track that could have become hopelessly overstuffed in lessconfident hands. Instead, Hansen uses the extended running time to let the song breathe, change direction and indulge in the sort of grand melodic gestures that havealways been part of his musical vocabulary.

Elsewhere, “I.D.G.A.F.” is one of the record's biggest left turns, while “End Of TheRoad” provides something closer to the classic Hansen sound. “Triple Trouble” features Hansen's son Tim Hansen on guitar, and the album's core lineup also includesguitarist/producer Eike Freese, Alexander Dietz of Heaven Shall Burn and Dan Wildingof Carcass on drums.

Not another Keeper — and that's the point

There is an obvious temptation with any new Kai Hansen record to measure it againstthe history of Helloween and Gamma Ray. After all, Hansen was part of the earlyHelloween lineup and contributed to the band's formative records before departing, while Gamma Ray went on to become a major force in German power metal.

Born With A Hammer makes that comparison less useful than it might initially seem.

This isn't an attempt to recreate Keeper of the Seven Keys. Nor is it simply a Gamma Ray album wearing a different jacket. Instead, Hansen throws familiar heavy-metal muscle into a much broader musical playground. The result moves between traditional metal, power metal, hard rock and punk-flavoured material, occasionally adding strangertextures along the way.

That doesn't mean every experiment is destined to land perfectly. Reviews havedisagreed about the album's consistency, with some finding its stylistic variety exhilarating and others feeling that the different ideas occasionally pull against each other.

But perhaps that's what makes the record interesting.

After spending so much of his career helping define what European power metal could sound like, Hansen doesn't seem particularly interested in following his own rulebook.

The hammer is still there. He's just decided to hit a few different things with it.