Jul 212022
 

It’s hard to understand what life is really like in another country unless you’ve lived there, or maybe spent a lot of time seriously studying it from afar. In the case of Poland, I’ve done neither. Living in the United States, what I know about the current state of affairs in Poland comes just from reading a scattering of news stories from time to time.

A lot of the recent stories tend to focus on the country’s support for Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invasion, and the huge volume of Ukrainian refugees that have flooded into Poland. At least here, that reporting (which comes with a favorable gloss) has tended to eclipse other things I remember reading about the autocratic and theocratic nature of the country’s right-wing ruling regime over the last few years.

Herida Profunda‘s new album Power to the People caused me to re-focus on those eclipsed narratives. The band’s frustration and fury over socio-political conditions in Poland (where they live) is plain for all to see (and hear) in the album. The music burns so ferociously that you could know and feel the emotions that spawned it even if you were ignorant about its lyrical content.

Of course, the assaults on civil rights that have been occurring in Poland are happening in many other countries, including the one where I live. And thus Power to the People is a rallying cry that knows no borders. Continue reading »

Jul 162022
 

“Pocket” is a Mozilla app that you can easily install in Mozilla’s Firefox browser. When you do that, a small Pocket icon shows up in the toolbar of Firefox. Wherever you happen to be on the web, if you click that icon it saves the page to your Pocket list. When you then navigate to your Pocket list, you see all the links you’ve saved, along with thumbnail images of the linked pages. Even better, you can access that list from any device that includes the Firefox browser.

This is not an ad for Firefox or Pocket. I mention it because it has made my work for NCS on these Seen and Heard roundups much, much easier.

I used to make endless lists of band names with links to their new songs and videos that I was interested in checking out. Even just typing band names into an online document and copy/pasting the links was time-consuming, since I was usually adding more than a dozen per day, or much more if I fell behind. Not to mention that I kept dozens of tabs open in my browser until I had time to write those lists. Now I use Pocket, and don’t have to type a word or copy any links or keep any tabs open. Continue reading »

Dec 102020
 

 

Since Herida Profunda‘s inception in 2012 in Poland, they’ve amassed a host of gigs throughout Europe, including numerous festival appearances, and have assembled a discography that includes a self-titled debut release in 2013, a 2015 split with UK’s Hellbastard, a 2017 split with UK’s Hello Bastards, and In Fear We Trust — a three-way split with Psychoneurosis and Suffering Quota in 2019. Obviously, the relocation of the band’s vocalist Edi to the UK in 2014 didn’t prove to be an obstacle.

The band are now at the point of completing work on a new album named Power To the People, which will be released on tape and vinyl in early 2021 via 783punx (UK), 7DegreesRecords (GER), Heavy Metal Vomit Party (SLO), To Live A Lie Records (USA), and Give Praise Records (USA). What we’ve got for you today is the premiere of a lyric video for a single from the new album named “Hunters Will Be Hunted“. Continue reading »