..according to our team of experts at least. Authors Catriona Ward, Michael Cisco, Greg F. Gifune and Leila Taylor join tQ writers Sean Kitching and Mat Colgate to bring you what they consider to be the best novels, short stories and graphic novels in the genre. Words by Sean Kitching

Welcome, dear readers to Halloween, when in the UK and US children dress as their favourite fictional horror characters (and some, misguidedly, as serial killers) to walk door-to-door asking neighbours for sweets (or candy). Haitian practitioners of Voodoo pay their respects to Baron Samedi, the Irish celebrate Samhain with the baking and eating of beer-soaked Barmbrack cake, and here at tQHQ, it gets just a little bit easier for genre-inclined writers to…

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As we approach the final months of 2025, tQ staffers select the finest album and tracks from October’s releases

We are fast hurtling towards end-of-year-list-ageddon, which means this October roundup is one of our last chances to zoom in to examine 2025’s music in relative microcosm. As you’ll see from our selections below, the last 31 days have been as fertile as any when it’s come to excellent music, whether languid ambient, mangled noise, or the spaces inbetween

Everything you’ll find below, as well as all the other excellent music we’ve covered at tQ this month, will also be compiled into an hours-long playlist exclusive to our subscribers. In addition, subscribers can enjoy exclusive music from some of the world’s most forward-thinking…

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The best Fall album of the 21st century, or ever? Fergal Kinney makes the case for a dark and heavy masterpiece made up of ketamine, Pete Tong and pumpkin soup

Stand on the high street of an English town centre as darkness covers the early evening, and strip-lit shops – stacked with sleek, touch sensitive tech or vaporising tobacco simulators – glow harshly amongst empty units and the sad, or simply shut, pubs. The future’s here today. In The Unutterable by The Fall, their 21st studio album and first of the 21st century, the future is a little like this: here, garish and banal. Not merely the best album that the Greater Manchester band would release this century, The Unutterable stands…

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Bruise Blood

You Run Through This World Like An Open Razor

Mike Bourne of Teeth of the Sea and Hirvikolari takes us on a dystopian synth-wave journey replete with industrial crunches and stabs of sub bass

You Run Through the World Like An Open Razor by Bruise Blood

A taxidermied parrot glares back at you from the cover of Bruise Blood’s debut album You Run Through This World Like An Open Razor. The bird was once a childhood presence for Bruise Blood’s Mike Bourne, but recently has presided over his home studio, and thus the making of this album. Now, the listener is graced with its glassy eyes glaring at them, creating a uncanny Pynchon-esque scene soundtracked by the album title, which feels like…

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Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson will “go round the block one more time” to play 11 shows in 2026

Cabaret Voltaire have outlined plans for their final tour.

Coming more than 50 years on from the formation of the band, the 11-date run will see Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, who co-founded the project with the late Richard H. Kirk, play shows across the UK. The tour kicks off at Birmingham’s Town Hall on October 10, 2026, with stops following it in Liverpool, Nottingham, Cardiff, Bath, Newcastle, Glasgow, Manchester, Bexhill, London and Sheffield.

Gazelle Twin will support the duo across the full tour. Tickets go on sale here this Friday (October 31) at 10am GMT.

The announcement of the shows comes after Mallinder and…

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Palais, set to open in February 2026, is a new project from the owners of Night Tales and Netil360

A new nightclub in opening in the Peckham Palais building in South London.

Set to open its doors in February 2026, Palais is a new venture from Night Group, the operators of East London’s Night Tales and Netil360. The club will be located inside the former Jones & Higgins department store, which first opened in 1867 and ultimately closed in 1980, when part of the building was demolished to build a shopping centre. For some years after that, the building housed the Peckham Palais nightclub, which put on a number of techno and dubstep-focused lineups until it closed in 2011.

Following a number of…

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“I wanted the melody to overwhelm and swoon,” Martin said of the rework

Kevin Richard Martin, photo by lulia Alexandra Magheru

Kevin Richard Martin, AKA The Bug, has remixed a track by US composer and multi-instrumentalist Rafael Anton Irisarri.

Martin has turned in two reworks of Irisarri’s track ‘Empire Systems’: a ‘Wildfire Mix’ and a ‘Frozen Mix’. The latter appears on Irisarri’s new remix album, A Fragile Geography: Reworks, which is out now.

In a statement about his remixes, Martin said: “Rafael noticed my online praise of his album Fragile Geography, and subsequently invited me to remix a track from the album. When I approached my ‘Frozen Mix’ I became obsessed with the album’s beautiful title, and attempted to reflect it, with a deeply…

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Luke Turner looks back 30 years to a singular album and a nation standing at a cultural crossroads. First published in 2015

September 25, 1995. After school, the walk into town to Our Price. I might have been wearing my grey silver sixth form suit three chest sizes too big, black charity shop silk shirt and orange and brown spotted tie. I did five walks into town for Pulp around that time, to buy ‘Common People’, ‘Disco 2000’, ‘Sorted For Es & Whizz’ the Different Class album itself, and ‘Mis-Shapes’. I’d have taken the CD home, eagerly looking forward to whatever slogan Pulp might have put inside it. ‘Mis-Shapes’ ran thus, and I can still remember it, even without the sleeve…

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Oruã

Slacker

From Rio de Janeiro, the group’s loose, kosmische indie pop enacts its own quiet, day-to-day revolutionary practice, finds Hayley Scott

Slacker by Oruã

The phrase “poor man’s jazz, working-class krautrock” appears in Oruã’s press materials with the same tongue-in-cheek grandiosity Royal Trux brought to calling themselves “the world’s greatest boogie woogie band.” There’s fun embedded in the claim, but it carries weight: a declaration that doubles as a joke that doubles as the truth.

Oruã emerged from Escritório, an underground creative space in Baixada Fluminense, one of Rio de Janeiro’s poorest areas. Born from improvisational jam sessions during one of Brazil’s most turbulent periods – coup d’état, political imprisonment, the rise of the extreme right – the band formed around Lê Almeida (guitar/vocals),…

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Husband and wife duo Rachel Nakawatase and Ryan Betschart blend their doom with dreampop, noise, ambient and shoegaze elements, exploding the confines of linear perspective into new forms of sonic space

Husband-and-wife duo Shrine Maiden deal in heavy music and heavy concepts. They are a group seemingly intent on weighing down your shoulders with immense waves of sound while taxing your grey matter mulling the works of art theorist Hubert Damisch and Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.

Fuller and more rounded than their earlier work, A Theory of /Cloud/ sees previous rough edges worn smooth like pieces of glass washed ashore after years being buffeted by the tides. As a prima facie drone metal release, it’s heavy when it chooses to be –…

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