Week of Sep 21 – Sep 27 · 2026
A hundred and twenty-one tracks across seven heard days, and the week's habit is to take things in pairs. Two nights in a row of dissonant death metal on Wednesday and Thursday, the second opening on the exact track the first had closed on. Two nights in a row of Porcupine Tree to finish, the second picking up where the first had stopped. Between those pairs the pendulum swings hard: Wednesday is the heaviest day of the week at its most airless, and two days later Friday is three songs of hushed Danish neofolk. The week opened on prog and dark jazz, the cerebral door that had been left ajar since the Sunday fusion, and it closed on Steven Wilson's melancholy. The heaviness never left, but for the first time in weeks it had to share the room with music that wants to be thought about.
The same week as numbers
| Day | Tracks | First play | Last play | Mean heaviness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | 23 | 11:46 | 22:53 | 6.0 |
| Tuesday | 30 | 12:17 | 23:16 | 6.8 |
| Wednesday | 14 | 23:31 | 01:04 | 8.3 |
| Thursday | 10 | 21:52 | 22:48 | 8.1 |
| Friday | 4 | 12:49 | 19:08 | 3.8 |
| Saturday | 29 | 12:26 | 01:07 | 6.3 |
| Sunday | 11 | 23:53 | 01:28 | 5.7 |
The Arc
Monday is a prog day across both its ages, and Tuesday reopens the jazz door, dark jazz this time, Bohren and the Dale Cooper Quartet. Then the week drops into its deepest pit, two after-midnight sessions of dissonant death metal, Ulcerate and Artificial Brain and Gorguts, the most disorienting corner of the library. Friday answers with almost nothing, four quiet tracks. The weekend rebuilds: Godflesh, finally given a full afternoon after a month of single tracks, then two late nights of Porcupine Tree.
The Map
Britain carries the week by volume, Porcupine Tree's nineteen tracks and Godflesh's ten, Steven Wilson and Justin Broadrick at opposite ends of English heaviness, one melancholy and one mechanical. America supplies the dissonant death of Artificial Brain and the prog-death of Rivers of Nihil, New Zealand the Ulcerate that anchors both pit nights, Greece the Dead Congregation that joins them. The quiet edges are continental: Bohren and Der Club of Gore out of Germany, the Dale Cooper Quartet out of France, :Of The Wand and The Moon: out of Denmark.
The Subjects
The week's subject is weight of two kinds. The dissonant death nights are about collapse, music built to feel like vertigo; the Porcupine Tree nights are about numbness, Fear of a Blank Planet and its medicated youth. Godflesh sits between them, dehumanisation by machine. Even the gentlest stretch, the neofolk Friday, is melancholy through and through. Nothing this week is cheerful; what changes is whether the darkness arrives through the gut or through the head.
The Turn
The turn is Saturday afternoon, when a name that had trailed the whole month one track at a time is finally taken whole. Godflesh's afternoon gives way to a song from The Wicker Man, and after it the week changes register for good, into Porcupine Tree's sad and cerebral prog, carried over two nights. The paired-night habit that held the dissonant death holds the prog just as tightly. What he takes in twos has changed; that he takes it in twos has not.
Of the 68 artists heard this week, 17 had never appeared on the record before. The longest he stayed with one name: Porcupine Tree, 11 tracks unbroken.
Who spanned the week
What followed what
| Hushed | Low | Mid | Heavy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hushed | ||||
| Low | 8 | 5 | 1 | |
| Mid | 2 | 24 | 8 | |
| Heavy | 2 | 7 | 57 |