The rate at which prolific musicians in the Bandcamp era can churn out new material on a short notice will never cease to amaze me. The idea of an “album cycle” in which an artist drops one album a year, or even less frequently, and spends the time between proper releases promoting and performing based around one album’s material still exists in the upper echelons of the music industry.

Rock Island-based black-metal band Everlasting Light has been a favorite Quad Cities project of mine since the release of Heavy Sanctuary back in 2019. A project that revels in the extra layer of obfuscating scuzz that comes from a more informal approach to recording, they still always manage to hit a sweet spot between the high fidelity detail of a “proper” studio take and the more room-tone-soaked final product of a DIY demo tape.

Bettendorf’s resident freak-noise-slash-post-rap industrial producer/vocalist VoidDweller has been trolling our eardrums with their aggro strain of free-for-all genre-mashing psychosis for a minute now, but the charmingly titled cum is probably their most fully formed and ultimately “complete” release to date.

The Davenport-based horror-score psych-rock experimental crew Giallows dropped a new track called “Lost Boy” on the most recent iteration of Bandcamp on March 5 – the first Friday of the month being the day the music-hosting platform cedes its usual share of profits directly to the artists, which has caused a huge monthly spike in both artist output and fan purchasing.