Unsung Podcast

Unsung Podcast

If there was a definitive discography of classic albums, what should be in it? Hosts Mark Fraser and Chris Cusack, plus the occasional guest, discuss and dissect perceived classic albums to decide which albums would make this list. We also interview amazing artists, do genre deep dives and throw a journalistic lens on musical topics you might not know much about.

  1. 1d ago

    We Journey Back Into the World of Black Metal to Discuss Satyricon's 'Volcano'

    With Damnation Festival 2026 just around the corner, we thought it provided an excellent opportunity to ask Dave back to talk about a band he’s been wanting to discuss for a while: Satyricon. Specifically we're looking at their 2002 major label debut 'Volcano'. This isn’t the first time we’ve tackled black metal. Indeed, we did a whole two-episode deep dive into the genre back in 2019, but when doing this episode, we realised that we didn’t actually talk about Satyricon at all. Which is weird, because they were fairly integral to the creation of the second-wave black metal sound in Norway. Satyr himself was already a known quantity in that scene. We right that wrong today. Oddly, though, we also know that this particular Satyricon album is, to some folk, not even considered a black metal album. It’s clear that this record marked a kind of change in direction for the band, as they began to embrace heavy metal more fully. Satyr himself probably disagrees with that, given that he’s on record more or less saying that he sees his band, regardless of the music they make, as part of the lineage of black metal... But we digress. On this episode we take a canter through their discography, place their success in wider context, and touch upon some of the band’s internal politics. 00:00 Intro 01:17 Halloween Takes Over 02:57 Fire Facts And Folklore 03:47 Studio Admin And Festivals 05:02 A Halloween Gift?! 06:46 Damnation Lineup Hype 08:52 Introducing Satyricon 09:47 Origins And Early Era 15:25 Major Label Shift 18:32 Waves Of Black Metal 23:53 Purists And Sellout Talk 25:32 Controversies And Ethics 32:49 Ranking The Discography 36:09 Rebel Extravaganza Breakdown 38:40 Streaming Rights Mystery 39:29 Now Diabolical Era 40:40 Fan Ratings Whiplash 43:08 Age of Nero Breakdown 44:29 Later Albums Decline 46:17 Art Project and Lifestyle 49:12 Bands That Changed Sound 59:14 Volcano Track By Track 01:03:28 Fuel for Hatred Spotlight 01:10:52 Closing Thoughts

    We Journey Back Into the World of Black Metal to Discuss Satyricon's 'Volcano'

  2. Oct 26

    FROM THE VAULT: Death Magic by Health (149)

    THIS WEEK we're opening our vault to unleash this rather, erm, SPIRITED discussion about Health and their 3rd album, Death Magic. It is, in many ways, a fun encapsulation of the way this podcast used to be. Which is to say, divisive. This we recorded in the in period in between lockdowns during the pandemic so we'll leave it to you to decide whether the weirdness of that entire period contributes to the atmosphere of this episode. We're also blowing the cobwebs off this bad boy because in a little under two weeks Health will play Damnation Festival 2026 in Manchester. We'll be in attendance, so if you see us come say hi! Next week normal service resumes as we bring Dave back (again?!) to talk about Damnation headliners Satyricon. Original shownotes: This week we take a critical look at the discography of LA noise/electronic/pop/metal/dance/whatever band Health from good ol’ Los Angeles. Perhaps best known to some as noise rock band, their sound has changed a fair bit over the years. After releasing two acclaimed DIY noise type records they went away and did the soundtrack to Max Payne 3. When they returned years later they had fully embraced the electronics that they had begun to incorporate in their second album “Get Color” and fully enhanced their presence within their music. Of course, that’s only part of the story. They’re a band who had always had a penchant for a remix or two - indeed every album of theirs has had an accompanying remix record called DISCO - so to say their movement into the realms of industrial and electronica was a surprise would of course be an understatement. On this episode we chat about their third album Death Magic. Things get a bit heated this week as - shocker - we don’t agree on this album at all. But hey, that’s the kinda content you’re here for right?

    FROM THE VAULT: Death Magic by Health (149)

  3. Oct 13

    The Chaotic Good, Bad and The Ugly - Understanding The Worst of Music Marketing

    Most businesses require marketing in order to generate sales and, ultimately, success. We’re all aware of this: our feeds are flooded with ads on a daily basis because, when we really get down to it, all platforms are an ad business first and foremost. This means that when you’re an artist trying to promote your wares, you probably need to do marketing in order to get people to pay attention and generate new fans. For most small artists, trying to break through the noise is a thankless and, frankly, onerous task. One may hope for some kind of virality in the hope of obtaining many viewers that you can convert into fans, but the truth about virality is that nine times out of ten, it doesn’t work. No, what you need to do is commit to the grind and slowly churn out content in the hope of training the algorithms just enough that your content is placed before the right audience at the right moment. But what if you could circumvent all that? What if you could just pay someone a large amount of money to create momentum on your behalf by utilising fake accounts to push you into that algorithm? That’d sure be great, huh? In essence, that’s what some marketing agencies do. Agencies like Chaotic Good. Their name is probably familiar. They went somewhat viral themselves earlier this year when they spoke about how they achieve huge internet success for their artists via dubious means. They were, in fact, very blasé about it. Soon afterwards it transpired that they were running campaigns for the band Geese, a medium-sized weird indie band that, in 2025, suddenly found themselves riding a wave of success due to an apparent groundswell of support on TikTok. It’s taken us a while to address this issue. We wanted the dust to settle a bit before really trying to capture our thoughts, and we think we’ve done a pretty good job here. This week, we dig into the Billboard interview that started it all, the services Chaotic Good offered, and how bot farms, paid contractors and armies of fake fan pages actually work. We ask whether any of it is legal, why virality so rarely turns into real fans or ticket sales, and what it means for artists who’d rather not play this game. Then it gets bleaker: AI slop, industry plants, and what happens to a culture that can no longer tell what’s real. Everything you ever wanted to know about the seedy world of major label music marketing but were afraid to ask... it’s all covered here in this week’s episode. Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 02:00 Why Chaotic Good, and Why We Waited for the Dust to Settle 09:00 Who Are Chaotic Good? SXSW, Origins & the Client List 13:00 "We Know How to Go Viral": Rival Agencies & a Hologram of a Herd 18:00 The Four Services: Narrative Campaigns, UGC, Fan Pages & Brands and Media 36:00 Scale, Not Skill: Discord Clippers & the Failures You Never See 39:00 Flooding the Comments: NASCAR Memes, Dance Cats & Identity Fraud 41:00 Human-Like Accounts, TikTok's Six Billion Deletions & the CAPTCHA Sidebar 43:00 Juicing Accounts & the Bot Farm Question 48:00 Paid Humans as Bots & "Is It Okay Because It's Art?" 52:00 Where Else Do Bot Farms Go? Politics, Films & Repurposed Infrastructure 54:00 "That's the Internet": Organic Behaviour at Inorganic Scale 57:00 Virality vs Success: Vanity Metrics & the Marketing Funnel 1:01:00 When Fake Fans Don't Buy Tickets: Pulled Tours & Underselling Shows 1:11:00 Music Was Never a Meritocracy 1:12:00 The AI Arms Race: Dancing Baby Slop & More 1:15:00 Conclusions: Hubris, Money & "Engineer's Disease" 1:19:00 Gaslighting on an Industrial Scale & TikTok as Astroturf 1:22:00 Overt vs Covert Marketing: The Man Behind the Curtain 1:29:00 Wrap-Up: Next Week's Satryicon & Sign-Off

    The Chaotic Good, Bad and The Ugly - Understanding The Worst of Music Marketing

  4. Sep 14

    Is One Minute Science by Sunna an Unsung Classic, or Has It Been Banished to the Mists of Time for a Reason?

    For about 8 and a half years, our former (and beloved) co-host Dave had been mulling over doing this album. Then one day, out of the blue, he messaged us: I'm coming in I want to talk about One Minute Science by Sunna. In another timeline, we'd have gotten this out of the way a long time ago. Hell, Chris almost suggested it himself. And yet here he was, unprompted, reopening a wound he'd apparently been carrying since he was fourteen. One Minute Science came out in 2000, and on paper it shouldn't have needed anyone's courage. Sunna were a Bristol grunge (?)/electronic rock(?)/industrial metal (?)/nu metal (?) band with a genuinely unlikely pedigree: the album was produced by Neil Davidge, Massive Attack's long-term studio partner, and frontman Jon Harris reputedly played on Mezzanine itself. They signed to Melankolic, the label Massive Attack half-owned, then to Astralwerks in the States, and eventually toured with Smashing Pumpkins, A Perfect Circle and Vast, and picked up Best New Band at the Kerrang Awards in 2001. Lead single Power Struggle found itself on the Hollow Man soundtrack and they even almost had a song from their second album appear on the soundtrack to Spider-Man 2. A fate the film industry's collective good sense narrowly spared everyone. This was, by any measure, a band with momentum. But it didn't pan out. The album stalled at 151 in the UK charts, the press treated it as an inconvenience to be filed under nu metal and dismissed, and Sunna never really recovered - three more records, increasingly hard to find, never on Spotify, cover art that gets worse with each release. One reviewer's verdict at the time, that if Sunna were foreboding and menacing then so were Creed and Bush, turned out to be a pretty efficient way of ending a career. So why the secret almost nine-year fandom? We get into it properly this week, with...mixed results. Dave defends the record as a load-bearing piece of his adolescence, uncompromising and strange even now. Chris tries, valiantly and with increasing desperation, to make a case for the production doing the heavy lifting. And Mark - hearing it stone cold for the first time in his life - declares it not just bad but the worst thing he's heard on this podcast in very nearly nine years of doing it. Grim. Nobody comes out of this one agreeing with anybody else. Which is exactly how this podcast used to be, back in the days of yore. Everyone's got a record like this. The question is whether you'd admit it on air. Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 04:04 The Sunna Reveal: Dave's Unprompted Text After 8.5 Years 08:11 One Minute Science, Sunna & First Impressions 11:03 The Massive Attack Connection: Neil Davidge & Mezzanine 12:38 Band History: Chillum, John Harris & the Bristol Scene 18:47 Drummer Departures & Mark Richardson's Near Miss with Feeder 19:30 Jon Harris's Accident-Prone Years, Kenya & the Exorcism Story 21:00 Genre Confusion: Nu Metal, Post-Grunge & the UK Scene Comparisons 28:00 DJ Flatline, Bristol Trip-Hop DNA & the Hollow Man Cameo 29:00 The Spider-Man Near-Miss & the Hulk Screening Anecdote 30:07 The Press Reviews: "Tool to Travis" and Getting Savaged 32:11 The Worst Album Art in Music History 35:26 The Follow-Up Records: Two Minute Terror, Third Pin & Global Morning 42:00 Standalone Singles: Swimming with Snakes & Sentiment Attacked 43:26 Track-by-Track Begins: I'm Not Trading & the Production Debate 1:05:10 Dave's Conclusion: A Flawed Nostalgic Safety Blanket 1:07:55 Chris's Conclusion: The Racist Uncle Defence 1:10:36 Mark's Verdict: "The Worst Thing I've Heard on This Show" 1:14:00 Bush, Nickelback & Finding Mark's True Hated Genre 1:17:00 Wrap-Up & Sign-Off

    Is One Minute Science by Sunna an Unsung Classic, or Has It Been Banished to the Mists of Time for a Reason?

  5. Aug 31

    Exploring the Magickal History of Coil (Part 2) w/ P6 from OMO, Desalvo, Stretchheads and Security

    Last time we admitted defeat in our attempts try to summarise a fifty-plus album discography. This time our play P6 turns up with an actual diagram (which you can see right here) and we spend an hour and a half trying to work out whether that's a genuinely useful map or just a very elegant way of saying "it's complicated." We get into what actually meant when they called one period of their music “solar music” and the other “moon music”, both to themselves and to people writing about them afterwards. We begin with Scatology and then go into a long stretch on Coil as a queer band specifically: not queer-adjacent, not later reclaimed as queer, but a band who were writing directly out of the AIDS crisis while the gay mainstream press was too frightened to touch them. We talk about the rejected Hellraiser score, Clive Barker's actual bowels, and how a soundtrack too creepy for a horror franchise ended up as one of the most bootlegged, most fought-over corners of their catalogue. We get into Trent Reznor giving them free run of a New Orleans studio for their aborted album Backwards, the slow drift into drone and ritual with Time Machines, and the posthumous artefact economy that's grown up around the band. There's a lot of Coil in this episode that isn't really music in any conventional sense; arguably a lot of it is more like documentation. Documentation of a relationship, of a pandemic that was devastating their community, and of two people slowly working out what they were for. Whether that makes the later, harder-to-love records worth the effort is something we argue about without really resolving. We’d say give it a go anyway – you might find something you love. Chapters 00:00 – Welcome back, and the state of the venues in Glasgow 00:04 – Phil's solar/moon diagram, and the pivot point of Horse Rotorvator 00:07 – Scatology as manifesto: no personality cult, just "this is us" 00:12 – Defining solar vs moon in Coil's own terms 00:16 – "Kill a queer for Christ": the hostility Coil were writing against 00:20 – Coil as a queer band, not a queer-adjacent one 00:24 – The AIDS pandemic as the actual subject of the solar period 00:27 – Why Coil succeeded where Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the "gay icons" of the 80s didn't 00:31 – The Spanner case, outlaw community, and the limits of gay respectability 00:35 – The artefact economy begins: box sets, reissues, and "picking at the corpse of Coil" 00:36 – The rejected Hellraiser score and Clive Barker's bowels 00:44 – Love's Secret Domain, clubbing, and ecstasy as a response to the fear of touch 00:48 – Derek Jarman, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and Phil's own ordination 00:55 – Into moon music: The Angelic Conversation and the shift toward mysticism 00:57 – Trent Reznor, free studio time, and Nine Inch Nails' debt to Horse Rotorvator 01:02 – Membership shifts: Danny Hyde, Drew McDowell, and Thighpaulsandra 01:04 – Black Light District and the "dank, downbeat" transitional period 01:14 – Moving toward live performance and the birth of Coil's occult stage identity 01:19 – Balance's addiction, Funeral Music for Lady Diana, and the Foxtrot testimony 01:26 – Post-9/11 visuals, prisoners, and a return to transgression on stage 01:27 – Closing thought: boredom, labour, and what it cost to make this music

    Exploring the Magickal History of Coil (Part 2) w/ P6 from OMO, Desalvo, Stretchheads and Security

  6. Aug 24

    Exploring the Magickal History of Coil (Part 1) w/ P6 from OMO, Desalvo, Stretchheads and Security

    Coil have a reputation for being genuinely difficult: ritualistic, transgressive, the kind of band you approach the way you'd approach a locked door marked "occult correspondence, keep out." So it's a bit disarming that this episode opens with hand-written Christmas cards from Jhonn Balance and Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, sent to a teenage psychiatric nursing student in Paisley who wrote to them out of genuine fandom. Coil, it turns out, wrote back. The student in question is Phil Eaglesham, or P6 as he is perhaps better known, formerly of Desalvo, Stretchheads and currently of OMO and Security. He's returning after breaking our brains once already with Cabaret Volatire, and this time he's turned up armed with decades of correspondence, first-hand context, and a refusal to let Coil calcify into myth. We trace the band from Jhonn Balance's teenage letters to Throbbing Gristle, through Psychic TV and the deliberately porous, ceremony-blurred confrontation of early industrial music, into the Temple of Psychic Youth and its uncomfortably close relationship to actual cult structure. We get into the brass dildos sent to record labels as a two-fingered thank-you-for-nothing. We get into AIDS-era queer culture, MDMA, and the particular kind of self-medicating grief that eventually caught up with Balance. And we get into why a band this steeped in the esoteric and apocalyptic was, underneath it, trying to build something more human and more DIY than the mysticism suggests. Jhon Balance himself suggested that Coil would forgotten within ten years after their end. They weren't. Whether that's a triumph of the work outlasting the intent, or proof that even planned obsolescence can't out-manoeuvre a good back catalogue, is something you can decide for yourselves. And we'll give you a bit of time to do that, because there's a whole second episode of this still to come next week. Highlights 00:00 – Welcome back, Phil Eaglesham 00:04 – Setting the scene: resources, Tony Dickey, and the Coil album map 00:06 – The letters: correspondence with a psychiatric hospital 00:10 – Reading list: England's Hidden Reverse and Everything Keeps Dissolving 00:14 – A quick word from our sponsors (that's you) 00:16 – Origins: Jhonn Balance, Throbbing Gristle, and teenage letter-writing 00:20 – Psychic TV forms, Warner Brothers money, and the 23 brass dildos 00:23 – Temple of Psychic Youth and its uncomfortable proximity to cult logic 00:27 – Coil as an alternative: queerness, esotericism, without the cult of personality 00:29 – Ecstasy, connection, and the AIDS-era comedown that became alcoholism 00:32 – "In ten years, nobody will remember" — legacy, reissues, and Mute Records 00:34 – Sleazy in Bangkok, and his death in 2010 00:39 – Peter Christopherson's design career: Hipgnosis, Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols 00:42 – The boy shop window, the leg, and the police raid 00:44 – Industrial music's roots in performance art and danger music

    Exploring the Magickal History of Coil (Part 1) w/ P6 from OMO, Desalvo, Stretchheads and Security

  7. Aug 10

    What Does the Explosive Reaction to King Tut's and DF Concerts Tell Us About the Growing Sense of Injustice in Grassroots Music?

    If you've been tuned into the news around the Scottish grassroots music scene at any point in the last few weeks, you'll likely have seen there's been a bit of controversy brewing around King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow and their owners, DF Concerts. Following a piece published in The Bell, where numerous people spoke out about the poor terms that King Tut's offers to emerging artists, various corners of social media were ablaze with righteous fury. It prompted DF to threaten to take The Bell to court, and also saw The Herald get in on the action. So we think it's fair to say that this is a blaze that might be threatening to run amok. The terms that King Tut's offers has been something of a known issue in the Scottish music community for a number of years, and whilst there are certainly reasons for small artists to be aggrieved (reasons which we share), the matter is not quite as clear cut as The Bell article would have you think. On this week's episode we draw from our own experiences as musicians and promoters to try to give a more complete picture of the issue. We also do a wee exercise where we map out whether putting on gigs yourself is more cost effective, using examples of the rates offered by many venues in Glasgow to paint a picture of what the costs of running a show yourself actually are. Which ultimately leads us to ask a few questions: is what King Tut's offer fair? Is it just better to put on gigs yourself? And if King Tut's parent company, DF Concerts, used their corporate backing to pay artists more, what might be the outcome of that on the wider grassroots scene as a whole? If you like this episode please consider subscribing to our Patreon at www.patreon.com/unsungpod

    What Does the Explosive Reaction to King Tut's and DF Concerts Tell Us About the Growing Sense of Injustice in Grassroots Music?

  8. Jul 13

    IN SESSION: Jonzip from The Zips Talks About the Life and Times of Being in Glasgow's First(ish) Punk Band

    This week we sit down with Jon Zipp of The Zips — one of Glasgow's original 1977 punk bands — for a conversation that doubles as an oral history of Scottish punk. The Zips' story is a strange and charming one. Formed in '77, gigging by '78, split by the end of 1980 after two small-run EPs — 500 copies of the debut, sold out in six weeks — the band lay dormant for over two decades until a record collector tracked down the drummer via the West of Scotland phone book. It turned out The Zips' records had been bootlegged all over Europe, their EPs had become prized collectors' items, and a new generation of bands citing the Clash and Buzzcocks as influences had made the world safe for them again. They've been at it ever since, complete with a "Zips USA" franchise lineup, European squat tours. But the real revelation of this episode is John's first-hand account of Glasgow's infamous punk "ban". In the late 1970s, Glasgow City Council — having decided after a Stranglers gig at the City Hall that the city "had enough hooligans without importing them from down south" — made it known that any pub or venue hosting punk bands risked losing its licence. The effect was chilling: a generation of would-be Glasgow punk bands strangled at birth, touring acts like Elvis Costello turned away on the day of the show, and a city now famed as one of the great music capitals of the world temporarily hostile to the most vital music of its era. Along the way we get John's reflections on punk's flirtation with fascist imagery and provocation, why John Lydon is his biggest disappointment (and Paul Weller one of his quiet triumphs), the surprising resurgence of very young audiences going wild for original 77-style punk, and a truly outrageous tale of how, with his post Zips band in the 80, how he blagged — via the Mitchell Library's phone books and Harvey Goldsmith's office — onto a 30,000-capacity bill at Ibrox with Rod Stewart in 1983.

    IN SESSION: Jonzip from The Zips Talks About the Life and Times of Being in Glasgow's First(ish) Punk Band
See All (463)

Trailer

4.2
out of 5
13 Ratings

About

If there was a definitive discography of classic albums, what should be in it? Hosts Mark Fraser and Chris Cusack, plus the occasional guest, discuss and dissect perceived classic albums to decide which albums would make this list. We also interview amazing artists, do genre deep dives and throw a journalistic lens on musical topics you might not know much about.

Information

  • Creator
    Unsung Podcast
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    463
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Unsung Podcast
  • Show Website
    Unsung Podcast

You Might Also Like