Here's a translation of the Indonesian text:
Exciting news: Dongker has partnered with Inner Sight Games to create "Dongker vs The Ratocrats," a roguelite beat 'em up game featuring music adapted from their album "Melankolia Radikal."
The game is set in Ratpublic, a fictional country ruled by politician rats, robotic security forces, and bureaucratic goblins. The main character is Dollar, Dongker's mascot, who can transform into a giant robot, or "mecha," to fight against the corrupt regime and destroy symbols of power. So, in addition to the action, the game also features political satire.
The three members of Dongker, Delpi, Arno, and Dzikrie, are playable characters, each with different fighting styles: the guitarist relies on quick claws and energy shields, the vocalist uses sonic screams and bites, while the drummer has powerful punches and drilling attacks. Players will explore districts, government areas, and iconic political buildings in Ratpublic, facing off against riot control units, surveillance machines, and bureaucratic goblins.
What's particularly interesting is the music: the songs from "Melankolia Radikal" are being transformed into instrumental tracks that accompany the battles. The album, which contains 11 songs, was released by Greedy Dust Records on August 28, 2026, and includes tracks like "Takbir Terdengar Kejam," "Lautan Bunga Warna Terang," and "Lagu Selepas Hujan."
This isn't their first collaboration. Previously, they released "Dongker Beats," an 8-bit rhythm game for mobile phones. "Dongker vs The Ratocrats" is currently in development for PC via Steam, and the release date has not yet been announced. Updates will be shared on the official Instagram accounts of Dongker and Inner Sight Games.
Source: Pophariini
I've been teaching guitar for more than fifteen years, and there's one question I get asked again and again: how do I start from scratch? It's normal to feel lost when facing something so big. The second worry, almost always, is whether they're too old to start. And my answer is a resounding no: it's never too late. The best time is whenever you're able to start and, above all, enjoy it.
The first step is getting hold of a guitar, and there's no need to overthink it: a borrowed one, a second-hand one or a new one will all do. I started on a half-broken Spanish guitar that a cousin found abandoned on a building site. If you play electric guitar, an amp or headphones with built-in multi-effects help, but they're not essential on day one.
Next, you need guidance: a private teacher, an online course, YouTube videos or a local music school. Each option has its pros and cons, and it's normal to switch between them. What matters is having a path and not giving up. Learning comes from adding up small wins: a chord that sounds better today than yesterday, a chord change that starts to happen without thinking.
My final piece of advice: enjoy the process. The music is what matters most, not speed. If you're hesitating, go for it, because playing an instrument is a life experience you never forget.
Source: David García
3voor12 made Fat Dog its album of the week, and after reading Seth de Wildt's review I'm quite curious. The album is the second from the London band: Cancel Me (I'm Tired).
The five-piece formed during the Covid period in south London, as a reaction to bands that took themselves too seriously. Their live shows are known as extremely energetic and chaotic, and the band already had cult status before any official music came out. The 2024 debut WOOF. is described by the reviewer as uncompromising and intense.
On the new album the intensity remains, but there are calmer moments too. The title combines exhaustion from endless touring with cancel culture: when you get canceled, at least you can rest for a while. The music mixes new wave, dance, punk and indie.
The review highlights a few tracks. 'Smile and Wave' opens as a sturdy, mostly fun punk record. The title track is a synthpop song that recalls the nineties and is better suited to dancing. 'Shit love' reminds the reviewer of a badly dubbed intro to an American teen series. 'Heart of Darkness' is an accessible indie tune with a catchy melody, with singer Joe Love in the foreground, and the closer 'Aliens' starts small and keeps getting bigger.
The reviewer calls the album a "garbage-can breed that goes in all directions", different from the earlier work but with recognisable humour. It sounds like a record I want to play loud before forming an opinion, and the description alone makes me enthusiastic.
Source: 3voor12
A rather unusual fraud case in the music industry has just reached a verdict, and I think it's worth recounting. According to VnExpress, Michael Smith, 54, from North Carolina in the United States, was sentenced to 18 months in prison, two years of supervised release, and ordered to pay more than 8 million USD in fines for defrauding online music platforms to take royalties.
Jamie McDonald, a prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, said Smith exploited AI to commit the fraud. The FBI arrested him in September 2025, and he pleaded guilty in March of this year. The scheme ran from 2017 to 2024 in three steps: creating thousands of bot accounts on Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music and Amazon Music; using those accounts to play songs generated by AI non-stop while claiming them as his own works; and then collecting royalties based on fake listening counts.
The number that caught my attention is this: according to Tom's Hardware, in April 2023 Smith's bot accounts streamed 80.9 million AI tracks through family plans, while Taylor Swift's entire catalogue reached only 9.3 million plays on YouTube Music through family plans in the same period. To avoid detection, he spread the plays across thousands of songs, so no single track showed unusual listening numbers, and at one point he ran as many as 10,000 bot accounts at once.
The article also quotes a comment on X, arguing that Smith used AI to create both the music and the audience, earning millions of dollars from songs that in reality nobody listened to. For me, this story is a reminder that artists and the music industry will increasingly have to tell real listeners apart from fake ones.
Source: VnExpress
Afisha Daily wrote about Shortparis's new album, Iliad, but the piece by the author, who calls herself the band's biggest fan in the editorial office, read like a personal letter. Here is what I want to pass on.
The album was recorded with Nikolai Komyagin, who died on 20 February 2026. The author advises listening to the record without reading the press release or looking at the cover. She recalls that Shortparis's videos and shows once seemed to anticipate future events, and she links the album's title to today's renewed interest in Homer. In her view, the lyrics of the title track and the song “Farewell” fit the same pattern. “Farewell” is the only track credited to Komyagin alone, without the band.
The press release quotes Chernyshevsky on a “bold, lively little song”: at concerts, Komyagin would read that passage aloud to calm the audience. The album sounds very varied: dirty guitar riffs, elegant songs in French, and a bright, almost rock-opera or musical sound in which tragic and frightening themes become epic. A gospel choir and brass instruments also appear.
The author recalls that Komyagin's obituary in Afisha quoted his words: the next album would be an outstanding work. What matters is that Iliad was a planned release, not a posthumous compilation, and for the author this is a meaningful answer to the question of whether it is worth singing at all.
I have not heard the album in full, so I won't judge the sound. But the way people talk about it makes me want to put the record on my listening list, if only for “Farewell”.
Source: Afisha Daily
Today marks 20 years since Marek Grechuta's death, and Interia Muzyka has recalled his story. I'd like to summarise that text, because it shows the artist from a less familiar side.
Grechuta died on 9 October 2006 in Kraków, aged 60, of heart failure. He was buried in the Avenue of Distinguished Men at the Rakowicki Cemetery. His music combined poetry with song, jazz, rock and classical instruments. Among his best-known songs are “Dni, których nie znamy”, “Niepewność”, “Będziesz moją panią” and “Wiosna, ach to ty”.
He moved to Kraków from Zamość to study architecture. In 1966 he co-founded the architecture student cabaret Anawa with Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz, which later became his band. Their 1970 debut album, “Marek Grechuta & Anawa”, included “Nie dokazuj”, “Niepewność” and “Będziesz moją panią”. With the group WIEM (“W Innej Epoce Muzycznej”) he explored jazz on the albums “Droga za widnokres” and “Magia obłoków”.
Most attention has gone to his illness. Grechuta suffered from bipolar disorder, and difficult periods affected his work and performances. He sometimes interrupted or cancelled concerts and forgot lyrics. Some observers blamed alcohol, but his relatives denied this. In Marta Sztokfisz's book “Chwile, których nie znamy”, Magda Umer describes how hard it was to work with him in bad periods, and the only person who endured his anxieties was his wife Danuta, whom he married in 1970. Kora recalls the stress of tours and his sensitivity to criticism.
In 2006, shortly before his death, he received the Grand Prix for lifetime achievement at the Opole festival. For me, this story changes the way I listen to his songs: there was much more beneath the calm.
Source: Interia Muzyka
The music video for RADWIMPS' new song 「夕星-ゆうづつ-」 has been released. According to a BARKS article, the song is the theme song for the film 『汝、星のごとく』, and the MV came out on the same day as the film's release. The song itself was released digitally at midnight on October 2.
The MV was directed by Michihito Fujii, who also directed the film. It was shot in Imabari, Ehime Prefecture, the film's setting, at the cove where the main characters Kai Aono and Akatsuki Inoue spend time together. It mixes band performance scenes with scenes from the film. The performance scenes were shot on the day of the Onmaku Fireworks Festival held in Imabari in August 2026, and the band reportedly played in front of real fireworks.
The original work is the novel 『汝、星のごとく』 by Yu Nagira. In the film, Ryusei Yokohama and Suzu Hirose share the lead roles, the screenplay is by Naoko Adachi, and the music is by Noboru Omama. It depicts a love and destiny spanning 15 years between two people on the islands of the Seto Inland Sea. Yojiro Noda commented, "You can decide your own happiness yourself," and said the work gave him hope.
What's on my mind is the first TV performance. RADWIMPS will appear on TV Asahi's 『Music Station』 on Friday, October 16, from 21:00 to 21:54, where they plan to perform 「夕星-ゆうづつ-」 on TV for the first time.
I'm personally looking forward to how the footage of the band playing under real fireworks and a song that fits the film's ending will resonate. For now, I'll watch the MV and wait for the Music Station day.
Source: BARKS
A quote from Thom Yorke is making the rounds that I found oddly comforting: even the people behind a classic can be sick of it. NME reports that, in a long conversation with Harry Styles for Rolling Stone, Yorke said he was already tired of Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer before it was released.
His reasoning is simple. The band had played the songs so much before the record came out that he felt the need to move on. When the manager told them they would have to tour for two years to promote it, Yorke says he begged not to. The tour ran from May 1997 to April 1998, with more than a hundred shows. "Two years later, we were still going," he said, calling the situation really messed up.
He also recalled a November 1997 gig in Birmingham where he walked out of soundcheck, lost his security and hid on a train, which he describes as the closest he came to trying to escape. NME notes that bassist Colin Greenwood called that tour the band's worst point in 2003, partly because of the toll it took on Yorke.
There is a more recent thread too. Radiohead announced their live return in September 2025, their first shows in over seven years, and played 20 arena dates across Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin that November and December. Yorke told Styles the reunion tour caused a massive crash in his self-confidence that took months to recover from. Earlier this year Styles presented him with an Ivor Novello Fellowship, where Yorke debuted a new song called Space Walk.
For context, OK Computer is certified five-times platinum in the UK and has sold over 4.5 million copies, with Paranoid Android and No Surprises among its best-known singles. What I take from it is that a record can be a masterpiece to the listener and a grind to the people who made it, and both can be true at once.
Source: NME
I read a personal column on Infobae by Guillermo E. Pintos, written after learning of the death of Italo-Argentine singer-songwriter Piero. I found it a very beautiful way to say goodbye to an artist: by telling what his music meant in an ordinary home.
Pintos remembers his childhood on the outskirts of Olavarría in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, when the radio and the record player played all day and were his doorway to new music. He mentions Ricardo Soulé and Vox Dei, and the album "Cuero caliente" that his family brought from La Plata for his brother. His father, Víctor Pintos, hosted a sports program on the local radio station LU 32 on Sundays, and every Father's Day he opened the show with "Mi viejo" and read a text he had written for his own father.
For the author, that song expresses the affection between two men of few words who never knew how to get close or say what they felt. He also recalls the duo of Piero with journalist and writer José Tcherkaski, who wrote the lyrics with social observation and everyday characters while Piero provided the music and interpretation. From that partnership came "Mi viejo", "Pedro Nadie", "Juan Boliche", "Para el pueblo lo que es del pueblo" and "Un hombre común".
The column also recounts that Rubén Blades, while studying law in Panama, said Piero was the first artist he saw bring the ballad into an urban format with a social story, and that years later Blades composed "Pablo Pueblo". About "Juan Boliche", Pintos observes that the bar is the only place where the character exists socially, and that the proper name fused with the name of the place makes him part of the landscape. He also recalls Mercedes Sosa singing "Soy pan, soy paz, soy más" at the Teatro Ópera in February 1982, while the dictatorship was still in power, as an act of collective healing.
The column closes with "Buen viaje, tano". For me, what stays is the idea that a short song can hold decades of affection.
Source: Infobae
It is good to hear that Claudio Baglioni is returning to live performance. In an encounter reported by ANSA, the singer-songwriter explained that when he fell ill a few months ago, he feared he would never set foot on a stage again. He describes his return as a restart, and says the stage is the place where he hides best.
Because of the forced break, his GrandTour "La Vita è adesso" has been pushed back to summer 2027. First, though, comes "Che notte è questa!", seven concerts in Piazza di Siena in Villa Borghese, Rome: on 24, 25, 27, 28 and 30 to 31 October, plus 1 November.
The venue is no accident. On 24 October 1982, Baglioni played this same Piazza di Siena with "Alé-oò", one of the first big open-air concerts in Italy, with around 250,000 people in attendance. He remembers it as a turning point, so much so that a few days later he cut his hair to close an era. Forty-four years on, he is returning.
The farewell is set for 23 October 2027 at the Fori Imperiali, at the end of a tour of about 50 concerts across Italy. Baglioni makes clear that it may not be his last time live, but it will be the last of that kind, and he does not want a night of pure celebration. He also recalls all the places he has played in Rome, from stadiums to the Foro Italico, from the aula magna of his university to the Vatican, from the Colosseum to prisons and the Quirinale. The only ones missing, he says, are courtyards. At 75, he dreams of one day playing in Centocelle, his old neighborhood.
I like the honesty of these words. At the Campidoglio, welcomed by mayor Gualtieri, there was even room for irony: asked about returning to conduct Sanremo, Baglioni joked that it would be better to be mayor for a day.
Source: ANSA
K-pop group BIGBANG has become a talking point in the music scene with their return to Taiwan after 11 years. According to a report by the Central News Agency, the group began a three-night run of the 'XX : COSMOS' concert at Taipei Dome on October 9, and about 40,000 fans attended on the first night alone. Their last Taiwan show was the 'MADE' concert at Taipei Arena in 2015.
The group currently performs as a trio of TOP, G-Dragon (GD, Kwon Ji-yong) and Daesung, and this time they took the stage as a full group. Mandopop superstar Jay Chou sent a flower basket to congratulate them. The opening show began with 'FANTASTIC BABY', their signature song with 670 million views on YouTube, followed by 'HANDS UP', 'TONIGHT', 'BLUE' and 'LOSER'. During 'TONIGHT', GD recreated the classic guitar-smashing moment, and the whole arena erupted.
The three members also made an effort to connect with Taiwanese fans. GD greeted the crowd in Chinese, calling himself 'Dragon Brother', Daesung introduced himself in Chinese and said he had missed the fans, and TOP shouted his love in Taiwanese. TOP also revealed that Taipei is the first Asian stop of this tour, and said he arrived the night before and ate beef noodles and pineapple cakes, praising the fans for being warm and passionate.
Each member also had a solo stage. When TOP was walking down from the stage, he slipped and fell down two steps, but he quickly grabbed the handrail and did not fall. He later went down to the crowd, held hands with fans and sang, surprising and delighting them.
Despite an 11-year gap, I feel that 40,000 people singing together was not only thanks to the old songs, but also to the sincerity of these members who were willing to speak in the language of their audience. There are two more nights to go, so if you're thinking about going, it's worth checking it out.
Source: Central News Agency
I’d been waiting a while for Iolanda’s first album, and “Quebranto” finally came out on October 8. Thirteen tracks, already on the streaming platforms, including singles like “Olha P’ra Ela”, “Responso” and “Noite Inteira”.
What interests me about the record is how it goes back to the roots of central Portugal without turning into a museum piece. The word “quebranto” — the evil eye, and the state you’re left in after someone casts it on you — comes from the village where she grew up. She says the album opens with someone lifting the quebranto from her and, after the prayer, uncovers what was underneath: traumas, fears, decisions, heartbreaks.
Musically, the viola braguesa runs through almost everything, meeting cavaquinhos, strings, accordion, synthesizers and programming. It opens with the voice of Avó Lena (Grandma Lena) over guitar and braguesa. Produced by Luar, with Iolanda co-producing; the songwriting credits include names like Carolina Deslandes, Agir, LEFT., Milhanas, Extrazen and xtinto.
The live presentation is set for December 7 at the Coliseu dos Recreios, in a 360º format with the audience all around. For me, it’s exactly the kind of Portuguese record I want to be listening to this autumn: pastoral, melancholic and contemporary all at once.
Source: Rádio Comercial
