Unsung Podcast

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

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?

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

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

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