“What would dance music on Dune’s planet Arrakis sound like?” – Steven Archer
Stoneburner returns bearing artillery and attitude, backed this time by producer Mark Alan Miller (Out Out), conjuring musical demolition from a smoking cauldron of ruin. Baltimore’s Steven Archer, known best from Ego Likeness, casts aside comfortable conventions to navigate more treacherous territory. With Miller steering the chaos toward structured collapse, each track unfolds like encrypted sabotage; a controlled explosion in slow motion.
Archer labels his latest output as Post-Industrial, though genre labels are weak defenses against a record hell-bent on inciting chaos. This music is forged from discarded metal, concrete dust, and rogue code—a dark prayer whispered through gritted teeth at civilization’s twilight hour.
Opening strong with C4 Amore, Archer channels visceral industrial dread that evokes Ministry’s sinister mechanized rhythms and the nihilistic bite of Nine Inch Nails. Vocals grind forth in rusted agony; melodies pulse like a dying city’s irregular heartbeat.
His references to Lovecraft’s dreamy Celephaïs transform hopeful escapism into something unsettling. Archer’s Celephaïs is corrupted, turning dreams into corrosive addictions, idealism rotting into despair. These twisted echoes of Lovecraft’s luminous realms emerge tarnished, decayed, and scarred by modernity’s poisons…distorted, fierce, and uncompromising.
Exhale grapples brutally with identity’s fragility, articulating a relentless self-destructive cycle through raw lyrical candor and imagery sharp enough to pierce armour. The album’s closer, 29 Silver Nails, descends into paranoid hallucination: locked doors, fungal decay, and haunted architecture. Each word drips cold dread, every metaphor a specter. Archer here constructs an emotional house of horrors…bleakly beautiful, structurally doomed.
Listen to C4 Amore below and order the EP here.
Stoneburner fuses science fiction with political and personal reflections, ranging from literary homages (Donna Tartt, Peter Watts) to social issues like neurodiversity, abortion rights, and anti-racism. With 2021’s Apex Predator, produced by John Fryer and marking Archer’s debut on COP International Records, Stoneburner pivoted toward introspective lyricism and away from club-centric tracks, reflecting deeper on human experience. Beyond Stoneburner, Archer is a multidisciplinary creator: a Bram Stoker Award-nominated illustrator and graphic novelist (Red in Tooth and Claw), the mind behind electronica project Hopeful Machines, and composer of a NASA mission soundtrack. Collaborations include remixes and joint works with Information Society, Stabbing Westward, and The Joy Thieves. Stoneburner’s extensive discography…early albums like The No Chamber (2014), conceptual EPs such as Songs in the Key of Arrakis, and 2017’s The Agony Box, cemented Archer’s distinct blend of sci-fi mythology and dark electronics.
In late 2025, the project launches the Post-Industrial Occult North American tour, opening in Montreal, combining high-energy performances with dystopian visuals and multimedia elements, promising an immersive showcase of the new album and setting the stage for additional tour dates and festivals into 2026.
In Stoneburner’s hands, collapse becomes not a warning but an invitation—a provocation to dance on the ashes, to savor the ruin. Miller’s disciplined hand complements Archer’s fury. Together, they’ve created music that revels in its darkness and reminds us the apocalypse is best experienced through sound.
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