The Smashing Skull Sessions

The Smashing Skull Sessions is a podcast, interview and review website, set up to showcase and support the underground rock and metal scenes. Our goal is to promote artists and bands from right across the globe, giving them another voice and another forum in which to get their music out to a greater audience. We also have a new review series, The Review Room, which is another unique way of getting bands and artists some extra coverage and promotion

Monosphere - Friends & Foes feat. Mirza Radonjica (Siamese)

I have been an almost overzealous supporter of Monosphere since the release of The Puppeteer back in 2021. I reviewed the album back then and have always admired the sheer ferocity that this collective from Mainz could conjure up, all under the tsunami of aggressive and progressive riffs, pummeling percussions and filthy bass lines. Highly technical and meticulously infallible in full flow, Monosphere excited me, simple as that!

Well, as part of the ONE TO WATCH series, we have been gifted their brand-new single, Friends & Foes, which features Mirza Radonjica from Siamese as guest artist. With a razor-sharp visual experience accompanying the track, which is free to view on YouTube by the way, Monosphere have obliterated the textbooks, and have written a short but devastating track that sees the band push more boundaries and fuse multiple genres into one cacophony of euphonic fury and might.

From the opening riffs, the intensity is fever pitch with a vocal onslaught that quite literally bludgeons the eardrums and puts every part of the body on sensory overload. Experimental timing and devastating delivery are the order of the day here. Amidst the wall of sound, the unmistakable melody found interwoven through The Puppeteer is still there to enjoy but as I mentioned earlier, they have somehow found another gear. Monosphere are back my friends, and bloody hell, they mean business.

https://youtu.be/CYFQ6TGqaik