GOLDSCAMMER – Mayday Royale (2026, LP, Morc Records) 

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Morc Records

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition (comes in a fold-over sleeve with full color overlay), 200 copies 

Release Date: 28 Oct 2026

Belgium has never been short of strange musical creatures, and Tim Depraetere has certainly spent enough time wandering through its underground to know a thing or two about avoiding the obvious. From Maan and their singular KRAAK release to Camargue, Tina, collaborations with Annelies Monseré, and, eventually, his own Goldscammer project, Depraetere has kept moving, changing shape and refusing to settle comfortably inside one particular musical box. His trail leads through electronics, guitars, ambient spaces, lo-fi songs and other beautifully difficult-to-classify territories, making the word “eclectic” almost useless when trying to describe what he does.

Yet “Mayday Royale” feels like something different: the moment when all those scattered threads finally become one proper statement. His first solo LP, arriving on Morc Records on October 28, 2026, has been a long time coming, with Depraetere spending years reshaping and fine-tuning the recordings. At its core, there are guitars and vocals, but this is far from your average songwriter affair. Dreamy synths, additional voices and strange textures pull the A-side inward, while the B-side gradually becomes rougher, darker, more repetitive and almost mechanically obsessive. 

“Mayday Royale” is a record that has clearly taken its time, but it doesn’t sound tired from the journey. Quite the opposite. It sounds ready to pull the plug, wipe the slate clean and start the whole strange trip again…

“Mayday Royale” contains 4 tracks on the first side of the LP album and 3 on the second side. “It Trickles Down” opens the journey in acoustic territory, but nothing is comforting about this acoustic sound. A creepy atmosphere slowly crawls underneath the torturously slow, almost funeral-like vocals, while distant voices seem to come from somewhere beneath the surface, giving the whole thing an eerie, half-buried quality. It flirts heavily with Acid-Folkish Psychedelia, but with an intense dark Nick Cave / Current 93 feeling hanging over it; imagine a much darker, more disturbing version of “All the Pretty Little Horses”, and you’ll get somewhere near the atmosphere here. “Vampire Blues” stays within the same haunted scenery but moves a little faster, remaining dark, hazy and strangely obscure. It feels like some kind of weird-folkish tune lost inside a fog of minimalism, with various underground “noisy things” creeping around the edges and somehow adding a strange charm rather than destroying the fragile construction. Then comes “It Gets Old”, almost eight minutes of naked, slow and acid-drenched acoustic low-fi folk, carrying a melancholic touch while an incredibly creepy atmosphere slowly develops behind it. Fragile dark male vocals are joined by eerie, almost goth-like female backing vocals, while whispers and strange synth “things” gradually turn the track into a genuinely unsettling soundscape. Little by little it transforms into an acoustic freak-a-delic, creepy folkish anthem before suddenly stopping dead, leaving you hanging in mid-air. “A Bit Of Blood” begins with nothing more than a piano, immediately establishing another funereal mood before a cold, minimalistic and repetitive synth slowly enters the picture, adding another layer of weirdness and obscurity. Experimental, frightening and beautifully uncomfortable, it somehow sounds like a long-lost, seriously haunted outtake from one of the darker corners of Mike Oldfield’s legendary “Tubular Bells”. Wow… and once again, Goldscammer refuses to give us a proper ending, cutting the track off almost as abruptly as it began.

Flip the record and “Lines Of Men” dives even deeper into obscurity, loneliness, darkness and Psych. The sound becomes grittier and more grinding, with acoustic guitar and cold, solitary male vocals surrounded by an out-of-this-world creep-a-delic atmosphere, largely created by that haunted-sounding synthesizer lurking somewhere behind everything. “The Lost Beliefs” stretches this peculiar Goldscammer universe across more than ten minutes, returning to the acoustic psych landscape we have by now become familiar with, but making everything rougher, darker and more grinding. Slow and deeply melancholic, it feels like a gothic, weird and almost balladesque piece emerging from complete isolation. Sitting here listening to it while my thoughts are drifting somewhere else, I can easily imagine this as the soundtrack to an Edgar Allan Poe film, especially as the synth gradually constructs a cold, futuristic ambient scenery towards the end. Definitely not an “easy” track, and certainly not an immediately digestible one — perhaps exactly why I like it. This is weird, esoteric Folkish Psych coming straight from the deepest underground. Finally, “From Within Us, Or From Beyond” takes us into even stranger territory. An instrumental, experimental and slightly improvised piece, it develops beneath a complicated noisy background, extremely dark, hazy, fuzzy and profoundly isolated, flirting with both Psych and Avant-Garde without ever becoming comfortable in either. It builds towards a sound climax that somehow never arrives, leaving the tension unresolved and the listener suspended inside its strange sonic fog. This is not music designed to explain itself, and certainly not something that will reveal all its secrets on a casual first listen. It is the kind of obscure, challenging trip that demands — and rewards — ears willing to dig much deeper…

“Mayday Royale” is not the kind of record that politely waits for your approval. It leaves some doors half-open, others firmly locked, and invites you to decide how far you want to go. For listeners attracted to the stranger, less obvious corners of underground music, this may well be one of those releases that keeps revealing new shadows with every return. Goldscammer has made a debut that deserves to be approached with curiosity rather than expectations — preferably with the lights down and the volume up… Invest… TimeLord Michalis

Tracklist

Links

Listen / Get it via GOLDSCAMMER Bandcamp

Alternatively, grab it through MORC RECORDS Official Web