One of the most distinctive and revered forces in rock music, Sweden’s GRAVEYARD have announced October 9th, 2026 as the release date for their highly anticipated seventh studio album, Fever. Three years after the dreamlike haze of much-lauded previous record Six, the band return with a heavier, more direct sound — while still carrying the blues-soaked soul that defined their breakthrough album Hisingen Blues.
GRAVEYARD commented:
“Alright folks. Here it is — album number 7. Fever. Haven’t we always had it? The itch, the burn and the restlessness. The urge to push forward into the fog. Even with the teeth of hopelessness snapping at our asses and all the smoke and mirrors of our time telling us we got no future. Come what may. Let’s go!
This time around, we decided to waste no time. No outside producer. No detours. Just GRAVEYARD, straight to the point, doing what we do best. This just might be our greatest album so far! Hope you like it, too.”
The striking artwork for Fever was created by acclaimed Dutch artist Maarten Donders, whose powerful and expressive visual style has been showcased at the renowned cult festival Roadburn. Over the years, Donders has created artwork for more than 50 artists, ranging from Acid King to Frank Zappa.
Handling mixing duties is Pelle Gunnerfeldt, celebrated for capturing the raw intensity of bands such as The Hives and Refused, while more recently working with Viagra Boys.
Furthermore, GRAVEYARD have confirmed the first leg of their 2026 / 2027 tour with BLUES PILLS. Scroll down for all confirmed shows. Stay tuned for more European dates to be announced!
More exciting news regarding Fever and additional GRAVEYARD live dates will be revealed soon!
GRAVEYARD Fever October 9th 2026
01. Back From The Grave 02. Tongue Tied 03. A Better Cut (Note To Self) 04. Year Of The Horse 05. A Means To An End 06. Time To Tell 07. Don’t Shoot! 08. Room Tempered 09. Dead Note
In the late 1930s, Gibson began producing amplifiers to accompany the electric guitars that were quickly growing in popularity. They developed a significant amp line that spanned from simple and practical, to funky and unique.
By the mid 1960s, the Beatles were all the rage. The Vox amplifiers and Rickenbacker guitars they used were visually sleek and psychedelic, which became the standard for amplifiers during that time. On the bench today, I have an amp that represents Gibson’s response to those fads: the Titan.
The Titan has a normal channel and an LDR-driven tremolo channel, and it is equipped with 11 tubes. Tonally, the amp was designed to have a lot of headroom via about 65 watts of power. According to the original catalog, the amp was intended to be used with either guitar or bass. This was a pretty powerful amp for Gibson at the time!
“The obscurity of the Gibson Titan makes me wonder if another one will ever come across my bench.”
What makes the Gibson Titan stand out visually is its sharp angles, shiny metal faceplate, and futuristic control panel design. The Titan is indeed a stylish amplifier, enough even for Keith Richards, who has been pictured using one.
The Titan came with different speaker cabinet configurations. This particular amp is a Titan III, which means its cabinet houses two 10" speakers and one 15" speaker. The Titan I was accompanied by a 2x12" cabinet, and the Titan V had a pair of 15" speakers. While I did not have the cabinet with the amp in the shop, I was sent photos of the speaker configuration with the original Jensen speakers and original crossover circuit.
This amp came to me with a few issues, which included low output and weak tremolo. Opening up the amp, I immediately noticed one of the replacement Sovtek 6L6 output tubes was cloudy and white. This indicates that the tube’s vacuum had been compromised, and it will no longer work properly. Typically, this happens if there is a failure inside of the tube that causes the glass to crack. The amp will get a fresh quad of 6L6s, which I figured would improve the output level.
Otherwise, I could tell that the amp had been previously re-capped. The previous technician replaced all of the electrolytic capacitors with Illinois capacitors (as pictured in the photo). I typically like to use higher quality F&T capacitors, as they tend to have a longer lifespan. The amp’s owner opted for the filter capacitor upgrade, which adds reliability to the amp’s power supply.
Channel one includes the tremolo, so I decided to tackle that first. Typically, tremolo issues are caused by weak oscillator capacitors, a bad LDR, or a bad tube in the tremolo circuit. In this case, the main issue was affiliated with the oscillator caps, so I replaced the three .02 uf disc capacitors. Once the tremolo was back in full force, I moved on to address some resistor replacements.
The 470 ohm screen resistors for the output tubes were pretty toasted. There is one screen resistor per 6L6 output tube, acting as a safety component to protect the tube. Often when a tube fails, there is damage to this resistor. Not only were the resistors themselves darkened in the center, but they measured pretty far past 470 ohms.
In addition to the screens, I replaced the preamp plate resistors. These components deal with both high voltage and signal flow, and they often wear out over time. In the case of this Titan, replacing the plate resistors was effective in solving any remaining output issues and minor background crackle.
Once the amp was serviced and the new tubes biased, I was able to enjoy it for a while. In general, it sounds thick and clean with tons of headroom. Despite having upwards of six tubes in the preamp section, the circuit design is not driving the preamp tubes very hard, resulting in multiple stages of clean amplification.
I found myself appreciating the tremolo as well. The oscillator capacitors in this amp are valued slightly larger than those used in a similar Fender-style circuit, resulting in a nice slow fluctuation of volume. Channel one is a bit louder than channel two thanks to its extra gain stage.
Titans are very rare, but the ones that do exist are commonly modified for more gain in the preamp section. The amp’s owner and I agreed that leaving the amp stock was the way to go. These amplifiers take pedals very well, and I feel that a boost or distortion pedal in front of this amp would sound very alive. It was a treat to work on this amp, and the obscurity of the Gibson Titan makes me wonder if another one will ever come across my bench.
Manuel Delgado with his daughters Ava (r), and Lila (l).
Photo by Scott C. Jackson/The Tennessee Folk Art Series
This July, as you read this issue, our family has a momentous occasion to share: We have been asked to participate in the Smithsonian’s “Of the People: The Smithsonian Festival of Festivals.” This historic event coincides with the United States’ Semiquincentennial, with this July marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. To commemorate the anniversary, the Smithsonian is taking its oldest and largest public event, the annual Folklife Festival, on the road to communities across the country.
At Delgado Guitars, our family business is just a few years away from celebrating its 100-year anniversary, a milestone that would not be possible if the tradition of our craft had not been passed down generation to generation. For me, the most profound measure of this legacy is the next generation: my daughters, Ava and Lila.
"My father built his first instrument when he was 14, and I did so at 12. My girls accomplished this feat at the age of nine, beating my own record.”
Last summer, I was blessed and proud to accompany my two daughters when they were invited to participate in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in the nation’s capital. They hold a record in our family that fills me with immense pride: Ava and Lila are our family’s first female luthiers, and the youngest to have built an instrument. My father built his first instrument when he was 14, and I did so at 12. My girls accomplished this feat at the age of nine, beating my own record.
As a luthier, my work involves crafting and selling unique creations, while also holding firm to the teachings and knowledge passed down to me. Just as a musician strives to share their gift, I hold the responsibility to share this work with the next generation and continually seek ways to improve and move things forward for them.
Having my daughters involved in the craft and building has already broken past traditions, where women were not necessarily part of or at the forefront of a business like ours. While you can find many amazing, successful female luthiers today, when I was a child, I knew of none. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that I first learned the name of a female luthier. To now have my daughters recognized by the Smithsonian, growing up involved and connected with our family’s business and luthiery in general, is a powerful indicator of progress.
We see this same evolution in today’s musicians. For decades, female musicians have fought past historical exclusions and discrimination to earn the respect for their craft that their male counterparts never had to fight for. As parents, we are lucky to raise a generation of young people who see themselves represented in artists who look like them, breaking the stereotypes of the past. Our shop has always worked to ensure all are welcome and feel comfortable, and it is encouraging to see how music is evolving to be fully inclusive.
Few things fulfill me more than seeing the accomplishments of my daughters and knowing that they will forever have a place connected with our family business and the Smithsonian. I know the work is never done, but more and more limits and barriers are being broken, and when that happens, we all benefit from the talents that would otherwise never be allowed to flourish to their full potential.
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s tagline—“Culture of, by, and for the people”—is a fitting theme as it goes national for the United States’ 250th birthday. We hope you get out to see one of these great events in a city near you! More information can be found at festival.si.edu
The Fender Vintera III series delivers meticulously crafted vintage recreations that capture the authentic look, feel, and tone of iconic Fender guitars from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. The Vintera III Early ‘60s Bass VI features an alder body and a maple neck with rosewood fingerboard for classic Fender tone that’s full of punch and clarity. The early ‘60s “C”-shape, 30” scale maple neck with 7.25” radius rosewood fingerboard and vintage-tall frets provides supreme comfort and outstanding feel. At its heart, you’ll find three vintage-style early ‘60s single-coil pickups that deliver all the deep and growling, rich and articulate tone that made Fender famous. Other features include a vintage-style floating tremolo for expressive vibrato, individual on/off switches for each pickup, vintage-style Bass VI mute and vintage-style tuning machines for enhanced tuning stability. Embrace the authentic vintage spirit and legendary sound of Vintera III – where every detail tells the story.
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Schoolly D sent Kurt Vile a link. “Somebody stole my fake fur coat,” the pioneering gangsta rapper told the easygoing folk-rock singer-songwriter. “And you can’t be the King of Philly without your fur coat.” Without hesitation, Vile clicked the link and bought Schoolly D the coat.
With this transaction, the rapper best known for 1985’s “P.S.K. ‘What Does It Mean?’” showed up at music club Kung Fu Necktie in a red cap, shades, and, yes, the fur coat, to film what became a few seconds in Vile’s new video “Chance to Bleed.” “Anything for Schoolly D,” Vile says in a phone interview. “He’s literally just himself. All he’s got to do is fuckin’ show up.”
Schoolly D’s cameo is one of many subtle references to Vile’s hometown throughout his 10th and latest album, Philadelphia’s been good to me, from name-dropping the late astronomical jazz bandleader Sun Ra in “You don’t know cuz it’s my life” to references to the Schuylkill River and Baltimore “just across the way,” to titling “Holiday OKV” for his home studio. (Vile first met Schoolly D at the 2023 Philly Music Fest, and they discussed a potential future collaboration.)
“I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a Philly music museum! If there is one, I’d like to go,” Vile says. “I definitely delve into the books and the music. I do have that Philly pride.”
Photo by Eleanor Petry
Vile, 46, started his music career in Landsdowne, Pennsylvania, his birthplace, as a 14-year-old banjo player who recorded his own compositions. It was the era of grunge, DIY, and whatever Neil Young happened to be doing, and Vile began to put out his own cassettes before joining singer-songwriter Adam Granduciel in the War On Drugs, then departing before the band truly took off. By then, he’d developed a distinctive voice—a thin, scratchy, friendly-next-door hippie singer-songwriter style resembling Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis. He signed to indie-rock fixture Matador Records, and his fourth album, 2011’s Smoke Ring for My Halo, showed talent for pop hits—like 2015’s “Pretty Pimpin,” which hit 100 million Spotify streams and turned him into a star.
“It’s been a minute before I got a bunch of good electric-guitar solos. I finally captured that in the studio.”
For years after that, Vile seemed to be everywhere—touring solo, gracing the War on Drugs albums, collaborating with Courtney Barnett, the Sadies, and the late John Prine. These days, he’s no longer hovering around the indie-rock high-water mark commercially, but he and his band, the Violators, are big enough to play festivals and ballrooms everywhere. “I’m making a living off my music—that’s the beauty,” Vile says. “I’m happy about that.”
Philadelphia’s been good to me, recorded at OKV Central, which Vile and his longtime bandmate Adam Langelloti began building during the pandemic, is, characteristically, filled with songs that combine contemplative, minor-chord melodies with upbeat guitars and mandolins. In the opening track, “zoom 97,” he sings: “I wrote a song, yeah / some people said / I was doing it wrong, yeah / but check out my hands / my chiming chords / on a Gold Tone mandolin guitar.” At one point during “99 bpm,” Vile exults: “Yeah! Twang-pop. Whoo!”
In a press release for the album, he declares Philadelphia“my best vocal record,” “my best electric guitar record,” and “my most organic record, made in the comfort of my own zone.” In the interview, by phone from his home in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia, Vile says his manager told him Philadelphiais his “most upbeat record in a long time.”
The album, he adds, is “not like bubblegum—it’s just comfortable and happy. I’m calling out my hometown by name, which I do a lot, but I haven’t done it in an album title. If I feel comfortable and happy, in a lot of ways, I am. As happy as I can be, with this crazy world.
“I’m no Frank Sinatra,” Vile continues. “I just feel a little more comfortable. My voice is relaxed, but it’s got some good melodies and some good emoting. And then electric guitars—a lot of times, I end up acoustic in the studio. It’s been a minute before I got a bunch of good electric-guitar solos. Just from touring and stretching out a little more, I finally captured that in the studio.”
Unlike 2013’s “Wakin On a Pretty Day,” a small hit that has become one of Vile’s signature songs, Philadelphialeans minimalist. “Wakin On a Pretty Day, that’s like one-million guitars,” Vile says. “Some people say that record of mine is kind of epic, but this one’s more organically Neil Young-style, where it’s, like, one guitar solo.”
As for the way he combines downbeat music with upbeat guitar sounds, Vile gets briefly technical: “You leave the high E open all the time. Things like that make things dreamy. If you play an F, and leave the high E open, it’s a dreamy sound. So maybe the combination is, you’re getting the pretty melancholy thing, but there’s so much sunniness in the other notes.”
“I’m making a living off my music—that’s the beauty. I’m happy about that.”
One stretch of “Every time I look at you,” a love song, demonstrates this happy-sad contradiction: “I flew close to the sun / and I had a lot of fun / Then I guess I had to come down,” Vile sings, his voice surrounded by xylophone plinks and upbeat guitar arpeggios. “Punishment fitting the crime.” The album feels like arriving somewhere after a difficult journey. Vile has two daughters, 13-year-old Delphine and 16-year-old Awilda, and they both play multiple instruments, focusing on the harp, tutored by family friend Mary Lattimore, a Vile collaborator and former Philadelphian. “They can just pick anything up,” Vile says. “Girl-dads are the best. Daughters are the best.”
OKV Central was an important source of the comfort that inspired the album, a fact that he brings up frequently. Langellotti, a longtime Vile bassist who is now his primary engineer, helped the singer-songwriter achieve the studio’s ambience—it’s named for singer Tompall Glaser’s Nashville facility, nicknamed Hillbilly Central, where the late Waylon Jennings and others helped build the foundation for what became the outlaw-country movement in the ’70s. “I love Waylon. I wear him on my shirt a lot because he’s the coolest and the realest,” Vile says. “[OKV Central] is a place where I could be real and not have other people telling me how it’s done—and surround myself with people who want to be there. It’s my version of my outlaw era.”
Photo by Eleanor Petry
OKV Central is the kind of musical space where friends have the time and trust to conduct experiments to achieve the perfect sound. One of Vile’s bandmates, keyboardist Matthew Jugenheimer, came up with the handclaps in the closing track, “Avalanches of Snow,” by listening to Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s double-clapping 1999 hit with Kelis, “Got Your Money.” Vile sat at his desk, but every time the pair tried to record the handclaps, he says, “It didn’t sound like that. It’s the way your head hears something.” They moved around, shifted the mike position and employed a Zoom recorder until they achieved prime ODB-ness.
“My band members are all my good friends. The band is growing. A lot more weight off my shoulders,” Vile says. “Happy to be among my people and among my family and be able to combine the two.”
Vile mostly produced Philadelphiahimself, with help from the Violators, including Langellotti, Jugenheimer, drummer Kyle Spence, and guitarist Jesse Trbovrich, as well as longtime producer Rob Schnapf. At first, at OKV Central, Vile was “excited and hands-on and learning the gear—and I could run it all if I have to.” But he found turning on computer screens “kind of zaps my creativity,” so he ceded much of the technical details to others. “I like to record simply, from a four-track or a reel-to-reel or a Zoom recorder, or even on my phone. Get it down when you’re feeling it. Any way you can. Always record,” he says. “But it’s definitely complicated. Every one of my bandmates has been an engineer. I joke that people aren’t put in my band for what they play—it’s more they’ve got their hands in everything. That’s what I like.”
“Laid back is ultimately where I want to be, but there’s a lot of stress to get there.”
The non-technical ingredient for Philadelphiawas, of course, Philadelphia itself. Vile is a prolific reader, and his studio is filled with books. One is John Szwed’s Space Is the Place, a biography of Sun Ra, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and died there in 1993, but spent much of his career working in Philly—he’s so associated with the city that his longtime saxophonist, Marshall Allen, now in his 90s, still lives in the Sun Ra house, not far from Vile’s home. “I just loved that book. It was like my bible,” Vile says. “[Ra] is from Saturn, and what he did for his people, and just his output in general—he was a fascinating character. You could visit his various ghosts around here.” During the phone interview, Vile refers to reading Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove, the autobiography of Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of the Philadelphia-born Roots, and the fact that Ice-T borrowed Schoolly D’s “P.S.K. ‘What Does It Mean?’” for 1986’s “6 in the Mornin’,” which inspired the beginnings of gangsta rap.
Although the Roots became famous out of Philly just a decade or so before Vile did, the singer-songwriter has seen the hip-hop band from The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallononly once, in 2012, when both headlined the Sasquatch Music Festival in Washington state. “They just blew my mind. They didn’t stop,” Vile recalls. “And [lead rapper] Black Thought was so cool to me and my brother backstage. I’ve got to make a point to get to a Roots Picnic or something.”
Photo by Eleanor Petry
Befitting his public musical image, Vile speaks in a slow, friendly tone, as if you expect him to start puffing on a vape during the call. (Unprompted, he refers to himself multiple times as “laid back.”) But in a 2013 Pitchfork interview, Vile quoted his producer, John Agnello, suggesting some of this is carefully constructed: “I’ve never associated you with being laid back whatsoever,” Agnello told him. So what’s the secret to making music that sounds laid back while not actually being laid back?
“That’s, like, a persona I give off from the stage—but behind the scenes, anyone who works with me knows you’ve got to push to get it right. I’m sort of pushing for it to come off laid back,” Vile says. “Laid back is ultimately where I want to be, but there’s a lot of stress to get there.
“You’re trying to chill and relax in general. Even when I was a kid, all I wanted to do was sit in the shade,” he continues. “And it doesn’t really change. You’re still trying to get out in the sun and relax. But there’s a lot of work to get to that point sometimes.”
Early in his career, Vile had to struggle. He was a forklift operator in his early 20s, while putting out cassettes and CD-Rs on the side. The employer was Eagle Air Freight, in Everett, Massachusetts, near Boston, where he lived with his future wife, Suzanne, who was in graduate school at the time. He unloaded tractor trailers. “That’s the kind of ball-busting job I had,” Vile recalls. “Lately, I’m watching The Wire, Season 2—[the freight job] was not unlike the docks. I said, ‘I’m never going to drive a forklift again.’”
Later, when Vile and Suzanne returned to his hometown, he found work at Philadelphia Brewing Company—and one of the jobs on the premises was forklift operator. “Because I was so good at the forklift, it’s like, you get a break from the other job,” Vile says. “I loved driving a forklift there. They were definitely impressed by my forklift skills.” He worked at the brewing company from 2003 to 2009, when he signed with Matador as a solo artist, and life changed.
“I’m pretty positive I’m not gonna have to go back to driving a forklift,” he says.
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