“Orphans of wisdom” is the kind of phrase that either lands or it doesn’t, and AKASHIC GODS has built an entire album around making it land. The line names the fourth track on The Ether Element, the concept record the one-woman project releases this August, and it describes how the artist sees a culture that is, in her words, “information proud” yet starving for truth. The album’s argument is simple enough to fit on a placard. Its execution takes ten tracks and a lot of distortion.

Akashic Gods came up somewhere else entirely. Her earlier work sat in dance music, drawing support from DJs including David Guetta and Fatboy Slim, before the project as it exists now took shape in 2024. The three singles released ahead of the album have performed well on independent radio, with “Karmic Justice” holding No. 1 on the independent airplay charts for four consecutive weeks and “Weapons in Space” spending three weeks at No. 1 on the UK Talk Radio Hot 100. “Gods and Machines,” her first single under the name, reached No. 2, picked up international airplay and was featured on a national television music show in Norway. Away from radio, she was interviewed on the red carpet at the UK film premiere of Dream Hacker earlier this year and turned up as a guest on the Martin Talk Show podcast.

That track opens the record and sets its terms. “Gods and Machines” pits ancient religious imagery against automated modern life, and the artist describes it as a warning against trading a soul for the illusions of the digital age. The phrase driving the song is “mindless express,” and the rhythm track was built to match it, rigid and unstoppable, a train nobody gets to step off. The song’s official video is already out, and it’s the most direct preview of where the album is heading.

The production leans into the same opposition. Working with producer Carlone Lewis, AKASHIC GODS set glitchy industrial synths and stiff electronic programming against warm orchestral strings and stacked, choir-like vocal harmonies. The stated aim was to make cold machinery and human voice fight over the same space in the mix. The record is built in two movements, The System, described as the weight of modern manipulation, technology and betrayal, and The Sanctuary, described as the awakening of the human spirit through divine justice and forgiveness. Whether that reads as a smart structural idea or a heavy-handed one, the method matches what the songs are saying.

“Orphans of Wisdom” makes the case more directly. The track borrows the biblical warning that people perish for a lack of knowledge and pairs it with Socrates’ admission that all he knew was that he knew nothing, plus a nod to Alexander Pope on fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. AKASHIC GODS frames online arrogance as the newest version of a very old problem, describing a swarm of screen-addicted tech titans who have traded virtue for silver screens and data streams. The verses stay tight and claustrophobic before the chorus opens out, a structure meant to mimic being stuck behind a screen and then getting out from behind it.

The preoccupation keeps resurfacing in different costume. “Weapons in Space” describes a numb society as sleeping satellites drunk on vanity and screen glare, dragging apocalyptic imagery into fast, distorted punk territory. “Live Your Epitaph” goes after the habit of killing time with fantasy, arguing that a life spent deferring to tomorrow is a life spent on autopilot. “Ancient Civilians,” the closer is a war track about technological advancement running alongside moral regression, asking what bombs could possibly know of a golden age. After a first full listen, Josh Robinson, CEO of LMSUK, the marketing agency working the album, said the album was “SO good” that he was “in shock,” while naming “Surf the Future” as his favourite of the ten.

AKASHIC GODS is candid about wanting the record to work as an intervention. “In a culture that constantly feeds us a loop of digital noise, outrage, and distraction, leaving us as ‘orphans of wisdom,’ this album is designed to act as an immediate circuit-breaker,” she says, adding that she wants the music to shock people out of tech-driven hypnosis. By introducing an immersive vocabulary filled with empires of lies, bleeding edge of the web, and cybernetic matrices, the album ensures that listeners who come for raw guitar grit stay for a thought-provoking philosophical awakening—bridging stadium-sized rock power with a brilliant, multi-layered spiritual manifesto.

What keeps the record so gripping is its absolute specificity. The core message here is not a simple rejection of technology, but an intentional exposure of how human attention has been quietly outsourced to an automated hivemind, and the songs keep returning to the mechanics of how that trade happens. The Ether Element arrives August 28 with “Bring in the Elohim” as its focus single (official music video dropping Thursday, August 27th), and full details on the album project are laid out in the artist’s press kit. Its central claim is one Socrates got to first. Knowing everything and understanding nothing are not the same thing as wisdom, and the orphans in the title made that swap themselves.

AKASHIC GODS can be found on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X.

To explore more of AKASHIC GODS’ earlier work, creative development and the technology-and-war themes behind “Weapons in Space,” visit this Just News International profile.

ONY still remembers the guitar. He was nine years old when he found his mother’s old nylon-string instrument tucked away in the attic, and something about it stuck. He started writing lyrics and working out his own melodies almost immediately. By eleven, he’d formed his first band. Decades later, that early pull toward music hasn’t loosened its grip.

The Norwegian singer-songwriter and producer, born Øystein Nybøe, lives in Ålgård on the country’s south-west coast. His recording career stretches back to 1993, when he released his debut full-length album, “Aktive skjerma,” in a duo with pianist Trond Fykse. Albums, singles, and collaborations followed, and in 2011 he wrapped his Relation Trilogy, the last of his physical releases before he moved to digital. Alongside his own records, he’s built a reputation as a producer and composed pieces for the municipality of Gjesdal, Stavanger 2008, and companies including SR-Bank and Aibel.

His influences don’t sit in one lane. AC/DC and Judas Priest shaped his guitar playing as a kid, but the list runs straight through the bass and drums of Madonna’s records, the melodic instincts of the Alan Parsons Project, and newer names like Sabrina Carpenter, Goldie Boutilier, Jason Mraz, The Weeknd, and John Mayer. Melody is the common thread. His own sound is positive and uplifting, alternative pop built on mid-tempo grooves, and those reference points are all in there.

Then there’s the Guinness World Record. In 2010, ONY conducted the largest Lucia torch-lit parade ever staged, and the same year he flew to Los Angeles to perform at a conference for artists and producers. It’s the kind of detail that tells you he’s never treated music as a purely studio-bound pursuit. These days he balances it with academic work as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Stavanger.

His latest single, “Take My Hand,” arrived on August 7, 2026. It’s a quiet, narrative song about a child guiding a younger girl home, and it’s the newest piece of “When Now Meets Then,” the album he’s writing, playing, and producing entirely in his own studio for a November release. Seven songs from it are already out, with more singles on the way.

For ONY, the numbers were never the point. He talks about music as a gift, something you make because you love it, and about how a song written by one person can reach someone on the other side of the world. That belief has carried him from an attic in Norway to a career three decades deep, and it’s still where the work starts. You can find him at his official website or follow him on YouTube.

Some artists shoot their videos in a studio with a green screen and call it a day. Dave Curl flew to a volcanic island in the Atlantic, sat down in the arid hills with an acoustic guitar, and let the landscape do half the storytelling. That’s the setup for “Julia,” his acoustic dream-pop single arriving August 12, and the visuals shot across Fuerteventura, Spain, are the kind of thing you notice before you even hear a note.

The official lyric video, filmed by Loic Michel, opens with aerial footage gliding over broad stretches of volcanic terrain, all warm browns and ochres under low golden light. Curl shows up in a white shirt, seated among the hills, playing his guitar and mostly facing the landscape rather than the lens. It’s a small figure inside an enormous frame, and that contrast runs through the whole piece. Wide shots of ridges and ravines give way to overhead drone passes that trace the contours of the land, then cut to closer performance shots, then to coastal and underwater footage where the color shifts to pale blue skies and dark blue-green water.

What ties it together is restraint. Michel’s editing leans on long takes, slow fades, and dissolves instead of quick cuts. Several transitions layer two images at once, blending Curl into the terrain through double exposures that leave everything looking a little hazy and half-remembered. That dreamlike quality isn’t accidental. It’s the visual equivalent of what the song is reaching for, a track about fleeting moments and the memories that stick around long after they’re over.

“Julia” came from a chance meeting at a surf camp in Portugal, and Curl built the whole thing around an idea he borrowed from The Little Prince, that what’s important can’t be seen with the eyes alone. You can hear that in the writing. The song floats on peaceful guitar, a moving bassline, and vocals that stay genuine without reaching for anything flashy. It’s more floaty and heart-on-sleeve than a lot of his earlier work, which tends toward folk-pop-rock with a rougher alternative edge. Here he lets the softer instincts take over.

The choice of Fuerteventura fits a pattern for Curl, who has a habit of picking filming spots that most musicians wouldn’t bother hauling gear to. He once shot a video at a medieval watchtower on the cliffs of Portugal, and he’s filmed alongside contemporary dancers and other collaborators in places that ask a lot more of a shoot than a rehearsal space would. Honestly, he’ll tell you himself that the locations get increasingly impractical, which is part of the appeal. When your songs are built on small, sincere moments, a backdrop that feels vast and a little untouched does the emotional lifting a plain set never could.

A little context on who’s behind the guitar. Dave Curl is a Swiss singer-songwriter with English-Australian roots, born and raised in Switzerland, and he’s been writing and performing his own material for over twenty years. He points to a volunteer stint as a gardener on Hawaii’s Big Island as the moment the whole thing crystallized, one of those trips where you leave home to figure out what you want to do when you get back. His music has been streamed more than 2 million times and landed in over 2,000 Spotify playlists, and he’s played 200-plus shows that range from living-room concerts to festival headline slots.

The catalogue backing “Julia” is deeper than a casual listener might guess. His 2021 debut album Introducing pulled together earlier songs, including an acoustic take on “These Days,” and gave people an intimate first look at his writing. The 2022 EP Slave To Instinct dug into heavier material, obsession, false friends, the darker corners of the internet, gender identity, and its title track picked up airplay on independent radio in Germany and beyond. He followed with the single “Angel” and the EP Hold Me Close in 2023, and his most popular song, “Serenity,” came out of that same stretch, a personal track about letting go of someone.

“Julia” sits inside a fuller rollout, too. Curl has a lyric video, a music video, and an acoustic live version all planned around the release. The lyric video went live August 5 and works as a hybrid piece, part lyric video, part cinematic performance, previewing that same Fuerteventura footage with its mix of landscape and guitar. The single itself is the next chapter in a run of releases going back to 2021, not a one-off, which is worth keeping in mind with an artist who’s clearly playing a long game.

That long game might be the most interesting thing about him. Curl has spent two decades building a body of work without chasing whatever the algorithm rewarded that month, and “Julia” reads like proof that the songs which last tend to be the ones written for the right reasons. He turns train rides, coffee shops, and passing encounters into music, then finds a volcano or a watchtower to film it against.

You can hear “Julia” and follow the rest of it on his website, and keep up through Spotify, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. For now, “Julia” is up for pre-save ahead of its August 12 arrival.