Unsung Podcast

About Unsung Podcast

If there was a definitive discography of classic albums, what should be in it? Hosts Mark Fraser and Chris Cusack, plus the occasional guest, discuss and dissect perceived classic albums to decide which albums would make this list. We also interview amazing artists, do genre deep dives and throw a journalistic lens on musical topics you might not know much about.

Publisher

Unsung Podcast

Category

music

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

14 Dec 2017

Latest episode

13 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

461 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   13 Oct 2026

   The Chaotic Good, Bad and The Ugly - Understanding The Worst of Music Marketing

   Most businesses require marketing in order to generate sales and, ultimately, success. We’re all aware of this: our feeds are flooded with ads on a daily basis because, when we really get down to it, all platforms are an ad business first and foremost. This means that when you’re an artist trying to promote your wares, you probably need to do marketing in order to get people to pay attention and generate new fans. For most small artists, trying to break through the noise is a thankless and, frankly, onerous task. One may hope for some kind of virality in the hope of obtaining many viewers that you can convert into fans, but the truth about virality is that nine times out of ten, it doesn’t work. No, what you need to do is commit to the grind and slowly churn out content in the hope of training the algorithms just enough that your content is placed before the right audience at the right moment. But what if you could circumvent all that? What if you could just pay someone a large amount of money to create momentum on your behalf by utilising fake accounts to push you into that algorithm? That’d sure be great, huh? In essence, that’s what some marketing agencies do. Agencies like Chaotic Good. Their name is probably familiar. They went somewhat viral themselves earlier this year when they spoke about how they achieve huge internet success for their artists via dubious means. They were, in fact, very blasé about it. Soon afterwards it transpired that they were running campaigns for the band Geese, a medium-sized weird indie band that, in 2025, suddenly found themselves riding a wave of success due to an apparent groundswell of support on TikTok. It’s taken us a while to address this issue. We wanted the dust to settle a bit before really trying to capture our thoughts, and we think we’ve done a pretty good job here. This week, we dig into the Billboard interview that started it all, the services Chaotic Good offered, and how bot farms, paid contractors and armies of fake fan pages actually work. We ask whether any of it is legal, why virality so rarely turns into real fans or ticket sales, and what it means for artists who’d rather not play this game. Then it gets bleaker: AI slop, industry plants, and what happens to a culture that can no longer tell what’s real. Everything you ever wanted to know about the seedy world of major label music marketing but were afraid to ask... it’s all covered here in this week’s episode. Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 02:00 Why Chaotic Good, and Why We Waited for the Dust to Settle 09:00 Who Are Chaotic Good? SXSW, Origins & the Client List 13:00 "We Know How to Go Viral": Rival Agencies & a Hologram of a Herd 18:00 The Four Services: Narrative Campaigns, UGC, Fan Pages & Brands and Media 36:00 Scale, Not Skill: Discord Clippers & the Failures You Never See 39:00 Flooding the Comments: NASCAR Memes, Dance Cats & Identity Fraud 41:00 Human-Like Accounts, TikTok's Six Billion Deletions & the CAPTCHA Sidebar 43:00 Juicing Accounts & the Bot Farm Question 48:00 Paid Humans as Bots & "Is It Okay Because It's Art?" 52:00 Where Else Do Bot Farms Go? Politics, Films & Repurposed Infrastructure 54:00 "That's the Internet": Organic Behaviour at Inorganic Scale 57:00 Virality vs Success: Vanity Metrics & the Marketing Funnel 1:01:00 When Fake Fans Don't Buy Tickets: Pulled Tours & Underselling Shows 1:11:00 Music Was Never a Meritocracy 1:12:00 The AI Arms Race: Dancing Baby Slop & More 1:15:00 Conclusions: Hubris, Money & "Engineer's Disease" 1:19:00 Gaslighting on an Industrial Scale & TikTok as Astroturf 1:22:00 Overt vs Covert Marketing: The Man Behind the Curtain 1:29:00 Wrap-Up: Next Week's Satryicon & Sign-Off

2. 

   14 Sept 2026

   Is One Minute Science by Sunna an Unsung Classic, or Has It Been Banished to the Mists of Time for a Reason?

   For about 8 and a half years, our former (and beloved) co-host Dave had been mulling over doing this album. Then one day, out of the blue, he messaged us: I'm coming in I want to talk about One Minute Science by Sunna. In another timeline, we'd have gotten this out of the way a long time ago. Hell, Chris almost suggested it himself. And yet here he was, unprompted, reopening a wound he'd apparently been carrying since he was fourteen. One Minute Science came out in 2000, and on paper it shouldn't have needed anyone's courage. Sunna were a Bristol grunge (?)/electronic rock(?)/industrial metal (?)/nu metal (?) band with a genuinely unlikely pedigree: the album was produced by Neil Davidge, Massive Attack's long-term studio partner, and frontman Jon Harris reputedly played on Mezzanine itself. They signed to Melankolic, the label Massive Attack half-owned, then to Astralwerks in the States, and eventually toured with Smashing Pumpkins, A Perfect Circle and Vast, and picked up Best New Band at the Kerrang Awards in 2001. Lead single Power Struggle found itself on the Hollow Man soundtrack and they even almost had a song from their second album appear on the soundtrack to Spider-Man 2. A fate the film industry's collective good sense narrowly spared everyone. This was, by any measure, a band with momentum. But it didn't pan out. The album stalled at 151 in the UK charts, the press treated it as an inconvenience to be filed under nu metal and dismissed, and Sunna never really recovered - three more records, increasingly hard to find, never on Spotify, cover art that gets worse with each release. One reviewer's verdict at the time, that if Sunna were foreboding and menacing then so were Creed and Bush, turned out to be a pretty efficient way of ending a career. So why the secret almost nine-year fandom? We get into it properly this week, with...mixed results. Dave defends the record as a load-bearing piece of his adolescence, uncompromising and strange even now. Chris tries, valiantly and with increasing desperation, to make a case for the production doing the heavy lifting. And Mark - hearing it stone cold for the first time in his life - declares it not just bad but the worst thing he's heard on this podcast in very nearly nine years of doing it. Grim. Nobody comes out of this one agreeing with anybody else. Which is exactly how this podcast used to be, back in the days of yore. Everyone's got a record like this. The question is whether you'd admit it on air. Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 04:04 The Sunna Reveal: Dave's Unprompted Text After 8.5 Years 08:11 One Minute Science, Sunna & First Impressions 11:03 The Massive Attack Connection: Neil Davidge & Mezzanine 12:38 Band History: Chillum, John Harris & the Bristol Scene 18:47 Drummer Departures & Mark Richardson's Near Miss with Feeder 19:30 Jon Harris's Accident-Prone Years, Kenya & the Exorcism Story 21:00 Genre Confusion: Nu Metal, Post-Grunge & the UK Scene Comparisons 28:00 DJ Flatline, Bristol Trip-Hop DNA & the Hollow Man Cameo 29:00 The Spider-Man Near-Miss & the Hulk Screening Anecdote 30:07 The Press Reviews: "Tool to Travis" and Getting Savaged 32:11 The Worst Album Art in Music History 35:26 The Follow-Up Records: Two Minute Terror, Third Pin & Global Morning 42:00 Standalone Singles: Swimming with Snakes & Sentiment Attacked 43:26 Track-by-Track Begins: I'm Not Trading & the Production Debate 1:05:10 Dave's Conclusion: A Flawed Nostalgic Safety Blanket 1:07:55 Chris's Conclusion: The Racist Uncle Defence 1:10:36 Mark's Verdict: "The Worst Thing I've Heard on This Show" 1:14:00 Bush, Nickelback & Finding Mark's True Hated Genre 1:17:00 Wrap-Up & Sign-Off

3. 

   31 Aug 2026

   Exploring the Magickal History of Coil (Part 2) w/ P6 from OMO, Desalvo, Stretchheads and Security

   Last time we admitted defeat in our attempts try to summarise a fifty-plus album discography. This time our play P6 turns up with an actual diagram (which you can see right here (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yne0K4Ne8a3R4VLTimh0s-VJCwA-v4aZ/view?usp=sharing)) and we spend an hour and a half trying to work out whether that's a genuinely useful map or just a very elegant way of saying "it's complicated." We get into what actually meant when they called one period of their music “solar music” and the other “moon music”, both to themselves and to people writing about them afterwards. We begin with Scatology and then go into a long stretch on Coil as a queer band specifically: not queer-adjacent, not later reclaimed as queer, but a band who were writing directly out of the AIDS crisis while the gay mainstream press was too frightened to touch them. We talk about the rejected Hellraiser score, Clive Barker's actual bowels, and how a soundtrack too creepy for a horror franchise ended up as one of the most bootlegged, most fought-over corners of their catalogue. We get into Trent Reznor giving them free run of a New Orleans studio for their aborted album Backwards, the slow drift into drone and ritual with Time Machines, and the posthumous artefact economy that's grown up around the band. There's a lot of Coil in this episode that isn't really music in any conventional sense; arguably a lot of it is more like documentation. Documentation of a relationship, of a pandemic that was devastating their community, and of two people slowly working out what they were for. Whether that makes the later, harder-to-love records worth the effort is something we argue about without really resolving. We’d say give it a go anyway – you might find something you love. Chapters 00:00 – Welcome back, and the state of the venues in Glasgow 00:04 – Phil's solar/moon diagram, and the pivot point of Horse Rotorvator 00:07 – Scatology as manifesto: no personality cult, just "this is us" 00:12 – Defining solar vs moon in Coil's own terms 00:16 – "Kill a queer for Christ": the hostility Coil were writing against 00:20 – Coil as a queer band, not a queer-adjacent one 00:24 – The AIDS pandemic as the actual subject of the solar period 00:27 – Why Coil succeeded where Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the "gay icons" of the 80s didn't 00:31 – The Spanner case, outlaw community, and the limits of gay respectability 00:35 – The artefact economy begins: box sets, reissues, and "picking at the corpse of Coil" 00:36 – The rejected Hellraiser score and Clive Barker's bowels 00:44 – Love's Secret Domain, clubbing, and ecstasy as a response to the fear of touch 00:48 – Derek Jarman, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and Phil's own ordination 00:55 – Into moon music: The Angelic Conversation and the shift toward mysticism 00:57 – Trent Reznor, free studio time, and Nine Inch Nails' debt to Horse Rotorvator 01:02 – Membership shifts: Danny Hyde, Drew McDowell, and Thighpaulsandra 01:04 – Black Light District and the "dank, downbeat" transitional period 01:14 – Moving toward live performance and the birth of Coil's occult stage identity 01:19 – Balance's addiction, Funeral Music for Lady Diana, and the Foxtrot testimony 01:26 – Post-9/11 visuals, prisoners, and a return to transgression on stage 01:27 – Closing thought: boredom, labour, and what it cost to make this music

Who has been a guest on Unsung Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Ferruccio Quercetti
• Casey Chaos
• Joe McGlynn

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

16,802,341

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.2 / 5

13 ratings

Spotify

4.7 / 5

67 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 84 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

94

Social presence

0

YouTube

93

Engagement

92

Contact Unsung Podcast

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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