AlbumNew PlanetsGuillotine
New Planets Follow 'Blood Diamonds' With Ten-Track 'Guillotine'
The Ithaca band's second album arrives on Angry Mom Records with ten tracks, ten credited players and two drummers, recorded and mixed by Angelo Paradiso at Black Bear Recording.
by
May 19, 2026
Ithaca band New Planets released Guillotine on May 19, 2026, a ten-track album issued on Angry Mom Records as catalogue number 0013.
It is the group’s second album, following the nine-track Blood Diamonds from September 28, 2024. Two of the ten tracks had already appeared on their own: “Noetics,” which sits second in the sequence, and “Now and Gone,” ninth.
Bandleader Angelo Paradiso wrote all the music and lyrics apart from “Deprogrammed,” a co-write with percussionist and vocalist Yao Foli “Cha Cha” Augustine. Paradiso recorded and mixed the record at Black Bear Recording in Ithaca, and Dana Billings mastered it.
Ten players and two drummers
The album credits ten musicians, with Aaron Fumarola and Tom Gilbert both listed on drums and percussion.
Paradiso plays bass, synths, guitars and vocals. Alicia Aubin is credited on trombone and vocals, Augustine on percussion and vocals, Emmett Scott on synths, pianos and organs, Jason Shegogue on guitars and effects, Gabe Banford on pianos and synths, Mark Karlsen on saxophones and flute, and Fabio Patino on congas.
Two players cover the keyboards and two cover the drums. Aubin and Karlsen carry the horns between them, with Karlsen credited on both saxophones and flute.
The sequence
| # | Track |
|---|---|
| 1 | Guillotine (4:51) |
| 2 | Noetics (3:23) |
| 3 | Covidians (3:29) |
| 4 | Deprogrammed (5:04) |
| 5 | Side Chain Me (5:08) |
| 6 | Circles (4:16) |
| 7 | My Shadow (4:30) |
| 8 | A Slice of Watermelon (3:09) |
| 9 | Now and Gone (4:24) |
| 10 | Sink or Swim (5:14) |
Cole Stearns and Paradiso are credited with the artwork, a cut-paper ransom-note treatment of the band and album names over a guillotine mounted on an amplifier cabinet.
An Ithaca band assembled from other Ithaca bands
New Planets formed in 2019 and works as a seven-to-eight-piece with a rotating cast of singers and players. The band describes its own sound as “Other-Worldly Party Music” and its label copy calls the group a psychedelic poly-rock outfit.
The project is Paradiso’s, and he also plays in Big Mean Sound Machine and in Donna the Buffalo, the founding band behind the Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival. Aubin also plays in Big Mean Sound Machine, and Augustine performs with Mosaic Foundation.
Gilbert has played with Donna the Buffalo and with Jim Lauderdale.
That overlap places New Planets inside the same circle of players that has supplied John Brown’s Body and several other long-running groups in the region, and it is the reason a ten-name credit list reads as a local roster rather than a session cast.
Where it was made
Black Bear Recording is an Ithaca studio, and Paradiso handled both the recording and the mix there himself. The same room and the same engineer produced “Noetics” before it was folded into this sequence.
Guillotine is available through the band’s Bandcamp page.
Guillotine by New Planets, released May 19, 2026 on Angry Mom Records, catalogue number 0013. Ten tracks. Recorded and mixed by Angelo Paradiso at Black Bear Recording, Ithaca, New York, and mastered by Dana Billings.
Sources: New Planets / Bandcamp, New Planets / Bandcamp, Spotify, The Purple Fiddle.
Cover art by Cole Stearns and Angelo Paradiso, reproduced to illustrate the release.
