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The profile · researched 17 October 2026
Black Satellite and the eight-year gap: how a New York duo became one bandleader and a touring machine
Larissa Vale's industrial-metal project took eight years to follow up its debut, lost its co-founder along the way, and is currently four weeks into a North American run below Cradle of Filth with nine dates left to play.
A name coined at fifteen
Black Satellite began as a New York City duo in 2017: vocalist Larissa Vale and guitarist Kyle Hawken. Vale has said she settled on the name at fifteen, taken with an image she found eerie and hard to shake, and that she had decided on a career in rock music while still at primary school. The band's first single, "Valkyrie", arrived in April 2017, and the debut album Endless followed on 7 July that year.
Endless got more attention than a self-starting debut usually manages. Billboard premiered the record and described its scale rather than its subtlety, picking out the vocal hooks laid over layers of studio-finished guitar. Ben Grosse, whose mixing credits include Marilyn Manson, Breaking Benjamin and Filter, mastered it. In January 2018 Alternative Press placed the band in its "12 Bands You Need To Know" feature, which remains the citation the band leads with.
The touring started immediately and has barely stopped. Black Satellite supported Starset on the 2017 Vessels tour, then worked through a long list of support slots: John 5, Drowning Pool, Fozzy, DevilDriver, Wednesday 13, Nita Strauss in 2021, Cradle of Filth repeatedly, and festival appearances at Blue Ridge Rock and Metal in the Mountains. Vale's stated influences are the records she grew up on — Marilyn Manson and Korn — and the band has paid tribute to Peter Steele with Type O Negative covers.
Eight years, then fifteen songs
The second album took until 2025. The singles kept the band visible in the interval: "Void" in August 2020, mixed by Ben Grosse; a cover of Rammstein's "Sonne" in July 2021; "Broken" in March 2023. Vale has described the follow-up as a record that kept growing during the pandemic, with further material recorded in 2023, which is part of why the gap ran as long as it did.
Aftermath was released on 5 September 2025, self-released, fifteen tracks, produced by the band with Kane Churko — whose credits include Papa Roach, In This Moment and Five Finger Death Punch — and mixed again by Ben Grosse. "Downfall" went out in May 2025 and "Kill For You" in September, the latter about, in Vale's words, the lengths someone will go to for the people they love and the point at which that starts to border on obsession.
The theme is in the title. Vale has said the writing process was a matter of unpicking what the word meant to her, song by song, and that the record is about coming through the rubble after tragedy or hardship and then doing the hard work required to move on. The idea underneath it — that something has to be broken down before it can be rebuilt stronger — is the thread holding fifteen tracks together.
What the record got
Reviews were warm rather than unanimous. Grave Noise Media scored Aftermath 8/10 and singled out "Broken" for its bass sound, "Disengaged" for vocal power, "Here It Ends" as one of the album's catchiest, and "Kill For You" as a shout-along; the write-up's main argument was consistency, that most of fifteen tracks land despite the running time.
Musipedia of Metal also gave it 8/10 in November 2025, reading the album as darker than the band's earlier work and describing it as guitar-driven industrial music with gothic edges. That review picked out the electronics on "Downfall", the emotional weight of "Far Away" and "Void", the riffs on "Kill For You" and "Doom Or Die", and the angular melodies of "Imperfectly You" and the title track, and credited the touring company — John 5, Nita Strauss, Cradle of Filth, Wednesday 13, Fozzy — with shaping how the record sounds.
The band's own press page collects coverage from Revolver, Loudwire and Kerrang alongside the Billboard quote, and lists endorsements from ESP Guitars, Spector, Bad Cat and others. There is no label: Aftermath went out on the band's own steam.
A duo that is now a bandleader
The most significant change around the album was not musical. Kyle Hawken, co-founder, guitarist and co-writer, left the band in 2025. Vale's account of it has been undramatic — that it simply was not for him any more, and that she respects the decision. Reference pages still list the band as a two-piece, which is now out of date; what exists is Vale as sole bandleader and writer with a touring group behind her.
That reorganisation happened in the middle of the heaviest touring stretch of the band's career. Black Satellite played its first European dates in November 2024, supporting Cradle of Filth and Butcher Babies, then picked up North American dates with Marilyn Manson in 2025 before the album landed. Later in 2025 the band went out with Mushroomhead on a US run that launched on 10 October alongside Psychostick and Mind Incision, taking in Rochester's Anthology on 15 October and Cleveland's Agora on 1 November.
The pattern is unusual for a self-released act: no label infrastructure, a steady supply of A-list support slots, and a bandleader who has treated opening sets as the main promotional vehicle rather than radio or playlists.
Where things stand now
The most recent release is a single, "Never Let Me Down Again", out on 25 September 2026 — a Depeche Mode song, and the second time the band has put out a cover as a standalone release after "Sonne". Depeche Mode and Rammstein are the two artists whose material turns up in Black Satellite's live sets, so the choice is consistent rather than opportunistic.
Cradle of Filth announced the Majestic In Death II North American tour on 14 July 2026, with Black Satellite on the bill. It opened on 29 September in San Diego and runs through to 28 October in Colorado Springs, taking in Phoenix, Sacramento, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Spokane, Boise, Butte, Des Moines, Davenport, Toronto, Montreal, Norwalk, Sayreville, Baltimore, Boston, Wilmington, Brooklyn, Allentown, Cleveland and Cincinnati. Moonspell and Worm were announced as the other support acts, though some logged dates list Blackbraid instead, so the middle of the bill has not been fixed.
Nine dates remain. Sayreville's Starland Ballroom on 17 October, Baltimore on the 19th, Boston's Big Night Live on the 20th, Wilmington on the 21st, Brooklyn's Warsaw on the 22nd, Allentown's Archer Music Hall on the 24th, Cleveland on the 25th, Cincinnati's Bogart's on the 26th and Colorado Springs on the 28th. Black Satellite has been playing first of four; at Seattle's Substation on 4 October the band's billed start time was just before seven o'clock.
The show, now
Black Satellite is currently playing the opening slot on Cradle of Filth's Majestic In Death II tour, first of four bands on a bill that also carries Worm and either Moonspell or Blackbraid depending on the date — an early set, billed from just before seven in Seattle on 4 October 2026, and short enough that the material has to be chosen hard. Setlist.fm's logs put the Rammstein cover "Sonne" as the band's most-performed song with 38 documented outings, ahead of "Void" (32), "Broken" (29), "Far Away" (29) and "Here It Ends" (28), and recent sets lean on Aftermath — "Downfall", "Kill For You", "Doom Or Die", "Dead Eye" — before closing on the cover. The approach is Vale's stated one: extreme energy from the first song, on the reasoning that for part of the room it will be the only time they see the band. There is no elaborate production in the support slot; what gets reported from the floor is physical performance from the whole group rather than staging, and the Vancouver show at the Vogue Theatre on 6 October 2026 was photographed as a full set rather than a token three-song appearance. Nine dates are still on sale, running from Sayreville on 17 October to Colorado Springs on 28 October.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · setlist.fm · setlist.fm · rochesterbeacon.com · mkultramagazine.com · gravenoisemedia.com · musipediaofmetal.blogspot.com · metaladdicts.com
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