Rising New York-based noise outfit YHWH Nailgun — currently founding members Zack Borzone (vocals) and Sam Pickard (drums), along with newest members Saguiv Rosenstock (guitar, production) and Jack Tobias (synths) — began in 2020 as a raw collision between its founding members, before expanding into a full-fledged quartet,
The act’s debut, last year’s 45 Pounds introduced a sound that’s visceral, immediate, difficult to neatly categorize and rooted in a feral intensity. Building upon a growing profile, the New York-based quartet recently released their sophomore album Magazine through 4AD Records. The 10-song album clocks in at just 11 minutes, and sees the band pushing their sound into a more skeletal and immediate territory. They strip abstraction in favor of something much more direct: Throughout the album’s runtime, Pickard’s drums are leaner, Rosenstock’s production much more exposed, and Borzone’s lyrics — filled with image of blood, serpents, God and the Devil — take center stage. And yet despite the abrasiveness and extremity of their sound, the quartet approaches their music with instinct over self-consciousness, building what they’ve described as an autonomous creative world, unconcerned with trends or reactionary impulses.
Sonically, the album sees the band walking a tightrope between barely contained chaos and precision: Frenetic guitars are paired with bruising percussion, shrieking, air-raid-like synths and Borzone’s now-unmasked vocals, which sees him howling, pleading with equal parts despair, yearning and fury, which gives the material’s surreal, religiosity a fevered and heightened pitch. The songs feel like transmitted, fuzzy fragments of fury, despair and confusion that’s confrontational yet yearning and seemingly channels a blend of Tricky, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back-era Public Enemy and industrial music. The result is an album that channels our strange, end of times moment.
The band shared an accompanying short film directed, produced and edited by Lane Stewart. The film is a surreal and otherworldly blend of a shadowy dark and dusky light, of endless halogen-lit highways and neon-lit gas stations. In the dark, things are different; the primal id seemingly unleashed in a strange, brutal, blood-soaked land.
“We made this almost entirely in the heat of the night, in the place I’m from, the wider stretch of country my family comes out of and the ground I was born into,” Stewart says, “The songs already had that otherworldly quality in them, and the lights in the darkness helped reveal some sense of mystery out of one of the most ordinary places deep in America.”
YHWH Nailgun will be supporting the album with a lengthy North American tour this fall. The tour includes an October 29, 2026 stop at Warsaw. Check out the tour dates below.
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Tracklist:
5. Ballerina
6. Give Blood
7. Magazine
8. Sewer Tree
9. Burns
10. To the Devil
US TOUR:
09/16 – Boston, MA – Sonia *
09/17 – Montreal, QC – La Sala Rossa *
09/18 – Toronto, ON – Longboat Hall *
09/19 – Detroit, MI – Sanctuary Catacombs *
09/22 – Columbus, OH – A&R Music Bar *
09/23 – Chicago, IL – Reggie’s *
09/24 – Minneapolis, MN – Zhora Darling *
09/26 – Denver, CO – Lost Lake *
09/27 – Salt Lake City, UT – Kilby Court *
09/29 – Boise, ID – Neurolux *
10/01 – Seattle, WA – Chop Suey ^
10/02 – Vancouver, BC – Fox Cabaret ^
10/03 – Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios ^
10/05 – Berkeley, CA – Cornerstone ^
10/07 – San Diego, CA – Soda Bar ^
10/09 – Los Angeles, CA – Lodge Room ^
10/10 – Arcosanti, AZ – FORM #
10/11 – Phoenix, AZ – Rebel Lounge #
10/13 – Austin, TX – 29th St. Ballroom #
10/14 – Denton, TX – Rubber Gloves #
10/15 – Houston, TX – White Oak Hall (Upstairs) #
10/17 – Miami, FL – III Points Festival #
10/19 – Atlanta, GA – Aisle 5 #
10/20 – Nashville, TN – Third Man Records #
10/22 – Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle (Back Room) #
10/23 – Baltimore, MD – Ottobar #
10/24 – Philadelphia, PA – Warehouse on Watts #
10/29 – Brooklyn, NY – Warsaw #+
Support from:
Nuda *
@ ^
keiyaA #
Morgan Garrett +
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