YHWH NAILGUN - Magazine

Eleven minutes. Ten tracks. With "Magazine", New Yorkers YHWH Nailgun have done something more radical than writing songs: they've called into question the very form of the album itself. And they've done it with a density that defies every logic of the market, crafting episodes (all under two minutes) that hit like sledgehammers, in a record that's over before you can even say "I'm starting to get where this is going".

The quartet, made up of Zack Borzone on vocals, Saguiv Rosenstock on guitar, Jack Tobias on synths and Sam Pickard on drums, arrives at this second chapter after upending expectations with "45 Pounds" (2025), a 21-minute debut that already felt like an act of defiance. With "Magazine", they've decided to double down: halving the runtime while ramping up the intensity, stripping everything down to the bone until the music becomes pure skeleton. There's not a moment to breathe here, not a second wasted.
The opener "Ghost Of Love" is a pulse that swells like a heart holding its breath. It's a modern invocation for an end-of-the-world atmosphere. Rosenstock's guitar and Tobias's synths merge into a single sonic organism, while Pickard holds it all together with a mechanically human drumming style.

"Stillness Blues" is pure tension: a riff that repeats like a nail hammered into the skull, driving deeper and deeper. "Hips On A Wheel", on the other hand, is grotesque: Borzone scrapes out the words like a preacher in the grip of a nervous breakdown, while the rhythm section twists into a groove that seems to escape even itself.
"Ballerina" is the track closest to a club song, except it's a disco abandoned in a horror movie. The title track "Magazine" lasts thirty-five seconds. Is it a joke? An artistic statement? A comment on our inability to sustain attention? Probably all of these at once.

The production on "Magazine" is made up of dry, compressed, almost claustrophobic sounds. The drums are up front, but the synths and guitar merge into a single indistinct mass, as if the boundaries between the instruments had been deliberately erased. YHWH Nailgun aren't four musicians, they're a single organism moving in sync, like one of those inflatable tube men swaying outside car dealerships. Charmingly unsettling.
"Magazine" is an album made of fragments of a lucid nightmare. There's no linear story, just an accumulation of images left hanging in the psyche. It's certainly not a record for everyone. It's a work that defies convention, that shrugs off expectations, and that mocks anyone looking for a "complete" song. But it's also a record that, in its extreme brevity, manages to be denser than plenty of albums three times its length. It's a snapshot of a band unafraid to experiment and push the language of noise-rock into uncharted territory, and all things considered, in this fast-paced world, eleven minutes isn't heresy but a more-than-acceptable running time.

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28/07/2026