Are Moin a band? They are three people who play music together and write “songs,” so technically, probably, yes. But the trio’s approach to composition is lopsided, wonky. They aren’t splatter-paint artists, not quite, but they have a slash-and-burn approach to what is essentially rock music. Perhaps that’s because two of the band’s three members have spent much of their music careers not making it.
For the decade preceding Moin’s debut album in 2021, Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews were active as the electronic duo Raime. The music they made was moody and oblong, stark soundscapes with rapid percussion and interjections of haunted synthesizer. Their music was dark, interested in texture more than rhythm. They were more techno-adjacent than techno. Their 2012 album Quarter Tones Over a Living Line features recordings of string instruments deconstructed and reconstituted atop a bed of industrial grumbling.
So it was quizzical if, in retrospect, not surprising when, three years ago, they rekindled a short-lived alliance with the powerhouse drummer Valentina Magaletti as Moin. What were these heady electronic dudes doing playing around on guitar? On the group’s debut, Moot!, we got the answer: They were doing just that—playing around. And thank God for that.
Moot! is the most conventional of Moin’s three albums, a (relatively) straight-ahead instrumental post-hardcore record. With a grayscale tone and guitars that howl like wolves, it would have been a natural extension of Raime’s sound were it not for the addition of Magaletti—a prolific, boundaryless player, with experience in improv, house, pop, and more. Her asymmetrical percussion rhythms were the album’s defining feature. While Halstead and Andrews were noodling away scientifically, she sounded like 10 subway bucket drummers playing all at once.
On their second album, Paste, the group added more pronounced vocal samples, to great effect. A spoken-word snippet by writer Lynne Tillman, saying that a man hung up on her, is mesmerizing, disorienting, placed against a woozy drum beat and plinky guitar. Another song, “Forgetting Is Like Syrup,” includes a slowed-down vocal sample that eventually disintegrates with a cassette-jammed-in-the-tape-deck effect. The album is weird and haunted, less linear than Moot! but more substantive.
You Never End somehow moves both closer and further from the center. There’s more glee, less terror. The songs slither. It’s a stretch to say there is regular rhythm here, but some songs do dance. “It’s Messy Coping” somehow sounds as much like techno as it does Fugazi. “C’mon Dive” uses a chopped-up, high-pitched vocal sample the way a jungle song might, and ups the ante for Magaletti’s roiling drums, which sound as colossal as the Hoover Dam. It’d be a weird DJ that could play this song, but a DJ nonetheless.
Other songs double down on the entropy while never sparing the groove. “Happy in the Wrong Way” (what a title) is essentially a metallic jam. Imagine if the Grateful Dead had been a noise band. A song called “Just Married” sounds like chaos, which I think is the joke. It’s a good one.
The principal novelty of You Never End, and the one most effective in moving the Moin experiment into a new stage of vitality, is tapping a handful of friends and peers to contribute vocals, which (naturally) humanizes the band. AD 93 labelmate Coby Sey joins on several tracks, adding a smoky touch. Better is artist Sophia Al-Maria, who opens her guest spot on “Lift You” with a meta moment. “I just want to say I really appreciate this, cuz nobody ever asks to use my voice for a track,” she says. They don’t let the sweetness linger, however—the moment she finishes the sentence, Magaletti pounces and the guitars kick in sharply. But eventually the song softens, and Al-Maria reads a list of emotional states and circumstances: “To have experienced so much love, to have resisted/To be bitter, to think of you/To feel your mood like the weather, to not let it affect me anymore.”
Though Al-Maria isn’t in the band, her recitation feels like finally putting real words to Moin’s music. “To feel like a failure, to stop trying/To change the subject, to prefer not to talk/To laugh, to joke, to ask/Some new friends, an old question that’s been bothering me/Do you believe one can love unconditionally?” Al-Maria’s question unanswered, the guitar saunters towards its end, fading out. After so many exclamation marks, finally, an ellipsis.
