Ask me without warning if there is a guitarist in YHWH Nailgun, and I will absolutely pause to think, possibly before even incorrectly saying no. This is not intended as an insult against Saguiv Rosenstock, a fascinating instrumentalist whose 2022 enlistment in YHWH began transforming the band from the atavistic burst of feeling it was to the multivalent spell it has become. Rosenstock was also the source of drummer Sam Pickard’s rototoms, an inspired choice that became an easy press hook for their exhilarating debut last year, 45 Pounds.
It’s just that, no matter how many times I have seen the quartet live or how much footage I’ve watched, they are less like a band of four individuals playing their parts than a single being—a lot like one of those air-dancing inflatables waving beside a car dealership, each distinct section moving in a strict and specific relationship to the rest, because that’s the way it was built. Is that noise coming from Jack Tobias’ synth, Rosenstock’s guitar pedals, or Zack Borzone’s bleat? Is that rhythm a sequence or a drum? Hard to say. Like the Body, early Battles, Lightning Bolt, or even SML now, YHWH collapse the boundaries between members, their work less a composite of people and more something they just collectively exude.
That sense has intensified on Magazine, a 10-track, 11-minute barrage that is so dense with musical ideas and replete with lyrical intrigue that I do not balk at the insistence of 4AD, their new label, that this is a full album. Listen to it passively, and it rips right past you, the drums-down-the-hallway fade-in that starts opener “Ghost of Love” making it all seem like an ellipsis tacked onto the end of 45 Pounds. But if you sit with it, trying to peel the alien sounds apart or decode Borzone’s rasped gasps about “serpents as long as limousines” and barks of “pissed rain,” Magazine is a structural marvel, evidence of YHWH Nailgun’s ability to fit little worlds of self-doubt and defiance into 48 and 95 seconds. This tracklist scans like the start of a straight-to-tape hardcore paroxysm; the work itself lands like a self-directed art-rock wonder, moving by a logic all YHWH’s own.
First, yes, the rototoms are gone, at least for now. They were key to that out-of-nowhere frisson on 45 Pounds, but the music moves even more cohesively now that Pickard has pushed them aside. He remains a rapturous drummer; witness the way he maintains a swing through a heavy metal rumble on “Give Blood” and treats the rests on “Innocent Sigh” like the slivers of space between exclamation marks.
What’s more, the lack of rototoms emphasizes YHWH’s link to dub, particularly in the way sounds are always ricocheting off one another, as if locked in a room with very low ceilings. The three-way counterpoint during the first 15 seconds of “Hips on a Wheel,” for instance, suggests white light seen through stained glass. The guitar’s sliding growl bleeds into the synth’s fluorescent washes (or is it the opposite?), and both slip around the drums and turn around to restart the cycle. The static bursts that shoot through “Ballerina” sound like an accident that the band liked enough to keep, an error honored as intention. I hear it and think of the line between Lee “Scratch” Perry and This Heat now stretching to these four insurgent New York tinkerers.
The other change that YHWH has touted with Magazine is the lack of effects on Borzone’s voice, out of his hope to “not be hidden by abstraction anymore.” The choice does not dull what he delivers. He is so intensely sibilant during “Stillness Blues” that his tone seems etched into flaking magnetic tape, and his moans and roars, stammers and sighs during “Burns” conjure a salvaged recording of a madman’s final confession. He is not necessarily easier to parse here than on 45 Pounds.
His writing, though, has new focus and direction, as he documents depravity, hypocrisy, and self-deception in poetic fragments that suggest snapshots arrayed to tell a larger story. “I’m a hangman, mama, but I love to breathe,” he hilariously grunt-sings at the start of the mighty “Hips on a Wheel.” Or on the simmering-until-bursting “Sewer Tree,” he half-sighs, “Low down/Demon shine,” the words hanging together so as to feel like both self-censure and boast.
Borzone often explores dark corners as a writer and a singer, but I’m struck by some lines early in “Ghost of Love,” a song that surveys all the ways we’re barely hanging on: “But I’m still alive. Feet on land in a wind of lies; my love has a thousand eyes.” Maybe it’s how the synths and the guitars glow like neon or the drums move like a calvary coming in for a rescue, but there is a glimmer to everything YHWH Nailgun does. It is light reflecting off obsidian.
Though Magazine is only 10 minutes shorter than its predecessor, it may be tempting to see it as a minor novelty, a stopgap between the “real records.” More charitably, maybe it’s proof that 45 Pounds wasn’t an anomaly, that the band that made songs as singular and striking as “Castrato Raw (Fullback)” and “Iron Feet” can at least repeat it. Magazine, though, is to me a tremendous next step, as YHWH Nailgun find how much structure and sophistication they can fit into very tiny spaces. If you thought the rototoms were a gimmick, even a good one, they’re gone; if you thought Borzone’s words were inscrutable, they have new relevance and urgency, motivational slogans for the dispossessed. YHWH Nailgun still remind me of one of those car-dealership air dancers, a perfect display of uncanny movement. But it feels like that creature’s going somewhere now, like it’s finally found its mission.
