YHWH Nailgun's 'Penetrator' is a guttural and gangling sonic brawl.

By lloydbolton52 on November 18, 2024

On their new single, the New York four-piece rummage further into the meaty caverns of their rhythmically punctuated and viscerally experimental sound.

Photo: Steve Gullick | Words: Hazel Blacher

Right now, New York City is a particularly plenteous breeding ground for the emerging frontiers of alternative music's contemporary cutting edge. YHWH Nailgun are the latest in a string of these new trailblazers to furiously tumble their way into our orbit here in the uk, laying bare the grittiest corners of the city's experimental underground with their stupefyingly bestial offerings. Largely defying conventional genre definitions and instead paving the way for new margins within experimental rock and art-punk, the Brooklyn four-piece hold a reputation for live performances that are equally, if not even more somatically captivating and adrenaline-charged than their recorded output. Emerging once again with their new single 'Penetrator', the band have since also announced their signing to AD 93 records, a fitting home for them amongst the label's leftfield, boundary pushing roster.

'Penetrator' is a gnarled, double-jointed creature, a tortured living thing brought to life by drummer Sam Pickard's annihilatory fills that squelch over a wavering signal of netherworld summoning synth glimmers. With percussive bones that spill out of their sockets and scrape against one another with jumbled determination, Zack Borzone's vocal nestles so deep into the track's fleshy guts that the resulting noises that comes out are a barely decipherable series of beastly caterwauls transcending any words or language. So kinetic that you can feel the salty beads of sweat pouring from it, there's something fascinating about YHWH Nailgun's fearless actualisation of a sound that strives for depravity but stops just before it hits that nauseating breaking point. Perhaps, ultimately, it is the acute sense of some sort of carnal unburdening that speaks to the animal in all of us.