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On their first full-length album, the band explore the malaise of existence and the earnestness to truly live. |
| Words: Grace Palmer | Photo: Daniel Breuer |
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Emboldened by intense ferocity, sincerity and a penchant for pretence, the debut album from London-based trio Prayer Tech is a masterclass of post-hardcore psychedelia. Formed in January 2025 by current and former members of Pozi, KEG, and Blue Bendy, Prayer Tech is a band unencumbered, rife with experimentation, open guitars, and heavy bass riffs. Exploring the malaise of existence and the earnestness of living, this self-titled debut offers an honest reflection of humanity. Muddled in the haze of mundanity, Prayer Tech starkly remind us that the immediacy of heaven is not as accessible as it may seem. |
Recorded in London’s Crypt Studio, the album absorbs the morbidity and darkness of its namesake. The opening track, ‘Raspberry Jam’, cements the desperate anguish that permeates the album. Drawn in by the atmospheric, distant call of “I’ll be there” and an atonal guitar that bends restlessly across the track, ‘Raspberry Jam’ conjures a sense of dislocation – heightened by the uncertain security of the line “just know I am here.” This discordant melody unravels as the track culminates, giving way to an eruption of drums that had lain dormant until this point. Distilling a recollection of childhood hardships into vignettes of adolescent fears – red faces and “stuffy allergies”– ‘Raspberry Jam’ encapsulates the ache of longing to grow up, and the realisation that adulthood is never as perfect as it seems. This dread of liminality is woven throughout the push and pull of the band’s instrumentation, drifting in a fugue state. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the album’s single, ‘Hallways’. The vocalist’s monotone refrain, “It all looks the same, when you’re facing the floor”, manifests a crushing sorrow, or as drummer and vocalist Albert Haddenham describes it, “the drudgery of monotonous living”. ‘Hallways’ is a track of two halves: it mysteriously quietens at the mid-point before rising into an ethereal sequence of soft guitar melodies and reverberating vocals – so near, yet just out of reach. As the track draws to its riotous conclusion, the band’s melancholic phrase “there’s a harmony that I’m searching for,” lingers amid the sharp guitar chords. ‘Hallways’ is rhetorical, leaving open the yearning for everything at once, while trudging through the emptiness of the everyday. |
As much as Prayer Tech immerse themselves in the listlessness of the ordinary, their debut boldly embraces the sharply ironic, the witty and satirical. Ending songs like ‘Same Old Fuck’ with the whimsy of saying “goodbye” or the quasi-comical imagery invoked in tracks like ‘Dr Shmagoo / Emperor Slang’, with its call to “abduct the puritans”, introduces a sardonic undertone to the album’s otherwise suffocating intensity. ‘GOTW’ fully embodies this humorously bleak attitude, channelling Getdown Services’ brand of aggravation at humanity’s idiocy. Unleashing their reckless self-liberation, screaming, shouting and rallying against mundanity, the band are reminiscent of Ben Wishaw’s uninhibited Joseph in ‘Surge’ (2020). The post-chorus’ gentle phrase “I know a four letter word that begins with ‘h’, Hate,” gradually devolves back into the aggressive demand “get out the fucking way.” ‘GOTW’ explodes as an impassioned cry against boredom – all trapped in the burning fervour of every individual. |
While the album delves into liminal and abstract emotional states and experiences, particularly in tracks like ‘Gooseflesh’ and ‘Sistine Chapel’, personal and self-reflective moments also frame the record. The closing track, ‘N’, echoes the wistful, recollective themes of ‘Raspberry Jam’. Cloaked in the band’s signature fantastical lyricism, ‘N’ navigates escape, freedom and the odd familiarity of hometowns. Quotidian images of “orange peel”, “painting in clouds” and “damp on the walls” intertwine with broader political anxieties of “psychological weaponry”, forming a track that feels like a dive into the untethered brain of someone on the edge. As the drums drive towards the song’s bold instrumental crescendo, these grounded worries unravel into frantic vocals and the pervasive psychosis that threads throughout the album. Prayer Tech’s debut challenges self-assurance, with tracks that revel in their desperation for more beyond the banality of the everyday. Fuelled by the fervent intensity of Frank Lindsay, Albert Haddenham and Harrison Charles’ instrumentation and their surreal, abstract lyricism, Prayer Tech are, as Albert aptly puts it, “a group who don’t know what they are yet, unashamedly writing themselves into being.” |
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