Xiu Xiu – ‘Eraserhead Xiu Xiu’ album review: A worthy revisit to David Lynch’s original fever dream
With David Lynch’s passing still fresh in the avant-garde memory, experimental post-punk outfit Xiu Xiu have decided to reimagine the serenely nightmarish score for 1977’s Eraserhead.
The Skinny: It’s not the first time they’ve grappled with the Hollywood surrealist’s legacy. Back in 2016, Xiu Xiu dreamed up the album and touring project twofer Plays the Music of Twin Peaks with Lynch and original composer Angelo Badalamenti’s thumbs-up, before wrapping up the spectacle two years later. Now, two of the three Xiu Xiu members, Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo, holed themselves up in their Krankenschwester Berlin studio to take on Lynch’s most abyssal conjuring.
A hell of a lot of guts and chutzpah are required to reach into Erasherhead’s towering shadow. As any fan will know, there’s an alchemic fusion of image and sound throughout, the black-and-white traverse of shock-top-pompadoured protagonist, Henry Spencer, wandering a hyperreal Philadelphia landscape, troubled with the alien anxieties of his mutant infant, scored by the ever-present howl of industrial hiss and factory clangour.
The duo don’t deviate too much from the sonic blueprint already mastered by Lynch and Alan Splet. Eraserhead Xiu Xiu likewise stays firmly planted in the abrasive winds that echo and haunt around Spencer’s cavernous dreamscape, an aural element standing with as much character as the mewling baby or mother to his wretched child, Mary X. Yet, new corners and crannies are uncovered in Lynch’s smokestacked wasteland, Xiu Xiu flexing everything from novel field recordings, modular synth emissions and concrète editing to add their own revamped flair.
There’s a chaotic yet sonically consistent journey to Eraserhead Xiu Xiu. Terse snaps of ambient dread to tread-plated churns of metallic growl all bellow on Spencer’s turmoiled revisit with yo-yoing mood, Xiu Xiu smattering the soundtrack with their own post-punk detritus without ever feeling overly foreign—one of the big exceptions being ‘Tetra’s blast of cartoon effects which the pair just about pull off.
Eraserhead Xiu Xiu’s most piercing asset is the way the newborn creature plays such an omnipresent role on the soundtrack. It’s never too far away, be it ‘Tetra’s brittle gurgles, the netherwordly howls that shriek across ‘Sleep Synth’, or the animated babbles that writhe and wriggle on ‘Viento’. Then there’s ‘The Lady in the Radiator’. Breaking from the album’s instrumental wander, Stewart sings Peter Ivers’ eerie ‘In Heaven’ atop foggy organs in the only moment featuring front-and-centre vocals, elevating the piece and the character’s disfigured ethereality that honours her lasting haunt in Lynch’s master oeuvre.
All of this will no doubt spark greater artful magic if watched live with its accompanying visuals, and many committed fans of the movie will shut down any notion that Lynch and Splet’s disquieting soundscape should ever be touched, but Eraserhead Xiu Xiu is powered with serious love and just the degree of the original’s essential DNA to render the pair’s second Lynch outing a worthy reventure across Eraserhead’s desolate fever dream.
Standout Track: ‘Tetra’
The Verdict: Sticking close to the original’s sonic example but artfully pushing those perimeters, Xiu Xiu offers new angles and insights into Eraserhead’s aural subterranean, standing as a solid accompaniment to Lynch’s disordered fantasy for the longtime fan or curious newcomer.
Release Date: July 10th, 2026 | Producer: Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo | Label: Polyvinyl
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