YHWH Nailgun – ‘Magazine’ album review: Another blast of panicked, alien industrial
Not long after 45 Pounds’ impact is still smouldering on the post-punk underground, New York’s YHWH Nailgun have jumped back into the arcane bowels of their industrial racket on sophomore follow-up Magazine with the ever-reliable 4AD.
The Skinny: It’s been a brisk 15 months since their debut, but restless creativity beats at the heart of YHWH Nailgun’s clanging urgency. As ever, every one of Magazine’s snapping wriggles of avant-garde writhe feels less written and rehearsed but more caught in the studio as if the ten songs are weird insects frantically caught in the band’s own cosmic bug catcher. Such a febrile pace results in Magazine’s ten blistering cuts racing through a dizzying 11 minutes in total, quite possibly a record for the shortest studio album.
You wouldn’t want Magazine to last much longer. Brevity is no less a major asset to YHWH Nailgun, as proved so essential to their 45 Pounds debut, Jack Tobias and Sam Pickard’s respective electronics and drum clash fighting and clawing at each other, all the while gelling with alien elasticity. Like last time, Saguiv Rosenstock’s guitar attack lends the record its gagnatuan heft, keeping the knotty enmeshing of punk synths away from a digital clump of IDM density or software hardcore removed from the earthy and organic.
There’s certainly a sense of ‘Vol II’ about Magazine, YHWH Nailgun scoring the same sonic caverns and teeming industrial reactions like a chemical explosion, but ambient crevices have stretched some air pockets into the aural disorientation. ‘Innocent Sigh’ wields biting shards of elegiac stirs, offering a roomier breathing space for Pickard’s subterranean percussion, as well as spiking some clarity into frontman Zack Borzone’s snarling incantations.
In fact, Borzone’s newfound embrace of relative intelligibility unveils subtle but rewarding dimensions to YHWH Nailgun’s evolution. The seething howls are still firmly intact on the guttural ‘Hips On a Wheel’, but ‘Sewer Tree’ shines a light on the potent humour that lies in the band’s cacophony, Borzone mewling a line like “Baby, don’t cry / You want it like a piece of pie,” with comic spit.
Elsewhere, sentences are gobbed for their tangy phoneticism alone in the best Captain Beefheart tradition, “Serpent long as a limousine / Vision of sins unseen,” sitting belligerently in the mouth packed with visceral evocation.
“It’s just the four of us in a room making music, and what’s outside the room isn’t important to that,” Tobias has said in recent press materials. It’s an ethos that never wavers across Magazine’s erratic but sublime pummel, the unholy sound of four YHWH Nailgunners pursuing some kind of primitive, experimental electricity with liberating abandon.
Sometimes profound, sometimes ridiculous, and usually straddling a tension between the two, Magazine cements the New York metallic conjurers as one of the most original voices in punk, post-punk, electronica, industrial, and whatever sub-genre permutations their dilated, mutoid pupils have spotted miles ahead of their alternative peers.
Standout Track: ‘Stillness Blues’
The Verdict: Taking another trip into the churning bowels of their debut’s industrial chaos, YHWH Nailgun loosen the peripheries just a little to afford some new chinks of chromatic light into the post-punk wrestle for a sophomore that attests to their inventive growl.
Release Date: June 11th, 2026 | Producer: Saguiv Rosenstock | Label: 4AD
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