REVIEW: YHWH Nailgun – Magazine
Gimmick-ridden slop manufactured for a greasy rush
11:09 // June 11th, 2026 // 4AD
YHWH Nailgun are technically a Philly band, but they’ve been based in New York for most of their career — and if there’s one thing that vindicates the move, it’s that their new record Magazine reeks so much of self-conscious half-arsery and aesthetic jumble that it’s practically smothered by visions of Brooklyn basements. Bar the sole, minor highlight “Sewer Tree”, these ten tracks in almost as many minutes uniformly lack the focused narrations, structural precision, or else sheer intensity that support shortform delivery, and if they attract any praise for innovation, then it will inevitably come from the stuffy cohort that struggles to mask their wish for all music to be templated from This Heat and Xiu Xiu.
If you are in this camp, well, the aesthetics are all there! Synths and guitars shriek like water bowls, while vocalist Zack Borzone occasionally threatens to growl and/or sob over an otherwise passable U.S. Maple impression. There is no bassist, and so in the midst of all this textural frittery from his three bandmates, it falls to drummer Sam Pickard to make good on the group’s experimental it-band credentials: his interplay between a stubborn, splintering assault and tom-heavy cascading grooves makes him easily the most engaging performer here, all without any use at all of his trademark rototoms.
Pickard’s contributions would probably pack more clout if the band weren’t so intent on making the point that none of these tracks should break the two-minute mark. Or even the minute-and-a-half mark (the opener clocks 1:36, and even that feels a little transgressive). They claim that this is an act of restraint, but there’s something gratingly exhibitionist about implying that these fleeting art attacks are substantive enough to obviate traditional songwriting, especially because the individual ideas are rarely even singular. Get your head around the album’s repeated alternation between hulking foghorn menace (”Stillness Blues”, “Give Blood”, “Burns”) and piercing melodic accents (”Ballerina”, “Magazine” and “To the Devil”), and it’s hard to resist the misgiving that any given track in either camp could be freely exchanged with any other on the tracklist; if the band had circumvented my formalistic handwringing by releasing the record as an 11-minute track1, then this would hardly make the cycle any less tedious by the time its final iteration comes to a close.
4/10
Further listening:
U.S. Maple - Long Hair in Three Stages
Otori - Digitalized Human Nature
Water From Your Eyes - Everyone’s Crushed
Xiu Xiu - Girl with Basket of Fruit
And as an honest-to-God 7” at that! Fuck that wasteful Single Sided LP conceit they’re pedalling.