YHWH Nailgun’s 45 Pounds is a Gnarly, Coagulated Debut

It’s pronounced “Yahweh.” And YHWH is a name so sacred it is no longer pronounced in Jewish tradition. After the Babylonian Exile in 6th century BCE, Jewish people ceased using the tetragrammaton in favor of “Elohim,” a Hebrew noun meaning “God.” Elohim was rendered in power, in an Israel God’s supremacy over all others, the mortal and the mystical included. In the books of Samuel, God was known as He Brings the Hosts into Existence. But before it was revealed to Moses in Exodus, Yahweh was known by his tribe of Levi, and it is said that YHWH is a “religious invocation of no precise meaning,” an interpretation chronicled through “mysterious and awesome splendor of the manifestation of the holy.”

Zack Borzone writhes on stage like some great, divine and unknowable thing has pillaged the normality out of his body, invoking the “no precise meaning” of the very YHWH he represents. In Austin barely a week ago, I watched him slink his combat boots across a platform stage, delivering inaudible, guttural sounds into a virgin microphone. And this was at 12 in the afternoon, mind you. Borzone sings like he’s about to cough up his lunch, but he moves his limbs like a spasming contortionist. There is something sickly—perhaps gnarly—about the way he purses his lips, or in the blank, blackened gaze of his piercing eyes. He is a collision of menace and diva; something fascinating yet oh so very gaudy. Watching him move, it feels vulgar to stare—but you can’t look away, nor do you want to; the clanging, angular guitars and breathing, vivacious synths capture and hold your attention even in horror.

Borzone’s band, YHWH Nailgun, have spawned out of a New York City era under great siege by in-your-face, non-conforming noise-makers alike. I’m thinking of bands like Lip Critic, Model/Actriz and Machine Girl. But YHWH Nailgun’s music makes my skin crawl in a way that feels far more spiritual and relentless than that of those aforementioned groups. Borzone, Saguiv Rosenstock, Jack Tobias and Sam Pickard are players influenced by Xiu Xiu, Television and 3 Chairs, brought together in the throes of COVID when Bandcamp-only releases were intoxicating. But they’re closer in league with a band like the Serfs from Cincinnati—metallic electro-punks blasting listeners with grime-covered, sunken textures tarnished by a glaze of shock-rock skeletons and sexy, disarming edges. But even then, YHWH Nailgun don’t have any interest in conceding to a template, instead threatening to dismantle the very fabric of experimental music by being so devoutly in-tune with its most academic instincts. They’re the mole inside the post-industrial tenet; a poison to indie rock’s formulaic habits.

YHWH Nailgun’s debut album, 45 Pounds, is a quick listen, but it will linger inside you long after “Changer” ends. Think Guided by Voices but more granular. Barely half of the songs are more than two minutes in length; just one entry stretches past three minutes (“Tear Pusher”). It’s music that demands an audience yet quickly banishes it away. YHWH Nailgun got the well-earned Pitchfork treatment early, on account of their 90-second, shivering single “Sickle Walk.” At SXSW last week, as the drum beat in “Sickle Walk” rang like a balled fist pounding against a steel door, the band turned middle-aged day-drinkers into foaming-at-the-mouth hoofers thanks to no-wave angles sharpened into hookless epidemics. There are no guitar solos, no recognizable or chewable melodies. As Paste’s associate music editor Casey Epstein-Gross very aptly put it last month, “Sickle Walk” is a “sonic assault.”

Borzone, even at his most mangled and delirious, is a poet: “She’s a damnation in the night, even the sky gets ugly when it gets so bright,” he dry-heaves through splatters of wincing jungle-summoning synths during “Castrato Raw (Fullback)”; “Vultures lift me by my hair, I watch their wings like a baby would,” he testifies during “Tear Pusher,” a song so kinetic and vulgar it erupts with fireworks of electronica before crashing into oozing wounds of indecipherable grunts and pronounced spellings of the title. The percussion during “Animal Death Already Breathing” clashes into a backline of cultish, frenzied chants; “Ultra Shade” beams with head-splitting distortion; “Pain Fountain” crushes into its title, as Borzone’s affectation fades into the havoc of machine gun synths; there’s even a beaming catchiness crowning at the surface of “Blackout,” as Tobias’ keys simmer in a flatline of anti-chaos.

The number 45 is significant in the Bible. Caleb and Joshua were the only two men allowed to enter the Promised Land, after God “mercifully” kept Caleb alive for 45 years. The name “Zebulun” is written 45 times in 43 King James verses; “Simeon” appears in 45 King James verses. Abraham proposed to the Lord that he would not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if 45 righteous people lived within its walls. There is a righteousness to 45 Pounds, too, as YHWH Nailgun turn whiplash into a gala of their own hedonistic, smart-alecky weirdness. Whether Borzone, Rosenstock, Tobias and Pickard are riffing on castrated opera boys or turning the colloquialisms of Walt Whitman into hyper-coagulated sparkles of traffic light glow, they are serving a niche most avant-garde, genre-agnostic bands wouldn’t dare touch. 45 Pounds is a grotesque, eccentric, 21-minute reverie of feels-bad-man doom music. These 10 songs are uncomfortable, foolish and, above all, brassy. But, hey, the world could certainly benefit from a few more squirming bodies.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.