Chasing Fridays: YHWH Nailgun, truegaze, Chanel Beads Q&A, more

In case you missed it earlier this week, I published a very in-depth conversation with the band ear, who I've written about extensively since discovering them roughly a little over a year ago. What's wild about ear is that their two members, Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan, barely knew one another when the band started, and within a year they were one of the hypest indie acts in the world – but still not really proper friends. Getting to know one another through the process of their band breaking out has been a "truly singular experience," as Avtan told me, and their fantastic new album, Rumspringa, is informed by that strange – and beautiful – social trajectory.

ear are still getting to know one another

A long talk with Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan about indulgence, ambiguity, manifesting, and ‘Rumspringa.’

Chasing SundaysEli Enis

This is the first longform interview I've published on Chasing Sundays in a few months, but I'm planning to ramp up my output over the summer and really build Chasing Sundays out into the powerhouse publication that I want it to be. For that to happen, I need the generosity of my paid subscribers, who, for just $5/month, can read all of my longform interviews, all of my weekly mini-Q&A's, all of my subscriber-only playlists, and any other paywalled content on my site, which there will be more of now that my book writing is winding down. I'm really proud of this ear interview and everything else I've published on Chasing Sundays, and I hope you enjoy reading it, too.

And now for this week's Chasing Fridays. After zeroing in on the underground last week, I decided to zoom out and write about some more established names, as well as some lesser-known ones. First, I attempted to illustrate exactly why I dislike the new YHWH Nailgun, and basically every other band like them. Then I compared Kim Petras to Kafka, wrote about three new-ish releases I've been sifting through, and lastly interviewed cloud-rock kingpin Chanel Beads, who's about to drop a new album next week that I enjoy quite a bit.

YHWH Nailgun - Magazine

A friend recently expressed shock when I told him that I don't like YHWH Nailgun. It wasn't the first time when I found myself struggling to explain to someone that, despite my simultaneous enjoyment of heavy music, indie-rock, and outré pop, I rarely enjoy bands who sit at the center of that Venn diagram. I can see why this would seem peculiar, especially considering my well-documented admiration for cross-genre mutations in other spheres of music (indie, electronic, rap, pop). At risk of evoking the "just making sure I don't fit in" meme, I often feel like I'm one of the only working music critics with an appetite for extreme music who doesn't like the "extreme" bands that music critics are supposed to like.

I don't like Death Grips or ​Model/Actriz or Lip Critic or Show Me the Body all that much. Or Chat Pile or Guerilla Toss or Mandy, Indiana or really even Prostitute, even though I profiled them earlier this year and find them conceptually intriguing. All of these groups, including YHWH Nailgun, who just released an 11-minute album on 4AD, make some form of abrasively skittish, artfully chaotic noise-rock that's appreciated by hipsters. A loosely related milieu of bands that I'll call Music Critic Zany-Core. None of that music does much for me, and I've spent a lot of time trying to determine why that's the case. I think finally I've pinpointed the reason: I want my heavy music to intimidate rather than agitate.

For a lot of people with well-rounded taste, including myself, "heavy music" is an itch we need to scratch. It's not the homebase we default to every time we're indecisively rooting through our phones to to find something familiarly comforting to throw on. It's a lane of music we intentionally seek out when we're in the mood for it. To be fair, I'm probably in that mood more frequently than the average YHWH Nailgun fan, and when I am, I want music that'll bludgeon my senses. I want to be taken far away from the cerebral, atmospheric, artful dimension where I spend so much time engaging with other genres. I want my heavy music experience to feel like a vacation, not like homework.

Listening to YHWH Nailgun, and nearly every other Music Critic Zany-Core band like them, feels like homework. The Philly band's 2025 breakthrough, 45 Pounds, was a 20-minute blitz of scattershot art-rock with ballistic drumming, bulbous bass bursts, steely guitar stabs, and harried groans. Its elemental urgency was hampered by its own byzantine execution, a self-impressed gesture at high-brow inscrutability that's common among all Music Critic Zany-Core bands. I see it like this: the abstruse density of a dry academic text doesn't make a book "smarter," it merely flatters the perceived intelligence of the enlightened few who take the time to grasp its arcane functionality. YHWH Nailgun's music suffers from the same naval-gazing dysfunctionality disguised as galaxy-brained de/reconstruction.

At half the length and with roughly half the energy of its predecessor, Magazine is a dreadful flurry of fragments that begin abruptly and then quickly resolve with an ambivalent shrug, well before any cogent ideas, musical or otherwise, are given the chance to materialize. The songs are in a constant state of distress – collapsing/contracting, clanging/clamoring – but that frantic anxiety never translates into action. No direction, no groove, no melody, no gusto, no summoning of cosmic discordance (Lightning Bolt), no performance of deranged personality (Killdozer), and, perhaps because I'm living through YHWH Nailgun and can more legibly read them with skeptical eyes, none of no-wave's subversive edge.

So what does Magazine have? Peculiar textures, arch rhythms, foreboding ambiance, the ghoulishly moaned lyric, "Baby don't cry/you want it like a piece of pie." Thrilling! The song "Burns" is a snippet-length eyeroll of detuning guitar burbles, jumpscare synth ruckus, and singer Zack Borzone's excruciating brays. It's not heavy music, per se, but it's supposed to instigate some kind of hot-blooded response in the listener that completely evades me. All I feel is YHWH Nailgun's desperation to be seen as enigmatic, their suffocating sense of intellectual superiority, their burning desire to be perceived as zany renegades. I'll stick to the primal anger of hardcore, the fear-stoking menace of death metal, and the skull-softening fury of rage-rap. Less zany, perhaps, but also much less Zzzzzzz.

Kim Petras - "Jeep"

People said Kim Petras made a good album for once, which is a misleading way of saying that she made a somewhat listenable album that happens to house one great song. That song is "Jeep," a track written in collaboration with Bandcamp-pop stalwart Porches, which basically sounds like Alex G's country songs. It's a catchy, surprisingly touching tune that ends with a nonsensical passage where Petras, born and raised in Germany, recites the cultural syllabus of a stereotypical Midwestern American dirtbag: Slipknot, Eminem, Four Lokos, the aimless self-sabotage that characterizes much of 21st century suburbia.

One of the funniest things about Kafka's Amerika is that the Czech author wrote a book about New York despite never once visiting America during his short lifetime. Kafka had very little idea of what America actually looked like, and hardly any sense of what it felt like, yet still managed to craft a surprisingly convincing portrait of coastal aristocracy and the life-changing promise of Westward expansion during the early 20th century. The uncanny patriotism of "Jeep" is Petras' own Amerika, another work of unfinished art (the chorus frustratingly never returns after the would-be bridge, much like how Kafka never lived to finish ​​Amerika's third act) that's equal parts pleasing and teasing.

Three releases I have some thoughts on...

But not too many thoughts.

Star Moles - Highway to Hell

The first time my friend Devon told me about Star Moles (before this February record had found its growing audience, mind you) I asked him to repeat her name like six times because the words didn't make sense to my ears. Fittingly, Highway to Hell doesn't really make sense to my ears either. It's an album, like Cameron Winter's Heavy Metal, which it certainly resembles at points, that sounds different than I expect it to every time I hear it. Psych-tinged balladry with Laurel Canyon classicism crossed with lord knows what else. It might be the sleeper record of the year for me.

​​Anysia Kym, Tony Seltzer - Purity (Flips)

Anysia Kym and Tony Seltzer dropped a short album last year called Purity that didn't leave much of an impression on me, but these remixes are incredibly stimulating. The duo hired an ensemble cast – 454, umru, username, FearDorian, Popstar Benny, Doris, and many others – to flip their watery R&B murmurs into all variety of dancefloor fodder: footwork, drum 'n' bass, and straightforward trap. It feels like we're living through a low-key renaissance of great remix LPs, and this is my latest fave in that flood.

1LDK - 1LDK

I sat down to write about why I don't like this cloud-rocky indie-pop EP by the Tokyo duo 1LDK, but as I was revisiting the record for the purposes of criticizing it, I realized that I actually do like it. Mostly. It's an assortment of plucky, club-conscious electro-pop that reminds me of a more focused Smerz colored by the playfulness of the classic Shibuya-kei pop sound, which the band are admittedly influenced by. "Second Choice" is the track that won me over: elastic, striding, melodiously glitchy.

Doused, Sparkler live @ Government Center

On Sunday, I went and saw a couple small shoegaze bands I didn't know very well and had a fantastic time. Doused are a shoegaze band from Philly who don't have the "Philly gaze" sound associated with TAGABOW, Blue Smiley, Julia's War, etc. They sound more like Swervedriver circa Raise by way of Loveless, which would place them under the semi-facetious "truegaze" umbrella that their tourmates in Sparkler coined. Doused are a well-liked band in Philly who I'd listened to several times before and never really connected with. I thought their 2026 EP, sckrpnch, lacked the oddball flair that's made their city the world 'gaze capital, but live, this band are tremendously engaging.

The Government Center is a Pittsburgh record shop where I saw that transformative Total Wife show last year, and although gigs here always take at least an hour longer than they need to due to slow-rolling changeovers, the room is perfectly outfitted for blisteringly loud bands like Doused and Sparkler. I stood right in front of the stage and felt the Philly band's glide-guitar ripples wash over me like lapping waves. Their songs sound a lot more alive and animated in-person compared to the record, and the band – especially the bassist – were rocking the fuck out while still holding it all together. Upon revisiting sckrpunch the morning after, closing track "slug" is the best representation of Doused's pulverizing allure in the live setting. This is a must-see band next time they're in your city.

Sparkler's set was also very solid even though I find their 2026 album, Glidewinder, to be similarly underwhelming. It's hard to be a better MBV clone band than Fleeting Joys, so at this point I wish bands would stop trying and work on crafting a sound of their own. That said, even Loveless-lite delights in a room like the Gov Center, where Sparkler started off with lower energy than Doused but incrementally added more passion to their playing as the set wore on. They had the most pedals I've ever seen on a single stage, and the lead guitarist played a cracked Jazzmaster that he belligerently tossed onto the ground while the concluding siren of feedback wailed into the tiny record shop. Was it a gratuitously aggressive spectacle? Yes. Was it awesome? Yes again.

Chasing Down

Shane Lavers
of
Chanel Beads

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

Chanel Beads is the NYC-based band helmed by Shane Lavers, also featuring contributions from violinist Zachary Paul and singer Maya McGrory. I didn't really get their 2024 breakthrough, Your Day Will Come, the first few times I heard it, and for a while I wrote Chanel Beads off as needlessly cryptic art-pop shit. In fact, I didn't get a lot of musicians from Chanel Beads' milieu until I started viewing their music through the matrix of cloud-rock, at which point the context of a broader cultural shift helped bring Chanel Beads' foggy, gossamer pop into focus. Now I'm a big fan, especially of the songs on their new record, Your Day Will Come, which bears the exact same title as their last one.

I think that decision is mischievously clever in the same way Chanel Beads' music is. Lavers makes all of his songs in Ableton, and the tension between his homebound production techniques – mining from esoteric YouTube vids, tweaking vocals in strangely "unprofessional" ways – and the lavishness of the songs themselves – regal violin swells, intense singing cloaked in linens of reverb – results in some remarkable sounds on this record. It's one of the year's best.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Lavers about what he learned touring with Lorde last year, my fave song on his new record, the understated honesty in his lyrics, his favorite underground artists, cloud-rock and much more. Read the full interview below – and the 50-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.