What a gamble, to front a band with only your body and a microphone! The lone vocalist has to be willing to really go there, or at least adopt a persona that will, in front of a hungry crowd. Those who nail it – the Iggys and Karens of this world, even the occasional Samuel T. Herring – have the power to turn a good band into a great one.
It takes just seconds to realise that YHWH Nailgun’s Zack Borzone is one of these singers, all feline contortion and electric angst as he prowls the short stage of The George Tavern in London with intent. “I’m a naturally analytical person,” the frontman and poet says, attempting to explain his on-stage antics as we huddle in the pub’s concrete garden a few hours before the show starts. “With art, the thing that takes me somewhere is trying to frustrate that part of myself, or get beyond that part of myself, and go somewhere that I don’t understand. I’m always chasing my own tail.”
It’s the New York City outfit’s second time in Europe, and their short, sharp set has the hundred-odd crowd instantly rapt. Borzone’s voice is spit and gravel, chiselling his bandmates’ serrated anti-rock to a fine point. In a world of fake scenes, AI slop rations and the decimation of the live band, YHWH Nailgun seem like they could solve three industry problems at once.
“Something we keep turning back to is trimming the fat off of everything – we want the song to be this complete, airtight package,” the band’s drummer Sam Pickard says. His whirlwind percussion exerts an almost gravitational pull, holding YHWH Nailgun’s fractured sound together through sheer momentum. Their songs – brief, dense, explosive – emerge from what engineer-cum-guitarist Saguiv Rosenstock calls a process of “gut writing”. The way he puts it: “We do something in the moment and it feels complete without having to think about it too much afterwards.”
The four-piece are about to release 45 Pounds, their debut album, on unpredictable London imprint AD93. It’s easily the most abrasive record in the label’s catalogue, but also one of the most digestible: 10 tracks barely touching 20 minutes, like a series of controlled explosions. The album slots into the American underground canon spanning from Swans to Xiu Xiu, but as children of the internet, they feel just as connected to NYC peers like Chanel Beads, their AD93 labelmates Moin, and even the afro-gabber torque of the Nyege Nyege label, a big influence on Pickard’s off-the-leash drumming.
The band initially formed during the pandemic, when Borzone and Pickard were in lockdown together in Philadelphia, before swelling to a four-piece in New York. Moving in the same DIY circles, they were fans of each other’s bands at first – Pickard’s doomy Godcaster and synth operator Jack Tobias’ project Threesome – before forming the equally well-titled YHWH Nailgun, with Rosenstock absorbed into the lineup after producing their first EP. (The band’s name means nothing and anything, “just two things next to each other,” according to Borzone.) The chemistry was immediate. Songwriting happens in a “wave of energy coming from all of us,” Tobias explains, whose synth-stack scrambles the rock signal with oil-slick colours and alien textures. “And because the lyrics come a little bit after, Zack is kind of controlling this orb of energy.” Pickard laughs. “Sort of like a wizard,” he adds.
“I have a mic, so I can make little comments,” Borzone says of the writing process. He likes to imagine himself “in the loft” over the rest of the band, “thinking about the shape of the song and about how my lyrics are going to fit.” Citing the dark, estranged poems of Paul Celan and the vernacular ease of Walt Whitman among his influences, Borzone conjures mysterious scenes with stark language: “Vultures lift me by my hair,” he gasps on “Tearpusher”. “I feel like the king of the sky / I feel like a Russian plane.”
“Early on, [the lyrics] probably had something to do with trying to find the ugly parts of my own instincts,” he says, squirming, searching for the right words. “I used to think about it like cutting a gem… it’s a three-dimensional thing.” When a song is finished, it’s “not mine anymore. It’s a thing that somebody else could hold.”
All of the band are transplants to the big city, hailing from Ohio, Maine, New Jersey and “the jungle” in Rosenstock’s case, meaning Costa Rica’s Central Valley. “We talk a lot about meeting people from big cities for the first time,” Rosenstock says. “They’re so tapped in and they understand coolness in a completely different way.” Borzone recalls his shock at spotting a poster for no wave icon James Chance on the street when he arrived in New York. Back home, that was his “secret disgusting music.”
Scraping an artistic living in the city is harder than it’s been in decades, but the perks are still very real. “One thing about New York is that you can’t just be there and do your day job,” Rosenstock says. When you’re surrounded by other artists and musicians, you’re “pushed into” being creative too. The problem, as always, is spatial. “It’s tough if you practice in a tiny space and that gets demolished, as has everything before,” Tobias says. “It’s hard to be in a full rock band with drums.”
“You peel back the layers of Dimes Square and what is it? Oh, you guys hang out. It’s a social life”
Sam pickard
Yet the band are totally committed to the ephemeral thrills of playing live, as Borzone was recently reminded during an improvised festival set in West Virginia with gonzo noise duo Model Home. “There’s a sharp division now between [performing] a pre-made thing on the laptop and doing something in the moment with your hands,” he says. “[It] gives me the urge to lean further in the direction of, ‘This is happening right now, and it’s different every time’.”
“I don’t want to see perfection that much,” Pickard concurs. He has an electronic side project called Beheadings Online, but it’s on the back burner while he focuses on the band. “My head is in the opposite place. As much as people can be really good at their instruments, like – we fuck up! It’s cool to see somebody who’s technically imperfect, because that’s just a person making music.”
They’re unavoidably a New York band too, feeding off the zombie energy of no wave and post-punk, though their attitude could hardly be further from the city’s current downtown zeitgeist. Dimes Square has “the shape of a scene,” concedes Pickard, “but then you peel back the layers and what is it? Oh, you guys hang out. It’s a social life.” Borzone nods, adding tentatively: “I feel like a lot of the people in that world are really into accelerating the thinnest parts of culture.”
NYC has perhaps had the same wearying effect on them as it can have on any hopeful small town incomer. “It’s crazy, for how aesthetically sophisticated New Yorkers see themselves as being – eight in 10 bands are cosplaying,” Pickard says laughing. “The most cowardly option to me is being like, ‘You know what seems nice? 2003. Let’s do 2003.’” Borzone chimes in: “And if you don’t know the band that somebody’s referencing, you just got away with it!”
The point of YHWH Nailgun, as far as they can bear putting a label on it, is to go in the opposite direction, to do “something that feels meaningful”. They’re hardly the first band to decide that going back to basics is the only way forward – but there’s an urgency to their logic. We are bored of virtual reality. We want flesh and bone and electricity, and we want to see someone take a risk, in front of our eyes. For Borzone, the task is simple: ‘There’s nothing to do but try to be contemporary.”
Credits
Words: Chal Ravens
Photography: Sophie Schwartz