Moin

During the last five years, Moin—Joe Andrews, Tom Halstead, and Valentina Magaletti—have cracked open questions about what it means to be in a rock band or make rock music, about where the form of a trio playing somewhat traditional instruments starts to split into something else. In what seems like another lifetime, childhood friends Andrews and Halstead were working as the obliterative electronics duo Raime when they met Magaletti at a party and instantly admired her powerful and idiosyncratic drumming. She worked with them as Raime, but they mostly set the collaboration aside until launching Moin in a post-pandemic haze. Using guitar, drums, and a bank of samplers and processors, Moin began making work that felt at once like post-punk, post-techno, post-noise, and even post-pop, themes and rhythms scattered around a hall of mirrors but somehow making perfectly strange sense.

Moin was always interested in the way voices may fit into its pieces, how their disembodied elements of rock music could make space for the most familiar of them all. On 2021’s Moot! and 2022’s Paste, they took the shape of heavily processed samples, severed from their source and embedded into Moin’s strange fractals of sound. But on 2024’s You Never End, Moin confronted the question more directly, recruiting friends like James K, Olan Monk, and Sophia Al-Maria to speak or sing directly with the band. With Al-Maria, on “Lift You,” the band curls like the question mark of the poetry itself; on opener “Guess It’s Wrecked” with Olan Monk, they suggest some mangled mix of The Fall, Shellac, and shoegaze, splitting genre lines and, once again, notions of how rock music should move. Big Ears 2026 is thrilled to host a rare U.S. appearance by this fascinating project.