YHWH Nailgun

Locating a narrow lacuna among primitive industrial, belligerent post-punk, and the emancipatory spoken-and-sung invective of both, YHWH Nailgun is one of the United States’ most revelatory and riveting young rock bands. Elastic drummer Sam Pickard and laser-focused writer Zack Borzone emerged from post-pandemic Philadelphia and moved to New York, meeting synthesist Jack Tobias in the DIY underground there. After Saguiv Rosenstock produced their first EP and enlisted as the full-time guitarist, YHWH Nailgun was complete, an instrumental trio that applied the askance rhythmic approach of dub to absolute aggression and an idiosyncratic vocalist whose fragments of poetry provided a trapdoor into and out of despair. “I got the fear in me,” Borzone rasps at the start of “Castrato Raw (Fullback)” on their astonishing 2025 debut, 45 Pounds. “She’s a damnation in the night/Even the sky gets ugly when it gets so bright.” 

Much has been made of Pickard’s trio of rototoms, a 60-year-old orchestral percussion invention that later became associated with prog-rock excesses. And their sound, all attack, lets Pickard treat the drums like he’s cutting and chopping his sound on Ableton in real time, each punch perfectly placed. But every member of YHWH Nailgun makes such distinctive choices, like the way Rosenstock moves between laser-sharp riffs and pure texture and Tobias’ modular synthesizers glow like lurid picture frames around it all. This daring eccentricity is perhaps most apparent in Borzone, who pushes his urgent bits of poetry out of his mouth with what always sounds like his last breath. By set’s end, he is soaked from the effort. “It’s an oligarchy,” Pickard told KEXP of the band’s approach. The joke holds a shred of truth—their sound is total willpower and control.