Photo by newpleasure

With today’s release of their standout debut full-length, Fully Beat, recent Buzz Sound honorees, Aluminum, offer up a sound clinic on just what it means to be a new band reshaping the shoegaze form beyond just an aesthetic static wash. The San Francisco quartet — which features members of Wild Moth, Marbled Eye, and Torrey — ruminate on pop reconfigurations and stylistic adjacencies throughout the course of the listen in a manner that meshes facets of texture and feedback together, and no more is that clearer to hear than on the album’s central track, “Call An Angel”. It’s one of the listen’s more subdued energies, with its soft smear of trip-pop and Marc Leyda’s voice peering over earth from above, though the way it tempts a pastel synesthesia and flotational experience in synthetic samples melting through the guitar-and-drum vortex creates an atmosphere which, as it lyrically suggests, could pull diamonds from its air. That cognitive experience is accentuated further in its music video directed by Rick Alteiri. Focalizing a chopped and screwed daze of psychedelic dance through a performance by Kati Mashikian and interwoven with sun-glinted views of Aluminum against nature, Aluminum truly become the ethereal.

Directed by: Rick Alteiri

Aluminum’s Fully Beat is available now on Felte Records.