11 minutes has never felt so welcomely long. Perhaps that’s because entering the YHWH Nailgun vortex means having your sense of time, space, and gravity upended in ways which stretch your relationship with them against the more immediate surroundings of thee physical world.

As a quick follow-up to the amorphous NYC experimental noise rock quartet’s 2025 breakthrough and list-topping debut, 45 Pounds, their sophomore (mini) album and first release since swapping one AD-addled label for another in the rising experimental indie AD 93 for the seminal independent pillar 4AD is just as perplexing to the senses as its predecessors’ — especially when it’s condensed inside shorter, albeit supersaturated pockets of sonic matter where each of the 10 tracks’ boundaries move through your ear canals like liquid mercury.

Part of that comes from drummer Sam Pickard’s abandonment of rototoms in his kit. The steely instruments weren’t necessarily cliche, but any well-versed listener of the noisenik universe might correlate how YHWH Nailgun’s introductory outing was kindred in that percussive context to the rapid rupturing heard all over early Smell scene classics by HEALTH and Abe Vigoda or throughout the industrial synergy of dearly departed Brooklyn scene peers YVETTE in a next-gen sort of way.

Rhythms on this turn swerve around one another before collapsing from multiple dimensions into singular layers before expanding out all over again. These moments gives vocalist Zack Borzone a window to escape the reverb-smeared cloak on the surface of 45 Pounds, punctuating his fragmented naturalistic existentialism with sharper exclamation points, filled with horse whips, bleeding lambs, pissing rain, serpent eaters, and beasts.

If you were to line up the listen on repeat several times in a row, its asymmetrical looping designs alongside the increasingly symbiotic vein of revving and blinkering riffs and seething synths crafted between guitarist Saguiv Rosenstock and synthesist Jack Tobias would likely make the whole of it infinite if it were to keep going. Given Magazine‘s distortion on perception from all angles, perhaps that’s the point.

Highlights: “Ghost of Love”, “Stillness Blues”, “Hips On Wheel”

YHWH Nailgun’s Magazine is available now on 4AD.